When the Moon was Ours (11 page)

“Dammit, Miel,” Aracely said, her hands on Ms. Owens' shoulders. “Did you hear me? Open the window!”

Ms. Owens sat up, clutching for the pocket square she no longer had. She looked down, startled to find her hands empty.

Miel hadn't even heard Aracely ask the first time. But she could see the startled look in Ms. Owens' face, the way her eyes looked almost white.

Aracely had taken out her lovesickness.

And because Miel hadn't opened the window fast enough, it had struck the glass, and then rushed back into Ms. Owens.

Miel leapt toward the window, pushing up the sash as wide as it went.

“It's okay,” Aracely said to the trembling woman on the table. “It's okay.”

But Ms. Owens' breathing fluttered, and she broke into screaming again.

But Aracely kept her hands on Ms. Owens.

“Lie back down,” she said.

However assuring Aracely's voice sounded, Miel caught the straight line of her back, like a current had gone through her.

Ms. Owens lay down again. But she shivered. She clutched at the air.

Aracely hovered her hands over Ms. Owens, ready to set her palms against her collarbone.

But Miel could see the lovesickness, even more restless now that it had left and rushed back, kicking around inside Ms. Owens.

Ms. Owens sat up, and her hair spilled down her back. “No,” she said. The tightening of her face pinched two more mascara-darkened tears from the corners of her eyes. “I can't.”

She ran out of the indigo room, the waves of her hair sweeping her shoulders.

These were not words Aracely drew from those who got up from her table. Each time Aracely gave a cure, the visitors always said they were tired.
It's so strange, I'm so tired. I've never been this tired.
Aracely's lovesickness cure often made people sleep for days. They felt fine at first, awake and alive, and then they sank into relief and exhaustion. Once the lovesickness cure had made a man fall asleep to the rust-colored leaves of late November and wake to the first snow silvering his window.

But Ms. Owens was running out of the violet house, startled and awake.

The door slammed. Ms. Owens' steps scattered the gravel outside.

The torn pocket square had fallen to the floor.

Miel bent to pick it up.

Aracely's steps clicked on the wooden floor, and Miel looked up. Aracely was rushing toward the front door.

Miel followed her outside, the air cool and green with the smell of grass and light rain.

But Ms. Owens had already started her car. In the distance, the taillights were growing smaller.

“Just let her go,” Miel said. “She'll come back.”

Aracely turned to her, so close Miel could smell the amber of her perfume. “You told me you were ready. You told me you could do this.”

“I thought I was,” Miel said. “I just wasn't paying attention for one second. I'm sorry.”

“Do you realize what you've done?” Aracely looked stricken, possessed, like she'd witnessed sons and daughters scratching out the names on their family's headstones.

“I'm sorry,” Miel said.

“Great,” Aracely said. “You're sorry. Well, that solves everything, doesn't it?”

Miel felt the aftertaste of her own apology turning, growing sharp on her tongue. “Look, if you're so mad at me, why don't you call Sam?” she asked. “He's better at helping you anyway, right?”

“Sam.” Aracely's laugh was a sharp inhale, almost a gasp. “You wanna talk about Sam? How do you think he and his mother have kept that secret this whole time?”

“What are you talking about?” Miel asked.

Aracely grabbed a handful of Miel's sweater and tugged her close, more like she didn't want anyone to hear than to shake Miel.

“Emma Owens is the only one who's seen his real paperwork,” Aracely said, her teeth half-clenched. “She's the reason he's registered as Samir and not Samira.”

The grass under Miel felt soft, like it would turn to water and pull them both under.

“What?” she asked.

“Did you think we got lucky this whole time?” Aracely asked. “That the school just took his mother's word about his name and his date of birth? Sam's mother got away with saying she didn't have the papers for grade school or middle school, but they wouldn't let it go for high school. They wouldn't register him without official documents. So I called in a favor, to the one woman who's on that table more than anyone else. She owed me. She's the only one who knows his birth name. And she's kept quiet because of everything I've done for her, but now…” Aracely's words trailed off, and she looked down the road Ms. Owens had left by.

