Blanca & Roja

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  Page ducked her head further and followed.

  “You two make yourselves at home,” Lynn said.

  I gave her a thank-you smile as she guided the kitchen door shut behind her.

  As the door met the frame, I let the smile fall.

  Roja sank onto a sofa the color of mustard seeds. “I hope it was a really good apple.”

  I sat down next to her, fluffing up the sofa cushion as I landed. “Not helping.”

  “Oh yeah?” Roja looked through a stack of old magazines. “What would help right now? We’re done, you know that, right?”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “We’re the del Cisne girls”—she tipped the magazine toward the kitchen door—“and we’ve been keeping them in our house. Think their grandmothers will get a crowd together to drive us out of town, or will they just do it themselves?”

  “Stop it,” I whispered.

  “Who better to blame for the two of them vanishing into the woods than the creepy family who lives at the edge of it?”

  “Hey.” I lifted a hand in the space between us. “We are not creepy.”

  “Not my word. But it’ll be everyone else’s once we get blamed for this. They’ll all say we’ve been keeping them in our attic.”

  “We don’t have an attic.”

  “You really think anyone will bother to check?”

  She flipped to a yellowed-page spread about how to speckle Easter eggs.

  I resisted the idea that she might be right. But it swept over me, and I fell under.

  If women here were so afraid of us that they didn’t even wear white to their own weddings, how far was it to blaming us for this? What would I tell Lynn, soft, opal-eyed Lynn, about why I’d kept her own grandson from her?

  My sigh fell heavy on the square of sofa cushion between us. “You’re right.”

  “I know I am,” Roja said.

  Tess burst out of the kitchen door. “Where are your parents?” she asked us both.

  “Business,” I said, standing up at the same moment Roja said, “Family funeral.”

  We snapped our heads toward each other.

  When it came to shared lies, we were out of practice.

  Lynn gave the lightest shake of her head, a you-poor-girls look.

  Roja elbowed me so slowly no one else would notice, a prodding for me to welcome Lynn’s pity. This was how we would get out of this. If we didn’t gratefully accept pity, scorn would take its place.

  “Well, now that we’ve covered that.” Tess looked back at Page and Yearling. “You two care to share anything about where you’ve been?”

  I tried to catch Page’s eye. But I couldn’t. She and Yearling were swapping looks, the same unspoken language my sister and I had shared our whole lives.

  I half turned my head toward Roja, trying to ask her a question without saying it. What had the four of them been talking about in the kitchen a minute ago if not where Page and Barclay had been?

  Then the answer came, cut so clearly I wondered if maybe I still knew how to hear Roja without her talking.

  Maybe Roja had been right. Tess and Lynn must have wanted to know if my sister and I had been hurting their grandsons, if we’d been keeping them when they did not want to be kept.

  We were the del Cisne girls, the swan daughters. I understood it as a fair question, even as I took the sting of it.

  Tess watched Yearling, still waiting for an answer. Lynn gave Page an encouraging nod, like she could begin whenever she was ready. But Tess didn’t lift her stare off Yearling. He was older, so he took the brunt of explaining.

  “It’s a long story,” he said.

  Tess sat down on the other sofa. “Then start talking.”

  YEARLING

  I’d been in Lynn Ashby’s house with Page as often as I’d been in his parents’ house. But now it seemed like a landscape that had shifted when I had my back turned.

  There were still fixed points. The walls, with their patches of sun-faded wallpaper. The stairs that I could mark without looking. The sink that dripped so persistently Lynn had given up trying to fix it and just put a watering can under it. But there were other things that seemed like they’d just turned up here, like a magician had made them vanish from my grandmother’s house and reappear in Lynn Ashby’s. Stacks of books leaned against either side of the full bookshelf, one of which I almost toppled. The dresser that used to be in my grandmother’s room was now a side table in the front hall; I bumped into it in a way that was both startling and familiar, like running into someone I knew on the street. An enormous vase Grandma Tess had bought from a yard sale now sat at the base of the stairs; I skidded to a stop just short of crashing into it.

  But there were things my hands remembered. Even with my grandmother’s life moved into Lynn Ashby’s house, they remembered. I found the box of old clothes my grandmother never opened. The plain linen dress she’d married my grandfather in, the wool skirts she’d worn at the all-girls college, the first woman in our family to get past high school.

  I wondered if Lynn Ashby and my grandmother being together was new, or if I’d been that slow to notice. A small, dust-frosted room at the back of the house held stacked cartons and old citrus crates. It all sat quiet, the only noise coming off the kitchen where Lynn and my grandmother asked the del Cisne girls a hundred questions.

  Mostly, they were asking Blanca. Roja had gotten distracted with one of my grandmother’s books of fairy tales and was flipping through for “Snow-White and Rose-Red.” Not that I blamed her. My pieced-together version probably left her wondering how much I’d just made up.

  My fingers found the envelope at the bottom of a box. When I pulled it out, the smell of my grandmother’s perfumes—the powdery, flowery one she’d worn in college, the ambery one her mother gave her when she got married—drifted out.

