When the Moon was Ours(59)

So he nodded.

“Good,” his mother said.

With that one word, the space around them felt lit with the violet petals and gold threads of all those crocuses. He couldn’t see them, not straight on, but he could sense their shape, the soft lines of the flowers and the wisps of glowing orange. They were halfway between living blooms and the arcs of colors his grandmother had drawn him so many years ago.

His mother’s nod looked like a surer, quicker version of the one he’d given her. That was his mother, forever taking hesitation and making it into something clean and finished.

“People should know what they want,” she said.





bay of dew

Miel was on her knees in Aracely’s closet, pulling at her clothes. Aracely’s favorite nightgown, black velvet trimming copper satin, heavy and long enough for fall nights. The linen of her morning-glory-purple skirt, the hem stained from how she wore it to work in the garden. The skirt she put on to go out, covered in so many glass beads it looked jeweled with sprays of seawater.

But Miel could not find Leandro. She could not find any trace of her brother. Instead of the pressed clothes their mother always put him in, there were these twirling skirts. Instead of the way he smelled, the strangest mix of wood and powdered sugar from their mother’s kitchen, there was the amber of Aracely’s perfume. There was none of Leandro left, not because Leandro had become Aracely, but because instead of choosing to be Miel’s sister, Aracely had chosen to be a liar.

Everyone called Aracely the kind curandera. Other curanderas made the lovesick drink flaked deer antler, obsidian dust, and batata. That black milk would leave them sick for hours, making it easier to pry the lovesickness loose.

But there was nothing kind about Aracely. Her gentleness was as much of a lie as her name. She could have given herself their mother’s name, so Miel would know her. She could have told Miel the day she slipped from the water tower.

She could have been the sister who took her home, put a kettle on the stove. They would have passed back and forth aster honey crystallizing in its glass, the kind Aracely liked as much as Miel. She ate it like candy, and they shared a jar when they stayed up late talking.

Even that memory wasn’t soft anymore. Now it was as rough as the crystals along the edge of the aster honey jar.

Aracely’s perfume crept into the room, as strong and deep as aged whiskey.

Miel didn’t look at her.

Aracely, like Leandro, was the beautiful one of the two of them. Aracely was tall the way Leandro had been tall, even as a child. Aracely glittered with wry mystery the way Leandro glowed with kindness. But instead of Leandro’s dark hair, Aracely had so much gold flowing over her shoulders it looked like the crown of her head was spinning it.

Miel knew Aracely as well as she knew the crescent whites of her own fingernails. She knew Aracely’s eyes, dark as Spanish molasses. But now Aracely was someone else. She was a woman holding the heart of the brother Miel thought she’d lost.

She remembered the sense of Leandro, how he felt and how he laughed, the softness in his hands. But she didn’t remember him well enough to account for all of him. She could not number all the pieces that made him, and then find them all in this woman.

“Do you remember the town we lived in?” Aracely said. There was a sigh under her words, like she didn’t know where to start and decided this was as good a place as any.

Miel didn’t remember. She remembered more about their family’s kitchen than the place she was born.

“It was further up the river,” Aracely said. “That’s why no one here recognized you.”

“How did we end up here?” Miel asked.

“It’s where the river widens and slows,” Aracely said. “The calmest point before it gets to the sea. Everything stops here.”

Miel felt the flinch of wanting to argue with everything Aracely said, but she knew Aracely was right. The bottom of the river here was cluttered with old nets and washed-away branches and even little boats that had sunk and bobbed along the bottom until they rested here.

“It’s where we washed up,” Aracely said.

Now Miel remembered Leandro calling her name, looking for her, and then their mother wailing, screaming when the current stole Leandro, and he could not fight it.

“I know you were trying to save me,” Miel said.

Aracely stepped to the threshold of the closet. “But you don’t know how I lived.”

The smile in Aracely’s voice—she could hear it—made Miel look up.

“The water took me,” Aracely said. “It saved me.” Her face was full of a soft peace that made Miel think of the few minutes before the sun set. Aracely looked like she was talking about a lover she had parted from, but still thought well of. “It took me. And then it gave me back this way.”

“What do you mean, this way?” Miel asked.

“It let me die as a boy,” Aracely said, “and it gave me back as a woman.”

Miel set her folded hands against her chest. The depths she feared most had given back the brother she lost.

If Miel shut her eyes she could see it, the water stripping her brother down to his heart and building him back up as this woman. It took every part of Leandro, and gave him the body that would become Aracely, building her out of the cold and the dark and the things she had once been.