“There’s nothing wrong with who we love,” Estrella whispered. “What’s wrong is what’s always been wrong. We’re Nomeolvides girls.”
Letting Bay go, accepting that Bay loved Dalia in a way she did not love the rest of them, had not lessened the poison in Estrella’s blood. She was still a girl born from generations of broken hearts. That was the dangerous thing. Not that she and her cousins all spoke the language of loving boys and girls, but that they all shared the legacy of losing them.
“And we thought we’d be the ones to get out of this,” Gloria said. “We thought we were so much smarter than our mothers.”
Estrella settled into the feeling of the six of them, her and her four cousins and this boy. For that minute, she didn’t think of kissing him. She thought only of keeping him. If keeping him meant thinking of him as a brother and nothing else, she could do it.
A breeze brought the thread of perfume off Gloria’s skin.
Not hers. Not the clean orchid scent, and not any scent familiar in the stone house.
Estrella touched her cousin’s neck, like she could trace her fingers over the place where another woman’s perfume had rubbed off on her skin.
“Who is she?” Estrella asked.
She tried to keep her voice soft, flat. She just wanted to know.
There were so many parts of themselves they never let one another see.
Gloria’s eyes glinted like the beads sewn into her dress.
“I never ask for a name,” she said. “It’s easier that way.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
“Luminous paint,” Calla told him, explaining the scraps of cloth glowing blue green in the dark. “They’re how we find each other.”
Lamps lit up patches of different-color flowers. Bulbs set near the ground made the trees glow from underneath. But they were flickering off. And that glowing blue green would mark them until first light licked at the dark sky.
Calla finished the knot. She offered her arm to Gloria, who tied a band onto Calla’s small wrist. The gesture was so intimate, a thing done between cousins who were more like sisters, that it stung.
Watching them, the careful motions of Gloria’s fingers, put a ringing in Fel’s brain, like the echo from a thunderstorm.
He knew this. Not just the scene of two Nomeolvides girls caring for each other.
He knew this work of siblings marking each other.
Fel shut his eyes, and saw his brother’s hands tying a scrap of cloth onto his shirt. On that scrap, his brother had written a name.
The first three letters Fel knew. They had been pinned to his shirt when Estrella found him. Fel.
But the longer he shut his eyes, the more letters showed themselves, like glowing paint appearing in the dark.
Fel.
Felipe.
And then a name he could not make out.
He heard his brother arguing with the men who had told them what to do.
You can’t have two last names, the foreman yelled at them.
They’re not two last names, Fel’s brother said. It’s our father’s name and our mother’s name.
Well, pick one, the man said.
Fel’s brother said he would not choose between their mother’s name and their father’s. So he had told the man they would use their second name—Felipe, a family name; they both had the same one—as their last name.
This was how they had marked themselves in the gray world, where the threat of death was so close it hovered like a low ceiling. They wore their names always tied onto their clothes, last name first, then first name, so that if they died they could be known.
Fel’s brother had not wanted this. Wearing this tag, and switching their names—last name, first name—had seemed like an admission they were already dead. But the other men had talked him into it.
You think the foremen keep track of us? Fel remembered these words, the rhythm of a man’s accent. You think you matter any more to them just because you came up from slate picker? And your brother—at this, he’d tilted his head toward Fel—to them he’s always gonna be a breaker boy. We all are. They give us our dollar a week and then they forget about us.
You wear this, another man said. Fel remembered he had hair as black as Fel’s, but fine and straight, hair that looked neat even after a day’s work. He knew little English and no Spanish, but he had met Fel’s eyes with his own, the brown so deep it felt cool. For your family.
Without our names pinned on us—a third man this time, another unknown accent, a hangman’s laugh—our mothers’ll never know if we’re in the ground or the gambling halls.
Now Fel opened his eyes, finding no light but the moon and the glowing bands the Nomeolvides girls tied onto one another’s wrists.
The gardens were full of not just one caballuco, but a hundred, in as many colors as La Pradera’s flowers. They rushed through the trees in reds and oranges and greens. They sprouted dragonfly’s wings, enormous and sheer. They flew above the highest boughs. Their golds and purples streaked the dark. They screamed across the stars.
The caballucos had become too big for his hands. He could not hold them. They stood bright and fearless. The tans and browns of Fel’s body and clothes could never match their gold and green.
He and his brother had carried those carved wooden horses in their pockets, a charm against their fate. They had thought the caballucos would keep them from death. No harm could come to them as long they carried them.
But this had been a fairy tale. The same as how his brother had talked of buying land, how both he and Fel would decide whether their first horses would be grullos or palominos. But his brother had never had his land. He never taught Fel all the names for the colors of horses. He never told Fel another trick for staying out of fights he never wanted into in the first place.
Because Fel had lost him as much as he’d lost himself.
Fel’s own stupidity bit at him. He had never wondered how the caballucos had turned up in these gardens. How they had come to gather in a tiny, colorful herd on Estrella’s shelf.
They were here, because this was where Fel and his brother had died. The caballucos were a sign of death, but Fel had turned his face away, refusing to see it.
The caballucos had been the only bright color in the gray world, the world that had once stood in the same place as these gardens. The gray world was not flowers but rock and rust. It was Fel and his brother sleeping outside in their clothes, dust sticking to them so hard it felt like part of their skin. It was getting rich men in town drunk enough to win money off them, not for fun but so he and his brother could pay to get broken bones set.
The gray world was the truth of this place. La Pradera was the lie. Everything Estrella and her cousins had given him was lies. Their family’s legacy was fairy tales. What to them was the color of raw gold dust was to him the shade of a dun horse, or the color of a quarry they had made into a garden.