“When?” Aracely asked. “When would have been a good time to tell you? When you were a little girl, and I looked this different from the brother you knew? When you were a little older? Last week? When was the right time?”
Miel’s memory slid back over every time Aracely had opened her mouth, pausing before speaking, and Miel had braced so hard she felt it in her body. Each time, she’d thought Aracely was about to ask her questions that would land too hard for her to catch them. Each time, she’d hoped Aracely would say nothing.
And each time, Aracely had.
Miel had given off such raw fear, such apprehension, that Aracely had never been able to say the words. Miel’s panic had scared her off. Miel had startled Aracely with the force of her conviction that for things to be good, they had to stay as they were. They had to be two women who knew just enough but not too much about each other.
In so closely guarding her own secrets, Miel had forbidden the possibility of Aracely ever telling hers. “Please don’t blame Sam,” Aracely said. “Be mad at me all you want, but I asked him not to tell you.”
“Why?” Miel asked.
“Because I didn’t want him telling you what I couldn’t figure out how to tell you myself.”
Aracely sat down on the floor next to Miel, her dark red skirt fluffing like the edges of her zinnias. Her sigh sounded like a breeze wisping at the petals.
Aracely reached for Miel’s hand, then hesitated, letting her fingers pause halfway between them. “Do you remember our family?” she asked.
“Not a lot,” Miel said.
“We’re a lot of brujos and brujas.”
Miel laughed then, but it came out strained and short.
“We come from a family where everyone has a gift,” Aracely said. “Do you think I just learned how to cure lovesickness? It’s in my blood. It’s my gift. We all have them. Our great-uncles with broken bones. Our cousins with susto.”
Miel reached out for what little she remembered. In the presence of Aracely’s voice, it bloomed like a bud opening.
Their relatives had gifts that were useful, without thorns. Miel’s great-uncles could cure joints that had gone stiff with age and the ache of old injuries; she had watched them rub chili powder into bent fingers until they came back to life. Her second cousin could bring down any fever, cutting it with the tea of young blossoms.
Her great-grandmother could drive away even the worst nightmares, her garden full of marjoram and moonflower. Miel had been two, maybe three, when her mother had taken her and Leandro to their bisabuela’s house; she did not even remember what the old woman looked like. But she remembered that the house had smelled so much like vanilla that the air went down like syrup.
“We’re curanderas,” Aracely said. “And curanderos.”
“I’m not a curandera.” Miel turned over her arm, hiding her wrist. “I don’t know how to cure anything.”
Aracely folded her hands and set them in her lap, her dark fingers disappearing into the fabric.
“It had been so long,” Aracely said, eyeing Miel’s forearm. “Everyone thought the roses had just died out.”
Miel’s mother and aunts must have sighed with relief at that, celebrating the other gifts that blessed the family.
“When your first one showed up,” Aracely said, “it’d been a hundred years since anyone in our family had grown one.”
Miel turned her wrist on her lap. The appearance of these petals must have been as sudden and unwelcome as a bat emerging from a dark attic.
“Our mother,” Miel said. “Did she have them too?”
Aracely’s mouth paused, half-open for a second, before she said, “Our mother?”
“Did she have the roses?” Miel asked, wondering for just that minute if this was why her mother was so set on ridding her of them. Maybe her body had grown them too. Maybe they sprouted from her back or ankle, and she veiled them under her clothes. “Did she have them and hide them?”
“No,” Aracely said. “The curanderos and curanderas weren’t in her family. None of this was.”
“What?” Miel asked.
“The roses,” Aracely said. “The curanderos. They were in our father’s family, not our mother’s.”
The possibility of her mother having the same roses drained away, like wind stripping the petals off a bud.
Her father.
“What happened to him?” Miel asked, but even through her own words, she felt her center humming with the understanding that she already knew.
She heard more than her father shouting. She heard his whispers. She heard her own screaming. She heard the crying and pleading of a boy named Leandro.
She heard everything.
It must have taken a few seconds. But in all that noise, she felt like she’d been sitting in this closet, beneath the sweep of Aracely’s skirts, for as long as she’d been in the water tower.
“You remember,” Aracely said. At first it had the ring of a question. But then it echoed. You remember. You remember. No question. Only the understanding that Miel was sliding into the same memories Aracely must have had this whole time.
bay of mists
“Miel,” Aracely called after her.