When the Moon was Ours (24 page)

He tried to even out his breathing. But it stayed quick and gasping, and he had to tear the words out. “What if I wanted to stay this way?”

The words came out in a rush of air, and he started coughing. His mouth felt like orange pith, bitter and wrung-out.

He folded his tongue against his teeth, bracing for her questions. Her asking what he meant, and him having to tell her that he wanted not to go back to being Samira, but to go forward as Samir. That being a bacha posh had been a lie he told himself to pretend he was like the girls whose mothers and fathers dressed them as boys, but who then grew up to be women. That he had made the mistake of believing his discomfort would be like theirs; theirs was less often a wish that they could be boys, and more a longing for the way boys were allowed to take up as much space as their bodies could fill.

But he wanted both. He wanted to be a boy who grew into a man, and for there to be space in the world for him.

His mother set down the knife. “Is that really what you want?”

Sam's mouth was still too dry, his breath too used up from saying the words all at once, to answer. The inside of him was cracking and crumbling like the glass and paper frames of his moons.

Later, they would have to talk about this. They would have to talk about how he did not know if he wanted to change his body but he knew he wanted to change his name. How they would have to change his papers to say what they had made everyone believe they already did.

How there was no letting go of Samira, because now she felt like a friend he had imagined to fill the empty space before Miel. But he could not be her.

There was still a part of him, spinning and wondering, that wanted to know how long his mother's calm and patience would stand, how long until it fell or crumbled beneath everything he was. Would it hold if, one day, he drew closer to the faith of her father's family, or her mother's, both these faiths she'd rejected because she was so sure God was bigger than religion? Would it stay if, one day, he left this town to hang moons every place on earth there were trees, or if he never lived anywhere but this place his mother had given him? Would it stand no matter what he became or did not become?

But for right now, that one sentence—
What if I wanted to stay this way?
—was all he had in him. He'd used up all his words.

So he nodded.

“Good,” his mother said.

With that one word, the space around them felt lit with the violet petals and gold threads of all those crocuses. He couldn't see them, not straight on, but he could sense their shape, the soft lines of the flowers and the wisps of glowing orange. They were halfway between living blooms and the arcs of colors his grandmother had drawn him so many years ago.

His mother's nod looked like a surer, quicker version of the one he'd given her. That was his mother, forever taking hesitation and making it into something clean and finished.

“People should know what they want,” she said.

 

bay of dew

Miel was on her knees in Aracely's closet, pulling at her clothes. Aracely's favorite nightgown, black velvet trimming copper satin, heavy and long enough for fall nights. The linen of her morning-glory-purple skirt, the hem stained from how she wore it to work in the garden. The skirt she put on to go out, covered in so many glass beads it looked jeweled with sprays of seawater.

But Miel could not find Leandro. She could not find any trace of her brother. Instead of the pressed clothes their mother always put him in, there were these twirling skirts. Instead of the way he smelled, the strangest mix of wood and powdered sugar from their mother's kitchen, there was the amber of Aracely's perfume. There was none of Leandro left, not because Leandro had become Aracely, but because instead of choosing to be Miel's sister, Aracely had chosen to be a liar.

Everyone called Aracely the kind curandera. Other curanderas made the lovesick drink flaked deer antler, obsidian dust, and batata. That black milk would leave them sick for hours, making it easier to pry the lovesickness loose.

But there was nothing kind about Aracely. Her gentleness was as much of a lie as her name. She could have given herself their mother's name, so Miel would know her. She could have told Miel the day she slipped from the water tower.

She could have been the sister who took her home, put a kettle on the stove. They would have passed back and forth aster honey crystallizing in its glass, the kind Aracely liked as much as Miel. She ate it like candy, and they shared a jar when they stayed up late talking.

Even that memory wasn't soft anymore. Now it was as rough as the crystals along the edge of the aster honey jar.

Aracely's perfume crept into the room, as strong and deep as aged whiskey.

Miel didn't look at her.

Aracely, like Leandro, was the beautiful one of the two of them. Aracely was tall the way Leandro had been tall, even as a child. Aracely glittered with wry mystery the way Leandro glowed with kindness. But instead of Leandro's dark hair, Aracely had so much gold flowing over her shoulders it looked like the crown of her head was spinning it.

Miel knew Aracely as well as she knew the crescent whites of her own fingernails. She knew Aracely's eyes, dark as Spanish molasses. But now Aracely was someone else. She was a woman holding the heart of the brother Miel thought she'd lost.

She remembered the sense of Leandro, how he felt and how he laughed, the softness in his hands. But she didn't remember him well enough to account for all of him. She could not number all the pieces that made him, and then find them all in this woman.

“Do you remember the town we lived in?” Aracely said. There was a sigh under her words, like she didn't know where to start and decided this was as good a place as any.

Miel didn't remember. She remembered more about their family's kitchen than the place she was born.

“It was further up the river,” Aracely said. “That's why no one here recognized you.”

“How did we end up here?” Miel asked.

“It's where the river widens and slows,” Aracely said. “The calmest point before it gets to the sea. Everything stops here.”

Miel felt the flinch of wanting to argue with everything Aracely said, but she knew Aracely was right. The bottom of the river here was cluttered with old nets and washed-away branches and even little boats that had sunk and bobbed along the bottom until they rested here.

“It's where we washed up,” Aracely said.

Now Miel remembered Leandro calling her name, looking for her, and then their mother wailing, screaming when the current stole Leandro, and he could not fight it.

“I know you were trying to save me,” Miel said.

Aracely stepped to the threshold of the closet. “But you don't know how I lived.”

The smile in Aracely's voice—she could hear it—made Miel look up.

