With one hand, Aracely cracked the first egg into a jar of water. She held the jar up to study the pattern of the yolk.
Sam set the heels of his hands against his eyes. He would not give in to the jagged breathing that rattled his lungs and throat. But he blinked, and tears dropped from his eyelashes, first the left, then the right.
He brushed them away. He knew what Aracely thought of crying. She once caught Miel sobbing because the pain of a new rose, hours from bursting through her skin, would not let her sleep. She stood near her bed and said, “Stop it, mija, you’re gonna turn yourself to salt.” When she found Sam crying over a stray kitten that had died despite him and Miel feeding it eyedropperfuls of milk, she said, “And you think this will bring it back to life?” Not harshly. The truth ballasted her words. It kept them straight and tall.
Crying was a waste, she told them.
But now Aracely whispered, “Get it all out of you,” neither kind nor reprimanding, a recommendation no different from another curandera’s prescription for curing nightmares. “It’ll make everything inside you softer. This’ll go easier.”
He kept his hands on his eyes as Aracely swept the bergamot orange over him. It hurt, the lovesickness coming unanchored and drifting from the edges of his body, his fingers and his toes, his lips and the ends of his hair. It drained toward his heart, the gathering weight pinning his rib cage to the table.
But it was as much relief as pain, the shock of relaxing a muscle after keeping it tense. Aracely’s hands were sharing the weight, luring it toward her palms and out of his body.
Aracely had left the window open, knowing that he didn’t care how cold the room got. He was not some lovesick woman or man who expected his money’s worth, who would complain if the indigo room had chilled, making it necessary to keep the window closed until the last minute. Aracely would draw out his lovesickness, and then throw the nervous, feathered thing, no bigger than a thrush, out the open window. She would launch it like a dove, a barely visible wash of peach or blue Sam never would have caught if Miel hadn’t taught him to watch for it flying out the window and vanishing.
Aracely set one palm on his heart and the other on his throat until the lovesickness rose to her hands.
In that moment, he was thirteen, and Miel was wearing her favorite dress, the violet-tinged blue of a cloudless sky. The thin ribbons of the dress’s straps kept loosening and falling down her arms, and each time he helped her tighten them he peeled a gold foil star off a sticker sheet and pressed it onto her shoulder or her upper back. She asked him why, and he told her to trust him.
And she had. She had left them there the whole day, while they let the sun heat their backs. When they ran, her perspiration made the foil shine damp, and it wore the edges of the adhesive, but the little stars stayed. And that night he had lifted each one off her, slowly, so they didn’t pull at her skin. When he was done, she laughed, mouth open, to see that each foil star had left a lighter cast of its shape. In that first blazing day of summer, her skin had tanned enough that she was covered in constellations.
She had wanted to name every one. She named one for Aracely, one for Sam’s mother, and then she told Sam he had to pick one, the one she would name after him. He had brushed his fingers near one at the base of her neck, the shape small but the edges clean and sharp.
He had mapped her body like a new sky. He had known even then that this night was something perfect, without jagged corners to catch themselves on. But it was only now that he knew why. That day, with the foil stars, there was both a reason for him to be touching her, and no need for a reason. They were younger. She didn’t hesitate before she pulled leaves from his hair, and he hadn’t paused before reaching out and placing one of the foil stars on her shoulder.
Sam sat up, pulling away from Aracely’s hands.
“Sam,” Aracely said, his name emerging from one gasp and falling into another.
The lovesickness rushed back into him. It stung every corner of his body. He was a river caught between water and ice. Frozen too much to move. Not enough to stand solid against the wind and the pull of the moons he had made.
His body felt heavy with the lovesickness that had almost gone. Now it hooked into him, its hold deep and firm. It was an animal nearly torn from its nest, and he was the tangles of twigs and thread and grass where it made its home.
If anyone tried to tear it away again, its claws would rip him apart.
“I can’t,” he said, the words choked and small.
Aracely’s eyes flashed red brown. Her hands still smelled like laurel and cloves. “Why?” she asked.
“Because it’s mine,” he said.
It was his. All of it was his. His body, refusing to match his life. His heart, bitter and worn. His love for Miel, even if it had nowhere to go, even if he didn’t know how to love a girl who kept herself as distant from him as an unnamed constellation.
These things belonged to him. They were his, even if they were breaking him.