Blanca & Roja

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  ROJA

  The rage I had for Liam whirled and bloomed. It made my heart and blood feel hot as a nebula, a spinning star held in my body. It spread through me so fast it was a sound in my brain, louder than the drone of wings.

  But I had to pretend. To keep Yearling’s cousin from coming after him, I had to convince Liam I had been on his side this whole time.

  I found him filling his car up at the station just outside town.

  “Could you be any stupider?” I asked.

  He slid his wallet back into his pocket. “What, no shotgun this time?”

  “I know what you want,” I said. “And it has nothing to do with making Barclay part of your family again.”

  “Fine,” he said. “Prove it.”

  “I don’t need to.” I pressed the edge out of my voice. “And I don’t really care. You were right the first time. I like the idea of you owing me.”

  “You really expect me to believe that now?”

  “I saved you from yourself. You could’ve killed him. And how would that help you when you need to know what he knows? I can find that out.”

  A considering look worked its way across Liam’s face. I both reveled in a lie well told and sickened at the words I’d made myself say.

  “And now he trusts you,” Liam said, his voice buoyed by realizing.

  “Guess you’re not as stupid as you look.” I leaned against his car to make myself look more careless than I was. “Now get out of my way and let me do what you really want me to do. I’ll find out what he has and what he knows. But you can’t pull anything like that again, okay?”

  He flicked a leaf off his side mirror. “Fine.”

  “Good.” I pushed off his car. “Now stay back this time. I will get you what you want but not if you mess this up. I can’t fix all your mistakes.”

  I turned my back on him and the pump.

  This was what I did best now. I lied. I did it to use Yearling. Now I could do it to save him.

  “I’m not as stupid as you think I am,” Liam said.

  I should have kept walking. I knew it even then. But I kept remembering Yearling on the forest floor, his blood on the yellow leaves.

  Liam was an enemy I had to know as well as I could.

  I turned around.

  “I know you’re playing me, Roja,” Liam said.

  I held my throat tight. There was no better way to convince someone he was right than to argue with him. My father taught me that before my first day of school.

  So I kept quiet.

  “But that’s okay,” Liam said. “Because you’re also playing yourself.”

  I let a slow breath out between my lips, letting it take the words I shouldn’t say.

  “You care about him,” Liam said.

  Now I opened my mouth to say something back.

  “Don’t bother.” He lifted a hand. “I saw it. You probably think that matters to me. It doesn’t. I’m still choosing to trust you. Want to know why?”

  When the nozzle clicked, the gas tank full, I still hadn’t said anything.

  “Because you care about your family more than you care about him,” Liam said. “You want me to owe them something, not you. You know who you owe your loyalty to. That’s the difference between you and Barclay. And that’s the reason you’ll do all this, even if right now you don’t think you will.”

  I felt myself rising to his words. The things I wanted to say collected in my mouth, like the first bubbles in a pot of boiling water. I tried to keep the lid on tight.

  But a few slid out.

  “My family is not your family,” I said.

  “That.” Liam set the nozzle back on the pump. “That right there is how I know I’m right. You can’t stand me saying anything you don’t like about them. And that’s good. I respect that.”

  “We’re not friends, Liam,” I said. “I don’t care if you respect me or not.”

  “Fine. But I do care what you think of me.” He shut the gas cap. “Think about it. How nature works. Brothers destroy brothers. Gulls peck each other to death. Wild dogs from the same litter kill each other. Fire salamanders eat their own siblings while they’re still in their mothers’ bodies, before they’re even born.”

  I set my back teeth together.

  “Don’t like that one?” Liam asked. “You want a prettier example? How about the mourning cloak butterfly? One of the most beautiful you’ll ever see. Black wings with gold edges and bright blue markings. You want to know something about them? The larvae that hatch first eat the eggs of the ones that are slower to hatch.” He opened the driver’s side door. “The strong devour the weak, even when the weak are your own. It’s how any family gets stronger.”

