When the Moon was Ours (10 page)

But the sheen of glass must have pulled him back. He looked again, his eyes settling. His stare moved over the cluster of glass pumpkins, the deep red and violet, and dark blue and green. He was reconsidering these things he'd had to work around while cutting fruit off the vines.

He looked at her again.

“You didn't do that,” he said. “That's not your fault. You know you didn't do that, right?”

Sam was so stupid. He was stupid and kind and always had a guard up against Miel being blamed for things. He knew that the only people in this town called witches more often than the Bonner girls were her and Aracely. When anyone came to the violet house blaming them for too much rain or not enough, or because a bad cough was spinning through the grade school, his mother was the first one to tell them to go back to their homes. And Sam was the first one to say that if they didn't, he'd tear down every moon in this town.

Both Miel and Aracely knew he'd never do it. He'd never take down anything that was letting this town's children sleep. But he was a dark-skinned boy, a kind of dark they could not place, so when he threatened them, they believed him.

Sam and his mother were right to defend Aracely. But they should have let the town do whatever they wanted with Miel.

It was her fault Leandro was dead. It was her fault her mother was dead.

Sam reached his hand out to her, slow as the sway of the trees.

“Let's go home, okay?” he said.

He touched her sleeve, and she pulled her arm away, her skin shrieking with everything she couldn't say.

Please don't touch me.

Please don't leave me.

Please don't let me be this anymore.
Afraid of everything, and angry at everyone, and so awful at holding all of it within her own skin that it burst from her wrist as thorns and petals.

She was poison. And the last boy who had hair as black as wet ironbark and who tried to save her ended up dead.

The motion had felt small to her, pulling back her arm. But Sam looked startled, worried, the border between his dark eyes and the white looking clear and sharp.

He set the moon down so close to her that her skin turned a little blue.

“I'm gonna leave this with you, okay?” he said.

The moon, big as Aracely's bedroom mirror, cast a faint glow on his skin like the reflection off snow at dusk. He had painted the craters and lunar seas,
mare insularum
and
lacus hiernalis,
the sea of islands and the lake of winter, in pale and dark silver. The glow looked like moonlight filtering through shallow water.

He'd already lit this one, the candle cupped and burning inside.

“And I'm coming back,” he said.

 

sea of serenity

He found Aracely sitting at the yellow kitchen table, rubbing polish off her fingernails.

“Where's Miel?” she asked when she saw him. “I thought you two were making out in the woods somewhere.”

“Not exactly,” he said.

He looked down at the pattern of tiles on the kitchen floor. He'd never noticed how close the brown of the worn ceramic was to the shade of Miel's skin in winter. In summer, her skin turned darker, cutting the sharp outlines of the foil stars he set against her skin. But after months of gray skies, this was the color she was, and he'd never noticed it before.

It made him feel odd about standing on it, like she'd feel his weight even from where she sat at the edge of the Bonners' fields.

“Words, Sam,” Aracely said. “Use some.”

She'd been saying this since he was in middle school, when he'd gone quiet so no one would notice his voice wasn't lowering like other boys'. They'd written it off as evidence that he was waiting out his own voice change, self-conscious of it hitching if he talked. Alone, in his room, Sam had practiced driving his pitch lower, so that when other boys, frightened into silence by unexpected cracks and breaks in their words, emerged with dropped voices, so would he.

But Aracely had little patience for his silence, then and now.

He looked up. “I need your help.”

That was all it took. She didn't panic or ask him questions. Aracely had a calm that rivaled his mother's. When his mother didn't know how to talk to him when he started bleeding between his legs, Aracely spoke to him once on his own, and then herded him and Miel into the wisteria-colored house's living room for the kind of talk their school used to give in health class, before they cut health class altogether. Aracely had been the only one who didn't squirm through the whole thing. Sam and Miel had sat, cringing, at opposite ends of the sofa, his hand in his hair, fingers digging into the roots, while she buried her face in a throw pillow.

Aracely threw out the remover-soaked cotton balls, and went with him.

