Blanca & Roja

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  It was the last proof I needed that this was Barclay Holt. That color was the same as his mother’s. Roja and I had watched her in town as little girls, her winter coat and her gloves deepened and lightened shades of that same blue.

  His eyes were the blue of the filled cranberry bog. They were coins made of sky. They were a color the señoras had fastened to me as though it were a blessing.

  And it was the worst news I’d gotten since the swans arrived.

  ROJA

  I had considered that the yearling bear might have been a nahual, a wrathful spirit living in an animal’s body. That white moon on his chest had warned me.

  But Barclay Holt? The bear—my bear, that soft, patient osezno—was Barclay Holt?

  Somehow, that was so much worse.

  Barclay Holt, a boy who’d gone missing, probably after some argument with his father over whatever rich boys argued about with their fathers. Or just because he was bored. Barclay Holt, who’d taken his best friend with him, because it’s not enough for rich boys to wreck their own families, they have to wreck everyone else’s.

  But I did what he asked. I called him Yearling. I wasn’t giving any reverence to his last name. It brought with it thoughts of the Holts’ great brick houses, Barclay’s mother and aunt in the kinds of shoes and scalloped-hem dresses you couldn’t even buy in this town.

  I brought him inside. It was less kindness and more my fear that someone might see us and wonder what a wicked del Cisne girl had done to this misplaced boy.

  I threw at Yearling whatever clothes I could find. If it was too big, it was his problem. I pulled out a set of Abuelito’s jeans and a flannel shirt, ones he wore to work at the cranberry farm.

  “Thanks,” Yearling said, lowering his head as he buttoned the jeans and shirt onto himself, slipped the belt through the loops.

  The shirt gave off an iron-and-salt smell. A wet bloom showed on the plaid flannel.

  Barclay Holt was bleeding.

  A patch of his shirt was stained red, washed out to rust in the yellow of the lamps. The staining was off-center, the same as the wound on the yearling bear’s back.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  He slid his shirt up, examining gashes that were thin, but deep. Wounds, not the thin slits from the swans’ wings.

  “Older bear didn’t like the look of me,” he said.

  They ran alongside each other, evenly spaced, the other bear’s claw marks. Reddened, raised skin surrounded them.

  “Stay there,” I said.

  “Where do you think I’m going to go?”

  I found gauze, tape, and a bottle of peroxide in the upstairs cabinet.

  “What happened to you?” I asked when I came back, hands full.

  “I just told you.”

  “I meant where have you been.”

  He shrugged. “Just around.”

  Yes. Barclay Holt was going to be exactly as big a pain in the ass as I first thought.

  I streaked the peroxide onto his back, like he was anyone else. A relative. A classmate. A stranger.

  Putting hands on him when he was a boy and not a bear carried the strangeness of who he was and who he was not. He was Barclay. Yearling. He was not a nahual I should be afraid to invite into our house. He would not draw a dozen more slouching nahuales from the forest.

  The gashes turned pale and bubbled white. He set his teeth.

  “You’re getting off easy,” I said. “Blanca uses rubbing alcohol.”

  I taped gauze over the gashes.

  He looked at me through the hair that got in his face. “Thank you.”

  He was shorter than Abuelito had been. When he wore my grandfather’s jeans, the hems trailed on the floor. He was different from the pictures they’d run of him, like the woods had carved him, and put him back not quite like he’d been before. I wondered if his bear’s body had been like this under all the fur. The muscle and sense of being almost grown but still growing.

  He smoothed his shirt down over his back. “Are your parents here?”

  “No.”

  He looked around. “When are they coming back?”

  “They’re not.”

  He stared at me, the light catching first his right eye, then his left.

  “I mean they’re gone for a while,” I said.

  I tried not to stare at the brown in his left eye. The mixing of brown and blue had the swirling look of pictures in my father’s astronomy book, one cloud of cosmic dust colliding with another.

  In Blanca’s storybooks, princesses and heroes had two-color eyes to mark them as special, and they were always described like jewels. A girl with one eye like an emerald and the other like an amethyst. A boy with one eye like a cut sapphire and the other glowing like poured gold.

  But Yearling’s eyes were not polished jewels, each shining and distinct from the other. It was just that blush of brown that made the left different from the right. Both were a blue that was dark but not bright, a river-in-winter color, and that blurred sliver of brown at the lower, outer edge of his left eye looked like the sudden intrusion of summer or fall. Against the blue, the brown looked so warm it made him seem fevered. This wasn’t the deep, clear browns of my family’s eyes. It was a thin crescent, clouded at the edges, like silt gathering in water. Muddy but with a kind of light behind it.

  I wanted to keep looking, not because he was pretty. Because there was something desperate and flickering in his eyes that had nothing to do with the color. I wanted to stay close to it in the same way I liked staring down lightning even when I knew to run from it.

  “Do you want to call your family?” I asked.

  “Not really.”

  “They probably want to know you’re okay.”

  “I’m sure they’re busy,” he said. “Booked solid. You gotta get yourself an appointment months in advance.”

  I didn’t want to laugh, but I did.

