Abuela Lila set her hand beneath Calla’s chin, gentle but still correcting. “Do you know what it was like for our family before?”
Calla nodded. She could have recited, half-asleep or deep in a fever, all that Abuela Lila was about to say. They all could have. Before La Pradera they were las hijas del aire. Children of the air. Children who, on paper, did not exist, and so were considered invisible and formless as the air beneath the sky. It had been an insult thrown at their family as they moved from place to place, after new treaties had declared their land now belonged to another country.
So they wandered, with no birth certificates, no paperwork proving their names and their homes, no proof they had ever been born except the word of their mothers and the parteras who helped bring them into the world. Some—a girl who grew Mexican sage, another with a gift for tulips—tried to bury their last name and the lore of this family. But when their legacy was discovered, when blooms they never intended sprung up without warning, when their cursed love claimed the lives of adored sons, they were marked as witches, or killed.
Some had tried to suppress their gifts for the ground. They’d tried to pretend they had no flowers waiting in their hands. They looked for job listings like secretary or shopgirl, nothing to do with anything growing or blooming. They rented apartments in cities, or houses in towns too small to be printed on maps. They tried to act as though they had not been born with petals in their fingertips.
The blooms inside them always found their way out. Pushed down, they rose strange and spiteful, in ways as unexpected as they were dangerous. The girl christened after the purple velvet of Mexican sage had woken up to find a hundred thousand vines splintering her house apart.
Another with a gift for the petaled cups of ranunculus accidentally grew enough to flood the schoolhouse where she worked. The children ran from them like snakes, and mothers and fathers drove her from town.
The one with a blessing for tulips had resolved not to grow a single bloom, not even in a window box or flowerpot. She had not wanted to flaunt her gift in the middle of the drought-parched town where she hid.
Then, one morning, the yard in front of her rented house turned from the bristle of dried grass to tulips so thick she could not find the ground. Cream and orange. Lipstick pink and pale green. Color-broken red and frilled peach. All with smooth leaves as green as algae on a pond. And before she could clear them, her neighbors saw. They thought she was a witch who’d stolen all the water, and a group of barely grown sons shot her like a scavenging bird.
“La Pradera may keep us here,” Abuela Lila said now, “but we had a worse life before these gardens.”
They all knew. Their mothers never let them forget.
The legacy of disappearing lovers made the Nomeolvides women reviled, called the daughters of demons. They had endured the taunts and threats that came with being considered witches. Towns cast them out, not wanting them near their sons and daughters for fear Nomeolvides women would love them and they would vanish.
“And now the land is softening toward us,” Abuela Flor said.
Estrella could almost hear the unspoken hope hovering in this house.
La Pradera had given them back a boy a Nomeolvides heart had once loved out of existence. His presence in their house held the enchantment and wonder of making a vanished love reappear.
If La Pradera could bring back a boy lost a hundred years ago, maybe it could break this curse they had carried here in their hearts. Maybe it would give them back other vanished lovers. Maybe it would lift the awful legacy from this generation of daughters.
That hope calmed Azalea, quieting her for as long as it took the boy to wash himself.
But then Abuela Liria volunteered clothes that had once belonged to her vanished husband.
“You’re putting him in the clothes of the dead,” Azalea said, paling.
Abuela Magnolia and Abuela Mimosa handed him the trousers and pulled the shirt over his head.
“Fine,” Azalea said. “You don’t care what you’re bringing down on us. But what about him? You could be cursing him.”
“Enough,” Gloria said. The word came low, Gloria not wanting the boy to hear. But she hit it so hard it turned rough. Her eyes flashed to each cousin, first Azalea, then Dalia, Calla, Estrella. “If there’s any chance he belonged to one of ours, we treat him like one of ours.”
They all hushed under her logic.
If he had been loved and made to vanish by a woman in their family, no matter how long ago, then in some way he belonged to them. His lostness was, in whatever far-removed way, their fault. Every woman in this house had inherited it, the same way they had inherited the loss and broken hearts written into their blood.
This was Gloria, quiet, her posture straight and unyielding. She held back so often that sometimes her voice startled them. But when she thought the four of them were acting like children, she took certain hold of their whispering and wondering and she decided.
“So until we have a reason to say otherwise, he’s our brother.” Gloria caught each of their eyes again. “Understand?”
The pride in their mothers’ and grandmothers’ faces was so open and full that Estrella thought it might lift them off the floor, each of them floating to the rafters and bobbing beneath the ceiling like balloons.
In the easing of their shoulders, Estrella saw their faith that, one day, this family could be left in Gloria’s hands.
With the same rough efficiency as they’d gotten the boy naked and clean, the grandmothers went about feeding him. They fried eggs and tortillas for huevos divorciados, Abuela Mimosa spooning salsa verde over one egg and salsa roja over the other, and they sat him at the kitchen table.
Tía Hortensia and Tía Iris told him to “Eat, mijito, you’re so skinny, mijito,” as though it was his own gaunt frame, and not the legacy of this family, that put men at risk of vanishing.
“Gracias,” he said, the first word Estrella heard him say. Then he bowed his head and said grace as though he had been speaking the whole time.
FOUR
They asked him if he wanted to sleep. He shook his head; he felt as though he had been sleeping, or dead, for a long time before this.
They asked him if he wanted to read, and handed him an age-softened Biblia. The insistence with which they pressed it into his hands made him wonder if they could see into his soul, if this was in fact el Purgatorio, a softer version of it than any he could remember hearing of.
He set la Biblia on the kitchen table.