When the Moon was Ours (7 page)

But now she was pulling away, and his own questions felt like threads of spider silk catching on his skin. What version of him did she want? Sam, or Samir, or some boy named Moon that this town had made up?

Did she want him because he hadn't grown out of this, or because she assumed he would? How long could he want her, as Sam, before he grew up and became someone else?

“Miel,” he said. “What's wrong?”

“I'm fine,” she said. “I'm fine.” She kissed him, but it was as stiff and uneasy as the first time she'd done it, when they were children and she set her lips against his for no longer than it took to blink.

He could taste the clover and sugar on her lips, like sage honey. It made him think of her licking it off a knife when Aracely wasn't looking.

She went inside, and he heard the soft creak of the stairs and then saw her bedroom lamp turn on. Light filled the window, and she felt as far and unreachable as the moon.

 

bay of trust

Aracely had tried to make Miel immune. Often, she brought home blue-rinded Jarrahdale pumpkins and deep orange Rouge Vif d'Etampes, and Miel would hide in the hallway closet. Aracely would narrate her progress from the kitchen.
I'm splitting it open, Miel. Okay, now I'm hollowing it out. I'm putting it in the pot now.
But Miel stayed in the closet, worried that new vines might sprout from the pumpkin's severed stem.

That was probably another thing Aracely had almost asked ten times, opening her mouth and then hesitating. Why, to Miel, a pumpkin couldn't just be a pumpkin. A question Aracely knew better than to say out loud. That hesitation always told Miel that the words on Aracely's tongue had more weight than
Are we out of blue eggs?
or
Have you seen my yellow sweater?
Miel wondered if a look crossed her face that showed Aracely the thread of fear in her.
Please. Please don't ask questions. Please don't wreck this, this life I have with you, by making me tell you.

Now, standing at the edge of the Bonners' farm, Miel wrapped her arms around herself, fingers digging in. Light from the Bonners' house poured onto the fields, warming the soft gray color of the Lumina pumpkins. The sight of each rind covered Miel in the feeling that it could crush her, that it could put out vines and sink them into her. It would draw the life out of her and grow bigger, and she would become small enough for it to swallow.

She was stupid to come here, and she knew it. It was after midnight, hours too late to pretend she'd stopped by to find Sam, or even to lie that she'd come to see Lian or Peyton.

But she had to see the pumpkins.

It hadn't been the fever of Ivy cutting away her rose. More of the pumpkins had become glass. Constellations of them glinted, each one heavy and shining. The living flesh of a few pumpkins had turned, like flowers freezing into ice.

The little storm held between the Bonner sisters had spilled out of their family's house. They were shifting to try to give Chloe back the space she'd held, but they couldn't settle into where they'd been before she left. They still held that shared power of being Bonner girls. It had kept its sharpness. But it was turning into something halting and jagged. And now the fields were showing it.

The night air covered Miel. The cold threaded through her, and in the hollow of the wind she heard the sad murmur of her mother's voice. To everyone else, it would sound like the warning of a storm. But if Miel listened, if she shut her eyes and found that humming under the wind, she heard her mother, caught between this life and leaving it.

She could never hear her father. She couldn't even remember if he'd died or if he'd left them. But how could he have left them? Miel held on to the thought of him wrapping a bandage around her wrist. Her saying
It's hurting me
when he fastened it too tight, and his calm voice saying it needed to be tight, to heal.

His mild dismay when he checked on the wound and found it growing new leaves. His assurances that
don't worry, mija, we'll get it next time,
as though he could will her rose to vanish.

Those memories—even if they were laced with the feeling that they were not real, that they belonged to some other girl and Miel had stolen them—were her certainty that her father did not leave them.

That left the awful possibility that they'd lost him. It left Miel to guess how, to wonder if it was her fault.

With each wink of glass the moon found, her mother's song sounded a little sharper, a little more like weak sobbing.

