When the Moon was Ours(54)

It wasn’t Peyton’s fault, how much Miel feared pumpkins. But with the four of them all lined up like that, it was no surprise that Miel had seen Peyton’s first step toward her as a threat.

Maybe if Peyton had just been Peyton, instead of one of four bright-haired girls, she would have seemed more like a friend and less like a force. But they would always be the Bonner sisters, a truth that both guarded and isolated them.

“You don’t have to tell her that,” Peyton said. “But I wanted you to know.”





lake of goodness

Tonight, half the town was putting pumpkins into the water, the way they did every year. They had hollowed out pumpkins they’d bought for the occasion. Dusky orange Estrellas. Deep blue-green Autumn Wings. Gray that was almost violet, and the off-white Luminas. They had emptied their shells of seeds and flesh, and then carved patterns of leaves and lace lattices. When they set candles inside, the cuttings glowed. One by one, they let them float on the water, the wide, slow current reflecting the light.

A little farther down the bank, Miel saw Sam’s mother, watching the same children she persuaded to practice their euphoniums and cellos. Her skirt almost swept the ground as she bent to talk to them, the glimmer of her eyes and her slight smile drawing them as if she were about to tell them a secret.

Sam had to be around here somewhere. He usually helped his mother keep track of the sons and daughters she’d been charged with taking to see the pumpkin lanterns. Miel looked for him, but even when she didn’t see him, she felt the pull of him, the certainty that he was close. That they would touch again before the heat from their hands faded off each other’s bodies.

Miel stood with Aracely at the edge of the river, unashamed of the wet hem of her skirt. She let it brush her knees, and did not try to hide it.

The weight of pumpkins filled their hands, the candles inside them warming the shells. The one Aracely held, round and green, she had carved with swirls like the tops of fiddlehead ferns, the shapes traced in light. Miel’s, a cream Lumina, glowed where she had cut out little rounds for the light to come through. It looked like one of Aracely’s favorite dresses, pale fabric dotted with coins of gold dye.

A few old women, the ones who argued about whether milk helped pumpkin vines grow bigger fruit, the same ones Miel thought would have been first to gossip about her, watched her, and smiled.

Miel thought her rose would burst into petals. They would spill from her sleeve and cover the ground. The whole town knew she was afraid of pumpkins. But she never thought these se?oras would be proud of her for carrying her own floating lantern.

She had never thought this town held even a handful of people who cared if she was afraid.

“You ready?” Aracely asked.

Miel nodded. Aracely crouched alongside the river, and set her pumpkin on the water. It drifted into the dark, the current carrying the swirls of light.

Then Miel knelt, looking into the water, and watched the pumpkins floating down the river. A pale one dotted in light spun near the bank. One so dark green it looked blue bobbed along the current. A flatter orange one with the billowing shape of a fairy tale pumpkin looked like its rind was glowing.

Miel let the Lumina pumpkin go. The cream-white round floated, casting coins of light on the water. It rode the current and joined the clusters of other pumpkins, bumping Aracely’s so their light flashed and skittered.

But the soft rush of the river was sharpening, deepening like a knife cutting down through the earth. It held the thread of her mother’s screaming. It cupped the small breaking of Miel’s sobs, her begging her mother to let her out, or not to hold her under. The sounds swirled through the water like the hem of a dress.

Part of Miel was still in the water.

Both she and her mother and Leandro were lost down there.

So many women had given her mother advice on what to do with her. Draw a star on her forehead every Sunday. Mallow tea at sunrise. Say the prayer of Nuestra Se?ora de las Nieves, and then, when she is older, buy her a dress as blue as the Virgin’s veil.

The history of Miel’s family had said that, one day, she would turn on her mother, the roses growing from her body a warning of her treachery.

Held within all those sounds was her father’s voice, a memory of him yelling that existed only in the distance. When she tried to look at it straight-on, it vanished.

Her unease broke and brightened in her stomach.

She was inside one of those pumpkins. Her body, small as when she was five, was inside one of the bigger ones floating on the water. Or maybe she was in the smaller ones. Her hair in a white one. Her rose in one as orange as Ivy Bonner’s hair. Her hands in a blue-gray one. She was in pieces.

Miel waded into the river, the water splashing up to her waist. She pulled the lids off the carved pumpkins, grabbing at every one she could. But she found each one empty except for the candle set inside.

Even within the walls of the stained glass coffin, she’d been able to keep away the truth of why her mother did what she did. Even when she remembered the small space inside the pumpkin, or the wide, rough river, she kept these things as far as her hands could push them.

But now, surrounded by all this water and all these pumpkins, her memories shook off the film and haze of so many years.

Her mother had put her inside a deep gold pumpkin, the biggest she could find, to try to make her good.

Miel’s roses were proof of what her mother already knew. Miel’s brother, Leandro, had made her mother beautiful and happy. But Miel had made her mother ugly. Her mother had been beautiful since she was a girl, looked at by men years before she was old enough to marry. And Miel had not turned out the same. Miel had left her mother’s body misshapen from giving birth, her face tired and worn, and Miel had not stolen that beauty for herself.