The truth ran over Estrella’s skin, sharp as winter rain.
It hadn’t been her family.
They had not brought this curse to La Pradera. They had thought their lovers had been disappearing long before they came here, back when they were las hijas del aire.
But it was the land.
Estrella and her cousins had given the land what they thought it wanted. Necklaces and bottles of perfume. Paper flowers and sugar hearts.
A carved wooden horse, painted blue, that called back the boy it once belonged to.
Estrella ran through the dark, her hands finding Dalia’s shoulders.
“Has a woman ever disappeared?” she asked.
“What?” Dalia asked.
Now Estrella looked to her other three cousins. “Has a woman our family loved ever vanished?”
Gloria shook her head, hesitating. “I don’t know.”
“We never heard about it,” Azalea said. “Do you really think they’d tell us?”
Estrella’s understanding fell scattered and bright as the sparks off a bonfire.
“It’s men,” she said. “It’s only men.”
“What are you talking about?” Gloria asked.
“The land,” Estrella said. “It doesn’t take women. It takes men because it’s men who died here. The miners. Our family helped hide their deaths, so the ground’s been taking the men we love ever since.”
“You’re wrong,” Calla said.
Estrella looked at her.
“This has nothing to do with La Pradera,” Calla said. “The disappearing…” The words dissolved in the air. Even Calla couldn’t say the raw truth of it, the disappearing of their loves, the vanishing of anyone they cared for too much. “It was happening to our family before we ever came here.”
“Was it?” Estrella asked. She looked around at all her cousins. “Does anyone know that for sure? Do we even have stories about it that far back?”
They opened their mouths, considering speaking but then staying quiet.
“We accepted this as the way it’s always been,” Estrella said. “We thought we brought this curse here with us. But do we know that?”
She felt their four sets of eyes settle on her, listening but not yet understanding.
“We helped cover this up,” Estrella said. “So it took something from us. It wanted us to answer for what we’d done. And it wanted our attention.”
“It?” Calla asked.
Estrella looked down at her feet. “The ground. This place.”
“But we didn’t know about what happened,” Azalea said. “Not until tonight.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Estrella said. “We turned a graveyard into gardens.”
Comprehension spread over Calla’s face. “So it wouldn’t let us leave.”
Calla’s words threw a new spray of embers across Estrella’s thoughts.
La Pradera held them, made them sick if they tried to run, because it would not let them walk away from the truth they had veiled in so many flowers and leaves.
“That means it’s not us,” Azalea said, her face so soft and hopeful she looked younger than Calla. “We didn’t kill them.”
They traded glances, the language of having lived together so long they could speak to one another with their eyes.
Estrella wished she could pry the ground open like the shell of a pomegranate, spilling out its secrets like shining red seeds.
Beneath the sharp color of the flower beds and the gray of the flagstone paths, this land would always be its own. It would always hold its own rage, its own vengeance. Estrella and her cousins, and their mothers and grandmothers, could draw a hundred thousand blossoms from the earth, but it would never belong to them. It would never belong to the Briar family, either, even if, on paper, it was theirs.
If it had ever belonged to the Briars, it had gotten away from them when they buried the awful things that had happened here. Their own carelessness caused the rock fall, and by covering it, they had turned it into a worse violation against this ground.
This garden, and all the loss here, had haunted the Nomeolvides women, and none of them had realized. It had grabbed them, trying to speak of what it had witnessed. It had tried to make them see it.
The loss of their lovers had been less its wrath and more it trying to make them pay attention.
It wanted them to look deeper and see the stories buried here.
These unspoken things had their own pull. Spun together, they were heavy as a moon.
The colors of the sunken garden swirled around Estrella.
Of course La Pradera would not let them go.
A hundred years ago, Nomeolvides women had hidden the jagged rock of the quarry walls with so many trees and climbing flowers, no one could tell there had once been a landslide big enough to kill so many men. Her family had cast a veil of vines over the sunken garden, a place they had never thought of as more than a rocky canyon.
If they did not know how many lives the quarry had taken, those first Nomeolvides women on La Pradera would have thought they were doing nothing but tending land that could not be farmed. The steps of the quarry, broken by the rock fall, would have looked like nothing but forbidding ground.
They had turned this place from a graveyard into a fairy tale.
“Estrella?” Dalia said.
Even with the soft echo of Dalia’s voice, all Estrella could see was this place they had made.
With dahlias and azaleas, calla lilies and morning glories, Estrella’s cousins had painted this ground. With roses and countless bulb flowers, her mother and her cousins’ mothers had kept this blood-soaked land a bright garden. With branches of blush and yellow flowers, her grandmother and great-aunts had spun this place from a tragedy to an enchantment.
They had given this place their hands. They had sealed the Briars’ lie with so many petals they could not be counted. And for this, the land would not let them leave. It made them stay, hearing its voice. If they tried to run, it drew blood and pollen from their lungs.
They had to uncover the ground again. They had to let it speak and be seen.
They had to kill all the beauty they’d made.
Estrella ran down into the sunken garden, the place that had once been a quarry. She knelt next to one of the flower beds. She plunged her hands in, and dragged out a border of blue starflowers.
The rushing of steps on the stone stairs made her look up. Bay and Fel and her cousins were following her down, her cousins watching Fel like he might be some figment of these gardens. An imagined boy.
