Wild Beauty

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  Estrella’s family had been his when he had no family. This was his fight, too.

  He pulled himself to standing. His steps felt unsteady, things he had to think about. He had to force his body into them, like he’d been startled awake from sleepwalking.

  Estrella grabbed his arm, and he couldn’t tell if she was trying to stop him or help him stand.

  With each step, he felt more rooted in his own body, and he closed more space between him and Reid. There was current in his hands, half rage, half the untethered feeling of coming back to life.

  Fel would kill this man. For his brother. For the other men. For the women who had become his family.

  Steps struck the courtyard flagstones.

  “Reid.” Bay’s voice rang out through the gardens.

  Reid’s stare flew and found her.

  Bay stopped, catching her breath. In the distance, Estrella’s cousins crossed La Pradera, the wind streaming their hair and skirts.

  Reid studied Bay like he was watching her through a rain-blurred window. There was no flash of satin or fair hair, nothing pale or bright against the dark sky. In the place of blues and yellows there were browns and grays.

  But he recognized her, her voice if not her clothes and her hair, cut and dyed. She put a haunted look into him, as though the voices that lived in the ground had gotten their fingers around his throat.

  The sight of her deepened his fear. It shocked him into stillness.

  “Reid,” Bay said, moving closer. “Did you ever think about why they sent you here?”

  The shadow and silver of clouds moved over Reid’s face.

  “This is the land of Briar disappointments,” Bay said.

  “I know that,” Reid said, his voice unsteady. “Everyone knows that.”

  “Did you know we’ve disappeared, too?”

  “What?” Reid looked down at his own body as though it might be vanishing.

  “A long time ago.” Bay unfolded papers from her back pocket, sheets that looked like copied newsprint. “More than a hundred years ago.”

  Fel tensed, waiting for her to tell the rest, not sure he wanted to hear the story of his own death and Adán’s told like it was far history.

  “The Briars who lived here went missing and nobody ever found them,” Bay said.

  Fel turned to Estrella. What? He’d meant to say it, not mouth it, but no sound came.

  Estrella shook her head.

  “Nobody knew what happened to them,” Bay said. “People around here thought they’d skipped the country. That’s one of a dozen theories the papers ran. But they just disappeared. I’m talking about their tea and their fountain pens left out on their desks and everything. They just disappeared, Reid.”

  “That’s not true,” he said, the sureness folding back into his voice. “You can’t believe every story you hear. None of it’s true. You’re here, aren’t you?”

  Bay glanced at Fel and Estrella, as though these were things that should not be said in front of them.

  “Look.” Bay handed Reid the papers.

  Reid’s eyes moved over the print.

  The only sign of him understanding was the pull of muscle between his jaw and his neck.

  “It’s not them,” Bay said, looking first to Estrella and then to Reid. “It’s the land.”

  “What are you talking about?” Reid asked.

  “Something happened here,” Bay said. “And the land’s been taking people ever since. The stories, they all turned it into something about the women here, but it happened before they ever got here. The land took the men who lived here. Our family. Your family.”

  Fel watched Estrella, her lips parting as though she was breathing in Bay’s words. He felt it, how neither of them expected Reid to believe Bay. To Reid, the Nomeolvides women were witches, an explanation so simple and clean he felt no need to adorn it.

  But Bay, appearing with the wonder and terror of an angel, frightened him into believing.

  “You know I’m right,” Bay said. “You can tell me you don’t, but you feel it.” Bay looked toward Estrella. “The same way they feel everything in their family, you feel this. I can see it in you.”

  Reid handed the papers back. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because I want you to know that our own family…”

  Reid cut her off with a raised hand. “They are not your family.”

  “Fine,” she said. “Your family. They sent you somewhere where there was a chance you could just vanish. They send their failures here hoping they’ll stay out of the way, but you know what I think? I think they’re hoping we’ll just disappear. We won’t be their problem anymore. Why else would they have started sending everyone they didn’t want here? They knew. They were willing to risk you and Marjorie’s father and everyone else. They’ve been doing it for generations.”

  Pain started at the edges of Reid’s face, gathering until it shut his eyes.

  Fel hated this man, for hitting Estrella hard enough that her blood found Fel in the ground. For living off money made from the blood of men who had no other choice.

  But for this second he saw him enough to recognize the understanding in Reid, his realizing how much his family counted him lost. He could hate him, and still see it.

  Bay wouldn’t let Fel kill Reid. Fel knew that, the rage dulling in his hands. But at least he had this, Reid’s fear. If Bay would not let Fel use his hands against Reid, he could still use this, his fear, to keep him away from Estrella and her family.

  “They want to get rid of you, Reid,” Bay said. “One way or another.”

  Reid opened his eyes. “What happened here?”

  Bay gave a short, pained whisper of a laugh. “Your family killed people. A lot of them. They died here. Almost a century and a half ago.”

  Fel saw neither shock nor recognition in Reid’s face. Reid didn’t know about the rock fall in the quarry. But he was also so unsurprised by the possibility that the Briars had blood and death on their souls, that Fel wondered how many others like him there were, how many quarries, how many lies spread so far and for so long they became true.