Mr. and Mrs. Bonner would notice. And if they asked, their daughters would blame Miel. Chloe and Ivy would tell their mother and father that Miel was not only a girl once made of water, but that she'd had a mother who tried to kill her. The girls half this town thought were witches would call Miel a witch, a wicked girl the river had kept and then given back, and who was now turning their fields to glass.

The lies in the Bonner girls' hands were a thousand pairs of scissors, brass and tarnished. If they spread that story, her mother's soul would never be free of it. It would follow her, pin its weight to her and drag her down. Her mother already stayed too close, watching Miel and looking for the brother Miel would never see again.

She had to do what Ivy said. She had to wait for her next rose to grow and open, and then she had to let the Bonner sisters have it.

The question of why they wanted them pinched at her. It couldn't have been as simple as making boys fall in love with them. They already knew how to do that. Even Chloe, months gone, with the rumors trailing through her hair like ribbons, hadn't lost the shimmer that lived on their skin.

That was the worst thing, the not knowing. If them wanting the roses was about any boy in particular, or all of them. If it meant Ivy was set on the boy who'd been so disinterested at the river, or if one of her sisters had decided on a boy from another town who had never heard of the Bonner girls, and would be unprepared for the force of them.

Or Sam. That possibility whispered to Miel too. He worked at their family's farm. No other boy had ever gotten that close to the Bonner girls without wanting them.

Miel put her palm to her wrist, the muscle still sore. And the words she hadn't been able to find when Ivy opened those scissors filled her mouth.

No,
she whispered over those fields.
No, you can't have this part of me.

If they tried to take Sam, she'd do anything she could to stop them, but that choice was his. This one was hers.

I am not your garden,
she said, the words no louder than the thread of her mother's voice the wind carried.

I am not one of your father's pumpkin vines.

You do not own what I grow.

The wind, and the crackling sounds of leaves and vines, answered her.

Those glints of glass looked a little duller. Instead of their shine, she saw the cream gray of the Estrella pumpkins or the deep blue-green of Autumn Wings.

The wind, and that thread of her mother's voice, quieted.

It was the first time the sight of pumpkins, fresh and alive, had warmed her. She stood facing those fields instead of cringing away. And this was as much of a sign as her mother had ever given her. Between them, pumpkins were a language as sharp as it was unknowable to anyone else. If she heard the distant rush of her mother's voice, it was her blessing.

Miel wouldn't do it. The next time she had a full rose on her wrist, she was staying far from the Bonner girls.

A tired feeling swept over her, equal parts exhaustion and relief. She wanted to sink into it, fall onto her bed with her clothes still on. No matter how the Bonner sisters thought they could threaten her, she wouldn't give in to it. The decision had left her worn out, ready to slip beneath the glow of Sam's moons.

She went home to the violet house, and found the light on in the kitchen.

Aracely was standing in front of the wall calendar, the belt on her robe tied in a halfhearted bow.

Aracely looked over at Miel, eyeing her sweater, her jeans, her lack of a nightgown. “Where were you doing out?”

“What are you doing up?” Miel asked.

“Trying to remember the last time Emma came in.” Aracely studied the calendar. “I think we're about due.”

Emma Owens, the wispy blond woman who ran the school office, managed to get her heart broken at least once every couple of months. She fell in love with men who didn't call, or men who did call and who she scared off with her gratitude and hurry. In her early thirties, hell-bent on getting married before thirty-five, she ended up sobbing on Aracely's table at least once a season.

Every time she set her hands on her rib cage, Aracely told Ms. Owens to slow down, that the right heart would find hers, but only when both hearts were ready. But every time Aracely cured her, rid her of wanting whatever regional produce buyer or accountant did not want her back, she was barely off the table by the time she had another date with another man who would drift between interested and indifferent. Even in her prim pearl-buttoned cardigans, she was pretty and white-blond-haired enough that she was rarely alone on a Friday night.

Miel stood next to Aracely. “Don't you worry about how often she comes in?”

“First rule of business, never argue with a repeat customer,” Aracely said. “Besides, I know what I'm doing.”