  I looked up without lifting my head.

  If anyone had mapped my family against the Holts, Blanca would have been Yearling, and I would have been Liam. Blanca was the one who read me fairy tales when we were little, set on finding out which was my favorite, while I was the one who’d taught Olive Lindley’s new kitten to go after anything she could get her claws into. Blanca was the one who made me our grandmother’s remedio every month, and I was the one who spread the swans’ poison to birch trees and bear-boys.

  “What, you don’t like that kind of science?” Liam got in the car. “You believe in a god who made the world in seven days. Who made all the birds on one day and the cute little animals on another, right?”

  I hadn’t understood quite why Yearling would hide in our old weatherworn home when he could have been among great stone houses and hilled lawns.

  But in Liam’s laugh, in the moment of it turning mocking, it registered.

  I wouldn’t have wanted it, either.

  “Six,” I said.

  “Sorry?” Liam asked.

  “God,” I said. “The world. It was six days, not seven.”

  BLANCA

  The minute Roja came in the door, I threw my hand across her face, hard enough that she reeled back.

  I hadn’t meant to do it this way. I’d meant to talk to her. But all I saw in her was what I’d done to Page. In some moments, I thought I’d dreamed it, breaking the heart of the boy I loved. In a minute, I’d wake up, startle with the worry and horror of it, then sink into the drowsy relief that none of it had happened before remembering that it had.

  I had done it for Roja. And all Roja had done back was betray all of us.

  Roja put her hand to her lip. The tips of her fingers came away blood-spotted.

  She looked up at me, red on her lower lip and on one front tooth.

  “What was that for?” she asked.

  “You saw what Liam did to him,” I said. “And you’re friends with him now?”

  “What?” Confusion bloomed on her face. Then it contracted and settled. “No. I was lying to him.”

  “That’s not what it sounded like,” I said. “He saw you.”

  “Of course he did.” Roja licked the blood off her lip. “I wanted him to.”

  “No, not Liam.” How slowly she understood broke apart the force of my anger. But that left jagged edges, a new kind of wrath, compact and sharp. “Barclay. He went looking for you and he saw you.”

  Her lips parted, showing the thin red stain along her lower lip. “What?”

  “You better thank God he told me and not Page because I think Page might’ve killed you.”

  “No.” Roja went for the back door. “No.”

  “Don’t bother,” I called after her. “He doesn’t want to talk to you.”

  She whirled back. “Yeah, that seems to be going around.”

  The bitter cut to her voice threw me. “What?”

  “I know.”

  She gave each of those two words such weight.

  Her eyes flared into me, her head tipped down so her glare sharpened.

  I lost the gravity of my own body. The sense of it came with the sudden worry that the rest of me would fly away from my heart. I would be star-stuff thrown off a nebula.

  “I know what they
told you,” she said, “and I know you didn’t say a word to me.”

  In that second, everything since the swans arrived shifted, like a change in light.

  And I saw how all this must have looked to her.

  The señora telling me a secret she did not tell Roja.

  Me going after Yearling as though getting him would save me.

  The swans bringing their beaks and sharpest wings down on my sister.

  She knew everything.

  Except that I had done all this to save her.

  I registered a familiar sting and warmth between my legs. But I had caught on Roja’s last words, so I was slow to recognize it, that first small rush of blood. I always started a couple of days after Roja. Her cramps had long been my warning to carry a pad in the back pocket of my jeans.

  The back door slammed. The sound both broke me and opened me.

  Roja knew just enough to think I had left her to the swans. She thought I’d forgotten us lying awake during storms, counting on our fingers the seconds between lightning and thunder. She thought I’d thrown away every Christmas Eve we’d stayed up together, making our parents atole in two colors. She thought I’d cast aside those midnights of blue corn and white, of cloves and cinnamon and vanilla.

