This dark garden valley, glowing with veins of light from the pond, spreading rings of blue mushrooms, gave him back more of his family than his heart could hold.
He’d had a mother who sometimes deferred and other times defied. When she made torrijas every Holy Week, she added honey and spice and olive oil as her own mother had taught her. But when her mother insisted she should not let her sons near horses, not after her great-grandfather had died being thrown from one, she’d ignored her.
He’d had aunts who told him that he should plant wood betony around where he slept. The stalks of purple blossoms would scare ghosts wandering from graveyards and witches from his threshold.
He’d had a grandfather who’d worked as a cork harvester, and then bought enough land for a whole grove of wild olive trees, passing them down to Fel’s father.
The thought of the olive trees broke into a million green leaves, each knife-thin, and Fel caught the blunt pain of remembering what had happened to them.
A cold winter. A bad frost coating the leaves like sugar.
It had killed the trees. And with that memory came his half-formed understanding of why he and his brother had had to leave the place where they’d been born.
There was no money. With the trees frozen and dead, there was not enough to eat and there was not enough work. So their mother and father had sent them across a wide sea.
Even if he crossed that sea again, his family was gone. All of them. Fel knew that. He had felt the Nomeolvides girls trying to guard him from this, but he heard their whispers, their guesses about how he had appeared from a hundred years ago, and he knew that any family he had, he had lost.
But they were still his. They had risen from the broken-down, half-remembered places, and they were his again.
His brother was still here. The flapping of bird’s wings were his whisper. The dark of the pond’s surface was the color of his favorite wooden caballuco, the paint on the winged horse soft and chipping. The crush of grass under Fel’s feet were hushed as his brother’s steps, always quiet even over rocky ground.
Fel was everyone he had lost, and the land he had left behind. He was the almond trees ringing his grandmother’s village. He was the roan and silver grullo horses whose coloring had enthralled his brother. He was a cork oak, stripped bare every ten years.
For so long, he had caught these things only in worn threads, like remembering scraps of a dream, how trying to remember that dream only made it drift further away.
Now all of this streamed into him so fast that he had to do something with it so it did not crush his heart into dust.
Estrella pulled him up from his knees. She kissed him so slowly it felt more like a blessing than a sign that she wanted him. He accepted it.
He picked blue mushrooms from their rings. He brought them to the Nomeolvides kitchen so he could cook them with lemon and green herbs and chili. He would do this how he’d seen his mother do it, the way she and her sisters had made them for one another and for their brothers when they were lovesick.
He did the only thing he knew how to do for these women who had become his family. He cooked for them. The indigo of the dirt-shadowed mushrooms brightened as he brushed them clean. They heated into teal, bright as the feathers on the bee-eating birds his grandmother kept as pets.
As Estrella handed him cut lemons and set out ceramic bowls, he gave in to a memory that felt like a thing torn out of him.
Fel and his brother making a cake for their father’s birthday, covering it with hundreds of borraja petals they’d picked and washed. The petals were the deep blue of the sky; their edges seemed dipped in purple.
First they stuck the petals to the icing one at a time, then by handfuls. They opened their palms and rained blue over the cake. By the time they ran out of borraja, the cake looked less like a cake and more like a sea creature from a fisherman’s stories, with scales made of sky and water. When their father and mother saw it, they could barely stop laughing long enough to taste it.
Fel would make that same cake for these women. The same way, so that maybe they would laugh. He would make what he knew for when loss wore them down, and for when there was so much joy between them the air in this house smelled like lilacs. When they could not sleep, he wanted to stand at the stove with the grandmothers, frying leche frita, and set out glasses of anís or tigernut orxata. When the March thaw came, he wanted to cook them estafado de pollo, stirring purple potatoes into the red sauce and shelling spring peas from their waxed pods. When they were heartbroken, he wanted to pour them the blackthorn and hard liquor bite of patxaran.
That night, Estrella asked him about the word. Caballuco.
“There’s a story,” Fel said, speaking into the dark between them. “About dragonflies. How they’re really little horses that come from the devil. That they’re the souls of those who’ve sinned and that you can tell their sin by their color.”
His voice sounded like a thing outside him. It was buzzing near him like the dragonflies that screamed through the air, hovering around saints’ day bonfires. They were flashes of iridescent blue above the embers.
Fel pulled down the purple caballuco from the shelf, and set it in Estrella’s hands. “But my brother, he thought the story was a lie. That those dragonflies were horses that missed running. Not sinners. They just missed being horses. So they fly now.”
“Your brother?” Estrella asked. “The one…”
“Yes, the one who liked men,” Fel said, laughing softly. “He’s the one who taught me anything I know about horses. He knew a lot more than I do.”
When a shallow sleep took Fel under, he dreamed of indigo caballucos. Their teeth. Their blue-lavender manes. Their song that was both laugh and warning.
He woke to her fingers on his forehead.
“Fel,” she said.
He sat up, blinking away those last flashes of the caballucos, their backs sprouting wings. His fingers found the blue stains on her skin, turning teal.
“Do you remember how you got here?” she asked.
He knew what she was asking. He had heard her family talking enough to know now. She thought he’d disappeared because, sometimes, those they loved vanished. She was asking if he remembered vanishing. His heart vibrated with so much hope he could not help taking this question as a sign that he was one of them, those they loved.
“No,” he said. He said it without sadness, because however he had died to the gray world and the soft, olive-leafed world before that, he was in this world now. Estrella’s.
This was the place he was coming back to life.
TWENTY-SEVEN
She woke him in the hours before dawn. He still smelled like the pond in the sunken garden, all willow water and meadow cordgrass. La Pradera left its scent on anyone it touched. But the earth smelled different on this boy than it did on her own fingers. On him, it was deeper, like fall.