When the Moon was Ours (12 page)

“That's right,” he said. “You'd never heard of it. So don't pretend you know anything.”

“I know that these girls live with the freedom of being boys for years and then they're expected to become wives. They're expected to forget everything they knew about being anything other than what they're supposed to be.”

The words turned the back of his neck hot. They left him tense with the feeling that Aracely was lecturing not only him but the grandmother who had told him about Pakistan, and about bacha posh, and who was no longer alive to speak for herself.

These girls. What they're supposed to be.
All of it felt like Aracely's judgment of a world she did not know, and a world that had given him a quarter of his blood.

“You want to play whose culture is more backwards?” Sam asked. “Because I can do that. Women like you, with your cures and your prayers and your different-color eggs, you know what they say about you? Those old women—what do you call them, the señoras?—they're nice to you to your face. They send their sons and their daughters to you. And then they call you a witch behind your back. A bruja. Even
I
know that word.”

Aracely's eyes were still as open as they'd been before, neither closing with a flinch nor spreading wider.

“And these are your own people,” Sam said. A cruelty, a kind of rubbing it in, had slipped into his tone before. Now he let it wrap every word. “They want you for what you can do for them when no one's looking, and then in church they curse you. That's your culture. I pick mine any day.”

Aracely watched him, her face unchanged.

“And where do you get off acting like it's any different here than where my family came from?” Sam asked. “You think girls can do whatever they want here? You think Miel can? How do think girls here would do if they got to be boys growing up and then had to be girls again?”

“But that's what you're counting on, right?” Aracely asked. “That one day you'll wake up and wanna put on a dress?”

“Fuck you,” Sam said. It had never been about a dress. It had been about the clothes his grandmother would have wanted to see him in for family photos. Not a boy's kurta
,
but the sunrise colors and scrolled patterns of a girl's salwar kameez
.
A dupatta draped over hair longer than he ever wanted to grow it
.

He looked for any cringe in Aracely's face. Some sign that she knew she'd gone too far.

Instead there was just the trace of a smile, curving one side of her mouth.

She'd baited him. She'd wanted him angry.

“So you've got that in you,” Aracely said. “Good. You're gonna need it.”

Sam gritted his teeth, hard enough to feel it in the back of his jaw. “For what?”

“To be this.” She took in his clothes again, and again he felt like they were pinching him. “To live like this.”

“I'm not living like anything,” he said. “I do this for my mother. This country's no different than anywhere else. It's better for a woman if there's a man in her house, even if that man's her son.”

“Stop pretending this is for anybody but you.”

Sam turned around.

Aracely didn't know anything about him, or his family. Once his grandmother was gone, it had just been him and his mother. His mother had no sons, only him, born a daughter, and Sam had wanted, as badly as he wanted his grandmother back, not only to be a boy but to be a son to his mother. Years ago, when he'd first thought of living as a bacha posh, he'd felt the same shiver of triumph every time he was, in jeans and hair shorter than most girls, mistaken for a boy. He'd thought of having that all the time. How he could have something he wanted and at the same time do something for his mother.

He would be the man in their house, taking care of her. If he became a son to her, he'd thought, she wouldn't cast a nervous glance toward the windows when she locked the door at night. If he was a son, she would have let him paint over the letters sprayed onto the side of their house, instead of her doing it herself, having to look at it. She hadn't let him near that wall until she could get it covered over, and it wasn't until he was thirteen that he got her to tell him what slur those letters had spelled.

“Sam,” Aracely said.

He left the indigo room and went for the front door.

“Sam,” Aracely said, a whispered yell. He could tell she wanted to raise her voice but didn't want to wake Miel. “Get back here.”

He looked over his shoulder.

Aracely still had a basket of eggs in her hands. She'd forgotten to put it down.

“Miel may think you know everything,” he said. “But you don't know anything about me.”

“I know more than you do.”

“Oh really?” He turned around. “How?”

“Because I used to be where you are.”

The lie of her words made him lonelier than if she'd said nothing. The fiction that anyone in this town had ever been where he was, caught between feeling bound by the clothes he wore and being so desperate to keep them he wanted to hold on to them with his teeth, made the slide toward resenting her quiet and fast.

“No, you don't,” he said, and it wasn't until he heard the tremble in his own voice that he noticed the prickling damp at the edges of his eyelashes. How much tears irritated his eyes when he tried to stay still, how they refused to be forgotten until he blinked and let them go. “How could you?”

“Because you were right,” Aracely said. “I am Miel's family. And not just because that's what we've become to each other. I always have been.”

This was the thing he'd wanted to know so badly a few minutes ago. But now, how much he didn't want to talk cast a heavy shadow over how much he cared.

“What does that have to do with anything?” he asked.

Aracely crossed her arms, and her thin elbows turned pointed and sharp. “Because Miel remembers me as her brother.”

 

sea of waves

At first, Sam could not understand why Aracely was telling him the truth. He felt the caution of wondering whether it was a trick, another lie. He didn't understand why she didn't say those words
—Miel remembers me as her brother
—and then order him out of the wisteria-colored house. But then he noticed in her face a tension that was half-hesitation and half-relief, a look that he knew because he'd worn it himself.

He knew it from that day Miel had caught him changing, seen him naked enough to know there was distance between his body and what he let everyone believe it was. He knew it from that moment of sitting down next to Miel on the back steps of his house, and telling her everything.

That was the truth of holding so much back, and then giving up a little of it. The rest came.

