When the Moon was Ours (19 page)

He had spent the last ten years making sure he pushed exactly as hard against her as she did against him, so that everything they had built would stay standing. If he either let up or gave it more of his weight, it would fall.

And until the night he ran the pollination brush over her arm, this kept him still, the possibility that if she did not feel how he felt, it made no difference, unless he put her in the position of having to tell him.

This was what they had created, a place where she was more than the girl the water tower had spilled out, and he was more than a boy painting a hundred moons, a boy who knew
mare nectaris
and
sinus roris,
the sea of nectar and the bay of dew, and every other lunar feature better than his own body. As long as he didn't question it, prod it, it stayed. But now he had, and he was losing her.

It's here, and I'm bored.
The words came back to him. Maybe why she once met him on the open land every night was that simple. He was here. She was bored. And now she wasn't. But he was still stranded in this world that only half-belonged to him.

Aracely considered a blood orange but then set it down, and chose a bergamot, the kind grown in the place that made the father he had never known.

The warm scent of cloves and the honeyed acid of the bergamot orange wafted over him. He opened his eyes just enough to see the pair of eggs Aracely had chosen, one red, the other copper.

Her hands settled on his shoulders. He tensed, then reminded himself that this was how the lovesickness cure worked. He had to let himself take it.

The room turned into a whirl of scents, cloves and cardamom and laurel leaves. The walls took him into their blur of indigo. Aracely whispered a prayer under her breath, keeping her hand on his chest. Not off to one side enough to touch either place his binder flattened. But in the center, below his collarbone.

The rhythm of her hushed words cut through him. Her hand hovered over his body.

The perfume of the spices, the calcium of the eggshell, the sweet acid of the bergamot left his forehead throbbing. Under the pressure of Aracely's palm, he felt his love for Miel turning over and pulling away from the places it hid. It had woven itself into his veins, as much as the stem of her rose had roots under her skin.

He felt the sting of the lovesickness dragging away, like tearing the weft out of a woven cloth. His body resisted, but Aracely kept him still, pinned like a butterfly under glass.

With one hand, Aracely cracked the first egg into a jar of water. She held the jar up to study the pattern of the yolk.

Sam set the heels of his hands against his eyes. He would not give in to the jagged breathing that rattled his lungs and throat. But he blinked, and tears dropped from his eyelashes, first the left, then the right.

He brushed them away. He knew what Aracely thought of crying. She once caught Miel sobbing because the pain of a new rose, hours from bursting through her skin, would not let her sleep. She stood near her bed and said, “Stop it, mija, you're gonna turn yourself to salt.” When she found Sam crying over a stray kitten that had died despite him and Miel feeding it eyedropperfuls of milk, she said, “And you think this will bring it back to life?” Not harshly. The truth ballasted her words. It kept them straight and tall.

Crying was a waste, she told them.

But now Aracely whispered, “Get it all out of you,” neither kind nor reprimanding, a recommendation no different from another curandera's prescription for curing nightmares. “It'll make everything inside you softer. This'll go easier.”

He kept his hands on his eyes as Aracely swept the bergamot orange over him. It hurt, the lovesickness coming unanchored and drifting from the edges of his body, his fingers and his toes, his lips and the ends of his hair. It drained toward his heart, the gathering weight pinning his rib cage to the table.

But it was as much relief as pain, the shock of relaxing a muscle after keeping it tense. Aracely's hands were sharing the weight, luring it toward her palms and out of his body.

Aracely had left the window open, knowing that he didn't care how cold the room got. He was not some lovesick woman or man who expected his money's worth, who would complain if the indigo room had chilled, making it necessary to keep the window closed until the last minute. Aracely would draw out his lovesickness, and then throw the nervous, feathered thing, no bigger than a thrush, out the open window. She would launch it like a dove, a barely visible wash of peach or blue Sam never would have caught if Miel hadn't taught him to watch for it flying out the window and vanishing.

