When the Moon was Ours(63)

She stumbled again, stopping. But this time she looked up, meeting Miel’s eyes. “She never wanted to hurt you.”

Those memories had left in Miel a fear of her mother’s hands, the pinch of those desperate nights when she sealed Miel inside that pumpkin and, later, held her underwater.

“You really believe that?” Miel asked, and she heard in her own voice both skepticism and forgiveness. A suspicion both that her mother had been trying to hurt her and that she had been justified in doing it.

“Yes,” Aracely said. “I’ve always believed that. But just because she loved you doesn’t mean you deserved what she did. Or what he did.”

The knot of scar tissue in her wrist felt hot and tight. It stung with wondering if maybe her father wasn’t wrong, that these roses were things to be killed. How could Miel think anything else now? Her roses were the reason the Bonner girls knew what Sam needed so badly for no one to know.

“I should have let her,” Miel said. “I should have just stopped fighting.”

Aracely squeezed her hand. “Never stop fighting.”

That water, that river that did not save their mother, had adopted them. It had found her and Leandro when their mother couldn’t. It had kept them until it decided it was time to let them go. Miel hated it, wanted to turn it all to ice too solid to get lost in, while knowing that she owed it her life and her brother’s.

Her sister’s.

Miel looked down at Aracely’s hands. Those long fingers. Leandro had long fingers, and small palms. Miel remembered them even when she couldn’t remember the rest of him. And now those hands belonged to this woman.

“Do you ever hear her?” Miel asked.

She expected Aracely to ask, Who? And Miel would have to explain that sometimes she heard her mother’s murmuring, not crying but mournful, when the winds grew deep and loud.

But Aracely’s mouth pinched. Her eyes fell shut, and she nodded.

Miel couldn’t help looking over Aracely’s body. Maybe there was some of Leandro in her. Maybe her shoulders that made dresses hang so well. Or her feet, the left foot a half-size bigger than the other. She couldn’t remember if Leandro’s had been the same way.

Miel’s envy turned the back of her throat bitter. This woman in front of her had been so good at being Leandro. And now she was so good at being Aracely.

Miel had never been good at being anyone.

But she couldn’t be mad at Aracely for that. She couldn’t even be mad at Leandro, a boy who did not exist except for how Miel remembered him and Aracely remembered the flinching discomfort of being him.

If Miel hated Aracely for not telling her, she was little different from the gossips in this town, those whispers that would call Sam a liar for not telling them the truth of a body that was not theirs to judge.

That little splinter of guilt, catching in Miel’s palm, made her understand that there were things to be angry at. She could be angry at the river, the drought, the undercurrent that year. She could hate the fears that ran through her family like blood, the unquestioned faith that all girls who wore roses on their skin would turn against their mothers.

She could rage into the whole rainless sky, without hating Aracely, this woman who had both been born her family and become it.

“You’re smart,” Miel said. “Hiding like this.”

“What are you talking about?” Aracely asked.

“If you’re trying to hide from what happened, this is how to do it,” Miel said. “Becoming someone else.”

“Miel,” Aracely said. “This isn’t me hiding. Me trying to be her son, that was hiding. This”—the tips of her nails, painted the color of champagne, grazed Miel’s forearm—“this is me not hiding.”





lake of spring

Maybe she still hated Sam for lying to her. But his life, his names, all of them, did not belong to the Bonner girls.

Neither did Miel. She left her wrist bare, so the Bonner girls could see how she’d cut away her latest rose. It had never been theirs.

She found Ivy on the side of the Bonners’ house.

For a second, how nervous Ivy looked stilled her. Ivy had her arms crossed, each palm and set of fingers spread just above her elbow. Barefoot on the cold brick, but wearing a scarf. One of a thousand Bonner-girl contradictions that played in the imagination of every boy in this town.

She was looking at the pumpkins, the vines that crept closest to the Bonner house. A few more had turned to glass. One a dark blue-green. Another red as the skirt Aracely had been wearing on the floor of the closet. A third as purple as the violet house, if the color had been distilled and darkened like vinegar reduced down in a pan. Each one, once dull orange or an almost-blue green, now caught the sun inside its shell, lighting up gold.

Miel stepped onto the brick path that hugged the house. “This ends now,” she said.

Ivy turned, and in this light her eyes shifted to a darker gray. “Excuse me?”

Miel stepped forward. The windows above them were cracked but not lit. She still came close to Ivy, and kept her voice low.

“Do you want your mother and father to know what Peyton does on Thursday afternoons?” Miel asked. “I’m sure they know, in their own way. But no one’s ever really made them think about it.”

There was something almost like pity in Ivy’s laugh. “You think I’m afraid of my parents?”