When the Moon was Ours(56)

What she’d just realized, he already knew. The regret on his face was so settled.

He’d known all this for so much longer than she had.

The boy she loved and the woman who looked after her had told her so many lies.

Miel looked at Aracely, her face stricken, eyes frozen wide.

“You are my blood,” Miel said. She turned to Sam. “And you…”

His eyes fell shut. He was surrendering to what she knew, not defending himself.

She wrenched her arms out of Sam’s hold, and ran.

“Miel,” Aracely called.

They tried to go after her, but she lost them. She slipped away from the river and into the trees, cutting through farms and skimming dirt paths.

Her wrist stung and throbbed. Her body took in all this brokenness, all the lies, and through her roses released it, so the weight of it wouldn’t break every one of her ribs.





sea that has become known

He painted mare frigoris, the sea of cold, and then lacus somniorium, the lake of dreams, sure he felt Miel across the open land, sure he could find the perfume of her roses. Just a thread of it, carried by the wind. It made him brave and reckless. It drove him to cover every brush he had in color, flicking them over metal and glass. He wanted to send out into the night his apology, made of paper and paint and light.

An old tarp and newspapers covered his bedroom floor, brushes and paints scattered over the canvas. He wanted to hang a dozen moons, each painted dark, nothing but a slash of light at the edge. One covered in deep violet, edged with a rose crescent. Another hunter green, with the grass-colored thumbnail of a corn moon. Some smaller than young Lumina pumpkins, and some big enough that Miel couldn’t pretend she didn’t see them.

This was the one thing he was good at. Painting moons, leaving them in trees where they shone gold or silver, the night sky claiming them like stars. This was the only way he knew to tell her that without her, he wasn’t Moon. Without her, the girl they called Honey, the girl who licked her own name off knives when Aracely wasn’t looking and off spoons when she was, he was as diminished as an almost-new moon.

He was nothing but a young moon, the thin thread of light that clawed its way along the edge of a dark new moon.

The moons had always told her what he did not know how to say. When he was too much of a coward to tell her he loved her, the blush of a rose moon, or the washed-out red of a strawberry moon, or a pinkish purple of a flower moon, spoke for him. And now these dark moons, edged in light, were his weak try at an apology.

But there was no true apology in telling her that even though he was sorry, that he wouldn’t have done anything differently. He knew that.

If all this had been his, if it had belonged to him, he would have told her. He’d given her his hands, his real name, every story his mother ever told him about Kashmir and Peshawar and even Campania, even the clan of fishermen who’d made the father he did not know. He’d given Miel his family’s fairy tales about banded peacock butterflies, and he’d given her a body he wasn’t even sure of possessing.

He gave her all of it. If it belonged to him, it was hers.

But this hadn’t been his secret to tell. Even if Aracely and Miel belonged to each other, even if they were sisters in a way Miel did not yet understand, he could not have made this his choice. It had never been about him. It had been about so many secrets Aracely kept unspoken that Sam wondered if she would burst into a hundred thousand butterflies.

If he didn’t want everyone in this town knowing that his mother had given him the name Samira and that underneath his clothes he had a body that matched it, he couldn’t tell anyone, not even Miel, that the woman named Aracely had once been called Leandro.

But Miel was hurting too much to see that. She hated him. She hated Aracely.

Now he’d worn himself out painting, sitting on the edge of his bed with his head in his hands, fingers combed into his hair. Every free paper and glass globe he had, he’d covered in color. Paint smudged his forearms. He’d brushed his hair out of his face, and left an arc of dark blue on his forehead.

Her words still spun through him. And you …

Even when he shut his eyes he saw her glaring at him.

His fingers left streaks of paint in his hair, but he didn’t move them. Painting another moon, and another, hadn’t made him forget. Ink blue and pale gold only reminded him of the nights he’d snuck outside with her.

The smell of turpentine made him remember being in bed with her, the self-consciousness of wondering if his skin and his sheets smelled like it, that bitter smell like new leather.

A soft but sure knock clicked against the door.

He got up and pretended to blend a dot of umber into yellow. “Come in.”

His mother had barely stepped into the room when she had the heels of her hands against the window, easing it up. “This paint. You’re going to give yourself a headache.”

The wind rustled the edge of the newspapers.

She clicked on a lamp. “And you’re going to make yourself blind.”

Sam squinted against the light. He painted with as little electric light as possible, seeing by candles in tin holders, or the moon itself when enough of it flooded through the window.

“Come downstairs,” his mother said. “You need to eat.”

He didn’t have it in him to argue. He followed her down to the kitchen, where blood oranges, stems on, clustered on the counter next to a bowl of olives.