The Radical Element

by Jessica Spotswood (ed)

  Sawyer stood as a reminder of all the cruelty she had to fold into herself to keep Grace Moran.

  When she helped her mother with the cooking, Graciela was so distracted, she nicked her thumb slicing potatoes. Throughout dinner, she watched this boy, her mother’s mole rojo bitter on her tongue. She gave thanks that her father and Miguel were so loud and laughing, with their stories about winning fine watches off rich men playing cards, that Sawyer didn’t notice.

  After they had cleaned up from dinner, after her father had shown Sawyer the new chickens Miguel had bought, ones who made blue and green eggs, that anger and fear still wove through her.

  She had invited Sawyer here because she thought if she was nice to him, he wouldn’t squeal on her, tell the director she was really some wetback in a witch’s costume.

  She hadn’t realized how odd it would feel to see this boy among everything she’d tried to hide. This world of her mother’s mole and so many white-blossoming trees only her father could count them all. As far from the blond and blue shape of Grace Moran as the stars were from the earth.

  After everyone else had gone to bed, she waited outside his door. She waited until she heard the sounds of him changing. The soft, blunt landing of his shoes on the floorboards. The click of buttons as he threw a shirt over the back of the wooden chair.

  She wanted him to know, just for a second, what she had felt. To feel that seen, laid bare.

  This was who she was. Not Grace Moran, poised and polite. She was Graciela Morena, dark-haired and brown-skinned like her family, but as vindictive as her family was generous.

  Before her mother’s voice could wedge its way in, urging her to show kindness to boys who could not go home to their families on Easter weekend, Graciela opened the door.

  Sawyer froze, the glow from a lamp lighting half of him. It warmed the shade of his dark hair. It flashed off his eyes so they looked like the sun through a marble.

  He was not naked. She was a little disappointed. Not because she had wanted to startle him, she realized. Because she wanted to know what he was like under his clothes, what she had missed the chance to learn when she threw him off her in the green room.

  But as the room’s wood smell rushed at her, relief filled her. She did not want to be the girl she was in this moment. A girl who forced her way into this boy’s room just to catch him off-guard. The fact that she knew what it was like, that feeling of being seen when she didn’t want to, gave her less of a right to do this, not more.

  Sawyer had his shoes off, but pants and socks on. He’d cast aside his collared shirt for a loose sweater, one so pilled and worn soft, he’d probably relegated it to an extra layer on cool nights. At the cuffs and collar, the cotton of a long-sleeve undershirt showed.

  On the chair, next to his collared shirt, Sawyer had thrown a few wide ribbons of cloth and a thick swathe of all-cotton elastic.

  She thought of his leg. He walked in a way that made him seem so used to himself that she’d always thought whatever happened had been a long time ago. Now she wondered if he’d been injured in a way he had to keep wrapping and tending to.

  “Are you hurt?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. A resigned laugh opened inside the word.

  “If you are, we can get you help,” she said. She could put on Grace Moran’s colors, her best dress, and a coat of lipstick, and charm some doctor into seeing this boy.

  “I’m not hurt,” he said. “But you’re afraid.”

  Graciela tried to keep herself straight and tall, a star girl in a flying harness. “No, I’m not.”

  “If you weren’t, you wouldn’t have invited me here,” he said.

  “That’s not true,” she said, the lie dull on her tongue.

  He held up a hand, a gesture that said he wouldn’t believe any arguments, but that it was okay, he didn’t blame her. “You’re afraid I’ll tell everyone something you don’t want them to know.”

  He came forward, edging farther into the lamp’s light. At first it felt like a threat, a way of commanding the space between them. But his stance was more assurance than threat. He was neither scared nor trying to scare her.

  She wouldn’t have caught it if he hadn’t let her, if he hadn’t moved this slowly and stood where she could see him. But when he stepped into the light, the lamp showed the shape and shadows of him. What was under the sweater and shirt he would sleep in.

