That was the truth of holding so much back, and then giving up a little of it. The rest came.
Now that he knew Aracely was like him, he understood, and she knew that both he and she were creek beds, quiet when they were full and quiet when they were dry. But when they were half-full, wearing a coat of shallow water, the current bumped over the rocks and valleys in the creek beds, wearing down the earth. Giving someone else a little of who they were hurt more than giving up none or all of it.
Now that Aracely had told him this one thing—Miel remembers me as her brother—the rest came, as long as he was quiet.
So this time, Aracely did not lie. She did not tell him that she was just a woman who took in the girl from the water tower.
She spoke, and Sam learned all these truths he had never guessed. How Aracely once lived as a boy named Leandro, a boy who was years older than his younger sister but still small.
That Leandro loved his sister, that he almost died trying to save her from a river that wanted to take her.
That his mother had died trying to save them both.
But the water took Leandro, folded him into its current, brought him back as the girl he’d always wished he could grow into.
Not a girl. A woman, finished and grown.
That a summer covered in amber butterflies turned her hair to gold and welcomed her back into the world as someone else. How she did not know if this was the water’s gift for trying to save her sister, or if it was only the water seeing her for what she was, and showing it to everyone else. But how she felt, as the water brought her back toward the light, was the certainty that she was not small anymore.
The water had felt her sorrow, her broken heart because she had failed to save her sister. That sorrow had aged her heart, made her grown instead of a child. So the water made the outside of her show the truth in all ways, not just by making her a woman, but by making her old enough to match her bitter heart.
That woman gave herself a name, and looked for her lost sister, and found her only when she was sure she had lost her forever.
Miel didn’t know. Sam knew that. Not because she would’ve told him. She had so many secrets, so many fears and places she did not let him bring light into, that he couldn’t count on it.
He knew from the way Aracely was touching the eggs, pretending to arrange them, but doing nothing with them. Her hands patted the nest of shredded paper.
Aracely took a few strands of the paper between her fingers, crushing them.
The moment of realizing, again, that Aracely had not lied, that she knew the narrow, rocky ground of being one thing and wanting to be something else, crept down each knob of his spine. It wrapped around his rib cage, harder and tighter than the bandage he’d used before Aracely had bought him these undershirts that pushed his chest flat.
He didn’t want to think of that though, to open the door to her asking him questions because she thought they were the same. So he tried to imagine Aracely with dark hair, how much more she and Miel would have looked alike.
“You’re family to her,” he asked. “Why didn’t you tell her?”
“Because there are things she doesn’t remember, and never should.” Aracely had set down the eggs, but now she turned a jar in her hands, the blue glass filled with water, ready for the gold of an egg yolk. “And if she remembers me, like I was, if she sees me and knows who I am, she might remember the rest.”
Sam tried not to guess at all the things that could have happened to Miel. She might have slipped and fallen into the river. She might have once loved water, and swam with the current, realizing too late that it did not love her the way she loved it. Or she might have been small enough to see the moon on the surface, and think she could wade in and catch it.
So he would not think of these things, he looked at Aracely. Even with all the little ways she and Miel were the same, there were so many other ways Aracely was different, traces of who she might have grown to be if the water had not intervened. Her height. How she had bigger hands, but no one noticed because most of their spread was thin, wispy fingers.
“Is this what you wanted?” he asked.
Aracely looked at him. “Always. But my mother always told me how handsome I was, how happy she was to have a son. So there was no space for any of it.”
It was the first crack Sam had seen in Aracely, sadness rather than annoyance or worry. She looked at her own fingers, the polished, rounded nails, her palms paler than the backs of her hands. Tears sat in the outer corners of her eyes.
She had the self-control he didn’t, the gift of ignoring what prickled and stung and wanted to be blinked away.
“How did Miel end up in the water?” he asked.
Now Aracely smiled, and the shift in her expression forced one tear onto her temple. “That I’m not telling you.”
“Because you don’t want anyone to know?” he asked.
“Because I’m never saying it out loud.”