I drew a line through the fog on the window. “Do you miss her?”
He nodded without looking at me.
Something in me cracked, like ice thawing and splintering. He missed his grandmother in the same way I missed Papá. I still felt the pull of my father leaving, like a little of me had trailed after him. If that was Tess to him—and from the look on his face, she was—how could he let a set of stairs and a front door keep him from seeing her?
“Why don’t you go talk to her?” I asked.
He dropped his hand from the window. “I just can’t.”
YEARLING
It wasn’t like I hadn’t thought of going to Grandma Tess’s before I just let the woods take me. I had. I’d thought of coming in her kitchen door, the thyme-and-juniper smell of her house cutting through the smell of my own sweat.
But then I’d thought of her seeing all the blood on me. I’d thought of how she’d look at me, lips held thin and straight, eyes narrow but watching.
And I couldn’t do it.
I couldn’t do it now, either.
So I stumbled through this house I did not know, knocking my left shoulder on a doorframe, catching my left hip on the corner of a counter so hard I could feel it in the bone. I couldn’t blame it on how many rooms and corners I had to map; the del Cisne house was a lot smaller than my father’s house, which he’d built up an addition at a time in competition with my uncle (my mother and aunt eventually demanded they both stop before the houses became, in their shared word, garish).
But this house was unknown enough that it felt as wide and forbidding as a museum. I had never been in the del Cisne house, so I had no muscle memory for it. I reached for the narrow, worn-wood banister that ran alongside the stairs, and my fingers missed it. I rounded a corner I was sure I knew the shape of and hit it with half my body. I was no match for even the soft things in this house. I saw a cloth-covered chair from one angle, and then from another angle it would seem like it had moved on its own. I missed a woven rug and ended up stumbling on the edge.
When Blanca gave me a kindergarten-teacher-like tour of the house so I would know where everything was, I stayed back like a disinterested student, trying to hide when I rattled a potted plant I hadn’t seen, or knocked a table hard enough for water to slosh up the side of a glass. Her tour didn’t stop me from, an hour later, mistaking the stairwell for a hallway and tripping against it, my shins hitting the hard edges of the steps.
I got a look at myself in the del Cisnes’ bathroom mirror and then wished I hadn’t. I looked tired in a way that made me more tired. The tiny comet-trail scars were still there, pale and faint but there. And even though my eyes were mostly the muddy blue they’d always been, the left one had gone brown at the lower edge. Not the clear, strong-tea brown of Roja del Cisne’s eyes, but reddened, like iron rusting over.
I couldn’t let Tess see it. Because if she saw, I’d have to explain how it happened. And that meant telling her everything.
Thinking of the day the woods took me brought back the stinging pain in my lower eyelid and left temple, like I could still feel the blood getting caught.
I’d really thought I knew what I was doing. I thought I was doing the right thing, for once. But all it got me was the backs of my hands broken open and my ribs cracking like branches.
And it had gotten Page lost, too. The guilt of knowing what Blanca told me bit into me. It pulled me outside and got into me like the bite of winter air.
Somehow, I had dragged Page down with me. I didn’t even know where to start looking. Page could’ve been anything. A stray fox. A handful of quartz gravel at the edge of the pond. A downpour through trees I’d never recognized. And that was if the woods had Page at all.
If there was any chance they did, I had to try.
“Page,” I said to the light between the trees.
If I stood there long enough, I could pretend the wind was answering.
“Page,” I said again, in case he could hear me. “You gotta come back.”
I was talking to the air. I was actually talking to the air. It was the kind of thing that would have made sense for the del Cisnes, who got chased by swans and who could stir up the wind just by walking through the woods. But me? I could almost hear Grandma Tess’s commentary. Try all you want. Around here doesn’t know you like they know those girls.
But I still had to try.
“You can’t get lost,” I told the trees in front of me, hoping the air would carry the words to wherever Page was. If Page was here at all. “Come back.”
