Each day, Reid gave Fel the tasks he wanted done. The bulbs in the lanterns looked dull, and Fel should check them. Lichen was dulling the stone on the fountains, and Fel should polish it away. The copper benches were growing a patina, and Fel should scrub them clean.
This last one he hated most. Fel knew the grandmothers liked the green on the copper, that they thought of it as the breath of some far sea.
Fel scoured rough cloths over the metal. When the green did not fade, he wondered if it was defying him. It was clinging to remind him he was rubbing away a thing loved by women who looked after him.
With sweat dampening his hair, he looked up and saw the grandmothers standing on the grass, handing him the salt, vinegar, flour, and olive oil.
“You’ll need this,” Abuela Mimosa told him. “It’ll strip it, then you’ll shine it.”
He wanted to make apologies for the fact that he had no will in him except to do as he was told. So at night, with the sun down and Reid’s tasks for him done, he did small things for the ground around the Nomeolvides house.
Light from the stone house spilled out, the upturned leaves catching it. The plots here weren’t as thickly or brightly flowered as the garden valley or the courtyards, but they sat close to the house, crowding the windowsills with green, and they grew not only petals but things the women ate.
He pulled weeds from the herb window boxes. He braced young tomato plants to their stakes. He cleared dead ivy stickers from the stone, which Azalea told him was best done by burning them away with a lit match. He didn’t believe her until Calla and two of the grandmothers nodded their agreement.
And his favorite, tilling the wood-bordered beds so they would be easy for the women to slide their hands into. The spinning points on the tiller looked so much like ornaments that at first he’d been sure they were a child’s toy.
“What are you doing?” Estrella asked.
He turned toward her voice, the tiller spurs slowing.
She stood at the edge of the garden, the wind turning her hair to streamers. Her skirt blew around her knees like a river was pulling at it.
“They look like stars,” he said, the tiller spurs slowing to a stop. The moon glinted off the metal.
“There’s stars up there.” Estrella tilted her hand toward the sky. “If you wanna look at them, just look at them.”
“But these ones you can touch,” Fel said.
She looked amused by him. He didn’t mind. If she thought he was worth looking at, worth considering, he didn’t mind.
“I’m glad you’re back,” he said. “Calla and Gloria thought he’d locked you in the attic. They were working on a way to break you out. I told them if you could find a matchbook you could do it yourself.”
A surprised smile brightened her face. “Did you just make a joke, Fel?”
“I do sometimes,” he said.
She sat on the low stone wall, her skirt fluffing up around her.
“What you made the other night,” she said, pressing her fingertips together, and he understood how hard this question was for her to ask, this reference to a night when the Nomeolvides girls were too heartbroken to put on their shoes. “What’s it called?”
He shut his eyes, feeling the sense of the name near him. He reached out for it, expecting it to flit away from him.
But it stayed.
“Molletes,” he said. “They’re called molletes.”
“No, they’re not,” she said.
Her protest, and the laugh underneath it, made him open his eyes. He remembered so little, but he remembered this, the name for manteca dyed red with paprika and then poured over bread.
“What do you mean, ‘no, they’re not’?” he asked.
“My family makes molletes all the time. It’s not that.”
“Then what is it?”
“It’s a bolillo you cut in half and then you put stuff on it.”
He didn’t even try not to smile. “Stuff?”
“I don’t know,” she said. She sounded a little frustrated, like she was trying to teach him a word that could not be translated. But she was smiling, too. “It depends what we have. But it’s usually not red.”
“That’s what I know as molletes,” he said.
She tore stray threads off the hem of her slip. Wisps of blue trailed off her fingertips.
“Was he hard on you?” he asked.
“Reid?” Estrella asked. “No.”
“Did he hurt you?”
“Do I look hurt?” she asked.
“He just let you go?”
“Not quite. He wants a favor. He wants me to charm his rich friends at his little party. Show them how polite and sweet and entertaining we can be. I’ll do it”—she lifted the corner of her skirt like she was curtsying—“and all will be forgiven.”
“And you don’t worry about him thinking you owe him something?” Fel asked.
“I’m not afraid of him. My mother always says the same thing about men like that. They’re cotton candy. All puff and show, but throw water on them and they dissolve.”
There was something brittle in how she moved and smiled. If she kept trying this hard not to seem thrown by Reid, it would splinter her.
Fel grabbed on to something else he could get her talking about, words she’d said that he didn’t know.
“What’s cotton candy?” he asked. It sounded made up, or maybe it was the kind of cloth Estrella’s skirt was sewn out of.
“You’re kidding, right?” Estrella asked. “What are you, two hundred years old?”
If he’d been in el Purgatorio longer than he could imagine, maybe he was. “I don’t know.”
