She was still breaking through the feeling of being half-asleep. But through the blur she saw the deep red of Ivy’s hair.
Ivy was standing over Miel, staring at her wrist. Her eyes looked gray as the pumpkin Peyton had held that night by the water tower. Her expression hovered between satisfied and relieved, like she’d just checked a door or a stove and found that yes, it was locked, yes, the blue gas flame had been turned off.
Without meaning to, Miel followed Ivy’s stare. She looked down at her own wrist. Two new leaves lay bright green against her skin. They were young and soft, not yet showing the hard stem of the coming rose.
To Ivy and the rest of the Bonner sisters, those two leaves were evidence that a new rose was growing, that Miel hadn’t destroyed another one of the blooms they’d decided was theirs.
Miel looked up, but the copper sweep of Ivy’s hair and the gray of her eyes was gone.
She shook off the feeling of sleep, and ran to the back door.
It was a little open, a few inches left between the door and the frame.
The smell of the grass outside, clean and a little sour, filled the hall and the kitchen. But cutting through it was a scent that did not belong in this house. Not the tart fruit smell of the soap she and Aracely used. Not the heavy amber of the glass bottle that sat on Aracely’s dresser.
It was a smell like almonds and Easter lilies, the kind of perfume Mrs. Bonner might have bought her daughters, and that the four of them would have passed between them. It held the undertone of Ivy’s camellia-scented soap.
Miel left the door open, letting in more of the night air so the perfume would fade. She stood there, waiting for it to become so faint she could tell herself that Aracely, rushing out to Emma Owens’ house, had just forgotten to close the door.
serpent sea
It took more nerve than Sam had expected. He’d been so sure, looking between Aracely and Miel. But in the morning, that certainty had vanished, the sun and its white-gray light washing it out. Then, at night, it came back, deepening with the sky. By the time he got home from the Bonners’ farm, it was spinning inside him, its weight wearing him down.
Later that night, after his mother had gone to sleep, he stepped out into the cold air, filled with the dull spice of falling leaves. He followed the trail of moons toward the wisteria-colored house.
Most nights, he stood outside where Miel could see him, the moon in his hands calling her out into the dark. But tonight he stood in the house’s shadow, hands in his pockets, waiting for Miel’s light to go off.
Her window went dark, and he knew she was asleep. His fingers brushed the metal in his pocket. His mother and Aracely both kept spare copies of each other’s house keys in their kitchen drawers. He’d taken theirs with him in case Aracely was locking her doors earlier now that it was getting dark faster. But she hadn’t.
He paused in the doorway. For the first time since he left his house, he felt the force of how strange, how invasive this was. It didn’t matter how well he knew Miel. He was walking, without being asked, into a world ruled by women. Even at the threshold he could smell perfume and the sugary fruit scent of their soap.
The longer he stood there, the sharper that hesitation felt. He listened for the creak of floorboards above him. If Aracely had already gone upstairs to bed, he’d turn around, work himself up to this again another night.
The creak of wooden cabinets came from the indigo room. Aracely was awake, still down here.
Sam found her checking her store of eggs.
He wasn’t sure if she’d heard him come in the back door. So he knocked on the doorframe, to let her know he was there.
Aracely jumped, clutching the basket of eggs.
“You scared me,” she said. “What are you doing here?”
She had on her coat, the heavy velvet one Miel had found her at a secondhand store last Christmas.
“You going somewhere?” he asked.
“Just got back,” she said, looking down at her coat like she’d forgotten she had it on. “I had to make a house call. What’s going on?”
He could map her features against Miel’s. Their shoulder blades, Miel’s as pronounced as Aracely’s even though Aracely was thinner. The slope of their eyebrows. Even the shape of their ears, how the right lobe was a little different from the left.
“Is everything okay?” she asked, slipping out of her coat.
Sam leaned against the doorframe. He hoped it would make him look patient, unhurried, that Aracely wouldn’t be able to tell he was using the frame to keep himself steady.
“Who is she to you?” he asked.
Aracely set down the eggs and smoothed a new sheet onto the wooden table. “What are you talking about?”
“Miel,” he said. “Who is she to you? You’re not old enough to be her mother, so what is it?”
“I take care of her.” Aracely tugged on the sheet so the edges wouldn’t drag on the floor. “Why does it need a name?”