  The thin slashes on my skin prickled, both from the swans’ feathers and from the sting of a debt unpaid. Barclay Holt had helped me. I didn’t want to owe him anything. If I had anything to say about it, we were settling up now.

  “Do you need somewhere to stay?” I asked.

  “I’ll figure it out.”

  “Want to stay here?”

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Good point. We’re the del Cisne girls.” I gave him the widened eyes of a vengeful witch. “Who knows what we might turn you into?”

  “I meant why would you let me.”

  “I won’t unless Blanca says yes.” He had to know this. The swans had to know this. There was no putting distance between Blanca and me. Not with the force of all those wings. Not with a bear who became a boy. This once, I could be fearless and sure for her the way she’d always been for me. “If she wants you gone, you’re gone, okay?”

  I turned toward the kitchen, looking for where I’d seen Blanca’s shadow a few minutes ago.

  The kitchen stood empty and dim.

  I checked out the window. My sister stress-gardened, the same way I ate twenty pieces of hard candy before every time we saw the señoras. Maybe Blanca was in the back, tugging out foxglove and bluebell that sprung up where she didn’t want them. When it came to our garden, no one knew better than Blanca that beautiful things so often choked things trying to grow.

  I set my fingers against the chilled glass.

  “Blanca?” I said through the window. But I couldn’t find her.

  Who I saw, instead, coming through the leaves’ shadows, was my father.

  BLANCA

  I waited for them at the pond. When they came they landed like snowdrifts bringing winter with them. They came with the flicking sound of their wings and the wax-and-earth smell of their feathers.

  Some landed and bent their necks to me. Others flitted away, as though I wasn’t worth the attention.

  I winced at the sight of their wings, remembering the fine cuts on Roja’s cheeks and Barclay Holt’s back.

  They wanted me to look
away. They wanted me to understand the threat in those cuts. First, with a thousand rose petals and jagged-edged leaves, I had tried to deny los cisnes their claim on either one of us. So the swans had turned all of this into a game that started with a few words from a señora’s lips. A game I’d refused.

  So they’d gone after the sister I loved.

  “I understand,” I told them, chin lifted. “If you want to hurt me, you’ll hurt her. If I defy you, you’ll hurt her.”

  Their marble-black gazes bore out from their pale bodies. It took all the stillness in me not to rip the finest feathers from the tips of their wings, the ones that had landed sharp on my sister’s skin.

  But I held myself back, fingers interlaced. They knew my heart lived deep in my sister’s rib cage. They could always hurt her to hurt me. They had that on me, like the point of a jewel-hilted knife held between my shoulder blades, perfect and deadly, the pressure slight but never giving.

  I didn’t break my stare away from them. I stayed, feet planted into the ground. I needed them to know I wasn’t afraid. I needed them to think I was worth granting a favor.

  However much I had failed Roja so far, I could still bargain for her life.

  I could not let her smile become a sharp beak, her eyes become swans’ eyes, small and shining. I could not let the brown of her skin be bleached to pale down and her hair turned to feathers.

  I had promised Roja we could fight back, that we would be sisters so much like each other that the swans could never choose.

  It wasn’t a promise I could keep anymore. The swans were here. They never left without taking a daughter with them.

  But I had one more way to save her.

  “I know what you want,” I told the swans.

  Piecing the words together still left me cold. If you’re a good girl, you can get a blue-eyed boy.

  A blue-eyed boy who had appeared the morning after the swans arrived.

  They wanted me to play their game, to give in to the blessing they had probably whispered to the señoras with the brush of their wings.

  “This is how it’s going to go,” I said. “I’ll do what I’m supposed to do. I’ll get him.”

  Now they bent their necks to me. They were listening.

  “And when I do,” I said, reveling in how closely they paid attention, “you’ll take me instead of her.”

  I knew the rest of the tall señora’s words. If you can get a blue-eyed boy, you will save yourself.

  But if I saved myself without saving Roja, I would be a girl hollowed out, a tree withering from its heartwood. When we were small, there were times when our classmates’ mothers could not tell us apart in shadow. Without the difference of color in our hair and skin, we blurred to them. We moved and laughed and reached for sorrel blossoms or books in ways so alike that our silhouettes could have been one girl. Sometimes our mother’s friends would call one of our names across a road at dusk, or whisper it through the low-lit stacks at the library, drawing back when the other turned around in response. It happened so often that until I got taller, my sister and I were used to answering to each other’s names.

  Roja and I had woven the roots of ourselves together so well that if she was ripped from the ground, I would be wrecked.

  Maybe I was born yellow-haired. Maybe Roja was born with skin as brown as our mother’s, and red-stained hair no one else in our family had. Maybe everyone thought they knew us just by looking. To them, Roja’s hair was a sign of her wickedness. To them, I was weak, a girl born without fingernails or teeth sharp enough to get into anything. The swans probably thought they could soak me in water like cotton candy and I would fall apart.

  But I would not let the swans write our story for us.

  A shared gleam passed across the swans’ eyes. They lowered their graceful heads, slowly, but it still was enough to be a nod.

  PAGE

  She still saw me.

