Estrella stood in the hall, the first time she could remember pausing in front of Dalia’s door.
The cousins all entered one another’s rooms without knocking. They never apologized if one walked in on another half-naked, or drying her hair, or scrubbing salt and baking soda over the red stains on their underwear at the same time every month. When Fel started sleeping in Estrella’s room, she had tied a green ribbon around the doorknob, a reminder to her cousins that she wasn’t in there, and not to walk in on this skittish boy changing his clothes or sweating through a nightmare.
But opening this door felt like holding her lungs still to go underwater.
At the sound of the hinges, Dalia looked up, pausing midstitch. She was sewing a fabric leaf back onto a nightgown. Calla’s.
Estrella had always recognized Dalia as beautiful in the way all her cousins were beautiful. But now, Estrella saw the woman Bay loved. Her black hair and dark eyes warmed against the fire colors she wore, the softened oranges and peaches, the butter yellows and chili reds. Her eyelashes were lush and curling as the center petals on her cream dinner plate dahlias.
But that lie. It spun and whirled and pulled Estrella down.
“You know, we had a great-great-aunt who wanted to be an actress,” Estrella said.
Dalia set down the nightgown, tucking the threaded needle into the gathered fabric. “Estrella.”
“Abuela Flor told me about her. She used to play in the chorus in the theater in town sometimes.” Estrella let the bitterness thicken in her voice. “If she was as good an actress as you, she could’ve been the star of every show.”
Dalia’s eyes shut. “Estrella.”
From her dress pocket, Estrella pulled a bag of strawberry vanilla drops, Dalia’s favorite. She threw them at her cousin.
Dalia caught the bag against her chest. She looked up from the sugar-sanded red and cream.
“I held you,” Estrella said, her back teeth set so hard the words sounded choked. “My heart broke when yours broke.”
She had thrown her arms around Dalia as she screamed and cried into the air. She had blinked at the ceiling in the half-empty bed, worrying about her cousin who slept even less than the boy down the hall.
But Estrella knew now. It hadn’t been grief keeping Dalia awake.
It had been the unfamiliar guilt of keeping a secret from her cousins.
Estrella shut the door behind her.
“You’re a liar,” she said, startled at how level the words came.
“Bay had to get out from under Reid and you know it,” Dalia said. “The best way to do that was for everyone to think she was gone. If you had a better idea, I’d love to hear it.”
“I don’t blame you for what you did. I blame you for keeping it from me. From all of us.”
“It was safer for everyone. I did this for us.”
“You did this for you,” Estrella said. “Because you wanted to be the only one she was still alive to. You wanted her to be yours.”
“That is not true.” Dalia got to her feet. “And even if I did, so what? We have to answer to each other for everything?”
“We don’t lie to each other. We don’t keep things from each other.”
“Oh, we don’t?” Dalia asked. “So you just forgot to tell us you were planning on torching Reid’s car?”
Estrella shoved her anger down. She tried to dull the whispering voice reminding her that she and Calla had kept their own secrets.
“You don’t know anything about that,” Estrella said.
“Because you didn’t tell me, or any of us. And you didn’t tell us what you did to make Reid forget about it. Are you in bed with him now?”
“That’s disgusting.”
“I mean what are you doing for him?” Dalia said. “What does he want from you?”
“A good show for his friends,” Estrella said. “That’s all.”
“What does that mean?” Dalia asked. “Are you his date now?”
“He just wants me to show his friends how we grow flowers. It’s nothing.”
“I don’t like this,” Dalia said. “You’re not a sideshow. He has no right to ask you for that.”
“A few flowers for a whole car?” Estrella asked. “That’s the best deal we’ll ever get from someone like him. Leave it alone. If it was something you needed to know, I would have told you. And if you’d asked me earlier, I would have told you then. I didn’t lie to you. We’re not supposed to lie to each other.”
“We give each other reasons to,” Dalia said.
“What does that mean?”
“Remember Gloria and that boy at Marjorie’s costume ball? We ate them alive. And Azalea with that girl’s lipstick on her dress? We acted like she was cheating on us.”
“We did not.”
Dalia set a harsh glare on her, a visible reminder of the cousins’ silent judgment. They laughed over Azalea flirting with pearl-wearing women just to provoke them, or Calla’s joking pronouncement that the first boy at church to grow a mustache would win her heart. But when they saw anything true and deep in each other, they turned their backs. When they caught a dreaming smile or a halting nervousness across the ballroom, their disapproval stamped out any ember of new love.
