Blanca & Roja

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  Blood filled the left side of my mouth. I coughed to keep from choking on the salt. “Top right drawer. On the track.”

  He pulled the drawer out of my dresser and threw it across the floor. It hit the opposite wall, spilling socks onto the baseboard.

  “That’s it.” I tried to stand. “I swear.”

  He let go of my shirt. “If you’re lying—”

  I fell to my hands and knees. “I know.”

  A hard, clattering noise from the del Cisnes’ house broke me out of remembering. It pulled me back. It was the first thing I registered about that sound, how it made the weeks from then until tonight spin down until I was back here.

  The second thing about that noise was that it sounded like someone falling.

  BLANCA

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “You’ll see.” Page held a canning jar by its rusted wire handle, one of my grandfather’s old ones he’d used to hold nails and wood screws. A tea light burned at the bottom, the jar letting out a faint glow the glass tinted blue.

  We were far enough into the trees that I couldn’t see the road.

  I breathed into the bark-and-rain smell. If this was about apples, all I had to do was go with Page, try whatever kind of wild apple she thought I’d like better than the ones at the store, hate it as much as I’d hated that first one, let Page declare me a lost cause, and go home.

  “Almost there,” Page said.

  The lantern lit nothing but the ground cover of pine needles and leaves.

  Page set her hand on the small of my back. She did it like it was only to guide me around rocks or fallen pinecones. But when she did it, I was that glass jar with a candle set inside. The heart of me was as soft as the wax of the tea light.

  I dug my finger between the back edge of my shoe and my heel, and fished out a pond-smooth pebble. “Does my sister know where we are?”

  “I told Barclay. If she asks, he’ll tell her.”

  The tea light burned itself out. Page blew in the jar to cool it and reached a hand in to pick it out. Her fingers glowed in the quarter moonlight.

  I was light for my family. I knew what it was to be stared at, to be the girl from the brown-skinned family but who had yellow hair, sticking out as much but in the opposite way from my sister, with her crushed-blackberry hair. A güera, my grandmother had called me. Lucky, my mother called me.

  But I was not pale like this, colorless as uncooked masa. It almost made me worry for Page, the way my tía worried after anyone who walked in her door. I wanted to share the color of my family with Page the same way my tía fed all visitors, worried each was too thin. It made me look for what little color Page had of her own, to be sure she was really here—the gold of her hair, the gray-brown of her eyes, her lips vivid as carved coral. Page’s paleness made her strange to me, like the cream-white buck Roja and I had spotted in the woods last November.

  Page’s thumb crimped the metal edges over the film of wax the wick couldn’t burn. She blew on it again before she tucked it into the right front pocket of her jeans. She took another tea light from the left, but didn’t light it.

  My eyes tried to adjust to the dark, but I could only see her hands.

  She slid her palm onto my back again, her hand catching in the space between my coat and my body. My shirt rode up from the waist of my skirt.

  At finding my bare skin, she pulled her hand away.

  I should have chosen right then. I should have let the tall señora’s words be the light that led me.

  But I guided Page’s hand to where it had been. Because I was stupid enough to tell myself that this wasn’t too far. I was arrogant enough to believe I could pull myself back.

  I would give myself up to the swans. But before I did, I wanted this one night to know Page Ashby.

  Page stayed, but fidgeted. Her fingers tangled in the eyelet fabric of my shirt. The dark glass jar swung from her other hand.

  She stopped me as the woods thinned, and lit the new candle. The flame took, and I made out the trees before us.

  Not wild apples. An orchard’s rows, stretching out into the dark.

  Page took a deep draw of the air, all leaf- and fruit-sugar-scented. “These are my family’s trees.”

  The canning jar’s light reached the apples on the closest boughs, as dark and heavy as garnet. They were rounder and stouter than the long ones the grocery store carried. Bursts of violet broke up the deep red.

  “They’re beautiful.” I admired the fruit even if I didn’t want to eat it, the way Roja loved the pink-red of pitahaya but hated all the seeds.

