When the Moon was Ours (5 page)

His mother knew.

She'd stayed the night before at the Hodges'. Mr. and Mrs. Hodge were in the city until morning, so they'd asked her to watch their children. She'd probably told them bedtime stories about a brother and sister crossing a forest guided only by stars, or a girl learning the language of Kashmir stags and musk deer. Or one Sam had heard from his grandmother, the story of a girl named Laila and a boy called Majnun.

Now his mother stood in the doorway. As soon as she looked at him, he caught the slight lift of her chin, half a nod, that told him she understood.

She looked tired but not wearied, this morning's kohl drawn over the smudged echo of yesterday's eyeliner, so soft gray ringed her eyelashes. The kohl, and the way she painted it on, was one of the few traditions from their family she'd held to, that one from her mother's side. Her father, Sam's grandfather, had given her washed-out blue eyes that looked even paler the way she lined them.

Neither surprise nor disappointment crossed her face. Only a breath in, a steadying. As much as Sam wanted this to pass by without comment, he knew better.

Finally, she said, “Well, I hope you were both safe.” She set down the red and blue tapestry bag she'd taken over to the Hodges'. “I'd hate for you to get that girl pregnant. Aracely would murder me.”

He was supposed to laugh. He knew he was supposed to laugh.

But he couldn't force out the sound.

He wished he were different. He wanted to laugh off her words, to say back,
Oh, very funny.
Short of the kind of miracles Aracely taught Miel out of her Bible, Sam wasn't getting anyone pregnant.

“And you trust her,” his mother said, more checking than questioning.

Of course he trusted Miel. She knew everything that could wreck him, but acted like she didn't.

When he was eight, and she walked in on him changing, she didn't scream, or run down the hall. She just shut the door and left, and when he pulled on his jeans and his shirt and went after her, he found her sitting on the back steps. Her expression was so full of both wondering and recognition, as though she almost understood but not quite, that he sat down next to her and told her more than he'd ever planned to.

Now, she slipped him tampons at school because he couldn't risk carrying them in his bag. They had it timed so they passed each other while she was leaving the girls' bathroom and he was going into the boys', the two of them clasping hands just long enough for the handoff.

Once they'd worked out the system, they never spoke of it again, and she never brought it up. He never asked how she always knew when. He didn't have to. They'd spent enough time together that their bodies had pulled on each other, and they now bled at the same time, when the moon was a thin curve of light. If Miel had been anyone else, her knowing this, the steady rhythm of her knowing every month, would have been humiliating.

Sam braced himself, though for what he wasn't sure. Not a morality lecture. His mother had never cautioned him to wait until he was married. Agnostic, indifferent to the faiths of both her father's family and her mother's, she had barely tolerated Sam going along with Miel and Aracely to church and Sunday school. She allowed it only because she thought things would be easier for him if this town thought he was a
good Christian boy,
a phrase she never said without disdain edging her words. She'd made it clear that any God she believed in could not be contained within walls, certainly not inside the whitewashed clapboard of the local church.

But he was never supposed to sleep with a girl. This had been temporary, him living this way, with his breasts bound flat and his hair cut as short as his mother would let him. It was so he could take care of his mother, so there would be a man of the house even though his mother had no sons.

“Are you mad?” he asked, trying not to cringe and look down. His mother hated when he did that, which made him tend toward it even more.

“If you didn't hurt yourself or anyone else, it's not my place to be,” she said.

Sometimes she said things like that, and he could almost see the pallor of frost on her words.
It's not my place to be disappointed,
she'd said when he was failing math three years ago.
It's your future, not mine.
And that made him feel even worse.

But it wasn't like that now. There wasn't the same posture of holding herself tall and straight, her expression still. Now her face looked soft with worry. Worse, pity.

“Are you upset?” he asked.

She put her fingers to her temple, shut her eyes, let out a long breath that turned into a sigh. “Sam,” she said, the word sounding like wind, like a soft, sad song.

