Wild Beauty

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  But they were all the work of her youngest cousin’s hands. Her youngest cousin, whose name had blessed her with a gift for growing perfect calla lilies.

  It drew the breath out of Estrella’s throat. It was stunning and bright as the sky catching fire at sunset.

  And it had ruined Reid’s beautiful car.

  Estrella ran, catching Calla by the arm in a side garden.

  The pressure of Estrella’s fingers must have warned Calla. She turned, her expression guilty but unashamed.

  Estrella caught her breath. “I don’t want to jump to any unfair conclusions.”

  Calla smiled, an acknowledgment that if Bay had not vanished, if Dalia did not walk the halls at night like some lost spirit, if Reid was not laying his claim to La Pradera, she would have laughed.

  Estrella let go of her arm. “Why?” She had meant to speak a whole question. Why did you do it? Why would you risk yourself and all of us? But her weak breath cut the question down to one word.

  Calla checked over both their shoulders. When she saw no one near the hedges and rows of azalea bushes, a clenched-jaw rage came into her face. “He cornered Dalia. I saw him.”

  Estrella’s breath turned sour in her throat. “What?”

  “Nothing happened,” Calla said. “I made sure of it. But he was trying to kiss her, and she was pushing him away, but she did it like she was flirting. She knows she can’t make him mad, so that was all she could do.”

  “Then how did you make sure nothing happened?”

  “I hid behind the bushes and I threw a rock,” Calla said.

  Estrella nodded. “Good.”

  Calla allowed a little pride into her face. “They thought it was a rabbit or a fox or something. It distracted him enough that she just said good night and left.”

  The perfumed sweetness of the roses and the lily magnolias filled Estrella. Most days, she liked it, the smell of these gardens so strong it seemed liquid. But now it made her forehead ache.

  “Throw all the rocks you want,” Estrella said. “But you can’t do this. Do you know what he could do to us?”

  Calla bit her lip. “It’s not fair.”

  “I know,” Estrella said.

  To Marjorie Briar, Estrella and her cousins had been las haditas, garden fairies who promised rich men magic held in seeds and bulbs. Marjorie taught them to trick men with too much money in their pockets, to part them from the contents of their billfolds. And if they ever came back complaining that the bulbs did not take into flowers as grand as those on La Pradera, they convinced them the only answer was to buy more.

  But Reid just wanted them to grow flowers that could be stuffed into vases. He wanted a ball not so the Nomeolvides women could sell their sewn burlap bags of iris bulbs and hydrangea seeds but so he could impress rich men. So he could work out how to wring enough money from La Pradera to pay his debt.

  And Bay. Reid had taken the loss of Bay no harder than misplacing a fountain pen.

  Reid’s reign had seeded in all of them, for the first time, the idea of leaving. They wouldn’t do it of course. They knew it could cost them their own lives and their mothers’ broken hearts. But the thought was new, and enough to frighten Estrella as she lay in the dark at night. She dreamed of La Pradera striking her sick as soon as her nightgown hem crossed the property line.

  “I promise you,” Estrella said. “The minute we can get rid of him, we will.”

  “No,” Calla said. “I mean”—she shook her head, shutting her eyes—“yes, I want that. But it’s not that. It’s his shirts.”

  “What about his shirts?”

  “They’re wrinkled,” Calla said. Her lips pressed together tight, a guard against tears. “He wants our cousin, and he has all that money, and he can’t even put on an ironed shirt.”

  A little piece of Estrella cracked. She loved Calla for how this small thing bothered her. She felt Calla’s rage and frustration so sharply tears burned at the corners of her eyes.

  “Listen to me,” Estrella said. “We’ll fix this.”

  “I don’t want to,” Calla said. “I want him to see it.”

  She could not let Reid come down on Calla for this. Not Calla, not brilliant, vindictive little Calla. She might have been taller than Estrella, but she was all thin limbs and round eyes. Sometimes, when Estrella was not close enough to have to look up at her, Calla still seemed ten.

