“I will cut out his heart” was the first thing Estrella got close enough to hear. Calla.
Then, “And I’ll make him eat it”—Azalea.
Then, Gloria, saying, “No, you won’t. Now stop it. Both of you.”
The three of them stood, watching Dalia’s fingers play at Reid’s collar and at the curled white rose pinned to his jacket.
Gloria’s hand landed on Calla’s arm, stilling her.
Calla shook her head. “She’s lost her mind.”
“No,” Azalea said, her gaze on Dalia and Reid so unmoving Estrella wondered how they didn’t feel it on their necks. “It’s Bay.”
Estrella stopped, just close enough for the blue of her skirt to skim the lilac hem of Gloria’s.
“She misses Bay,” Azalea said. “And he’s the closest Briar she has.”
Gloria shook her head. “She’s too smart for that. She’s up to something.”
“Like what?” Calla asked.
Gloria shrugged. “Stealing his wallet?”
“Slitting his throat in his sleep?” Azalea said under her breath. “She might have competition, though.”
Azalea cast her eyes on Estrella, the first indication any of them had noticed her skirt brushing against theirs.
“You’re not some puppy he can train to do tricks,” Azalea said.
“Azalea,” Calla said. She threw Estrella a fast but apologizing look.
Reid’s request had seemed so small until Estrella had to do it, all those eyes fixed on her. Not just the guests’, but her mother’s. She could tell that her mother would have been disappointed, angry even, if she hadn’t been afraid for Estrella. That fear had been like the green tarnish on copper, hiding the color underneath.
“I can’t believe you let him do that to you,” Azalea said.
“You and Fel both.” Estrella could argue this down with Azalea on any other night. She had her own shame over this. She didn’t need her cousins to give her more. They weren’t the ones who’d heard Reid speak the words las hijas del aire. “Now what are you three doing?”
Azalea touched the air in front of her, pointing one polished fingernail to the scene of their cousin and the man they wanted off La Pradera.
“We’re not doing anything until we talk to her,” Gloria said.
“Then let’s go talk to her.” Azalea crossed the courtyard.
“Azalea,” Estrella whisper-called after her.
Azalea would break Dalia open like a chocolate orange. Estrella had seen her banging them on the kitchen counter at Christmastime, the only one of the five of them who could make the segments fall apart with one sure whack.
The three of them went after Azalea, skirts fluffing out with each step.
Azalea tapped Reid once on the shoulder.
“Could we steal her for a minute?” she asked.
She shoved Dalia toward the hedge.
“Girl things,” Azalea added over her shoulder.
“Girl things?” Calla whispered, leaning into Azalea. “He’s gonna think we’re all…”
“Let him,” Gloria said. “Nothing else in the world makes a man like that more afraid than five girls on their periods.”
Before Reid could catch Calla’s gritted teeth, Fel appeared at the edge of their ring of skirts, mumbling something about a guest being allergic to silver-dollar leaves, which the florists had slipped into every arrangement.
“Then pull the eucalyptus out of the vases,” Reid said.
Estrella inclined forward, ready to tell Reid that Fel wasn’t his to order around.
Calla reached out, her hand slapping Estrella’s forearm. Not in a way meant to hurt, but to stop her. Calla looked at her, flicking a glance toward Fel.
Estrella watched him, caught how he made his face a little blanker than usual.
He was baiting Reid. He was distracting him. Calla had understood this when Estrella hadn’t.
Estrella knew Fel’s touch, the taste of his mouth, the warmth of his bare back. But the small, feathered thing living in her rib cage had made her miss details about him. It had made her miss certain signs that he was not just sad and lost and kind but also smart, and always watching.
That feathered thing made her know him in a way her cousins did not, but they knew him in a way she’d failed to.
Fel stayed, asking Reid increasingly stupid questions—But what do I do with it once I pull it out? How do I know how many arrangements there are? What if I miss one?—until Reid gave the air a heavy sigh and led him toward the ballroom.
Azalea watched Fel trail after Reid. Pride made her tilt her head, like he was her little brother, nine or ten and just now learning how to go up against the will of other boys.
She patted Calla on the back. “We taught him well, didn’t we?” She shared one sisterly sigh with Calla, and then turned her eyes back to Dalia.