Estrella stood up from the wall. “Come on.”
When she had found him in the valley made of flowers, he had known to let her lead him. The understanding that she was his way toward anything familiar felt woven into him. But now, a mirrored kind of understanding, that he should not follow her this time, had the same depth and shape.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he said.
“Why?” she asked.
“I heard your grandmothers talking.” He had caught their whispers, their agreements that they must keep a close watch on Estrella and her cousins. “They said…” He stopped himself, struck with the fear that he might be speaking what wasn’t his to tell.
“What?” Estrella asked.
He hesitated. Estrella had been the one to find him, but her family had been the ones to let him stay.
“They said they didn’t want you going anywhere without their permission,” he said.
“Their permission?” she asked. “Are they kidding? Gloria and Dalia and Azalea are grown women. Calla and I are close enough. And they want to treat us like children?”
“I don’t know.” He felt caught, wanting neither to agree with her family nor to turn on them. “They said they don’t want you leaving. They said it could hurt you.”
“They still think we’re children. They think we don’t know how this place works. But we know. We all know the stories.”
“What stories?” he asked.
“If we try to leave La Pradera—I mean really try to leave, for good—the land hurts us,” she said. “It wants to make us stay, so it hurts us when we try to leave. But that’s if we try to run away. Not if we go down the road for cotton candy.”
“But how would it know the difference?” he asked.
“How would what know the difference?”
“The land,” he said. “How would it know if you’re taking a walk or if you’re trying to run away?”
“It knows,” she said. “It just knows.”
“How?”
Estrella took slow steps toward him. “I want you to listen to me very carefully, Fel.” She came close enough that he had to pick between looking down at her and backing up. But her face was so serious, so intent, he could not move. “Never underestimate what the ground under your feet knows, what it can do. What it can give you and what it can steal. It gave us a home when there was nowhere else we were safe. It defied every town that tried to make sure we’d be wandering forever.”
This close, the air between them smelled like her, half the dry spice of the perfume she shared with her cousins, half the fruit soap that left a little of its sugar on her body.
“And then it defied what happened to you,” she said, her voice low, more like a warning than a secret. “It brought you back from wherever you were before. It made you appear after you’d vanished.”
He tried to remember disappearing. What it felt like. How it had happened. Whether it had hurt or just been a fading out of everything, even the sense of his own body.
It didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel like a story that was his. But she sounded so sure of it that on her tongue it became truth. It became his. He just couldn’t remember it.
“Don’t think for one second you can hide anything from this place,” Estrella said. “No one ever has.”
His guilt slid through him again. But he still didn’t know what he’d done, so there was still no confessing it.
“I think it’s my fault,” he said.
“What is?” she asked.
“That your family’s worried.”
“That’s not true.”
“But they’re worried about you,” he said. “And I think that is my fault. Because I’m here.”
“No.” Estrella set her hand on his upper arm, like she could pull him back from what he was thinking. “They like you. Even Azalea likes you, and she doesn’t like anyone.”
He could see her trying to laugh at her own joke, to get him to laugh.
It didn’t work on either of them.
“That’s your cousins,” he said. “I’m talking about your mothers and your grandmothers. They don’t like how I just showed up.”
“You know that’s not true.”
“Fine,” he said. “Then your mother.”
He felt the small breath of her putting a little more space between them. She dropped her hand away from him. Her face showed what she now realized, that Fel understood more than just the shared whispers of grandmothers. He caught the warnings of mothers to daughters, ones neither thought anyone else had heard.
“I don’t think she wants me around you,” he said.
“It’s not like that,” she said. “It’s more that she doesn’t want me around you.”
“Isn’t that the same thing?”
His own guilt threaded together with the thought of his scars, the memory searing across his skin.
“Your family,” he said. “They’ve been good to me.” They had been good to him even when they had seen his crimes written on his back. “I don’t want to do anything they wouldn’t like. Especially your mother.”
Something in her eyes shifted, like the glint of a polished stone.
“You want to talk about my mother?” Estrella asked. “She thinks she understands everything. But she doesn’t understand me.”
There was both relief and disappointment in how fast Fel knew what she was talking about. She wasn’t talking about this, the small stirring of night air between them. It was a thing he sometimes thought he’d imagined and that sometimes seemed real enough that he could see it growing feathers.
Estrella was talking about Bay. She was talking about her own heart, and how it loved in a way her mother would judge without turning it over and learning the shape of it.
“Today I solved a problem my mother knew nothing about,” Estrella said. Her words twisted, each one sounding harder, like a knot tightening. “She still doesn’t. I fixed it, and she had no idea. My mother, all our mothers, they think they’re holding everything up, but we have it too. It’s ours too. So forget what my mother thinks I should or shouldn’t be doing because we’re going and getting some damn cotton candy, okay?”
