When the Moon was Ours(55)

And her mother had forgiven her for that, for stealing her beauty and not even taking it for herself.

But then the roses had come. They had declared that Miel was not a daughter but a possessed creature. And all those voices, the priests and the se?oras and the gossips, had told her mother what heartbreak those roses, and any child who grew them, would bring her.

Her father’s yelling, the only memory she had of him raising his voice, spread out through the dark. She caught just enough of his words, the sound like clouds tumbling over, to understand.

You don’t know what she’ll do to you when she gets older.

I’m doing this for you, don’t you understand?

She’ll turn on you.

The words came with a pain in Miel’s wrist, small but deep. It felt like the point of a hot knife, held against her skin.

Miel’s father and mother had argued, about her roses.

He had left, because of her roses. He was gone, because of her roses. The things that grew from her body had scared him off, driven him away.

Now there was nothing left of Miel but her roses.

Miel threw the lids off more of the pumpkins, freeing their light to spill into the air. She had to be in one of these. There had to be somewhere she could find the body that had been hers. The more she heard her mother’s wailing, the faster she worked.

Miel had not only cost her mother her beauty, and her husband. She had cost her Leandro. Her mother had lost her son all because he’d tried to save Miel.

This was the brittle core of how her mother had died. She was looking for her son, always looking for her son, and when she knew she’d lost both Leandro and Miel, she must have stopped fighting. She must have given up, stopped kicking and grabbing at the current, and let it have her.

Miel only registered the flash of Aracely’s hair before Aracely grabbed her arm.

“You’re fine,” Aracely whispered. “You’re fine.”

But Aracely shouldn’t have touched her. Anyone who touched her, she would take down with her. If Aracely held on to her, if she tried to save Miel, she would die like Leandro. The river may have saved Miel but it did not save Leandro. She could still hear her brother yelling, looking for her.

Miel elbowed Aracely in the ribs, and broke away from her.

Sam caught her upper arms.

“Hey,” he said. “Come on. Let’s go home.”

Miel stilled, his touch bringing her back to the first day she met him. The feeling that she was small made him seem the age he’d been when they met.

That day, Miel had come back to life. Her eyes felt new and raw. They stung with all the minerals in the water, dimming everything she saw so that everyone watching her looked like a nightmare creature.

Sam’s voice had been so gentle, his hair black and his skin dark enough that she mistook the blur of him for her brother. But the moment her vision cleared, letting her see his unfamiliar face, she heard the echo of her brother’s voice in the water, and knew he was gone.

This was the worst thing, the thing she could never tell Sam, that this was how Miel thought of him, always. Even before she thought of him as Sam, or Samir, or Moon. The first one willing to touch her, and the one who had slit her open with the truth that he was not her brother. The first one who did not recoil, thinking she was the cursed child of a river spirit or the omen of a coming drought, and the one who made her realize how much she had lost.

A hundred eyes shone in the dark. The air vibrated with whispers. Miel felt them wondering, out loud but in hushed voices, if she was the witch who had turned those pumpkins on the Bonners’ farm to glass. They had already ruled out the Bonner girls, who exonerated themselves by being afraid to touch those glass pumpkins.

But Miel and Aracely wore the name bruja on their skin.

Now everyone watching wanted to know if the girl with the roses had turned those pumpkins hard and translucent, if she had left some curse that would spread across the fields, chilling the flesh of every vine and its fruit.

Next those eyes would sweep over to Aracely, blaming the woman who pulled lovesickness from weary hearts. Aracely would have to hide in the violet house, fearing who might be waiting in the side yard or at the edge of the road, and Miel would carry with her the truth that she ruined everyone she loved.

Miel looked from Sam to Aracely.

In Aracely’s face, she found the things that had been missing from Sam’s, the absences that had told her Sam was not Leandro. Aracely’s arched eyebrows. The smooth, unbowed line of her lips. The hair that was straighter than anyone’s in their family; Miel saw it now, even though it was gold instead of dark.

Aracely half-parted her lips. She looked caught between speaking and deciding not to.

Miel fell back toward every moment she’d thought Aracely might ask her where she had come from, or why she feared pumpkins as though they had teeth. Every time, Aracely had opened her mouth with a kind of hesitation that made Miel wince, and then had shut it.

Aracely had never been trying to ask Miel anything.

She’d been trying to tell her.

But she hadn’t told her. All those times, and she hadn’t told her.

Miel had never been able to figure out why this woman had loved her when she was a strange girl made feral by water.

But Aracely cared because she knew the dark places Miel had been.

She remembered them better than Miel did.

Miel looked back at Sam. In his face was sadness. Not confusion or shock.