“Come here,” Reid said, more voices going quiet with each word, “and make me an ocean.”
This was how she would pay him back. How she would make Reid forget any thoughts of forcing them off La Pradera. He would demand something so impossible it drew gasps from the rich men and women whose steps brought up the smell of lemon and wax and shoe polish. When Reid had first told her what he wanted, it had sounded so easy and small. But now he summoned her with words he might call any of her cousins.
This way, he could put them all on display at once.
TWENTY-FOUR
Young lady?
Had Reid really said that? Like he was Estrella’s mother, correcting her posture or saying her skirt was too short?
The music had faded and stopped so suddenly Fel wondered if the violinists and cello players had thought the words were as ridiculous as he had. Then he realized Reid had nodded at them to still their bows.
The start of a laugh vibrated in Fel’s chest.
Estrella grabbed the back of his arm and pinched him. Hard. Under the small shock of pain, he wondered if this was what it would be like to be part of this family. It was such a gesture between brother and sister that he felt almost ashamed of setting his hands on the small of her back the night before.
It felt like a kind of betrayal, an impossibility, to both want her and want her family.
She pinched him harder.
“No wonder our grandmothers keep trying to feed you,” she whispered.
“What?” he asked, matching her volume. “Why?”
“You’re hard to pinch,” she said.
“Then why are you pinching me?”
“Because I need you to be quiet,” she said, both their voices becoming taut whispers.
“Then why didn’t you just tell me to be quiet?”
Reid gestured to the grass in front of him, not forbidding, not yet. But with the widening eyes of impatience.
Estrella let go of Fel. She descended the few stone steps, the light from inside clinging to her skirt and turning it the same searing blue as the sky reflected in water. Clear glass beads winked near the hem. A strand of yellow ones crossed her hair.
She walked with the stares of all these men and women on her. Her cousins watched, but she did not find them over her shoulder. She did not kiss her hand and blow air over her fingertips. She kept her path straight through the open doors.
Outside, the fountain glowed like there was a small sun under the water. Candles floated between water lilies. The trees’ boughs and branches reached out and intertwined.
The breezes swept petals into the air. Estrella crossed beneath the canopy of purple and white and pink.
Make me an ocean. Reid didn’t look drunk. He didn’t stagger. His words did not blur together. But that strange command made Fel wonder if he had a flask in his inner pocket, already halfway down.
A few guests whispered to one another, Reid’s order holding them in the same wondering place. How could a girl make an ocean?
Estrella knelt alongside a tall hedge. The blue of her skirt, light on the dark grass, filled with air and then settled. Reid’s shadow darkened the hem. She lowered her eyes, and slid her hands into the dirt. Fel could almost see the current from her palms stirring buds out of the earth.
The horror drifting off her family was a silent language Fel understood. Her mother—he found her in her pale yellow dress—watched, knowing she could not stop this. But her fingers were laced in front of her, and Fel understood that if Reid touched her, Estrella’s mother would scratch his neck open.
Fel would help. One worried nod from any Nomeolvides mother or grandmother, and Fel would shove Reid against the fountain like the stone was a brick alley, and Reid was a man calling a boy Nancy, Molly, anything cruel and unanswerable.
Estrella tipped her chin up, as though she felt these thoughts. Her gaze found him, and her look was almost a glare.
He read the warning in her face.
Don’t you dare.
Do not intervene.
If you try, you will make this worse for me.
If you try, I will make you regret it.
She slid her hands deeper into the ground. She held it until it sprouted borraja. They were blue flames catching and spreading.
Fel shuddered between rage at Reid and wanting to protect this girl and the things she grew. He had held these petals on his tongue. He had opened his eyes to them covering the ceiling of her room. When they fell, he had caught them between his hands and her back, her shoulder, her hip.
And now Reid was turning them into a show.
Estrella gripped the soil, stirring new growth. Her palms cradled handfuls of ground until the next stems rustled the leaves. Green pushed up through the dark blue. Buds dotted the curled stems, turning paler green, then white, then lilac-colored. They grew and fattened, darkening from purple into blue. Then each fluttered open, five tiny petals around a yellow center. Their blue was the same as the after-sunset sky.
Forget-me-nots. Estrella drew her hands through the borraja and grass, bringing up her family’s name. She freckled the leaf-covered ground with blue and violet. Forget-me-nots clustered between the borraja. The dark and lighter blue mixed together, giving the shades of a sea. The borraja and the forget-me-nots became one sheet of blue. They crawled along the grass like spilled water.
With fists clenched around the soil, Estrella made vine after vine of forget-me-nots, the curling green bursting with lilac buds and then blue flowers.
She knifed her hands into the soil. Forget-me-nots and borraja crowded the ground, blooms rustling among leaves. She drove her hands down, telling the earth this was what it would give her. Petals like coins of sky. The purple of buds so soft it looked watercolored. Borraja that looked like brushstrokes of night.
She had nothing left. She was forcing it.
The men and women gasped and laughed their delight. This girl whose name they did not care to know had done it. She had grown a blue sea in the middle of La Pradera. The little ocean of borraja and forget-me-not filled in full and bright. The bed opened up as round and wide as a pond. She kept her hands in the earth for so long, and the blue flowers grew in so thick that the bed looked like wind-flicked water.
They applauded like she was an attraction, a fascination.
Reid offered his hand, and Estrella took it. She knew, like her family knew, that these were the men who would advise Reid what to do with these strange, perfect gardens. If she defied them, offended them, they would tell him to level it and sell the land.
She let him help her to her feet. She curtsied when he gestured at her, like a performer at a carnival.