Their family’s curse had made them cold toward each other.
They had held together on everything but this. They did not want to see one another mourn vanished lovers like so many of their mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers had. They had all worried over the same thing, and it had made them harsher than the sternest of their grandmothers.
“We were protecting each other.” Estrella took a step forward, breaking the light of the bedside lamp.
“We didn’t protect each other from loving Bay.”
“Because we thought loving Bay was safe.”
“Only because you thought she’d never want any of us,” Dalia said, her voice raising to a yell before she tamped it down into a whisper.
The words went into Estrella deep and fast.
Their mothers did not notice the other moments that made color bloom in their daughters’ cheeks. How Azalea flirted with girls in ruffled dresses. How the thing that first made Estrella fall a little in love with boys or girls was so often their hands, whether they were showing at the edge of a shirt cuff or a lace sleeve. How Gloria blushed when she caught the eye of women in sleek gowns, women who wore their hair in low, smooth chignons and who preferred gray or black or navy. And how she shared her laughter, her true, fluttering laugh, with boys who could more easily be called pretty than handsome.
Estrella and her cousins had grown up admiring girls and boys in the splintered light of chandeliers. They fell a little bit in love with women and with men at Marjorie’s summer parties and winter balls. None of them had seemed safe the way loving Bay had seemed safe. Bay, the one they’d grown up alongside but who was never close enough for them to hold on to. She was the yellow fleck of a planet in the night sky, too far to grasp, but shining and easy to find, appearing in the dark so reliably they could almost believe she was theirs.
Estrella and her cousins blessed one another’s love for Bay not only because they shared it but because they considered it impossible.
“Why can’t we love who we want to love?” Dalia asked. “I love Bay. Gloria’s too scared to fall in love with anyone, and so is Azalea. She’ll kill you if you say that to her, but it’s true and she knows it. She flirts because it’s safe. Calla’s young enough that maybe if we all stop being so knotted up about this she doesn’t have to be too. And you”—Dalia looked at the door behind Estrella—“you care about him. And you’re terrified about what that could mean.”
“Because what if he disappears again?” This time Estrella was almost yelling before she choked her words to a whisper.
Azalea’s first guess made as much sense as any after. This was a boy a Nomeolvides woman had once loved to vanishing, and now, generations later, the gardens had given him back. In him, her family found hope for their own lovers reappearing. But Estrella and her cousins worried that if they did not care for this boy, then the wrath of not only La Pradera but whatever great-great-grandmother had loved him would pelt all of them like hail.
Estrella could not be the second girl in this family to love Fel into vanishing. She had kissed him, eyes shut, her thoughts turning to blossoms streaming over terrace gardens. He had been the one to pull away, and it left her skin so hot that she could not look at him.
Dalia’s eyes opened a little wider. Not surprise. Sympathy so deep it was almost pity.
“If we love them, we lose them,” Estrella said.
“Sometimes,” Dalia said.
“If we love them for long enough and they stay long enough, we always lose them.”
The only lovers who did not vanish were ones who did not stay. The ones who left or who were made to leave were the ones who lived. Sometimes the men’s superstitions drove them from La Pradera. Sometimes Nomeolvides women’s hearts shrank from their own desire until one morning they told their lovers Please go, coolly as if it was the first night they spent together. And sometimes, in rare, blessed instances, both halves of a couple grew tired of each other at once.
The ones who stayed, the ones so taken with their own love that they decided to risk what they considered old wives’ tales, were the ones they lost.
A sickening question came back to Estrella, the wondering about which of her relatives might have once loved Fel.
“He’s someone else’s,” Estrella said.
“What does that mean?” Dalia asked.
“You heard what Azalea said the day we found him. He belonged to someone else. I don’t want to be a girl who steals my great-great-grandmother’s boyfriend.”
“You don’t know that,” Dalia said.
“What other way do we explain it?” Estrella asked. “You believe the fairy tale our grandmothers tell us? That the gardens wanted to give us a brother and give them a son?”
“So you want to go on loving Bay because Bay is the safe choice?” Dalia asked.
“Bay? The safe choice?” A bitter laugh built in Estrella’s throat. Maybe they had thought Bay was safe in some ways, but not this way, not in the sharp language of their family. “What do you think our mothers would say if any of us tried to be with her? If we hadn’t all stalemated each other by loving her at the same time? They’ve only let this go on because she can’t get us pregnant. Try kissing Bay in front of them, see what they say. See what they say when it’s out in the open.”