  “I’m not gonna tell your secrets, Graciela,” he said.

  Her name, her real name, in his voice, brushed the back of her neck like feathers.

  “I know what it means to have things you want to make sure stay yours,” he said. “I would never tell what wasn’t mine to tell. I need you to know that.”

  In that moment, Graciela was one of her family’s almond trees, and understanding landed on her like finches.

  If Grace had reached for Sawyer’s belt when she was kissing him on that brocade fainting couch, he would have stopped her. He would not have let her unbuckle his belt and get her hand inside his trousers. He would not have let her find the shape of him with her fingers, no more than she would have chosen to let him see her with her glamour fallen away.

  “I’m sorry,” Graciela said, the words as deep and true as confessing a sin. She was sorry for walking in on him. For pushing him away months ago. For thinking he was a boy who could never understand the fear and the loneliness of having truths no one else could know.

  Her favorite tree was waiting for her, the stars above sharp as the glitter in a cascarón. The magnolia’s thick boughs formed a bowl she and Miguel had crouched in on summer nights, and now she sat with her back against the cool bark.

  “Grace,” Sawyer called to her across the rows of flowering almonds. The fluffy branches shifted in the night breeze.

  She slid down from the tree.

  How awful she’d been to wait outside that door. How thoughtless to see him bear the taunts of the other men on set and still assume he did not know what it was to be out of place.

  How petty to want vengeance against this boy for doing nothing but seeing her as she was.

  He stopped at the tree’s base, again wearing his collared shirt. She’d thought walking out of the room was the polite thing. Now she cringed with how he’d had to get dressed again to come outside and find her. His shirt had been buttoned one off. His suspenders hung down against his thighs.

  “So that’s it?” he asked. “Stalemate?” No worry in his voice. Just a question.

  Graciela put a little of her weight down on the soft dirt, and then all of it. She brushed the magnolia bark dust off her hands, feeling the shame of how she’d acted. She’d walked in on him, and in the face of her doing this, he’d offered her even more of himself than he had months ago. Then she’d walked out on him.

  A question swirled around her feet like dust.

  “Is that what happened to your leg?” she asked.

  She’d always thought it was polio. If he hadn’t been so young, she would’ve thought he’d been in the war like her brother.

  “What are you talking about?” Sawyer asked.

  “Did you make a bad bargain with some bruja?” She’d heard of that, women who pretended to be curanderas but who instead dealt in the trade of souls and hearts. She might have promised she could help him live as a man and not told him her price, that it would cost him the easy use of his leg.

  Sawyer’s laugh was small and sad. “You want to know what happened to my leg?”

  “Was it because someone found out?” she asked, her shoulders tight against the thought of it.

  “No.” Again came that pained laugh. “I lived like this” — Sawyer looked down at his shirt and suspenders — “like I am, even before I came out to California. My mother” — now his smile was soft — “she’s never fought me on it.” Sawyer lowered his eyes. “She’s always been good to everybody. She even took in a boarder no one else would rent to. He’d served for most of the war and he wasn’t right, not after the things he�
��d seen. But he was nice to me. Called me ‘son’ and always wanted to give me advice about women.”

  Beneath the nectar of almond blossoms and magnolia, the wind brought the bitter scent of almond bark.

  “But on one of his bad days, he didn’t recognize me,” Sawyer said. “He thought I was someone else. Later he said I looked just like some kid in his division. He thought of me dying like that, I guess, and he wanted to save me. He wanted to make sure they could never call me up. So he did. He made sure of it.”

  A well of protectiveness rose up in Graciela. Not because Sawyer belonged to her; he didn’t. But because there was already so little sense in how Miguel had lost his leg, and there was even less in this, how the war had done this to Sawyer even after it was over.

  “He did that to you?” she asked.

  Sawyer shifted his weight, heels scuffing the dirt. “He’d, uh, he’d helped out the medics over there, during the war.” He swallowed, hard. “So he knew which muscles to get at.”

