When the Moon was Ours (25 page)

“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.

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 señoras
.

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…”

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.”