Whenever she said his name like that, it meant the same thing. That whether she or anyone else was upset wasn't the point. That, failing math grade or lost virginity, this was his life, and to her mind, he wasn't acting like it, not as long as his first question was
Are you mad?

“Are you okay?” his mother asked.

“I think so,” he said.

“Is she?”

“I think so.”

He would grow out of this, he wanted to tell her. The same way he'd grown out of saying his favorite color was clear (
Why?
Miel had asked him.
Because everything clear is magic, because it's invisible,
he'd told her) and Miel had grown out of saying her favorite color was rainbow (
Why?
he'd asked her.
Because they all look prettier together,
she'd said,
and because I don't want to pick.
).

He would wait it out.

His grandmother had told him the name for these girls. She had brought it with her from Pakistan, and from stories she'd heard from across the border in Afghanistan. Bacha posh. Dressed as a boy. Girls whose parents decided that, until they were grown, they would be sons. Sam and his mother had lost his grandmother when he was so small he could barely remember the wrinkles of her face and whether the brown of her eyes was more gray or gold. But he remembered her voice. Her telling him that their family's saffron farm in Kashmir had been small, but for its size the most productive for a hundred miles. How it took a hundred thousand of those purple crocuses to yield less than a kilogram of saffron.

When his grandmother told him this, it was always with a current of sadness beneath her pride. Their family had had to leave Kashmir to stay with distant relatives in Peshawar, abandoning their bright fields. As things around them grew worse—that was how she always put it,
things were getting worse
—trading the spice from their fields became impossible. And when she got to that part of the story, the part that left her heart bitter, she turned to stories that did not pinch and bite, like the stories of these girls. Daughters who lived as sons in families who had no sons. These girls spoke to boys and men in the street. They escorted their sisters out. When Sam heard these stories, he felt a clawing envy as strong as if he knew these girls by name.

He had been four, his grandmother only a few months gone, when he decided he could—he would—be one of these girls. He would be a bacha posh. He would be the same kind of boy as those girls who lived as sons.

But when those girls grew up, they became women. And maybe their lives as wives and mothers at first felt cramped, narrow after the wide, cleared roads of being boys. But whatever freedom they missed was not because they wanted to be boys again. It was because they wanted to be both women and unhindered.

That was his problem. Sam was sure of it. He couldn't be a girl. But maybe if he waited out these years in boys' clothes and short hair, he would grow up enough to want to be a woman. He would wake up and this part of him would be gone, like rain and wind wearing down a hillside.

“You know, I never wanted a son or a daughter,” she said.

“Mom,” he said, trying to cut her off.

“I didn't think about it that way,” she said, ignoring him. “I just wanted a child.”

Sam nodded. He'd heard the story before. How his father had come from a family of fishermen in Campania, all of whom were famous for catching a kind of red-mantled squid that came close enough to the surface only during new moons. And how his father's lack of talent with that squid was the first of many things that made Sam come to be.

But she didn't go on with the story.

“Do you want to talk?” she asked.

Sam picked up the tapestry bag, to take it upstairs for her. “No.”

 

bay of the center

Miel picked up the phone thinking it was Sam. When he got back from his shift at the Bonners' farm, he'd call her, never starting with a greeting. He'd hear her answer and then start with something like, “I just saw a woman jog past the hardware store with two parakeets, one on each shoulder.” Or, “The king of hearts is the only one without a mustache. Ever notice that?”

She was one of the few people Sam would talk to on the phone, afraid of how the line skewed his voice a little higher when he was always working to keep it low.

But it wasn't Sam. It was Ivy. Asking Miel to come over.

Not asking. Just saying, “Come over.”

