Blanca & Roja

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  He rubbed one hand with the other. The small motion drew my eye.

  A reddened bruise crossed his fingers. Even broken from one knuckle to the next, I could make out the mark’s shape.

  A swan’s beak.

  Swans didn’t have the sharp teeth of a wolf or the pointed beak of a hawk. To make that kind of bruise, one must have bitten as hard as its jaws could clamp.

  “Papá,” I said.

  He bristled. “It’s nothing.”

  “They hurt you,” I said. “For coming back?”

  The warmth in me that he would do this, risk returning under the watch of the swans, was weighted with the understanding that they had hurt him for it.

  With los cisnes, nothing was free.

  “You worry about yourself.” He hid his hand in his coat pocket. “None of this is fair, remember that.”

  “You think I ever forget?” I asked. “All this because one poor woman a hundred years ago wanted a daughter?”

  “No,” he said. “I mean this time. This is a test. And if I hadn’t come back, you wouldn’t know the terms. Only your sister would.”

  “There’s no test,” I said. “They’ll just choose one of us.”

  “They might have. But they’re angry with you.”

  “Me?”

  “Not just you. You and your sister.”

  “What did we do?”

  “You thought you could stop them from coming.”

  My lungs took in the smell of the sharpest herbs in my mother’s garden.

  My father knew about that? Had he seen me swallowing the sweetest leaves and Blanca the bitterest? Had he noticed me trying to quiet the jealous part of me that hated how the cygnet liked Blanca better?

  “That was your sister’s decision as much as yours, if not more,” my father said. “She should pay for it, too. She shouldn’t leave you alone in this.”

  “She’s not.”

  “I hope you’re right.” He watched the windows. “But the swans have a way of coming between sisters.”

  “Blanca loves me.”

  “And do you think you’d be the first sisters who loved each other before los cisnes made them enemies?” he asked. “What do you think happens when only one girl can be saved and they both know it?”

  The smell of the bitter greens took on a harder edge.

  We’d been brave and arrogant and sure in a way only young sisters could be.

  “I have to get back,” my father said. “I never thought I’d be this old and sneaking out like I’m your age.”

  “I’ve never snuck out,” I said.

  My deadpan made him laugh, just like I’d hoped.

  I kept that laugh. I kept it as my worry mixed with my certainty that Blanca would never keep secrets from me. They swirled together, oil and water that stayed and would not mix.

  I tried to put my arms around my father again. I tried to remember the way we’d talked about me visiting him when he was old. How we’d trade favorite books. How he’d let me take as many blooms from his rosebushes as I wanted so I could fill my apartment with their perfume.

  None of that would happen if the swans took me.

  My father stopped me. He held me away from him.

  “No,” he said. “You’re not going to act like this is the last time. Because it’s not. You’re going to live.”

  He checked the trees at his back again. He was leaving me now.

  But I need you here, I wanted to tell him. The words echoed, small and too young. I caught them behind my teeth and kept them quiet.

  “I don’t care what those old women told your sister,” he said. “You can survive this.”

  “How?” I asked. Blanca’s conviction that she could save us both had turned to ash in our hands. The swans had come. They wouldn’t leave without one of us, and it would never be Blanca. Perfect, beautiful Blanca, with hair a gold that showed up in our family as rarely as black moonflower bloomed in our gardens.

  The moment the swans came, I had already lost.

  “Let them see you,” my father said. “Let the swans see you’re a girl who deserves to live.”

  Papá set his hand on my shoulder, and I felt like a son taking a father’s benediction. I always thought men would prefer sons if given the choice, that my father just made the best of having daughters. But when he placed the full weight of his hand on my shoulder like that, I believed he wouldn’t have chosen a son in the world over me.

  These were words from a man who’d lost a sister he never spoke of. As a child, he had witnessed the swans’ wrath.

  “Los cisnes will lay you bare,” he said. “They have a way of doing that. Once the swans see you, they’ll decide. So make them recognize you, and respect you.”

  “But how do I do that?”

  “Remember what I always told you.”

  I let my eyes fall shut. “I have teeth.”

  I opened my eyes in time to catch his nod.

  “So use them,” he said.

  BLANCA

  I could do this for Roja. I could hold to my bargain with los cisnes. Reminding myself of these things had a rhythm, an off-and-on like the steady background noise of my heartbeat. If I had to win Barclay Holt’s heart to keep the swans from taking my sister, I could do it.

  And if one of us had to kiss a boy we didn’t want to be kissing, at least it was me.

  So the next time Barclay and I passed each other in the hall downstairs, I did.

  I pretended he was the same as the few boys I’d kissed behind the school after our parents pulled us out. I thought about what to do with my face. I tried to take his lead.

  Except Barclay Holt wasn’t leading. He didn’t move his lips. He didn’t move at all, like I was a wasp that had landed and might sting him if he flinched.

  When I pulled away, his eyes were already open.

  “What was that for?” he asked.

  Embarrassment flushed up my neck, made worse by knowing I had messed this up. An awful first kiss. Now I’d have to try even harder.

  I grabbed for the first lie in reach.

