When the Moon was Ours(45)

The memory of her mother holding her down forced away the feeling that she had her own body. She was turning to water.

Her mother’s voice echoed in her head, her insistence that all Miel had to do was stay still, give in, and she would be cured. Her mother had repeated the priest’s words. The difference between baptism and drowning is a few faithless breaths.

Miel threw her hands against the glass, banging her palms against the dyed stars and planets not just because she was trapped but because being among the blues and greens plunged her into that night years ago, that night that had made her water. The memory was floating back, a distant air bubble at the bottom of the river, making a slow ascent.

She was hitting the glass because her brother was gone, her brother was dead, and she could hear the echo of him calling her from the river, looking for her, realizing there was none of her left to find or save.

She was hitting the glass because, years ago, when Sam had first knelt in front of her, the rust-dirtied water soaking the knees and shins of his jeans, she had thought he was her brother.

Later, when Miel looked at Sam, she didn’t understand how she could have thought this. Sam looked so little like Leandro. He did not have Leandro’s arching eyebrows, and Sam’s lips, compared to Leandro’s, were thin and tinted almost purple. His hair fell in loose coils instead of half-straight and half-curly like Miel’s and Leandro’s.

But no matter how many years she put between her and that moment of mistaking him for someone else, it stayed.

She drove her hands hard into the top panel. The skin on her knuckles broke and bled, and the pain made her shut her eyes. But she still shoved her hands against the glass, because her mother was dead too, and Miel could hear her cry on the wind.

Her mother had died not just in the water, but in a way only a broken heart could kill. Not with the kind of lovesickness Aracely cured. Not longing for a lover. Her mother’s heart was the kind of broken caused by children, one who grew forbidden petals from her skin, and the other who lost his life trying to save her.

Miel’s roses had cost her both Leandro and her mother. And the memory, inside this small space that would not let her get away from it, drained away the daylight. The silver between the trees turned to gray and then deep blue.

She was screaming and sobbing even knowing that no matter how much noise she made, even if her voice could tear the gold leaves off the hornbeam trees, it would not bring back her mother and Leandro. Here, within this narrow space, covered in stained glass light, she could not forget. The air around her, hot as her skin, and the glass, cold as the river, would not let her go.





unknown sea

Sam watched Aracely pick through her store of eggs, all those colors she could get only from the Carlsons at the edge of town. Theirs was the only farm that had so many kinds of chickens their egg cartons held every shade from mint green to pink to dark brown.

Sam glanced toward the ceiling. “Is Miel gonna hear us?”

“No.” Aracely weighed each egg in her hand, pale blue and rich olive green, deep copper and peach. “You know why? Because she’s at school.” She side-eyed him. “Where you should be.”

So Miel wasn’t sick. He’d never known her to cut class, but if anyone could get her to do it, it was the Bonner sisters. If they could get Mrs. Galen to tell their parents they were in Sunday school when they’d really snuck off to try nail polishes at the drugstore, then they could get Miel to skip school. She was probably somewhere looking through magazines with Lian while Chloe braided her hair. The ways in which girls made formal their friendships, the ways they declared and solidified that yes, they belonged to one another, were as foreign to him as the ice-covered fjords in his geography textbook.

Maybe they weren’t friends anymore, but he wasn’t turning on her, not even for Aracely. If Miel wanted to cut class with the Bonner girls, it was her call, not his. If she was willing to have Ivy come in and lie for her, and the teachers were stupid enough to believe everything Ivy said, it was none of his business.

Aracely had narrowed her choices down to three eggs, one blue, another brick red, another dark brown. “And where you would be if you hadn’t punched some guy in the face.”

“I didn’t punch him in the face,” he said.

Aracely took the sheet and unfurled it, letting it spill over the table like milk. “Lie down.”

Even through the sheet, he felt the grain of the wood. In a few minutes, he would look like Aracely’s other visitors, calm, as though they could see the stars on the walls of the indigo room.

From this angle, he saw a flash of green.

A sweater the color of clover hung over a chair. Sam’s heart pinched. He recognized it as Miel’s, remembered unfastening each button as they climbed the stairs, eyes shut, his mouth on hers. It had ended up draped over the edge of his bed.

So many times, he’d found a scarf she’d left behind in a classroom. Halfway through their study sessions, she’d take down her hair, and then she’d forget to pick up the hairpins. He had learned, early on, that Miel was both clean and sloppy. She left her clothes strewn over the floor of her room. But when she came over, and Sam left her alone for more than a minute, she would start doing any dishes in the sink. “Will you stop that?” he would say when he came back into the kitchen. “What?” she would ask, and then say, “It’s here, and I’m bored.”