  I lost every version of her all at once. The little girl brushing her hands through the grass, looking for garden snakes. The sister who stole sprays of our mother’s perfume. The Roja of earlier this fall, running her palms over a yearling bear’s fur in a way as guileless as when she was small.

  I lost every Roja that had ever been mine.

  YEARLING

  She called my name through the trees. First Yearling, the name I’d asked her to call me so I could forget my own. Then Barclay, the name I could no longer think of without my last name attached to it.

  Roja caught up with me, the reddened centers of her cheeks matching how she tried to get her breath. “It’s not true.”

  “Yeah, go ahead, lie to me,” I said. “Tell me you weren’t talking to my cousin like you’re friends. Tell me I didn’t see that.”

  A slit of red on her lower lip stopped me. A fine cut slashed it.

  The rage in me rose. Even if I wanted to put whole forests between me and Roja, I wasn’t letting Liam do to her any of what he’d done to me.

  “Was that him?” I asked.

  “No.” Roja laughed. “My sister.” She sounded disbelieving, but almost proud.

  So that was what it took to get Blanca angry. She had always seemed so distant and quiet, like she kept her feelings hidden under floorboards.

  “What were you even doing with me?” I asked.

  Roja’s lips parted. I could see her holding air between them, measuring her words.

  “You know what, I don’t want to know,” I said. “I don’t want anything to do with any of this. You, your family. Just leave me out of it, okay?”

  Her posture stiffened. “You think you get to judge any family?”

  “Is that supposed to hurt me?” I asked. “Come on. I know what I am. I get it. Page, Tess, Lynn, they all got through to me.” I took one slow step toward her, not quite knowing I was doing it until the undergrowth stirred. “Who’s getting through to you?”

  “Did you think it’d be you?” This time her laugh was bitter. “Did you think you’d save the bad del Cisne girl? You only wanted me because I’m worse than you. Because I make you feel good about yourself.”

  “No,” I said.

  The word landed with enough force that it cut her off. Saying it that hard made my jaw and forehead and ribs hurt, everywhere Liam had gotten me.

  I wouldn’t let her do this, strip everything away until it was small enough to fit the story she wanted to believe.

  But the force of her certainty, it wasn’t something I could fight back against. It could’ve laid the trees bare of their leaves. It could’ve made the sky blaze a searing blue or frozen it over into gray. That was the force of her. If she wanted to make us into something else, she could do it. The story she told about us was the one that became true.

  Her shoulders moved a little with her breathing. Leaves fell through our stare, but didn’t break it.

  “None of that’s true and you know it,” I said.

  “But the story,” she said.

  My anger fell as I tried to figure out what she was talking about. “What story?”

  “About the sisters and the bear-prince,” she said. “Who was the one who ended up with him? Snow-White. It’s always Snow-White.”

  What did that have to do with anything? It was a few pages out of a book so long I’d never read all of it.

  “It’s just a story,” I said.

  “It’s never just a story,” she said.

  “Yeah?” I asked. “Well, you’d know, wouldn’t you? You wrote this whole story for both of us. So thank you.” I backed away from her, spreading my hands to let her know she’d won. “At least now I know how it ends.”

  ROJA

  The heat of Blanca’s hand stayed on the side of my face. I could feel my pulse in my split lip, the cut from my own tooth.

  It reminded me of what I already knew.

  Blanca was the siren who lived between water and shore, the one who seemed so gentle until she lured the curious to the sea. She was the pond nymph, the ends of her hair floating on the surface, beckoning with outstretched fingers to anyone she might pull under.

  We were the same. I was just less skilled at drawing what I wanted toward the salt-covered rocks or the pond’s edge. I wasn’t like her, a girl as glowing and soft as feathers or blush blossoms or gold leaves. I was winter, with its trees stripped to brown and white. Winter, in its veil of blue and gray. Winter, with its stars so sharp that if I lifted my hands to the sky, I could cut my fingers.

