The sun fell below the trees. The shadows deepened, leaving just enough light for Estrella to lead Fel through the gardens.
They passed the Briar house. When Estrella was little, that long front of brick gables and dormer windows had seemed like a storybook castle. In the courtyard of blossoming trees, the grandmothers’ magnolias and lilacs ringed a wide stone fountain, filling the air with the smell of sugar and wet petals.
Wooden lattices and rose trellises screened the beds of hyacinths, irises, and lilies. Tía Hortensia’s hydrangea bushes grew clouds of blue and violet blossoms.
Behind the trellises, Estrella caught her mother’s shadow. Through the crosshatch, she watched her mother setting palms to the wood. Her thin fingers gripped the lattices, and rose vines climbed the frame. Brambles twirled up toward the arbored ceiling. Leaves spread, finding the sun. Buds opened into tea roses so pale pink and peach they were almost white, and into wide blooms the yellow of candle flames or the deep red of black pearl peppers. They came in the soft tints of a shell’s inner curves, and in colors as deep as ink and indigo.
Through the rose lattices, her mother watched her with something between observance and disapproval. Estrella wondered if she was already falling short of the task of showing this boy the gardens.
Estrella stood up straight as they passed through the checkered shadows of the trellises.
“It’s called La Pradera,” she told Fel.
“The Meadow?” he asked. She saw the thread of confusion slipping into his wonder.
“The Briars named it, not us,” she said.
There was a kind of false modesty to the rich Estrella still didn’t understand. An estate thick with gardens was called a meadow. Women in cream silk tipped a hand toward their dresses and said they’d just thrown something on. Even Marjorie had called her midsummer balls little parties.
“My family’s been here for a hundred years,” Estrella said. “Before that it was just rocks. Nothing grew but brush and wild grass.”
Fel walked with her alongside a low garden bed. Fireflies lit the flowers, drawn by the damp air and the mild scent of azaleas and dahlias. During the hottest summer months, Estrella and her cousins slept in the afternoons and woke at dusk, gardening by the lightning bugs’ glow.
The sunken garden opened in front of them. When the Nomeolvides women first came here with flowers waiting in their hands, it had been nothing but a jagged ravine.
Estrella led Fel down the sloping path to the sunken garden’s floor. The deep, wide well sat several stories below the rest of La Pradera. The basin, lined with trees and hedges, ran down toward a carpet of green. Bright curving flower beds and cypress trees swirled through, the color softening in the morning and deepening in the evening. Blue hyacinths and morning glories made the shadows under the cypress trees richer. Globes of hydrangeas grew in the purples and fuchsias of sugar plums. Pink day lilies and burgundy calla lilies followed the waves of hedges. Flowering trees sprinkled petals over the stone paths.
At the sunken garden’s deepest point, a pond went down forty feet. The number dizzied Estrella. Branches of trailing willows almost met at the water’s center, so the thought of a pond that went down as far as it was deep made Estrella feel like she was looking into the night sky.
“We made it our home,” Estrella said. “So now we live here.”
Fel stopped on the stone path, looking at the color rising around him. His lips were a little parted, like his lungs were held in the place between taking a breath in and letting it out. The border between wonder and fear.
“You made all this?” he asked.
She nodded. “About five generations of us.”
“How?” he asked.
She felt a smile coming to her. She knelt, grabbed his forearm, pulled him down so he knelt next to her. The sudden cool of the ground came through her skirt.
She plunged her hands into a flower bed, clutching palmfuls of dark ground. This was as second nature as shaking her hair out from a braid, but the shiver of it, the feeling of something living in her becoming visible, never faded. And Fel shuddered as though he could feel it.
Small sprouts broke through the dark ground. They twisted out of the dirt, the single point of green becoming four rounded leaves. The leaves lengthened, veins deepening. The green grew richer, more textured. Stalks appeared from the point where the leaves met, and from those stalks, purple-red stems curled out from the center. Pear-shaped buds weighted the purple stems, covered in faint down, like the bowing heads of swans.
She held on to the earth, and the buds opened into the bright purple-blue of borraja flowers, five-petaled like stars. Five thin fruit petals unfurled purple-red between the blue ones.
“Does it hurt?” Fel asked. “When you do that?”
She drew her hands from the earth, untangling her fingers from the new roots.
“It hurts more if we don’t.” She brushed her hands together, raining dark soil over the leaves.
Her fingers drawing out these blooms felt like letting out the force in her. It brought the comfort not only of releasing these petals from her hands but of deciding where and when they appeared.
She couldn’t do anything about the confetti of starflowers that grew over her bed some nights. It worried her cousins and their mothers and grandmothers. Not like she was a witch; the Nomeolvides women were used to being painted as witches. More like she was a girl who needed watching, a girl whose own gifts might betray her or give her away. But here, kneeling on the ground, Estrella could decide.
“Things growing just live in us,” she said. It was true for all of them. For Estrella’s cousins, for her mother, her cousins’ mothers, all their grandmothers, there was order to it, lilies and irises growing only where they asked them to. But their inherited gift still put a kind of desperation in them, a need to grow what was in them. They all had it. It was a drive rooted as deep in each of them as it was in Estrella.
