“What?” he asked. “You’re not going by yourself.”
“Hey, you want to be older brother to someone, go find Page.”
“You sure you want to go out?” he asked. “You don’t look so good.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“I didn’t mean…” I couldn’t tell if he was blushing or if it was the bloom of heat off the stove. “I meant I can make you something. I promise I can do more than cast-iron pancakes.”
“Trust me,” I said. “There’s nothing you can make me I can eat right now.”
“You’re still not going alone.”
“You’re just planning on taking a stroll with me?” I asked. “Someone will see you.”
“No,” he said, the word so sure I believed it, “they won’t.”
BLANCA
“You gotta bite into this.” Page picked another apple, striped with light green and red like amaranth.
I swallowed to clear the taste of the other apples from my mouth.
First, I lost the mild sugar of the Sweet Sixteen, mixed with the faint acid Page said helped protect it from fire blight. Then the Apricot Apple faded, a taste like the white wine my mother let me and Roja try.
Now the strawberry apple, peridot-green with a cloud of pink-red, flooded me with the scent of dark garden roses. Page picked it gently, like she was cradling a bird.
“The skin bruises easy,” she said. “Usually we need gloves for this one.” Her fingers pulled the knife through, handling this apple even more lightly than the others.
She set a wafer of fruit on my tongue.
“It’s like roses,” I said, the taste bright in my mouth.
“Apples are related to roses,” she said. “Pears, too. My grandma used to put bowls of these in the house instead of flowers. They make a room smell nice just as well.”
Its aftertaste stayed. My mouth was full of rose petals.
Page crouched to the stream at the edge of the orchard and dipped another apple into the moving water.
“Here.” She held the fruit, beaded with cold drops, to my lips.
I set my hand over hers. My teeth broke the skin, releasing the scent of gardenias and citrus trees. The spray of juice, still chilled from the river, bloomed into the taste of grapefruit and raw sugar.
I swallowed and opened my eyes to Page’s shy smile. My gaze crawled along hers to the apple. My bite had exposed a circle of fruit, bright and pink as French tulips.
“It’s not your lipstick.” Page’s mouth fit into the space mine had made. She bit it in almost the same place. The fruit stayed just as pink.
“See?” She took my hand and cupped my palm around the apple again.
“It’s beautiful.”
“They call it Pink Pearl,” she said. “We used to make applesauce with it because of how pretty it’d come out.”
I held it near my nose so I could memorize its scent, like candied violets and sugared lemon peel.
Page interlaced her fingers with mine. Both our palms were sticky with the apples’ sugar. “I got a couple more, if they’re ready. I’d have to check.”
“Page.”
She pulled me through the trees, bending the boughs out of the way so they didn’t catch my hair. “You’ll like them.”
She hung the glass jar’s rusted handle on a low branch.
“This one’s called Maiden Blush, or Lady Blush, depending on who you ask.” She reached up through the branches, her sleeve rustling the dense leaves. “It catches fire blight easy, but if it doesn’t, it keeps its color, even when you dry it.”
A few feet away, a shotgun round clicked into position.
Page froze, her arm still in the tree.
The sound repeated in my head a half dozen times. My body wouldn’t move. My veins were growing through the soles of my feet and into the ground, tangling together with the tree roots.
“You kids think you can just run through here whenever you want?” A woman’s steady steps crushed the fallen leaves.
Page grabbed me and got me in back of her, her body blocking mine. “Don’t.”
An old woman stepped into the ring of the candle’s light. “Page?”
Page’s breath wavered. “Grandma?”
ROJA
I slid into it like a too-hot bath, ignoring the prickling of the water. But now that I was in, the understanding felt like flinching awake.
Barclay Holt and I were stealing a car.
I voiced this objection as he opened the passenger side of the old four-door and waited for me to get in.
“Not stealing,” he said. “We’re just taking it out for a few minutes.”
“This isn’t your car,” I said. In the dark distance, I could make out the cranberry bog. The dulled mint green on the car’s finish told me the rest. “This is Olive Lindley’s, isn’t it?”
He reached under the driver’s seat and found the keys.
“You’ve done this before,” I said.
“She used to let me borrow it.”
“Without asking?”
“Well, no, not if you want to get technical.”
When my grandfather was still alive and working on her farm, there wasn’t a week I didn’t hear Olive’s laugh, rough and generous. Now I only saw her around town, the red-blond of her hair bright against her sun-toughened skin. She dressed the same as her husband and the other men who worked the farm, the same as Abuelito had. Plaid shirts, jeans, work boots.
But at this moment, all I could think of was the look on her face when she got mad. She had a stare that could frost over a crop of tomatoes, one that kept boys from school off her land.
“Do you even know how to drive?” I asked.
“I got my license. And before that I drove the tractor-harvester.”
The diesel engine gave a damp purr, gravel crackling under the tires.
I took what little money I had on me and wouldn’t need for ice cream, and tucked it into the visor.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“If I have to be a thief, I’m at least going to be a considerate one. She’ll see the gas gauge is down.”
“For five miles there and five back? No, she won’t. Nice thought, though.”