Miel wondered if Ivy was calling on the ivory princess phone that had once belonged to her grandmother. So old it had a rotary dial and a silver base, that phone, according to Sam, was something buyers always wanted to see when they came to negotiate pumpkin prices. Carlie Zietlow, the girl Miel shared a desk with in math class, said the Bonner girls took pictures of one another with it each time they dressed up, once before dances and now before the pumpkin lighting each October.

A week had gone by since Miel had seen Ivy at the river. She'd settled deep into the relief that Ivy had disregarded her offer, and had forgotten about it.

Now Ivy hung up, so softly the noise was a single, crisp click.

Ivy's voice stayed inside Miel's ear like the sound of the ocean caught in a shell. The words had sounded open, guileless, one girl asking another outside to play. But there was also the edge of something a little alluring, like the piloncillo sugar Aracely melted into hot chocolate. It made Miel cringe, thinking of every time Sam heard that voice as he bent down to the vines crossing the Bonners' fields.

But in those two words, Miel thought she caught a little of that same sadness. Ivy's voice matched that same blank, damp-cheeked look she'd had by the river. So she did what Ivy said.

If no one in this town had cared what happened to Miel, she would still be wild-eyed, hiding in the brush where the old water tower had fallen, or in Sam's house, his mother wondering what to do with her. It was the least Miel could do to go over, even if the Bonner sisters, the whole Bonner house, scared her. The Bonner sisters talked to so few people outside that house that Ivy's request seemed like something of an honor, and something dangerous to turn down.

Compared to the violet house Miel and Aracely lived in, with Aracely's blue-green cups and her kitchen table, yellow as a Meyer lemon, the Bonners' farmhouse looked so neat and tame. That navy paint made the white trim so bright. The shutters were hooked in place. The lace curtains in the windows looked age-softened, but Mrs. Bonner bleached them so often they never yellowed.

The door was open, only the screen shut. That seemed like an invitation to come in without ringing the bell.

The strangest thing about the house was their mother's mint-green refrigerator, an antique that, according to Aracely, she spent more money to repair than it would have cost to replace it. The rest was so much more muted, so ordinary, compared to the girls and even the farm. The kitchen counters were plain white tile. Linen dish towels, creased and folded, were stacked next to the sink. There was no orange like the girls' hair or the Cinderella pumpkins, flat and deep-ribbed. No deep green or gold or blue-gray like the few rare ones dotting the fields.

Miel's eyes moved over the first floor, until they landed on those four shades of red hair.

Las gringas bonitas. All four of them. The Bonner girls clustered around a wooden dining room. Round, no bigger than needed to fit the six Bonners, or at most, them and a couple of guests. As though Mr. and Mrs. Bonner assumed their daughters would never leave them, or that they would leave and never come back, never bring their husbands and children for Thanksgiving or Christmas.

Chloe still wore those cigarette jeans, but now with a turtleneck that covered her freckled collarbone. Lian had pulled her hair, so much darker than the rest of theirs but still so red, into a bun that was already falling out. She rested her elbows on the table, one hand cupped loosely in the other. Peyton was tracing her finger along the circle of a water stain, her hair in a braid so much like Chloe's that Chloe must have done it.

Ivy leaned against a sideboard, hip against a drawer.

They all looked at Miel.

They'd all been waiting.

“You're not going to kill your roses anymore,” Ivy said.

It wasn't until that moment that Miel noticed the vase at the table's center. She wondered how she'd missed it, the glass as dark blue as the Bonners' house.

The sleeve of Miel's sweater covered her newest rose, as pale yellow as a candle flame. But Lian and Chloe were looking at her wrist as though they could see through the fabric.

She pulled her eyes away from the vase, to the Bonner sisters' faces.

Miel looked at Ivy. “They don't do what you think they do,” she said. Her roses, left under a pillow, would not make boys fall in love with the Bonner sisters. They would not give them back what they had before Chloe's body held another little life.

“You're not going to kill your roses anymore,” Ivy said again, opening a sideboard drawer. Each word was as calm and sure as the first time. “When you grow one, you're going to bring it to us.”