Other Nomeolvides girls were christened with flower names, guiding the form their gifts would take. Gloria covered the sunken garden’s walls with morning glories, the leaves brilliant green as the flowers were blue and purple. The cream and soft rust petals of Dalia’s blooms grew wide as dinner plates, and Azalea’s bursts of flowers turned whatever sunrise color she wanted. Even as a baby, Calla got her hands around fistfuls of earth until the bells of lilies sprouted toward the light.
But Estrella’s mother had instead christened her after the stars.
“You wanted me to have this name,” Estrella said.
“And I made a mistake.”
The word cut in like the slip of a needle.
Her mother drew her long fingers toward her mouth, covering it. Not with the panic of saying something she did not mean. More like the regret of saying something she had never meant to speak aloud.
“You know why I did it,” her mother said.
Of course Estrella knew. Her mother had hoped that a name that was not a flower could free her daughter from the blessings and curses of being a Nomeolvides woman.
“And look how well it worked,” Estrella said.
From the stories her grandmother told, Estrella had been only two when she grasped handfuls of dirt and made pink starflowers. In the bath, she had splashed the water until borraja vines choked the drain.
And now, the starflowers on her bedroom ceiling must have been too much like tulips or Mexican sage, showing up without warning. Those blue petals were too close to the unexpected blooms that condemned girls to being called witches.
Standing here, with her mother who would not quite look at her, Estrella hated that ceiling of blue stars. And she hated her mother a little for what she’d named her.
She hated her name the way she’d never hated it before, now that it was hitched to that word. Mistake. It was like a new middle name.
“Estrella,” her mother said. “I love what you are. And the mistake was mine, not yours.”
Estrella flinched at the word again, wondering if she’d been mouthing it in a way her mother could see.
“Abuela warned you,” Estrella said.
Her grandmother had told her mother; women before her had tried giving their daughters names that were not flowers. Azalea’s great-grandmother had been named Luna and had spent her life drawing night-blooming moonflowers up from sandy earth, half of them as she sleepwalked across La Pradera. Three generations ago, a girl had been christened Maria, only to grow up with a gift for making Castilian roses, the kind la Virgen revealed to Juan Diego. A Nomeolvides woman named Alba had a gift for apricot trees; they flowered on La Pradera for forty years after her death.
And now Estrella, a girl whose flowers did not keep to where her hands put them. A girl whose mother wanted her to stay far from the boy she’d found in the gardens, because she feared their dreams and nightmares touching.
“Just tell me something,” Estrella said. “Are you protecting me from him or him from me?”
“I just don’t want you around him at night,” her mother said. “I worry about whatever is in him calling to something in you. I don’t want his dreams coming off on you. Stay away from boys who don’t sleep.”
A scream cut through the gardens. It had the far echoing sound of coming across the flower beds and paths. It broke into a sob, and as it broke it took the sky with it, ripping it in half like paper.
Estrella and her mother followed the sound. They each held hands to their throats to make sure they were not the ones making it.
They passed under the shadows of cypress trees.
Two figures showed against the green hillside.
Reid, taking slow steps back. Dalia, yelling at him, shoving her palms against his shoulders. He looked more startled than angry, like he thought Dalia was something feral he might provoke with any small movement.
“You did this,” she said, her words shredding into screams. “This happened because you came here. She didn’t want you here.”
On the back of her tongue, Estrella found the bitter taste of blood and pollen, the taste of death for girls who strayed from La Pradera. The salt and bite would rise to each of their lips if Reid turned them off this land.
“You did this.” Dalia threw her hands into Reid hard enough that he stumbled back. “This place was protecting her before you came here, and you ruined it.”
Estrella ran at Dalia. She threw her arms around her cousin from behind, pulling her off Reid. Dalia cried out, but Estrella held on.
Dalia’s scream collapsed, splintering into sobs. Estrella kept her hold, her grip keeping Dalia from sinking to her knees.
“What happened?” Estrella asked, grasping her cousin so tightly her mouth was against Dalia’s hair.
Dalia sobbed harder, each cry rattling through her body so Estrella felt it.
“What happened?” Estrella asked, raising her voice to cut through Dalia’s.
Dalia’s words came broken. They rose between sobs a few at a time.
Estrella caught them and strung them together.
She’s gone. She’s just gone.
Dryness spread over Estrella’s tongue. It felt like a stone in her mouth.
Bay.
Their love had taken Bay.
Dalia let a few words break from her lips, like she was surfacing between waves. How Bay had been there and then, in a whirl of wind, had disappeared.
She had seen it. Dalia had seen it happen.
Estrella had always thought this part of the curse was pure rumor, the stories about lovers disappearing right in front of them, even vanishing from their hands as they held them. They had all thought they could count on this, that they had been spared the sight of their lovers vanishing.
Instead, lovers were lost at night, a Nomeolvides woman waking with a gasp from a dream. She rose from the nightmare of losing her love, and, for one half-asleep moment, felt the relief of it having been a dream. Then the next moment came, when the dragging weight of her own heart made her realize it was true.
Or, as she knelt in the garden, her heart turned and felt as though it was cracking, a stone breaking open and showing the crystal inside, and she knew.
But Dalia. Dalia had witnessed the moment of losing Bay. She had seen her fading into the air.
With each string of words, Estrella shut her eyes harder. Even with so few words, Estrella could see it. This thing the Nomeolvides girls had all feared since the day they realized their childhood love had grown with them.
Bay was dust stripped from the ground. She was rain swept across a valley. She was a veil of sand shimmering gold and then dissolving.
In one moment she existed for them to touch, and then was nothing.
The wind threaded between Estrella’s lips.
Bay could not be gone from here. She was as deeply rooted in La Pradera as the magnolia trees. She cast a shadow as strong as the tallest hedges.
There was no La Pradera without glimpses of Bay. Marjorie braiding her hair. Bay poking the back of her grandmother’s chair with the button end of her épée, needling her into a hand of baccarat banque. Those satin trousers that made Bay look like a centuries-old portrait but that she wore so well other rich daughters had pairs made for themselves.
Now Bay had vanished the same as Calla’s father, and Abuela Flor’s lover, and the man who collected maps, and anyone who loved too deeply and stayed too long.