  The floorboards in the doorway creaked.

  Page took another step into the room, hands in his pockets. “What’s that?”

  I tucked the flaps of cardboard under each other to close the box. “Nothing.”

  “Don’t lie to me when you know I won’t believe it.”

  If I told Page this, I’d have to tell him everything. How I’d almost killed Liam. How Liam had probably been ready to kill me.

  “I don’t want you to worry about it,” I said.

  “I’m already worried about it. And about you. You’ve been hiding something since you left, and I keep waiting for you to tell me whenever you’re ready but I’m starting to think that’s never going to happen.”

  “Page,” I said. It sounded more like a warning than I meant it to. “You don’t need to know. I don’t want you to know. It’s better that way.”

  “Better for who?” Page asked. “Your family? Because it’s not you and it’s not me.”

  “It’s about my family.” I slid the box back toward the wall. “I want you as far from them as you can get. Better yet, as far from me as you can get. I’ve never done you any favors.”

  “Are you serious?” Page asked. “It was being around you that stopped everyone at school from giving me hell. You really don’t know that?”

  The words stung more than they should have. Knowing what little I had done right for Page threw into sharper contrast all the ways I had failed him.

  “I would have been there,” Page said. “Whatever it was, I would have been there.”

  “I didn’t want you involved, okay?”

  “Barclay.” Page laughed. “I went into the woods with you. How much more involved can I get?”

  I lowered my voice. “You had enough going on. I didn’t want to put this on you. Not with everything going on with your family.”

  “What was going on with my family is they were nervous around me. I could handle it. I didn’t need you to do it for me. Your family, though…”

  Page went quiet, like he didn’t want to say it any more than I wanted to hear it.

  “Yeah, well, how about your family?” I asked
. “Your mom and dad? They should’ve just taken you as you are. Everyone should. Screw anyone who can’t.”

  This time Page’s laugh was gentle, tolerating. “You don’t get it.” He shook his head. “You never have. You think you can just cut a path for me in the world and nothing will ever get in the way. But when you’re like me, when you’re anything other than what everyone thinks you should be, you don’t always get to make those kinds of demands. I don’t get to say ‘screw it’ to anyone who doesn’t just accept me, not in a town this small. Maybe I should, but I don’t think I’ll get anywhere that way. You know how I get somewhere? Finding people who do. My grandmother. Your grandmother. You. Blanca.”

  “And Roja,” I said.

  Page hesitated. “I don’t know about her.”

  “Why not?”

  “I just don’t trust her.”

  “Why?” The word came out bitter and sharp. “Because she’s not Blanca?”

  I could see Page holding his tongue against his teeth. “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Then what did you mean?” I asked.

  “I trust her fine,” Page said. “I don’t trust her with you.”

  That was probably the nicest way Page could think of to tell me I was becoming pathetic. An hour ago I was looking at a bottle of Cheerwine in Lynn’s fridge because it was the color of Roja’s hair.

  I looked up, and all I saw were the boxes in this room, the mixing together of Grandma Tess’s stuff with Lynn Ashby’s.

  I laughed. I couldn’t not.

  “What?” Page asked.

  “That day behind the school,” I said. “That was about the two of them, wasn’t it?”

  Page cringed, but was smiling. “Sorry.”

  Now I couldn’t help laughing about it. “What was that? You thought my grandmother was trying to get yours to run off with her?”

  “That was how my mom made it sound.”

  “It looks pretty mutual to me.”

  “Yeah, I guess you didn’t deserve that. I’d do it again, though.”

  “Thanks a lot,” I said. “Why?”

  “Because I don’t think I ever would’ve talked to you otherwise. I don’t think you would’ve talked to me, either.”

  I shrugged, my way of saying Fair point.

  “Barclay.” Page’s stare caught the envelope again. “What is that?”

  I picked it up. I couldn’t act like it wasn’t there anymore. “Everything. The whole reason Liam wishes I’d fall off the face of the earth.”

  “What are you talking about?” Page asked.

  I tapped the edge against my palm, a nervous habit that showed up every time I handled this envelope. “It’s stuff about my family.”

  “Then show it to Tess,” Page said. “She’ll know what to do.”

  “My parents already hate her. And she’s with Lynn now, so anything that blows back on my grandmother blows back on yours.”

  She’s with Lynn now. The words on my tongue felt unfamiliar, my mouth getting used to the shape of them. They brought with them the bitter tang of wondering if my grandmother had been lonely in the years between when my grandfather died and when she started her life on the north side of the Ashby orchard.

  “How did you get all that?” Page asked.

  “How do you think? I took it.”

  “No,” Page said. “I mean why’d you go looking for it in the first place?”

  I breathed out. “When I first heard my father and my uncle talking, I just wanted to know what happened. What went on that they didn’t want anyone hearing about, you know? But the more I found, the worse it got.”

  “So what do you want now?”

  I looked down at the envelope. Once it had been the color of vanilla wafer cookies, but age had faded it. “I want them not to get away with it.”

  “With what?” Page asked.

