When the Moon was Ours(61)

“We’re curanderas,” Aracely said. “And curanderos.”

“I’m not a curandera.” Miel turned over her arm, hiding her wrist. “I don’t know how to cure anything.”

Aracely folded her hands and set them in her lap, her dark fingers disappearing into the fabric.

“It had been so long,” Aracely said, eyeing Miel’s forearm. “Everyone thought the roses had just died out.”

Miel’s mother and aunts must have sighed with relief at that, celebrating the other gifts that blessed the family.

“When your first one showed up,” Aracely said, “it’d been a hundred years since anyone in our family had grown one.”

Miel turned her wrist on her lap. The appearance of these petals must have been as sudden and unwelcome as a bat emerging from a dark attic.

“Our mother,” Miel said. “Did she have them too?”

Aracely’s mouth paused, half-open for a second, before she said, “Our mother?”

“Did she have the roses?” Miel asked, wondering for just that minute if this was why her mother was so set on ridding her of them. Maybe her body had grown them too. Maybe they sprouted from her back or ankle, and she veiled them under her clothes. “Did she have them and hide them?”

“No,” Aracely said. “The curanderos and curanderas weren’t in her family. None of this was.”

“What?” Miel asked.

“The roses,” Aracely said. “The curanderos. They were in our father’s family, not our mother’s.”

The possibility of her mother having the same roses drained away, like wind stripping the petals off a bud.

Her father.

“What happened to him?” Miel asked, but even through her own words, she felt her center humming with the understanding that she already knew.

She heard more than her father shouting. She heard his whispers. She heard her own screaming. She heard the crying and pleading of a boy named Leandro.

She heard everything.

It must have taken a few seconds. But in all that noise, she felt like she’d been sitting in this closet, beneath the sweep of Aracely’s skirts, for as long as she’d been in the water tower.

“You remember,” Aracely said. At first it had the ring of a question. But then it echoed. You remember. You remember. No question. Only the understanding that Miel was sliding into the same memories Aracely must have had this whole time.





bay of mists

“Miel,” Aracely called after her.

But Miel ran from the room. She tried to leave behind each dim memory that caught fire and lit a dozen more.

First, she heard all those stories, her father warning her mother in a voice low enough that he thought their children would not catch the words. But Miel and Leandro were pressed against the hallway wall. They were there for every story about how children born with roses turned on the women who’d borne them. Either by bringing curses on their families’ farms, or by confessing their mothers’ sins, out loud, in church, or even by killing their mothers. The sharp memory of her father, telling the story of his great-great-aunt who poisoned first her mother and then her whole family, came back. That girl had drawn the toxins from the white trumpets of moonflowers, and slipped them into her family’s tea.

All of them, her father had said, his whisper rasping at the edges. She just killed them. Do you understand that?

She heard her mother and father arguing, still in those whispers so strained they turned to hissing. Her mother saying, She won’t be like that, she’s our daughter. Her father saying, And you don’t think every mother before you said the same thing? I don’t want her turning on you.

And all this had alternated with his sobbing apologies for bringing this curse on her.

Aracely called Miel’s name again.

Miel’s steps struck the hallway floor. These things she remembered were swirling, forbidding stars. If Miel ran fast enough, she could break out of their gravity.

The roses had come from her father’s side of the family. Miel remembered that now. He had carried them, unseen, like passing a sickness with no sign of it. I didn’t know it would come back, he’d told Miel’s mother. I’m so sorry, I didn’t know it would come back. We thought they were gone. I never would have done this to you. And her mother telling him there was nothing to forgive, trying to convince him, in whispers, that this petal-covered curse was a ghost that would go silent if only they found the right way to quiet it.

But her love only made him set on making sure Miel didn’t hurt her, that she didn’t betray her mother as so many rose-bearing girls before her had. So when he inspected her bandage one afternoon, and found that three green leaves had broken through it—not slipped from the edge, but grown straight through the bandage—it must have felt like her roses defying him. Miel remembered his face, his anger not at her but at these blooms. They had not only possessed his daughter. Now they were mocking him.

Miel’s bed took the force and speed of her body. She set her face against the blanket, trying to press herself down into the dark, where she was nothing but a girl who spilled from a water tower.

But what came next, what she remembered now, brought with it the same pain in her wrist that had kept her awake so many nights.

Her father, holding the rounded end of a butter knife’s handle into the blue flame of their gas stove. Her asking what he was going to do with it, him telling her not to worry, and didn’t she want to be a good girl for her mother.