Miel didn’t remember. She remembered more about their family’s kitchen than the place she was born.
“It was further up the river,” Aracely said. “That’s why no one here recognized you.”
“How did we end up here?” Miel asked.
“It’s where the river widens and slows,” Aracely said. “The calmest point before it gets to the sea. Everything stops here.”
Miel felt the flinch of wanting to argue with everything Aracely said, but she knew Aracely was right. The bottom of the river here was cluttered with old nets and washed-away branches and even little boats that had sunk and bobbed along the bottom until they rested here.
“It’s where we washed up,” Aracely said.
Now Miel remembered Leandro calling her name, looking for her, and then their mother wailing, screaming when the current stole Leandro, and he could not fight it.
“I know you were trying to save me,” Miel said.
Aracely stepped to the threshold of the closet. “But you don’t know how I lived.”
The smile in Aracely’s voice—she could hear it—made Miel look up.
“The water took me,” Aracely said. “It saved me.” Her face was full of a soft peace that made Miel think of the few minutes before the sun set. Aracely looked like she was talking about a lover she had parted from, but still thought well of. “It took me. And then it gave me back this way.”
“What do you mean, this way?” Miel asked.
“It let me die as a boy,” Aracely said, “and it gave me back as a woman.”
Miel set her folded hands against her chest. The depths she feared most had given back the brother she lost.
If Miel shut her eyes she could see it, the water stripping her brother down to his heart and building him back up as this woman. It took every part of Leandro, and gave him the body that would become Aracely, building her out of the cold and the dark and the things she had once been.
The water had finished her, spun her into a grown woman during the years she had belonged to it. It had been her cocoon. It had made the raw elements of Leandro into this woman.
There had been so much more to the appearing of this beautiful woman than a summer of gold-winged butterflies.
The butterflies had not brought her here. Yes, they might have turned her hair a color to match them. But they had not given her to this town the way the water had. They were a celebration of her emergence, a sign of her appearing.
Leandro had reappeared as Aracely, an event marked by countless wings.
Miel had fallen out of a metal tower filled with dirt-and rust-darkened water.
“It’s not fair,” Miel said.
“What isn’t?” Aracely asked.
Miel couldn’t remember those years in the water. She couldn’t remember the rush of the water that held her being drawn from the river and into the tower. She felt only the dim light of knowing she had half-existed, not breathing because, for that time, she had no heart and lungs. They, like the rest of her, had been folded into the river.
For a while, she had not had a body but had been made of water, before that water gave her back.
“It made you older.” Miel had stayed the same as when the water took her, a little girl who did not grow until she again had her body and breath. “It didn’t make me older.”
“It wasn’t about it making me older,” Aracely said, though the tightness in her face told Miel there was more than she was willing to say. But this, unlike everything else, was Aracely’s business, not Miel’s. “It just gave me back as what I was meant to be. And I was glad you were still little. I was glad the water kept you the way you were, that you didn’t lose any time.”
Miel searched Aracely’s face, the understanding spreading inside her. “You knew I was in there.”
Aracely pursed her lips, looking caught but not ashamed. “There were only so many places you could be. I couldn’t find you in the river. But then I stood under that water tower one day, and I could feel you. You were so close I kept thinking I could take your hand.”
“Then you just waited for them to take it down?”
“That water tower was a storm hazard,” Aracely said. “They should’ve torn it down ages ago. All I had to do was flirt with the right people, and its days were numbered.”
Miel cringed thinking of her brother—no, not her brother, this woman—recognizing her in that stale water. She tried to remember what it felt like to be in there, and couldn’t.
She felt hollow with the understanding that her brother, the boy named Leandro, no longer existed. His muscle and bone and heart had been repurposed into making this woman.
“You should’ve told me,” Miel said.