Wild Beauty

by Anna-Marie McLemore

Another splashed up and joined the one in the air. Still another stayed underwater, lighting up the pond and the willow streamers.

  Some stayed. Some flew out and clustered on the meadow cordgrass and muhly grass, lighting up the pink fluff. They looked like fireflies or tiny stars.

  “Estrella?”

  She thought the voice was an echo of his voice from earlier, the gardens throwing it back at her.

  But she turned, and he stood there, the pond casting bands of bowing light over him.

  “Fel?” she asked.

  He stepped out from the willow’s shadow.

  Later, she would tell herself he’d kissed her first. She would remember that. He’d started this. Maybe she wrapped her fingers around the back of his neck and pulled him toward her, but he’d still started this.

  She kissed him hard enough to realize it wasn’t just the air but Fel that tasted like wild sage and smelled like blue shale. The insistence and faltering of kissing him had its own rhythm. It was the alternation of which of them wanted it more and which of them thought they should stop. They passed the two back and forth so one of them was always pulling away while the other drew closer.

  The feeling that she should stop collected in her.

  If she thought she could ever love him, she shouldn’t let his mouth near hers. If there was anything in her that wanted him, she shouldn’t learn the pattern of his breathing when he kissed her.

  If she wanted his body not to vanish, she could not put her hands on him.

  This was the heart of being a Nomeolvides girl. The more she loved a boy, the more reasons there were not to touch him.

  The price of knowing he would be there for her to touch was her not touching him.

  She knew this, even as he set his hands on the waist of her dress, slid his tongue between her lips, even as she dug her fingers into his hair. And with the moon veiling the clouds, with the garden lanterns and the little stars her necklace had turned to as their only light, it was almost as though, for those few seconds, La Pradera could not see them.

  But around them, the ground was whispering, the grass and flower beds giving up strange things Estrella could not name.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Indigo milk caps. As they grew from the grass, they took root in Fel’s memory.

  He knew them. They spread through the garden valley in fairy rings big enough that, even with the sweep of Estrella’s skirt, they could both fit inside. The mushrooms stood pale and bright against the dark earth and grass.

  Estrella breathed in, and he could hear the wonder in that breath, like she’d never seen mushrooms that color. On land her own family made beautiful, she must have thought there was nothing to find, no unfamiliar magic.

  She knelt down, and the back of her skirt trailed across a fairy ring. The garden lamps slipped gold light into the folds of fabric.

  “What are these?” she asked.

  “Mushrooms,” he said, letting a laugh into his words. What did she think they were?

  She hesitated to touch them, hovering her fingers a little above the caps. “They’re blue.”

  He crouched near her. The mushroom caps were pale purple, but he lifted the margin to show the dark gills underneath, a storm blue tinged with violet.

  He remembered finding these with his brother, how the wonder of it never dulled. Each morning he forgot the deep blue, and each night he found it again.

  But it wasn’t just the thought of his brother spinning back toward him.

  His family.

  He’d had a whole family. The shape of it was rising toward him like kelp breaking loose from a seabed and floating to the surface.

  He’d had a mother. With hair the color of a cork tree’s outer bark, and with hands as soft as lily petals. She and her sisters used to hunt these mushrooms in the forests, finding their pale caps at the bases of white pines and oaks. Her grandmother sold them in the markets. They had to be sold quickly because within a day the blue turned dark green, and the rich families sending their cooks to buy food would not pay as much for green mushrooms as for blue.

  Estrella stroked her fingers over the caps. She lifted the margin to look at the gills herself, dark as blue amethyst.

  Fel put his hand on hers, the memory of his fingers moving them. He snapped the stem, and blue paint spread over their palms.

  Wonder made her laugh light as a breath. She cracked one of the stems, let the milk bleed onto her fingers, and pressed a dot onto Fel’s nose.

  He laughed. “Hey.”

  She ran her thumb over his left eyebrow.

  He snapped another stem, and the blue trickled into his palm.

  She scrambled to the other side of a cypress tree, her laugh as soft as the brush of leaves.

  He came after her. He ran his hands through her hair and streaked it blue. She ducked out from under his hold and hid behind a tree in bloom.

  “Give up yet?” she asked around the tree.

  She had her back against the other side. All he could see was her profile, the sweep of her hair on her shoulder, the edge of her skirt.

  “Never.” He found her and painted comet trails on her cheeks.

  She smudged bands of blue amethyst on his hands and forearms, staining his skin indigo. When they needed more paint, they cracked another stem, and the color seeped onto their fingers. The milk in his hair brushed onto his forehead. The whites of his fingernails were blue sickle moons.

  He reached for her cheek. Without meaning to, his fingers grazed her mouth. A slick of milk rested on the inner curve of her lip.

  He came a little closer, pinning her against the tree not with his hands but with the small distance between his body and hers. Blue shone wet on her eyelashes. She blinked, and they left wisps of paint on her cheek.

  The warmth under his palm registered. He’d set his hand against her waist, and his fingers left darker blue stains on the blue fabric.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “Don’t be.” She put her hand to the side of his face.

  The gesture felt as dangerous as it was small, a calling back of him kissing her in the dark.