It was just that sometimes Estrella’s appeared, unwelcome, as she slept.
“It’s like words we need to say,” she told him. “If we don’t say them, it hurts.”
Estrella could see Fel trying to keep the confusion off his face. Her family was its own language, its own country, and she knew it. She laughed, the wind throwing a ribbon of her hair across her cheek. When she brushed it away, she felt her fingers leaving a damp streak of earth across her forehead.
Fel reached for her, so slowly she could have leaned back and stopped him. He brushed his fingers over her forehead, his thumb warm on her skin. That one point of heat spread through her face. It bloomed in each of her cheeks.
The pad of his thumb on her forehead felt as rough as unfinished wood. Callused. She had felt the calluses on his hands the first time she had led him from the sunken garden, their grain softened by wet earth. She’d registered the coarse brush of his fingertips when she’d set the little winged horses in his hands.
But it wasn’t until now, with his thumb set against her skin, that she realized how hard and solid those calluses were.
She took light hold of his hands, turned them over. The calluses covered his fingers and palms, thick and pale as a dusting of sand.
“How did you get these?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Do they hurt?”
“No. Not now.”
She brushed her fingertips along the center line of his palms, and he flinched.
“Sorry,” she said.
She felt him pulling his hands back. It was so slight it felt like something he was doing without thinking, rather than him asking her to let go. In the slight closing of his eyes, she found the shame he felt over these calluses. She wondered if seeing Reid’s hands on the cut-crystal glass had made it worse, the long, smooth fingers, the nails filed and squared off.
But to her, these calluses were things he should wear with pride, the way Estrella and her cousins showed off the half-moons of dark earth under their fingernails.
His calluses were beautiful things both because they were signs of the work he had done, and because if he could remember what that work was, he would know a little more about what he had once been.
Who he had once belonged to.
Estrella let go. She sifted through things that might distract him. She shouldn’t have turned over his hands, showing his rough palms, and now she wanted him to forget them.
“Have you ever heard the fairy tale about the red shoes?” she asked.
“No,” he said.
“It’s a story Tía Azucena used to tell us when we were little,” she said. “I don’t remember all of it, but there’s a girl who loves dancing, and one day she wears her red dancing shoes to church when she’s not supposed to, so the red shoes make her dance until she dies.”
“That’s the story she told you when you were little?”
“It was something like that,” she said. “I don’t remember all of it, and anyway, that’s not the point. The point is, think of it a little like that.”
“The flowers kill you?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “I mean it’s like dancing. We have to dance because it’s in us. We can’t not. But if we dance too much for too long it would hurt, because our bodies couldn’t take it. It’s like that with the flowers. We have to make them because it’s in us. But we couldn’t make this whole garden overnight. It would kill us if we tried. That’s why it took a hundred years.”
“Like a horse,” he said.
“What?” she asked.
“You’re like a horse.”
“I’m telling my cousins you said that.”
He smiled, and it looked so true she wanted to take it apart and see how it worked. How she could draw that smile out of him again.
“No,” he said. “I mean if horses don’t have the chance to run, they wither. If you keep them in stables, they end up kicking at their stalls. But if they get worked too hard, they get sick.”
She didn’t know about the comparison, this boy likening her and her cousins to animals. But before she could object, an idea flickered on with the garden lamps.
“How do you know about horses?” she asked.
He looked at the grass beyond the flower bed. “I don’t know.”
“Did you work with them?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
Estrella slid her hands back into the earth, as much habit as a way to make him less conscious of her watching.
“Fel, I’m going to ask you something, and I really want you to think about it,” she said.
“Okay.”
“Were you ever in love with anyone?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Anyone who looked a little like all of us?” There was no softer way to ask this. She wanted to know if he had belonged to a Nomeolvides woman neither she nor her cousins nor their mothers had been alive to know. Their grandmothers had no memory of a boy like Fel, even in stories.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Did you ever love anyone?” she asked.
He shut his eyes. “Yes.”
“Who?” she asked.
He shook his head. She was learning this was his shorthand for I don’t know.
“Someone who took care of me,” he said.
“Do you remember anything about her?”
He watched the borraja, the blue bright against the earth.
“No,” he said.
She let the silence draw out. This was a place she couldn’t press too hard. He was soft here. He would feel the pressure as pain and turn quiet.
“Did she give you the horses?” Estrella asked. “The wooden ones.”
More borraja sprouted, first leaves, then stalks, then down-covered purple stems and sharp-petaled flowers.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Do you know anything about them?”
“I know I loved them very much,” he said. “But I don’t know why.”
He looked wound, coiled, even when he breathed out.
“It’s okay,” she said. “This isn’t a test.”
“Yes, it is,” he said.
Now he looked at her. The light had turned from gold to blue, and the warmth in the brown of his eyes cooled.
She picked a borraja flower. “You can eat them, you know.”
She held it out on her palm, the five petals opening into darker blue.
“Try it,” she said.
“I don’t think I should,” he said.
“Why not?” She ripped away a handful of them, the starflowers breaking from their vines. “I do it all the time.”
Fel cringed like she’d torn out a lock of her hair. “But they’re yours.”
“And I’m giving these ones to you.” She took his hands and let the confetti of blue petals rain into his palms. “So now they’re yours.”