When the Moon was Ours(67)

She wished her roses were the magic Ivy thought they were. She wished a cup of fluffy petals, their bay-laurel-oil-and-lavender smell, could make a woman realize she was in love with a man who sold las flores de calabazas at the market. She wished its perfume could make that woman brave enough to tell him that the soft pumpkin taste of the blossoms he grew was forever making her think of kissing him.

Her poor mother. All the stories Miel’s father told her, those tales about the treachery of those roses, how they would turn Miel against her, how they would make her nothing but a creature possessed by the things that grew inside her. Her mother was right to try to save Miel from those petals. Because those petals, and the fact that Ivy and her sisters had wanted them, were killing her now.

Light swam through her vision, like gold glitter from the cascarones they broke at Easter. Blood slicked her collarbone as she held her forearm against her chest.

Her body was not a garden. It was not earth waiting to be rid of brambles and weeds. Ivy had bled that rose out of her body, and now her life was coming with it.

She raised her head, hoping to see the road, or the edge of any farm except the Bonners’.

But her eyes found only the shine of stained glass, those etched stars and planets, brightened by flashes of moon that slipped through the trees.

She could not get away from it. She’d thought she was crawling and dragging herself away, when all she was doing was dragging herself back. No matter where she pulled her body, it would wait for her. She was too lost to find a straight path away from it, and all those stars and planets of jewel-colored glass would draw her back.

The Bonner girls would make the moon—the one in the sky and every one Sam had ever painted—disappear. They would take all that light into their skin.

Miel resisted the feeling of her body going limp, but she was collapsing onto the ground. Her hands were too weak to do anything but open and close her fingers. The blood and air went out of her, and there was nothing but those whorls of green and violet.





sea of cold

The truth—Sam wasn’t afraid to admit this, and he doubted Aracely would’ve been either—was that this town liked his mother better than they liked him, or Aracely. Even though his mother was a generation closer to not being from this country, even if they would count that against anyone else, she charmed them. She laughed easily. She enchanted children into practicing instruments and trying foods and reading books their own parents couldn’t convince them to.

That made her the best choice to ask around if anyone had seen Miel. Aracely took the farms, the orchards where she bought bergamot oranges and the families that sold her Araucana and Faverolles eggs. And Sam searched the woods, these trees he’d mapped with the light of his moons.

He carried with him a moon, cold and blue as the one in the sky. It lit the ground as he walked. It chilled the warmth of the rust-colored trees.

It found a ribbon of deep red cutting through a carpet of gold leaves.

The thought of Aracely’s wrist, bleeding the same as Miel’s, made the leaves look like they were turning to blades, each branch covered in knives.

“Miel?” He held up the moon, following that band of red.

A soft gasping sound pulled him deeper into a grove of yellow trees.

He stopped. In front of him was the stained glass box he’d found her locked in.

The gasping sound flared again, pulling his eyes down.

He dropped the moon. The candle flame flickered before the wick caught again.

She was a dark shape, clutching her arm to her chest, her hair fluttering with how hard she was trying to breathe.

“Miel.” He knelt next to her, saying her name again, and again.

His body felt like it was turning into one of his own moons, his skin and muscle a frame of paper, his heart a lit candle.

Her eyes were half-closed, her shirt and jeans patched with stains that were drying red-brown. A slick of new red, wet and bright as pomegranate seeds, covered her forearm.

Her rose. It had been pulled out by the stem, and its absence was costing her all this blood.

“What happened?” he asked. “Who did this to you?”

She opened her mouth like she was trying to answer, but there was no sound except her breath rasping against her dry lips.

He saw his hands doing the things he knew to do. Unbuttoning his shirt, wrapping it around her forearm, tying it to slow the bleeding. Taking her arm, the one not coated in blood. Putting it around his shoulder. He felt her damp skin, sensed his hands moving.

But the candle at his center had turned cold, a wick darkening to an ember and then going out. And all that cold pulled so deep into the core of him that he didn’t even feel the bite of the air against his bare forearms. He didn’t feel the chill of the earth against the shins of his jeans, or through his undershirt and his binder.

“Hold on to me, okay?” he said, and the words were as unsteady as his breathing. There had to be a way to move her without hurting her more. They had to be able to help her before the empty place in her forearm gave up all the blood she had.

Her body trembled against him, the movement slight as her petals underwater. Sam held on to her, trying to steady her, her wrist held between them. The wound let off water and blood. It soaked through the shirt he’d tied around her forearm.

Sam found the recognition in her eyes. The hollow in his chest turned tight and hot.

Her roses were as much the life in her as her heart. And the way she bled was killing her.