This was the cousin who saw me as a traitor.
“Barclay?” He backhanded me, lighter than usual.
I tried to pull myself back to now, to where I was standing at the edge of the parking lot. I tried to anchor myself in the cold shapes of the trees above me, the feeling of the asphalt under my feet, how it cracked and got rough-edged where it gave way to dirt. Anything I could grab on to that would keep me in tonight and not in that day. If I could just stop myself from remembering the rest, it could be almost like it didn’t happen. If the memory just stopped, Liam could leave me there, and that would be it.
But I couldn’t stop it, even weeks later, even after losing my own body and getting it back. That day had the kind of dragging weight I couldn’t fight.
It wrenched me back into it, making me remember in a way so bright and sharp it was like I was on the ground again, trying to stay still. It was the same as a dream, things happening that I couldn’t stop.
In that moment of Liam shaking me, I let my head fall to one side like it would if I was dead.
But I wasn’t dying on his terms.
He grabbed me by my shirt again. “Barclay.” He clutched the side of my neck and felt for my pulse. His hand bore into my stomach to see if I was breathing.
The pain in my ribs tried to make me open my mouth for air. But I held my breath so my body wouldn’t move. I didn’t shudder at the blood from my mouth dripping onto my jaw.
Then I came back to life, my body deciding for me.
I went for him. I got him down on the ground before he understood. And I started hitting him, driving my fists into his jaw until I couldn’t tell how much of the blood on my knuckles was his and how much was mine.
In that minute, he wasn’t just Liam, the cousin who’d turned on me when all I did was try to find out what our fathers didn’t want us to know. He was my uncle, Liam’s father, who’d buried everything so deep, even I had a hard time getting at it. Liam was himself and our fathers, and he was this family, all of us, all the things we’d ever done.
I didn’t stop. I hit him again, fists into his jaw over and over, until he grabbed a rock and drove it toward my temple.
It shook me out of it, the pain cracking down my cheek. It wasn’t a right-on hit, but it got me at an angle hard enough that I felt my skin break.
The force knocked me back.
Liam sat up, jaw looking knocked loose, blood from his nose soaking his lips and chin. His eyelids were already swelling. Those eyes looked at me not with rage or even pain but with disbelief, as though I was some unfamiliar copy of myself.
Then I left him. I left my cousin there, him watching me with this shock, this lack of recognition, like I had become something else right in front of him.
I had hidden from all this for half of fall, in branches or storm-charged nights or the body of a yearling bear.
But now that I was back in my own body, I would never get away from this. The ways I’d turned on my own family. The places I’d bruised and how my skin still remembered. What I’d done to my own cousin, and what he would’ve done to me if I hadn’t.
This was the body I now couldn’t keep still. It wouldn’t take the even breaths I wanted it to. Its heart wouldn’t steady.
I crouched down in the dark, trying to get back the feeling of being a bear, closer to the ground. I raked my hands into my hair, trying to pretend it was fur. I bent my head, but that made breathing harder. It just deepened the pain in my forehead.
I couldn’t breathe enough to keep everything still. It darkened and shifted in that nightmare way, like light was water that could all drain away at once.
“Barclay.”
The sound of my name startled me. It came with her hands on me.
She cleared my hair out of my eyes. “Can you look at me?”
I tried to come back to her, but I couldn’t. I was too deep in that day, the smell of my own bruises, the feeling of cuts on the backs of my hands.
“I can’t,” I said.
“Can you talk to me?” she asked.
I tried to level my breath out enough to say more than two words, but my lungs went tight, like muscles knotting. “I don’t know.”
Now I heard her breathing, slower and off-rhythm from mine.
“Tell me something about Tess,” she said.
I shut my eyes, because I thought that maybe if I forgot that heavy, dulled feeling in my left temple, I would forget what had happened to my left eye, how it had happened, the force Liam brought down on me like he never had in our old fights. But closing my eyes just made me go back there, with Liam holding my shirt collar.
“Like what?” I asked.
“I don’t know, I don’t know her,” Roja said. “You tell me.”
She put her hands on the side of my face and made me tilt my head up.
It let me breathe a little deeper. But my breathing didn’t slow. My lungs felt as small and useless as worn-out party balloons.
“Tell me something about her from when you were a kid,” she said.
I braced my hands harder against my knees. “Like what?”
“Anything you remember.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “She used to tell me and my cousin these stories.”
“What kind of stories?”
Grandma Tess had never seen the point of softening fairy tales. She told me and Liam and our second cousins about doves who pecked out eyes, millstones that fell from the sky, swans that saved their sisters from being burned as witches.
“They were just stories she heard growing up, I guess,” I said.
“Tell me one.”
“Now?” I had to breathe deeper to get the word out.
“Yes,” she said, and right then the lack of pity or sympathy in her voice felt like the best thing anyone had ever done for me. “Now.”
“Are you trying to distract me?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“It’s not working.”
“Well, maybe if you tried telling me one of the stories it would.”
