They had done this. The venom of their own hearts had collected like rain, and they had done this.
Estrella and Azalea had done it when they fought about who Bay thought was prettier, fraying the ribbons in each other’s hair and leaving bruises on each other’s shins. Azalea writing Bay’s name in places it would lay against her bare skin had done this. Calla falling in love with the smell of yew wood and how close it was to the scent of Bay’s hair had done this.
Gloria keeping that creased photo at the bottom of her drawer. Dalia swallowing two glasses of sparkling wine at a summer ball and then wrapping Bay’s braid around her fingers and whispering against her neck.
Estrella thinking of kissing her every time the wind stirred up scent of lily magnolias, like lemons and worn linen. She imagined pressing her lips to Bay’s so lightly the wind would find its way between them.
They had loved her in ways that streamed from their bodies as much as the flowers they grew. Estrella had loved her in the blue and white and pink of starflowers. Azalea had loved her in sherbet-bright blooms. Calla had loved her in straight-stemmed lilies, Dalia in countless cream petals, Gloria in bells that opened at first light.
They had each been a little bit in love with Bay Briar. And this had been such strong poison that their nighttime offerings could not temper it. The truth of it sank into Estrella with the heat of her cousin’s back, the damp and blossom-sweet warmth of her wearing-off perfume, the sour salt smell of the tears glossing her cheeks.
Bay. They had, all five of them, killed Bay.
FOURTEEN
For the first nights, he heard them in their rooms. The Nomeolvides girls bit their pillows as though this would keep them from crying. He heard the rustle of pillowcases against sheets, the wet, rough noise caught in their throats.
Their mothers gathered on the worn sofas downstairs, running their thumbs over the rims of ceramic cups. From the way they shook their heads at their roselle tea, Fel thought that the mothers were grieving, too. They were grieving for Bay, who they’d all lost, though no one would say how she’d died.
But the mothers tilted their heads toward the ceiling; their daughters’ sobs were coming through from the floor above. They were crying more for the breaking of their daughters’ hearts than for the loss of Bay Briar.
Their own mothers, the Nomeolvides girls’ grandmothers, sat outside on wooden benches, reading from their Bibles in soft voices and praying with their heads bowed to the grass. The sky clouded over. Rain beaded the leaves like drops of glass, and a spring wind left the air cold. But still, they read to one another from their Bibles, and they stayed.
Fel pulled wool blankets down from the linen cupboard and left them folded at their feet. But they did not take them, as though the penance of their own bodies might bless their granddaughters.
He searched for some thread of grief in Reid. Some halted breath. Some pause as he stepped onto the paths Bay had walked. But Reid had meant the things he had told Fel under the stares of painted men and women.
Reid and Bay did not belong to each other. He did not consider the loss of her as something that was his. He did not wear the dark colors the Nomeolvides family wore, the younger ones in purples and greens, the older ones in black and brown.
After a few days, Reid prodded them all into town and into a shop where Fel could not see walls. There were only dark suits and bright dresses and angled mirrors that reflected them back over and over.
Reid wanted them all measured. But the Nomeolvides grandmothers did not close their Bibles and prayer books. They did not give up their rosaries. They did not lift their eyes. They did not yield to the women trying to push them toward the mirrors. Their weathered hands held on to the beads and the leather covers. So the women at the shop had to work around the Bibles and prayer books and the red glint of the rosaries. They had to weave their measuring tapes over and beneath.
The Nomeolvides mothers tried to lift their daughters’ chins. They tried to make them laugh, told them that maybe Reid would set a tablecloth on fire with a candlestick and have to leave La Pradera. Maybe he would set so many things on fire with so many candles that there would be no place in the world that would want him.
But their cheer sounded so dry and forced, Fel expected it to catch in their throats.
As the women at the shop turned and measured them, Estrella and Gloria stared out the windows, as though they might catch Bay passing by. Calla held her hands lightly cupped in front of her, like she was holding something that might fly from her palms if she drew her fingers apart. Azalea winked to the women in the shop, setting a fingernail to her teeth, tilting her head back with a silent laugh when her flirtation made them shiver.
Dalia kept her eyes on the corner point between the ceiling and two walls. As a measuring tape whipped across her waist, Fel saw she was holding her back teeth together, flinching at the touch of hands she did not know.
Fel looked away, feeling guilty for watching.
He tried to draw out anything he might know about the town’s main street. But it seemed as far from his memory and as unfamiliar as the garden valley. Like all those flowers, it dizzied him. Everything seemed so defined, so bright, it felt sharp. The cobblestones looked as perfect as the brick of the enormous house. The coverings arching out from the storefronts were as green as La Pradera’s lawns. The dresses in the window were as complicated as the flower-covered arches, frilled skirts puffing away from dress forms.
Everything here—even the white trims and the tints of the palest flowers in the window boxes—looked clear, the edges cutting. The far memory of where he had once come from, small and blurred, felt both duller and warmer. He felt its colors, not bright, but gray, brown, its most vivid shade the auburn of rust.
The contrast between this place and what little he remembered pressed cold against his skin. His fingers prickled with wanting to cross himself, to join in the grandmothers’ prayers.
But the loss of Bay was not his, and this family was not his, and he had no place shoving his way into their blessings and whispers.
Coming back to the gardens, seeing the wild land that led to the scrolled iron gates, stirred something in him. It felt like a single dark point spinning between stars.
He brushed his fingers over the woody stalks and purple-spined flowers of milk thistle.
He had gathered these from the roadside, brought them back to the one who was taking care of him. He and the one who had taken care of him had peeled away the spines and eaten the stalks and hearts and leaves.
In spring, they had filled their arms with dandelion greens and snapped wild asparagus from their stems, sunrise turning the tips gold.
In fall, they had been so hungry they took their chances with wild mushrooms and feral grapes one color off from nightshade berries.