When the Moon was Ours (23 page)

Miel looked at Aracely, her face stricken, eyes frozen wide.

“You are my blood,” Miel said. She turned to Sam. “And you…”

His eyes fell shut. He was surrendering to what she knew, not defending himself.

She wrenched her arms out of Sam's hold, and ran.

“Miel,” Aracely called.

They tried to go after her, but she lost them. She slipped away from the river and into the trees, cutting through farms and skimming dirt paths.

Her wrist stung and throbbed. Her body took in all this brokenness, all the lies, and through her roses released it, so the weight of it wouldn't break every one of her ribs.

 

sea that has become known

He painted
mare frigoris,
the sea of cold, and then
lacus somniorium
, the lake of dreams, sure he felt Miel across the open land, sure he could find the perfume of her roses. Just a thread of it, carried by the wind. It made him brave and reckless. It drove him to cover every brush he had in color, flicking them over metal and glass. He wanted to send out into the night his apology, made of paper and paint and light.

An old tarp and newspapers covered his bedroom floor, brushes and paints scattered over the canvas. He wanted to hang a dozen moons, each painted dark, nothing but a slash of light at the edge. One covered in deep violet, edged with a rose crescent. Another hunter green, with the grass-colored thumbnail of a corn moon. Some smaller than young Lumina pumpkins, and some big enough that Miel couldn't pretend she didn't see them.

This was the one thing he was good at. Painting moons, leaving them in trees where they shone gold or silver, the night sky claiming them like stars. This was the only way he knew to tell her that without her, he wasn't Moon. Without her, the girl they called Honey, the girl who licked her own name off knives when Aracely wasn't looking and off spoons when she was, he was as diminished as an almost-new moon.

He was nothing but a young moon, the thin thread of light that clawed its way along the edge of a dark new moon.

The moons had always told her what he did not know how to say. When he was too much of a coward to tell her he loved her, the blush of a rose moon, or the washed-out red of a strawberry moon, or a pinkish purple of a flower moon, spoke for him. And now these dark moons, edged in light, were his weak try at an apology.

But there was no true apology in telling her that even though he was sorry, that he wouldn't have done anything differently. He knew that.

If all this had been his, if it had belonged to him, he would have told her. He'd given her his hands, his real name, every story his mother ever told him about Kashmir and Peshawar and even Campania, even the clan of fishermen who'd made the father he did not know. He'd given Miel his family's fairy tales about banded peacock butterflies, and he'd given her a body he wasn't even sure of possessing.

He gave her all of it. If it belonged to him, it was hers.

But this hadn't been his secret to tell. Even if Aracely and Miel belonged to each other, even if they were sisters in a way Miel did not yet understand, he could not have made this his choice. It had never been about him. It had been about so many secrets Aracely kept unspoken that Sam wondered if she would burst into a hundred thousand butterflies.

If he didn't want everyone in this town knowing that his mother had given him the name Samira and that underneath his clothes he had a body that matched it, he couldn't tell anyone, not even Miel, that the woman named Aracely had once been called Leandro.

But Miel was hurting too much to see that. She hated him. She hated Aracely.

Now he'd worn himself out painting, sitting on the edge of his bed with his head in his hands, fingers combed into his hair. Every free paper and glass globe he had, he'd covered in color. Paint smudged his forearms. He'd brushed his hair out of his face, and left an arc of dark blue on his forehead.

Her words still spun through him.
And you …

Even when he shut his eyes he saw her glaring at him.

His fingers left streaks of paint in his hair, but he didn't move them. Painting another moon, and another, hadn't made him forget. Ink blue and pale gold only reminded him of the nights he'd snuck outside with her.

The smell of turpentine made him remember being in bed with her, the self-consciousness of wondering if his skin and his sheets smelled like it, that bitter smell like new leather.

A soft but sure knock clicked against the door.

He got up and pretended to blend a dot of umber into yellow. “Come in.”

His mother had barely stepped into the room when she had the heels of her hands against the window, easing it up. “This paint. You're going to give yourself a headache.”

The wind rustled the edge of the newspapers.

She clicked on a lamp. “And you're going to make yourself blind.”

Sam squinted against the light. He painted with as little electric light as possible, seeing by candles in tin holders, or the moon itself when enough of it flooded through the window.

“Come downstairs,” his mother said. “You need to eat.”

He didn't have it in him to argue. He followed her down to the kitchen, where blood oranges, stems on, clustered on the counter next to a bowl of olives.

It had been one of his favorites before they moved here, orange and olive salad. Once it had made him think of his father, of the little town he came from on the Gulf of Salerno. The stories his mother passed on. Groves of hundred-year-old olive trees and orchards of figs that smelled of caramel when they fell. Lemons in blue-glazed bowls. Hillsides so steep that from the water they looked like straight drops into the sea.

He wondered how his mother thought of his father now, maybe as some vibrant, shimmering visitor who stopped by a few times for dinner and then disappeared. A man who belonged to them so little she did not miss him.

But then that wondering got crowded out, and all he could think of was the whispers in their old town. Even if he was so small he only half-understood what they were saying, he caught the tone. The glances toward him as if he could not see them looking, even when he was staring back.

His mother snapped the stems off the oranges. “Are you going to tell me or are you going make me ask?”

Sam pushed at one of the oranges, letting it roll away and then back.

“Something happened with Miel,” his mother said. “At the lighting.” No hint of a question in her voice.

The lighting. He wondered how much of this town was whispering about Miel rushing into the water, tearing the lids off the lanterns, or if they had been too busy helping their children give the current the pumpkins they'd carved together.