Fel reached the path and then stopped. He watched her with his head a little tilted, like he hadn’t decided whether he should stop her. She didn’t blame him. She could see herself now, wild-eyed, her hair tangled as brambles.
She pulled stems so fast the indigo blossoms flew. Pink blooms and buds the color of dark wine fell to the dirt. Between flower beds, she dragged her fingers through the forget-me-nots dotting the grass.
She caught her breath. She found Fel’s silhouette in shadow.
“Are you gonna help me or not?” she asked.
He took a few steps toward her. His uncertainty held him. He must have thought that tearing up these flowers, these gardens her family had made, was its own violation. She could read the hesitation in him.
She took his forearms and pulled him down with her.
This was his story, too, all that had been hidden under leaves and blooms.
He was slow pulling the first ones out. But when he saw the recklessness in her hands, the borraja arcing through the air, he tried again. This time he mirrored her, clutching the stems and tearing them away.
She went faster, grabbing not just at the stems but at the ground. Wet earth got under her fingernails and stained her dress. It dyed her shoes.
She and her family had made all this. She was not too delicate or clean to tear it all down.
Her cousins stood on the brick and stone paths. They watched, eyes following Estrella’s and Fel’s hands. Azalea stood with crossed arms. Calla kept near Gloria, Gloria’s palm resting on her shoulder.
Dalia’s eyes landed on Bay. The look between them wove so thick through the air Estrella thought she could reach in front of her and touch it. It was invisible, but solid as the kind of satin ribbon Estrella and her cousins once offered La Pradera.
Dalia dragged her hands through the ground like she was stirring the surface of a pond, grasping at something that had just slipped beneath the surface.
Their cousins reeled back. Dalia was ripping at flowers like she was stamping out flames. Her fury turned to a thing that looked like madness into a luring light. Estrella could see it on her cousins’ faces, their heads inclining toward her.
Dalia spun through the sunken garden, her hands fast as moon-silver over water. Calla slid from Gloria’s light hold. Gloria trailed after, not to stop her but to join her. Azalea followed, hands ready.
They took up flowers by the roots, the amethyst-colored calla lilies, the bright azalea bushes, the pastel rounds of dahlias. They tore down the morning glory vines purpling the quarry walls.
Dahlias spun like stars. Stalks of calla lilies in every color from cream to near-black flew. Blue morning glories fell from where they’d crawled up the balsam poplars. Azalea petals fell away from their centers.
They tore it all into a bright confetti. The petals caught in their hair and on their clothes.
Estrella felt the ground drawing back, like the sunken garden was taking a breath. She felt that breath spreading through the irises and hydrangeas and through all of them.
Their mothers and grandmothers appeared at the top of the sunken garden. Their faces showed their wonder as they recognized the lost Briar daughter in this auburn-haired stranger. They took in Fel, this brown-skinned boy with his sleeves still cuffed up, like he was a saint bearing sacred roses.
They watched him, this boy they thought had disappeared, earth flecking his skin. They watched Bay, this woman they had all claimed as their daughter. They watched their own children and grandchildren, each wrecked vine drawing both their horror and their thrill.
In the distance, Estrella found the far-off shape of her mother. She rushed down the stairs, and then was pulling at her own roses, tugging off enormous blooms. Dust-violet amnesia and yellow candlelight and pink secret garden roses tumbled from their stems.
Then Tía Jacinta was alongside her, picking bouquets of blue grape hyacinth like she was a little girl skipping through a wildflower field. Then Tía Azucena clutched at the day lilies. Even Tía Iris and Tía Hortensia followed, tearing at hello-darkness irises and a wall of blue and purple hydrangeas, the globes of tiny flowers spinning.
Lily magnolia and weeping cherry blossoms drifted over the quarry garden. The snow of pale petals swirled through the air.
The fever had caught even their grandmothers. They had followed their daughters and granddaughters, destroying the trees they had urged into flower. Abuela Mimosa and her branches of tiny yellow blossoms. Abuela Magnolia’s sprawling white blooms. Abuela Lila’s clusters of four-petaled lilacs. Abuela Flor’s full-flowered cherry trees and Abuela Liria’s wide-petaled lily trees.
Everything that cursed them had made a home of this ground. It had grown tendrils and shoots. It had twisted and curled, and shot out thorns. They had to dig their hands in as deep as the earth would let them. They could not free themselves by deadheading flowers and crushing leaves.
They would change nothing by picking flowers.
They had to rip out their fate by the roots.
The floor of the sunken garden spread over acres, and they scattered over its paths and lawns. They tore up so much of the ground that it helped them. It buckled and waved like an ocean.
Folds rose up in the earth like little mountains. They lifted what was left of the bulb flowers and hedges.
Those breaks in the earth took on forms Estrella recognized. Hands, arms, shoulders. Not like they were rising from under the ground.
Like the ground itself was making them.
Figures emerged from the earth the Nomeolvides women tore up. A man from the dirt beneath hydrangea bushes. Another from the stretch shaded by a weeping cherry tree. A third from under the iris beds.
A man with features Estrella recognized.
Near-black hair, flashing with the blue of a few caught forget-me-not petals.
Skin the color of sand when water left it mirror-wet.
A man who looked like an older version of Fel.