I narrowed my eyes at her without lifting my head. But in that second of glaring at her, my annoyance became something I could hold on to. It was a way out. It broke me out of being frozen. It let me leave this place I was stuck in, afraid to move because I still hadn’t gotten used to how the world looked.
“Fine,” I said.
I followed my memory of those stories, looking for “The Water Nixie” or “The Almond Tree.” I tried to remember how “The Griffin” or “The Star Money” or “The Crystal Ball” went.
But the only one I could grab hold of was the one that had held on to me, the one that had been written so deep into me that the woods turned me into part of it.
“Snow-White and Rose-Red.” The story of two sisters who were as different as their names. Even as a kid I could tell Grandma Tess was using it as a less-than-subtle way to remind Liam and me to get along.
The day I went into the woods, it was the story that chose me.
I took in the fullest breath I could get. “There’re these two sisters, Snow-White and Rose-Red, and they have pretty much nothing in common but they love each other anyway. And one day they get to know this bear. And they let the bear into their house, and they use hazel rods to knock the snow out of the bear’s fur. But they get kinda rough, and they keep beating him with them, and they’re not trying to hurt him, they just don’t know when to stop until he tells them.”
“Why?” Roja asked.
“I don’t know.” I took a slower breath. “I guess the point is everything good can turn into something else.”
“That’s the kind of moral your grandmother wanted you to get out of her stories?”
“I didn’t make it up, okay?”
What I didn’t say was that it was true. Everything you mean well can twist and become something else when you’re not looking. Everything has an edge if you know to watch for it.
“What happens after that?” Roja asked.
“The
bear goes away, and then there’s this goblin or wizard or something, I don’t remember what he was.”
The story wasn’t holding together. I had crushed it in my careless hands and all I had were pieces that didn’t fit.
But Roja just held on to me and asked, “What happens next?”
“The bear’s really a prince who got turned into a bear, and he doesn’t turn back into a prince until he and Snow-White and Rose-Red defeat the wizard, but then he does.” I settled into the unexpected rhythm of my heart rate slowing. “I know, it doesn’t make any sense.”
“These kinds of stories never make any sense,” she said. “Take the Little Mermaid story. She dies and turns to seafood…”
“Sea-foam not seafood.”
“Fine, she turns to sea-foam, because she can’t bring herself to kill the prince, but what’s simpler than that? He forgot her. He didn’t even remember the girl who rescued him. And now she has the enchanted dagger. If it was me, I would’ve just stabbed the bastard.”
I almost choked on my next laugh. “Why am I not surprised?” I got it all out at once, not gasping between words this time.
The pressure lifted off my collarbone.
“You’re okay.” Roja held my hands. “You’re okay.”
ROJA
I pulled the car back to where the Lindleys kept it, slowing over the gravel.
When I set it in park, Yearling still wouldn’t look at me. But he turned his head just enough to leave the sheen on his eyes visible. A film of water caught what little light there was.
He was coming down. But seeing Liam tonight had left him rattled in a way it hadn’t in daylight.
“Thanks,” he said.
“For listening to the strangest fairy tale I’ve ever heard?” I asked.
“I told you,” he said. “Sorry for getting like that.”
“Can we call tonight even?”
“I’d like that.”
I looked at him, finding where the two colors met. Blue like Abuelito’s jeans. Brown like the star anise my mother added to her mole rojo.
This was my chance. I knew it with the same certainty I knew the swans were somewhere in the dark.
I put my hand to his shirt where I thought the moon was. I traced its outline.
Even through his shirt, I could feel it, smooth like scar tissue, warmer at the edges and cooler in the center. The one mark the woods had left on him.
I brushed my thumb over his lower lip and felt a tiny patch of smoother skin, a scar. Then I stayed still. He had to be the one to come closer.
He did. It was slow, but he did.
My eyelashes grazed his cheek, and his brushed my temple.
I waited for one of us to move so I could put my mouth on his. I thought of my tongue finding that scar on his lip.
A rough sound startled us both away from each other, the hard break of a throat being cleared.
We looked up.
Olive Lindley stood in front of the car, arms crossed. The moon bleached the edges of her hair. She set her stance, the heels of her boots stirring the gravel.
For a minute I wished it was Blanca and me in the car. When one of us was covering for the other, we could almost get our stories straight without talking.
Yearling got out of the car, slowly. He hung his head, pieces of his hair shielding his eyes.
I followed.
I held out a pint carton. “Ice cream?”
“No,” Olive said. “How about you introduce your friend?”
Yearling tossed his head to get his hair out of his face, taking a slow breath to keep himself from looking down again.
Olive studied him. I could hear from how her tongue clicked that she was holding it against her cheek.
“Huh,” she said, the sound like a conclusion. No further questions needed. I wondered if she’d felt him this whole time, a nahual stalking the woods and the cranberry bogs.
She held up her hand.
Yearling threw the keys. He was three feet off, but Olive stepped to the side and grabbed them out of the air.
“You need these again, you come to me, you understand?” Olive said.
Yearling nodded.
