She went home to the violet house, and found the light on in the kitchen.
Aracely was standing in front of the wall calendar, the belt on her robe tied in a halfhearted bow.
Aracely looked over at Miel, eyeing her sweater, her jeans, her lack of a nightgown. “Where were you doing out?”
“What are you doing up?” Miel asked.
“Trying to remember the last time Emma came in.” Aracely studied the calendar. “I think we’re about due.”
Emma Owens, the wispy blond woman who ran the school office, managed to get her heart broken at least once every couple of months. She fell in love with men who didn’t call, or men who did call and who she scared off with her gratitude and hurry. In her early thirties, hell-bent on getting married before thirty-five, she ended up sobbing on Aracely’s table at least once a season.
Every time she set her hands on her rib cage, Aracely told Ms. Owens to slow down, that the right heart would find hers, but only when both hearts were ready. But every time Aracely cured her, rid her of wanting whatever regional produce buyer or accountant did not want her back, she was barely off the table by the time she had another date with another man who would drift between interested and indifferent. Even in her prim pearl-buttoned cardigans, she was pretty and white-blond-haired enough that she was rarely alone on a Friday night.
Miel stood next to Aracely. “Don’t you worry about how often she comes in?”
“First rule of business, never argue with a repeat customer,” Aracely said. “Besides, I know what I’m doing.”
“One day you’re gonna pull her whole heart right out of her.”
“Oh, I’d love to explain that,” Aracely said.
Miel extended a hand in front of her, like she was setting a headline. “‘Curandera accidentally kills local woman.’”
“Screw ‘accidentally,’” Aracely said. “They’d never believe it.”
“A correction to Monday’s front page,” Miel said. “‘Bruja did it on purpose.’”
Aracely clicked her tongue and shook her head, like the women gossiping at the market. “‘Tore that poor woman’s heart straight out of her body.’”
Miel looked at Aracely. “You know my ancestors could do that in under fifteen seconds, right?”
Aracely held her hands out in front of her. “Not with this manicure.”
Miel felt the air settling between them, Aracely letting fall her irritation over needing to call Sam.
“I’m sorry,” Miel said. “About before. It won’t happen again.”
Aracely nodded, as much at the calendar as at Miel. “I know.”
lake of death
Aracely washed out a blue glass jar, the inside milky from when she’d used it during a lovesickness cure. The mix of water and egg always resisted coming clean.
Miel was at the yellow kitchen table, making a stack of books she needed and another of books she didn’t.
She felt Aracely watching her even as she scrubbed the glass.
“You’re gonna go study?” Aracely asked, in a voice she must have meant to be joking, but it made Miel blush more than laugh.
Aracely had caught on to what she was doing when she put her books into her bag each afternoon, the class assignments she’d read while she waited for Sam.
“You just make sure you let him get his work done,” Aracely said. “He’s got his hands full finding enough pumpkins to cut.”
“What are you talking about?” Miel asked.
“The glass.” Aracely set the jar on the drying rack. “It’s spreading. Now when he’s cutting fruit off the vine, he has to make sure he’s not breaking anything.”
Miel could imagine him like that, stepping through the fields, feeling for rough, living stems instead of glass. He would look like a cat, crossing a crowded shelf without knocking anything over.
But the thought of those glints in the fields still felt like a chill along Miel’s ribs. Of course Mr. Bonner would have his farmhands continue as though nothing had changed. Of course he would ignore all that glass, pretending it wasn’t there. It was the way he treated the force that was his daughters, as though they were still young girls settling ribbon headbands into one another’s hair.
“What?” Aracely asked, her eyes going over Miel’s face. “You know something about it?”
“No,” Miel said, a little too fast. But whatever was happening between the Bonner sisters, however their land felt it and reflected it back, it was neither Miel’s business to question nor her responsibility to explain.
Sam was the one thing that could get Miel close to the Bonners’ farm. But she didn’t let the sisters see her. Especially not now, a week later, when she’d grown and drowned a white rose with petals tipped in faint green. Last night the petals had spread wide, showing her the breath of yellow at the center, so she’d cut the stem and let the river take it.