Wild Beauty

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  It was the possibility, the potential in a laugh or the brush of fingers, that could leave them in pieces. It had etched on Fel’s rib cage the memory of light on a girl’s skin, her ankle wearing thin cords of gold and moon silver.

  The earth should have given Fel the sense that he couldn’t breathe, like the ground falling over him so long ago. But down here, he had no body to be crushed, no breath to be taken, no blood to be lost.

  All that was left were his dreams of indigo horses, turning teal beneath the sun’s heat.

  A girl setting her lips against his forehead as he slept.

  The wild flicker of her skirt, like petals scattering.

  This was a thing he’d learned: that setting his hand on a girl’s back, and that girl letting his hand stay, led to fairy rings, and ponds full of stars.

  Even in its first faint traces, love could alter a landscape. It wrote unimagined stories and made the most beautiful, forbidding places.

  Love grew such strange things.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Her mother did not try to hold her as she cried into the sheets Fel had slept in. Her mother did not try to stroke her hair or shush her with a soft voice. Instead, she soaked a cloth in rosewater and with rough, quick strokes she cleared the trails of salt and the indigo dried on Estrella’s cheeks. She handed Estrella a small cup and told her to swallow it down. The alcohol burned the back of her throat, then left the taste of anise and honey.

  The sting of the liquor faded, and Estrella fell into the open well of sleep.

  “Luisa,” her mother said from the doorway.

  Estrella sat up, half-asleep, wondering if, for a moment, her mother had forgotten her name.

  “The one I loved most wasn’t your father,” her mother said, her shape a silhouette in the hall’s light. “We loved each other the way friends do, your father and I. But I loved someone else in a very different way. Her name was Luisa.”

  To another daughter, it might have stung, the revelation that her father was some lesser love to her mother.

  But this one name shimmered with the possibility that her mother understood the hearts of Estrella and her cousins.

  And right now it kept Estrella breathing.

  “What happened to her?” she asked.

  “I sent her away,” her mother said. Even in the dark Estrella could make out the hardening of her face, bracing against the memory. She looked washed clean of excess color, her lips pale against the brown of her face and her deep eyes. “I told her I didn’t love her.”

  Estrella sank back onto the bed. “I should’ve sent him away.”

  “Where?” her mother asked. “This was the only home he had.”

  Estrella’s eyes fell shut, and she breathed in the air through the window and the soft breath of her mother whispering, “Sleep.”

  This was what turned Nomeolvides girls into women. Not their first times bleeding between their legs, but the first time their hearts broke. Estrella could feel hers inside her rib cage, a bird trapped in an attic.

  She still wore her blue dress, limp and creased. The stains from the mushroom milk had turned a deep green. She slept in the bed that still smelled like him, the salt of his sweat and the scent of leaves in the gardens. She dreamed of setting her mouth against him, kissing the places where pale scars crossed his back like he was a map. She dreamed of the heat that lived just under his skin. And when she dreamed of him, she woke to starflowers spreading across the ceiling. The vines unfurled, wrapping around rafters and trailing down to the curtain rods. The purple blooms opened and showed their five blue petals.

  She didn’t care who saw them. She didn’t care if they reminded her mother or her grandmother of girls driven from their houses for being witches. Estrella was more dangerous than any bruja. She had killed the boy she’d brought back. And this was a thing worse than loving him into disappearing in the first place.

  She opened herself to her family’s worry. She hoped it would sharpen into scorn, because that was what she deserved. Not their concern. Not their sense that she should be looked after. Their contempt. Their blame.

  Estrella deserved the name her mother had given her. She deserved how it made those blue flowers unpredictable, waiting at the edges of her dreams. She deserved the way it kept her a little distance from her cousins, making her a lesser Nomeolvides girl.

  Later, her cousins filled the room, carrying haircombs, a clean dress, glasses of water, cups of tea. They came with hands ready to lead her into the shower and spin her into something living.

  “We have to tell her,” Estrella said.

  Her cousins stilled. She had said so little since shutting herself in this room that now her voice caught them.

  “What?” Gloria asked.

  “Bay.” Estrella slid to the edge of the bed, her feet brushing the floor. “We have to tell her to get away from us.”

  “Why?” Calla and Azalea asked, a half second off from each other.

  Estrella stood, the floor cool under her feet. “So we don’t kill her.”

  As her cousins traded glances, the feeling of standing filled Estrella. The sense of her own weight and will came back into her body.

  She could not save Fel. Nomeolvides girls had been the death of him twice. But she and her cousins could warn the girl they had grown up loving.

  “We have to tell her to get away from us before we kill her,” Estrella said.

  “No,” Dalia said. “We’re not telling her to do anything. We’re giving her time to do what she needs to do.”

  “You convinced us all that we lost her,” Estrella said. “Do you really want to know what that felt like for us? Do you want it to happen for real so you can know?” The force of her own voice shocked through her. “Is that a chance you’ll take with her?”

  “This was her home,” Azalea said. “Where do you want her to go?”

  “Anywhere,” Estrella said. “Away from us. Away from Reid.”

  “We are not Reid,” Dalia said.