  “You’re not taking the blame for this,” Estrella said. “I am.”

  “No,” Calla said. “I’m not letting you.”

  “You have to. Because you catch things before any of us do. We need you. Reid doesn’t know how much you notice and I don’t want him to. Let him keep underestimating you.”

  “But then what’s he gonna do to you?” Calla asked.

  “Don’t worry about me,” Estrella said. “Worry about Dalia. Take care of her.”

  “How?” Calla asked.

  Estrella thought of Calla folding up her thin arms and legs behind a bush, making noises that sounded like the skittering of a deer or rabbit.

  “Keep throwing rocks.”

  Estrella sifted through her thoughts for the way out of this, how to rub out any trace of what Calla had done.

  The bottle of whiskey in Reid’s hands, the gleam of the gold label, drifted back to her.

  Estrella combed out her hair and put on her best dress, a blush-colored one she’d worn to a midsummer party last year. The bodice was sewn with ribbons and satin flowers. The straps, thick pink ribbons, fastened in bows at each shoulder. The skirt brushed her calves, and the memory of how Marjorie used to pick out their dresses with their mothers stung.

  Liquor crates had been coming in for the ball, stacked high in an unused shed. Estrella stole bottle after bottle. Aged whiskey. Imported grappa. Champagne wrapped in pink foil. Absinthe the bartenders would serve by lighting sugar cubes in slotted spoons, the liquor burning blue green.

  She slipped through the carriage house’s side door, popped the bottles, and soaked the interior of the car. Grappa flooded the consoles and rained down over the calla lilies’ leaves. Absinthe left the steering wheels stained and sticky. Scotch dampened the dark soil. Champagne filled the flutes of the calla lilies, foaming over the petaled rims.

  She poured out liquor and wine onto the chrome and leather. The fragrance of sugared grapes and bitter wormwood filled the carriage house. The fumes made her body feel light.

  From the last few bottles, she poured out enough to soak a few rags, and stuffed one in the neck of each. She held a lit match to a rag. The soaked cloth went up, and she threw it into the car. She lit the next, tossed it in, and again until they littered the inside.

  On the way out, her foot kicked green glass. A half-empty champagne bottle she’d missed. She grabbed its throat before it toppled, and took it with her.

  By the time the bottles blew, Estrella had climbed one of La Pradera’s grass-covered hills. It gave her a view of the flash and the fire lighting the carriage house windows.

  She sat on the grass, drinking straight from that bottle of champagne that probably cost more than Reid would ever pay her family. The windows in the carriage house doors showed ribbons of fire jumping up from the car.

  In every flick of light, the fire swallowed any evidence of Calla and her lilies. The bells and stems caught and went up, disappearing into the flames.

  It didn’t take long for Reid to notice, and for men to arrive in their red trucks.

  Fel appeared in a smoke-filled doorway.

  He coughed into the bend of his elbow, his shirt grayed with smoke.

  Panic prickled her. She hadn’t seen him go in. She’d been so set on burning any evidence that Calla had touched the car, she hadn’t thought about Fel, quiet and so unknown to them that he was unpredictable.

  He spoke to the firemen, gesturing inside and telling them, Estrella guessed, that no one was in the carriage house.

  Her heart settled and slowed. He was okay, this boy who cooked for her family when
they could not cook for themselves, this boy who searched the thick gray of liquor-filled smoke to make sure they were not lost in it. His clothes and hair were smoke-dulled, and he was coughing to clear it from his lungs, but he was okay.

  And Estrella had turned to ashes anything that could damn Calla.

  There was nothing for Reid to do but stand, try to deaden the horror on his face, and look around at who was there to witness it.

  The men threw open the barn doors, letting the bitter smoke billow out. They had the fire out with a few snowy arcs of the extinguishers. But it had done its damage. The car was ruined, and the carriage house would smell like smoke for weeks.

  Reid’s eyes moved in Estrella’s direction. They missed her at first, passing over her.

  When they snapped back, she knew he’d seen her.

