Wild Beauty

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  She put them in his hands, their small bodies crowding the green one. “You can have these ones too, if you want.”

  But he could not answer. He could not nod to thank her or shake his head to refuse them. With each small weight into his hands, these tiny horses broke him. Each new color cracked him open a little further. He knew them. The feeling of the worn paint, their colors, the shape of their wings all pulled him back toward something he could not reach.

  These were things he had touched and held before. But between where he was and the place where that understanding lived stood a border as heavy as the stone of this house. It was the same feeling he’d had in the garden, wanting to speak and not remembering how to ask his tongue and lips to make the words.

  He knew what this girl wanted. She was giving him these small, winged creatures, and in return she wanted things he could not tell.

  He could not give her his name, because he did not know it. He could not say how he had come to the garden valley, because he had no memory of a time before. He could not even admit to her that he was lost, because lost meant there was somewhere he would not be lost if he could just trace a path back.

  There was no path back. He reached past the moment of opening his eyes, blinking against the pale sun in the garden, but beyond it there was only the dark, heavy blanket that felt as open and empty as a dreamless sleep.

  He could remember having this body. He could remember things like oceans and ice, leaves and the smell of lemons, but he could not remember what any of these things meant to him. He knew plates and spoons and how to use them, but not where he had first learned how. He felt the certainty that this little green horse had lived in his pocket, but he could not remember why, or where he had gotten it.

  He felt like he had woken up from a dream he very much needed to remember, but the harder he thought about it, the more it faded. The few fraying threads he could grasp weren’t enough to suggest the whole cloth.

  The girl watched him, her blinking slow. The brown of her eyes deepened and warmed. Her sympathy was so heavy and covered in thorns he didn’t know how to hold it. The compassion of these women and girls did not come without pity, and he bristled against it.

  He could not remember if the three letters sewn to his shirt were the beginning of a verse, or the start of a name, or a warning declaring the thing he had done, the reason he had been sent here stripped of memory.

  If it was a mark, he should wear it. Or as much of it as he knew, the three letters that had not been torn away.

  “Fel,” he said.

  “What?” the girl asked.

  “You thought my name was Fel,” he said.

  “Is it?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But that’s what I want you to call me. That can be the name you call me.” It would be the name he called himself. F-e-l, the three letters left on him.

  “Estrella,” she said, fingers on the doorframe.

  It was only after she left that he understood it was her own name.

  This place, this house filled with women who treated him like he was a son, these gardens that spread out as wide as a sea, they were all too soft and too beautiful to be where he would pay for his sins.

  Instead, he had done something he could not remember, and to punish him for it, to punish him for forgetting, God had taken the things he knew.

  God had left him just enough to be sure he had existed before he had come to these gardens. Enough to leave him reaching for things he could not know.

  His back felt hot and damp. He reached to take off his shirt.

  On his back, his fingers found veins of harder, raised skin.

  He turned to the mirror on the inside of the door.

  Thick, pale scars crossed his back, like strikes of a knife over clay. With the sight of them, pain traced along each one, not alive in his body now, but remembered.

  Even the memory of how much they’d hurt sank under the shame of realizing they marked him.

  The grandmothers had seen them. When they’d taken off his clothes they had sucked air in through their teeth and echoed the word pobrecito. He thought it had been about his ribs showing, or the way his hair had gotten messy enough to make him look like a stray animal.

  But it had been this.

  He put his shirt back on.

  He found the grandmothers with their Bibles, laughing together in a way he had never thought was allowed over those onionskin pages.

  Their eyes all found him at once.

  Their gazes made him silent.

  He could not ask them to keep his secrets.

  “Thank you,” he said, realizing that they could have already told their daughters and granddaughters if they wanted to. They all could have driven him out of their house as a criminal or a heretic or whatever they decided had gotten him these scars.

  That night, behind the door of that room they had put him in, he broke open. All the color, all the things he did not know, the paths of scarring under his fingers, broke him open. He bit the backs of his hands so he would not cry onto the wooden horses.

  He had done something wicked enough for God to carve out the center of him, and bad enough that men had marked him with it. If that was true, these women were showing him kindness God would not have wanted for him. But God had hollowed him out, and now he was not strong enough to refuse as firmly as these women insisted.

  He could not even confess his sins to them because he could not remember the ways in which he had fallen.

  As he slept, he held all those wooden horses in his loosely cupped hands, hoping he would dream of the things he had lost. But he woke up with nothing but the feeling of a dreamless night, empty and unyielding. He surfaced to the feeling of petals brushing his skin and realized they were falling from the ceiling like snow at midnight. Blue, dark, and shimmering.

  The marks of his own teeth had cut into the knuckles of his forefingers. The salt of his tears had dried pale on the winged horses, like frost coating their bright backs.

  SEVEN

  Without the horses to turn over in her hands, she didn’t sleep easily. Without them to count like sheep, the night streamed out in front of her, smooth and endless.

  There was magic to things that were familiar and ordinary. The way they were known was a kind of enchantment, and when they were gone, the spell broke.