Behind her cousins’ backs, Estrella gave Dalia her own apologetic look, one of I couldn’t stop them. Dalia’s widened eyes and pressed-together lips answered back You could have tried a little harder.
But Estrella knew even Dalia didn’t believe that. One cousin could never stop three. Not even Gloria, with her cloud of authority that seemed to be passed down to eldest women in their family like a string of coral beads. Not even Azalea, with sheer momentum on her side as she rushed toward whatever she had decided. Not even Calla, with her logic they only halfway followed so that before they knew it, she had talked them into something they thought they’d decided against.
No one of them could take on two or three or all four of the others.
Azalea took Dalia’s arm, her fingers pinching into her skin.
“Are you drunk?” Azalea asked. “He’s the enemy.”
“The closer I get to him, the more we know, the more we have to fight back with,” Dalia said, keeping her voice below the music.
Azalea and Calla rushed Dalia toward the high wall of a hedge, their skirts sweeping her into the inner curve. Gloria and Estrella followed, their dresses dragging the scent of grass after them.
“So all that giggling, that’s just part of your plan?” Azalea asked.
“Azalea,” Dalia said. Estrella could see her trying to keep her voice steady. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Estrella almost reached out, wanting her fingers on Dalia’s arm to be a warning. This was how Azalea always trapped them.
“Then tell me,” Azalea said.
Estrella let her hand fall. Azalea had caught Dalia like a bramble snagging the corner of her dress. The insult. The provocation. Then Azalea’s invitation to correct her.
Dalia shut her eyes, and Estrella’s heart shivered like it wore a coat of hoarfrost. Ice crystals scattered and fell away.
Dalia led them beyond the hedge wall, the courtyard’s music and voices muffled by leaves.
“Bay didn’t disappear,” Dalia said.
“Dalia,” Gloria said. Sympathy spread through her voice, as though Dalia were letting herself fall into some dream where their family’s curse did not live.
“I helped her disappear,” Dalia said. “She had to get away from Reid so she could find a way out from under him and this mess with the will.”
“But…” Calla paused. “You saw her…” She stopped, lips parted, realizing. “Oh.”
The air felt braided with threads of warmer and cooler air, the three of them sinking into the truth Estrella already knew.
Dalia had lied. Bay had asked her to. And all this blazed through them, the sting like a shared wound.
Bay was not gone from them. It was a joy that would have bloomed into a thousand each of the flowers they’d been named for, if those other truths hadn’t dulled it.
They had all thought Bay had loved them, or not loved them, the same. But Bay had shared the trick of her death with only one of them.
Azalea tensed, her collarbone looking sharper. “You know, you could really make it on the stage if you wanted.”
“Don’t.” Dalia threw a glance toward Estrella. “I’ve already heard that speech from her.”
Azalea’s head whipped toward Estrella. “You knew?”
Estrella lifted her eyes to glare at Dalia, a look of thanks a lot.
“I told her not to tell anyone,” Dalia said.
“And anyone means us,” Gloria said. The way she put no questioning in her voice gave the words a bitter edge.
“It was bad enough she had to lie for Bay, and for me,” Dalia said. “I didn’t want all five of us to have to.”
“We all would’ve lied for her,” Calla said. “And for you. But we don’t lie to each other.”
“Except they do.” Azalea set her hand on Calla’s shoulder. “Come on. If they’re too good for us, we can leave.”
“Don’t you ever get tired of this?” Dalia asked.
Azalea looked back at her. “Of what?”
Dalia closed the space between them so she could keep her voice low. “All five of us acting like we’re one person?”
For once, Estrella couldn’t guess what Azalea or the rest of her cousins were thinking. Their faces didn’t show her. Estrella was left wondering if they, too, struggled for full breaths in the tight space of being one in five, one more generation of Nomeolvides girls. Guests never learned their names. At balls, Marjorie’s business acquaintances mixed them up, Azalea with Estrella even though they looked the least alike, Calla with Gloria even though they were years apart, for no other reason than that they were both tall.
In Azalea’s flinch, Estrella thought she might have caught it, the sting of her realizing Dalia was right. But then it was gone, replaced by Azalea asking, “So you’re better than we are now?”
“Azalea,” Gloria said. “Just listen to her.”
