Her lips held the sweet and bitter taste like a dull spice. Like the pollen that sometimes brushed his lips when the grandmothers told him to drink the perfume of La Pradera’s flowers, really take it in, so the petals touched his face.
He liked her kissing him like this, her mouth light on his. But he worried about what it meant, her hesitating with him when she seemed so sure about everything else.
“You don’t need to be careful with me,” he said, their lips brushing as he spoke the words.
She pulled away enough to look at him. “What?”
He tried to think of another way of explaining it, that she didn’t need to treat him like something fragile. The scars that marked him had not made him more breakable than he was before.
They’d just left him with nightmares. They shoved their way in when there was so much else he wanted to remember instead.
So he said it again. “You don’t have to be careful with me.”
The light off Estrella’s eyes showed her considering.
He wanted her to draw the air from his lungs. He wanted to give her the breath in him so she would forget how La Pradera had choked hers from her body.
He felt her taking this understanding into her.
She kissed him hard enough that he could not tell it from her biting him. This was not something she was doing out of pity for him, and he let himself fall under the relief of this. Her touch was strong and certain as a storm, her fingers like the shock of hail and hard rain, her breath a cold current against his back.
And when she was done with him, when she was through wrecking him, he slept. He dreamed that the ceiling was turning to blue borraja. A whole sky of it spread out above them, each bloom both a star and a scrap of darkness. It rained over them, like the cherry blossoms drifting through the far corners of his memory. Their hands on each other made them each part their lips, so they caught the petals on their tongues like snow.
And he slept. He slept in the way God and his own soul had not let him sleep since he first opened his eyes in the garden.
TWENTY-THREE
Fel’s skin grew warmer as he slept. Estrella’s veins had felt coiled, taut as cords, but the heat off his body made them give. The muscle around her lungs eased. She set her palms against his back. The contours of his scars crossed her hands, his skin as warm as the ground late in the afternoon. She wondered if it was his dreams that did this, blazing inside him like embers.
She traced her fingers along his scars. They branched over his back. He looked like ground that had been tilled too hard, rock that had been storm-weathered.
He had seemed so much more like some unnamed saint than a boy she could ever touch. He had seemed unknowable because she had assumed there was nothing more to know than his nightmares and the praying reverence he shared with the grandmothers.
But there were broken places in him, too.
She saw him carrying the shame of this, his grasping at remembering what had happened. She wanted to tell him she felt nothing about these scars but hate for whoever had given them to him. The time he had once been alive, the time signaled by the clothes she’d found him in, was one Estrella thought of as a world that would punish boys like him for small, easy things. If he’d been on the crew of a ship, he could’ve gotten them from talking back.
But she didn’t know how to tell him this without sounding like she was calling the time he’d lived in backward. So instead she kissed the line of each one she could find in the dark, the veins of scarring smooth under her lips.
Light spilled onto the windowsill. It crawled across the ceiling, casting a veil of gold over the starflowers she thought she’d imagined the night before. The deep blue of the borraja lightened and warmed, the vines glowing like they were made of sun.
Estrella slipped out of this bed she had grown up in and down the hall, as though she could pretend she had nothing to do with the meadow covering the rafters. She acted as if it was not hers, or at least no more hers than his.
Dalia’s dress for Reid’s ball hung from the curtain rod, the skirt brushing the floor. Dawn filled the window, and the color of the dress lit up coral. The skirt, streaked with brushstrokes of black, looked like a wild poppy.
Estrella slid into bed next to Dalia.
She could hate Dalia when they were both awake. But asleep, she was the same Dalia who’d smuggled them the dark lingerie and deep perfume their mothers thought they were too young for. She was the Dalia who’d convinced rich men to buy their grandmothers gifts, whispering that if they gave las brujas viejas offerings they would bring luck back to their own estates. The Dalia who had the same craving for saladitos, her mother’s salted plums dusted with anise and chili, every month when she bled.
Estrella combed her fingers through her cousin’s hair, kissing her temple like she was a favorite doll.
Dalia groaned softly. “You’re welcome.”
“For what?” Estrella whispered.
“Lying for you,” Dalia said, still half-asleep. “She’ll wring your neck like a chicken, remember?”
Estrella tried not to laugh. Either Dalia had been listening in, or her mother had tossed the threat around like confetti.
The sun rose past the window, and the hallway outside turned to chiffon and satin. Yellow and pink trailed out of her cousins’ hands. Lilac and green hung from curtain rods.
Estrella took in perfumed air in slow, even breaths. La Pradera’s sudden hold, its pulling her back, had left her tired and dragging.
Dalia brushed color onto her cheeks while she was still lying in bed. She outlined her eyes in the blue of dark water. Then she pulled Estrella out of bed, shoving her dress at her.
Estrella gave in to knowing she would not tell. She would not break open Dalia’s secrets and Bay’s, not even for her other cousins.
“I don’t want to do this,” Estrella said.
“None of us do.” Dalia put lipstick on her, a pink-red that stood bright near the blue of her dress. “But now you know what happens to any of us if Reid throws us out, so we have to.” Dalia brushed a stray eyelash off Estrella’s cheek. “Just do what he asked and be done. Trust me, you don’t want to owe him anything.”
“No,” Estrella said. “I didn’t mean that.” She looked toward the door. “I mean I don’t want to lie to them.”
Dalia fastened the last hook-and-eye clasp on her dress. “Then don’t say anything.”
Estrella clipped on the necklace that had once belonged to her father’s mother. Estrella had never met either one of them, her father or his mother, but she knew he had given Rosa Nomeolvides this necklace. Years later, long after he had left both her and La Pradera, Estrella’s mother had caught her holding it as gently as a feather.
Her mother had said she could keep it, shrugging as though loaning a hairpin.
There were two kinds of Nomeolvides hearts, ones broken by the vanishings, and ones who counted themselves lucky to have seen the back of their lovers as they left.
Estrella and her cousins climbed the stone steps to the ballroom. The air glittered with white lights. The sound of string instruments—violins, a cello, a harp—wafted out the French doors.