  Estrella had given him the horses because it had seemed like the kind thing to do. It had felt like returning something he had lost. But they had made him sadder, like their wooden wings opened something in him. That made her wish she’d hidden them all in her dresser, tucking them under her slips and sweaters so this boy, Fel, wouldn’t have to see them. But she had offered them, and he had accepted them—more like a responsibility than a gift.

  Each time she woke, Estrella checked the ceiling for the green of vines and the blue of starflowers. But the space above Dalia’s bed stayed clear, the wood bare. That was something.

  In the morning, the man called Reid had not left. Estrella and her cousins knew because three of their grandmothers had gone up to the brick house. They had pretended they were there to clean it, and because men who stood so proud in pressed slacks and wrinkled shirts were used to having brown-skinned women wait on them, he seemed not to notice.

  Worse than not leaving, he had unpacked his things into an empty room. Not Marjorie Briar’s. Estrella was thankful for that. If he had stuffed his clothes into her inlaid dresser and slept in her four-post bed, Dalia would have slit his throat in his sleep.

  In the old carriage house, he had parked a gleaming car, all leather and shined chrome. Gloria almost spit onto the steering wheel, and Calla asked if they could drag an old key across the paint.

  “You’re not doing anything,” their mothers said. “You don’t know anything about him yet.”

  But they didn’t need to know more than that Bay did not want him there. They saw in how tightly she held her shoulders, like they were a wooden hanger and the rest of her was da
ngling loose like a coat. They saw it in how she set her back teeth as Reid walked across the grounds, pointing out retaining walls that needed repairing or rose trellises that seemed a little overgrown.

  “Why don’t we just go welcome him?” Azalea asked as the light was falling that afternoon.

  Calla and Gloria looked ready to throw ice water on her, to break her out of the spell of this man’s polished car and gold-banded watch.

  “He’s probably used to having girls like us fixing his drinks,” Azalea said. “He won’t give it another thought.”

  The pinched corner of her smile told the rest.

  “So we get him drunk enough that he forgets his own name,” Estrella said.

  Azalea drew up one proud shoulder. “Then maybe we go through his things.”

  “Okay,” Gloria said. “But how do we get him that drunk?”

  “I know how to do it,” Fel said.

  Their eyes all found him. He’d been quiet, drawing so close to the edges of the room he seemed like a panel of wallpaper. Estrella hadn’t noticed he was there.

  “You know how to make drinks?” Gloria asked.

  He blinked, like he was pulling back from his own words, surprised he had said them.

  He had said them without thinking.

  This would be how Estrella would get him to tell things he either would not say or did not believe he knew. She would get him to speak without thinking.

  “I know how to make a drink that’ll make a man like that get drunk quick,” he said. “But it’s not Christmas, so I don’t think we have what we need for it.”

  He spoke without hesitation, but he had the slight edge of an accent that reminded Estrella of her grandmother’s. But her grandmother’s was both fuller and sharper, more certain. He seemed unused to the sound of his own voice.

  “What do you need?” Dalia asked.

  “Sherry,” Fel said.

  “Done,” Azalea said. “We’ll steal it from Marjorie’s liquor cabinet.”

  “We don’t steal from the dead,” Gloria said.

  “Why not?” Azalea asked. “She’s not using it.”

  Dalia cut through their arguing with a sweep of her hands. “What else do we need?”

  “Oranges,” he said, wincing, like he was asking for the moon to pour out into cut crystal. “And sugar. Ice if you have it.”

  Azalea’s look was tinged with pity, but brightened with her own amusement. “I think we can manage that.”

  Estrella wanted to pinch Azalea so she would not laugh at him. Whether this boy had loved a Nomeolvides woman a hundred years ago or not, they had his clothes and his wonder about phones and showers to tell them this was not his time. He had come from a time when poor men could not easily get sugar or oranges. These were things boys like him knew only on holidays.

  The six of them went up to the great brick house. They filled the empty kitchen. Azalea and Fel went to work on the drinks, him pouring sherry and sugar and her slicing oranges.

  Azalea set curls of rind on each glass. She grabbed one and took a sip. “You can’t even taste the sherry.” She passed it to her cousins.

  “That’s the idea,” Fel said, with no trace of pride.

  “I like you,” Azalea said. “You’re smarter than you look. I’ve decided you can be our brother.”

  Fel gave her a cringing smile.

  A chill spun through the kitchen. Every time one of them declared him a brother or a cousin, or their mothers and grandmothers pronounced him a nephew or son, they remembered that they did not know what the gardens wanted.

  Estrella was sure the gardens were asking them to care for him, proof that they would do anything, even look after a strange boy, in exchange for La Pradera saving Bay.

  But that was only the part they knew. There would be more. The gardens never let themselves be understood this easily.

  Azalea brought the drinks into a damask-curtained room. Bay and Reid sat talking on antique chaises, each upholstered with different color brocade.

  Fel handed Reid a glass, and Azalea leaned down to Bay and whispered the reminder Gloria had asked her to pass on, that she should drink slowly. For a few seconds, the dark curtain of her hair shielded both her face and Bay’s.