  The envelope rested light in my hands. For a minute I made a wish like a little kid would, that the papers in my hands would just fly off like they were wings, taking everything I knew with them.

  But it had too much weight to it now. I thought I could keep it away from Page, but it had drawn him into the woods with me.

  I owed him this.

  I slid my thumb under the flap and ripped it away. I pulled out the stack of papers and set them in Page’s hands.

  Page flipped through the photocopies of sales records, check stubs, memorandums on letterhead, handwritten notes on plain paper or the backs of envelopes or bar napkins.

  “What is all this?” Page asked. Official language cluttered the pages. Anything handwritten had gone grainy from the copier. My faded highlighting and pen marks yellowed and circled certain lines.

  I couldn’t look at it all for too long. I was still getting used to how my eyes worked now, and if I stared at a printed page the wrong way, the words blurred.

  But even without looking, I knew what it said. I knew it as well as Tess knew the stories she used to tell Liam and me.

  “It’s proof,” I said.

  “Of what?” Page asked.

  “Everything my family built—their business, their money, their name—they built all of it on lies.”

  “Is that really news to you?” Page asked. “Your mother leaves coats at parties and doesn’t bother going back for them. You think that kind of money gets made by telling the truth?”

  “I’m not just talking about lies,” I said. “I’m talking about fraud.”

  Page’s eyes flashed a harder color, a grayer brown. “What?”

  The details still drifted through my dreams. My father and uncle had invented places they knew would never exist. They had made up towns that would never be anything more than names. Towns my father and uncle had talked about as though they were months from being built.

  “They sold people land in the middle of nowhere and pretended they had plans to develop it,” I said. “And I’m not talking about middle of nowhere like here. I really mean middle of nowhere. No roads go out there, not even dirt or gravel. No wells, no electricity, nothing.”

  “How?” Page asked, still looking at the papers.

  “They talked people into buying land with all these promises about highways and schools and streets with all these new homes,” I said. “It’s like ghost towns in reverse. Twenty years later, they’re still nothing. People sank their savings into these lots, thinking they could move there or sell them at a profit when the roads got built. But no one ever built the roads, or the wells, or brought in power. No one ever intended to.”

  “But what happened when everyone found out?” Page asked.

  “They didn’t.” I worked at the corner of a photocopy, one of the handwritten notes. “My father and my uncle and their partners pretended that the builds fell through or got delayed. They said they couldn’t get the permits for the roads or the wells or the power lines. They said it might take a while, but that it was all a good long-term investment. They made all these promises that everyone’s children or grandchildren would see the profits. But all those plots are still worthless. They’re still in the middle of nowhere and there’s not even a way to get to them. But a lot of those people are still waiting. They still think those towns will get built and they’ll make all their money back and more.”

  “This”—Page stumbled on the word—“this is your family’s business?”

  He didn’t try to shear the horror off his words. I saw it clicking in him, the dry truth of all this, barren as those squares of desert.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But this is how they got started.”

  “And your father and your uncle didn’t want this to get out,” Page said. Not a question.

  “Neither did Liam.”

  Page pulled out a memo, one I had memorized. It had told the men selling the land to push harder, to promise more. On its own it wasn’t damning. But put together with everything else, the lies came forward.

  “And if this does get out,” Page said.

  “Then they’d actu
ally have to answer to everyone they lied to,” I said. “And maybe it’s too late to do anything about it, I don’t know. But everyone would know.”

  All these things were etched into me. Towns that would never be, that stood as endless miles of dirt and sage. Places that existed only on maps my father and uncle drew and in the dreams of the families they sold pieces of them to. Streets they’d called names like Lemon Grove Lane and Jasper Circle, so buyers could imagine writing their future addresses on the upper-left-hand corners of envelopes. The shadows of homes that wouldn’t be built, swing sets in schools that would never exist, lampposts and lawns that were only real to those who still believed.

  My family had turned other people’s dreams into currency.

  “So what do we do with this?” Page asked.

  I lifted my head. The glow from a lamp on my left side turned fuzzy.

  “We?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “You want to help me?”

  “You’re not doing this alone,” Page said.

  “No,” came a voice I couldn’t place as Blanca’s or Roja’s, not at first. “You’re not.”

  I looked to the doorway.

  Blanca. She stood at the threshold.

  Roja stayed a little behind her, hand on the frame.

  “Do you even know what we’re talking about?” I asked, half challenge, half wanting to know how long they’d been listening.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Blanca said. “If you need help, we’re all helping you.”

  “Like hell you are,” I said. “My family got where they are by lying to people. And I don’t even know how they got the land in the first place and how they convinced everyone they had a right to sell it. But I do know we are not people you want to get mixed up with.” I made eye contact with Blanca, then Roja. “Neither of you are getting mixed up in this, okay?”

  “That’s not up to you,” Blanca said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You can’t refuse our help,” Blanca said. “I refuse your refusal.”

  Page pressed his lips together like he was trying not to laugh. Roja’s eyes flicked between the three of us.

  Blanca looked back at her. “How about you?”