Fel still was not sure how to speak to Adán. He’d wanted to see him again so much that now, when he could, he had no words to give him. Instead, he brought him the caballucos, wrapped in cloth that showed those flashes of yellow and orange, red and white and purple. The green one Estrella had found in Fel’s pocket. The indigo one she had buried, bringing him back to life; it had turned up in the wrecked gardens, covered in dew that looked like drops of glass.
Estrella. This girl whose neck reminded him of the color of buckskin horses. This girl who’d done so well at avoiding him lately that new bursts of borraja were the only way he knew she hadn’t run from La Pradera. The Nomeolvides women still had petals in their hands, but now they let them grow like wildflower fields, not ordered gardens.
Fel set the cloth in Adán’s palms. Adán turned each small horse in his hands, his fingers tracing the dragonfly wings on their wooden backs. Their coats of paint had chipped, but their colors still showed.
Adán laughed. Fel did not understand why until his brother reached into his pocket and drew out an eighth caballuco, this one painted as black as their hair.
The one Adán kept in his pocket each day when they went down into the quarry.
Now Fel laughed with him, if for no reason but that his throat needed to remember how. He needed to fall back into how his laugh threaded with his brother’s, two almost identical sounds. Like the Nomeolvides girls all talking at once.
He and Adán had no family anymore. They had only these things they could hold, and the stories they could tell.
Their Rife?a grandmother, born just outside Ceuta, had come from a family of flounder fishermen, always looking to the sea. Adán remembered her talking about it, when Fel had been too small to remember. The port sat so far on the tip of the peninsula that from the hill of her childhood home their grandmother could make out the far-off green of la Costa de la Luz. Later, she would tell her grandsons how she looked out on that horizon and knew her future husband was just beyond the land she could see, a young man harvesting cork in Cádiz.
Few believed her, this woman whose sisters called her dream-eyed, sentimental. While she halved lemons in the sunlight for leems, she would forget what she was doing, her fingers pausing on a yellow rind as she looked for shapes in the clouds.
But the Nomeolvides girls would have believed her. They would have seen the truth of it in the skill of her hands, so gentle she could rinse los azahares for orange blossom water without bruising the petals.
This much was still Adán’s, and Fel’s. Their hearts were nuez moscada, seeds encased in shells of red. Their bodies were maps of their family’s blood. They were Cantabrian dragonflies and Andalusian oaks. They were the teal water of Ceuta’s harbors.
They were Adán’s dreams of horses.
Adán set the black caballuco in Fel’s hand.
“It’s Alejandro,” he said.
“What?” Fel asked, for a second thinking that Adán had named each caballuco, one more thing that had not yet come back to Fel.
“Your name,” Adán said, a laugh in his voice. “It’s Alejandro.”
Alejandro. He remembered it, but hadn’t thought of it. He had been Fel, and when his life before La Pradera came back to him, it had been with so much else that his name had fallen under.
“I’ve heard the women here call you Fel,” Adán said. “And I like it. I like that you kept that part of our name. But I want to make sure you didn’t forget your own. The one that’s just yours.”
THIRTY-NINE
All colors of torn-out flowers dotted the hills. Every stripe of color had been broken. Fountains stilled and trellises shrugged away their coats of climbing roses. Trees shed their blossoms, growing toward the sky. And in the days after, the land turned wild.
The stories Fel had told Estrella grew and flowered. Cherry and almond trees sprouted from the ground and wore coats of white and pink petals. Cork oaks spread from saplings into thickening trunks. Wild olive trees broke through the green hills, their leaves growing in like feathers.
Indigo mushrooms and stalks of unfamiliar flowers rose in their shadows. They grew tall and straight, the tan stems giving way to tiny brown flowers.
In all this new life, La Pradera had given Fel and his brother back a small piece of the land they had come from. A little of the life they’d had before found its way into these gardens. In these shade-growing flowers. In the perfume of almond and cherry blossoms. In the warm green and dust smell of olive trees.
Estrella knelt to the stalks of brown flowers. They looked like snapdragons, but spindlier. Instead of reds and yellows, these were all in tones of brown and gold. They looked photographed in sepia. Some were closed, their tops like hyacinth buds or tiny pinecones. But they were all drawn in those same browns.
“They’re called bird’s-nest orchids,” Fel said.
She looked up, finding the boy she didn’t know had been watching her.
“They grow wild in the woods,” he said.
The way he looked at her made her feel like she was made of countless petals. Like her skin was the brown of orchids that grew in Cantabrian forests.
“Why are you avoiding me?” He said it without accusation or hurt. He just stood there, hands in his pockets.
His eyes followed the vines of blossoming almond and cherry branches, the petals blushing the wood. The bird’s-nest orchids rose in soft brown stalks. Fairy rings of blue mushrooms covered the ground. Dandelions showed their wispy blossoms and greens.
He recognized these things. He knew them as belonging to his family. His stories had taken deep enough root here that they grew into things that could be touched.
If Estrella could keep her own brutal heart from finding him, she could keep him safe. She could guard the beautiful things locked inside him.
She opened her mouth to say she hadn’t been avoiding him. That the stone house had been thrown into welcoming back lost men, and mourning ones who’d drifted up toward the stars. That the grandmothers and mothers were busied with how they would use the rumors of what had happened here to keep selling seeds and bulbs as though they were covered in gold. That at night Estrella and her cousins stood at the border of La Pradera, clasping hands, wondering if this land would still draw blood and pollen from them if, one day, they ran.
He felt it, the excuses building in her throat, and he gave her a smile of Don’t even try.
The lies fell away.
“You shouldn’t be with me, Fel,” Estrella said.
He took a few steps toward her, the bird’s-nest orchids brushing his calves. “Why?”
She shut her eyes tight, shaking her head. But the cherry and almond blossoms just got sweeter, and darker, an almost fall smell that the courtyard of flowering trees never let off. There, everything was perfume and light. Here, flowers smelled like wood and rain-slicked oranges.
You shouldn’t be with me, because I helped turn the place you died into flower beds. This was the truth. But she could not bring the words to her lips. So she grabbed at any others in reach.
“We’re las hijas del aire,” she said.
“And my brother and I are immigrants with no family,” he said.
“For years we didn’t even exist on paper, Fel. You did.”
“You want to talk about paper?” he asked. “On paper, I’m twenty-five. Or I was.”