  Then he felt the mushroom milk on her palm. She’d painted half his cheek.

  He set his hand on hers. “You did that on purpose.”

  A smile curved one side of her mouth. She dropped her hand, her palm dyed indigo.

  A rush of blue sped past the corner of his vision.

  He turned, looking for it. Another fairy ring maybe. Or the moon lightening the sky between trees.

  At first, he saw nothing. Then, far off in the aspens, he found it, a horse as deep indigo as the mushrooms’ gills. A colt, small and young but strong, a carved horse figurine come to life.

  “Fel?” Estrella called.

  He startled at how far away she sounded.

  She was no longer under his hands. He staggered toward the blue horse. He set his palms against the trunks of flowering trees, steadying himself.

  The horse flicked its mane, a lighter blue like the mushrooms’ caps. Then it galloped off, the dark taking it.

  “Fel?” Estrella said.

  But her voice didn’t find him. One word echoed across the night, dyed indigo, until it settled on his lips.

  “Caballuco,” he said, like the name of someone he’d just recognized.

  “What?” she asked.

  He shut his eyes, and saw the carved horses together. Green, yellow, white, purple, orange, red. And two he remembered that were not on Estrella’s shelf. One pure black as her hair, the other indigo, deep as the mushroom’s gills.

  That color opened him, and there was more rushing back to him than his hands could hold.

  He remembered his brother smelling like hay from being around horses. How he brought the faint sun scent and tang of it home on his clothes. How Fel got it on him, too, the few times his brother talked his way into bringing his younger brother with him to see a criollo stallion or a red-shouldered mare.

  Fel’s brother had taught him the n
ames of horse colors like they were another language. Palomino and dark bay. Blue roan and red roan. Dun and dapple gray. His brother had taught him the secret meanings of the names. How could flea-bitten gray mean anything good, Fel had wondered until his brother taught him it meant a white horse freckled auburn.

  His brother, who had seen Fel come home with a bruise on his temple, had never offered pity or scorn. Instead, he had taught Fel one thing: how to tell, from watching how other men walked and laughed, whether an unbroken stare would provoke them or scare them off.

  His brother, who had made Fel believe that the brown of his skin was a thing to wear with pride. They would never be pale men, never fair like the drying husk of a white onion, and for this, they should be proud. Their blood held the history of their family.

  A family. Fel had a family, and they were all this brown his brother told him to take pride in. His brother marked their family by the colors of horses, the brown of a bayo rodado or bayo encerado. If anyone else had compared Fel to an animal, it would have stung as an insult. But the hills of his brother’s dreams were crowded with horses, so there was no better compliment.

  Estrella took hold of his arm, saying his name.

  He looked at her.

  There were so many colors of her. Her hair as dark as a grulla colt’s mane. The deep gold in her skin. Her eyes as brown as his brother’s favorite Andalusian horses.

  Fel could not remember the awful things he had done, the sins that had made God strip his memories from him, giving them back only in small pieces.

  But this girl. She had led him through these gardens. She had given him back everything good. She made him more than the things he had done that were written onto his back.

  Her heart had a stronger pull than all of it. And the beauty and force of her pulled him down to his knees like she was some beautiful, terrifying angel.

  Under his shins, the grass gave off its clean, damp scent. He put his hands on the small of her back, the blue of her skirt billowing and settling. He let his cheek rest against her stomach, and through the fabric of her dress, he kissed her hip, a place she’d let him touch in the dark.

  He braced for her to pull him to his feet and ask what he was doing. But she set one hand in his hair, and the other on the back of his neck. His tears came without sound, so when he saw the darker blue stains on her dress, they surprised him. He tried pulling away.

  But she kept her hands on him. Her fingers met on the back of his neck.

  This dark garden valley, glowing with veins of light from the pond, spreading rings of blue mushrooms, gave him back more of his family than his heart could hold.

  He’d had a mother who sometimes deferred and other times defied. When she made torrijas every Holy Week, she added honey and spice and olive oil as her own mother had taught her. But when her mother insisted she should not let her sons near horses, not after her great-grandfather had died being thrown from one, she’d ignored her.

  He’d had aunts who told him that he should plant wood betony around where he slept. The stalks of purple blossoms would scare ghosts wandering from graveyards and witches from his threshold.

  He’d had a grandfather who’d worked as a cork harvester, and then bought enough land for a whole grove of wild olive trees, passing them down to Fel’s father.

  The thought of the olive trees broke into a million green leaves, each knife-thin, and Fel caught the blunt pain of remembering what had happened to them.

  A cold winter. A bad frost coating the leaves like sugar.

  It had killed the trees. And with that memory came his half-formed understanding of why he and his brother had had to leave the place where they’d been born.

  There was no money. With the trees frozen and dead, there was not enough to eat and there was not enough work. So their mother and father had sent them across a wide sea.

  Even if he crossed that sea again, his family was gone. All of them. Fel knew that. He had felt the Nomeolvides girls trying to guard him from this, but he heard their whispers, their guesses about how he had appeared from a hundred years ago, and he knew that any family he had, he had lost.

  But they were still his. They had risen from the broken-down, half-remembered places, and they were his again.

