He pulled weeds from the herb window boxes. He braced young tomato plants to their stakes. He cleared dead ivy stickers from the stone, which Azalea told him was best done by burning them away with a lit match. He didn’t believe her until Calla and two of the grandmothers nodded their agreement.
And his favorite, tilling the wood-bordered beds so they would be easy for the women to slide their hands into. The spinning points on the tiller looked so much like ornaments that at first he’d been sure they were a child’s toy.
“What are you doing?” Estrella asked.
He turned toward her voice, the tiller spurs slowing.
She stood at the edge of the garden, the wind turning her hair to streamers. Her skirt blew around her knees like a river was pulling at it.
“They look like stars,” he said, the tiller spurs slowing to a stop. The moon glinted off the metal.
“There’s stars up there.” Estrella tilted her hand toward the sky. “If you wanna look at them, just look at them.”
“But these ones you can touch,” Fel said.
She looked amused by him. He didn’t mind. If she thought he was worth looking at, worth considering, he didn’t mind.
“I’m glad you’re back,” he said. “Calla and Gloria thought he’d locked you in the attic. They were working on a way to break you out. I told them if you could find a matchbook you could do it yourself.”
A surprised smile brightened her face. “Did you just make a joke, Fel?”
“I do sometimes,” he said.
She sat on the low stone wall, her skirt fluffing up around her.
“What you made the other night,” she said, pressing her fingertips together, and he understood how hard this question was for her to ask, this reference to a night when the Nomeolvides girls were too heartbroken to put on their shoes. “What’s it called?”
He shut his eyes, feeling the sense of the name near him. He reached out for it, expecting it to flit away from him.
But it stayed.
“Molletes,” he said. “They’re called molletes.”
“No, they’re not,” she said.
Her protest, and the laugh underneath it, made him open his eyes. He remembered so little, but he remembered this, the name for manteca dyed red with paprika and then poured over bread.
“What do you mean, ‘no, they’re not’?” he asked.
“My family makes molletes all the time. It’s not that.”
“Then what is it?”
“It’s a bolillo you cut in half and then you put stuff on it.”
He didn’t even try not to smile. “Stuff?”
“I don’t know,” she said. She sounded a little frustrated, like she was trying to teach him a word that could not be translated. But she was smiling, too. “It depends what we have. But it’s usually not red.”
“That’s what I know as molletes,” he said.
She tore stray threads off the hem of her slip. Wisps of blue trailed off her fingertips.
“Was he hard on you?” he asked.
“Reid?” Estrella asked. “No.”
“Did he hurt you?”
“Do I look hurt?” she asked.
“He just let you go?”
“Not quite. He wants a favor. He wants me to charm his rich friends at his little party. Show them how polite and sweet and entertaining we can be. I’ll do it”—she lifted the corner of her skirt like she was curtsying—“and all will be forgiven.”
“And you don’t worry about him thinking you owe him something?” Fel asked.
“I’m not afraid of him. My mother always says the same thing about men like that. They’re cotton candy. All puff and show, but throw water on them and they dissolve.”
There was something brittle in how she moved and smiled. If she kept trying this hard not to seem thrown by Reid, it would splinter her.
Fel grabbed on to something else he could get her talking about, words she’d said that he didn’t know.
“What’s cotton candy?” he asked. It sounded made up, or maybe it was the kind of cloth Estrella’s skirt was sewn out of.
“You’re kidding, right?” Estrella asked. “What are you, two hundred years old?”
If he’d been in el Purgatorio longer than he could imagine, maybe he was. “I don’t know.”
Estrella stood up from the wall. “Come on.”
When she had found him in the valley made of flowers, he had known to let her lead him. The understanding that she was his way toward anything familiar felt woven into him. But now, a mirrored kind of understanding, that he should not follow her this time, had the same depth and shape.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he said.
“Why?” she asked.
“I heard your grandmothers talking.” He had caught their whispers, their agreements that they must keep a close watch on Estrella and her cousins. “They said…” He stopped himself, struck with the fear that he might be speaking what wasn’t his to tell.
“What?” Estrella asked.
He hesitated. Estrella had been the one to find him, but her family had been the ones to let him stay.
“They said they didn’t want you going anywhere without their permission,” he said.
“Their permission?” she asked. “Are they kidding? Gloria and Dalia and Azalea are grown women. Calla and I are close enough. And they want to treat us like children?”
“I don’t know.” He felt caught, wanting neither to agree with her family nor to turn on them. “They said they don’t want you leaving. They said it could hurt you.”
“They still think we’re children. They think we don’t know how this place works. But we know. We all know the stories.”
“What stories?” he asked.
“If we try to leave La Pradera—I mean really try to leave, for good—the land hurts us,” she said. “It wants to make us stay, so it hurts us when we try to leave. But that’s if we try to run away. Not if we go down the road for cotton candy.”
“But how would it know the difference?” he asked.
“How would what know the difference?”
“The land,” he said. “How would it know if you’re taking a walk or if you’re trying to run away?”
“It knows,” she said. “It just knows.”
“How?”
Estrella took slow steps toward him. “I want you to listen to me very carefully, Fel.” She came close enough that he had to pick between looking down at her and backing up. But her face was so serious, so intent, he could not move. “Never underestimate what the ground under your feet knows, what it can do. What it can give you and what it can steal. It gave us a home when there was nowhere else we were safe. It defied every town that tried to make sure we’d be wandering forever.”
This close, the air between them smelled like her, half the dry spice of the perfume she shared with her cousins, half the fruit soap that left a little of its sugar on her body.
“And then it defied what happened to you,” she said, her voice low, more like a warning than a secret. “It brought you back from wherever you were before. It made you appear after you’d vanished.”
He tried to remember disappearing. What it felt like. How it had happened. Whether it had hurt or just been a fading out of everything, even the sense of his own body.
It didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel like a story that was his. But she sounded so sure of it that on her tongue it became truth. It became his. He just couldn’t remember it.