If this was el Purgatorio, maybe it was his first test to resist her. The quiet force of her made him want to tell her things he did not know. It made him want to make things up, lie just so he could give her something that sounded true. And maybe she knew this and was waiting to see if he would lie in this way, or if he would admit that he knew nothing.
But her dress, green as the trees that softened the edges of this garden valley, her dress made him think of something.
Some understanding about the color drifted toward him but then skittered away before he could grasp it. And because he wanted to follow that understanding, to see if it would come back to him, he let this girl take his hand.
THREE
This boy was La Pradera’s answer.
Estrella found him in the same corner of the sunken garden where she had buried her little wooden horse. But she wasn’t telling her cousins that. If they thought the indigo horse had been the thing to do it, they’d look at her the same way they looked at her on the nights she woke with starflowers covering the ceiling. Like she was a girl whose dreams and favorite childhood toys were things they had to protect her from.
What they knew, all they needed to know, was that the five of them had brought their nighttime offerings, and the gardens had given them something back.
Gloria tried to hand the boy the phone and asked, “Is there someone you want to call?”
He blinked at the phone like it was something not only unknown but unknowable.
He reminded Estrella of the partridge chick Dalia had as a pet when they were little. That was before the old cat Azalea had started batting at it, and Dalia got worried the cat would eat it. Dalia had long since given it to an old woman who now fed it peaches and read it the Psalms, but Estrella remembered it. Scrawny and funny-looking and made presentable only by its fluff, a mix of brown, black, and gold.
Instead of fluff, this boy had his hair, coarse and dark as Estrella’s, but uncombed, and his loose clothes. Brown pants, and a shirt that had once been cream or tan but that the earth had darkened.
Dalia whispered something to Calla about his clothes.
The rough shirt, trousers, and thick suspenders were work clothes, but ones as out of place in this century as Bay’s waistcoats.
While Bay made the clothes of some other time seem as natural to her as her hair, everything about this boy seemed misplaced. He had an underfed look made more pitiful by the lost way he studied everything from that phone to the windows. He seemed like he had wandered into a world he did not belong to.
“How old do you think he is?” Gloria asked.
Dalia shrugged, looking at him as though he could not see her staring. “Seventeen? Eighteen?”
Dalia glanced at Estrella, and Estrella knew she was not saying the rest. He seemed about seventeen or eighteen, but he had the diminished sense of a boy the world had worked hard. It made them all feel a little guilty for having not just mothers who plaited ribbons into their hair but grandmothers who read to them when they had all had the chicken pox at once.
Being a Nomeolvides girl, living so closely with generations of five women each, meant they all had not just their own mothers, not just their own grandmothers, but five.
“Who loved him?” Azalea asked.
They all turned to her, understanding even with just those three words.
Azalea wanted to know which Nomeolvides woman might have once loved this boy into disappearing, and how La Pradera had returned him from whatever cursed place lovers vanished to. She looked at him like he was a spirit, despite Estrella leading him by the hand and showing him to be as solid as the flowers they made.
“I don’t like this,” Azalea said, shivering as though a draft had come through the house.
“Well, we can’t leave him like this,” Dalia said, her voice low in case the boy could understand her. “Look at him.”
Azalea flitted around the hall like a bird caught under the rafters. “I still don’t like this.”
Estrella let go of the boy’s hand. She felt the slow, shared breath in that always came before they started arguing.
To her and to Dalia, La Pradera had given them this boy, and they were asking for its wrath if they did not take care of him. If they ignored him, they risked La Pradera stealing Bay Briar, that girl they all loved, out of spite.
To Azalea, he was a lost lover returned from some disappearing place, and to touch him was to provoke La Pradera’s curse.
Before Gloria and Calla could choose their sides, all five of their mothers gathered around this boy the way they did around Bay. Gloria’s mother put her hands on either side of his face like he was a child, not an almost-grown man who stood a head above her.
“Pobrecito,” Estrella’s mother said.
The boy shuddered, eyes opening with recognition.
“?Comprendes?” Calla’s mother asked.
Dalia’s mother shoved between them. She spoke better Spanish than any of her cousins, swearing she had learned it all by reading la Biblia in two languages. Now she spoke to the boy in a low voice, reassuring him in words Estrella and her cousins could neither hear nor understand.
When she caught the younger girls staring, she took them all in with one sweep of her eyes.
“He’s not stupid,” she said. “He just speaks a language none of you bothered to learn.”
Estrella’s grandmother and her cousins’ grandmothers had no time for the pity with which their daughters greeted this boy. They led him upstairs, stripped him out of his earth-darkened clothes, and put him under a shower. Estrella heard the water turn on, and the old women’s calming murmurs told her that the spray had startled him.
Estrella floated between rooms, listening outside doors and catching scraps she could piece together.
Her mother and her cousins’ mothers whispered that maybe this boy was a sign from God. The lovers they had lost would reappear. The grandmothers, who now left the boy alone to wash himself, agreed that he was a gift from the land. The Nomeolvides women did not have sons, so this boy was the son they would never bear themselves. He was a son, a nephew, a boy cousin, a brother.
He was all these things this family did not know.
“The land doesn’t give us gifts,” Azalea said when Estrella told her cousins.
Even Estrella had to admit she was right. The land did not give anything without stealing something else. It had given their family a home, but in return it demanded the women stay. It insisted with such force that if any of them left, they weakened and grew sicker until they either came back or died.
“Watch your tongues,” Abuela Magnolia said, and both Estrella and Azalea jumped to realize she was alongside them. “You don’t know what it was like. You weren’t alive before we came here.”
“Neither were you,” Calla said under her breath. The Nomeolvides women had been at La Pradera for a hundred years. And despite Abuela Flor and Abuela Liria’s jokes that they were old enough to have seen the birth of Christ firsthand, no one alive in this family today had memory that far back.