  “We’re worse,” Estrella said, “because she thinks we’re safe.”

  Dalia’s flinch was so deep Estrella felt it.

  “Our love is her death,” Estrella said, “and you know it.”

  Dalia looked like she’d fallen into water, floating and weightless, like she’d lost the feeling of standing on this floor they’d all worn with years’ worth of steps.

  “If we don’t want to lose her,” Estrella said, “we have to let her go.”

  When Dalia nodded, it was slow, like she was answering through a dream. That nod, the giving in of her heart, pulled the rest of them with her.

  The five of them streamed out of the stone house, passing the iris beds and rose trellises and the courtyard of blossoming trees. With prodding from Azalea and Calla, Dalia gave up the room number at the hotel. Fifth floor.

  Bay opened the door on the first knock. By the shift in her expression, Estrella knew she’d expected just Dalia.

  The five of them rushed into the cloth-papered room.

  Estrella shut the door behind them. She parted her lips to say what she had brought her cousins here for, to beg Bay to flee from them.

  Don’t think you’re safe from us just because you grew up with us.

  Don’t die because we love you.

  Don’t let our hearts kill you.

  But the words trailed off Estrella’s tongue.

  Paper covered every furniture surface in the hotel room. The desk. The night table. Even the bed, papers strewn over the unmade blankets.

  Estrella drew closer, so slowly that Bay didn’t stop her.

  They were all copies. Reproductions of old photographs. Not just black-and-white but tintype, daguerreotype. And grainy copies of articles from newspapers that looked more than a century old.

  The newspaper clippings were single column, the kind that got buried deep in the pages. They used words Estrella recognized, in some vague way that only came to mind when she thought of them together, as geological. Overburd
en. Striation. Berm. Shear. But she didn’t know what any of them meant.

  “Calla,” Azalea said, handing articles to her youngest cousin.

  The photos showed the low contrast of a scene that was all rock, a hollow in the ground that looked like it had enormous, ringing steps up the sides. Some showed the rings of that hollow as unbroken levels, like stacked bowls.

  Others showed a wide ribbon of earth running from one edge down into the deep center, like a spilled liquid.

  “What is all this?” Gloria asked.

  Before Bay could answer, Calla said, “It’s the sunken garden.”

  Estrella looked at it again. She studied the shape in different photos, the edges, the faint smudges of scrub grass and trees beyond.

  Calla was right. She’d recognized it even without the flowers and vines and trees.

  Bay’s breath out sounded like the walls were sighing. “I told you I was still working it out. I just need time.”

  “Bay,” Dalia said, her voice gentle as the brush of petals she’d grown herself.

  The draft through the cracked window lifted the ends of Bay’s hair and then let them fall back to her forehead.

  “Bay,” Dalia said again, laying her hand on the side of Bay’s face.

  In the way she said Bay’s name, there was not pleading but urging, the assurance that to her and her cousins, Bay could tell these secrets.

  “I was looking for something to get Reid to back off,” Bay said, eyes flashing to all of them. “Unfiled taxes. Something like that. But when I started looking, I found out something happened at La Pradera. A long time ago. Before it was La Pradera.”

  “What happened?” Azalea asked.

  Bay shook her head. “I don’t know everything yet.”

  “Then tell us what you do know,” Gloria said, matching Dalia’s soft voice.

  Bay straightened her shoulders, like this story was a thing she had to stand strong against. Whatever it was, she was buckling under the guilt of it.

  “From what I could find, everyone thought it would be the best quarry in the country,” Bay said.

  “What quarry?” Gloria asked.

  “Where the sunken garden is,” Bay said. “It wasn’t just some canyon. It was a quarry.”

  With those words, Estrella’s memories of the sunken garden twisted and sharpened. The layers of petals fell aside. The pond streamed away. The wind stripped the trees. There was nothing left to imagine but the jagged stone beneath everything.

  “They all said the overburden—the dirt and everything else covering the minerals—was thinner than they’d ever seen,” Bay said. “That’s why they were stripping the ground, to get at what was underneath. But they ignored how much of it wasn’t structurally sound. There were faults and they knew it, and they didn’t do anything to account for it.”

  Bay said each word like she was forcing them out. Estrella wanted to tell her this wasn’t her fault. She didn’t own this. She’d caught the dates on the newspapers, and this had been well over a hundred years ago.

  “See the striations here.” She set a finger against a photograph, the bands in the sides of the pit. “They’re called benches. The part that drops down is the batter, the flat part’s the berm. I don’t know if you really understand how big this thing was. It’s hard to tell with all the trees and the flower beds now.”

  She handed photographs to Calla and Gloria. “The benches are supposed to prevent rock falls from going all the way down the wall. That’s to try to make it less dangerous for the miners and prevent damage to everything. Not always in that order though.”

  Estrella and Azalea clustered around Calla and Gloria, studying the striped benches.

  “There are angles you’re supposed to do all this at. Shallower angles. Especially if you have any structural weakness within the rock.” Bay said each word with such pain, like she was watching it happen and could not reach out to stop it. “Faults. Shears. Anything like that. But they didn’t do what the surveyors told them to do. They paid them off and just did whatever they wanted.”