She gave back one curt nod. I’d seen that nod on him. And I’d seen it before on Olive. I just hadn’t registered how similar they were, how Yearling must have picked it up from her. That flash of similarity made me count everyone who’d been family to Yearling when his own hadn’t bothered. Page. Tess. Olive. He’d had to go looking for what Blanca and I had always gotten from Mamá and Papá, that sense that we were as rare and valuable as star sapphires. They’d given us that with every careful examination of our kindergarten artwork, with every patient explaining of a recipe (Mamá to Blanca) or page in an astronomy book (Papá to me).
“You ever want your job back, you say the word.” Olive looked toward the bog. “I’ve never seen anyone take to corralling berries as fast as you.”
“Thanks,” Yearling said.
Olive let out a slow breath. It sounded like an understanding that Yearling would never come back.
“You look good, kid,” she said.
Yearling’s nod this time was ducking, embarrassed.
We were slipping into tree cover deep enough to keep out the moon, when I heard Olive call my name.
I turned back.
“Take care of him, okay?” she said.
I couldn’t say no to Olive’s face. This was the woman who’d given my grandfather good work, work that didn’t mean extra hours unpaid, or crop dustings that made his coughing come up with pinprick sprays of blood.
I did what I would’ve done no matter what Olive Lindley asked of me.
I said, “I will.”
I looked for that panic in Yearling again, the hard, uneven breathing, him bracing his hands on his knees.
But seeing Olive didn’t leave him like that. He came inside with me, and for the few minutes of eating from ice cream cartons together, I could pretend things that seemed unlikely as fairy tales. I could pretend he and Page had never gone missing. That the swans in the woods were just birds, that Blanca and I didn’t matter to them.
That the señoras had never made us rivals, and my sister had never let them.
I knew I needed to draw him closer to me. But I couldn’t break this, the stillness of right now. Not when I could feel pain waiting at the center of me. Not when I’d just gotten him breathing again.
Yearling let his head fall against the back of the sofa, studying me.
“What?” I asked.
“Your tongue’s blue.”
“It’s the ice cream.” I held out the carton to him.
“No, thanks.”
“Fine.” I tapped the edge of the carton he was holding. “Enjoy your boring ice cream.”
“I like boring ice cream. Food’s not supposed to be blue.”
“Blueberries are blue.”
“Have you ever actually looked at a blueberry? They’re kind of purple.”
“You sit around looking at blueberries?” I asked. “Hard to believe you weren’t more popular.”
“Ouch,” he said, the word cut through with laughing.
For that minute, the most remarkable thing about him was not that the forest had taken him in like a stray fox. It wasn’t even how much he was like the nahuales in my mother’s stories, a wrathful soul in the body of an animal.
The marvel of him was that he was here, with me and not with Blanca.
The phone rang.
I grabbed it before it finished its first ring.
“Get your ass over here,” the voice on the other end said.
I sat up. “Who is this?”
“Tess Holt.”
My throat felt stripped of water and sound.
“Both of you,” she said, “over here, now.”
“What?” I asked.
“You heard me. Lynn Ashby’s house. Now.”
“My sister’s not home.” I leveled my voice. “But when she gets back—”
“Not her and you ‘both of you,’” Tess cut me off. “You and my grandson ‘both of you.’”
She hung up.
“What’s wrong?” Yearling asked.
“You want the good news or the bad news first?” I asked.
“Bad first,” he said. “Always.”
“Great.” I threw a jacket at him. “Because right now that’s the only kind I’ve got.”
BLANCA
Yearling stopped just short of Lynn Ashby’s threshold.
“Don’t be mad at her,” he said, as though Roja needed to be shielded from two grandmothers. “I asked her not to tell anybody.”
“Get in here.” Tess grabbed his upper arm and pulled him past the doorway. The force of her words made him wince, so that when she pulled him into the kind of hard hug I’d seen fathers give sons, he startled.
Tess didn’t cry. She didn’t seem like the kind of woman who ever did. Lynn Ashby did it for her, tears holding to the corners of her eyes like drops of opal, the way they had when she recognized Page.
Lynn Ashby, the woman whose house Tess Holt now lived in. When Page and I had first followed Lynn into the house, I’d passed wooden frames showing Lynn and Tess, sometimes together, sometimes on their own. They stood among the apple trees in sepia. Tess climbed an orchard ladder in black-and-white, her fingers inches from an apple that looked as dark as onyx on film. In an old one, Lynn sat on the edge of a swimming pool in a bathing cap and one-piece, the colors in the photograph faded so the water had become light as a robin’s egg. Only the red of her lipstick had stayed bright.
Another, more recent, showed Lynn resting her cheek in the hollow of Tess’s shoulder, her meringue-white hair brushing Tess’s turtleneck. The sky behind them was gray, their eyes lightly shut. I could almost see the wind fluttering their eyelashes and hair. There was no mistaking their soft, eyes-closed smiles. It wasn’t a look shared by sisters or cousins.
Page toed the floor as she whispered to Yearling, “I didn’t tell them about you.”
“You didn’t have to,” Yearling said when Tess let him go. “She just knows.”
“Damn right, I do.” Tess shooed him toward the kitchen, eyeing Page to go with them.
Blanca & Roja Page 14