  Page cupped a piece of fruit on the highest branch she could reach, twisting her hand just before she pulled it away. “You said you didn’t like apples.”

  “I don’t.”

  “You don’t know that.” She took out a small, wooden-handled kitchen knife. She’d tucked it blade-down into the back pocket of her jeans before we’d left the house, and now she set it against the apple. Her thumb held it in place as the blade glided through. She peeled the round slice away, showing a full moon of yellow fruit.

  She cut another slice just below the first and offered it to me, a circle of gold ringed with violet. “Try it.”

  “When I said I didn’t like apples, I meant I hate apples.”

  “If you hate this one, we can go back to your house.” Page turned the fruit in her hand, showing a patch where the violet turned almost to blue. Pale dots clustered like stars over the indigo skin. The harvest-moon slice reappeared with another half turn of Page’s wrist.

  I bit the smallest piece I could off the edge, deciding whether I should swallow it fast or hold it under my tongue until the taste faded.

  It caught between my back teeth. The juice spread through my mouth. The fruit was coarse and crisp, not soft and mealy. It broke apart on my tongue, more like a cookie, the crumbling of a polvorón, than what I thought of as apple. The sugar was soft, blooming from the tart flavor, like a plum the day before it turns ripe.

  It almost dissolved before I swallowed it.

  “This is an apple?” I asked.

  “Blue Pearmain.” Page took the glass jar’s light deeper into the rows of trees.

  “Okay. You said if I tried it we’d go home.”

  “I said if you didn’t like it we’d go home. Did you like it?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Page set the blue apple in my palm. “Then we’re not going home.”

  ROJA

  I pulled myself upstairs, setting my weight against the old wood of the banister. I curled onto my bed, in the now-empty room I shared with my sister.

  My grandmother had given me her remedio for cramps every month. Then, before she died, she’d taught Blanca, and asked her to make it from the garden every month. And Blanca always did. It didn’t matter if we weren’t talking to each other, if we were arguing over who’d ripped one of our mother’s old party dresses, if we each blamed the other for scaring the wrens from the nest outside the kitchen window.

  Blanca had done it each month, when that slice of moon pulled at me.

  Now, I tried to sleep, wondering where Blanca had gone with Page Ashby, worrying that the wringing and twisting inside me was so loud Yearling could hear it.

  The pain found me. It woke me. The moon reached its fingers through the window and squeezed the pear of my womb so hard the rest of my body went numb. Through the window, the green, almost sweet scent of the woods and the cranberry bogs slanted bitter.

  The orange-slice moon tightened its grip, taking my breath with it.

  I got out of bed, and fell to the floor. I reached for the doorknob and tried to pull myself up along the frame. But that pear inside me grew heavy as solid glass. It dragged me down.

  I crawled along the dark hallway, through squares of moonlight.

  Blanca wasn’t here. I would have to wait out that orange-slice moon.

  My hand reached for the next plank on the dark floor, but there was only empty spac
e. My palm hit the first stair, and my body curled into itself as I fell down the rest.

  The edges scraped my limbs. The splintered corners pulled at my hair. But the moon wouldn’t let me feel it. All the pain I had was in that glass pear, heating to molten.

  My back hit the floor. The air went out of me.

  Blanca wasn’t here. Blanca would never be here again. I had lost her the day the swans came.

  And before the next time this happened, they would take one of us.

  Yearling said my name and slid his hand under my neck. “Don’t try to move.”

  No. He would never fall in love with me like this, with pain pressing into me so hard I couldn’t remember how to be a different girl than I was.

  He’d been sleeping. I could tell from how he was dressed, or not dressed. He wore his jeans but no shirt. He’d been sleeping that way each night, that strange contradiction. The jeans and belt still on, as though he wanted to be ready for night storms or wildfires. The lack of shirt seemed like a concession, a forced effort to look like he’d just fallen asleep in his jeans.