  “They—” I tried to make myself say the words, the swans, los cisnes, but I couldn’t. “They were going after my sister. You scared them off. I don’t know how, but you did. So, thank you.”

  “Oh.” His shoulders relaxed. He now probably thought this was how we greeted each other in my family. “Don’t mention it.”

  I should have eased my fingers up his arm. I should have drawn him close enough to feel my breath on his neck. But the veil of air between us felt hard as the floorboards. All I wanted to do was ask him things. Where’s Page? What happened to Page? Why didn’t Page come back with you?

  The memory of the swans bowing their heads, the small mercy of them granting me what I asked, quieted me. The thin feather-slashes on Roja’s skin kept me silent.

  “Hey,” Barclay said, “do you think maybe you could do me a favor?”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Do you think you could call someone for me?”

  “You don’t want to do it yourself?” I asked.

  “I can’t.”

  It sounded like half a sentence. I waited for the rest.

  He looked at the wall instead of me. “It’s a long story.”

  My impatience chilled what little warmth I had for this boy. But the way he hesitated, hands in his pockets, the pained way he held his shoulders, left me curious.

  “Page Ashby,” he said.

  The name tore through me, fast and hard as hail.

  “Can you just tell him I’m okay?” Barclay asked.

  Any hope that Barclay had the answers I wanted dulled and flickered out. The story of their vanishing, some hint of how Page might come back to us, I thought he carried all of that with him.

  “No,” I managed. “I can’t.”

  “Look,” Barclay said. “I know none of this is your problem, just—” His eyes flashed like he was shuffling through a deck of possible things to say, but all he added was “plea
se.”

  “No,” I said. “I mean I can’t call him.”

  In the slight widening and closing of his eyes, I caught that same hail-streaking feeling. The sense of something breaking through you, leaving a hollow space to mark its path.

  “What?” he asked.

  I resisted the feeling of thawing to Barclay Holt. Even as I tried to hate him for not bringing Page back with him, his concern, his panic, got into me.

  “I thought it was both of you,” I said.

  Any speculation about what had happened always tied Barclay Holt and Page Ashby together. They had disappeared on the same day, so it had always followed that they must have made the same choice or met the same fate.

  They’re never coming back, Cara Miller had whispered, with the kind of finality no one wanted to ask after.

  The river took them, Mr. Garcia had insisted, shaking his head. It was never safe, I’ve been saying that for years.

  They ran away together, Emily Benson’s mother said, smirking like she was impressed. I bet you anything.

  If they ever came back, we’d thought it would be together. Or they’d be lost for good, together.

  Now there was just this bewildered boy standing in our hallway. The other had fallen into the space between rumors and guesses.

  Barclay stayed quiet, his mouth half-open like he was still waiting for words.

  “I thought you’d know,” I said.

  He looked unanchored, like the floor was splintering under him. “What are you talking about?”

  ROJA

  I’d believed my sister. I had always believed her that if we held our hands tightly enough together, the swans could not tear one of us from the other. Maybe I was the dark and she was handfuls of stars, but we were still one night.

  So I wouldn’t have believed it if the cracked door hadn’t shown my sister with Barclay Holt.

  My sister kissing Barclay Holt.

  If she’d wanted him, I would’ve shoved him her way. I would’ve left them alone in the kitchen together, or locked them both out in the back garden.

  But Blanca held her body stiff, a way that got her close but still kept distance between them. Even with her lips against his, she kept her eyes open.

  The truth sank into me like rain into our garden.

  Blanca was kissing a boy she didn’t want.

  My father had been right.

  But now I knew even more than he did.

  Barclay Holt was the blue-eyed boy. Blanca would win him, just like the tall señora had told her to. She would save herself.

  All the rose petals and blackberries we’d eaten at midnight, all the stories we’d made up when the wind shrieked on autumn nights, all of it fell away. It had all turned to ashes the minute the swans arrived.

  YEARLING

  He was gone.

  He hadn’t been in any of the places I’d imagined him. In his room, reading a book with ten paper clips in hand as bookmarks, because there were always pages he wanted to come back to. Down in his family’s kitchen, him and his father saving seeds, wondering what kind of apples they’d grow. Out among the trees whose blooming and grafting seasons Page knew better than I knew anything.

  Everything I had done had so much weight, it had pulled Page off his family’s orchard. The secrets I’d kept had sharp edges I didn’t warn him about. The way I’d left had carved a space so deep he got drawn down into it, like the current of a whirlpool.

  Where are you? I said to the whole world I’d lost him to.

  However much the world off my left side had darkened and gone cloudy, however much I had trouble telling the shade of one tree’s leaves from the next in low light, this made it worse. The loss of Page dimmed everything worse.

  Where is he? I wanted to ask the ground, the air, the sky. I wanted to ask the moon because when Liam and I were little, Grandma Tess used to say the moon saw everything. I wanted to reach my hands into the wood of every tree and feel for the rhythm of Page’s heartbeat. I wanted to break the rocks open like the ones in my cousin’s geode set and see if, instead of amethyst crystals or jagged silica, they held the bright color of Page’s heart.

