When the Moon was Ours (6 page)

In Ivy's face, Miel saw a calm that fell between them like a sheet. The Bonner girls were losing their strange power, but Ivy thought these roses could get it back. They could make any boys they wanted fall in love with them. This town would understand that the Bonner girls could take whatever they wanted. And that fact would ring louder than any whispers about Chloe.

Miel looked around the downstairs, wondering where Mr. and Mrs. Bonner were. Either they weren't home, or they were upstairs, or the sisters didn't care. If they thought their daughters were, for once, having someone over, they might be keeping their distance, not wanting to disturb the strange, unknowable act of girls becoming friends.

“No,” Miel said. “They're mine.” The words sounded petty, but they were true. Her roses belonged to her. Her cutting them away and then drowning them was her offering to the mother who had feared them.

Chloe tilted her head. Her braid skimmed the side of her neck and traced the outer curve of her breast. Miel wondered if her breasts were heavy and full, and if so, how long it would take her body to realize there was no baby here, no one needing her milk.

But Lian spoke before Chloe did.

“It must make you sad,” Lian said, in a way that wasn't warm enough to sound kind or sharp enough to sound mean. “What happened with your mother.”

Miel's neck turned as perspiration-damp as the night she and Sam saw a lynx in the woods. Its pale fur had shone in the dark, its ruff banded in black. It had eyes the color of the dark yellow veins in canyon jasper. Two wisps of dark fur curved off the tips of its ears.

Don't run,
Sam had told her.
You'll just be telling her you're less than she is.

I
am
less than she is,
Miel had said. The lynx's fur, gray tinged with red and gold, had looked like strands of light.

“You don't know anything about my mother,” Miel said.

“I heard a story from a woman a few towns up the river,” Chloe said. “One of my aunt's friends. This old lady who talked about a woman who tried to kill her children and then killed herself.”

“That's not what happened,” Miel said. None of that was the way it happened.

“I doubt that's what people would think if they knew,” Chloe said.

Lower your head,
Sam had told her the night they saw the lynx.
And your eyes.

Miel had, tipping her chin down, still watching the lynx's face. She still remembered the feeling of perspiration dampening the small of her back.

Now back up,
he'd said.
Slowly. You don't want to look like you're retreating.

I
am
retreating,
she'd said.

Miel met Chloe's gaze, shrugging and shaking her head to say,
I don't know what you're talking about.
The woman in the old lady's story could have been any woman, anyone else's mother.

“You look like her,” Lian said, without malice, not baiting her. But Miel almost asked where they had gotten a picture of her mother, did they have it or was it pasted into that old woman's photo album.

She didn't ask. But stopping herself was enough of a flinch to tell them they were right.

One flinch, and they had her.

Miel not only had the petals they thought could root them back into being the Bonner sisters. She had committed the crime of witnessing one of them fail, seeing Ivy and that bored, polite boy.

Peyton was still tracing that water mark. She couldn't meet Miel's eye. Of course she couldn't, not after everything Sam had done for her.

Miel tried to make her feet move, but her shoes felt heavy as glass.

The night they saw the lynx, Sam had put his hand on her shoulder blade, and guided her out of the lynx's line of sight. The warmth of his palm had come through her shirt so quickly she thought the pattern of blush-colored flowers would turn dark as wet cranberries.

But she was not as calm, as steady with logic, as Sam.

“Isn't it worth it to you?” Chloe asked. “So everyone doesn't find out all the terrible things she did?”

Of course it was worth it to Miel. If people told those stories about her mother, her mother's spirit would feel it. She'd be haunted, weighted by all those lies. Her spirit would never find any rest. She was already weighted down having a daughter born with roses in her body, a curse that spurred those petaled children to turn on their mothers.

Now, because of Miel, because of the roses the Bonner girls wanted, her mother would be blamed, slandered. What worse could Miel bring on her mother's soul?

Without even meaning to, she had become everything a rose-cursed daughter was feared to be, a disgrace and burden to her own blood.

