“You don’t know anything about my mother,” Miel said.
“I heard a story from a woman a few towns up the river,” Chloe said. “One of my aunt’s friends. This old lady who talked about a woman who tried to kill her children and then killed herself.”
“That’s not what happened,” Miel said. None of that was the way it happened.
“I doubt that’s what people would think if they knew,” Chloe said.
Lower your head, Sam had told her the night they saw the lynx. And your eyes.
Miel had, tipping her chin down, still watching the lynx’s face. She still remembered the feeling of perspiration dampening the small of her back.
Now back up, he’d said. Slowly. You don’t want to look like you’re retreating.
I am retreating, she’d said.
Miel met Chloe’s gaze, shrugging and shaking her head to say, I don’t know what you’re talking about. The woman in the old lady’s story could have been any woman, anyone else’s mother.
“You look like her,” Lian said, without malice, not baiting her. But Miel almost asked where they had gotten a picture of her mother, did they have it or was it pasted into that old woman’s photo album.
She didn’t ask. But stopping herself was enough of a flinch to tell them they were right.
One flinch, and they had her.
Miel not only had the petals they thought could root them back into being the Bonner sisters. She had committed the crime of witnessing one of them fail, seeing Ivy and that bored, polite boy.
Peyton was still tracing that water mark. She couldn’t meet Miel’s eye. Of course she couldn’t, not after everything Sam had done for her.
Miel tried to make her feet move, but her shoes felt heavy as glass.
The night they saw the lynx, Sam had put his hand on her shoulder blade, and guided her out of the lynx’s line of sight. The warmth of his palm had come through her shirt so quickly she thought the pattern of blush-colored flowers would turn dark as wet cranberries.
But she was not as calm, as steady with logic, as Sam.
“Isn’t it worth it to you?” Chloe asked. “So everyone doesn’t find out all the terrible things she did?”
Of course it was worth it to Miel. If people told those stories about her mother, her mother’s spirit would feel it. She’d be haunted, weighted by all those lies. Her spirit would never find any rest. She was already weighted down having a daughter born with roses in her body, a curse that spurred those petaled children to turn on their mothers.
Now, because of Miel, because of the roses the Bonner girls wanted, her mother would be blamed, slandered. What worse could Miel bring on her mother’s soul?
Without even meaning to, she had become everything a rose-cursed daughter was feared to be, a disgrace and burden to her own blood.
A breeze came in the screen door, ruffling Miel’s skirt. The damp hem brushed the backs of her knees. Streamers of chilled air snaked up her sleeves, cooling the wound her roses grew from. They felt solid as ribbons, tethering her to this spot on the Bonners’ floor.
The sideboard drawer slid shut, the wood rasping against a worn track. But Miel didn’t see the scissors until Ivy was peeling back her sweater sleeve. Tarnish dulled the brass of the blades, the handle rubbed shiny by the oils of the Bonners’ hands.
It didn’t make sense.
They thought Miel could give them back whatever they had lost.
They didn’t understand that the only way to do that would be for Chloe never to have gone away. Chloe was a tree ripped out of and then planted back into an orchard, her roots and the roots of every tree near her shocked by the turning over of earth.
But Miel couldn’t move. She was letting them, because they were the Bonner girls, and all of them had their stares on her. Ivy’s, her eyes a gray that made the red of her hair look hot as a live coal. Lian’s, a green as deep as her hair was dark red. Chloe’s and Peyton’s, both their eyes a brown that in certain lights looked dark gray.
Because together they had so much shared gravity they pulled toward that navy blue house anything they wanted. Because they were four brilliant red lynxes, and she could not run.
Ivy snipped the stem.
The cut bit into Miel, like thorns waited under her skin. She cried out for just a second before biting back the sound.
The feeling came back into her body. Pain snapped away the ribbons of cool air tethering her to the floor. And she ran, holding her wrist against her chest. The stub of a cut stem dripped blood onto her sweater sleeve, like a broken branch of star jasmine letting off milk.
She threw the screen door open and let it slam shut.
Among the flecks of orange and white in the pumpkin fields were small glints of light, like the field was dark velvet dotted with white opal.
Her eyes adjusted, the vines and little points of light sharpening.