He looked a little older than Bay, closer to thirty than twenty. He wore pressed slacks, the kind Estrella thought men wore only to church, but a shirt so wrinkled he looked like he’d slept in it. He kept his hands in his pockets, not in the way the boy did, as though he did not know what to do with them. This man seemed to rest his hands in his pockets as a way of reminding anyone watching how at ease he was in the world.
He had a frame not so different than the boy’s. A few inches taller if Estrella had to guess, and almost as thin. But while the boy looked underfed, this man, Reid, looked like he had come this way. Ash and red wine stained his wrinkled shirt. Her grandmothers would have done something about that, fearing what became of young men who drank and smoked more than they bothered with proper meals.
A knot grew in Estrella’s throat, turning harder with each thread she drew between this man and Bay.
They both had that pale hair, the color of sand and shells. It held fast in the Briar family no matter how many brown-haired men and red-haired women they married. They both had eyes so light that a shift of sun could turn them from blue to gray. Fine freckles crossed the bridges of their noses like a dusting of nutmeg. Their noses had shapes so similar that, if it weren’t for the difference in their jawlines and foreheads, Estrella would wonder if he was a brother Bay had never mentioned.
Estrella and her cousins spied between curtain panels.
“Should we invite him in?” Gloria asked.
Azalea laughed. “What do you think?”
“Look at her,” Dalia said. “I don’t know who he is, but I know her, and right now she wants to push him down the steps of the sunken garden.”
They all saw it, the tightness in Bay’s neck like she was trying to swallow a tablespoon of black pepper honey that would not go down.
Bay led Reid around to the side of the house, so Estrella and her cousins could not see them.
“Then maybe that’s why we invite him in,” Calla said. “To find out who he is.”
“I have a better idea.” Gloria pulled on the end of the embroidered cloth Bay had just fluffed out for breakfast. The silverware clattered to the wooden table. “Let’s do some laundry.”
“What?” Estrella asked.
“Laundry,” Azalea echoed, the word as light as a sun-bleached sheet.
Estrella listened for the sarcasm but didn’t find it.
They followed Gloria to the laundry room, the tablecloth spilling from her arms.
The window gave them a framed view of Bay and Reid, walking the grass slope up to the Briar house. Calla sat on the windowsill, Azalea on the dryer, helping Gloria refold the tablecloth they had pretended needed a wash.
Dalia sprinkled lemon juice onto stained napkins. Estrella checked the pockets on their aprons and sweaters. Their mothers would let them spy on Bay and Reid only as long as they looked like they were doing something.
Estrella lifted the boy’s clothes from the woven basket. The smell of iron was so strong on his shirt that she touched it lightly, cringing, waiting to find it starched with dried blood.
“It’s the dirt,” Calla said.
Estrella looked up.
“It’s not blood,” Calla said. “It’s the minerals in the dirt.”
Estrella shoved her hands into the boy’s pockets, the second-nature checking that kept lipsticks and hairpins from going into the wash.
Her fingers found the rounded edges of something small. Wooden. She drew it out from his pocket.
A carved horse. Painted wings sprouted from its rounded back. The same as the ones she kept on a shelf and the one she had buried.
But this one was green. She had never seen one painted green. The ones she had left on her shelf were painted yellow, red, violet, orange, white. And the one she had buried, her favorite, had been indigo. This winged horse was as green as the trees of life in the sunken garden. Green as the dress she had worn when she found this boy.
Azalea’s eyes held the same worry as when she stood under a ceiling of Estrella’s starflowers. She fixed her stare first on Estrella and then on the green winged horse.
“What did you do?” Calla asked, shaking her head.
“Nothing,” Estrella said, her voice pitching up. It was a lie and not a lie, a word said more in reaction than because she meant to say it.
Even though they’d found it in the boy’s pocket, they all counted that horse as a thing belonging to Estrella. It was as much hers as the blue borraja clinging to her bedroom ceiling.
Her cousins fell quiet. They all watched the carved horse, as though it might beat its rounded wings and flutter from her cupped hands.
Whether all this was Estrella’s fault or not, whether it was the fault of those little horses or not, they all understood this as she understood it. That wooden horse was a small, painted sign that if they wanted to keep Bay, they had to do as Gloria said and care for this boy the land had given them.
Estrella had buried a blue wooden horse under the earth, and La Pradera had answered with this boy. A lost brother or son or lover who had turned up with a green wooden horse in his pocket.
SIX
When she first set the small thing in his hand, when she said, “Here, I found it in your clothes,” he did not recognize it as something that was his.
He turned it over. A tiny horse with wings on its back, chipped paint coating its body in green.
The wings were not the great feathered wings of a bird. They were simple and rounded. His fingers skimmed over the curved edge.
Green, the color of trailing vines in the garden valley. Green, the color of the dress the girl had worn. A cold shock of familiarity made him understand that this was why he had followed her.
He had barely taken into himself the knowledge that this little green horse was his, when the girl reached into her apron and pulled out another, yellow. Then another, purple. Then three more. White, orange, red.
She put them in his hands, their small bodies crowding the green one. “You can have these ones too, if you want.”
But he could not answer. He could not nod to thank her or shake his head to refuse them. With each small weight into his hands, these tiny horses broke him. Each new color cracked him open a little further. He knew them. The feeling of the worn paint, their colors, the shape of their wings all pulled him back toward something he could not reach.
These were things he had touched and held before. But between where he was and the place where that understanding lived stood a border as heavy as the stone of this house. It was the same feeling he’d had in the garden, wanting to speak and not remembering how to ask his tongue and lips to make the words.
He knew what this girl wanted. She was giving him these small, winged creatures, and in return she wanted things he could not tell.
He could not give her his name, because he did not know it. He could not say how he had come to the garden valley, because he had no memory of a time before. He could not even admit to her that he was lost, because lost meant there was somewhere he would not be lost if he could just trace a path back.