A breeze came in the screen door, ruffling Miel's skirt. The damp hem brushed the backs of her knees. Streamers of chilled air snaked up her sleeves, cooling the wound her roses grew from. They felt solid as ribbons, tethering her to this spot on the Bonners' floor.

The sideboard drawer slid shut, the wood rasping against a worn track. But Miel didn't see the scissors until Ivy was peeling back her sweater sleeve. Tarnish dulled the brass of the blades, the handle rubbed shiny by the oils of the Bonners' hands.

It didn't make sense.

They thought Miel could give them back whatever they had lost.

They didn't understand that the only way to do that would be for Chloe never to have gone away. Chloe was a tree ripped out of and then planted back into an orchard, her roots and the roots of every tree near her shocked by the turning over of earth.

But Miel couldn't move. She was letting them, because they were the Bonner girls, and all of them had their stares on her. Ivy's, her eyes a gray that made the red of her hair look hot as a live coal. Lian's, a green as deep as her hair was dark red. Chloe's and Peyton's, both their eyes a brown that in certain lights looked dark gray.

Because together they had so much shared gravity they pulled toward that navy blue house anything they wanted. Because they were four brilliant red lynxes, and she could not run.

Ivy snipped the stem.

The cut bit into Miel, like thorns waited under her skin. She cried out for just a second before biting back the sound.

The feeling came back into her body. Pain snapped away the ribbons of cool air tethering her to the floor. And she ran, holding her wrist against her chest. The stub of a cut stem dripped blood onto her sweater sleeve, like a broken branch of star jasmine letting off milk.

She threw the screen door open and let it slam shut.

Among the flecks of orange and white in the pumpkin fields were small glints of light, like the field was dark velvet dotted with white opal.

Her eyes adjusted, the vines and little points of light sharpening.

Glass. The pumpkins were turning to glass. Everything that whirled between the Bonner sisters had not stayed inside that house. It had not huddled inside the sisters' bedrooms. It would not be locked inside their closets or hidden on shelves under their sweaters.

It had slid out here, creeping over their family's fields, this land they would inherit. It was seeping into the pumpkins so that each one now held a little storm spinning it to glass. It made the pumpkins brittle and hard and unyielding as the bond between those four girls. Miel could almost feel it skimming her neck like fingers of cold air. If she stayed still, it would find its way into her. It would make her breakable.

It would turn her to glass.

Miel ran down the path to the road, keeping as far from those pumpkins as the spread of the land let her. Her sweater clung to her skin, and the scalloped neckline of the shirt she wore underneath bit into her like teeth.

The pain in her wrist shot through her body. But she ran, fast enough that she could pretend she didn't see the pumpkins at the fringes of the fields, hardening and turning clear, shining the faint gold of hot glass.

 

sea of vapors

Sam and his mother had just finished cleaning up from dinner when Aracely called.

“Can you come help me?” she said when Sam picked up.

His mother stood at the stove, firing the cast-iron pan, the way she dried it so it wouldn't rust.

Sam propped the phone against his shoulder and looked over at her, his silent way of asking,
Do you mind?
They'd held to the unspoken agreement that as long as he asked permission to go out when his mother was awake, she wouldn't comment on the times he snuck out to see Miel when she was asleep.

Did you finish your math?
his mother mouthed.

He nodded.

His mother turned off the fire and nodded back.

“Sure,” Sam told Aracely.

“Good,” Aracely said. “Because I'm about three seconds from strangling your girlfriend.”

She hung up, leaving Sam to pick apart what little she'd said. The clench in his throat when he wondered if Aracely knew. The breath out when he realized that if she did, she didn't seem to want to kill him. And the question of what had gotten her in a bad enough mood that she was ready to kill Miel.

His mother threw a jacket at him. He shrugged into the sleeves on his way out, and followed the moons he'd set out for Miel, a path of light between their houses.

Miel didn't cure lovesickness herself. She didn't have what she called el don, the gift Aracely had. But often Miel helped her, passing her matches and glass jars and the right kind of egg. She went out and picked lemons from the tree outside, the gold rinds rain-slicked. Aracely couldn't set these things out beforehand because she never quite knew what she needed until she met the lovesickness living inside a broken heart.

