“You don’t know anything about that,” Estrella said.
“Because you didn’t tell me, or any of us. And you didn’t tell us what you did to make Reid forget about it. Are you in bed with him now?”
“That’s disgusting.”
“I mean what are you doing for him?” Dalia said. “What does he want from you?”
“A good show for his friends,” Estrella said. “That’s all.”
“What does that mean?” Dalia asked. “Are you his date now?”
“He just wants me to show his friends how we grow flowers. It’s nothing.”
“I don’t like this,” Dalia said. “You’re not a sideshow. He has no right to ask you for that.”
“A few flowers for a whole car?” Estrella asked. “That’s the best deal we’ll ever get from someone like him. Leave it alone. If it was something you needed to know, I would have told you. And if you’d asked me earlier, I would have told you then. I didn’t lie to you. We’re not supposed to lie to each other.”
“We give each other reasons to,” Dalia said.
“What does that mean?”
“Remember Gloria and that boy at Marjorie’s costume ball? We ate them alive. And Azalea with that girl’s lipstick on her dress? We acted like she was cheating on us.”
“We did not.”
Dalia set a harsh glare on her, a visible reminder of the cousins’ silent judgment. They laughed over Azalea flirting with pearl-wearing women just to provoke them, or Calla’s joking pronouncement that the first boy at church to grow a mustache would win her heart. But when they saw anything true and deep in each other, they turned their backs. When they caught a dreaming smile or a halting nervousness across the ballroom, their disapproval stamped out any ember of new love.
Their family’s curse had made them cold toward each other.
They had held together on everything but this. They did not want to see one another mourn vanished lovers like so many of their mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers had. They had all worried over the same thing, and it had made them harsher than the sternest of their grandmothers.
“We were protecting each other.” Estrella took a step forward, breaking the light of the bedside lamp.
“We didn’t protect each other from loving Bay.”
“Because we thought loving Bay was safe.”
“Only because you thought she’d never want any of us,” Dalia said, her voice raising to a yell before she tamped it down into a whisper.
The words went into Estrella deep and fast.
Their mothers did not notice the other moments that made color bloom in their daughters’ cheeks. How Azalea flirted with girls in ruffled dresses. How the thing that first made Estrella fall a little in love with boys or girls was so often their hands, whether they were showing at the edge of a shirt cuff or a lace sleeve. How Gloria blushed when she caught the eye of women in sleek gowns, women who wore their hair in low, smooth chignons and who preferred gray or black or navy. And how she shared her laughter, her true, fluttering laugh, with boys who could more easily be called pretty than handsome.
Estrella and her cousins had grown up admiring girls and boys in the splintered light of chandeliers. They fell a little bit in love with women and with men at Marjorie’s summer parties and winter balls. None of them had seemed safe the way loving Bay had seemed safe. Bay, the one they’d grown up alongside but who was never close enough for them to hold on to. She was the yellow fleck of a planet in the night sky, too far to grasp, but shining and easy to find, appearing in the dark so reliably they could almost believe she was theirs.
Estrella and her cousins blessed one another’s love for Bay not only because they shared it but because they considered it impossible.
“Why can’t we love who we want to love?” Dalia asked. “I love Bay. Gloria’s too scared to fall in love with anyone, and so is Azalea. She’ll kill you if you say that to her, but it’s true and she knows it. She flirts because it’s safe. Calla’s young enough that maybe if we all stop being so knotted up about this she doesn’t have to be too. And you”—Dalia looked at the door behind Estrella—“you care about him. And you’re terrified about what that could mean.”
“Because what if he disappears again?” This time Estrella was almost yelling before she choked her words to a whisper.
Azalea’s first guess made as much sense as any after. This was a boy a Nomeolvides woman had once loved to vanishing, and now, generations later, the gardens had given him back. In him, her family found hope for their own lovers reappearing. But Estrella and her cousins worried that if they did not care for this boy, then the wrath of not only La Pradera but whatever great-great-grandmother had loved him would pelt all of them like hail.
Estrella could not be the second girl in this family to love Fel into vanishing. She had kissed him, eyes shut, her thoughts turning to blossoms streaming over terrace gardens. He had been the one to pull away, and it left her skin so hot that she could not look at him.
Dalia’s eyes opened a little wider. Not surprise. Sympathy so deep it was almost pity.
“If we love them, we lose them,” Estrella said.
“Sometimes,” Dalia said.
“If we love them for long enough and they stay long enough, we always lose them.”
The only lovers who did not vanish were ones who did not stay. The ones who left or who were made to leave were the ones who lived. Sometimes the men’s superstitions drove them from La Pradera. Sometimes Nomeolvides women’s hearts shrank from their own desire until one morning they told their lovers Please go, coolly as if it was the first night they spent together. And sometimes, in rare, blessed instances, both halves of a couple grew tired of each other at once.
The ones who stayed, the ones so taken with their own love that they decided to risk what they considered old wives’ tales, were the ones they lost.
A sickening question came back to Estrella, the wondering about which of her relatives might have once loved Fel.
“He’s someone else’s,” Estrella said.
“What does that mean?” Dalia asked.
“You heard what Azalea said the day we found him. He belonged to someone else. I don’t want to be a girl who steals my great-great-grandmother’s boyfriend.”
“You don’t know that,” Dalia said.
“What other way do we explain it?” Estrella asked. “You believe the fairy tale our grandmothers tell us? That the gardens wanted to give us a brother and give them a son?”
“So you want to go on loving Bay because Bay is the safe choice?” Dalia asked.