Under the rustling of the bristles, he heard the soft, choked sound of her breathing.
With slow steps, he came closer, so he wouldn’t startle her.
Her hair and her skirt fanned out in the grass, the fluffy stalks lapping at her skin. Her elbows seemed bent in a way more from letting herself fall into the grass than from lying down. Her hands almost touched her hair, fingers curled in on themselves.
From the sound, and her stare up toward the sky, he thought she might be crying. The fluttering of her rib cage under her dress matched the staggered, caught breaths between sobs. He’d seen it on her and her cousins, their breathing frayed from so much crying.
But her cheeks did not shine with tears. Her lips were not pale with dry salt.
Her dress and her hands were dotted with red.
Her family’s worry hadn’t just grown out of nightmares.
The things that had sent him out into the dark were true.
He knelt next to her, guiding her arms to him and telling her to hold on to him. He swallowed hard enough to choke the panic out of his voice.
She turned away from him and coughed into her hair. He winced at the sound of it tearing her throat.
“Hold on to me,” he said again. He didn’t know if she had heard him, but then she did. She held on to him. So hard he felt her jagged nails, the ones her grandmother was always telling her to file, slipping under the collar of his shirt. They dragged it aside and cut into his shoulder.
He gave her a weak laugh. “You’re good at that.”
He liked the slight pain of it. It reminded him that he was not losing her in the dark.
With each step closer to La Pradera, her breathing deepened and evened. Her body felt less fevered, her rib cage less like hot metal wrapped in her dress.
“It won’t let us go,” she whispered, her words faint as the rushing sound of the trees.
“It’s very beautiful here,” he said, just to keep talking to her, to keep her talking. “Maybe that’s why it wants to keep you. Because you make it beautiful.”
But he could not make the truth sound kind, or safe. Speaking it only made it worse. It made the Nomeolvides women children of these gardens. The land was a vengeful mother who loved them only as long as they did not run from her. If they did, it drew cords of breath from their lungs until they could not run.
She did not thank him, and for this he was grateful even to the God who had left him with so many questions. Fel had never known how to thank Estrella for finding him in the valley made of flowers. He’d tried, but any words he thought of putting together felt worse than saying nothing. They were a single prayer candle in a dark church, doing little more than showing how every other corner lay unlit.
When he got back to her family’s house, back to the bed she’d grown up in, her breathing was so quiet he thought she’d fallen asleep. But just as he turned away from her, he felt the brush of her fingers on his shoulder.
“I did that to you?” she asked, her words weakened into a whisper.
He looked over his shoulder. Her nails had cut into his skin, tiny half-moons of blood staining the back of his shirt. It mirrored the blood from her mouth that flecked the front.
“I don’t mind,” he said.
His pride in that blood opened enough space for a story his brother had told him. Fel could not remember his brother’s name but he remembered his voice, low and sure. The stories on his tongue. And this one he told over and over, whenever one of them got cut badly enough to leave a stain on their shirts they could not rub out with salt and cold water.
Their grandmother had heard the story from a horse breeder. She had told it to Fel’s brother, and Fel’s brother had told it to him a hundred times. Now Fel let the story onto his own tongue. He spoke it as he remembered it, as though his brother was el Espíritu Santo, the Holy Ghost giving him the words. It lit inside him, bright as a Pentecost flame.
“Red-shouldered horses,” Fel said, echoing his brother’s voice, “they have flecks of red in their coats. It’s so thick on their shoulders it looks like a wound, like spilled blood. But that red shoulder is a mark of the spirit within the horse. It means the horse is brave.”
The story taught Fel to wear his own wounds like a bloody-shouldered horse. It did not matter to his brother whether they were wide gashes they had to close with cheap liquor and sewing needles, or small as the half-moons of Estrella’s fingernails.
Or wounds thrown across his back that healed into trails of scarring.
That which looked to others like injury was, to them, a thing of pride.
Fel waited for Estrella to fall back asleep, lured into dreaming not by his voice but his brother’s, his way of telling stories that sounded even more like magic for being true.
Her hands, reckless and sure as her voice was weak, found him in the dark. She knelt on the bed to meet his height standing. She pulled off his shirt. Her fingers were so fast he didn’t think to stop her until he was naked from the waist up and shivering under the possibility that she could see his back in the dark.
He felt the heat of her breath on the back of his neck and thought she might bite him, tear open the same place her nails had cut into him. Make him even more of a bloody-shouldered horse than she had with her fingers. He was sure of it when her lips touched his shoulder blade. Not like she was trying to smooth over somewhere he was hurt. Like she wanted to know the taste of him.
He flinched away, and Estrella’s hands fell from him.
His hands grabbed for his shirt, but he left it, lowering his head to the dark floorboards.
He deserved this, standing before her and letting her see the record of what he had done but could not remember.
“What happened?” she asked.
He shook his head, to tell her he didn’t know.
“Does it hurt?” she asked.
He shook his head, this time to tell her no, not anymore. But the pain was written so deeply into his body that some mornings he woke up sure his back was bleeding, worried that he was staining sheets that belonged to this family.
He could remember each stroke coming down on him so sharply he could not think of it without his shoulders tensing. Whenever he forgot, he dreamed of it. With each one, he had felt like he was sinking deeper into a fever, and he was surer that the lash coming down on him was made of lightning. It was fast as those rushes of blazing white in the sky, but hot enough to spark brush fields into wildfires. It was a cord of heat, searing him open.
His body remembered how the scars had come to be his. But he could not remember why.
Estrella put her palm on his jawline, her thumb across his cheek. She turned his mouth to hers. He felt the wavering breath in her body, an echo of what La Pradera had done to her. The way she kissed him was soft, almost hesitant.