When the Moon was Ours(60)

The water had finished her, spun her into a grown woman during the years she had belonged to it. It had been her cocoon. It had made the raw elements of Leandro into this woman.

There had been so much more to the appearing of this beautiful woman than a summer of gold-winged butterflies.

The butterflies had not brought her here. Yes, they might have turned her hair a color to match them. But they had not given her to this town the way the water had. They were a celebration of her emergence, a sign of her appearing.

Leandro had reappeared as Aracely, an event marked by countless wings.

Miel had fallen out of a metal tower filled with dirt-and rust-darkened water.

“It’s not fair,” Miel said.

“What isn’t?” Aracely asked.

Miel couldn’t remember those years in the water. She couldn’t remember the rush of the water that held her being drawn from the river and into the tower. She felt only the dim light of knowing she had half-existed, not breathing because, for that time, she had no heart and lungs. They, like the rest of her, had been folded into the river.

For a while, she had not had a body but had been made of water, before that water gave her back.

“It made you older.” Miel had stayed the same as when the water took her, a little girl who did not grow until she again had her body and breath. “It didn’t make me older.”

“It wasn’t about it making me older,” Aracely said, though the tightness in her face told Miel there was more than she was willing to say. But this, unlike everything else, was Aracely’s business, not Miel’s. “It just gave me back as what I was meant to be. And I was glad you were still little. I was glad the water kept you the way you were, that you didn’t lose any time.”

Miel searched Aracely’s face, the understanding spreading inside her. “You knew I was in there.”

Aracely pursed her lips, looking caught but not ashamed. “There were only so many places you could be. I couldn’t find you in the river. But then I stood under that water tower one day, and I could feel you. You were so close I kept thinking I could take your hand.”

“Then you just waited for them to take it down?”

“That water tower was a storm hazard,” Aracely said. “They should’ve torn it down ages ago. All I had to do was flirt with the right people, and its days were numbered.”

Miel cringed thinking of her brother—no, not her brother, this woman—recognizing her in that stale water. She tried to remember what it felt like to be in there, and couldn’t.

She felt hollow with the understanding that her brother, the boy named Leandro, no longer existed. His muscle and bone and heart had been repurposed into making this woman.

“You should’ve told me,” Miel said.

“When?” Aracely asked. “When would have been a good time to tell you? When you were a little girl, and I looked this different from the brother you knew? When you were a little older? Last week? When was the right time?”

Miel’s memory slid back over every time Aracely had opened her mouth, pausing before speaking, and Miel had braced so hard she felt it in her body. Each time, she’d thought Aracely was about to ask her questions that would land too hard for her to catch them. Each time, she’d hoped Aracely would say nothing.

And each time, Aracely had.

Miel had given off such raw fear, such apprehension, that Aracely had never been able to say the words. Miel’s panic had scared her off. Miel had startled Aracely with the force of her conviction that for things to be good, they had to stay as they were. They had to be two women who knew just enough but not too much about each other.

In so closely guarding her own secrets, Miel had forbidden the possibility of Aracely ever telling hers. “Please don’t blame Sam,” Aracely said. “Be mad at me all you want, but I asked him not to tell you.”

“Why?” Miel asked.

“Because I didn’t want him telling you what I couldn’t figure out how to tell you myself.”

Aracely sat down on the floor next to Miel, her dark red skirt fluffing like the edges of her zinnias. Her sigh sounded like a breeze wisping at the petals.

Aracely reached for Miel’s hand, then hesitated, letting her fingers pause halfway between them. “Do you remember our family?” she asked.

“Not a lot,” Miel said.

“We’re a lot of brujos and brujas.”

Miel laughed then, but it came out strained and short.

“We come from a family where everyone has a gift,” Aracely said. “Do you think I just learned how to cure lovesickness? It’s in my blood. It’s my gift. We all have them. Our great-uncles with broken bones. Our cousins with susto.”

Miel reached out for what little she remembered. In the presence of Aracely’s voice, it bloomed like a bud opening.

Their relatives had gifts that were useful, without thorns. Miel’s great-uncles could cure joints that had gone stiff with age and the ache of old injuries; she had watched them rub chili powder into bent fingers until they came back to life. Her second cousin could bring down any fever, cutting it with the tea of young blossoms.

Her great-grandmother could drive away even the worst nightmares, her garden full of marjoram and moonflower. Miel had been two, maybe three, when her mother had taken her and Leandro to their bisabuela’s house; she did not even remember what the old woman looked like. But she remembered that the house had smelled so much like vanilla that the air went down like syrup.