When the Moon was Ours(46)

He had spent the last ten years making sure he pushed exactly as hard against her as she did against him, so that everything they had built would stay standing. If he either let up or gave it more of his weight, it would fall.

And until the night he ran the pollination brush over her arm, this kept him still, the possibility that if she did not feel how he felt, it made no difference, unless he put her in the position of having to tell him.

This was what they had created, a place where she was more than the girl the water tower had spilled out, and he was more than a boy painting a hundred moons, a boy who knew mare nectaris and sinus roris, the sea of nectar and the bay of dew, and every other lunar feature better than his own body. As long as he didn’t question it, prod it, it stayed. But now he had, and he was losing her.

It’s here, and I’m bored. The words came back to him. Maybe why she once met him on the open land every night was that simple. He was here. She was bored. And now she wasn’t. But he was still stranded in this world that only half-belonged to him.

Aracely considered a blood orange but then set it down, and chose a bergamot, the kind grown in the place that made the father he had never known.

The warm scent of cloves and the honeyed acid of the bergamot orange wafted over him. He opened his eyes just enough to see the pair of eggs Aracely had chosen, one red, the other copper.

Her hands settled on his shoulders. He tensed, then reminded himself that this was how the lovesickness cure worked. He had to let himself take it.

The room turned into a whirl of scents, cloves and cardamom and laurel leaves. The walls took him into their blur of indigo. Aracely whispered a prayer under her breath, keeping her hand on his chest. Not off to one side enough to touch either place his binder flattened. But in the center, below his collarbone.

The rhythm of her hushed words cut through him. Her hand hovered over his body.

The perfume of the spices, the calcium of the eggshell, the sweet acid of the bergamot left his forehead throbbing. Under the pressure of Aracely’s palm, he felt his love for Miel turning over and pulling away from the places it hid. It had woven itself into his veins, as much as the stem of her rose had roots under her skin.

He felt the sting of the lovesickness dragging away, like tearing the weft out of a woven cloth. His body resisted, but Aracely kept him still, pinned like a butterfly under glass.

With one hand, Aracely cracked the first egg into a jar of water. She held the jar up to study the pattern of the yolk.

Sam set the heels of his hands against his eyes. He would not give in to the jagged breathing that rattled his lungs and throat. But he blinked, and tears dropped from his eyelashes, first the left, then the right.

He brushed them away. He knew what Aracely thought of crying. She once caught Miel sobbing because the pain of a new rose, hours from bursting through her skin, would not let her sleep. She stood near her bed and said, “Stop it, mija, you’re gonna turn yourself to salt.” When she found Sam crying over a stray kitten that had died despite him and Miel feeding it eyedropperfuls of milk, she said, “And you think this will bring it back to life?” Not harshly. The truth ballasted her words. It kept them straight and tall.

Crying was a waste, she told them.

But now Aracely whispered, “Get it all out of you,” neither kind nor reprimanding, a recommendation no different from another curandera’s prescription for curing nightmares. “It’ll make everything inside you softer. This’ll go easier.”

He kept his hands on his eyes as Aracely swept the bergamot orange over him. It hurt, the lovesickness coming unanchored and drifting from the edges of his body, his fingers and his toes, his lips and the ends of his hair. It drained toward his heart, the gathering weight pinning his rib cage to the table.

But it was as much relief as pain, the shock of relaxing a muscle after keeping it tense. Aracely’s hands were sharing the weight, luring it toward her palms and out of his body.

Aracely had left the window open, knowing that he didn’t care how cold the room got. He was not some lovesick woman or man who expected his money’s worth, who would complain if the indigo room had chilled, making it necessary to keep the window closed until the last minute. Aracely would draw out his lovesickness, and then throw the nervous, feathered thing, no bigger than a thrush, out the open window. She would launch it like a dove, a barely visible wash of peach or blue Sam never would have caught if Miel hadn’t taught him to watch for it flying out the window and vanishing.

Aracely set one palm on his heart and the other on his throat until the lovesickness rose to her hands.

In that moment, he was thirteen, and Miel was wearing her favorite dress, the violet-tinged blue of a cloudless sky. The thin ribbons of the dress’s straps kept loosening and falling down her arms, and each time he helped her tighten them he peeled a gold foil star off a sticker sheet and pressed it onto her shoulder or her upper back. She asked him why, and he told her to trust him.

And she had. She had left them there the whole day, while they let the sun heat their backs. When they ran, her perspiration made the foil shine damp, and it wore the edges of the adhesive, but the little stars stayed. And that night he had lifted each one off her, slowly, so they didn’t pull at her skin. When he was done, she laughed, mouth open, to see that each foil star had left a lighter cast of its shape. In that first blazing day of summer, her skin had tanned enough that she was covered in constellations.