They’ll destroy us all, he’d said. She still remembered that, how he never blamed Miel for the roses, how he spoke of them like something apart from her. Even with that curse running through his family, he could not imagine his own daughter being intertwined with those stems and thorns.
Leandro had held ice to the burn on Miel’s wrist, sheltered her in the loose cover of his body while she cried with her eyes shut tight, and their mother’s and father’s voices swelled to screaming.
Miel’s shoulders tensed, like her body jolting awake after half-falling asleep, at the memory of the door slamming.
In that door slamming, Miel understood, for no longer than it took to remember the sound, what betrayal he must have felt. How hurt that Miel’s mother could not understand he was doing this for her, out of fear that they would lose their daughter to those roses, that she would turn on her mother. He had wanted to protect his wife from his daughter, and his daughter from herself, and his only thanks had been the screams of his wife driving him from his own house.
But then the sound faded, and Miel was that little girl again, crying at the pain and heat that encircled her wrist.
Not like this, her mother had yelled after him. We don’t do this to our children. And he had left them.
The pumpkin. The baptism.
Her mother had never disagreed with their father that their daughter needed to be cured. She’d just disagreed on the method. She would not go as far as he would go. The handle of the butter knife in the gas flame was cruelty she would not allow, not even from a man known for tending wounds and setting bones.
Her mother held to her conviction that she could cure Miel without hurting her. To her, sealing her daughter inside the hollow of a pumpkin, or holding her in water still a little warm after a long summer, was so much gentler than the pain of hot metal. These were cures blessed by the priests and the se?oras.
The warmth of a palm landed on Miel’s back.
“I’m sorry,” Aracely said.
I’m sorry. Leandro had whispered those words as he held her down, baring her wrist to the hot metal. He had clenched his back teeth to keep from crying. But he’d blinked, and a tear had fallen onto her forehead, hot as the spray off the kitchen sink.
Miel shook her head, face still pressed against the bedspread. But the dark didn’t take her.
“Miel,” Aracely said.
Aracely’s voice was calling her back, pulling her from deep water toward the surface.
“I’m so sorry,” Aracely said, and Miel broke into the light.
Miel turned onto her side, palm on the bedspread, her elbow pressing into the mattress.
Aracely’s eyes looked dark and wet as the river that had taken her, and their mother.
Whatever guilt Aracely had inherited from Leandro, it seemed so small compared to Miel’s. Her roses had cost them everything.
“I killed you,” Miel said. “And then I killed her.”
Aracely grabbed Miel’s hand, her palm warm but her fingers cool. “Don’t you say that.”
“You had to go in after me because I fought, and she couldn’t hold on to me. And then she had to go in after you.”
Miel couldn’t say the rest. The unexpected currents. The drag to the bottom of the river. How she imagined her mother swimming against the pull of the water, and then realized both Leandro and Miel were gone, and there was nothing to swim for anymore.
That was the part that Miel couldn’t let her thoughts land on, that moment of her mother giving up and letting the water take her.
“She loved you,” Aracely said. “But she got lost thinking that your roses were something outside of you…” Aracely stopped, her mouth half-open, her eyes skimming the floor. “She got so caught up thinking she could save you from them better than our father could, that if she loved you she had to…”
She stumbled again, stopping. But this time she looked up, meeting Miel’s eyes. “She never wanted to hurt you.”
Those memories had left in Miel a fear of her mother’s hands, the pinch of those desperate nights when she sealed Miel inside that pumpkin and, later, held her underwater.
“You really believe that?” Miel asked, and she heard in her own voice both skepticism and forgiveness. A suspicion both that her mother had been trying to hurt her and that she had been justified in doing it.
“Yes,” Aracely said. “I’ve always believed that. But just because she loved you doesn’t mean you deserved what she did. Or what he did.”
The knot of scar tissue in her wrist felt hot and tight. It stung with wondering if maybe her father wasn’t wrong, that these roses were things to be killed. How could Miel think anything else now? Her roses were the reason the Bonner girls knew what Sam needed so badly for no one to know.
“I should have let her,” Miel said. “I should have just stopped fighting.”
Aracely squeezed her hand. “Never stop fighting.”
That water, that river that did not save their mother, had adopted them. It had found her and Leandro when their mother couldn’t. It had kept them until it decided it was time to let them go. Miel hated it, wanted to turn it all to ice too solid to get lost in, while knowing that she owed it her life and her brother’s.