Now Aracely had failed. So many flawless cures, as much mercy as medicine, and now she had failed. It hadn't just been Aracely's good name resting on her giving a remedio so skilled it felt like a soft, shimmering dream.

It had been the secret name Sam didn't want anyone knowing. And it was Miel's fault.

Dread billowed through her.

Aracely went back inside.

“Can you fix this?” Miel asked, going after her.

Aracely slid into her coat and lifted her hair out from under the green velvet of the collar. “I don't know.” She grabbed her car keys. “But you better hope so.”

 

marsh of sleep

Pain sparked through Miel's wrist, startling her awake. She shuddered at the feeling that there were words she'd just heard, but that she'd been too asleep to hear them, and their echo had become too weak for her to catch now.

She scrambled from where she was curled on the sofa, waiting for Aracely to come home, and she sat up.

“Aracely?” she called toward the door.

She was still breaking through the feeling of being half-asleep. But through the blur she saw the deep red of Ivy's hair.

Ivy was standing over Miel, staring at her wrist. Her eyes looked gray as the pumpkin Peyton had held that night by the water tower. Her expression hovered between satisfied and relieved, like she'd just checked a door or a stove and found that yes, it was locked, yes, the blue gas flame had been turned off.

Without meaning to, Miel followed Ivy's stare. She looked down at her own wrist. Two new leaves lay bright green against her skin. They were young and soft, not yet showing the hard stem of the coming rose.

To Ivy and the rest of the Bonner sisters, those two leaves were evidence that a new rose was growing, that Miel hadn't destroyed another one of the blooms they'd decided was theirs.

Miel looked up, but the copper sweep of Ivy's hair and the gray of her eyes was gone.

She shook off the feeling of sleep, and ran to the back door.

It was a little open, a few inches left between the door and the frame.

The smell of the grass outside, clean and a little sour, filled the hall and the kitchen. But cutting through it was a scent that did not belong in this house. Not the tart fruit smell of the soap she and Aracely used. Not the heavy amber of the glass bottle that sat on Aracely's dresser.

It was a smell like almonds and Easter lilies, the kind of perfume Mrs. Bonner might have bought her daughters, and that the four of them would have passed between them. It held the undertone of Ivy's camellia-scented soap.

Miel left the door open, letting in more of the night air so the perfume would fade. She stood there, waiting for it to become so faint she could tell herself that Aracely, rushing out to Emma Owens' house, had just forgotten to close the door.

 

serpent sea

It took more nerve than Sam had expected. He'd been so sure, looking between Aracely and Miel. But in the morning, that certainty had vanished, the sun and its white-gray light washing it out. Then, at night, it came back, deepening with the sky. By the time he got home from the Bonners' farm, it was spinning inside him, its weight wearing him down.

Later that night, after his mother had gone to sleep, he stepped out into the cold air, filled with the dull spice of falling leaves. He followed the trail of moons toward the wisteria-colored house.

Most nights, he stood outside where Miel could see him, the moon in his hands calling her out into the dark. But tonight he stood in the house's shadow, hands in his pockets, waiting for Miel's light to go off.

Her window went dark, and he knew she was asleep. His fingers brushed the metal in his pocket. His mother and Aracely both kept spare copies of each other's house keys in their kitchen drawers. He'd taken theirs with him in case Aracely was locking her doors earlier now that it was getting dark faster. But she hadn't.

He paused in the doorway. For the first time since he left his house, he felt the force of how strange, how invasive this was. It didn't matter how well he knew Miel. He was walking, without being asked, into a world ruled by women. Even at the threshold he could smell perfume and the sugary fruit scent of their soap.

The longer he stood there, the sharper that hesitation felt. He listened for the creak of floorboards above him. If Aracely had already gone upstairs to bed, he'd turn around, work himself up to this again another night.