  I wanted to break open the moon itself, because if Grandma Tess was right, it held all the secrets in the world. Even how I could get someone back when it was my fault he was lost.

  Dammit, Page, what happened to you? I couldn’t tell if I was saying the words or if they were just getting ripped out of me, thinned into quiet once they hit the air.

  Where is he? I asked again.

  But the woods and the whole world didn’t answer.

  PART TWO

  Rose & Snow

  BLANCA

  A knock shuddered the front door.

  I answered expecting one of our cousins. But Tess Holt stood on our front steps.

  I held back a gasp so hard I almost choked on it.

  I couldn’t pretend I didn’t know her. Everybody around here knew the Holts.

  If I could just forget she was a Holt, maybe my throat would ease up.

  Barclay’s grandmother was not the type of grandmother drawn in storybooks of Little Red Riding Hood. She wasn’t like Lynn Ashby, with her whipped-cream hair and her smile like she’d be a grandmother to anyone who didn’t have one.

  Tess Holt had the solid look of a woman whose idea of a whim was hiking the edge of town in winter. She was taller than either of her grandsons. She wore a men’s hunting jacket, and her hair, silver as iron shavings, was held back with a scarf that looked more for use than style.

  “May I help you?” I cringed as soon as I said it. It was a carryover from one of the offices my father kept books for. I answered phones for the weeks Evie Tilton was out having her baby, and ever since, the words May I help you? formed on my tongue when I didn’t know what else to say.

  Tess slid a strap off her shoulder. She set a shotgun into my hands so quickly I didn’t register that I was reaching out to accept it. It was the kind of reflex that came in response to certainty, a meeting of the other person’s expectation that you will do what they want.

  My hands found more wood than metal, blond with age and lacquered with oil. The word ancient came to mind, like this thing was from a time before there were any guns at all. I didn’t even know how it was staying together.

  “What’s this for?” I asked.

  “For however long you two are on your own,” Tess said.

  I chilled at the idea of how much Tess had seen, if she’d been passing close enough to our house to witness our primas taking our mother and father.

  I angled my body so she couldn’t see in the house. “We’re not.”

  “Uh-huh,” Tess said, her tone a warning, but still permissive, like she’d let my underestimation of her slide this once.

  “I don’t want this.” I tried to hand back the old shotgun. Where was my sister right now? She’d know how to hold this thing, how to store it, and, most important of all, how to make sure Tess Holt left with it.

  But I did not have the same conviction as Tess Holt. When I held it to her, she did not open her hands.

  “I can’t,” I said.

  “Sure you can,” Tess said, already shifting her weight, halfway to leaving. “It’s not my favorite. I won’t miss it. You girls can borrow it until your mom and dad come back.”

  “But I don’t know how,” I said.

  “I’m not telling you to take aim at anyone,” Tess said. “So don’t. Just use the look of it to scare off anyone trying to bother you.”

  I settled into the understanding that I might not win. I might have to bring a stranger’s shotgun into my mother’s house.

  “It’s not loaded, is it?” I asked.

  “Birdshot.” Tess crossed the flat stones set into the grass. “So don’t fire at anyone, okay?”

  I fumbled the thing in my hands, scrambling to keep the barrel down. “Why would you load it? I don’t know what to do with this.”

  “All the coyotes and wolves that come down from the
hills in the summer?” Tess said. “You’re telling me your father never taught you how to scare them off? I’ve seen him driving crows out of your mother’s vegetables.”

  When had my father done that? The last time I’d seen him with a shotgun in his hands had been one he borrowed from the cranberry farm. If he’d shown either of us how to shoot it would’ve been Roja, not me.

  “Tess,” I said, following her down the walk. “I’ve never held a gun before.”

  “You’re doing just fine.” She said this without looking back.

  “Tess,” I called after her.

  Grandmother or no grandmother, she moved faster than I could think. Before I could come up with a good reason to go after her, before I could weigh the risks of being a del Cisne girl seen chasing a gringa grandmother with her own shotgun, Tess was gone.

  ROJA

  I saw the upstairs hallway window before I saw Yearling. An arc of five small circles dotted the cold-clouded pane, the five points where the pads of his fingers had been.

  He was watching Tess Holt, his grandmother, cross under the trees that stood between us and the road.

  The thin sun showed me his eyes were glassy. That film of water startled me. In some lights, I still thought of him as a nahual, more warning story than living boy. I thought all feeling in him had turned to instinct, like the nahuales with their animal bodies.

  Yearling’s hand fell to the sill. The heel of his palm pressed against the edge.

  I said his name.

  He jumped back from the window.

  “Don’t do that,” he said, with the clipped sound of catching his breath.

  “Do what?”

  “That,” he said.

  “What?” I asked. Annoyance slid into my voice.

  He sighed, like he was clearing the air between us. “I don’t see so great off my left side. So if you come up on me like that, be noisy about it, okay?”

  Yearling traced shapes on the cold glass, two panes over from where he had warmed it with his palm.

  The oddness of him being in our house came back to me. A boy who’d been lost to all of us had washed up here. Brown hair, and boy-sweat, and secrets he wouldn’t tell us any sooner than the trees would.