There was no path back. He reached past the moment of opening his eyes, blinking against the pale sun in the garden, but beyond it there was only the dark, heavy blanket that felt as open and empty as a dreamless sleep.
He could remember having this body. He could remember things like oceans and ice, leaves and the smell of lemons, but he could not remember what any of these things meant to him. He knew plates and spoons and how to use them, but not where he had first learned how. He felt the certainty that this little green horse had lived in his pocket, but he could not remember why, or where he had gotten it.
He felt like he had woken up from a dream he very much needed to remember, but the harder he thought about it, the more it faded. The few fraying threads he could grasp weren’t enough to suggest the whole cloth.
The girl watched him, her blinking slow. The brown of her eyes deepened and warmed. Her sympathy was so heavy and covered in thorns he didn’t know how to hold it. The compassion of these women and girls did not come without pity, and he bristled against it.
He could not remember if the three letters sewn to his shirt were the beginning of a verse, or the start of a name, or a warning declaring the thing he had done, the reason he had been sent here stripped of memory.
If it was a mark, he should wear it. Or as much of it as he knew, the three letters that had not been torn away.
“Fel,” he said.
“What?” the girl asked.
“You thought my name was Fel,” he said.
“Is it?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But that’s what I want you to call me. That can be the name you call me.” It would be the name he called himself. F-e-l, the three letters left on him.
“Estrella,” she said, fingers on the doorframe.
It was only after she left that he understood it was her own name.
This place, this house filled with women who treated him like he was a son, these gardens that spread out as wide as a sea, they were all too soft and too beautiful to be where he would pay for his sins.
Instead, he had done something he could not remember, and to punish him for it, to punish him for forgetting, God had taken the things he knew.
God had left him just enough to be sure he had existed before he had come to these gardens. Enough to leave him reaching for things he could not know.
His back felt hot and damp. He reached to take off his shirt.
On his back, his fingers found veins of harder, raised skin.
He turned to the mirror on the inside of the door.
Thick, pale scars crossed his back, like strikes of a knife over clay. With the sight of them, pain traced along each one, not alive in his body now, but remembered.
Even the memory of how much they’d hurt sank under the shame of realizing they marked him.
The grandmothers had seen them. When they’d taken off his clothes they had sucked air in through their teeth and echoed the word pobrecito. He thought it had been about his ribs showing, or the way his hair had gotten messy enough to make him look like a stray animal.
But it had been this.
He put his shirt back on.
He found the grandmothers with their Bibles, laughing together in a way he had never thought was allowed over those onionskin pages.
Their eyes all found him at once.
Their gazes made him silent.
He could not ask them to keep his secrets.
“Thank you,” he said, realizing that they could have already told their daughters and granddaughters if they wanted to. They all could have driven him out of their house as a criminal or a heretic or whatever they decided had gotten him these scars.
That night, behind the door of that room they had put him in, he broke open. All the color, all the things he did not know, the paths of scarring under his fingers, broke him open. He bit the backs of his hands so he would not cry onto the wooden horses.
He had done something wicked enough for God to carve out the center of him, and bad enough that men had marked him with it. If that was true, these women were showing him kindness God would not have wanted for him. But God had hollowed him out, and now he was not strong enough to refuse as firmly as these women insisted.
He could not even confess his sins to them because he could not remember the ways in which he had fallen.
As he slept, he held all those wooden horses in his loosely cupped hands, hoping he would dream of the things he had lost. But he woke up with nothing but the feeling of a dreamless night, empty and unyielding. He surfaced to the feeling of petals brushing his skin and realized they were falling from the ceiling like snow at midnight. Blue, dark, and shimmering.
The marks of his own teeth had cut into the knuckles of his forefingers. The salt of his tears had dried pale on the winged horses, like frost coating their bright backs.
SEVEN
Without the horses to turn over in her hands, she didn’t sleep easily. Without them to count like sheep, the night streamed out in front of her, smooth and endless.
There was magic to things that were familiar and ordinary. The way they were known was a kind of enchantment, and when they were gone, the spell broke.
Estrella had given him the horses because it had seemed like the kind thing to do. It had felt like returning something he had lost. But they had made him sadder, like their wooden wings opened something in him. That made her wish she’d hidden them all in her dresser, tucking them under her slips and sweaters so this boy, Fel, wouldn’t have to see them. But she had offered them, and he had accepted them—more like a responsibility than a gift.
Each time she woke, Estrella checked the ceiling for the green of vines and the blue of starflowers. But the space above Dalia’s bed stayed clear, the wood bare. That was something.
In the morning, the man called Reid had not left. Estrella and her cousins knew because three of their grandmothers had gone up to the brick house. They had pretended they were there to clean it, and because men who stood so proud in pressed slacks and wrinkled shirts were used to having brown-skinned women wait on them, he seemed not to notice.
Worse than not leaving, he had unpacked his things into an empty room. Not Marjorie Briar’s. Estrella was thankful for that. If he had stuffed his clothes into her inlaid dresser and slept in her four-post bed, Dalia would have slit his throat in his sleep.
In the old carriage house, he had parked a gleaming car, all leather and shined chrome. Gloria almost spit onto the steering wheel, and Calla asked if they could drag an old key across the paint.
“You’re not doing anything,” their mothers said. “You don’t know anything about him yet.”
But they didn’t need to know more than that Bay did not want him there. They saw in how tightly she held her shoulders, like they were a wooden hanger and the rest of her was dangling loose like a coat. They saw it in how she set her back teeth as Reid walked across the grounds, pointing out retaining walls that needed repairing or rose trellises that seemed a little overgrown.