  “It’s expensive, Bay,” Reid said as the Nomeolvides girls listened from the hallway. “All those parties.”

  “Those parties”—Bay struck each syllable hard—“kept this place going. They kept this town going. And they made sure the town loved us. That’s more than I can say for any other estate this family has.”

  Reid let the insult fall. “I know they meant something to Marjorie. But now that she’s gone, we have to think about the books.”

  How dare he.

  Estrella felt the words rising in all of them.

  This man couldn’t dream to be even a shadow of Marjorie Briar.

  Marjorie had loved this place like it was part of her own body. She had grown up at La Pradera because the Briars had exiled her father here for crimes she never spoke of. When she grew up, they mocked her investing money into bakeries and dress shops, whispering that the businesses of women would not give her the same returns as banks or silver mines.

  But later, when the Briars had spent more money than they had, when they had almost ruined themselves trying to look wealthier than any other family, they tried to sell La Pradera.

  Marjorie wasn’t having it, not the sale of her childhood home. She prodded and stoked the rumors about the Nomeolvides women haunting the land, about their disappearing men, until no buyer would come near the property line. So the Briars had no choice but to let her pay the overdue taxes and declare the land hers.

  Marjorie did not fear the lore of this place or the Nomeolvides women, the stories of disappearing men. These gardens were the home of her girlhood. She and the grandmothers built a steady business selling seeds and bulbs to rich men on the promise that they held a little of La Pradera’s enchantment.

  “We?” Bay asked. “‘We’ have to think about the books? I haven’t seen you here for, what, ten years?”

  “I came to help you,” he said. “This place could be making more money than you know what to do with.”

  No.

  Again, a word passed between the cousins like a breath.

  No.

  For months, Bay had lived with her shoulders a little rounded, made small not just by the loss of Marjorie Briar but by the understanding that she was expected to replace her. She would be the one the town looked to for those grand parties that kept the shops open. She would be the one to spin tales of what beautiful gardens wealthy men could expect if only they bought a little Nomeolvides enchantment for their own estates. She would be the one expected to remember a thousand names, the ages of children, the favorite books or colors that Marjorie recalled as easily as her own birthstone.

  For months, Bay had been choking. Her flourishes had grown stiff, her smiles more nerves than charm. But with every meal in the Nomeolvides women’s stone house, with every plate of mole poblano, Bay sat up a little straighter. A thread of light in her came back. Bay was coming alive again. “You watch, mijas,” Abuela Mimosa said a week ago. “Three months, she’ll be throwing an autumn ball as good as her grandmother’s.”

  And now, this man was shoving his way into this house and deciding Marjorie’s place was his.

  And Bay was letting him.

  Reid took another swallow of his drink, his posture a little looser than a few minutes before.

  Azalea nodded to them. The other four took off their shoes so their feet would be silent. They rushed up the dark wood staircase and tore through Reid Briar’s things.

  Estrella and Dalia threw aside clothes and cuff links, books and boar-bristle shave brushes.

  “Don’t go so fast,” Gloria said. “We have to put everything back where it was.”

  Dalia found a stack of papers in the lining of Reid’s suitcase. She let out a whispered but triumphant, “Yes.”

  The heavy sheet
of the cover page was printed with a lawyer’s letterhead. Estrella caught several copies of a court seal. But the sentences, thick and dry, were slow to give up their secrets.

  “It’s in legal,” Azalea said.

  “Give me that.” Calla snatched the papers, dividing them between her and Gloria.

  They skimmed the pages, leafing through.

  Their glances flicked up at each other at the same time.

  They caught each other’s eyes and fell into laughter so heavy they tumbled onto the thick duvet covering the bed.

  “What?” Estrella asked.

  The two laughing cousins tried to sit up, but one look at each other, and the laughter pulled them both under. The papers scattered over them like leaves.

  Dalia grabbed at a sheaf of papers.

  “Hey,” Calla said, still laughing.

  “As best I can tell,” Gloria said, swallowing her own laughter, not looking at Calla in case it started her up again, “this shining tribute to the Briar name”—she consulted the papers again—“attended a party at another family’s estate and started a fire that caused a fortune of damage before they could get it out.”

  Calla giggled, handing Dalia the letters to and from the lawyer’s office. “He was trying to show off by lighting a cigar with a candelabra.”

  “That’s not funny,” Estrella said. “What if somebody was hurt?”

  Gloria passed Estrella one of the papers. “Nobody was.” She leaned on her elbow, the duvet fluffing up around her. “Unless you count the Briars’ bank accounts. They paid for everything.”

  Dalia shook her head at the papers. “So that’s what he’s doing here.”

  “What do you mean?” Estrella asked.

  “He thinks he can make money here,” Dalia said. “He wants to repay it. Get back in their good graces.”

  “Fat chance of that,” Calla said. “Did you see the amount?” She fell back onto the bed. “All those priceless books.”

  “Irreplaceable artwork,” Gloria said. “Antique furniture.”

  “And the piano,” Calla said, still lying down but lifting a finger into the air. “Don’t forget the piano.”