Blanca & Roja

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  Liam’s eyes flashed a blue so bright it seemed like it didn’t belong under the gray sky. It looked like a painted-in part of a two-toned photograph. “Why would you do that?”

  “I know I’m nothing to you. I know my whole family is nothing to you.” I crossed my arms against the chill of the air and my own nerves. “But you will never forget that you owe me for this. I won’t let you.”

  “And why would I believe you?” he asked.

  “If I don’t bring you Barclay and those papers,” I said, “may the swans who fly over us kill me themselves.”

  He looked to the sky. He couldn’t help it.

  I drew a slow breath in, afraid for a moment they might not come.

  But then the flitting white arced across the clouds. Six swans cut their wings through the air, necks stretched out toward the horizon.

  Liam’s look of wonder, tinged with fear, was as good as a yes.

  I took a step back on the brick path. Everything here looked so formal, the mowed grass and cut hedges. It seemed more sculpted than grown. I couldn’t understand both this and my mother’s fluffy herb beds existing in the same word, garden.

  “And just so you know,” I said, “Barclay’s not at our house, and he’s not at Tess’s, or the Ashby farm. Don’t go looking for him. You won’t find him.”

  Even Liam couldn’t knock on every door in town, and the Lindleys weren’t telling.

  With a twist of a smile, Liam almost looked impressed.

  The swans passed over us, the beating of their wings an assurance that I was the right del Cisne girl to strike deals with.

  “I’m the only one who can get you what you want,” I said. “You just have to be okay with that.”

  ROJA

  My second cousins found the swans first. Beatriz and Julieta spotted them in a pond closer to their houses than ours.

  I recognized these birds who’d dipped their white necks to me and snapped at my dark feathers. I knew them, how they’d stripped the curse from our blood at the moment it would make us fall out of the sky. And I couldn’t keep the vengeance out of my heart as my mother and I drove them off the surface.

  We carried nothing to hurt or kill them. We came only with our rushing steps and our swan-women’s calls.

  My father carried the name del Cisne. He had watched one sister stay while the swans claimed the other. But in that moment, my mother flapped her hands as though they were wings, the cry from her throat so shrill it sounded like a swan’s trumpet. Her vicious will startled the swans off the water.

  I ran at them. My wounds still stung, knit back together with new feathers and birch leaves and blossoms. But I threw my body forward.

  We drove them off in the direction Blanca needed them, so they would appear in the sky as though she had summoned them. My mother and I made Blanca into the kind of witch everyone feared we were.

  My mother watched the sky as the last swan rose above the trees. “Did I do the right thing?”

  “Of course,” I said. “Blanca won’t be half as convincing if they don’t show up.”

  “No,” my mother said. “I meant taking you out of school. Should I have left you there, with those boys putting brooms in your locker?”

  The idea lit up, like a window I did not know was stained glass until the sun came through.

  “You took us out of school because of what was happening to me?” I asked.

  The brown of my mother’s cheeks warmed.

  My mother had never been blond. She had never had skin fair enough that, in winter, it shed enough color for her sometimes to be mistaken for one of the gringas. Her hair was a brown so deep it was almost the black of raven’s wings.

  But this was the first time I wondered if my mother had grown up a girl less like Blanca and more like me. Maybe not a del Cisne. But caught in what everyone thought they knew about her.

  My mother never answered me. But that stained-glass feeling stayed, brightening.

  “Come on,” she said. “It’s time you learned to cook.”

  My mother had so seldom invited me into her kitchen. When she did, it was on Christmas Eve or Sábado Santo, to give me and my father small tasks she and Blanca didn’t have time to do themselves.

  She had never before talked of teaching me to cook, to make things instead of just chopping walnuts or shelling pomegranates. As we walked back to the house, I was a whole bright church, with stained-glass windows for walls.

  YEARLING

  She came for me, like I knew she would, the girl who loved my best friend.

