Wild Beauty by Anna-Marie McLemore
For the women in my family,
for all women who hold the light for their families.
For the girls who’ve become my sisters,
for all the girls with the misunderstood hearts.
If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden.
—FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT
Quiero hacer contigo
lo que primavera hace con los cerezos.
I want to do with you
what spring does with the cherry trees.
—PABLO NERUDA
ONE
Later, they would blame what happened on the little wooden horses.
Estrella had found them when she was five, the set of them dust-frosted and forgotten on a high shelf. They had been small enough to fit in her hands, carved wooden wings sprouting from their painted backs.
No one could tell her where the little horses had first come from, or who they’d belonged to. Estrella took her mother’s shrug as permission to keep them. She dusted them off, lined them up by colors, their wings rounded and splayed like stouter versions of a dragonfly’s. At night, she counted them like sheep. She trotted them along her bedspread like the folds in her quilt were hills.
Now, eleven years later, they were more charms than toys. When she couldn’t sleep, she ran her fingers along their wings like her grandmother did with her rosary beads. And tonight, she lay in the dark, turning each one in her hands, trying to ignore that hundreds of blue borraja flowers had sprouted from the ceiling of her bedroom.
Outside the door, she heard her cousins talking. Whatever they were whispering about was good enough to keep them awake; they were all worn down from work. Today they had finished bringing La Pradera into its spring bloom. The gardens were thick with lilies and irises. Morning glories covered the arbors. The blossoming trees floated their clouds of lilacs and mimosa.
There would be more work, of course. At La Pradera, there always was. Keeping up the bulb gardens, stopping the borders from overgrowing, filling in the flower beds. But it wouldn’t be the same task they had each spring, forcing their fingers down into the hard earth, bringing the ground back to life after the cold months. Their hands were raw from it. They had called up new flowers so many times that the crescent moons of dirt under their nails seemed as much part of them as their skin.
Each spring felt like all of them, not just the gardens, coming back to life. They spent winters giving their flowers to ceramic pots they kept indoors, or pulling snowdrift roses out of patches of land soft enough to grow. But now all of La Pradera was theirs. They had every acre to let out the blooms that had been waiting in their hands all winter.
Estrella looked up at the ceiling, all those starflowers crawling over the rafters. Now that the season was coming on warmer, she had hoped she could wring herself out, give the ground all the flowers she had in her. But this still happened, borraja painting the space above her bed blue, no matter the season.
She left the little horses on her quilt and found her four cousins in the hall, all of them eyeing one of Azalea’s ballet flats. Estrella couldn’t tell why until she looked closer, and spotted the three letters Azalea had inked into the lining, where the writing would follow the lower curve of her anklebone.
Bay. Those three letters were as damning as a confession to a priest.
They all rushed into Azalea’s room, Azalea calling protests after them. Now that they knew to look, they found the same three letters in her clothbound journals. In her books, as though they belonged not to her but to that name she had written on the fly leaves. On the pale inner satin of a velvet choker.
Then, there was no stopping them. They raided one another’s rooms the same way their mothers checked for bottles of violet liqueur, or the dark-dyed lingerie they weren’t supposed to have until they were older.
In Gloria’s room, they found the creased photo she had pressed against the bottom of her middle drawer. The back looked sponge-painted in the lightest pink and coral of her lipsticks, the faint imprints of the hundred times Gloria had kissed the picture’s backing.
The length of yew in Calla’s closet told the same story. Bay, the girl those three letters and the face in that photograph belonged to, had been showing her how to carve her own bow. They had been sanding down the wood together, smoothing it in the last daylight hours before dinner.
Azalea eyed Estrella, willing her to be the next to confess.
Her glare reminded Estrella of the story neither of them had ever told. How Estrella had once kissed Bay under the flowering trees, how Azalea had seen it and, that night, gone after her like a lynx. Both of them had grabbed each other’s hair until Gloria pulled them apart, demanding to know what this was about. They had traded stares, understanding that they would not tell the truth, instead piecing together some lie about a dress borrowed without permission.
Now Azalea looked ready to grab Estrella by the hair again. She must have assumed Estrella had grown out of that small, fierce love that made her kiss Bay under the mimosa trees. Estrella had thought the same thing about Azalea, that she was done with wanting Bay, or at least that she’d gotten distracted. She’d seen Azalea flirting with the young wives who grew bored at La Pradera’s parties, their husbands talking of business they thought women couldn’t understand.
But Azalea had been caught, and that stare was her way of telling Estrella that if she, too, didn’t confess, Azalea would do it for her.
So Estrella opened her jewelry box to her cousins, showing them the collection of thick ribbons coiled together like a nest. They were each lengths of satin that had fallen from Bay’s hair during La Pradera’s summer parties and winter balls. When a ribbon slipped from the end of Bay’s French braid without her noticing, Estrella lifted it from the flagstone courtyard before it got trampled.
Gloria’s eyes slid upward, where the thick blanket of blue starflowers coated the ceiling. Her gaze made the rest of them follow.
Each five-pointed bloom was the deep, clear blue of a new night, the twists of vines flashing sea green between the flowers.
Dalia shook her head at Estrella, not in disappointment but in sympathy. Gloria gave her a small smile, gentle and sad, like Estrella was a child they were looking after. As though Estrella, not Calla, was the youngest Nomeolvides girl.
Calla, for her part, studied the flowers, asking if Estrella could remember what she might have been dreaming this time as blue stars opened over her bed.
“No,” Estrella said, the same thing she said every time Calla asked.