“If you put so much as a scratch on this car,” I said, “I will tell her exactly who did it.”
“She’ll never even know,” he said.
I curled into myself. The pain was waiting, but I could still feel the heat of his hand on me, keeping it back.
Yearling turned his shoulder to back out, and eyed the space between my hip bones. “Does this happen a lot?”
“Every month.”
He whistled softly.
We left the Lindley farm behind us.
I looked back at the bog. “So tell me something.”
“You want to be more specific?”
“What was a Holt doing working on a cranberry farm?”
“That was my dad trying to teach me a lesson,” he said. “I got into a fight with this guy at school. And I got caught.”
I gripped the edge of the seat as Yearling pulled onto the road.
He moved his head even more than the driving handbooks said to. He checked over his shoulder even when he wasn’t changing lanes. As his gaze moved between mirrors, his eyelashes flickered like Blanca’s when she was dreaming.
“What are you looking for?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he said, his voice flat. “It’s what I have to do to see everything.”
I sank down in the front seat, wondering how many stupid things I’d have to say before I stopped forgetting how this boy worked, the adjustments he had to make to catch the light and edges of the world around him.
After a few miles, he pulled off the road again.
The front left wheel bumped the curb.
He cringed. “Sorry.”
A neon sign flickered in the shop’s window, letting off the only light in the parking lot.
I unbuckled my seat belt. “What do you want?”
“I don’t care.”
“You can’t not care. It’s ice cream. Everyone cares.”
“I’ll eat anything that’s not pink.”
I rolled my eyes. “Because real men don’t eat pink ice cream?”
“Because pink ice cream tastes like cough syrup.”
“Tell that to my sister. Her and her strawberry milkshakes.” Of course Blanca, with her hair like lemon cotton candy, would love something that sweet, that pastel.
“Strawberry’s the worst.”
“Unless it’s the kind with strawberry pieces in it.”
“Exactly.”
I opened the door. “I’ll be fast.”
“You sure you can walk?”
“Better than you drive.”
“Hey.” He put a hand to his chest like I’d wounded him, but a laugh broke up the word. “I’d like to see you try Olive’s water reel sometime.”
He slumped down far enough in the driver’s seat that anyone watching would think I’d come here alone.
The bell on the shop door rattled when I went in. The lights were on, the freezer case unlocked. But no one was behind the counter.
“Hello?” I said.
The bell on the door sounded again.
“Guess they went out to milk the cows,” said a boy who came in behind me.
I turned around and matched the voice to Liam Holt’s face.
“Are you following me?” I asked.
A girl my age came out from the back. She straightened her necklace. “Hi, Liam.”
“Hi,” he said, the kind of halting “hi” people gave when they didn’t remember someone’s name. The “hi” Mimi Craft’s mother always gave my mother because she thought my mother and Mrs. Becerra-Vasquez looked alike, and she could never remember who was who.
I sorted through pints in the freezer case, wanting Liam to order and leave first.
I found my blue ice cream—it was either “blue moon,” “angel blue,” or “engelblau” depending on who’d packed and scrawled on the carton—and looked through the other kinds.
The girl watched me deliberating. “Our cotton candy flavor’s pretty good.”
“No,” I said. “It’s pink.”
“What?” Liam asked.
“Nothing.” I grabbed four different pints and set them on the counter, taking a guess at what my sister wanted and what Page liked.
“Are you eating all of that yourself?” Liam asked.
“Mind your own business.”
I went back to browsing the freezer case until Liam left.
“How much is that?” I asked the girl, watching Liam get in his car.
The girl stacked the pints in a paper bag. “He took care of it.”
“He did?” I looked out into the parking lot.
“He’s just like that.” There was no jealousy in her voice, just pride, like Liam was something to put in a town brochure. A three-hundred-year-old tree. A train car made into a house. A swing set that had withstood gale-force storms and termites.
I held the bag away from my body so it wouldn’t take the heat from between my hips. “He’s just like something.”
Liam waited outside, the engine of his shined-up car humming. Its sound was a dull whirr, not the loud, throaty rhythm I loved hearing every time Olive Lindley drove by.
“Do you need a ride?” Liam asked.
“No,” I said. “Thanks for the ice cream.”
“Are you ever going to stop hating me?”
I thought of his friends, of brooms shoved into lockers. “Didn’t you ever hear that absence makes the heart grow fonder?”
“Then I’d better start now.” He shifted into gear. “This could take a lot of absence.”
I laughed before I could help it.
He pulled onto the road.
I waited for his taillights to fade, then looked for Yearling slouched down in Olive Lindley’s driver’s seat.
He wasn’t there.
Or in the backseat.
Or anywhere near the car.
I scanned the neon-lighted front of the ice cream place, the closed hardware store, the pharmacy my father did the books for that had moved to the center of town. “Barclay?”
YEARLING
I’d shaken myself out of it the last time I’d seen Liam. Page had said my name, and I’d come back.
But now, hiding in the front seat of Olive’s car, seeing my cousin across the dark parking lot, I couldn’t do it.