  Blanca had never planned on breaking her word to my cousin. And I went with her, the del Cisne girl everyone considered compliant and docile.

  Blanca called Liam to the center of town, where I wore the bruises and gashes he’d left on me like they were a family crest.

  Liam came, eyes flaring open but not yet afraid. I didn’t flinch from him even as he took inventory of what his own fists had done.

  I let everyone see me. I drew power from their gasps instead of letting them strip it from me.

  Liam hadn’t counted on me letting myself be seen. He’d bet on me hiding. I guess I didn’t blame him. It was what I’d done up to now.

  Blanca handed Liam an envelope that held grainy copies of everything I’d collected. Now Grandma Tess and Lynn Ashby had extras, thanks to Page. So did Blanca and Roja’s father, thanks to Blanca. And once the mail came on Monday, so would the families who’d sunk the most money into towns that did not exist. That was thanks to Roja and her mother.

  Blanca gave Liam enough to know how much damage I’d done. But there was no containing it now.

  She kept every promise she’d made Liam. She even brought me to him.

  Cars slowed, wanting to get a look at me. If Liam wanted to grab me by the collar in full view of everyone, he could have at it.

  He didn’t.

  I wasn’t Liam’s to keep anymore. He couldn’t do what he wanted with me just because I was smaller or younger or scared. Holt may have been his last name, and our fathers’. But it was also Tess’s, and it was mine.

  Liam tried staring me down but couldn’t.

  “I can’t even look at you,” he said so far under his breath I barely caught it.

  I didn’t know if he meant what I’d done, or if something about me now unnerved him, if he didn’t know whether to look me in both my eyes or just my right.

  Maybe it should’ve hurt. But I’d lost the part of me that buckled under Liam’s stare. It was the same part of me that would’ve once cared what he thought of my left eye, whether he thought it made me weak or less Holt-like.

  But I’d lost track of that part of me somewhere in the woods between my father’s house and the del Cisnes’, so I didn’t care anymore. And it was the first time I realized how fighting back could look—sometimes, from the outside—like giving up.

  I stood there, a pinned specimen for everyone to look at. Just for a minute, though. Then I put my hands in my pockets and walked down the road, where Blanca waited with the boy she loved and the sister she’d gotten back.

  The sight of Page brought a new tide of whispers, a round of echoed questions that all started with Is that …

  But Page and I turned our backs on those stares, the words shielded behind cupped hands.

  We were more than two vanished boys reappearing.

  We were more than what they made us.

  BLANCA

  Maybe Papá would never love me the way he loved Roja. Maybe he wasn’t meant to. Even though Roja and I were more alike than we’d ever admitted, we were not the same.

  But when I passed his study, he looked up from his desk, and I caught a glint of pride in his face.

  I thought Papá would hate me for wounding the daughter he had always loved a little more than he loved me. I thought it even as I saw him and my mother thawing to each other.

  In the warm wake of the curse leaving us, they no longer pitted their daughters and their own hearts against each other. I
thought I might be imagining it until I saw my mother handing my father coffee grounds for his roses, his hands accepting the jar as though it held water from a blessed fountain.

  My father went back to his work, studying an open ledger.

  For years, he had looked at me like I was no more remarkable than a milk pitcher.

  But I had been the one to understand something before anyone else did. Before my mother and father. Before Roja. Before my cousins, and maybe even before the señoras.

  I knew it now. I knew it with the same thrill of waking up and realizing I still had my girl-body: getting a blue-eyed boy had never meant getting him to love me. It meant getting him to trust me. And that blue-eyed boy turned out not to be Barclay Holt, but his cousin, who I betrayed even while doing exactly what I promised him I would.

  Good girls had their own ways of hitting back.

  I crossed the threshold, the way I’d seen Roja do since we were small, always as easily as though this were her own room. I waited for Papá to stop me.

  He didn’t.

  I pulled a book down from his shelf, a heavy, clothbound one the color of dried bay leaves. Roja had done it so many times, Papá welcoming the questions the pages stirred up in her.