  “They?” Gloria asked.

  Bay’s shoulders rounded. “The Briars. My family.”

  She gave them the photographs with the lines of the benches broken, that wide ribbon of earth. “They should have known, with walls that steep. They should’ve known this would happen.” She swallowed hard enough that Estrella could also see the knot of it in her throat. “When it broke, the landslide was like nothing they’d ever seen. Millions of cubic meters of dirt and rock. Everyone in town thought it was an earthquake.”

  That was the band of earth. An avalanche, breaking the steps.

  Gloria handed a photograph back to Bay. “Did everyone get out?”

  Bay shut her eyes, shook her head, her jaw tight. “There’s no count. No numbers.”

  “What do you mean?” Azalea asked.

  “I mean I can’t find numbers anywhere,” Bay said. “My family buried this so deep I can’t even find out how many miners died. All I can find are the photos and those articles saying some kind of accident happened. I had to go looking for death certificates. But I can’t even find many of those.”

  The seam of a wallpaper panel was coming away from the wall, showing the yellowing glue underneath. Bay’s fingers worried at the edge.

  “All those lives,” she said. “All those stories. And we hid it all.”

  Every word looked like a stone in Bay’s pocket. She was more than a century removed from this, but still, the guilt had been passed down. No one else had taken it, so it had fallen to her, the Briar bastard, a burden tumbling down stone steps to the lowest point in this family.

  Bay looked at Dalia, wincing like Dalia might slap her, or tell her she did not love her, or scream at her that her family were murderers and liars.

  “This is what I come from,” Bay said, her voice breaking into pieces as she confessed this to the woman she loved. “This is my family.”

  “Who rejected you,” Azalea said. “Forget them. The things they did aren’t yours.”

  “I’ve lived off Briar money,” Bay said. “That makes me responsible.”

  “You lived off Marjorie’s money,” Calla said.

  “I’m still a Briar,” Bay said. “This is still mine.”

  “Then let’s do something about it,” Dalia said.

  “How?” Bay asked. “It’s done. Those men.” She sank onto the edge of the bed, fingers raking through her hair. “Their blood is on our hands.”

  “It’s not done,” Gloria said. “You can tell the truth. Make sure everyone knows what happened.”

  “Are you kidding?” Azalea asked. “The Briars will kill her.”

  “Not if we have anything to say about it,” Calla said.

  Their voices receded against the striped wallpaper.

  Estrella tried to listen. But the words floated round the room instead of reaching her. They patterned the bedspread. They stuck to the wallpaper. They caught on the white iron chandelier above them.

  The dark earth on the boy she’d found in the sunken garden.

  His clothes that seemed a hundred years out of date.

  The half-starved look of an overworked boy.

  The way he looked for things to do with his hands. The calluses on his fingers, rough as sand.

  Everything Estrella had imagined about where he had come from fell away.

  The force of it made her buckle toward the wall. She took slow, steadying breaths, but the world would not go still.

  Dalia was again holding Bay’s face in her hands, Bay’s eyes shut. The other three were swearing that if Bay told the truth, they would scare Reid and every other Briar into thinking they were witches who would turn them into violets if they laid hands on her.

  Estrella slipped from the room, down the stairs, across the open land that gave her a shortcut back to La Pradera.

  She found Reid standing on the grass, lighting up a cigar he’d no doubt stolen from the collection Marjorie kept for guests. He�
��d changed out of his formal clothes, all traces of jacket and pocket square gone. But he looked like he’d dressed himself by pulling pants and a shirt out of the laundry, then grabbing the formal shoes he’d worn for the ball, probably left beside his bed.

  How he looked didn’t matter to him. In a man, not caring was a draw, a mark of confidence. In Estrella, who’d worn her eyeliner until it smudged and her ball dress until it wilted, the same not-trying looked sloppy.

  What shamed a girl was, in a boy, so often worth showing off.

  Reid flicked the cigar. He threw embers over the ground. To him, this land was no different than a crystal ashtray.

  The ash struck the earth, and anger gave Estrella words.

  “You killed them,” Estrella said.

  He took in the sight of her, stained skirt and unbrushed hair.

  He flicked another ember. “What?”

  “Your family killed them.” Her voice was rising, like a bird’s call echoing off trees.

  “What are you talking about?” he asked.

  “Men died on your family’s watch,” she said. “And then you covered it up.”

  Reid crouched, putting out the cigar in the grass.

  Estrella pressed her teeth together, like she could feel the burn on the ground.

  Reid blew on the cigar. When it cooled, he tucked it into his pocket, rising to standing again.

  He eyed her dress and smudged makeup.

  “Clean up,” he said. “Get some sleep.”

  How level the words came out startled her, charged but not angry. Low enough that the wind wove through them.

  Reid started walking.

  “Reid,” Estrella called after him.

  He kept walking.

  “Stop,” she said, letting her voice go.

  She followed him past the fountains and trellises.

  “Look at me,” she said, and her voice turned to a yell.

  Reid crossed the courtyard of blossoming trees. He was almost to the hedge wall when she caught up with him.