Dalia’s flinch was so deep Estrella felt her own body mirroring it.
“Oh,” Estrella said.
Bay wanted Dalia. Dalia wanted her in a way that ran deeper than the love passed back and forth between five cousins.
And they had acted on it, a dark-haired girl kissing a pale, freckled one.
“You’re with her,” Estrella said.
“That’s not the point.”
“But you are.”
“I love her,” Dalia said, the words quiet, given through the small space between her lips.
“We all loved her.”
“She thinks the Briars don’t want her because there’s something wrong with her,” Dalia said. “She thinks it’s the same reason her mother left her with Marjorie. Did you even know that?”
The center of Estrella’s heart pinched, a hard knot for Bay. But the instinct to defend herself washed over it, so before she could stop herself she said, “What does that have to do with anything?”
“We never bothered to know her,” Dalia said.
“She didn’t want to talk about her mother. Or the Briars. She told us that.”
“No, she didn’t talk about them because we didn’t give her space to. We let her tell us she didn’t want to talk about any of it and we left it at that, because we didn’t really want to hear about it.”
“Why would we want to make her talk about it?” Estrella asked. “Why would we make her want to talk about anything that hurts her?”
“Because that’s what people need sometimes.” For a few words, Dalia yelled, before drawing her voice back down. “And if you love them, you let them. You wait until they’re ready. You give them the room to talk about it. But we didn’t. We didn’t want to see that there was pain in her. We just wanted what she was to us. How she entertained us. We wanted her charm, not her broken places. We didn’t want to see that there was anything broken in her.”
“That’s supposed to impress me?” Estrella asked. “That you think she’s broken.”
“Everyone’s broken. The only difference is how.”
Without wanting to, Estrella breathed in Dalia’s words. They stung like winter air.
“I love her for who she is, not who she was to all of us,” Dalia said. “We thought everything about her was some costume, some kind of show, but she is a person. She doesn’t exist for us to look at. She wasn’t just there so we could admire her. She’s her own person. We never left any room for that. And that’s my fault as much as yours, or Gloria’s, or Azalea’s, or Calla’s. We all did it. I did it. We made her ours, and we didn’t leave any space for her to decide for herself. We gave her no room to be anything other than what we made her.”
Each word clung to Estrella’s skin like wet leaves, the stems scratching and prickling.
Dalia was right. The cousins had diminished Bay, reduced her to what she was to them. Even tonight, Estrella had done it. She had contrasted the satin trousers and French braid with the suspenders and felt hat. She had never considered the possibility that both were fully Bay, or that maybe neither was, or that both were but so were other possibilities Estrella and her cousins could not guess, because Bay had yet to live them.
“We acted like she was ours,” Dalia said. “And she was never ours.”
Estrella shook her head, not because this was untrue, because it was a truth wider than Dalia realized. Nothing was theirs. Not this house. Not their dresses, bought on Marjorie’s account at the shop in town.
Not La Pradera. It was always its own, vicious and protective.
The only thing that was theirs was the legacy passed down to them, the fear that they would ruin anyone they loved. And now came this new guilt, breaking through like starflowers between forget-me-not vines. Estrella hadn’t known Bay. Maybe none of them had. And if Dalia was right, and Estrella hadn’t learned Bay in all this time, how could she ever know the odd boy La Pradera had given them?
“She never belonged to any of us,” Dalia said. “She was always her own and we never let her be her own.”
All of it rushed through Estrella. La Pradera in the hands of a Briar who had not lived here, had not grown to love this land and these gardens. Bay dying to all of them and then coming back to life. The lies Dalia had told, the tears she had forced, to both kill Bay and save her.
Fel’s mouth on Estrella’s.
The way he kissed her was soft, like he was asking permission, but his lips were almost as rough as his fingertips.
Her mother had been wrong. Men like Reid were not cotton candy. It was girls with hearts that could not be kept from falling in love, and anyone unlucky enough to be loved by them.
They all dissolved like spun sugar in water.
Estrella let everything awful and true shove her out of the room.
Dalia called after her, her name said like she was a child to be reasoned with.
But Estrella let all those things chase her down the stairs, out of the stone house, through the gardens where dahlias and calla lilies rose up around her like a flowering forest.
The lawns and paths flew under her feet, but still, she ran, until the gardens thinned and the land passed from tended to wild.