He backed up. Whatever cotton candy was, he was now afraid of it. But when she took his hand, he didn’t dare resist.
Fel had seen the Nomeolvides girls away from La Pradera. He had seen them being measured for dresses in town, none of them falling ill or turning to dust. But now he wondered if their mothers and grandmothers being with them had been a kind of blessing, their presence protecting Estrella and her cousins. Now he and Estrella were slipping through the night without anyone’s permission.
Estrella held on to his hand and guided him through the dark. She led him around fallen trees and over thick roots. She warned him about jagged rocks and ruts in the earth.
She had done this before. But he still shuddered wondering if, by letting her do this, he would lose her. La Pradera would grasp at this girl fleeing its borders. The grandmothers hadn’t said anything about what the land did to girls who ran, so that left him imagining her heart giving out in her rib cage, or her fingers turning to petals even as she clasped his hands.
“Stop,” she said.
He halted his steps.
“No,” she said. The fingers of her other hand brushed his so that, for a second, both their hands were touching. “I mean stop worrying.”
Now he wondered if she was a witch. He hadn’t when she found him in the valley made of flowers, or when he saw her drawing petals up from the earth. But now he wondered about this girl, beautiful and smelling of wood betony and knowing things he did not want her to know. “How did you…?”
“I can feel your heartbeat in your palms.” She set her hands against each of his, and the feeling of her fingers in the dark made him quiet. “Stop worrying.”
“You really believe the land will know?” he asked.
She dropped one of his hands and took tighter hold of the other. “I know it will.”
She turned, and the flick of her hair was a wing spreading through the dark. She pulled him through trees and across barren land and brush fields. The air around her had been vibrating, but now it slowed and stilled. When she spoke, it was with a laugh under her voice again.
“The back way to town,” she said.
A little farther, and the dark opened into the spilling light of the town’s streets. The storefront she led him to was all wooden barrels and glass jars. Jagged sticks of rock candy stood bright as La Pradera’s flowers. Sugar pumpkins were capped with bright green stems. Hard candies dyed red with thin white stripes shone like marbles. None of it looked real. They seemed more like things to put under glass than to eat.
Estrella grabbed bags of spun sugar in the same pale pink and blue as her dress and slip. Off a wide wooden spool, she measured out a length of paper covered in neat rows of sugar dots—pink, yellow, and blue.
“Pick something out,” she said. “Something you’ve never had before. We have to educate you.”
The only thing he could look at without making himself dizzy was a small box of some kind of sugar molded in the shape of fruits, then painted. The colors were so much softer than the wrapped candies, and it drew toward him something he could not quite recognize. Something almost remembered.
“We’re buying that too,” Estrella said to the man at the counter, throwing her hand toward the box Fel was holding.
“We can’t eat all this,” Fel said, his unease worsened by the fact that he did not have money to give her.
“Oh, don’t worry,” Estrella said. “We’ll have help. There’s a saying in my family. The meaner the girl, the bigger the sweet tooth.”
He thought of Azalea showing him how she made her favorite potatoes from those strange flakes that looked like snow. He remembered the sternest of the grandmothers putting him under the spray of warm water and telling him he was not lost, only misplaced.
“I don’t think anyone in your family’s mean,” he said.
He felt her glance slide over him, picking up the worry he didn’t want her to catch.
“It’s not my money anyway,” she said. “It’s Reid’s.”
“You stole money from Reid?” he asked.
A hand fluttered to her chest. “I’m wounded that you think I’m a girl of such low moral character.”
He drew back, worried he’d offended her. But then her smile glinted, first in her eyes before curving the corner of her mouth.
She was making fun of him. She liked making fun of him. Of how the colors of things shocked him. Of how his face always showed his wonder at the grandmothers turning tortillas over blue flames, fingers so close the fire almost touched them. Of how he did not understand the cousins running barefoot over wet grass when they all had shoes.
He didn’t mind. It didn’t bother him to be something Estrella batted at to see what he would do, like a cat at a feather. She was more curious than cruel.
“I might have told Reid we all needed more money to look pretty for his little party,” Estrella said.
That let Fel laugh. “I don’t think you said it like that.”
“You’re right. I was much more persuasive.”
Her pride was so sure he could almost taste it on the air, like sugar mixed with the bite of chili powder. She was both shameless and soft, openhearted and vicious. He wondered how she remembered to be all these things at once, how there was any space left in her to lure flowers from the earth.
Estrella handed the man money. Fel didn’t want to know where she’d hidden it, if she’d slipped it out of the band of her underwear or from between her breasts when both his and the cashier’s backs were turned.
The man at the counter gave her back two paper bags. She thanked him and handed one to Fel.