  His brother was still here. The flapping of bird’s wings were his whisper. The dark of the pond’s surface was the color of his favorite wooden caballuco, the paint on the winged horse soft and chipping. The crush of grass under Fel’s feet were hushed as his brother’s steps, always quiet even over rocky ground.

  Fel was everyone he had lost, and the land he had left behind. He was the almond trees ringing his grandmother’s village. He was the roan and silver grullo horses whose coloring had enthralled his brother. He was a cork oak, stripped bare every ten years.

  For so long, he had caught these things only in worn threads, like remembering scraps of a dream, how trying to remember that dream only made it drift further away.

  Now all of this streamed into him so fast that he had to do something with it so it did not crush his heart into dust.

  Estrella pulled him up from his knees. She kissed him so slowly it felt more like a blessing than a sign that she wanted him. He accepted it.

  He picked blue mushrooms from their rings. He brought them to the Nomeolvides kitchen so he could cook them with lemon and green herbs and chili. He would do this how he’d seen his mother do it, the way she and her sisters had made them for one another and for their brothers when they were lovesick.

  He did the only thing he knew how to do for these women who had become his family. He cooked for them. The indigo of the dirt-shadowed mushrooms brightened as he brushed them clean. They heated into teal, bright as the feathers on the bee-eating birds his grandmother kept as pets.

  As Estrella handed him cut lemons and set out ceramic bowls, he gave in to a memory that felt like a thing torn out of him.

  Fel and his brother making a cake for their father’s birthday, covering it with hundreds of borraja petals they’d picked and washed. The petals were the deep blue of the sky; their edges seemed dipped in purple.

  First they stuck the petals to the icing one at a time, then by handfuls. They opened their palms and rained blue over the cake. By the time they ran out of borraja, the cake looked less like a cake and more like a sea creature from a fisherman’s stories, with scales made of sky and water. When their father and mother saw it, they could barely stop laughing long enough to taste it.

  Fel would make that same cake for these women. The same way, so that maybe they would laugh. He would make what he knew for when loss wore them down, and for when there was so much joy between them the air in this house smelled like lilacs. When they could not sleep, he wanted to stand at the stove with the grandmothers, frying leche frita, and set out glasses of anís or tigernut orxata. When the March thaw came, he wanted to cook them estafado de pollo, stirring purple potatoes into the red sauce and shelling spring peas from their waxed pods. When they were heartbroken, he wanted to pour them the blackthorn and hard liquor bite of patxaran.

  That night, Estrella asked him about the word. Caballuco.

  “There’s a story,” Fel said, speaking into the dark between them. “About dragonflies. How they’re really little horses that come from the devil. That they’re the souls of those who’ve sinned and that you can tell their sin by their color.”

  His voice sounded like a thing outside him. It was buzzing near him like the dragonflies that screamed through the air, hovering around saints’ day bonfires. They were flashes of iridescent blue above the embers.

  Fel pulled down the purple caballuco from the shelf, and set it in Estrella’s hands. “But my brother, he thought the story was a lie. That those dragonflies were horses that missed running. Not sinners. They just missed being horses. So they fly now.”

  “Your brother?” Estrella asked. “The one…”

  “Yes, the one who liked men,” Fel said, laughing softly. “He’s the one who taug
ht me anything I know about horses. He knew a lot more than I do.”

  When a shallow sleep took Fel under, he dreamed of indigo caballucos. Their teeth. Their blue-lavender manes. Their song that was both laugh and warning.

  He woke to her fingers on his forehead.

  “Fel,” she said.

  He sat up, blinking away those last flashes of the caballucos, their backs sprouting wings. His fingers found the blue stains on her skin, turning teal.

  “Do you remember how you got here?” she asked.

  He knew what she was asking. He had heard her family talking enough to know now. She thought he’d disappeared because, sometimes, those they loved vanished. She was asking if he remembered vanishing. His heart vibrated with so much hope he could not help taking this question as a sign that he was one of them, those they loved.

  “No,” he said. He said it without sadness, because however he had died to the gray world and the soft, olive-leafed world before that, he was in this world now. Estrella’s.

  This was the place he was coming back to life.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  She woke him in the hours before dawn. He still smelled like the pond in the sunken garden, all willow water and meadow cordgrass. La Pradera left its scent on anyone it touched. But the earth smelled different on this boy than it did on her own fingers. On him, it was deeper, like fall.

  They had left the mushrooms on the stove, grandmothers and mothers and cousins spooning them from the copper pot as they came home. The air in the house still smelled like lemon and spice.

  Now both mothers and grandmothers slept, their dreams heavy with worry and perfume. The guests were gone from Reid’s party, Reid was sleeping it off in the Briar house, and La Pradera was theirs again.

  Estrella led Fel out into the gardens, where the two of them and her cousins passed around alegría candy, the puffed amaranth and honey smell warming the chilled air. They got into the extra crates left over from the ball, opening bottles of rose cordial and lemon liqueur.

  Fel was both an odd visitor she wanted to watch and an uncertain boy she wanted to guide through the thorn-sharp world of the gardens. She wanted to show him where he could step without falling into the snares and traps of this place.