Aracely set one palm on his heart and the other on his throat until the lovesickness rose to her hands.

In that moment, he was thirteen, and Miel was wearing her favorite dress, the violet-tinged blue of a cloudless sky. The thin ribbons of the dress's straps kept loosening and falling down her arms, and each time he helped her tighten them he peeled a gold foil star off a sticker sheet and pressed it onto her shoulder or her upper back. She asked him why, and he told her to trust him.

And she had. She had left them there the whole day, while they let the sun heat their backs. When they ran, her perspiration made the foil shine damp, and it wore the edges of the adhesive, but the little stars stayed. And that night he had lifted each one off her, slowly, so they didn't pull at her skin. When he was done, she laughed, mouth open, to see that each foil star had left a lighter cast of its shape. In that first blazing day of summer, her skin had tanned enough that she was covered in constellations.

She had wanted to name every one. She named one for Aracely, one for Sam's mother, and then she told Sam he had to pick one, the one she would name after him. He had brushed his fingers near one at the base of her neck, the shape small but the edges clean and sharp.

He had mapped her body like a new sky. He had known even then that this night was something perfect, without jagged corners to catch themselves on. But it was only now that he knew why. That day, with the foil stars, there was both a reason for him to be touching her, and no need for a reason. They were younger. She didn't hesitate before she pulled leaves from his hair, and he hadn't paused before reaching out and placing one of the foil stars on her shoulder.

Sam sat up, pulling away from Aracely's hands.

“Sam,” Aracely said, his name emerging from one gasp and falling into another.

The lovesickness rushed back into him. It stung every corner of his body. He was a river caught between water and ice. Frozen too much to move. Not enough to stand solid against the wind and the pull of the moons he had made.

His body felt heavy with the lovesickness that had almost gone. Now it hooked into him, its hold deep and firm. It was an animal nearly torn from its nest, and he was the tangles of twigs and thread and grass where it made its home.

If anyone tried to tear it away again, its claws would rip him apart.

“I can't,” he said, the words choked and small.

Aracely's eyes flashed red brown. Her hands still smelled like laurel and cloves. “Why?” she asked.

“Because it's mine,” he said.

It was his. All of it was his. His body, refusing to match his life. His heart, bitter and worn. His love for Miel, even if it had nowhere to go, even if he didn't know how to love a girl who kept herself as distant from him as an unnamed constellation.

These things belonged to him. They were his, even if they were breaking him.

He slid off the table.

“Sam,” Aracely said, more concerned than calling him back.

“I'm fine,” he said, not turning around. “I'm fine.”

He left the wisteria-colored house, and crossed feather grass fields toward the woods.

The feeling of Miel's mouth on his turned so solid it felt like the chill of metal. It grew from the brushing of her rose petals to the sting of how the winds blew on the shortest day of the year. It took root in him, digging itself in harder for having almost been torn out. He felt her, warm and alive as the roots of a yew tree.

The way he loved her was his, even if she wasn't. His names were his, all of them.

The moons he'd made were his, to hang or hide or wreck.

From a scarlet oak tree, he took down one that was the dark blue of an indigo milk mushroom's gills, the slice of a crescent moon almost lavender. From maple trees, he took down another the gray of an overcast but rainless day, and another the soft gold of the beech tree outside Miel's window. He found the lilac and pink moons of late spring, the green and yellow ones of the planting season, the amber of fall and the crisp, pale blue of winter. He found ones so small Miel could have hidden them in drawers, and others big enough that he'd forgotten how hard the metal or glass had been to take up the wooden ladder.

There were so many moons. So many lunar seas and shadowed valleys. When they filled his arms and he could not carry any more, he clustered them together at the base of a tree, trying to remember where he'd set each one down so he could come back for them.