Miel shuddered when Aracely touched her, the way she had when he tried the same thing. But Aracely spoke to her in a voice so soft Sam couldn't make out the words. She talked her down in a way Sam didn't know how to, like her words were a rhythm she was helping Miel follow. Her voice was a frequency she was getting Miel to tune in to, until Miel was nodding, and letting Aracely take her hands. Aracely helped her stand, guided her through the constellations of broken glass.

There was something about it so different from what he would have done, different even from the way his mother talked to Miel.

There was something not quite sisterly, and not quite maternal. Not just the familiarity that had grown between a woman and the girl who'd lived with her for ten years.

Tonight Sam would paint another moon for Miel, one warmer than the bluish one he'd carried into the woods. He'd make one big enough to fill his arms, the light both full and crescent. He'd paint its face the blush of a flower moon, its edge darkened almost to red, like a strawberry moon. He'd paint its
mare serenitatis
and
mare tranquillitatis,
the wide seas of serenity and tranquility crossing the crisp white of a snow moon.

All the colors would look like the rose moons he and Miel had found in the sky that summer. He'd hang it in the beech tree outside her window, and under its light she'd sleep. He wanted to give her every light that had ever hung in the night sky. He wanted to give her back what she thought she'd lost years ago.

Sam could stay with her. He could tell her what his grandmother had told him about the crocus fields, how they sometimes smelled like hay, and sometimes like leaves, and sometimes like the spice they held. He could tell her his favorite story his grandmother had told him. A prince and a fairy who fell in love, and could sometimes be seen over the water of Saif-ul-Malook on nights lit by the full moon.

But it took Aracely to get Miel home, to get her in bed, to get her to sleep. Aracely stood in the doorway of Miel's room, watching her breathe, lips parted.

There was something proprietary in that look. Something possessive, both defensive and proud.

Sam had disregarded that moment of thinking he'd seen a resemblance between Aracely and Miel. He'd let it fall like a stone he picked up, turned over, and then decided not to keep. But now he looked for it again, like brushing his fingers through a carpet of leaves, finding it a second time.

He couldn't ask Aracely, not now, with Miel settling into the space between those glass pumpkins and her own dreams. But he wouldn't forget. This time he wasn't letting it go.

 

lake of forgetfulness

Ms. Owens' voice came up through the floorboards, her nervous laugh and her chatter to Aracely.

Miel opened her bedroom door. She heard Aracely answering back in her slow, calming voice, her
aren't-men-awful
voice. Ms. Owens' voice was unsteady, and Miel wondered what actuary, what mattress-franchise millionaire, had broken her heart this time.

And why Aracely hadn't called Miel down to help her.

Aracely stood at the stove, boiling water for lavender and ginger tea. After the second time, Aracely always gave it to Ms. Owens, to relax her, to make sure the inside of her wasn't becoming too stiff and brittle from so many lovesickness cures.

Miel leaned against the counter, her elbows on the tile. “Where is she?” Miel whispered.

“Just fixing her face,” Aracely said, giving Miel a pained look. “It's a bad one this time. Mascara everywhere.”

“Why didn't you call me?” Miel asked.

Aracely leaned in. “I think that's the same thing she wants to ask the guy.”

Miel elbowed her, and Aracely pressed her lips together. Only Aracely could make those kinds of jokes without sounding cruel.

“I meant why didn't you tell me to come down,” Miel said, her voice still low. “I always help you.”

Aracely's eyelids pinched. “You had a long night last night. I thought you might be tired.”

Miel felt the unease of slipping from a place she'd claimed as hers. She always handed Aracely the eggs and the oranges. Aracely always signaled to Miel to open the window at just the right time to let the lovesickness out. They both carefully shooed the lovesickness out the window, watching so it wouldn't fly back, or end up stuck in a bowl of fruit or a vase of flowers, the ceramic trembling like a wasp's wings. Or worse, rush back into the body it came out of. To visitors, curing lovesickness seemed all instinct and flourish. But Aracely treated it as a craft that took as much patience and method as cutting raw opal.

