I let the leaves crunch under my feet, so he’d know I was there. If I came up too quiet, he startled, tensing when my fingers brushed the tips of his fur.
What I brought him, on its own, was never enough to make him get up. I had to prod him. I stroked the fur on his back and talked to him in a voice lower than the wind. “You have to eat, osezno.”
Then he would, the white patch on his chest showing when he lifted his head.
It got colder, red leaves twirling on half-bare branches and unveiling the sky. I brought him a blanket no one would miss. Not because it was not beautiful—Bisabuela Elena’s ojo blankets always were—but because her hands were so quick she’d made ten of them.
I set the blanket over his back. He didn’t flinch at the wool’s weight.
Blanca found me like that, my hands in his fur as I talked to him.
“His mother won’t like that,” she said.
“I haven’t seen his mother,” I said.
But I knew it wasn’t just about that.
Blanca had seen the moon on his chest, too. We were sisters enough to think of the same thing at the same time.
My mother used to tell Blanca and me stories about nahuales. She said they lived among humans but at night became wolves or owls, flying on the wind like la llorona. Sometimes they made children sick and sucked the blood of their parents. Sometimes they withered crops with the touch of their wasted fingers. They drew souls halfway from their sleeping bodies and then dropped them like handfuls of water.
Nahuales filled the ghost stories Blanca and I told each other on fall nights. I swore the man who gave us the eye at the hardware store was a nahual. Blanca and I kept our lamps on all night, dreaming of those feathers and fingers and silver claws. I told her tales of nahual owls hooting laughter when children shrieked at the sight of them. She made up stories of nahual turkeys chasing women who ran from the gleam of their eyes, and their beaks that curved into grins. Those stories made me laugh the most, because I didn’t believe a bird stupid enough to drown in the rain could hurt anyone. (I stopped laughing after our father calmly told us over breakfast one morning that the drowning-in-the-rain was a myth, and that turkeys—and nahual turkeys—were far smarter than they looked.)
Nahuales, to me and Blanca, had always been wrath and cruel mischief. They were stories of poor farmhands whose bodies crawled, still asleep, through grain fields in search of their pilfered souls. They never found them until morning, when the nahuales grew bored hiding them.
“Leave him alone,” Blanca said, her eye still on the curve of white against his brown fur.
“I’m not hurting him,” I said. “He likes me.”
Blanca smiled. She didn’t want to, but she did.
BLANCA
My mother took Roja and me to see the señoras every time we were sick, but I had never gotten used to the way they looked at us. Their gaze still left the back of my neck cold. They stared like they could see our souls through our skin.
The tall, thin one especially. Her sister, the short one, told us stories and gave us sprigs of hierbas to take with us. Her stout frame, as graceful as it was wide, moved through the shop with the sureness of a cat.
But the tall one, I never knew when she might take my chin in her hand and make me look at her.
Today they had summoned us. Just us, without our mother. Roja and I sat in the small room at the front of their shop, wondering why. Our fingers worried at the frayed chairs. We watched the closed door to the room where they gave remedios for susto or winter coughs that went down into the lungs.
Roja leaned into me. “Think they know about my ankle?” she whispered.
I pressed my lips together so I wouldn’t smile. Maybe the señoras had seen Roja walking home, limping on the ankle she’d twisted climbing out our window. It had healed, but I didn’t put it past them to make us tell our mother.
Or maybe they knew I still had a flush of acne between my shoulder blades, and wanted to lecture me about being lazy with the hamamelis. But I couldn’t reach the spot myself, and there was something about asking Roja to spread the witch hazel on me that made things feel backward. She was my little sister. When she got poison oak, I was the one who splashed the señoras’ jars of ocean water onto her back. And I was the one who boiled mejorana for her every month.
I nudged Roja’s shoulder with mine. “Let’s hope it’s not the smoke cure.”
Roja shuddered in a way I could almost feel, the way she did every time she remembered our mother guiding her head down onto the kitchen counter. “I’m never admitting to having an ear infection again.”
“Oh, come on, that can’t be worse than the salt water.”
Roja leaned back, her braid brushing the wall. “I disagree.”
Maybe the señoras had found a remedio for the pain that burrowed into her each month. Maybe they would press their hands into her belly and take it from her. My hope came so sharp that I didn’t dare speak it.
“Think they’re taking another try at my hair?” Roja asked.
“With what this time?” I asked. The señoras had tried everything from coffee and vinegar to manzanilla and walnut shells to darken my sister’s hair. Deepening the red to black, they were certain, would better her temper. “Fountain-pen ink?”
The harder I tried to make her laugh, the more I could forget my worry that I already knew why we were here.
Roja had heard something on the wind the night two boys vanished. She had lain awake, listening to the woods’ whispers, while outside, two boys disappeared so completely it was as though the air had spun them into clouds.
For the last few weeks, everyone had grasped at the small things they thought might tell the story. A shirt left out on a bedroom floor. Scribbles at the edges of lined paper. A book never returned to the library. But by now those scraps had been talked over so many times that they’d worn and frayed. There was nothing left to sift through and speculate on.