Now that he knew Aracely was like him, he understood, and she knew that both he and she were creek beds, quiet when they were full and quiet when they were dry. But when they were half-full, wearing a coat of shallow water, the current bumped over the rocks and valleys in the creek beds, wearing down the earth. Giving someone else a little of who they were hurt more than giving up none or all of it.

Now that Aracely had told him this one thing—
Miel remembers me as her brother
—the rest came, as long as he was quiet.

So this time, Aracely did not lie. She did not tell him that she was just a woman who took in the girl from the water tower.

She spoke, and Sam learned all these truths he had never guessed. How Aracely once lived as a boy named Leandro, a boy who was years older than his younger sister but still small.

That Leandro loved his sister, that he almost died trying to save her from a river that wanted to take her.

That his mother had died trying to save them both.

But the water took Leandro, folded him into its current, brought him back as the girl he'd always wished he could grow into.

Not a girl. A woman, finished and grown.

That a summer covered in amber butterflies turned her hair to gold and welcomed her back into the world as someone else. How she did not know if this was the water's gift for trying to save her sister, or if it was only the water seeing her for what she was, and showing it to everyone else. But how she felt, as the water brought her back toward the light, was the certainty that she was not small anymore.

The water had felt her sorrow, her broken heart because she had failed to save her sister. That sorrow had aged her heart, made her grown instead of a child. So the water made the outside of her show the truth in all ways, not just by making her a woman, but by making her old enough to match her bitter heart.

That woman gave herself a name, and looked for her lost sister, and found her only when she was sure she had lost her forever.

Miel didn't know. Sam knew that. Not because she would've told him. She had so many secrets, so many fears and places she did not let him bring light into, that he couldn't count on it.

He knew from the way Aracely was touching the eggs, pretending to arrange them, but doing nothing with them. Her hands patted the nest of shredded paper.

Aracely took a few strands of the paper between her fingers, crushing them.

The moment of realizing, again, that Aracely had not lied, that she knew the narrow, rocky ground of being one thing and wanting to be something else, crept down each knob of his spine. It wrapped around his rib cage, harder and tighter than the bandage he'd used before Aracely had bought him these undershirts that pushed his chest flat.

He didn't want to think of that though, to open the door to her asking him questions because she thought they were the same. So he tried to imagine Aracely with dark hair, how much more she and Miel would have looked alike.

“You're family to her,” he asked. “Why didn't you tell her?”

“Because there are things she doesn't remember, and never should.” Aracely had set down the eggs, but now she turned a jar in her hands, the blue glass filled with water, ready for the gold of an egg yolk. “And if she remembers me, like I was, if she sees me and knows who I am, she might remember the rest.”

Sam tried not to guess at all the things that could have happened to Miel. She might have slipped and fallen into the river. She might have once loved water, and swam with the current, realizing too late that it did not love her the way she loved it. Or she might have been small enough to see the moon on the surface, and think she could wade in and catch it.

So he would not think of these things, he looked at Aracely. Even with all the little ways she and Miel were the same, there were so many other ways Aracely was different, traces of who she might have grown to be if the water had not intervened. Her height. How she had bigger hands, but no one noticed because most of their spread was thin, wispy fingers.

“Is this what you wanted?” he asked.

Aracely looked at him. “Always. But my mother always told me how handsome I was, how happy she was to have a son. So there was no space for any of it.”

It was the first crack Sam had seen in Aracely, sadness rather than annoyance or worry. She looked at her own fingers, the polished, rounded nails, her palms paler than the backs of her hands. Tears sat in the outer corners of her eyes.

She had the self-control he didn't, the gift of ignoring what prickled and stung and wanted to be blinked away.

“How did Miel end up in the water?” he asked.

Now Aracely smiled, and the shift in her expression forced one tear onto her temple. “That I'm not telling you.”

“Because you don't want anyone to know?” he asked.

“Because I'm never saying it out loud.”

Aracely pressed her fingers to the corner of her eye.

“The day she showed up,” Sam said. “The day they emptied the water tower. Why didn't you come forward? Why didn't you do something? Why'd you wait until I did?”

The sadness on Aracely's face turned pure and pained, no bitterness or anger.

“I was going to,” she said. “But then I hesitated. She had no idea who I was. This woman she'd never met before? If I would've come near her, I just would've scared her. You saw how she was looking at everyone.”

Aracely folded one hand into the other, pressing both against her sternum.

“But you were little,” she said. “Almost as little as she was. You didn't threaten her. I hesitated, and you did something before I did.”

Aracely had a right to Miel, a claim on her as her sister. And Sam had acted before Aracely could. He had never once regretted coming close to Miel when no one else had. He'd always counted it as one of the few good things he'd done, pure and certain.

But now the sudden guilt rounded his shoulders.

“I'm sorry,” he said.

“I'm not,” Aracely said. “You made her feel safe. Enough that when I came to get her, she was ready.”

“When are you gonna tell her?” he asked.

Now her smile was amused, almost cruel but not quite. “When are you gonna tell your mother you're not putting on a dress anytime soon?”

His throat tightened, and he felt them both settle into their stalemate.

With her words, everything he'd tried to pull out from her story rushed at him, like a paper moon he could not push underwater. It might vanish into a dark river for a second, but then it would appear downstream, pale and bright and bobbing along the surface.

The fact that Aracely might understand what he could not say, it seeded in him a want, new and raw, like not knowing he was thirsty until water was in front of him. No one else, not his mother, not even Miel, could understand this wanting to live a life different from the one he was born into, so much that his own skin felt like ice cracking.

It shouldn't have mattered, not when Miel and the other girls in his class wore jeans more than they wore skirts. Not when they went out as late as they wanted. Not when they told their brothers what to do, and borrowed their fathers' books.