  The heft of the book was new in my hands. I held the cover to my nose, breathing in the smell of ink and dust, the deep vanilla of worn pages. I waited for Papá to notice that I was not Roja.

  But he didn’t stop me.

  I held the spine in both hands, the cover against my wrists and forearms. I walked it toward the door, waiting for him to object. I went slowly, in case it took him a minute to register what I was doing.

  “That’s a good one,” he said.

  I hadn’t realized he’d looked up enough to see which one I’d taken.

  I turned from the threshold.

  He met my eyes, his desk lamp showing one side of his face. “Let me know what you think.”

  ROJA

  Blanca and I watched them drive the water reels through the cranberry bog, beaters knocking the berries from the vines. Our father told us that, because of a little air pocket in each cranberry, they floated to the surface, covering the bog in dots of deep red and blond-white.

  Olive Lindley told me that, even as they took in the harvest, next year’s crop was already growing on the vine. Sixteen months of growing, so they were always nurturing two seasons at the same time. She said it like that was the best thing in the world, two seasons of fruit becoming at once, two harvests living on the same trailing vines.

  Now the water’s slate blue surrounded the fruit’s red. Yearling was one of the boys wading in for the wet harvest, sweeping the loose cranberries into the center of the bog.

  He’d live with Tess and Lynn now. His family had enough on their hands that they weren’t going to fight his grandmother keeping him. Yearling hadn’t been there to see this part, but according to Page, the entire conversation consisted of Tess asking, “How about it, Lynn? You up for raising a seventeen-year-old?” and Page’s grandmother didn’t flinch.

  Yearling showed up that night, out of his waders but still smelling of pond water, the tart acid of cranberries, the wet green of the vines.

  I met him outside, the trees slicing the moonlight into pale ribbons. I wondered if he was looking up through the branches again, taking the measure of the stars by how the leaves made them vanish and reappear.

  “Couldn’t sleep,” he said.

  “Ten hours corralling berries and you can’t sleep?” I asked.

  “Here.” In the space between us, he held a glass jar, the kind reused after holding applesauce or blackberry jam.

  White and red roses crowded the brim. At first I thought they were a mix, some white, some red. But each one was both, red petals and white intertwining. They mixed at the center, and stained each other at the edges. Cranberry red touched the white outer petals, and the fanning red ones looked frost-tipped.

  These red and white petals, slotting together like shuffled cards, mirrored my own body. Under my clothes, I was as much made out of different pieces as these roses. Feathers. Blossoms. Birch leaves.

  Yearling tugged at his collar, straightening it out. I’d never seen him nervous like that. The brown in his left eye shone a little brighter than the blue, like deep maple ink.

  I had never been the kind of girl a boy would bring flowers. I had known it so deeply that I wondered if a señora had said it over me when I was born, the words spilling onto my forehead like water for a christening.

  But Blanca had already refused the things everyone else had decided. She was the fair-haired sister who would not keep to the story as it had been told. Instead, Snow-White fell in love with a boy who brought her apples, a knife in the back pocket of his jeans.

  I accepted the jar from Yearling’s hands. I breathed in their scent, like winter and wine.

  I said, “Thank you.”

  PAGE

  Blanca and I leaned against my grandmother’s fence, eating cuttings from the snow apple I found deep in the orchard. The blushed red of the skin showed the frost-pale fruit underneath. It broke against our tongues, tart as lemons and early strawberries.

  “Are you ready?” Blanca asked.

  “No,” I said, and we shared a soft laugh. “Not even a little.”

  “Lynn’ll be there,” she said. “And so will I, as long as you want me there.”

  Maybe if my mother and father saw me as I was now, they wouldn’t get caught in their worrying. They would stop wondering how to be around me. If they let it, it could be like their eyes adjusting at night, the stars sharpening overhead as they walked the orchard.