The ones near houses he'd leave, so sons and daughters could fall asleep sure the tinted light would keep away their nightmares. But he'd tear down every one he could find in the woods. They cropped up like the eggs he and Miel dyed at Easter and then hid in the church grass for children to find. The only time of year Aracely bought white eggs. One moon reminded him of the ones they colored green with yellow onion. One was the dusk color that came from blueberries. Another was the gold and soft brown of the eggs they dyed with cayenne and turmeric. The next was the deep turquoise that came from red cabbage so purple that the work of the dye seemed like a magic trick.

The woods were grass and leaves, and he was a child trying to find countless eggs. He found one moon, and then spotted another, the trail of them leading him deeper into the trees, until the reds and rust colors were so thick he could barely tell it was daytime.

 

lake of softness

She fell deeper under the water. She was losing not just the bright gold of the trees outside the glass, but every light Sam had ever made. Those moons were how she knew him. Each year on his mother's birthday, he hung a moon the yellow of wild marigolds. The greenish cast of a corn moon told her he couldn't sleep. And a plain white moon, like clean linen, meant he was ready for a new year, breathing out the last of the December air.

He spoke in the light that slipped in through windows. It was his language, his tongue. On her last birthday, he'd left a moon painted dark gold, a honey moon so amber that the light it let off made her sure she had woken up in autumn, months after she'd fallen asleep. When she had a cough so deep in her lungs Aracely would not let her leave her bed, Sam had brought one that looked like sun through lilac blossoms. And each year, during the season when the farms took in their harvest, he hung one that cast a blush over her whole room, to keep away her nightmares of the pumpkins' vines and ribbed shells.

Those moons had been his way of calling her outside. They'd slipped out of their houses each night to find each other. But now the air between them prickled with warning, and she was losing him. He was every light in the sky, and she was losing him.

Cold air swept through the stained glass, and Miel surfaced to it. She floated toward it, the scent of damp leaves and earth flooding away the salt on her skin. She gasped and coughed like water had filled the panels. Inside these walls, she was, in every moment, slipping from her mother's grasp.

But now she was finding her breath.

The lid struck the side of the stained glass coffin, and the impact rattled the frame.

She thought she had made him up, this boy she had imagined out of shadow, the difference between dark and moonlight. His hair, so dark that at night it looked like blue-violet ink. The brown of his forearms and the back of his neck, the color of the cinnamon fiddlehead ferns his mother grew along the side of the house.

But then the dark flash of his hair and his hands turned to the warmth of him. It turned to him setting her arms around him when she couldn't feel them enough to do it herself, and him pulling her out. He had the gravity of the moon in the sky. He could pull on oceans and rivers. He could drag lakes across deserts. There was enough force in him to turn the river that held her to light. He drew the water out of this place where she was forever slipping from her mother's hold and drowning in the dark.

“What happened?” he asked.

She breathed in the warmth that clung to his skin, her forehead on his shoulder, her cheek against his shirt. If she stayed this close to him, he was the whole world. There was no stained glass, there were no pumpkins turning clear and brittle, no gradations of red sweeping through the dark. There was no lost moon, not when he remade it so many times. There was just the strength in him from all those nights taking the wooden ladder from his mother's shed and into the trees. She could feel it in his hands and his arms. She could feel it when she slid her palms over his back.

“Who did this to you?” he asked, his arms crossing her back.

But she only half-registered his words. Her body was sore from fighting the glass, and her skin was stinging with dried salt, and she held on to him hard enough that she felt him startle, his breath catching between them.

“Hey,” he said. “It's okay.” And for the space of his words, they were small again, her soaked in rust-darkened water, and him, the one boy she didn't scare.

She set her mouth against his cheek, kissing him where she'd slapped him, her grasp at taking it back. She would let her whole body turn to roses in exchange for making those few seconds disappear, how she'd struck him when he was hurting.

The steadiness came back into him. He understood. Her hands in his hair or clutching the back of his shirt, the
I'm sorry
folded into how she touched him. And she felt it, how him holding her, his palms making her feel her own body again, this was his
I know,
his
so am I.