When the Moon was Ours (27 page)

The shift away from the world he'd built with Miel, the knowledge that she now hated him, was so sharp, he could taste it on the air, like a salt crystal. The world they had between them was both brighter and softer than everything else, cast in deep blues and golds. It swept away the muddy haze that settled around all other things. It dulled the way Sam had to keep his eyes down if he wanted to be left alone at school but had to look up at the right time to scare off anyone who would not leave Miel alone.

A knock clicked against his bedroom door.

“Come in,” he said, expecting his mother, ready to show her what he'd finished so recently the paint hadn't dried.

It wasn't until the door hinge's soft creak that he realized that hadn't been his mother's knock.

Aracely stood at the threshold.

“Have you seen Miel?” she asked.

Sam let out a curt laugh. “What do you think? She doesn't want to see me.”

“She didn't come home,” Aracely said. “I'm worried.”

He grabbed the edge of the drop cloth on the floor and rubbed paint off his hands. “She's upset,” he said. “Did you think she wouldn't avoid us for a few days? She's probably not coming home until she's sure you're asleep.”

“I don't think that's what's going on,” Aracely said.

He folded the drop cloth in on itself. “Why not?”

Aracely held out her wrist.

A trickle of blood striped the inside of her forearm. It came from an unseen wound; Sam could not find the cut. But that thin stripe, that cord of red, looked the same as when Miel bled from the place her roses grew.

 

lake of time

The moon came through the ceiling of cloud cover, the reds and golds brightening the woods like the trees were catching fire.

The rush of breaking the glass pumpkin and running had worn away, and the pain had forced her onto her hands and knees. She crawled deeper into the woods, her skin so hot with pain that the cold felt faint as the brush of a leaf. Her blood spilled on her jeans, the stains deep as the gems on one of Aracely's necklaces.

She was losing the feeling in her fingers. She couldn't have screamed if she wanted to. All that came was the wet sound of her breath against the back of her throat. She lost the feeling in her wrists and ankles, the numbness opening her.

Miel raised her head and spotted a glimmer of purple and red. The shapes of planets and constellations resolved, cut and engraved in panels.

The stained glass coffin.

She scrambled away from it, crawling under the ceiling of gold leaves. Under her breath, she whispered Aracely's prayer of Santa Rita de Cascia, saint of impossible causes. But she did not know if the impossible cause was her life or her thorn-covered soul.

Pain anchored her, keeping her down. She clutched her arm close to her body, pressing her wrist against her chest to slow the bleeding. The knot of scar tissue in her forearm felt heavy as a metal bead. Crawling with both knees but one hand slowed her down, putting too little distance between her and the stained glass coffin.

The woods seemed endless, a whole world of green and gold. She didn't know them like Sam. The fields of feather grasses were their place, but the woods were his. Branches offered places to hang his moons that fallow fields didn't.

But she crawled. She dragged herself across the ground, understanding now that nightmares were weak, silly things that would scatter in the light. They were made of dyed glass and river water and lies that grew even sharper when the truth lit them up.

Dirt coated her clothes and her skin. She left a streak of blood on the ground, and was too weak to kick at it and cover it over.

They were too much entangled, Miel and her roses, like two trees that could not be pulled apart without killing both. Ivy had pulled a rose from her by its roots, and enough blood came with it to dye her clothes, to turn every breath into a gasp. She was bleeding out so much red her skin looked like countless petals, enough for a wide, endless garden of scarlet roses.

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.

Miel grabbed Sam's other hand, the blood on her palm slicking his. She held on so hard her fingers trembled.

He tried to ease his hand out of hers. “You've got to let go, okay?”

She didn't loosen her grip.

“Please don't leave,” she said, the words dry and wrung-out.

She put all the force and will she had into holding his hand, hard enough that he could feel her slowing pulse against his palm. Hard enough that he was losing the feeling in his fingertips.

“I'm not leaving you,” he said.

But her eyelashes flickered, the recognition leaving her. Her skin felt damp, fevered. She was too far away to hear him, but close enough to hold on to his hand so hard he couldn't get his fingers back without hurting her. He needed both his hands to help her, but she held on so tight he felt it wringing the blood out of her. She was giving what little strength she had, the force left in her heart and her breathing, to keeping her grasp on him. And if he waited until she was weak enough that it slackened, he'd lose her.

He was losing her, this girl who built with him each night a world so much softer and more beautiful than the one he woke to in the morning. She was the wild blossoms and dark sugar that spoke of what the world could be. She was the pale stars on her brown skin.

She was the whole sky.

That was the cruelest thing about losing someone. In being lost, they became so many different people, even more than when they were there. To Aracely, she would be the lost sister who had only begun to understand that the woman she lived with was made of a boy name Leandro, and a hundred thousand yellow butterflies, and the bright, wild wish to be as she really was.

To Sam, she was the girl who gave his moons somewhere to go. She was the dark amber of beechwood honey, the caramel of sourwood, and the bitter aftertaste of heather and pine. She was every shade of blue between two midnights.

And she was slipping from his grasp because she would not let go.

 

lake of perseverance

The world darkened and brightened. The wind cupped the thread of her mother's crying, weak and soft.

Only the slowing rhythm of her pulse in her wound made her sure she was still alive.

His hands on her took her out of these woods, back to a night when he left a rose moon in the beech tree outside her window. And she let herself slip out of the feeling of bleeding from her wrist, and into that first rush of light that had made her wonder if it was spring. It had brought the sudden feeling of being in a different month. Thinking winter was months away and realizing it was October.

This pale, rose-colored light had made her expect to look out her window and find all the trees blooming. A million blushing petals against a midnight sky. Spring descending over fall in countless pink blossoms. That blush on the whole world had turned her next breath into something between a gasp and a laugh. She could almost feel it in her mouth now, almost laughed like that again, but the salt at the back of her throat choked it out of her.

She sank under the memory of finding the trees outside not in blossom, but all amber and gold, tinted with that rose light. Instead of disappointment, it made her feel covered in the sound of his name.
Sam. Samir. Moon.
All the names she knew for him. Only one of his moons could make the world slip into another season.

Miel opened her eyes as much as she could, her eyelashes shading her vision. She slipped her fingers tight between Sam's.

She felt his heartbeat in his chest. She heard him saying her name over and over, the two of them breaking against each other.

Her eyes stung, and stayed dry. She had nothing left but the will to hold on to his hand, not to lose him. The water had taken Leandro. It had almost taken Sam. She wasn't letting go. All the strength in her body she let pour toward her fingers like sand. The night would not turn to water and tear his hand from hers. No matter how much the dark became a river and the wind a current, no matter how much blood Ivy's pale fingers had taken from her, Miel would not let go of Sam.

Through the slow, loud rhythm of her own pulse in her temples, she heard him sobbing into her hair. The sound was so low, it disappeared. He was holding it tight in his throat, like he meant to stay quiet. His breathing was hard enough that she felt it staggered with his heartbeat.