And Miel had been part of that for almost as long as she'd lived with Aracely.

“I'm fine.” Miel stood up straight. “I can do this.”

The kettle sang, and Aracely took it off the burner. “Are you sure?”

“It was just bad dreams,” Miel said. “That's all.”

“That's not what I hear.”

The gossip had already bubbled through the town about the newest glass pumpkins in the Bonners' fields, deep and bright as topaz and bloodstone.

“Are they saying I did it?” Miel asked.

“No.” Aracely poured the hot water. “Why would they?”

Miel felt the tension in her fingers pulling back toward her heart. No one but the Bonner sisters knew they had brought the stained glass coffin back from its distant place in their family's stories. No one but the Bonner sisters knew they had locked Miel inside it.

No one but Miel saw those jewel-glass pumpkins as the threat they were.

Miel handed Aracely the hard cone of piloncillo she always grated into Ms. Owens' tea.

“I can do this,” she said.

Aracely took the piloncillo. “Are you sure?”

“I always help you,” Miel said.

“I've cured her more times than I can count. I know her heart better than mine. If there's one you had to miss, this isn't a bad one.”

“But it's important,” Miel said. “You're always saying keep the repeat customers happy.”

Aracely eyed the door Ms. Owens was behind. The sound of the sink running came through.

“Fine,” Aracely said. “But take it slow. You don't have to get me what I ask for so fast you throw it at me. I can wait. So can Emma. If it takes an hour, so what? I don't want you handing me a pink egg when I want a green one.”

“Deal,” Miel said.

So they spread a sheet over the table in the indigo room, and Ms. Owens came in, clutching a pocket square that must have belonged to whatever man she had last fallen in love with. It looked like it cost more than any dress Miel owned. The candles turned the silk the color of Aracely's Spanish rice.

Aracely tried to take the pocket square.

Ms. Owens held on.

Aracely ran her fine-boned fingers through a lock of Ms. Owens' hair. “Let go
,
” she whispered, her voice warm with the assurance that everything was good and right, that it was the golden hour of afternoon and not night, that there was no fear in the world.

Ms. Owens shut her eyes, and opened her hands, and Aracely took the pocket square.

Miel folded her elbows, hands gripping her upper arms. All the heat in her body pulled to her wrist. She could almost feel the weight of Ms. Owens' heart, how she wore her disappointment like wet clothes.

“Lie down,” Aracely said.

Ms. Owens did. The almost-white blond of her curls fanned out from her head. Flakes of mascara clung to her cheeks like ash, and tears trembled at her lash line.

Aracely tore a scrap from the pocket square. Ms. Owens winced as though she felt it. Aracely burned the cloth in a glass jar and said the prayer of Santa Rita de Cascia. The edges of the satin blackened and curled in on themselves.

Miel handed Aracely a purple onion, the green stalk still on. Aracely always knew which color egg, which orange, which herb. She swept the onion over Ms. Owens as she said the prayer again, her whisper softening the air in the room.

Ms. Owens kept her eyes shut tight enough to wring tears into her hairline.

Miel stood, waiting for Aracely to tell her what to do. She waited long enough that she thought she saw ribbons of faint light shining along the floor. They snaked and twirled, skimming the baseboards. They wrapped around the legs of the wooden table.

At first they looked like tiny streams, bands of water no thicker than her wrist. Then they looked solid, their glint a hard edge.

Like glass. Like vines of glass, not just deep green but dark blue and red and violet. They spun up the indigo walls. They reached out toward Miel, trying to wrap her forearms. She felt them without them touching her, a cord of pain from each elbow to each wrist.

They pricked her like thorns and leaves growing under her skin, and she felt the ache of a glass vine caging her forearm. They would crack, and the jagged pieces would cut into her wrists. Her blood would tint the glass. It would splinter and cut deeper into her.

A bump against the window, like a bird hitting the pane, cut through the room. A sharp scream followed it. It streamed into the air, skittering along the walls.