  If I thought about it too much, I started to wonder. Because how could she have seen me when I was aspen trees, or water, or wind-weathered stones, or the night air itself? How could she have seen me through bright leaves and frost and the earth freezing at night and coming alive again each morning?

  How could she have seen me when I wasn’t there to see? When the woods took me, I was not Page anymore, not in a way anyone would have recognized. I did not wear the body that had been mine when we saw each other across the pond.

  But I swear she still saw me.

  She stood outside every evening as the sun was falling, arms wrapped around herself against the cold. Her wrists and elbows pinned her sweater to her body. Her hair flew against her cheeks and up off her shoulders like a spray of yellow leaves.

  She shut her eyes and she breathed in, so deeply that when I was the night air itself she breathed me in. She took me into her and she held me there until she had to let me go. When I was rain, she stood out in the downpour with her face upturned, lips parted, hands open. So I filled her palms. I slid onto her tongue and into her mouth.

  By now, I had already lost track of Barclay. At first I kept the sense of him being close. Sometimes I felt us both living in the same tangle of birch roots or the same leash of foxes. But then I lost him. So Blanca del Cisne became the star that drew me closer, whether I was a wolf cub or a clearing of blue chicory or whatever part of the forest would have me.

  There’s a lot of stories around town about the del Cisnes. Some of the whispers say their mother took them out of school to study witchcraft instead of geometry. Others swear their father can grow roses so red because whenever a much-loved family member dies, he plants their still-warm heart in the earth. Others insist that Blanca and Roja eat handfuls of hemlock and moonflower each night at bedtime, the poison as harmless to them as milk.

  But the one story everyone believes is about swans. How every generation one del Cisne girl’s arms turn to wings and her skin to feathers, and no one ever sees her again except in flashes of moon-white over the cranberry bog.

  I guess that was why the woods gave me to Blanca as something she would understand, something written as deeply into her body as the possibility of feathers. The kind of young gray bird that grows into a swan.

  But now the grown swans were here. And with each flutter of their wings, I felt the gray edges of my cygnet’s down vibrating like winter stars. They wouldn’t let me pretend to be one of them, not for long.

  They knew I was on her side, not theirs.

  ROJA

  If I’d been a good sister, my first thought would’ve been to go look for Blanca.

  It wasn’t.

  The shame of how much it wasn’t drew over me like fog. But this moment of my father reappearing wasn’t something I wanted to share. Not right away, not even with Blanca. And definitely not with the boy I’d just brought into our house.

  I threw my arms around my father, tamping down my voice so I wouldn’t exclaim Papá! too loud. “You came back.”

  His hug back was so stiff it felt formal, like I was the daughter of one of the businessmen he kept books for.

  “I don’t have long,” he said, holding me tighter for a second before letting me go. “They don’t know I left.”

  I stepped back, but held on to the edges of his coat. “Where are they keeping you?”

  “Your great-aunt’s house.” He gave me a weary smile. “Don’t worry, we’re fine. The worst thing is I can’t get a moment’s quiet for my work. And I have to sneak my mezcal when no one’s looking.”

  He tried hard with that joke, so I gave him a laugh. All the humor and will in him seemed dimmed by worry and lack of sleep. The brown of his face looked a little grayer, like dust-frosted wood.

  “How can they do that to you?” I asked. “You’re not their children.”

  He took my hands and drew them off his elbows. He checked over his shoulder, as though watching for what might come through the trees.

  “I need to tell you something,” he said.

  His next words billowed around me u
ntil I was veiled in them.

  If you can get a blue-eyed boy, you will save yourself.

  The tall señora had told Blanca something she had not told me. These were the words she had said just before the swans came.

  “Your mother doesn’t know I know,” he said.

  “How do you know, then?” I asked.

  “I heard her talking with your primas,” he said.

  “But why wouldn’t Blanca tell me?” I asked the ground underneath me more than I asked my father.

  But my father answered.

  “It’s all superstition.” He waved a hand. “They’re all so scared of those birds, they’re so afraid of breaking the rules.”

  There was something in how my father held his head, or in the way he didn’t quite keep his eyes on me, when he usually had a stare so unyielding I couldn’t meet it.

  I didn’t know if my father never lied to me, or if he was just good enough at it for me not to know. But I knew now. And where my father did not tell me the truth, I could fill it in.

  It wasn’t superstition. It wasn’t even the swans.

  My mother did not want me to know, because she wanted Blanca to win. Blanca was her favorite, as much as I was Papá’s. She didn’t want to give her up to the swans when she might have a chance of keeping her.

  My father probably thought this would hurt me. He probably thought I hadn’t already noticed.

  “Blanca wouldn’t keep something like that from me,” I said. “Not if she thought it was important.” Blanca wouldn’t even let me hold books far away from my face, warning me it would make my reading headaches worse, or let me suck on lemon wedges on hot days, insisting it would wreck my teeth. If there was anything Blanca thought might hurt me, I heard about it.

  Maybe the tall señora had meant for Blanca to take her words as counsel about los cisnes, but Blanca hadn’t realized it. If she had, she would have said something. I knew it with the same depth and certainty with which I knew my own body. We had always fought the swans together, one overripe or sour blackberry at a time.

  “Look out for yourself anyway,” he said.