  Graciela tasted iron on the wind, Sawyer’s memory so strong it chilled the air.

  “My mother got him to some people who could maybe help him,” Sawyer said.

  “Help him?” Graciela asked. “She forgave him?”

  “What good would it do to be mad at him?” Sawyer shook his head. “The whole history of the world, it’s kings and generals deciding where everybody goes. Not guys like him.”

  Sawyer looked down at his thighs, noticing the suspenders.

  “The whole town was talking about it.” He pulled the straps onto his shoulders. “I couldn’t get away from it. So my mother let me go out to California.”

  Graciela pressed her palm against her stomach. She tried to stop imagining it. The hands of a man who considered wrecking a boy’s leg a kind of mercy, a way to save him from the things he’d seen. A town’s gossip driving the boy from his own home.

  Sawyer looked down at his shirt, like that suggestion of what was underneath might be visible now. It wasn’t. He’d layered it over, bound it down as well as when he came to set.

  “That day in the dressing room,” she said.

  The back of her throat felt tight, knowing that if she said it, he would understand. Of course he would. This boy given a girl’s name when he was born. This boy hurt in a way meant to ensure he would never go to war. This boy whose walk made the grips on set laugh at him even when — especially when — he could hear them.

  But the explanations turned to ashes on her tongue.

  “I just want to be a star,” she said. “It’s all I’ve wanted since I was a little girl.”

  “And you want to do it by pretending you don’t have this family, and you’re not from this place.” He looked down the rows of almond trees, bowing their petaled branches. “I get it.”

  “If everyone knows what I am, do you know what kind of roles I’ll get?” Graciela asked. “With what I look like? Maybe none. If I’m lucky, a girl in some whorehouse scene, or if I’m really lucky, a dancing girl in a Western saloon. Over and over until I’m too old and they throw me away.”

  “Why do you want to work for people who would ever think about throwing you away?” Sawyer asked.

  Graciela took in the magnolia’s perfume. It wasn’t the powder and violets of l’Heure Bleue, but it gave the air the smell of lemon cream.

  She had never said the truth out loud. Not to her mother, who would’ve told that costumer to drop dead. Not to Miguel, who always said the girls in Photoplay looked like they’d been left out too long and bleached in the sun. Not to her father, who had blessed her leaving Almendro, but whose heart would crack like ceramic if he knew why.

  She had told no one why she wanted to become Grace Moran: because the world left so little room for Graciela Morena.

  “You heard my mother talking,” she said. “The full moon’s on Easter this year. I know my wish. You can make one too. Your leg, maybe.” Graciela had already tried talking Miguel into the same thing, but she doubted he believed enough to try. “Maybe it could be fixed.”

  Sawyer shook his head. “I’m not broken. This is who I am. Everything that’s happened to me, it’s who I am.”

  “So there’s nothing you want?” she asked.

  He came toward her, so slowly he did not limp. “I didn’t say that.”

  He slid his hand onto the back of her neck and kissed her. He tasted like the honey and first-harvest apricots they’d eaten after dinner. Amber sugar. Fireweed. It made her bite his lower lip just hard enough that the sound he made could have been either pain or him asking her to do it again.

  For a second, that taste faded away, leaving behind the bitter tang of brick wine. For a second they were back on that brocade fainting couch, and she was flinching under the feeling that one more kiss would break down the girl she’d given everything to be.

  But this was not some borrowed green room. This was the night air threading through her family’s almond trees. She was not laced into some costume corset, a petticoat rough against her legs. She wore a dress made by her mother, the skirt smooth as poured cream.

  This was not some set where she had to stuff herself into a girl called Grace Moran.

  There was as much room for Sawyer and Graciela as the whole shimmering sky.

  She wanted to be both here and in that green room, so she could do something other than what she’d done. Pull him against her instead of shoving him off. Letting him tangle his hands in her hair instead of wishing her hair was cream-rinse blond and fine as a doll’s bangs.