  His mouth stayed open. But even from this distance she could see the rage, the disbelief, boiling down into one expression.

  She held his stare. She didn’t want anyone else blamed for this. Not Calla. Not Fel. And for one reckless minute she wanted him to throw her out of the gardens. She didn’t want any part of the little kingdom he meant to make out of La Pradera.

  With the glow from the carriage house, and the warmth of the champagne spreading through her, there was nothing to fear in the whole world. He could kick her out if he wanted to. She’d die a legend. She’d be a story Dalia could pass on to the next Nomeolvides daughters.

  Estrella would be the girl who went out in the light of all those flames.

  She raised the bottle in Reid’s direction, the pink foil label peeling under her fingers, and she swallowed the last of the champagne.

  SIXTEEN

  The woman who insisted Fel call her Abuela Lila told him that, between the flower beds, the blossoming trees, and the sunken garden, there were more petals in La Pradera than souls in the world. Everything here bloomed. The clouds of hydrangeas and lilacs. The arbors and trellises. The beds of lilies and hyacinths.

  So when Fel had first seen the fire, he’d thought it was made of petals. He’d thought their flicker was the fast and sudden blooming of red and orange flowers.

  But as he came closer, the flames resolved, looking more like liquid, like spilled molten iron, than petals.

  The fire had seemed small until he went through the doors. The smoke had gathered hard and thick enough that it choked him. It stung with each breath but something about it felt familiar. Not comfortable, but known.

  He felt the fire’s warmth on his forearms as he checked the smoke-filled room. But it wasn’t until Reid came for Estrella that Fel understood she had set it.

  By now, the firemen had gone. The smoke had risen toward the sky and faded. And La Pradera smelled so much like ash that it reminded him of fall, the burning of leaves.

  Reid came to the stone house, where the grandmothers’ staked vegetable plants and fluffy herbs seemed like chicks gathering around a hen.

  Estrella knelt in the side yard, bringing up borraja petals in the shadows of tomato plants. Her cousins were brightening a sparse flower bed with pink and orange flowers. Fel had just softened it by running a tiller through the empty earth, and now he was doing the same with a cleared-out herb bed the grandmothers would replant. He pushed the tiller through the dirt, and the metal spurs glinted silver against the dark earth.

  But Reid did not cross the break in the low garden wall or follow the path toward the front door. He did not enter the trembling gardens crowded with dark green leaves and trails of flowers.

  He said Estrella’s name with the solemn tone of a priest calling her to confession.

  Estrella drew her hands out of the earth. She brushed her fingers first against each other and then against her skirt, leaving faint shadows on the pink fabric. And she followed him, her shoulders straight, drawing herself up to her full height so completely that for a minute she looked as tall as her mother. She interlaced her fingers in front of her, and that stoic look, like she was an accused witch going to her trial, thickened Fel’s apprehension into worry.

  That worry loosened his grip on the hand tiller. It urged him after her. But as she passed the low stone wall, she paused, letting Reid get a few more steps in front of her.

  She turned back, so quickly Reid did not notice. She kissed her fingertips and blew air over her palms at her cousins. It made her look like she was starting off on a trip and would bring them all back glittering stories as souvenirs.

  That gesture was for her cousins. She caught each of their eyes, and didn’t seem to notice Fel standing with the tiller, the metal stars slowing until they were still. She had set a fire to tell Reid how little she wanted him here, and she had done it in a dress nice enough to wear to Easter service. A slip the pale blue of a robin’s egg showed at the hem. Her lips shined a darkened shade of the same rose color as her dress.

  Since she had found him in the valley made of flowers, his soul had searched after the muted colors of a life he could not remember. He had come from a world that was so gray and dulled he wondered if maybe it had been el Purgatorio, the place where he’d been meant to work out his sins. But it had been familiar, and he remembered enough good in it that he had wanted to go back. To find the things he had lost. To learn the name and features of the one who had taken care of him, negotiated for stale bread and unrendered manteca, given him the little wooden horse to keep in his pocket.