“Let your education begin,” she said.
Even through the paper, he could feel the soft fluff of the spun sugar, the thing she called cotton candy. It gave under his hands like gathered cloth.
He thought of how he would pass these things to the Nomeolvides women, grandmothers and mothers and daughters, like a bright communion.
At night, with Estrella, this town was all lights and water-slicked cobblestone. Lampposts lined the sidewalks. White lights wrapped the trees, making everything look covered in snow.
They passed a bulb-signed theater and a tall-windowed hotel.
A man’s voice spilled out of the space between buildings. “You out here looking for a new boyfriend, Nancy?”
Fel heard the hard taunting in the man’s voice.
The words struck Fel hard enough that for a second he thought the man was talking to him.
Fel looked down the brick-lined alley, the ground wet with runoff.
A boy who looked younger than Fel leaned against a wall, the brim of a dark felt hat shading his face. Suspenders showed against his pin-striped shirt. Two men stood across from him, trying to needle him into looking up.
The boy did not speak.
“Hey,” the other man said, and kicked at the wall close to the boy’s knee. “You’re too good to talk to us, Nancy?”
Nancy. That one word, said as an insult not a name, made others rush back to Fel.
Uphill gardener.
Molly.
Backgammon player.
Fel’s thoughts caught on each of those words, and the memory, the cutting pain of how he’d heard them thrown at someone he loved.
His body acted for him. He threw the man who’d kicked at the boy up against the damp brick. Then he was hitting him, and when the other man went at him he hit him next.
He was hitting them because a long time ago, in the gray world he had lived in, he had heard someone he loved called these kinds of names and he had been too small to do anything. The memory of the rage and the helpless feeling, the sense that he had been too young to stop it, charged his hands.
The one who took care of him. The one who kept them both from freezing or starving. He had been a man who liked men, and so everyone felt it was their right to judge him, to call him names.
His brother.
Fel had had an older brother. The man he had hunted mushrooms with, picked dandelion greens with, the man who had bargained for manteca and day-old bread, this man had been his brother.
He knew this. He knew this the way he knew the weight of the wooden horses. And because he could not weep for this true thing, not here, it fed the rage in his hands. He could not defend his brother from the words, from the names Nancy and Molly.
But he could quiet these men. If he could not protect his brother, he could protect the boy in this alley. He could hit these men hard enough that fine cuts split open the backs of his hands.
Estrella dug her fingers into Fel’s upper arm, pulling on him, yelling at him to stop.
The boy cut between them all, trying to block the men from hitting Fel or Estrella.
“Hey,” another unknown voice sliced through the air. “What’s the problem here?”
They all broke away from one another, turning toward the mouth of the alley.
A man stood at the edge, wearing the fine suit and bearing of someone who worked for the hotel and could throw anyone out of it. Or out of the alley next to it.
He wasn’t looking at the men, or Fel, or even Estrella.
He was looking at the boy. But not with the hard-jawed judgment of deciding he’d been the start of the trouble. He was looking at the boy with the deference he might give a wealthy man.
The boy stepped back, holding out his hands. “Everyone’s okay here, right?”
Fel still didn’t recognize the boy. Not his shape. Not his face, still shadowed by his hat brim.
But that voice stilled Fel. He knew it, even though it was lower now, dropped with effort. That voice was the only one he had heard at the long wooden table that was not the similar, braiding sounds of the Nomeolvides women.
“Nobody’s hurt here,” the boy said. “We’re all gonna go home, okay?” He patted the air with flat palms, calming them all.
The men backed toward the street, stunned either by the fine-suited man or the unexpected power of a boy they had thought nothing of.
The suited man followed them, nodding at the boy as he left the mouth of the alley. The boy nodded back, the last sign Fel needed that they knew each other.
The men’s shadows faded, Fel’s knuckles sore and throbbing.
Estrella’s fingers shielded her mouth, her gasp so soft it sounded like a breath in. Fel wondered if she was short enough to see the boy’s face, or if that same voice had caught her.
Estrella and the boy in the felt hat passed a startled look between them, like they were two mirrors reflecting it back over and over.
The boy’s hair was darker, shorter. But Fel recognized the features.
“Bay,” Estrella said.
Bay shook her head, jaw held tight. “Not here.”
“Fine.” Estrella went around to the other side of the building.
They followed her. Of course they followed her, Fel because he had learned to follow the Nomeolvides women when they told him to, and Bay out of a worry so heavy it struck Fel like hot air.
The brick sill of a first-floor window gave Estrella enough height to pull on a rusted fire escape ladder. Her steps rattled the metal frame as she climbed to the first landing.
She stared down at both of them with a look partway between invitation and threat. “Then how about up here?”