“The water took me,” Aracely said. “It saved me.” Her face was full of a soft peace that made Miel think of the few minutes before the sun set. Aracely looked like she was talking about a lover she had parted from, but still thought well of. “It took me. And then it gave me back this way.”

“What do you mean, this way?” Miel asked.

“It let me die as a boy,” Aracely said, “and it gave me back as a woman.”

Miel set her folded hands against her chest. The depths she feared most had given back the brother she lost.

If Miel shut her eyes she could see it, the water stripping her brother down to his heart and building him back up as this woman. It took every part of Leandro, and gave him the body that would become Aracely, building her out of the cold and the dark and the things she had once been.

The water had finished her, spun her into a grown woman during the years she had belonged to it. It had been her cocoon. It had made the raw elements of Leandro into this woman.

There had been so much more to the appearing of this beautiful woman than a summer of gold-winged butterflies.

The butterflies had not brought her here. Yes, they might have turned her hair a color to match them. But they had not given her to this town the way the water had. They were a celebration of her emergence, a sign of her appearing.

Leandro had reappeared as Aracely, an event marked by countless wings.

Miel had fallen out of a metal tower filled with dirt- and rust-darkened water.

“It's not fair,” Miel said.

“What isn't?” Aracely asked.

Miel couldn't remember those years in the water. She couldn't remember the rush of the water that held her being drawn from the river and into the tower. She felt only the dim light of knowing she had half-existed, not breathing because, for that time, she had no heart and lungs. They, like the rest of her, had been folded into the river.

For a while, she had not had a body but had been made of water, before that water gave her back.

“It made you older.” Miel had stayed the same as when the water took her, a little girl who did not grow until she again had her body and breath. “It didn't make me older.”

“It wasn't about it making me older,” Aracely said, though the tightness in her face told Miel there was more than she was willing to say. But this, unlike everything else, was Aracely's business, not Miel's. “It just gave me back as what I was meant to be. And I was glad you were still little. I was glad the water kept you the way you were, that you didn't lose any time.”

Miel searched Aracely's face, the understanding spreading inside her. “You knew I was in there.”

Aracely pursed her lips, looking caught but not ashamed. “There were only so many places you could be. I couldn't find you in the river. But then I stood under that water tower one day, and I could feel you. You were so close I kept thinking I could take your hand.”

“Then you just waited for them to take it down?”

“That water tower was a storm hazard,” Aracely said. “They should've torn it down ages ago. All I had to do was flirt with the right people, and its days were numbered.”

Miel cringed thinking of her brother—no, not her brother, this woman—recognizing her in that stale water. She tried to remember what it felt like to be in there, and couldn't.

She felt hollow with the understanding that her brother, the boy named Leandro, no longer existed. His muscle and bone and heart had been repurposed into making this woman.

“You should've told me,” Miel said.

“When?” Aracely asked. “When would have been a good time to tell you? When you were a little girl, and I looked this different from the brother you knew? When you were a little older? Last week? When was the right time?”

Miel's memory slid back over every time Aracely had opened her mouth, pausing before speaking, and Miel had braced so hard she felt it in her body. Each time, she'd thought Aracely was about to ask her questions that would land too hard for her to catch them. Each time, she'd hoped Aracely would say nothing.

And each time, Aracely had.

Miel had given off such raw fear, such apprehension, that Aracely had never been able to say the words. Miel's panic had scared her off. Miel had startled Aracely with the force of her conviction that for things to be good, they had to stay as they were. They had to be two women who knew just enough but not too much about each other.

In so closely guarding her own secrets, Miel had forbidden the possibility of Aracely ever telling hers. “Please don't blame Sam,” Aracely said. “Be mad at me all you want, but I asked him not to tell you.”

“Why?” Miel asked.

“Because I didn't want him telling you what I couldn't figure out how to tell you myself.”

Aracely sat down on the floor next to Miel, her dark red skirt fluffing like the edges of her zinnias. Her sigh sounded like a breeze wisping at the petals.

Aracely reached for Miel's hand, then hesitated, letting her fingers pause halfway between them. “Do you remember our family?” she asked.

“Not a lot,” Miel said.

“We're a lot of brujos and brujas.”

Miel laughed then, but it came out strained and short.

“We come from a family where everyone has a gift,” Aracely said. “Do you think I just learned how to cure lovesickness? It's in my blood. It's my gift. We all have them
.
Our great-uncles with broken bones. Our cousins with susto.”

Miel reached out for what little she remembered. In the presence of Aracely's voice, it bloomed like a bud opening.

Their relatives had gifts that were useful, without thorns. Miel's great-uncles could cure joints that had gone stiff with age and the ache of old injuries; she had watched them rub chili powder into bent fingers until they came back to life. Her second cousin could bring down any fever, cutting it with the tea of young blossoms.

Her great-grandmother could drive away even the worst nightmares, her garden full of marjoram and moonflower. Miel had been two, maybe three, when her mother had taken her and Leandro to their bisabuela's house; she did not even remember what the old woman looked like. But she remembered that the house had smelled so much like vanilla that the air went down like syrup.

“We're curanderas,” Aracely said. “And curanderos.”

“I'm not a curandera.” Miel turned over her arm, hiding her wrist. “I don't know how to cure anything.”

Aracely folded her hands and set them in her lap, her dark fingers disappearing into the fabric.

“It had been so long,” Aracely said, eyeing Miel's forearm. “Everyone thought the roses had just died out.”

Miel's mother and aunts must have sighed with relief at that, celebrating the other gifts that blessed the family.

“When your first one showed up,” Aracely said, “it'd been a hundred years since anyone in our family had grown one.”

Miel turned her wrist on her lap. The appearance of these petals must have been as sudden and unwelcome as a bat emerging from a dark attic.