Especially not after Roja asked how I started working the cranberry harvests. I’d told her I’d gotten into a fight, but not why.
When Liam found out, he had yelled at me for three solid minutes. How stupid can you be? Right there in the middle of school? But when he was done yelling at me he nodded once, the closest he ever got to saying thank you. I nodded back, because for once I had gotten to take someone down for Liam instead of him always doing it for me.
Now it was a memory that bit into me. It felt as ancient as a fossil, something from another time, when Liam didn’t see me as something he had to destroy.
Remembering it made the memory of everything else spin forward. I lost the hundred times we’d thrown punches for each other. I lost the sound of Liam’s laugh, so loud I could hear it through walls. I lost how I was the only one he ever told the truth about navel oranges; Aunt Ava thought he didn’t like them when really he was afraid of the little node of the twin fruit.
Everything I loved about Liam vanished into the thickening dark of what I’d done. Before I could pull myself back, the ache came on in my left temple, and I was slipping into the day the woods took me.
I remembered Liam’s grip crumpling the papers I’d been hiding, him asking, “What were you doing with this?”
Instead of in the parking lot, I was on the floor of my room, saying, “I just wanted to know what happened.”
“It’s none of your business,” Liam said.
“Yes, it is.” And I remembered how much, at that moment, I needed to shut up. Even as I said the words, I had known I needed to shut up. “It’s yours, too. It’s our whole family’s business. Don’t you at least want to know?”
“It’s not yours to know.” His fingernails dug into the skin above my collar. “You’re leaving this alone. Tell me you’re leaving this alone.”
I hated myself for it, how I buckled, how I let the fear put cracks in my voice. But I said it. “I’m leaving this alone.”
I guess I didn’t sell it enough for him to believe me.
Again, I tried to shrug out of the memory. I slouched down deeper into the driver’s seat so I couldn’t see Liam anymore.
But the memory kept going. It played, and it trapped me inside me.
I grabbed at it, trying to shove it back into the dark. But it clung to me. It dragged me down.
It wasn’t that I hadn’t thought of it since the day I went into the woods. But then, I was part of the woods. I was birch trees. I was a yearling bear. I did not have to remember this in my own body. And when I was something other than what I was, the memory didn’t have to be mine. It could belong to anyone.
Now I was me again. The memory wove through the body I’d been in when it happened, and I couldn’t get away from it.
It made me understand how much it was mine. It forced me back into the feeling of Liam’s rage swirling around me. It made the air so thick it seemed like it was turning to water.
I didn’t fight back. Not that day.
“Come on.” Liam had pulled me up by the back of my shirt collar and grabbed my neck like a cat’s scruff. “Let’s go.”
Then I was caught in the part where he dragged me outside. He took me past where my mother’s carefully chosen landscaping ended, and into the trees.
The sight of Roja talking to Liam brought me back.
This was not the front of the del Cisnes’ house. This was not broad daylight. This was my cousin in a dark parking lot with a girl who liked asking questions. And if she asked ones he didn’t lik
e, he’d be out of his car before I could get to her.
When I’d asked questions he didn’t like, Liam became someone I didn’t recognize.
I got out on the far side of Olive’s car and went around in back of the storefronts. Even with the spill of neon light, the shadows were thick enough to hide me. I could do this.
But the memory still followed me. It put me in the moment when the light from our parents’ houses faded behind us.
I’d tried to shrug Liam off. But he had a few inches and a lot of muscle on me. My body went where he wanted it to.
He stopped. I kept moving forward for a second, and his fingers twisted against my skin. He balled his other hand into a fist and hit me in the stomach.
“You’re telling me the truth this time.” He let go of my neck, and I fell. Pine needles pricked my back. Dead leaves cracked under my weight. The pain opened out through my ribs.
“How many copies did you make?” He stood over me and grabbed my collar, lifting my back off the ground.
I held my throat tight. Had he gone through Grandma Tess’s house when she was at church or the store? I pictured him turning up the envelope I hadn’t even told her I’d hidden in her house.
When Liam slammed me down again, one of my shoulder blades hit before the other. My arm caught under my back, wrenching my shoulder and elbow.
I caught my cheek between my teeth just before he kicked my side. My ribs let out a cracking sound like tree branches about to fall. The way it hurt was so sharp and sudden it felt like going into an iced-over pond.
Liam stumbled at the noise and stepped back. I held my rib cage with my free hand. Blood warmed the inside of my mouth. My breathing shortened to gasps because full breaths spread the pain through my chest.
Then he’d started hitting me again. And I prayed to God to help me stay still and hold my breath and not flinch at the bleeding from my mouth and temple. I prayed for my muscles to stop bucking against the pain and just let it weigh me down.
I let my eyes close. My body went slack. Blood from my nose stung my upper lip.
Liam stopped. I didn’t move.
“Barclay?”
I clenched my stomach to keep from coughing. Coughing would spray blood on him and let him know I was awake. He’d think I had spat at him. He’d pull my hand from my chest and crack the rest of my ribs. This wasn’t the cousin I’d fought with my whole life.
Blanca & Roja Page 13