“If they ask you about that night, about Page and Barclay—”
Roja cut me off. “You think that’s why we’re here?”
“Nobody knows anything,” I said. “And if they think you do—” I lost the tail of the sentence.
“But I don’t,” Roja said. “I don’t know what I heard. I thought it was…” Now it was Roja who held words on her tongue she could not say.
The swans. Los cisnes.
I scratched at the chair’s worn upholstery, already working myself up to telling the señoras that Roja didn’t know anything about those boys, that the night they vanished had given her nothing more than swirling, shapeless dreams. She’d heard the brushing breath of the wind, too low to be the wail of la llorona but too sharp to be leaves shearing off the trees. That was all. If they thought they were going to tear her open with questions she couldn’t answer, I would shove my way into that room with her.
The door to the room opened.
I squeezed the inside of Roja’s elbow, a years-old habit to tell her not to be afraid.
The tall one set her eyes not on Roja, but on me.
I looked at Roja.
My sister shook her head, her way of telling me she didn’t understand any better than I did.
Maybe I would leave with an order to eat more squash blossoms, or put almond oil on the stretch marks that showed where my hips had come in.
The tall señora took me into the dim room, the walls smelling of sage and soaked wood.
She stared into my eyes longer than usual.
The brown of her eyes gathered what little light the room held, glinting almost yellow. I wondered if maybe she had found, just by looking at me, the only secret I’d ever kept from my sister. That one vanished boy meant more to me than the other.
Not the one everyone talked about.
The one everyone forgot.
I pretended not to listen to the whispers those first weeks, the speculations that these boys had not been taken, had not gotten lost, but that they wanted to be gone from us. They had h
ad a choice, and their choice had been to leave.
I didn’t have a right to let that wound me. I doubted this boy even knew my name.
Now I was sure the señora could see all of this in me.
The silence left my mouth dry. I wished I had something to hold in my hands, to remind me I would not turn to ash or dust under this woman’s stare. Maybe one of the ribbons Roja and I tied to our bedposts when we weren’t wearing them. Or a sweater we shared that smelled like both of us at once. Or my cygnet, his rubbery feet on my palms while his fluffy down brushed my fingers. But I kept losing track of him lately. I would look away, and he would be gone. He would only show up again in our flower border when I gave up hope of finding him.
“You’re growing up to be very beautiful, aren’t you?” the señora asked. She sounded like she had just realized, like she had never quite looked at me.
I caught the twist in her voice, as though growing up beautiful was something I could choose if I wanted it.
If I could have chosen, I would have grown up to look like my mother, like most women in my family. I would have wanted skin the same as hers, the brown of the inside of a walnut shell. I would have wanted her hair that was black by moonlight and brown-gold in the sun.
I stared back at the tall señora, her face as tough as ground masa, her hair streaked with silver.
“You’re going to be a good girl,” she said, “because if you’re a good girl, you can get a blue-eyed boy.”
I tensed to hide my shudder. I didn’t want her to see how the words blue-eyed struck me, the distance they stood from the grayish-brown eyes of a boy I missed.
A sound rose in the room. At first I felt it was coming off the walls, then lifting off the floor. I couldn’t find the source. I couldn’t pin it down.
“And if you can get a blue-eyed boy,” the señora said, “then you will save yourself.”
It sounded like wings.
“No,” I said, backing from both her and the sound. “No. I won’t do it.”
The tall señora did not startle. She only watched me, with a slight lift of her chin.
Her silence pressed more words out of me.
“I won’t do anything that helps me but not my sister.”
The sound lifted from the crisp flapping of a butterfly’s wings. It grew into the hum of dragonflies or hummingbirds, close and loud.
“If there’s a way I can save myself, then she can save herself the same way,” I said, my words higher, more frantic than I planned, so that a choked “Can’t she?” slipped out after.
The señora kept her stare on me for a few more seconds and then turned to the door. She nodded to the short señora, who lifted a ribbon of Roja’s hair and clipped it halfway down.
Roja gave me an eye roll so carefully timed that neither señora noticed. That eye roll spoke of all the rosemary and common nettle and sage they’d tried on that red.
The way Roja could slide a joke between us undetected—a feigned yawn during a boring Sunday school lesson, a perfect impression of how our aunt’s tongue stuck out as she folded letters in thirds—was its own art form. More than once, I’d sat in a church pew biting back a laugh.
But now I couldn’t even offer her a smile.
The tall señora took the lock of hair and shut us both inside the room again, the door closing between me and my sister.
I was still watching the door when I heard the rasping whine of scissors next to my ear.
A length of my own hair fell into the tall señora’s hand. She held both locks, one ribbon of blond and another of red. She brought them over to the blue candle, the one she said had the most pure and blessed flame, and let them catch.
The locks of hair went up, tingeing the air with the bitter smell of used-up matches. I drew back, worried she’d singe her fingers. But she let the candle flame swallow each of them, flaring to blue.
I waited for ash to fall to the wooden table.
