When the Moon was Ours(37)

“Do you want to stay until he comes back?” Aracely asked. “I’ll make café de olla.”

Of course Aracely would think the answer was coffee mixed with cinnamon and piloncillo in a clay pot. It made their lies feel as weak and thin as skim milk.

“No,” his mother said. “Thank you.” She nodded at Aracely and left, turning toward the door.

She must have been willing to believe them, or pretend she believed them, for now.

Aracely leaned into Miel. “Find him.”

Sam mother’s had barely left, the sound of her steps on the front walk just faded, when Aracely reached for her keys.

“Are you gonna help me look?” Miel asked.

“No,” Aracely said. “I’m gonna check on Emma Owens.”

“Now?”

“You better believe now,” Aracely said. “Your boyfriend”—she shrugged into her coat—“in case you haven’t noticed, isn’t ready to have this whole town know his legal name. The last thing we need is to worry about that woman keeping her mouth shut. I’ll let her talk all night if that’s what it takes.” She sighed. “And God knows it probably is.”

She was out the door before Miel could tell her not to, that there was no reason, and no use.





ocean of storms

The surface of the river was as dark as juniper berries.

All the stories were lies. His mother’s fables about chukar partridges and women who disguised themselves as lynx. Miel’s fairy tales about stars falling in love with moons.

What had his great-grandparents’ stories of stars and moon bears gotten them? It hadn’t let them stay in Kashmir with their countless saffron crocuses. It hadn’t saved their family trade, built of the delicate work of bringing those flowers to life and then slipping the rust-colored threads from their centers.

What had Miel’s fairy tales gotten her? This town didn’t love her the way they loved the Bonner girls, even if they feared them. They didn’t gather to protect her and Aracely when strangers threw empty bottles at the violet house, calling them witches.

To this town, Miel was as dirty as the water that had spilled from the rusted tower, and as strange as the roses that grew from her wrist. When she was a child, they thought the hem of her skirt, never drying even in full sun, meant she was possessed. Now they considered it the sign of some sin that lived as deeply in her body as her roses.

But if the moon in the sky could move whole oceans, then maybe, if he wanted it enough, every moon he’d made could pull at this water. It could draw it into the sky like a ribbon and turn it to ice crystals and clouds.

Sam stared down into the river. If he gave himself up to it, maybe it would do to him what it had done to Aracely, turning him into what he truly was. Maybe it would give him a body that matched this life he had built. Or maybe it would make him want to be a woman called Samira.

And if it did neither of these things, maybe it would have enough mercy to just take him under and turn him into water. Maybe there was enough force in him to fill in this river, drive all the water out like he was a meteor, so there’d be nothing left. Just a wetland, a damp crater in the earth.

He could not guard Miel against nightmares rooted so far into her they walked with her like shadows. But he could destroy this one thing Miel feared.

He waded down the steep bank until he found where the river dropped off to its full depth. The force of his body cutting through the water pulled him down. Almost warm near the surface, the river turned cold the farther he sank.

He lost the moon and the stars. He lost the clouds turning the sky to silver.

He drifted down, letting his body go, not fighting the dark. He shut his eyes and saw the blink of Miel’s eyes, like candied ginger, and how her eyelids were a little darker than the rest of her skin. How her fingernails were short from her biting them, how she always smelled like whatever rose her body was growing, even when it hadn’t yet broken through her skin.

She was amber and last light. The moment between summer and fall. The honey she ate off spoons in Aracely’s kitchen.

This was one of the things he loved about her, that they called her Honey, and she was so quick to eat her own name.

He would never be free of this. Of any of it. How he wanted Miel in a way that hurt as much as the tightening of his lungs against the cold water, a desperation for a breath in matched only by the impossibility of taking one. How he was losing the feeling that one day, he could live the life that matched the name his mother had given him.

The day he needed to be a girl, a woman, had once felt so far away for so long that he believed he’d be ready. The time when he’d be as old as when a bacha posh cast off her boy’s clothes and ways had seemed such a great stretch of time away from where he was that the impossibility of reaching it exceeded the impossibility of him wanting to be a girl.

He’d been pushing it for years, pretending that day was still far off. He’d pretended even when he’d started bleeding. Even when he had to start wearing binders under his clothes.

But for this moment, his body was not his. It floated and hovered. It belonged to the water, the current holding him. Its pull made him understand why he had gone into the river in the first place. It wasn’t just this rage in him, or even Miel.

It was that raw hope that maybe the water would not only take him and turn him into something else, but that it would decide for him. Maybe, the way it had for Aracely, it would see him for what he really was, and make him into it. If he was meant to be a girl, maybe it would make him want to be a girl. If he would never grow out of being a boy, maybe it would spin the raw materials of his skin and muscle into a body that matched.