BLANCA
The only time Page Ashby and I had ever touched was once when we collided on the sidewalk outside the florist. In my flustered apologies, my attempts to help gather up the notebooks and cereal box I’d knocked out of Page’s arms, all I managed to do was ask insulting questions.
In the rustle of paper, I’d wanted to make Page laugh, to break the quiet between us, as badly as I wanted Mamá’s sleeping cure on full-moon nights.
But the best joke I came up with was “I swear I didn’t wake up this morning thinking, ‘Why don’t I throw myself at him today?’”
Page blinked at me, eyelashes so sun-bleached I had to stare to see them.
I felt around for my mistake.
“‘At her today?’” I tried again, cringing my apology.
As soon as the question was out of my mouth, I wanted to fold myself into my own book bag just so I’d stop talking. I braced for horror on Page’s face, for Page to tell me to mind my own business. I would’ve deserved it.
“Help me out here,” I’d said, biting my lip each time I paused to breathe. I should have bit it hard enough to keep myself from talking. I had to stop talking.
“Are you asking which one’s right?” Page said, with just enough of a laugh under the words that I thought maybe I hadn’t ruined everything.
I nodded, because God knew I wasn’t about to try talking again.
“Both,” Page said, and then, in a show of charm I never would have expected from this pale figure who always walked head-down, smiled at me.
Page took the notebooks, and the cereal probably just picked up from the store. Page walked away, but kept smiling at me over one shoulder for the length of three more sidewalk squares. Yes, I counted. And I swear to la Virgen, if Page had proposed right then I would’ve said yes.
I could almost feel the women in my family looking on. Over Page Ashby, they would have traded either smirks or confused glances. Be a woman or be a man, they would have said, a criticism applied to daughters they thought spent too much time climbing trees, sons they thought spent too much time in their mothers’ kitchens, and children who played dress-up games in both their grandmothers’ old gowns and grandfathers’ slacks. They had little regard for women like Tess Holt in their duck-cloth jackets, or the young men in tight jeans who met at a bar just outside town. My second cousin had only understood her older daughter, the daughter she had once thought to be a son, because she was so much what we thought of as girl—flowered dresses, and white Mary Janes on her brown feet, and a laugh that was tinkling and demure instead of the loud cackle my sister and I shared when a joke surprised us.
But I kept my back to those voices. I looked for Page in town after that, in gray jeans and Mr. Ashby’s hand-me-down high school sweatshirt, fraying at the cuffs, a hundred washes’ worth of soft.
It had just been the one time. I knew I had no right to this sense that the inside of me was flickering out like live ash. I wasn’t anyone close enough to Page to feel what I felt now, all of me breaking open like I was a pomegranate. All of me spilling everywhere like red-jewel seeds.
I’d always thought that if one of our town’s lost sons appeared, they both would. Through all the whispers when I walked past the grocery store or the yarn shop, I believed that.
Now Barclay Holt had come back, and Page Ashby hadn’t. Barclay had no idea how to get Page back, and I tried to quiet how much I held it against him, the blame roiling i
n me.
But I could still do this. I didn’t have to love Barclay. I just had to get him to love me.
I went out. I couldn’t breathe in that house. It held Roja and Barclay and a thousand echoes of the señora’s words. The air thickened, like summer with no open windows.
There was no room for my heart, still full of a boy I’d seen through falling leaves.
My heart was so weighted with everything Page that it was becoming gold and gray and the deep reds of the Ashbys’ apples. My heart wasn’t a living thing anymore. It had turned hard and solid, a silvered box where I kept what little of Page Ashby I could call mine.
Maybe it was this, my jewel box of a heart and everything I set inside, that pulled Page back to me. Like in a storybook, a fairy deciding I was worthy of looking after an enchanted boy.
The woods made Page, out of the white-and-silver lichen trailing off tree branches. They made Page from the sheet of wavering light on the surface of the pond, and the reflection of tall spruce branches with their violet cones. They made Page Ashby out of stars I could not see in the morning. From the wings of dragonflies, as delicate as tissue paper and glass.
