But Miel ran from the room. She tried to leave behind each dim memory that caught fire and lit a dozen more.
First, she heard all those stories, her father warning her mother in a voice low enough that he thought their children would not catch the words. But Miel and Leandro were pressed against the hallway wall. They were there for every story about how children born with roses turned on the women who’d borne them. Either by bringing curses on their families’ farms, or by confessing their mothers’ sins, out loud, in church, or even by killing their mothers. The sharp memory of her father, telling the story of his great-great-aunt who poisoned first her mother and then her whole family, came back. That girl had drawn the toxins from the white trumpets of moonflowers, and slipped them into her family’s tea.
All of them, her father had said, his whisper rasping at the edges. She just killed them. Do you understand that?
She heard her mother and father arguing, still in those whispers so strained they turned to hissing. Her mother saying, She won’t be like that, she’s our daughter. Her father saying, And you don’t think every mother before you said the same thing? I don’t want her turning on you.
And all this had alternated with his sobbing apologies for bringing this curse on her.
Aracely called Miel’s name again.
Miel’s steps struck the hallway floor. These things she remembered were swirling, forbidding stars. If Miel ran fast enough, she could break out of their gravity.
The roses had come from her father’s side of the family. Miel remembered that now. He had carried them, unseen, like passing a sickness with no sign of it. I didn’t know it would come back, he’d told Miel’s mother. I’m so sorry, I didn’t know it would come back. We thought they were gone. I never would have done this to you. And her mother telling him there was nothing to forgive, trying to convince him, in whispers, that this petal-covered curse was a ghost that would go silent if only they found the right way to quiet it.
But her love only made him set on making sure Miel didn’t hurt her, that she didn’t betray her mother as so many rose-bearing girls before her had. So when he inspected her bandage one afternoon, and found that three green leaves had broken through it—not slipped from the edge, but grown straight through the bandage—it must have felt like her roses defying him. Miel remembered his face, his anger not at her but at these blooms. They had not only possessed his daughter. Now they were mocking him.
Miel’s bed took the force and speed of her body. She set her face against the blanket, trying to press herself down into the dark, where she was nothing but a girl who spilled from a water tower.
But what came next, what she remembered now, brought with it the same pain in her wrist that had kept her awake so many nights.
Her father, holding the rounded end of a butter knife’s handle into the blue flame of their gas stove. Her asking what he was going to do with it, him telling her not to worry, and didn’t she want to be a good girl for her mother.
Her running to Leandro when her father took a few slow steps toward her, the hot glow just fading out of the metal.
Her father yelling for Leandro to hold her down, Leandro saying no, her father leaning down and shouting at him that if he didn’t do this, it meant he didn’t love his sister, or her mother. If he didn’t do this, it meant he wanted to lose them both.
She remembered Leandro crying, the resistance leaving him, him doing as his father said.
The hot metal had burned the opening on her wrist, pain spreading down to her hand and up her arm. Her own scream had ripped against the back of her throat. Her father explained, his voice low even through her screaming, that this would seal the wound on her wrist, cauterize it, stop the roses from growing again. It will be over in a minute, mija. All over in a minute.
Now Miel folded her hands under her, palms against her sternum. Her thumb found the hard knot on her wrist, like a pearl buried under her skin.
The knot of scar tissue, the one she’d let Sam touch. The wound her roses grew from had been there for as long as she had memory. But this knot hadn’t been there before that afternoon her father had turned on the gas stove.
This knot was her body’s response to that metal searing her wound.
But even touching her own wrist, seeing that her body was no longer a child’s body, didn’t stop her from hearing her mother’s voice. How her mother grabbed the butter knife out of her father’s hand so hard and fast that the dull teeth cut his palm. She shoved him away from Miel and Leandro. What are you doing to her? Her mother’s voice had sounded like the shriek of the wind.