  “I’m calling someone, okay?” he said.

  “Don’t,” I said when I could breathe enough to talk. But that pear still tensed, choking my words. “Please, don’t.”

  “Is it this bad every time?”

  “Es la luna,” I said, the memory of my grandmother’s voice brushing under the words. I looked for the window, but my eyes opened so little that my eyelashes blurred my vision. “It’s pulling at me.”

  Yearling put his hand on the side of my face. “Is it always this bad?”

  I fell beneath one thought, then another, then another, like layers of snow. He was Barclay. Then he was Yearling. Then he was nothing but the bear-boy, the nahual. He would hold me down and drain my blood with his fingers, or put his hand between my hip bones until the pain killed me or he was bored. He’d leave my body for the leaves to bury. He’d go after my sister next.

  I opened my eyes and thought I saw the crescent moon of white on his chest, like he’d had on his fur as a yearling bear. His nahual mark. It was almost the shape of the orange-slice moon, but it lay on its side like a bowl.

  This moon was closer. It could pull on me harder than the one in the sky.

  The faint glow of it sent a cold heat through my body, like touching dry ice. But I couldn’t stop looking at it. In the dark, his body looked almost brown, and the moon stood pale against his skin.

  That moon on his chest was my warning that we would not survive each other.

  He lifted my arm over his head and set it against his shoulder. He picked me up, the pear inside me wrenching at the movement. I didn’t have enough feeling left in my body to fight him. It had all gathered at one point, and left the rest of me empty.

  “It’s okay.” He held me tighter, and my cheek fell against his chest.

  It’s not okay, I said. But the words caught in my throat.

  It was Blanca who was there when I bled for the first time. She didn’t say anything about the splattered red on the bathroom tile. She didn’t say anything about how I bled so much more than she did, more in one day than she bled in a whole month. And when our grandmother was gone, it was Blanca who made me her remedio.

  But Blanca wasn’t here. She would never be here again. And I held my throat tight against sobbing for this, because I did not want the nahual to see how weak and easily broken I was.

  The bear-boy put me in the downstairs bathtub and turned on the faucet. The water went hot, reddening his fingers.

  Heat and water soaked the back of my shirt. The bear-boy set his palm between my hip bones. I braced for the pain to grow until it pulled the rest of my body in.

  The moon gripped me tighter whenever I tried to speak, and no sound came. So I gave in, letting my fingers uncurl from their weak fist. I let my head fall to one side. I couldn’t think past tonight, or remember how the pain usually eased by morning. When the moon wrung me out like this, there was no morning.

  I just wanted it all to stop. The pain, the fear of the swans, the knowledge that no matter who the swans took, I would lose my sister. I had already lost her.

  The heat of the bear-boy’s hand and the water turned me from glass to blood again. The moon in the sky drew back its fingers, and couldn’t reach me.

  He took the back of my neck in his other hand and lifted my head out of the water. “You gotta breathe, okay?” He peeled pieces of wet hair from my face.

  The moon on his chest was as faint as the off-color of a scar. And the moon in the sky was waiting to pull on me again. But it had loosened its hold.

  ROJA

  I did the best I could, everything I could remember from watching my grandmother and then Blanca.

  I knelt in the backyard, the grass prickling my ankles. I filled my hands—lemongrass, parsley, and marjoram in my right, oregano in my left, on its own, so it wouldn’t bruise. It was the thing that would start me bleeding. Everything else would spur the slow unclenching of my womb.

  “You’re gardening?” Yearling asked. “Now?”

  “I’m trying to make what my sister always makes for me.” I brushed my wet hair off my shoulders. It dampened the back of the shirt I’d changed into after Yearling pulled me out of the water.

  The pain had dimmed enough to let me breathe. Yearling—his heat and his hands—had driven it out. But it was waiting.

  Every time Yearling spoke, asking “Can I help you?” or “Do you need me to do something?” I shushed him, fearing that one more break into my memory would make me forget something. Guelder rose. The feathery tufts of lilac chaste tree. The champagne-bubble fluff of fairy candle.