A last flash of gray-fluffed cygnet, and then Page was there. Page’s hands, callused from work on the Ashbys’ orchard. Brushfield-blond hair, wind stirring the strands. Shale-colored eyes staring into me like I was the one the woods had just made.
Before I could think about it, I came close enough for my fingers to brush Page’s shoulder, to see if this boy was here or if I had dreamed all of this.
Page let me, and stayed.
PAGE
If I thought about it too hard, I lost it. The Blanca del Cisne I knew turned thin and filmy. Barclay taught me that sometimes looking right at a star makes it harder to see. The light fuzzes out and blurs. But if you look just to the side of it, a little off, it sharpens, and brightens, like watching a firefly’s light.
That’s what it was like with Blanca. If I looked right at her, I lost her. I lost the feeling that she had never forgotten me. But if I caught just the flick of her hair, the lantern-brown of her eyes, the peach-red of her parted lips, I knew.
I could have hidden forever. I could have lived as a brush rabbit, or as streamers of lace lichen. If I stopped being a cygnet, there were other corners of the woods that might take me.
But now there were so many versions of me everyone had made up, before I went away and after. I felt the whispers carried in the air like the electricity before storms. They were static sparking at the edges of my gray down.
I had to be the one to say which Page was true.
I’d followed Barclay to make sure he wasn’t alone. But now Barclay had come out of the woods, the fur of his bear-body falling away.
Now I felt the pull of them, and I rose to it, like surfacing to light from underwater. Blanca, the girl who seemed made out of aspen leaves and the outer bark of silver birches. Barclay, who’d been folded into the woods until there was no him anymore, but now was Barclay again.
And my own draw, the want for my own body, even with all the questions it brought with it. Not my questions; everyone else’s.
But it was still my body.
I felt the woods letting go, the clouds murmuring that it was time to come back. Barclay had left his hiding places. Now I had to.
So I wove myself out of all the gray and silver in the woods. Lace lichen and cygnet’s down. Wolf cubs and river-worn stones. Low pewter clouds and the faint tint of frost on wild grass. I spun back into what I was, like threads taken back from birds’ nests. They came together.
I came together.
And I was Page again.
BLANCA
I brought Page in the back door with me, slipping us through a ribbon of quiet in the house that made me wonder where Roja and Barclay Holt were.
Abuelito’s jeans would never fit Page’s hips. Page was a kind of thin that, in my family, would have been counted as starving. My mother would have pinched Page’s collarbone and asked, Doesn’t anyone feed you? My grandmother would have shoved plates of chiles en nogada at Page, hoping the cream sauce would fatten this boy up. Page’s chest—I tried not to look, but once we were upstairs, I did—was small handfuls of masa.
Page was a shape I’d only ever seen on gringos. Wider shoulders, but thin-framed, and almost flat-looking from the side, at least compared with me and Roja. When someone like that came into our house, the women in my family always worried.
I gave Page a pair of my jeans, straight-legged ones I got from the secondhand shop and that I was pretty sure were a boy’s brand. I gave Page my plainest pair of underwear, white cotton ones I never used unless my blue and yellow ones were all in the wash. And I had to settle for one of Abuelito’s shirts; it would be too big, but I knew the cut and scalloped collars of my shirts and Roja’s would make Page cringe. I remembered Page in school, in town. On weekdays, sweaters and corduroy pants—the corduroy pants drew even more ridicule than Page’s careful study of apples. On weekends, plain sweatshirts, jeans, dirt-scuffed sneakers with blossom petals or leaves caught under the laces.
I could almost hear the swans’ laughter, haunting and musical. Did you think this would be simple? Did you think we would let any bargain you made with us come easily?
The boy I had wanted to come back to us had, at the worst time. Page was here, close enough that my heart felt spun into threads as fine as fairy floss.
And I had to make another boy fall in love with me.