Sam walked up the front steps, and like always, the color of the outside made him think of a paint he'd once used.
Wisteria,
the tube had called it. It had sounded like a place, somewhere that was both beautiful and too small to show on a map. But when he asked his mother, she told him it was a flower, a vine that dripped blossoms like icicles.

Aracely met him at the door.

“Watch her,” Aracely said, tilting her head inside.

Miel stood with her back against the wall, shoulders rounded. He would have wondered if Aracely had yelled at her, but in front of those who came for lovesickness cures, she never did.

Aracely's heels clicked against the floor, Sam and Miel following.

“What happened?” Sam said, keeping his voice low.

Miel shook her head.
Not now.

Tonight, Aracely was curing a man. Sometimes Aracely called Sam over to hand her eggs and herbs and the right kind of lemon. Having a boy around made the men more comfortable. They were already skittish about having Aracely's hands on their chests. Having a girl passing blue eggs to Aracely unnerved them, like the fact that there were two of them made it more likely they were witches.

This man looked a little older than Aracely, maybe twenty-eight or thirty. Everything about him seemed so pale against the dark walls of this room, the color of a blue milk mushroom. The waves of his hair, a dark blond like dried corn, had been cut short. He wore pressed slacks, nice enough for church, and a gray sweater in a knit too heavy for the weather, like he was trying to protect his heart from the thing he was paying to have done to it.

Aracely asked for a Faverolles egg, and Miel, staring at the patch of indigo wall, reached for a Copper Maran egg. Sam slipped it from her palm, replacing it with the cream egg Aracely wanted. Aracely asked for a blood orange, and Miel reached for a lumia lemon. Sam stopped her.

So that was the problem. Miel wasn't paying attention.

“Sorry,” Miel whispered.

“What's going on with you?” he asked. She'd taught him which kind of egg was which. She could usually help Aracely half-asleep. The only thing Sam was good for was reassuring the men.

Aracely cracked the egg into a jar of water. She studied how the yolk spread, in needles like comet trails, or thick full light like a cord of dawn outlining the hills, so she would know how the lovesickness was holding on to him.

She swept herbs and a new egg over the man's body, put her hands on his shoulders. She pressed down on his upper rib cage, feeling through his skin. Her hands drew the lovesickness out.

Lovesickness resisted leaving, Aracely had told him, always. Whenever Sam watched Aracely, he saw the strain in her face when she drew it out, like pulling a full, heavy bucket up from a well.

But this man was no different from any other visitor on Aracely's table. His heart was swollen and sore with unwanted love. It fluttered inside his rib cage like wings. When Aracely took it out, it might flit around the room, running into a cabinet, bothering the apricots in the fruit bowl. But then Miel would fling the window open, and she and Aracely would chase it out the window like a bird that had wandered in.

Except tonight Aracely opened her hands, and Miel forgot to open the window. She stood against the wall, watching the floor.

Sam jumped toward the window, pulling the sash up from the sill. He tensed, only relaxing when he didn't hear the unseen lovesickness skimming the walls or knocking against the glass jars.

Aracely caught Sam's eye, and then nodded between Miel and the door, a look of
get her out of here.

Miel caught that look, and turned to the door before Sam did.

She left the indigo room and then the house, stopping at the front steps.

Sam caught up with her.

“I don't know,” she said before he could ask. “I'm just off today.” She shut her eyes, and shook her head again.

He wanted to touch her. It should have been easy now. But since that night in his bed, he hesitated putting his hands near her, like his fingers and her skin carried the static of the driest days. Once they'd been like glass, and the little shocks, his forearm grazing her breast or her hand accidentally finding the thigh of his jeans, passed through them. But touching each other that night had turned them to copper. Their bodies would conduct the heat of every little moment. When his arm touched her back. When they were in his mother's kitchen making sohan, and they realized that the flame under the sugar and honey was up too high, both reaching at the same time to turn it down.