“One day you're gonna pull her whole heart right out of her.”

“Oh, I'd love to explain that,” Aracely said.

Miel extended a hand in front of her, like she was setting a headline. “‘Curandera accidentally kills local woman.'”

“Screw ‘accidentally,'” Aracely said. “They'd never believe it.”

“A correction to Monday's front page,” Miel said. “‘Bruja did it on purpose.'”

Aracely clicked her tongue and shook her head, like the women gossiping at the market. “‘Tore that poor woman's heart straight out of her body.'”

Miel looked at Aracely. “You know my ancestors could do that in under fifteen seconds, right?”

Aracely held her hands out in front of her. “Not with this manicure.”

Miel felt the air settling between them, Aracely letting fall her irritation over needing to call Sam.

“I'm sorry,” Miel said. “About before. It won't happen again.”

Aracely nodded, as much at the calendar as at Miel. “I know.”

 

lake of death

Aracely washed out a blue glass jar, the inside milky from when she'd used it during a lovesickness cure. The mix of water and egg always resisted coming clean.

Miel was at the yellow kitchen table, making a stack of books she needed and another of books she didn't.

She felt Aracely watching her even as she scrubbed the glass.

“You're gonna go study?” Aracely asked, in a voice she must have meant to be joking, but it made Miel blush more than laugh.

Aracely had caught on to what she was doing when she put her books into her bag each afternoon, the class assignments she'd read while she waited for Sam.

“You just make sure you let him get his work done,” Aracely said. “He's got his hands full finding enough pumpkins to cut.”

“What are you talking about?” Miel asked.

“The glass.” Aracely set the jar on the drying rack. “It's spreading. Now when he's cutting fruit off the vine, he has to make sure he's not breaking anything.”

Miel could imagine him like that, stepping through the fields, feeling for rough, living stems instead of glass. He would look like a cat, crossing a crowded shelf without knocking anything over.

But the thought of those glints in the fields still felt like a chill along Miel's ribs. Of course Mr. Bonner would have his farmhands continue as though nothing had changed. Of course he would ignore all that glass, pretending it wasn't there. It was the way he treated the force that was his daughters, as though they were still young girls settling ribbon headbands into one another's hair.

“What?” Aracely asked, her eyes going over Miel's face. “You know something about it?”

“No,” Miel said, a little too fast. But whatever was happening between the Bonner sisters, however their land felt it and reflected it back, it was neither Miel's business to question nor her responsibility to explain.

Sam was the one thing that could get Miel close to the Bonners' farm. But she didn't let the sisters see her. Especially not now, a week later, when she'd grown and drowned a white rose with petals tipped in faint green. Last night the petals had spread wide, showing her the breath of yellow at the center, so she'd cut the stem and let the river take it.

In moments of lying to herself, she told herself it was just Sam, just that she wanted to see him and touch where the sweat off the back of his neck had left his hair a little damp. She wanted to kiss him when his mouth was still wet from having just taken a swallow of water.

And that was true. But in moments of letting the rest of the truth edge into her, she knew she wanted the Bonner sisters to see her. Wanted them to catch her pulling Sam into the woods, kissing him before they even reached the trees' shadows. She wanted them to see her bare wrist and know that just because they were the Bonner girls, just because they'd gotten Hunter Cross and Jerome Carter and every other boy they wanted, didn't mean she'd turn over to them the things her body grew.

If they thought they needed her roses, they had lost something. That left Miel less afraid of them knowing she wanted Sam, and more intent on them knowing he did not belong to them. He belonged to himself, and to his mother, and maybe even to Miel, but not to them. He wasn't theirs any more than Miel's roses were.

Today she caught Sam at the edge of the pumpkin fields, pulled him under a sycamore big enough to hide them both. For a few minutes, before he went back to work, and she left to finish her reading or pick up eggs from the Carlsons' farm, this canopy of leaves, orange and gold at the edges but still green at its heart, was their whole world.