  But now he wanted this. He wanted this painted world that thrilled him even as it frightened him. He wanted to understand the language of women who laughed with tears dampening their cheeks, even if he would never speak it.

  He wanted the color of this unknown life. He wanted to grow the kind of bright, fearless heart that lived in this girl.

  SEVENTEEN

  Estrella knew this room. She knew its antique chaises, its marble-bordered fireplace, its cut-crystal decanters of port and plum brandy that the fireplace lit up like gemstones.

  When Marjorie had been alive, it was a room where guests gathered after parties, draping themselves on the damask and brocade. It was where Marjorie convinced men a few drinks deep that the best investment they could make was the tailor’s shop or bookstore in town, or the theater that was a month from shutting down, or that they should put up the money to repave a cobblestone street in exchange for a plaque declaring the town’s gratitude.

  Good talk about your name is priceless, she urged, refilling their drinks, laughter at the corners of her mouth because she never cared what anyone said about her. Only what they said about Bay, and Estrella’s family.

  But daylight made this room seem sad, desolate. Like the way funeral flowers smelled flat and chalky after the mourners left.

  Reid slipped the cuff links from his shirt and folded up the cuffs. Estrella flinched, wondering if he might hit her.

  He set out two glasses and uncapped a crystal decanter.

  “That wasn’t just any car,” he said, his tone factual, uninvolved. “It wasn’t some new model off the lot.”

  Of course it wasn’t. Estrella had seen enough nights of rich men’s Morgans and Aston Martins crossing La Pradera’s gates. They considered new cars garish, showy. Instead, they bought older ones, secondhand, limited editions that cost more than new cars.

  “I don’t know you,” he said. “But I think I know enough to know you don’t want your family to have to pay for your mistakes.”

  The words snaked down her back, cold as the drops off an ice cube.

  “That sounded like a threat, didn’t it?” he asked. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  His voice was open enough that she almost believed it.

  “What I meant was I know a little bit about what a debt to your family feels like,” he said.

  She thought of the candelabra. The rare books, the antique piano, the irreplaceable art. All up in flames.

  “You do, don’t you?” she asked.

  He gave her a pained smile. “So you’ve heard.”

  Without looking at the glass
es, he poured amber alcohol that smelled as strong as nail polish remover.

  “So Bay,” Reid said, and the muscles in Estrella’s shoulders clenched. “It’s true, the rumors about all of you and disappearing.”

  It didn’t sound like a question, so Estrella didn’t answer it.

  Bay was nothing to Reid. Reid was not Estrella and Azalea, folding Bay’s laugh into their jewelry boxes like beaded hairpins. He was not Calla, sharing marzipan plums with Bay because they were the only ones who liked things that sweet. He was not Dalia and Gloria, their wrists smelling of orange blossom perfume as Bay kissed the back of their hands, the younger cousins imagining the brush of her lips just below their own knuckles.

  “Doesn’t that make you worry about your boyfriend?” Reid asked.

  Who? She was so close to saying it out loud she had to bite her lip to keep the word from coming out. Then she remembered, the lie told about the boy she’d found in the sunken garden. She and her cousins had guarded the secret of his appearing as much for their mothers’ and grandmothers’ sake as for his. More.

  “Fel,” Estrella said. “His name is Fel.”

  She was cutting this off. Reid’s questions held not concern but the curiosity of a tourist.

  “Please don’t ask Dalia about what happened,” Estrella said. Dalia slept less than Fel did now. Estrella heard the hallway floor creaking under her steps at midnight. “Don’t make her live through that again.”

  Reid held his hands up, a gesture of surrender.

  If he meant to hide his smile, he gave it so little effort that it only flattened into a smirk. How charmed he must have considered himself. What golden luck he must have thought was his that even a family’s legacy conspired to give him these gardens, free from Bay’s objections. Of course he would think the whole glittering universe existed to spin anything he wanted out of stardust.

  He was a man, and a rich one, and these together made him believe the planets and moons orbited around the single point of his desires.

  “So you and your family,” he said. “You make flowers.”