“There’s nothing to listen to,” Azalea said. She looked at Dalia. “You’re a liar”—then at Estrella—“you’re her little apprentice liar”—she circled back to Gloria and Calla—“and if you don’t realize that, you’re both as stupid as they think you are.”
“Stop.” Gloria held out her hands, one toward Dalia and Estrella, one toward Azalea and Calla. Her eyes crawled back to Dalia. “Do you swear she’s alive?”
“Jazmín, Verónica, Mirasol, Luna, y Amapola,” Dalia said, listing all five names of their deceased great-grandmothers. It was an oath between them, as solemn and sacred as crossing themselves and naming the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
Gloria held a breath between her lips, letting it drain with a sound like wind through the blossoming branches. “Then we thank God and La Pradera for it.”
Azalea’s eyes slid over to her. “That’s it?” she asked. “You don’t care that she lied to us.”
“Of course I care,” Gloria said. “But what I care about more is that what we were afraid happened didn’t happen.”
“We only thought it happened because she pretended it did.” Azalea’s eyes snapped back to Dalia. “We really need to make sure you get some kind of award for that performance.”
“What do you want more?” Gloria leaned into Azalea. “To rip her apart right now, or to make sure we keep Bay safe?”
Azalea tensed, caught between her own conviction that she had been wronged, that all of them had, and the raw truth Gloria put in front of her.
Gloria kept looking at her, her expression urging her on. So? Which is it?
Azalea tilted her head back, her shoulders falling with one slow breath out. “Fine.”
This was how, on Gloria’s insistence, they all took the hundreds of stone steps down to the sunken garden. They did as Gloria said, giving La Pradera the offerings that showed their gratitude for not taking this woman they all loved.
Gloria and Estrella took out their earrings and tossed them into the curling vines. Calla brought her favorite book of fairy tales and buried it among the rocks and ivy. Dalia crushed dulce de cacahuate estilo mazapán between her fingers and sprinkled it over the earth like fairy dust, peeling the candy rounds of sugar and crushed peanuts from their rose-printed wax paper.
Azalea kept her eyes on Dalia. “We’re not okay.”
Dalia gave a small nod, accepting the hard edge of Azalea’s grudge like a knife offered blade-out. “I know.”
Azalea slid the thin bangles off her wrists, throwing a glance at Estrella and then back at Dalia. “And you dragged her into this.”
“I didn’t mean to,” Dalia said.
Azalea tossed the bangles into the pond. “I don’t care what you meant.”
They watched the bracelets, the gold glowing like rings of light as they sank.
“Do you ever wonder if this is a sin?” Calla whispered to Estrella.
Estrella was lifting her skirt, ripping away the crinoline layer that was her favorite shade of blue. “Why would it be?”
“Because we’re supposed to be giving our offerings to God, aren’t we?” Calla asked.
“You really think God hears us down here?” Dalia cut in, doing the same with her dress, pulling away the layer that was the softest shade of coral.
“We’re Nomeolvides girls.” Azalea threw the last of her bracelets into the water. “I don’t think God hears us at all.”
The glow from the band billowed out like rippling water. Estrella and Dalia lay their skirts on the pond, and they twirled and sank down like veils of light.
La Pradera was their god. Her family could pray. They could read their Bibles. But the bright colors and the night voices of this place scared off any saints and angels. What God would listen to the prayers of girls whose hearts were poison?
The wind picked up, blowing a spray of water into Estrella’s face. She shut her eyes, let it brush over her cheeks. She remembered the fever La Pradera had settled over her when she ran, the swelling sense that still things were moving. The feeling that the darkness outside was ink or an ocean. Wondering if the wind was shivering all the flowers in the world as much as it seemed to be.
La Pradera held them. It took the men and the women they loved, and if they ever tried to leave, it took them, too.
The rage of the three cousins still hung in the air, like the bitter tang of smoke. But this, they did together. This—their love for Bay, their understanding that La Pradera’s power was the only match for the curse of their blood—made them more sisters than cousins.
Above them, the well-suited men and gown-wearing women danced, drunk on champagne and lavender liqueur. But down here, with the sunken garden’s walls rising up around them, the slopes covered in green, this was their world. The floor was thick with every flower the Nomeolvides women grew. Low garden lamps gave the ground enough light to show its color. Cypress trees cast their silhouettes against the walls. Blossoming branches patterned the walkways in flowered shadows.