Whenever the weather turned cold, people grabbed at gossip quicker, as though they could spin it like wool, wrap themselves in it. Back in their old town, it had been a bare-branched winter when his mother had made the mistake of talking about Sam's father. With a trusted friend, she'd shrug off the story like flicking cigarette ash away from her fingertips.

But that friend couldn't resist telling a few of her friends, and soon the town had hummed with whispers.

“I don't think Miel and I are friends anymore,” he said. “I don't think we're anything anymore.”

His mother snapped off the last stem and set down the orange. “I doubt that.”

She cut the tops off the oranges, and set each one on its flat base.

“Your father taught me to make this,” she said.

“With fennel,” Sam said. “I know.”

Most of what they made in this kitchen was from his grandmother's recipes. Aloo baingan made with almost-blue eggplant. The warmth of a half-dozen spices lacing under the saffron and rose in Kashmiri chai. But a few his mother had learned from his Campania-born father. Dishes with lemon leaves, and wild arugula so sharp it felt cold on his tongue. They set their peaches and plums in a bowl Sam's father had given his mother, ceramic glazed as deep blue as a cloudless sky. His mother hadn't wanted to accept it, this piece that had been in his family for three generations. But his father thought it was meant to be with her, that blue he considered a darker shade of her eyes, so he'd hidden it at the top of her closet, knowing she'd find it only after he'd gone.

But the gossip in their old town had reduced all this to something as cold as trading olive oil or raw marble.
You want a green card, and I want a baby.
They called it a bargain his mother made to sleep with a man she didn't love, as many times as it took to have the child she wanted. How they were married for only a couple of years, how she was the only divorcing woman who, seven months pregnant, wished her husband well as he left her.

How Sam existed because his mother and his father thought little of trading things others considered sacred.

By the time they moved here, his mother knew better. She kept quiet about a story she always considered proof of how much she loved Sam, how much she had wanted a child even if there was no man she wanted as her husband.

But he never forgot. He existed because his mother set out to make him exist.

Sam turned one of the oranges in his hand. The flush of deep red thinned along the peel, and then faded.

“I made a mistake, didn't I?” he asked.

“Probably,” his mother said. “We all make them every day.”

“No,” he said. “I mean, coming near her that day. When the water tower came down.”

His mother ran her knife over a row of olives. “You don't really believe that.”

She held out a knife, her fingers cupping the blade, handle toward him.

As a child, this had been one of his favorite tasks, the first thing his mother had let him do with a knife on his own. Slicing away the pith. Using the tip of the knife to nick the seeds away. Making rounds of deep red fruit so thin they were almost translucent, while his mother sliced olives as purple as tiny plums.

“Do you know what kind of child you were?” his mother said, a laugh under her words. “To say there needed to be a man of the house and that you were going to be that man? To declare you were going to be a whole new person so that everyone would know there was a son taking care of his mother?”

Sam set the knife against the orange. He could do this. If he could do nothing right with Miel, at least he could do this for his mother. Slice perfect rounds of blood orange. Arrange them on the plate like the bright tiles of their roof, and know he had managed this one small thing.

“And just think.” His mother smiled, and the wrinkles around her eyes looked as fine as the silver necklace his father had given her. She wore it only with her good dresses. “You wouldn't have existed if it weren't for that squid.”

He offered as much of a laugh as he could. When he was seven or eight, it used to make him laugh every time, the reminder that his father had wanted to come to this country because of the squid that defied him. He'd been born into a family of fishermen famous for their skill catching squid as red as wine-colored velvet. They rose close enough to the surface to catch only when the moon was a dark ring in the sky, and his father's family was known throughout Campania for night fishing, filling the hulls of their boats before sunrise.

But not his father. When his father went out with his brothers, the squid scattered like minnows. The brothers returned at dawn, their boat light and bobbing, to the taunts of other fishermen.

Sam used to think that was a stupid reason for his father to leave where he was from. But then he thought of his great-grandparents, their fields, the skill it took to plant the corms. This had been their family's trade. There would have been shame in their brothers or sisters lacking the skill to grow those crocuses, or having hands too clumsy to pluck out the saffron threads that cost more for their weight than gold.

His father had come to this country both to escape from what he was not and to discover what he might be.

“What if…” Those two words, and Sam's mouth felt as dry as when he woke during a fever, his tongue parched. He had to force the words out.

His mother looked up from the olives.

Her gaze, neither indifferent nor intent, made him look down at his shirt.

Bacha posh
were words he'd first heard from his mother's mother. If he didn't follow the path set out by those words, he might forget her drawings of saffron crocuses, or how sure her hands looked separating mint leaves from their stems, the green never bruising. He'd been so sure he could become Samira if he gritted his teeth hard enough, wished it hard enough, pressed his fingernails into the heels of his hands so hard his knuckles paled. And now, if he didn't, he might forget how his grandmother sat with him, spread out his set of crayons on the kitchen table until she found the deepest gold and purple, showing him the shape and color of those crocus petals.

He would have to admit that whenever his grandmother told him the story of the two lovers at Saif-ul-Malook, he'd thought more often of being the prince than of being the fairy.

He wondered if it would be a kind of betrayal to his grandmother, shrugging away the name she had asked his mother to give him. If he lived his life without it, if he altered it even by one letter, he worried that part of him would disappear. He would become someone his grandmother would not recognize. The blood he shared with that old woman he loved even though he barely remembered her might drain away like dust and ice and light stripped away from a comet.

But he wouldn't know unless he said it. His grandmother wasn't here to listen, but his mother, his grandmother's daughter, was.

“What if I”—his breathing was turning shallow—“wanted to”—now it was stinging his lungs—“stay”—the words would come only one or two at a time—“this way?”

“What?” his mother asked, those fine wrinkles appearing again, this time with wondering instead of smiling.