  The flick of throbbing on my lower lip became the beating rhythm of all I’d lost. I had lost my sister. I had lost Yearling. And however little Page had ever been my friend, I would lose him, too.

  That was the problem with lying to everyone. When I told the truth, no one believed it.

  I didn’t blame them.

  I wouldn’t have, either.

  BLANCA

  We sat by the pond, both of us on a low branch. The wind fluffed the edge of my skirt, brushing it against Page’s jeans.

  Now Page knew everything. For the first time, I had spoken it all out loud. Los cisnes. What of the rumors was true. What was the invention of so many retellings.

  What I had to do to save Roja, even more now.

  Page had stopped saying Please don’t do this. I had begged her to stop saying it, each time ripping a little deeper into me.

  She hadn’t said anything for a few minutes.

  “Is there any other way?” Page asked now.

  “I can’t let them take her,” I said. “No matter what she’s done, she’s still my sister.”

  Page watched the water like it was a distant ocean.

  To me, Page was a handful of sea glass. What I knew of her I had collected one piece at a time. And now I kept her inside me like I was a locked jewelry box.

  “Do you think you could ever be with me like that?” I asked, imagining Page blooming from a fluffy gray cygnet into a grown swan. “Not all the time. I wouldn’t want that for you. Just, sometimes.”

  Page shook her head at the water. “It wasn’t like that. I didn’t get to choose what I was. I just let the woods take me when they wanted to.” She looked up at me, pieces of her hair falling in her face. “I can’t turn myself into a swan for you.”

  “I wouldn’t want you to,” I said. “Not forever.”

  “But I would, if I knew how.”

  Her voice shivered through me, light and echoing as the touch of her fingertips.

  The words, even if they solved nothing, rushed through me like a swallow of hot water. Page Ashby wanted me, and that was something I could take with me when I became wings. Even if all I could have of her was this pond, the same gray-brown as her eyes, and the sky
that saw everything we’d lost.

  PAGE

  They filled the cranberry bog on the Lindley farm, twelve to eighteen inches drawn off the river and reservoir that they’d put back when they were done. They borrowed it twice a year, harvest and winter, the blanket of water insulating the vines from the frosts.

  I watched the blue rising in the ditches until I couldn’t see the tips of the woody vines anymore. They looked like faded photographs of themselves now. The vines moved softly under the surface, like rubies in a kelp forest.

  I wanted to dream of that, nothing but leaves and points of red underwater. I wanted to dream of anything but the story I thought of as I fell asleep.

  Of all the fairy tales in all my grandmother’s books, this was the one I wanted to dream least.

  It came anyway.

  I floated on the edge of a marsh pond. Seven swans descended onto the water from the cold sky, as though their wings were made from snow, their necks from icicles.

  I saw her among them, a younger one with a neck that looked almost gilded.

  I saw the fowler before the swans did. I tried to call out to her, to all of them. But I wasn’t really there. I was as faint as marsh light, a green glow over the water. I had no voice to warn her.

  The fowler shot the gilt-neck swan. The other six flew and flapped around her, trying to protect her, guard her with their wings. But the fowler brandished an iron knife, and the other six scattered off, leaving her.

  The fowler found her alive, hissing and writhing. There was nothing I could do about any of it. I was only that far light, watching as she became a girl.

  The fowler was not her father, or anyone who looked like her, or anyone I had ever seen. He was nothing but her own blood, come to life, coming to take her back. He was as much mist as flesh.

  Three nights turned over in the same dream. Down grew from her skin. Her arms spread into wings. Her neck stretched and thinned, and her eyes darkened.

  She beat her wings against the fowler’s skin, her feathers sharp as obsidian. Her own feathers were the only things that saved her.

  This time, he couldn’t reach his iron knife. The other six swans joined her until he was dead. I hovered over the pond, a green light for them to see by, the glow caught in the blood on the ends of their wings.