The cousins streamed toward the stone staircases.
“Are you coming?” Calla asked.
“Soon,” Estrella said. “I’ll be right there.”
Dalia and Azalea paused before the first step.
“Azalea,” Dalia said.
But Azalea rushed up the stairs in front of her, ignoring her.
“Just give her time,” Estrella heard Gloria whisper. “She’ll come around.”
Estrella stayed. She stood before the pond, the water still enough to mirror the moon.
The air here smelled like wild sage and blue shale. Soft waves of meadow cordgrass and pink muhly grass, things that sprouted wild in the wet ground, grew in the willows’ shade. The feathery stalks looked like clouds of fairy floss when dry, and pink rock candy when they got wet.
Estrella crouched near the water. Her dress fluffed up behind her. Flower beds fringed the banks. The ends of willow fronds floated on the water.
Forty feet down to the bottom. The lowest point of the sunken garden.
Estrella shut her eyes and asked La Pradera not to break her and her cousins apart. They could last through a hundred fights about who’d borrowed whose yellow shoes, but they could not fight like this, cold and silent and mistrusting.
She asked these gardens why they had given her family Fel, a boy so kindhearted that he carried guilt none of them could name but all of them could see on his frame like a weight. She asked what La Pradera wanted her and her family to do with him. She asked it to let him out from under his own nightmares, to save him from being a boy who did not sleep.
She asked it to help him get back all he did not remember.
Estrella traced her fingers along her necklace. The one thread of romance her mother allowed was the story of its colors. The tumbled-stone beads, as round as pearls and as big as shell peas, were the colors of a rare bird from the Atacama Desert. Bronze and lilac. Cobalt and violet. Their feathers were bright bursts on the silver land. It was proof of Estrella’s own blood, worn on her neck.
Estrella had loved it like it itself was a desert bird, bright and flickering.
She grabbed the necklace, all she had of her father’s family, half her blood. And she pulled until the strands snapped.
The beads, the blue and green and bronze, flew and scattered. They broke the surface of the pond like raindrops.
Trails of light slid through the pond. They grew brighter and dimmer as they moved into shallower and then deeper water. When they stayed still for a second, they were points of light. When they moved, they were comet trails. They skittered and broke through the surface. One spun away from the water like a firefly. One flew, mirroring the path of the one in the pond.
Another splashed up and joined the one in the air. Still another stayed underwater, lighting up the pond and the willow streamers.
Some stayed. Some flew out and clustered on the meadow cordgrass and muhly grass, lighting up the pink fluff. They looked like fireflies or tiny stars.
“Estrella?”
She thought the voice was an echo of his voice from earlier, the gardens throwing it back at her.
But she turned, and he stood there, the pond casting bands of bowing light over him.
“Fel?” she asked.
He stepped out from the willow’s shadow.
Later, she would tell herself he’d kissed her first. She would remember that. He’d started this. Maybe she wrapped her fingers around the back of his neck and pulled him toward her, but he’d still started this.
She kissed him hard enough to realize it wasn’t just the air but Fel that tasted like wild sage and smelled like blue shale. The insistence and faltering of kissing him had its own rhythm. It was the alternation of which of them wanted it more and which of them thought they should stop. They passed the two back and forth so one of them was always pulling away while the other drew closer.
The feeling that she should stop collected in her.
If she thought she could ever love him, she shouldn’t let his mouth near hers. If there was anything in her that wanted him, she shouldn’t learn the pattern of his breathing when he kissed her.
If she wanted his body not to vanish, she could not put her hands on him.
This was the heart of being a Nomeolvides girl. The more she loved a boy, the more reasons there were not to touch him.
The price of knowing he would be there for her to touch was her not touching him.
She knew this, even as he set his hands on the waist of her dress, slid his tongue between her lips, even as she dug her fingers into his hair. And with the moon veiling the clouds, with the garden lanterns and the little stars her necklace had turned to as their only light, it was almost as though, for those few seconds, La Pradera could not see them.
But around them, the ground was whispering, the grass and flower beds giving up strange things Estrella could not name.