The sound rose to the sharp cut of great birds crossing the sky.
Like swans.
The sound of their wings, the whisper of feathers. The noise Roja and I thought we would never hear.
When the twin flames flickered out, they didn’t leave ash.
What fell first was the wisp and vein of a swan’s feather.
Then came the pale lock of my hair.
The flame had burned it up and then turned it back. It had given us this searing proof that the tall señora’s words had landed on me.
I couldn’t give them to the sister I promised I’d save.
ROJA
On the way home, Blanca did not look at me. She folded her arms, hands on her elbows, like ice crystals were frosting the air around her.
“Blanca?” I asked.
She held her arms tighter, and I knew she hadn’t heard me.
I wondered so hard what the tall señora had told her that my brain hummed.
“Did she measure you again?” I asked. Blanca had three and a half inches on me, and the tall señora insisted that if Blanca only held herself straight and drank the right hierbas at bedtime, she could grow another two.
Without looking at me, Blanca shook her head and gave a weak smile. I could see her forcing it, the tension held in her jaw.
“Then what?” I asked. Sometimes the short señora held her responsible for me biting my nails or scratching at the little scars on my knees, as though her good influence should calm my hands. Maybe the clipped lock of my hair was meant as a prop to lecture her, ask why she hadn’t made sure I combed in caléndula every night.
She didn’t answer.
“Blanca,” I said again, when we got closer to the house.
My sister stilled. But not at my voice. She lifted her face toward the sky, like she was watching for a storm.
Then I heard it, the distant flutter of wings.
I shuddered toward the trees, as if those wings might brush my skin and turn me right now.
This was how it happened every time, del Cisne girls hearing the warning in the air, their humming sense of how the swans would soon claim their next daughter.
Swaths of white flashed between the trees.
There, in the deepening blue that comes before every fall evening, I found them. They glided down toward the pond near our house. Their pale bodies stirred the gray-blue mirror of the water. They settled onto the surface, their wings like a snowfall landing all at once.
The light drone of their feathers trembled through my body.
Blanca thought we could keep them away. She thought the small magic of rose petals and our refusal to turn on each other would save us. Once my fifteenth birthday passed with no sign of white wings, she was sure.
But the swans had come.
For a while, they would stay close enough to consider us. They would decide. Then they would take one of us.
And it would be me. My body would turn to feathers and down. And worse than losing myself, I would lose Blanca, the sister who watched birds’ nests for months to figure out if they’d been abandoned. The sister who left bits of ribbons and thread for birds to make new ones. The sister who made me the remedio that got me through the worst night of every month.
As soon as we were upstairs in our room, Blanca shut the door.
She set her back against it, palms pressed flat to the wood.
“Roja,” she said.
I opened my mouth to thank her, for trying as hard as she had. For being so certain I could be saved.
She cut me off.
“Roja”—now she took me by the shoulders, so I had to look at her—“this is not over.”
BLANCA
I had done this. In the morning the swans were still there, the bright white of them sickening in the daylight.
In the moment of the señora telling me those words, in the beating of wings, I had doubted. I had feared los cisnes for that one minute, and that was enough for them to find their way between me and my sister.
It had been enough to seal the tall señora’s
words, for her to give me proof in flame and feather and pieces of our hair. I would survive los cisnes. Roja would not.
I sat on my bed, my temple against the wall. The light from the window touched my lips, and everything in me rang with the understanding that I had brought the swans here. We had gotten past Roja’s birthday; with most del Cisne girls, the swans came days after the youngest sister turned fifteen. But a few words, a chilled gaze from the tall señora, that far-off sound, and I had flinched.
Roja was downstairs, in the small warped-wood-floor room my father had lined with his books and turned into a study. I couldn’t make out their words, but I could hear my father’s low voice, his tone of reassurance that she could survive the swans.
I wondered if he thought of how one sister surviving always meant the other losing herself.
My mother came in and patted my hair like it was a cat’s fur.
“Tan linda,” she said. But her usual way of calling me pretty now held a catch of worry. She had seen the swans, too. She could use words that insisted this was any other fall day, but her voice gave up the fear she’d folded inside her.
I couldn’t look at her. Because I had shown the swans my fear, they would now take either me or my sister. One of us would be lost to our mother and father, and we would both be lost to each other.
“Mija?” my mother said.
I wanted to lock the secret under my tongue. To confess the words would introduce their poison into the air. It was a violet spell, laced with venom and the lie that Roja was the lesser daughter, undeserving of the señoras’ blessings. I didn’t want my mother to breathe that poison any more than I wanted Roja to believe those lies.
But my mother saw the truth stirring and roiling in me. And the words grew so heavy, I couldn’t carry them on my own.
I told her. I admitted that I had heard the swans before they’d arrived. I confessed the words that had brought the brushing noise of feathers. If you’re a good girl, you can get a blue-eyed boy.
My mother drew back. Her hand stayed on my hair.
Her eyes opened wider at me. Not like I had done something terrible. More like she’d put her hand to my forehead and found a high fever.
Blanca & Roja Page 3
