She woke him in the hours before dawn. He still smelled like the pond in the sunken garden, all willow water and meadow cordgrass. La Pradera left its scent on anyone it touched. But the earth smelled different on this boy than it did on her own fingers. On him, it was deeper, like fall.
They had left the mushrooms on the stove, grandmothers and mothers and cousins spooning them from the copper pot as they came home. The air in the house still smelled like lemon and spice.
Now both mothers and grandmothers slept, their dreams heavy with worry and perfume. The guests were gone from Reid’s party, Reid was sleeping it off in the Briar house, and La Pradera was theirs again.
Estrella led Fel out into the gardens, where the two of them and her cousins passed around alegría candy, the puffed amaranth and honey smell warming the chilled air. They got into the extra crates left over from the ball, opening bottles of rose cordial and lemon liqueur.
Fel was both an odd visitor she wanted to watch and an uncertain boy she wanted to guide through the thorn-sharp world of the gardens. She wanted to show him where he could step without falling into the snares and traps of this place.
She wanted to see La Pradera the way he did, find the wonder in the tiller spurs like they were silver stars.
Calla ordered him to stay still like he was a younger brother, not a boy with three or four years on her. She tied to his wrist a scrap of cloth, brushed with glowing paint, the same as they tied on one another after every ball and summer party.
“It’s so we don’t lose each other,” Calla said.
“Here.” Azalea handed Fel a bottle. “Unless you’re not legal.”
“You don’t want to play that with me.” He took a swallow without flinching and handed it back to her. “You’ll be under the table before dawn.”
Azalea took a drink twice as long as his, trying to hide her wince. “Try me.”
For that second, they seemed a little bit happy. In the town down the hill, they had their shared love, alive and not vanished. For right now, Gloria, Azalea, and Calla put aside their anger toward Dalia and Estrella. Estrella had heard Azalea say to Dalia, “If anything happens to her, I’m holding you responsible,” but after that, Azalea seemed to let it fall.
In that forgiveness, even if it was just for tonight, Estrella could even shrug away making that ocean of blue petals.
She had turned her family into a show. In doing what Reid asked, she had made them all more objects of fascination than women. The fact that there were reasons she had to, the truth that Reid could throw them off La Pradera whenever he wanted, didn’t soften what she’d had to do. The logic didn’t wear down the edges.
But for right now, she could put this away, sure as locking it inside her jewelry box.
Bay was alive, and in her being alive was the possibility for everything so ordinary it was luminous. Azalea tossing her head to clear her hair from her face. Dalia stealing the lower corner of a darkening window and checking the lipstick she’d borrowed from her mother’s dresser. Gloria and Calla wiping their mouths on the backs of their hands, hoping the hard candies they shared hadn’t turned their lips purple.
Tonight, they were the same girls who snuck out of their windows and ran into town on summer nights, first buying swirled sticks of candy and then lace-trimmed camisoles they didn’t want their mothers to know about. Except for these small things, the world outside La Pradera’s did not call to them. They knew what was waiting. A world that thought their gifts were magic within estate gardens but witchcraft on wild land. Towns that called them murderers for loving farmers’ sons and ministers’ daughters into nothingness.
Gloria stood next to Estrella, both of them watching Calla fasten the knot on the back of Fel’s wrist.
“Are you worried?” Gloria asked.
“About?” Estrella asked.
“That he was someone else’s,” Gloria said. Her voice was open, not accusing.
“Yes.”
Estrella wanted to reach into Fel and find every scrap of remembrance that might tell her who he had belonged to, which of their great-great-grandmothers. Was she the kind to forgive? Or would she be jealous even from the grave, striking down both Estrella and the boy she herself had once loved?
Fel looked seventeen, eighteen at the most, caught in the age he was when he vanished, the age he had been when that love burned so fast and bright he disappeared.
“Do something for me?” Gloria said.
Estrella looked at her.
“Don’t love him too hard,” she said.
Estrella put her hands against her dress, one spread over the other, like this was where Gloria’s words had gone in.
Don’t love him until he is nothing.
Don’t let your heart kill him.
Estrella felt her lips part and stay parted, until all she could say was, “Gloria.”
“Please,” Gloria said. “Azalea and Calla, they love him. They’ve gotten attached. And not the way we got attached to Bay. Worse. They love him like he’s their blood. Maybe you’ve been too distracted with Dalia and Bay to notice.”
“That’s not fair.”
“I don’t want anything bad to happen to him,” Gloria said. “First Bay walks out on us and now Reid’s made us a circus act. They can’t take anything else. It’ll destroy them.”
“I care about them too.”
“I know.”
“And I care about him.”
“That’s what I’m worried about,” Gloria said. “There’s a difference. You want him. They want their mothers to adopt him.”
“Whose fault is that?” Estrella asked. “You’re the one who told us to treat him like a brother.”
“What did you want us to do?” Gloria’s voice grew fiercer even as she lowered it. “We gave La Pradera our jewelry and it gave us a person. I didn’t want to test that.”
Estrella’s eyelashes felt hot, the corners of her eyes prickling. “What do you want from me?”
“I want you to wake up,” Gloria said. “All of us, our hearts for women and for men. You know what that means?”
“More ways to lose them?” Estrella asked.
“Our hearts or the ones we love?” Gloria asked.
“Both.”
The word came out bitter. Estrella let it. This was what their mothers would say if she and her cousins ever told them the things they folded inside their hearts. Twice as many paths to trouble, their mothers would whisper. As though their daughters loving men and women meant they wanted all of them in the world. There was no way to tell their mothers the truth and make them believe it, that hearts that loved boys and girls were no more reckless or easily won than any other heart. They loved who they loved. They broke how they broke. And the way it happened depended less on what was under their lovers’ clothes and more on what was wrapped inside their spirits. What secret halls and trapdoors their souls held, and what each one hid and guarded.
Estrella’s heart and her cousins’ hearts, the way they were as likely to fall in love with women as with men, was a language the five of them shared. But they did not know how to teach it to their mothers and grandmothers. All their mothers and grandmothers could do was listen and decide for themselves what it sounded like.
Estrella had fallen in love twice. They had been different not because once was with a woman and once was with a boy, but because once was with Bay and once was with Fel.
“There’s nothing wrong with who we love,” Estrella whispered. “What’s wrong is what’s always been wrong. We’re Nomeolvides girls.”
Letting Bay go, accepting that Bay loved Dalia in a way she did not love the rest of them, had not lessened the poison in Estrella’s blood. She was still a girl born from generations of broken hearts. That was the dangerous thing. Not that she and her cousins all spoke the language of loving boys and girls, but that they all shared the legacy of losing them.
“And we thought we’d be the ones to get out of this,” Gloria said. “We thought we were so much smarter than our mothers.”
Estrella settled into the feeling of the six of them, her and her four cousins and this boy. For that minute, she didn’t think of kissing him. She thought only of keeping him. If keeping him meant thinking of him as a brother and nothing else, she could do it.
A breeze brought the thread of perfume off Gloria’s skin.
Not hers. Not the clean orchid scent, and not any scent familiar in the stone house.
Estrella touched her cousin’s neck, like she could trace her fingers over the place where another woman’s perfume had rubbed off on her skin.
“Who is she?” Estrella asked.
She tried to keep her voice soft, flat. She just wanted to know.
There were so many parts of themselves they never let one another see.
Gloria’s eyes glinted like the beads sewn into her dress.
“I never ask for a name,” she said. “It’s easier that way.”