I wanted to go outside and take the swans by their pale, graceful necks. Page is not something for you to play with, I wanted to yell into their pretty faces. Page is a person, not a part of your game.
But they would have thrown their honking cackles in my face. They would have laughed at how I thought I was a girl with any power at all.
When I came in, Page was sitting on the edge of the bathtub, rubbing one foot against the linoleum.
Every curve of Page’s anklebone showed. It looked so sharp, and Page’s skin was pale as peach tulips with the sun coming through them. I worried the bone might break through.
“Here.” I handed over what I’d found.
“Thank you.” Page looked at me with a hint of that smile I remembered, the kind of confidence that filled in all the places I was unsure, and hesitant.
Page had gotten me with that smile. I had never gotten free of it. And now, this close, my veins felt like the shimmering arms of some far galaxy. All stardust and swirling heat.
“Do you want me to…” I twirled my fingers at the door, feeling a kind of awkward so thick it was catching in my throat.
Page laughed. “Does it matter?”
“Good point.” I dropped my hands.
I’d already seen Page naked. But watching someone put on clothes felt as intimate as watching them take them off. So I kept my eyes down.
That made Page laugh again. I liked this about Page Ashby, how even when Page was the one naked, I was the one blushing, and Page was the one laughing.
Page pulled on the jeans, turning away to put the shirt on.
In this light, I caught how there were strands of silver flashing in the blond of Page’s hair. That was something they said about the Ashbys, how they went gray young. Mrs. Ashby’s hair had already turned when she met Page’s father, even though she’d been in her twenties. Instead of thinking she was odd for it, Mr. Ashby had told her she looked like a fairy, or a water sprite, her hair spun out of pond-silver.
“Are you going back home?” I asked.
“No,” Page said.
“Why not?” I asked.
Page finger-combed that silvered blond, uneven from growing out. “Because it’s too hard.”
“For you?” I asked, bracing for the answer. I loved the Mr. and Mrs. Ashby I’d gotten to know through this town’s whispers. The story about how he’d fallen in love with her gone-gray-early hair. The orchard where my mother and I bought apples; she let me pick out the prettiest ones even though she knew I
wouldn’t eat any.
The Ashby boy I’d been too shy to talk to when we were small, my mother prodding, “Say hi, Blanca,” and me hiding in her shadow and the apple trees’.
I did not want Mr. and Mrs. Ashby to be the kind of mother and father who tried to make Page something different. I didn’t want them to have tried shoving Sunday dresses at Page, or putting sewing scissors in Page’s hands when what Page wanted was to tend the grafted trees alongside Mr. Ashby.
But if it was true, I had to hear it. It was Page’s truth to tell.
“No,” Page said, buttoning the last shirt button. “For them. It’s too hard for them.”
I nodded, as though I understood.
“Are you hungry?” I asked without thinking.
Page’s response was a half shrug.
“Sorry,” I said. “Habit.”
“What do you mean?”
“In my family when we don’t know what to do, we try to feed people.”
Page looked down, laughing softly.
I shivered at the familiar sound of that particular laugh, how it mirrored that day on the sidewalk, when I said things that were stupid and wrong and somehow Page turned them into something worth laughing at. I didn’t care if that smile was a little at my expense. I didn’t mind amusing this boy.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“You’ve got to stop saying that.” Page looked up. “What this time?”
“That I…” I stopped. I couldn’t bring myself to use the word naked. “I’m sorry I saw you.”
“Don’t be.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because you don’t look at me like I’m something you’re trying to figure out.”
I watched Page Ashby button the cuffs of my grandfather’s shirt.
“Page?” I asked.
“You’re a boy, right?”
Page nodded. “Yeah.”
“But she or he,” I said, careful on each word, remembering that day in front of the flower shop, “both of those work?”
“Yeah,” Page said, the same kind of level as the first yeah. “Just please don’t call me a girl. Or young lady. They never really fit me.”
Blanca & Roja Page 7