  They loved me. And they wanted me even when they could not make sense of me. So maybe if I was sure, it would make them less tentative.

  I wanted to see my father, to know if his smile still made me think of us looking for four-leaf clovers every spring. I wanted to hear my mother’s laugh, the sound as silver as her hair.

  They loved me. And if they didn’t know how, they’d learn.

  It was time to stop wishing I could be a cygnet who might one day grow into a swan. It was time to stop wishing the trees would take me back into their shadows until there was no me left.

  I had to choose this life that was mine.

  I was Page. I was an Ashby.

  Anything else I needed to know I would figure out as I went.

  I pushed myself off the fence. I crossed the orchard, Blanca walking the leaf-lined rows with me. My hands went hot and damp even in the fall air. When I felt Blanca’s touch cooling my palm, I couldn’t remember taking her hand, or if she’d taken mine.

  The front steps rose in front of me, ones I’d counted out every day growing up.

  Ones I hadn’t walked in weeks.

  Now I counted them again, my shoes making the familiar hollow sounds against the wood.

  I lifted my hand to the door, and I knocked.

  BLANCA

  The first frost was coming. Yearling said he could tell by how the trees caught the sun, the wet light thinning and sharpening. Page said she could smell it on the air, a clean smell like starched fabric and the pond in spring.

  We came out to welcome it, the four of us sneaking from our houses after midnight. Roja and I took cascarones from where they rested in a hall cupboard, three in each of the abandoned nests I’d collected from the forest floor.

  It was me who lured Roja out.

  At first she hesitated. I read in her half-asleep face her worry that if we left this house at night, we might come back at dawn to find it different. For once, there was enough room for both our hearts, and our mother’s and father’s. Roja must have feared that if we turned our backs, it would all collapse in on itself.

  But winter was so close I could taste the ice on my tongue. The birch leaves and the feathers and apple blossoms were falling away from the trees, even as they clung to Roja’s body. So I took her hands and drew her out of bed, like we were still small and I wanted to show her t
he first snow of the season.

  Our mother always told us not to tell lies, even to ourselves, because they became truer every time you said them.

  But we had told ourselves lies, and they had become the truth. We had started to believe that Roja was the sister whose heart was a handful of hard red jewels, and I was the one as insubstantial as the hollow center of a cranberry. The lie of who we were had killed who we might have been. It had buried us. It stripped us down into girls uncomplicated enough to be understood.

  Now we pulled ourselves free from the lies we had taken into our own bodies. We crushed them to stardust and let the wind steal them. We held on to our hope that the truth was water, so there was nowhere it could not get in. Or that it was light, spilling into all the unseen places.

  The air that night felt so clean and hard we could crack the eggshells on it. We crushed our fingers into the cascarones, and the wind drew out bright ribbons of glass glitter. The air turned to glinting mists of deep copper and blue and red. The night winked green and gold. We saw the stars through clouds of rose and violet.

  We painted the woods that night. We gave it the colors we were and the colors we borrowed.

  We were opening our hands. We were giving up the stories we thought we already knew.

  We were becoming.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The idea of reimagining Snow-White and Rose-Red as Latina sisters has been following me for years. It started with a wish to write my own communities into a fairy tale I had loved growing up. I wanted to envision the bear-prince in the language of Latinx folklore. I wanted to write a story as much about family as about falling in love. But when I thought of my reimagined fairy tale, something wasn’t quite coming together. I was missing some twist of magic, some essential spark.

  I found it when I was reminded of words I’d heard as a child: “If you’re a good girl, you can get a blue-eyed boy.” As a child, I think I had some innate sense of the racial and gender politics those words held, but it wasn’t until I started thinking about this story that I understood how to talk about them. Remembering those words brought me back to my two reimagined sisters, one considered a good girl, one considered anything but. And imagining these sisters drew me toward similar themes in stories like Swan Lake—the white swan, the archetype of purity and virtue, and the black swan who, by contrast, is portrayed as seductive and deceptive.