She was Calla, blushing too much to speak as she watched Bay’s careful hands shape yew wood with a rasp and hand plane.
She was Azalea, embroidering Bay’s initials into the hems of her pillowcases.
She was Gloria, stealing old tintype photos from Briar scrapbooks no one ever looked at, trying to work out which distant relatives Bay looked most like.
She was Dalia, her heart lit by the understanding that Bay was not just the one they all loved but also herself.
Estrella took another step, and Reid drew back, preserving the distance.
“That’s what you think, isn’t it?” Estrella asked, letting the sound of taunting slip into her voice. If she apologized for her own heart then she would make it tame, and small. But like this, it was wild, and limitless.
She could see him trying to twist his horror into rage, but Estrella could still find it, that fear.
Estrella was herself, a girl who had loved Bay even while Bay never considered her more than a charming little sister. She was a girl grateful for falling in love like that, because it taught her how. Because when she finally let go of this woman who did not love her back, it was to let her love Dalia. Because falling in love with a girl who feared nothing in this world had left her ready to love a boy whose heart had been broken before she ever touched him.
She was all of them, screaming for Bay to speed faster down the highway in Marjorie’s wine-red four-door. She was the five of them holding their arms out of the windows, their hands riding the night air. She was all of them hushing one another’s laughs and running through the dark as the engine cooled and creaked.
She was each of them, born with the possibility of flowers in their hands, but never feeling like living things themselves until they ran across La Pradera with Bay Briar. They were night-blooming girls, the grass damp under their bare feet and the stars above them as thick as spilled sugar.
“Who knows?” Estrella asked. “Maybe if you’re lucky we’ll all love you next.”
She shoved him, palms against his shoulders. And with more fear than rage he threw the back of his hand across her face again. He struck her like she was a stinging insect to swat away.
The impact shook through her cheek and her forehead. The force opened the cut on her lip wider.
She lifted her chin, showing him the blood on her face, proof that she’d rattled him. Proof that even Briars could not ignore girls with flowers and death in their fingertips.
“What do you think they’re thinking?” Reid asked. “The moment right before they’re gone.”
Blood dripped onto her tongue.
“Do you think they still love you?” Reid asked.
The dry feeling climbed back to Estrella’s throat. She could not shove Reid’s words away just because Bay was still alive. Fel was gone. The loss of him belonged to Estrella.
“Don’t tell me you’ve never thought about it,” Reid said.
The air carried the sour, bitter smell of her family’s tears, a scent like salt and lemon rind in hot water. The faint stirring of every flower she and her family had ever given to La Pradera rushed back, the sound of their petals rising up like the flutter of a million wings.
For a hundred years, her family had put their hands in this ground, and it wanted to hold on to them so much it would never let them go.
Now voices drifted from the sunken garden, so faint Estrella could not make out the words. It was too many voices for her to count, braiding together and then unraveling, weaving into a solid veil of sound and then fraying back into innumerable voices.
Lost lovers.
Men killed and then disregarded.
They were flooding her until there was no room left for her own thoughts. Her tongue was the flame blue of an iris petal. Her skin was the rust silk of dahlias, and her hair and her eyes were handfuls of storm-damp ground. Her heart was a handful of raw buds, red as pomegranate seeds and slicked with rain.
What happened to the miners? She wanted to ask. But calling them the miners felt like disrespect. Not naming them was a betrayal to their lives and deaths.
She only knew the name of one.
“What happened to Fel?” she asked.
“You know what happened,” Reid said. “You killed him.”
“No, I didn’t,” she said.
“Was it fun?” Reid asked. “Making him disappear?”
“I never wanted that,” she said, her voice splintering.
“Did you ever think of his family?” Reid asked. “Or did you not even ask if he had one?”
The ground looked like it was waving under her, billowing like a quilt.
She wanted to root herself here. She was close enough to reach out for her ocean of blue petals. She wanted to vanish into that sea of color, for it to swallow her, drink her. It was a wish that spun and grew until it had its own gravity, so heavy it dragged her to her hands and knees.
Reid’s shadow fell over her.
“You killed him,” he said.
Estrella kept her head down, so all she could see was the shimmer of blue petals. “I cared about him.”
Even with nothing in her vision but ground, she wondered if these words were a lie. Maybe her brutal heart’s version of love was hate, and she didn’t even realize.
Her cousins were life and enchantment. But she was all malice and knives.
“I loved him.” The cracks in her voice deepened. It was more confession than defense.
Her heart was poison. It was a close tangle of thorns. Even when it held love, that love came sharp, and she didn’t know how to offer it to anyone except with the edges out.
The Briars had killed Fel and all those men. And her family had killed men who came too close.
A wish flickered in her heart to become part of the ground. Fel was gone, and there was nowhere to mourn him. But he had once died in this ground, and now so could she.
It was the closest she could ever be to finding him again.
Her fingers sank into the bed of blue petals, and then into the soft ground. Blood fell from her lip, and the red dyed a forget-me-not petal.
The center of her flooded with every wish for things to be different.
For the treaties that had drawn new borders not to have been signed, so her family would not have lost their land and found they had nowhere to go but this graveyard. For them to never have been declared las hijas del aire or witches.
For La Pradera not to hold on to them so tight it drove the will out of them.
For the air to spin until it gave Fel back, his body and breath reappearing the way they had disappeared.
She wanted all this so much that when her hands sank further into the sand and met resistance, she could imagine what they were finding. Maybe they were meeting young, thin roots, or the closed fingers of unbloomed irises. But she could pretend they were not these things.
She could pretend they were hands.
THIRTY-TWO
He let himself fall into that ocean of lost voices. He was himself, and he was all these men.
They were boys who waited in the trees’ shadows. Men who had kissed Nomeolvides women in the curves of hedges and under the ceiling of leaf-covered arbors.