  “Stay,” Bay said. “Stay if you’re ready to tell this story with me. If you’re ready to take responsibility for what this family has done.”

  Bay’s stare was so sure, so unbroken, that Fel understood the warning in her voice. This was her signal to Reid that if he stayed and lied about this, the land would have its vengeance on him the same as it had those vanished Briars.

  For as long as it took for a cloud to pass over the moon, Fel thought he caught some sign of will and certainty on Reid’s face. There was the possibility that he might become different than what his family had made him. And with that possibility came hope drifting off Bay, that this minute would make Reid into someone else. He might become someone who told the truth, who counted it as currency. He might turn into someone who made room for Bay in the world of his family, more brother than enemy.

  But then the light came back, and Fel saw nothing but Reid’s wish to brush all this off him. Bay noticed, her eyes shutting as those hopes fell from her hands. Her disappointment was so full and deep he could feel it. It made him want Dalia’s hands on Bay as badly as he wanted Estrella’s on him. Dalia, the girl who could pull Bay out of all these jagged, broken pieces without them cutting her. Estrella, the girl who called Fel back from the places where he got lost.

  The Nomeolvides girls saved them as much as they destroyed them.

  But to Reid, they were just witches. It was written in the way Estrella had drawn Fel out of the ground, in the tree of so many colors, in the way these women spoke a language that shifted and turned too often for anyone else to learn it.

  Reid would run from this place. He would get as far away from all the death here as he could.

  “You know now,” Bay said. “So there’s no pretending you don’t.”

  Fel turned back to Estrella. But she was gone, and all three of them in the courtyard were left watching
the space where she’d been.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  The truth ran over Estrella’s skin, sharp as winter rain.

  It hadn’t been her family.

  They had not brought this curse to La Pradera. They had thought their lovers had been disappearing long before they came here, back when they were las hijas del aire.

  But it was the land.

  Estrella and her cousins had given the land what they thought it wanted. Necklaces and bottles of perfume. Paper flowers and sugar hearts.

  A carved wooden horse, painted blue, that called back the boy it once belonged to.

  Estrella ran through the dark, her hands finding Dalia’s shoulders.

  “Has a woman ever disappeared?” she asked.

  “What?” Dalia asked.

  Now Estrella looked to her other three cousins. “Has a woman our family loved ever vanished?”

  Gloria shook her head, hesitating. “I don’t know.”

  “We never heard about it,” Azalea said. “Do you really think they’d tell us?”

  Estrella’s understanding fell scattered and bright as the sparks off a bonfire.

  “It’s men,” she said. “It’s only men.”

  “What are you talking about?” Gloria asked.

  “The land,” Estrella said. “It doesn’t take women. It takes men because it’s men who died here. The miners. Our family helped hide their deaths, so the ground’s been taking the men we love ever since.”

  “You’re wrong,” Calla said.

  Estrella looked at her.

  “This has nothing to do with La Pradera,” Calla said. “The disappearing…” The words dissolved in the air. Even Calla couldn’t say the raw truth of it, the disappearing of their loves, the vanishing of anyone they cared for too much. “It was happening to our family before we ever came here.”

  “Was it?” Estrella asked. She looked around at all her cousins. “Does anyone know that for sure? Do we even have stories about it that far back?”

  They opened their mouths, considering speaking but then staying quiet.

  “We accepted this as the way it’s always been,” Estrella said. “We thought we brought this curse here with us. But do we know that?”

  She felt their four sets of eyes settle on her, listening but not yet understanding.

  “We helped cover this up,” Estrella said. “So it took something from us. It wanted us to answer for what we’d done. And it wanted our attention.”

  “It?” Calla asked.

  Estrella looked down at her feet. “The ground. This place.”

  “But we didn’t know about what happened,” Azalea said. “Not until tonight.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Estrella said. “We turned a graveyard into gardens.”

  Comprehension spread over Calla’s face. “So it wouldn’t let us leave.”

  Calla’s words threw a new spray of embers across Estrella’s thoughts.

  La Pradera held them, made them sick if they tried to run, because it would not let them walk away from the truth they had veiled in so many flowers and leaves.

  “That means it’s not us,” Azalea said, her face so soft and hopeful she looked younger than Calla. “We didn’t kill them.”

  They traded glances, the language of having lived together so long they could speak to one another with their eyes.

  Estrella wished she could pry the ground open like the shell of a pomegranate, spilling out its secrets like shining red seeds.

  Beneath the sharp color of the flower beds and the gray of the flagstone paths, this land would always be its own. It would always hold its own rage, its own vengeance. Estrella and her cousins, and their mothers and grandmothers, could draw a hundred thousand blossoms from the earth, but it would never belong to them. It would never belong to the Briar family, either, even if, on paper, it was theirs.

  If it had ever belonged to the Briars, it had gotten away from them when they buried the awful things that had happened here. Their own carelessness caused the rock fall, and by covering it, they had turned it into a worse violation against this ground.

  This garden, and all the loss here, had haunted the Nomeolvides women, and none of them had realized. It had grabbed them, trying to speak of what it had witnessed. It had tried to make them see it.

