This is where you are, she whispered. Stay. Don’t go off where you’re going.
Through the blue-gray veil of sleep he understood. She was stopping him from drifting away. She was anchoring him to this bed so his dreams could not draw him up into their current like dust into the air. She was pulling him back from the place where he dreamed about scars appearing on his back, that feeling like he was being cut open with a rope made of embers.
The petals went dark, one at a time like blown-out candles. Then there was nothing but night sky, and her hands, and these whispered words.
Stay. A thing she told him to do for no other reason than This is where you are.
THIRTEEN
In the morning, Estrella did not find her mother’s shadow behind the rose trellises.
Her mother found her first, catching her by the hair.
Her mother’s scent, a combination of the roses and the perfumed powder she sprinkled on the back of her neck, drifted over her. It was a scent that matched her name. Rosa.
Her mother’s grip on her hair was hard, a few strands caught on her nails and pulling at the roots. But even that slight pain was as familiar as her great-grandmother’s woven blankets. It was a thing that seemed to calm her mother, grasping Estrella’s hair like she was a doll.
She did it when Tía Azucena went through her closet; she’d held Estrella’s braid while whispering, If she borrows another of my skirts without asking, I’ll grow thorns through all her dresses.
She did it when Abuela Mimosa would not stop refolding the sheets Estrella’s mother had put away; she clasped her hands on either side of Estrella’s head and whispered through clenched teeth, Que Dios me ayude, if she does it again, I’m hiding them, all of them.
She did it when everyone was arguing about whether there should be one or two services for Bisabuela Mirasol and Bisabuela Luna, the sunflower and moonflower cousins who’d died within a week of each other. Her mother had come into her room in the middle of the night and whispered, They’re going to argue themselves into their own graves. Then I’ll have to plan everything for them, too! She had said it with such dramatic weariness, collapsing onto the bed in a way Estrella knew was meant to make her laugh.
But now there was a sharper cut to the way her mother held her hair.
“If you spend another night in his room,” her mother whispered, “I will wring your neck like a chicken.”
“I didn’t spend the night in his room,” Estrella said.
She had heard him through the door. The soft noise held at the back of his throat had been half groan, half whimper, like he was choking on the sound.
“He was having a nightmare,” she said. “I woke him up.”
“Don’t,” her mother said. “Don’t go near him at night.”
“You thought he was a good sign.” Estrella turned her head, her mother keeping a hold on her hair. “You all thought that.”
Her mother pressed her lips together, a look Estrella had seen on her own face and on her cousins’. Even through generations, she and her family were all such copies of one another. But her mother’s fingers were so much longer than Estrella’s, her face so much thinner, her arms floating with a kind of grace Estrella could only stumble after, that they looked alike more in their expressions than their features. Azalea and Gloria looked more like her mother than she did.
“That was before I realized he doesn’t sleep,” her mother said.
“He does so,” Estrella said.
“He dreams but he doesn’t sleep.”
“If he dreams, he’s sleeping.”
“He doesn’t really sleep.” Her mother let go of her hair. “He doesn’t go to that still place where everything is quiet. And that means there’s something that won’t let him sleep. With men, it’s almost always their own guilt.”
“If you’re so worried about him, why are you letting him stay?” Estrella asked.
“Because he means something. And we don’t know what he means yet.”
They didn’t know, but they all had their hopes that it wasn’t just this one boy. They all hoped he meant more than himself. He was the possibility of lost loves found, of legacies broken, of their hearts being built for something other than sorrow. He was the chance that the raw will of La Pradera was stronger than the curse they passed down like antique lace.
Fel was the glimmer that let them imagine that others might reappear after him. Even the most wary and superstitious among them could not turn their backs to this.
Especially not Estrella and her cousins. None of them spoke of their own wish that La Pradera might break the curse of their five loves, that it might protect Bay. But Estrella could feel it mirrored between their hearts, fragile and identical.
“Gloria said we should show him the kindness we would show our brothers if we had any,” Estrella said. “So did Abuela Lila. So that’s what I did. I did what I’d do for a brother.”
It’s what she and her cousins had all done for one another, when they were children who did not understand that it was falling in love, not just any love at all, that could end in vanishing. They had clutched one another, shaking each other out of their nightmares that the way they loved their mothers and grandmothers could make them all disappear.
Gloria and Dalia had held Azalea while she wailed, wondering if giving her grandmother a birthday present was too much love, and would it make her turn to air? And then, years later, Azalea had stroked her fingers through Calla’s hair and whispered that, no, loving their family would not make it all turn to dust.
That’s never happened, Azalea whispered, in a gentler voice than Estrella thought she could ever hold on her tongue. Not in a hundred years of being here. Not in a thousand years of being everywhere else we were before here. We keep our mothers and abuelas. We’re stuck with them.
Under her mother’s gaze, the soft memory iced over.
“Wait,” Estrella said. “This isn’t about him, is it?”
Her mother looked away.
“This is about me,” Estrella said. “You didn’t say you don’t want all of us around him at night. It’s just me, isn’t it?”
Her mother surveyed the ground at her feet.
“I think you could bring out the worst in each other,” she said. “He doesn’t sleep, and when you sleep, things happen.”
“‘Things happen’?” A laugh broke from Estrella’s lips. Her mother wasn’t one for softening the names of things, but even she couldn’t leave bare the truth of starflowers growing from ceilings. Things happen. Things meaning Estrella’s name wrapping around the rafters at midnight. “You named me for those things.”