When she was small, Estrella worried that the mere act of crossing La Pradera’s borders would kill her. When Gloria and Dalia had first lured their younger cousins out at night, the younger ones had winced at the act of setting their feet against the main road without their mothers’ blessing.
But in the years after, Estrella understood the hold La Pradera had on her and her family. It was intricate, and complicated. They could sneak into town to buy the deep brown and cognac-colored ribbons their grandmothers thought young girls should not wear. They just couldn’t run.
They couldn’t leave La Pradera with the intention of leaving for good. Like the distance between the rustle of soft wind and the warning of a coming storm, La Pradera sensed the difference between daughters sneaking out at night and girls fleeing its hold.
The land always knew.
Estrella didn’t care. She was breaking free of this before it wore her into dust. It could kill her if it wanted. By the time it took hold of her, she would be too far for it to drag her back.
Her mother, in refusing to name her for a flower, had thought she was doing her a kindness. Named Rosa herself, her mother had grown up believing she was nothing but black magic petals and secret garden roses, and had not wanted the same for her daughter.
Her mother had even hoped that by giving her a name that was not a flower, she would free her from the weight of the Nomeolvides gift and curse, and the hold of La Pradera.
Estrella would never know.
Unless she ran.
The sky rushed by above her, like the night was water sweeping the stars along its current. The wild grass rose to her ankles and then to her knees by the time she had to stop. Each breath turned wet and rasping.
She swallowed hard, but the trees in the distance blurred like the reflection on a stirred lake. Coughing rose up in her. It drew a line of pain from her collarbone to her sternum.
Her lungs forced a hard cough up through her throat, and she didn’t have the air to fight. She had to work for each breath, and the effort seared into her. Her rib cage was something hot, lit.
Even in that moment of her eyes and throat stinging, she felt it, La Pradera grabbing her, fast and certain and vindictive.
As long as she stayed, it would protect her, giving her a place safe from the taunts and threats that came with her family being considered witches.
But it knew she was running, and it wanted her to understand it knew.
She doubled over. Coughing wrenched a spray of blood from her throat. It left flecks of red on her hands, a bitter taste on her tongue. The force of her next cough made her gasp for air, and the spray of blood dotted her skirt.
It didn’t feel wet.
It felt like powder. Like ground cayenne, except more bitter than spiced.
The stars showed her the stains.
She brushed her fingers over the spots. The color smudged, leaving powdery trails on the fabric and her fingers.
Not just blood.
Pollen. Gold- and rust-colored pollen, like from the anthers of a lily.
She swallowed, and tasted it. On the back of her tongue, it felt chalky, and a kind of sweet that reminded her less of sugar and more of the medicine her grandmother gave her in winter.
The bitter taste of pollen rose in her throat again. She waited for it to clear. It didn’t. The coughing felt like the force of her own palm pressing into her chest. But her hands were not on her chest. That feeling of weight came from inside her, her lungs pulling in on themselves.
The gardens wanted to keep her so badly they were killing her. They had their hands around her so tightly they were choking the life out of her.
Her lungs fought to breathe, but now she felt the weight of the gardens pressing into her. A million flowers, a thousand branches, the wide spread of the sunken garden.
The pollen coated her throat and the back of her tongue. It burned through her chest and made her eyes water. The trees and sky looked like paint running. Whatever fight she had left was so deep inside her it grew cold and could not reach the surface.
Her own breathing turned on her. Her throat and the wet surfaces inside her lungs grew hot and tight. She was the snow globe that had once rested on Gloria’s desk. Half the water had evaporated out, so the little white pieces of snow scratched the glass and the carved trees.
She fell to her hands and knees, lungs pinching and tensing. The salt of her own blood stung her throat. Her lungs could not take the full breaths the rest of her body wanted so badly her veins vibrated.
Under the night breeze, she heard La Pradera whispering her name, telling her that if she had a heart set on leaving and never coming back, it would kill her.
She would not leave the gardens alive. They would let loose their rage over her ungrateful heart, for letting them shelter her and then fleeing them. It would strike her down for abandoning the land her family had made their home.
And it would punish her family for what it was, women who loved their lovers out of existence. They had brought the curse of their hearts and blood onto this land, and for that La Pradera would forgive them. Unless they ran.
She collapsed onto her side, the sky filling her vision. The dark drifted down over her like a sheet.
Her name had not saved her.
Estrella’s mother had hoped. If she named a girl for things held in the sky, how could she be tied to anywhere on this earth? But her mother had not freed her from their family’s legacy.
She had just given it the shape of stars.