When the Moon was Ours(62)

Her running to Leandro when her father took a few slow steps toward her, the hot glow just fading out of the metal.

Her father yelling for Leandro to hold her down, Leandro saying no, her father leaning down and shouting at him that if he didn’t do this, it meant he didn’t love his sister, or her mother. If he didn’t do this, it meant he wanted to lose them both.

She remembered Leandro crying, the resistance leaving him, him doing as his father said.

The hot metal had burned the opening on her wrist, pain spreading down to her hand and up her arm. Her own scream had ripped against the back of her throat. Her father explained, his voice low even through her screaming, that this would seal the wound on her wrist, cauterize it, stop the roses from growing again. It will be over in a minute, mija. All over in a minute.

Now Miel folded her hands under her, palms against her sternum. Her thumb found the hard knot on her wrist, like a pearl buried under her skin.

The knot of scar tissue, the one she’d let Sam touch. The wound her roses grew from had been there for as long as she had memory. But this knot hadn’t been there before that afternoon her father had turned on the gas stove.

This knot was her body’s response to that metal searing her wound.

But even touching her own wrist, seeing that her body was no longer a child’s body, didn’t stop her from hearing her mother’s voice. How her mother grabbed the butter knife out of her father’s hand so hard and fast that the dull teeth cut his palm. She shoved him away from Miel and Leandro. What are you doing to her? Her mother’s voice had sounded like the shriek of the wind.

They’ll destroy us all, he’d said. She still remembered that, how he never blamed Miel for the roses, how he spoke of them like something apart from her. Even with that curse running through his family, he could not imagine his own daughter being intertwined with those stems and thorns.

Leandro had held ice to the burn on Miel’s wrist, sheltered her in the loose cover of his body while she cried with her eyes shut tight, and their mother’s and father’s voices swelled to screaming.

Miel’s shoulders tensed, like her body jolting awake after half-falling asleep, at the memory of the door slamming.

In that door slamming, Miel understood, for no longer than it took to remember the sound, what betrayal he must have felt. How hurt that Miel’s mother could not understand he was doing this for her, out of fear that they would lose their daughter to those roses, that she would turn on her mother. He had wanted to protect his wife from his daughter, and his daughter from herself, and his only thanks had been the screams of his wife driving him from his own house.

But then the sound faded, and Miel was that little girl again, crying at the pain and heat that encircled her wrist.

Not like this, her mother had yelled after him. We don’t do this to our children. And he had left them.

The pumpkin. The baptism.

Her mother had never disagreed with their father that their daughter needed to be cured. She’d just disagreed on the method. She would not go as far as he would go. The handle of the butter knife in the gas flame was cruelty she would not allow, not even from a man known for tending wounds and setting bones.

Her mother held to her conviction that she could cure Miel without hurting her. To her, sealing her daughter inside the hollow of a pumpkin, or holding her in water still a little warm after a long summer, was so much gentler than the pain of hot metal. These were cures blessed by the priests and the se?oras.

The warmth of a palm landed on Miel’s back.

“I’m sorry,” Aracely said.

I’m sorry. Leandro had whispered those words as he held her down, baring her wrist to the hot metal. He had clenched his back teeth to keep from crying. But he’d blinked, and a tear had fallen onto her forehead, hot as the spray off the kitchen sink.

Miel shook her head, face still pressed against the bedspread. But the dark didn’t take her.

“Miel,” Aracely said.

Aracely’s voice was calling her back, pulling her from deep water toward the surface.

“I’m so sorry,” Aracely said, and Miel broke into the light.

Miel turned onto her side, palm on the bedspread, her elbow pressing into the mattress.

Aracely’s eyes looked dark and wet as the river that had taken her, and their mother.

Whatever guilt Aracely had inherited from Leandro, it seemed so small compared to Miel’s. Her roses had cost them everything.

“I killed you,” Miel said. “And then I killed her.”

Aracely grabbed Miel’s hand, her palm warm but her fingers cool. “Don’t you say that.”

“You had to go in after me because I fought, and she couldn’t hold on to me. And then she had to go in after you.”

Miel couldn’t say the rest. The unexpected currents. The drag to the bottom of the river. How she imagined her mother swimming against the pull of the water, and then realized both Leandro and Miel were gone, and there was nothing to swim for anymore.

That was the part that Miel couldn’t let her thoughts land on, that moment of her mother giving up and letting the water take her.

“She loved you,” Aracely said. “But she got lost thinking that your roses were something outside of you…” Aracely stopped, her mouth half-open, her eyes skimming the floor. “She got so caught up thinking she could save you from them better than our father could, that if she loved you she had to…”