She swallowed hard, but the trees in the distance blurred like the reflection on a stirred lake. Coughing rose up in her. It drew a line of pain from her collarbone to her sternum.
Her lungs forced a hard cough up through her throat, and she didn’t have the air to fight. She had to work for each breath, and the effort seared into her. Her rib cage was something hot, lit.
Even in that moment of her eyes and throat stinging, she felt it, La Pradera grabbing her, fast and certain and vindictive.
As long as she stayed, it would protect her, giving her a place safe from the taunts and threats that came with her family being considered witches.
But it knew she was running, and it wanted her to understand it knew.
She doubled over. Coughing wrenched a spray of blood from her throat. It left flecks of red on her hands, a bitter taste on her tongue. The force of her next cough made her gasp for air, and the spray of blood dotted her skirt.
It didn’t feel wet.
It felt like powder. Like ground cayenne, except more bitter than spiced.
The stars showed her the stains.
She brushed her fingers over the spots. The color smudged, leaving powdery trails on the fabric and her fingers.
Not just blood.
Pollen. Gold-and rust-colored pollen, like from the anthers of a lily.
She swallowed, and tasted it. On the back of her tongue, it felt chalky, and a kind of sweet that reminded her less of sugar and more of the medicine her grandmother gave her in winter.
The bitter taste of pollen rose in her throat again. She waited for it to clear. It didn’t. The coughing felt like the force of her own palm pressing into her chest. But her hands were not on her chest. That feeling of weight came from inside her, her lungs pulling in on themselves.
The gardens wanted to keep her so badly they were killing her. They had their hands around her so tightly they were choking the life out of her.
Her lungs fought to breathe, but now she felt the weight of the gardens pressing into her. A million flowers, a thousand branches, the wide spread of the sunken garden.
The pollen coated her throat and the back of her tongue. It burned through her chest and made her eyes water. The trees and sky looked like paint running. Whatever fight she had left was so deep inside her it grew cold and could not reach the surface.
Her own breathing turned on her. Her throat and the wet surfaces inside her lungs grew hot and tight. She was the snow globe that had once rested on Gloria’s desk. Half the water had evaporated out, so the little white pieces of snow scratched the glass and the carved trees.
She fell to her hands and knees, lungs pinching and tensing. The salt of her own blood stung her throat. Her lungs could not take the full breaths the rest of her body wanted so badly her veins vibrated.
Under the night breeze, she heard La Pradera whispering her name, telling her that if she had a heart set on leaving and never coming back, it would kill her.
She would not leave the gardens alive. They would let loose their rage over her ungrateful heart, for letting them shelter her and then fleeing them. It would strike her down for abandoning the land her family had made their home.
And it would punish her family for what it was, women who loved their lovers out of existence. They had brought the curse of their hearts and blood onto this land, and for that La Pradera would forgive them. Unless they ran.
She collapsed onto her side, the sky filling her vision. The dark drifted down over her like a sheet.
Her name had not saved her.
Estrella’s mother had hoped. If she named a girl for things held in the sky, how could she be tied to anywhere on this earth? But her mother had not freed her from their family’s legacy.
She had just given it the shape of stars.
TWENTY-TWO
He left her alone, keeping his distance from the door she shared with Dalia.
He dreamed of the wooden horses, of tiny bursts of fire swallowing them. Wisps of green showed under each small flame. When he looked closer he saw that it was not fire, but red starflowers. They grew between the horse figurines. Petals brushed their painted flanks. The blooms, gold at the center but edged in bright red, looked like a fire’s embers. They were lit wood chips, live and glowing.
He woke up with his hands already throwing the sheet aside. He blinked to clear the salt of his own sweat, dried on his eyelashes.
Floorboards creaked in the hall, the give of old wood under footsteps. Not her. He could almost tell her walk from each of her cousins’. The rhythm of their feet on the worn wood was like their voices, similar but with enough difference between them to tell apart.
He still slept in his pants, an instinct that felt like a habit, though he didn’t know why. Now he pulled on his shirt and opened the door.
Dalia paused, not quite putting her weight down with her next step.
They spoke at the same time, Dalia whispering, “She’s with you, isn’t she?” in the same moment Fel asked, “She’s not with you?”
So Estrella was still out there, hiding under the star-salted sky. She hid from Dalia because of the lies she’d told, and Fel because he had been too stupid and afraid to let her kiss him, and her cousins because she could not lie to them.
All the things he’d imagined as Estrella led him through the dark. The fear of her hands breaking into petals. The worry that her heart might forget it was the thing keeping her alive. All that he could not help imagining, because the older Nomeolvides women would not say what became of girls who ran.
What if, now, the land didn’t know what Estrella was so sure it would? Or worse, what if she was one of the running-away girls, and the gardens could feel it in the distant echo of her steps?
He went for the stairs, and Dalia’s voice brushed his back. “Fel,” she said, as loudly as she could without breaking a whisper. It sounded half like a question, and half like a warning.
“If she comes back, don’t let her leave,” he said over his shoulder.
“You really think she’ll listen to me?” Dalia asked.
Fel turned around. He read in Dalia’s face the way she was unfolding tonight like a crumpled piece of paper, imagining all the awful things Estrella thought.
“She loves you,” Fel said. “No matter how angry she is now, she loves you. You know that.”
Outside the stone house, the air smelled like winter-bare branches, as though the leaves and flowers had all left at once. Fel wondered if Estrella’s path off La Pradera would light up like the trailing glow of stars, so the land could always find her.
But beyond the garden lamps, there was no light. There was no sign or star leading to her. So he followed the same pathless route she’d led him on, the back way toward town. He waded through grass that brushed his shins and felt thick as water. It was the kind of grass he remembered from being very young, thin green stalks tufted with gold.
He expected to find her sitting with her back against a tree, maybe tearing another row of sugar buttons off the rolled paper in her pocket.
Instead, he found a break in the grass where her body weighted it down.