  Graciela knew more of Sawyer than she had in that green room. Now she wanted to touch him between his legs like she’d touched herself between her legs. She wanted his hands over her like his fingers had splayed over that white moon. She wanted to lick the little flecks of paint off his neck.

  But they were not alone. Grace was there, hovering among the stars, reminding her that this was a boy who knew the distance between Grace Moran and Graciela Morena.

  Graciela pulled away.

  Sawyer stilled, lips parted. Then he pressed them together, nodding like he understood.

  He took his hands off her.

  She hadn’t meant it like that. It had nothing to do with his limp, or what was under his clothes. It was that he knew she was two different girls, one blue and blond and another in shades of brown.

  “Sawyer,” she said.

  But he was already walking away.

  She stayed. Running after him seemed like rubbing in the fact that she had two good legs to catch him.

  At breakfast, they did not speak. And later that day, there was no chance to.

  Her father and Miguel were painting the almond tree trunks. All the farmers were saying this summer would be the hottest in years; the white paint would seal the wood from the scorch of the sun. When Sawyer offered his help, they handed him an extra brush.

  Graciela spent the day at the kitchen table with her mother and aunts, hollowing out eggs. Washing and drying the fragile shells. Filling them with glass glitter and sealing them up. The eggs they’d poured out would go into empanadas and capirotada, the bread pudding they ate during Lent but that her mother made with chocolate for Easter Sunday.

  She tried to laugh when they laughed, to shriek at their gossip, to tease Dolores about how many babies she and Miguel would have. But Graciela was choking on the hard knot of everything she wanted.

  To become the girl on the moon.

  To kiss the boy who had painted it.

  To disappear into the pale colors of Grace Moran and every promise she held.

  To keep her family and never miss a Pascua with them.

  All of it wrung her out so much that after dinner she was a starling scared out of a tree. She was running through her father’s fields, her skirt filling with night air. The almond rows opened up in front of her, branches so thick with blossoms, they looked like a hundred thousand sticks of rock candy.

  She wanted to run fast enough down these rows that she would break from the earth
. She wanted to spin out into the sky and turn to constellations. She wanted to become a shimmering thing children would make wishes on, instead of a girl whose own unmade wish blazed inside her.

  It was Holy Saturday, the moment of la Semana Santa she hated most. It was not Good Friday, the day of grief they all knew so well. It was not the Sunday of glorious resurrection. This was el Sábado Santo, the in-between day, and it stretched in front of her, a Holy Saturday as long as her whole life.

  Miguel had warned her that if she made her wish at the Easter full moon, it might not work. But it might. She might become Grace Moran, and she would never again look like a Morena. She would not have her mother’s hair and her father’s eyes.

  But if she didn’t make that wish, she would never be the girl in the moon.

  The price of getting everything she wanted would be everything she was.

  She slowed, breathing hard. Almond blossoms clung to her hair and stuck to her damp forehead. Their perfume mixed with the sharp smell of drying paint.

  The color glamour was wearing her out. It had never been meant to be used this way, to become someone else. It had always been so a Morena daughter could go places too dangerous for a brown-skinned girl. It had been to buy medicine or seeds, candles or wedding rings, things that some doctors and merchants would not sell to families who looked like the Morenas.

  But she had used it to pretend this was not her family. She had traded being her mother and father’s one daughter to be one of twenty identical stars.

  A hand rested on her back.

  “Hey,” Sawyer said.

  Graciela turned.

  The wind was sticking petals to him too. They caught in his hair, and Graciela couldn’t tell which flicks of white were blossoms and which were paint.

  “Come with me, okay?” he asked.

  He led her down the rows, and they came out from under the flowering branches.

  Graciela stopped, a breath rising out of her, spinning into a gasp.

  Sawyer hadn’t just painted the almond trees.

  He’d painted the dark trunk of her magnolia.

  But not all of it.