  The loss of their lovers had been less its wrath and more it trying to make them pay attention.

  It wanted them to look deeper and see the stories buried here.

  These unspoken things had their own pull. Spun together, they were heavy as a moon.

  The colors of the sunken garden swirled around Estrella.

  Of course La Pradera would not let them go.

  A hundred years ago, Nomeolvides women had hidden the jagged rock of the quarry walls with so many trees and climbing flowers, no one could tell there had once been a landslide big enough to kill so many men. Her family had cast a veil of vines over the sunken garden, a place they had never thought of as more than a rocky canyon.

  If they did not know how many lives the quarry had taken, those first Nomeolvides women on La Pradera would have thought they were doing nothing but tending land that could not be farmed. The steps of the quarry, broken by the rock fall, would have looked like nothing but forbidding ground.

  They had turned this place from a graveyard into a fairy tale.

  “Estrella?” Dalia said.

  Even with the soft echo of Dalia’s voice, all Estrella could see was this place they had made.

  With dahlias and azaleas, calla lilies and morning glories, Estrella’s cousins had painted this ground. With roses and countless bulb flowers, her mother and her cousins’ mothers had kept this blood-soaked land a bright garden. With branches of blush and yellow flowers, her grandmother and great-aunts had spun this place from a tragedy to an enchantment.

  They had given this place their hands. They had sealed the Briars’ lie with so many petals they could not be counted. And for this, the land would not let them leave. It made them stay, hearing its voice. If they tried to run, it drew blood and pollen from their lungs.

  They had to uncover the ground again. They had to let it speak and be seen.

  They had to kill all the beauty they’d made.

  Estrella ran down into the sunken garden, the place that had once been a quarry. She knelt next to one of the flower beds. She plunged her hands in, and dragged out a border of blue starflowers.

  The rushing of steps on the stone stairs made her look up. Bay and Fel and her cousins were following her down, her cousins watching Fel like he might be some figment of these gardens. An imagined boy.

  Fel reached the path and then stopped. He watched her with his head a little tilted, like he hadn’t decided whether he should stop her. She didn’t blame him. She could see herself now, wild-eyed, her hair tangled as brambles.

  She pulled stems so fast the indigo blossoms flew. Pink blooms and buds the color of dark wine fell to the dirt. Between flower beds, she dragged her fingers through the forget-me-nots dotting the grass.

  She caught her breath. She found Fel’s silhouette in shadow.

  “Are you gonna help me or not?” she asked.

  He took a few steps toward her. His uncertainty held him. He must have thought that tearing up these flowers, these gardens her family had made, was its own violation. She could read the hesitation in him.

  She took his forearms and pulled him down with her.

  This was his story, too, all that had been hidden under leaves and blooms.

  He was slow pulling the first ones out. But when he saw the recklessness in her hands, the borraja arcing through the air, he tried again. This time he mirrored her, clutching the stems and tearing them away.

  She went faster, grabbing not just at the stems but at the ground. Wet earth got under her fingernails and stained her dress. It dyed her shoes.

  She and her family had made all this. She was not too delicate or clean to tear it all down.

  Her cousins stood on the b
rick and stone paths. They watched, eyes following Estrella’s and Fel’s hands. Azalea stood with crossed arms. Calla kept near Gloria, Gloria’s palm resting on her shoulder.

  Dalia’s eyes landed on Bay. The look between them wove so thick through the air Estrella thought she could reach in front of her and touch it. It was invisible, but solid as the kind of satin ribbon Estrella and her cousins once offered La Pradera.

  Dalia dragged her hands through the ground like she was stirring the surface of a pond, grasping at something that had just slipped beneath the surface.

  Their cousins reeled back. Dalia was ripping at flowers like she was stamping out flames. Her fury turned to a thing that looked like madness into a luring light. Estrella could see it on her cousins’ faces, their heads inclining toward her.

  Dalia spun through the sunken garden, her hands fast as moon-silver over water. Calla slid from Gloria’s light hold. Gloria trailed after, not to stop her but to join her. Azalea followed, hands ready.

  They took up flowers by the roots, the amethyst-colored calla lilies, the bright azalea bushes, the pastel rounds of dahlias. They tore down the morning glory vines purpling the quarry walls.

  Dahlias spun like stars. Stalks of calla lilies in every color from cream to near-black flew. Blue morning glories fell from where they’d crawled up the balsam poplars. Azalea petals fell away from their centers.

  They tore it all into a bright confetti. The petals caught in their hair and on their clothes.

  Estrella felt the ground drawing back, like the sunken garden was taking a breath. She felt that breath spreading through the irises and hydrangeas and through all of them.

  Their mothers and grandmothers appeared at the top of the sunken garden. Their faces showed their wonder as they recognized the lost Briar daughter in this auburn-haired stranger. They took in Fel, this brown-skinned boy with his sleeves still cuffed up, like he was a saint bearing sacred roses.

  They watched him, this boy they thought had disappeared, earth flecking his skin. They watched Bay, this woman they had all claimed as their daughter. They watched their own children and grandchildren, each wrecked vine drawing both their horror and their thrill.