  But he kept asking, so I told him, “Can you boil some water?”

  He nodded once and went back into the house.

  A blunted sound came from the kitchen. Probably Yearling bumping into the counter on his left side. I knew exactly where he was, that edge that stuck out a little farther than it seemed like it should. I saw the same out of both eyes, and I’d hit that counter enough times that I could still feel the bruising.

  I filled my palms with the blush cups and sun-yellow centers of evening primrose. And when I saw Yearling at the stove, his careful hands adjusting the gas flame, I stared without meaning to.

  He looked up. “What?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “It’s just usually my sister doing this with me.”

  “My grandmother says real men know their way around a kitchen.”

  I spilled the leaves and blossoms onto the counter. “I’m sorry. For what I said about you and Tess.”

  “It’s okay,” he said.

  “It’s just”—I grasped for the next words, but the only way I knew how to close the sentence was—“my father.”

  “What about him?” Yearling asked.

  “If I were you, and Tess was him, nothing could stop me from seeing him.” I threw leaves into the almost-boiling pot. “Blanca’s the same way about our mother.”

  Standing at the stove, I remembered the last time I’d been in this kitchen with Yearling.

  I swirled a wood spoon through the water, stirring up the green leaves. “And I’m sorry I said that other thing.”

  “What thing?” he asked.

  “When I said you turning your head was cheating. I didn’t mean it. I don’t know what I’m talking about. Don’t listen to me.”

  He laughed. “Don’t worry about it.”

  I liked his laugh. It wasn’t loud, but not quiet like he was just letting air through his teeth either.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t notice,” I said, “you know, that you couldn’t see out of that side.”

  “It’s not like I expected you to just guess. I’m glad you know now, though.”

  “I’m still sorry.” The steam off the water heated the wooden handle. “I don’t know anything about what it’s like to be you.”

  “And I don’t know what it’s like to be you,” Yearling said.

  The way he said it wa
s so plain, so unguarded, that the spoon slipped from my fingers. The bite of lemongrass and passion flower sharpened the air between us.

  “I don’t understand you,” I said, my breath pressing up under the words, giving away my wonder.

  “There’s not much to understand.”

  “That’s not true,” I said. “Your family”—I thought of overhearing the Holts at a back-to-school night, how they’d said there were some people whose names just weren’t worth learning, and how I was pretty sure they meant people like my mother and father—“you could be like them. And you’re … this, instead.”

  “Thanks?”

  “I mean that as a good thing,” I said. Every time I talked to Yearling I felt like I was reaching into some smoke-glass jar, grabbing at words I couldn’t see and hoping they were the right ones. “You’re not what I expected a Holt to be.”

  “That I’ll take as a compliment.” He took the spoon from me and drew it through the water. “You should eat something. All this won’t get into you unless you eat.”

  I shuddered. This was the only time each month I didn’t want to eat. Food reminded me of the dreams I had when I had cramps, fever dreams where my body was made of the things in my mother’s kitchen. Soft apples were my heart, pomegranate seeds the tender alveoli in my lungs. Queso fresco was the marbled fat padding my hips and breasts, Oaxacan string cheese my ligaments. The fibers of squash and eggplant were my veins. A pear soaked in red wine held the cup of my uterus. When I woke up I couldn’t eat, and ever since, whenever the pain came, I didn’t want anything that looked like anything else. Even cooked corn tortillas were the paler skin on my stomach.

  But there was something I ate sometimes, under the last quarter moon, that looked like no part of my body.

  “Are you in the mood for ice cream?” I asked.

  “That’s what you’ll eat?”

  “Yeah, but it has to be the blue kind.”

  “That really fake-looking turquoise stuff? Don’t tell me that’s your favorite.”

  “Just this time of month.” I pushed myself off the counter, the space between my hips pinching. “What kind do you want me to get you?”