The creak of wooden cabinets came from the indigo room. Aracely was awake, still down here.

Sam found her checking her store of eggs.

He wasn't sure if she'd heard him come in the back door. So he knocked on the doorframe, to let her know he was there.

Aracely jumped, clutching the basket of eggs.

“You scared me,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

She had on her coat, the heavy velvet one Miel had found her at a secondhand store last Christmas.

“You going somewhere?” he asked.

“Just got back,” she said, looking down at her coat like she'd forgotten she had it on. “I had to make a house call. What's going on?”

He could map her features against Miel's. Their shoulder blades, Miel's as pronounced as Aracely's even though Aracely was thinner. The slope of their eyebrows. Even the shape of their ears, how the right lobe was a little different from the left.

“Is everything okay?” she asked, slipping out of her coat.

Sam leaned against the doorframe. He hoped it would make him look patient, unhurried, that Aracely wouldn't be able to tell he was using the frame to keep himself steady.

“Who is she to you?” he asked.

Aracely set down the eggs and smoothed a new sheet onto the wooden table. “What are you talking about?”

“Miel,” he said. “Who is she to you? You're not old enough to be her mother, so what is it?”

“I take care of her.” Aracely tugged on the sheet so the edges wouldn't drag on the floor. “Why does it need a name?”

“No, I mean, who are you to her?” he asked.

Her eyes drifted to the walls, that same indigo as the mushrooms his mother found at the markets when she was a child. The caps pale lavender, the gills deep blue-violet, stems bleeding that same color.

“I can't do this right now,” she said. “Can we talk tomorrow?”

“Are you her sister?” he asked. “Cousin? Aunt? I don't know.”

Aracely looked up. “I'm nothing, Sam. I'm a woman who had a room free.”

Sam put his hands in his pockets. “I don't buy it.”

“You don't have to.”

She could not talk him out of this. He would not forget that he'd realized Miel and Aracely both wore out their shoes the same way, the right sole thinning before the left, the wear heavier on the outside edge than the inside. These were things that did not come from living with each other. These were traits and tendencies each had been born with, and there were too many of them.

“You don't owe me the truth,” he said. “But you owe it to her.”

Aracely turned around. “If you think the truth is so great, how about you start?” She scanned his shirt and his jeans. Under her stare, his binder felt a little tighter, his jeans not quite loose enough to hide what he didn't have. “This thing you're doing…”

“It's not a thing,” he said.

Maybe
bacha posh
were words that did not belong to him. They were only his through the stories his grandmother had told him, of families across the border from Peshawar, mothers and fathers dressing their youngest daughters as sons.

But they were so much more his than they were Aracely's. His grandmother's father had welcomed into his home men whose youngest daughters lived as boys until it was time for them to be wives. He had done business with these men. To mark their arrival, Sam's grandmother and great-grandmother had shelled almonds and pistachios for sohan, their whole house sweet with the smell of cardamom.

Miel understood this. That day she'd seen enough of him naked to wonder, when she'd waited for him on the back steps, she'd been quiet enough to let him explain bacha posh. He remembered grasping at the words that would distill it down, words he could get out fast enough to keep her there, to stop her from running back to the violet house and telling him she never wanted to see another of his moons outside her window.

Where my grandmother comes from, sometimes parents who have girls but no boys dress one of their daughters like a son. Then it's like they have a son. She can do things boys can do and girls can't. And she can be a brother to her sisters. Does that make sense?

Miel hadn't been looking at him as he spoke. She'd been looking down, at their legs next to each other, his in jeans, her knees showing at the edge of her skirt.

But she'd nodded, and she'd stayed.

If Miel had been able to understand when she and Sam were both children, Aracely, a grown woman, had no excuse now.

Sam looked back at Aracely. “You don't get to pick apart bacha posh,” he said. “You don't know anything about it.”

“I know enough,” Aracely said. “I asked your mother because I'd never heard of it before.”