Wild Beauty

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  In the distance, Estrella found the far-off shape of her mother. She rushed down the stairs, and then was pulling at her own roses, tugging off enormous blooms. Dust-violet amnesia and yellow candlelight and pink secret garden roses tumbled from their stems.

  Then Tía Jacinta was alongside her, picking bouquets of blue grape hyacinth like she was a little girl skipping through a wildflower field. Then Tía Azucena clutched at the day lilies. Even Tía Iris and Tía Hortensia followed, tearing at hello-darkness irises and a wall of blue and purple hydrangeas, the globes of tiny flowers spinning.

  Lily magnolia and weeping cherry blossoms drifted over the quarry garden. The snow of pale petals swirled through the air.

  The fever had caught even their grandmothers. They had followed their daughters and granddaughters, destroying the trees they had urged into flower. Abuela Mimosa and her branches of tiny yellow blossoms. Abuela Magnolia’s sprawling white blooms. Abuela Lila’s clusters of four-petaled lilacs. Abuela Flor’s full-flowered cherry trees and Abuela Liria’s wide-petaled lily trees.

  Everything that cursed them had made a home of this ground. It had grown tendrils and shoots. It had twisted and curled, and shot out thorns. They had to dig their hands in as deep as the earth would let them. They could not free themselves by deadheading flowers and crushing leaves.

  They would change nothing by picking flowers.

  They had to rip out their fate by the roots.

  The floor of the sunken garden spread over acres, and they scattered over its paths and lawns. They tore up so much of the ground that it helped them. It buckled and waved like an ocean.

  Folds rose up in the earth like little mountains. They lifted what was left of the bulb flowers and hedges.

  Those breaks in the earth took on forms Estrella recognized. Hands, arms, shoulders. Not like they were rising from under the ground.

  Like the ground itself was making them.

  Figures emerged from the earth the Nomeolvides women tore up. A man from the dirt beneath hydrangea bushes. Another from the stretch shaded by a weeping cherry tree. A third from under the iris beds.

  A man with features Estrella recognized.

  Near-black hair, flashing with the blue of a few caught forget-me-not petals.

  Skin the color of sand when water left it mirror-wet.

  A man who looked like an older version of Fel.

  THIRTY-SIX

  They were coming back, the men and boys lost so long ago. The ones with forged papers. The unaccounted for, the ones listed on roll sheets. The ones caught in the ages they had been because no one had ever laid their bodies or names or memory to rest.

  For so long, the rumors had spoken for them. Their lives and deaths had not been spoken of, so the truth had been handed over to those who did not know. What had happened became twisted into stories about a family of women and their dangerous hearts.

  Now, Estrella and her cousins were stripping away the gardens enough to let the land tell the truth. And the land was giving back those it had held, those everyone else had forgotten.

  This was what Fel understood, that the force and rage in the Nomeolvides women was enough to tear down every bloom and vine.

  But it also pulled those he had worked alongside back from the deep place he now knew.

  Fel registered the shock moving through the women like water. But it did not slow them. They drew out boys Fel recognized, their clothes earth-stained, and men whose faces Fel had only ever seen stern and unmoving. But now they opened with wonder, like they had woken from sleep.

  These were the men Fel had known. The ones who told him It doesn’t matter what we do, we’re always gonna be breaker boys to them, and You wear this for your family, and Our mothers’ll never know if we’re in the ground.

  There was no gentleness in the women’s hands. Only certainty. They pulled these lost men from the ground as hard as if they were dragging them out of the sea.

  Bay followed Dalia to where she caught the ground moving, the stirring of the quarry beneath the garden. From this distance she almost looked like one of the men, plain trousers, suspenders, and a willingness to stay close to the ground as though it was her home.

  But all this Fel only took in with half-second glances. All these lives flowed around him like a soundless storm. His hands and Estrella’s were helping a man out of the ground near the deep pond. A man shrugging off dirt and grass.

  Estrella did this with the same fierce resolution as tearing up the gardens. Fel knew she wasn’t taking in the man’s face. She was more set on getting him to the surface.

  Fel’s hands worked with the distance of helping a stranger. His fingers numbed with each second of understanding who he was touching, the warmth of this man’s body coming through the chill of the earth.

  This man was a mirror of who Fel could be. This man had taught him to find blue mushrooms at dusk. He had been the one to tell him stories about the snows of cherry blossoms over los Pirineos, because Fel had been too young to remember.

  They had inherited the same history, one of terraced gardens and wild olive trees that died in a hard frost. That shared history had helped Fel take this man with him, even when he had lost him.

  Fel sensed the stares turning toward them, this matched set of brothers.

  Now Estrella was watching them both.

  Fel could see how they were different. Adán’s brow bone harder, his skin one shade lighter brown. But to anyone watching, they were identical, set apart only by years.

  It broke Fel open like a bud cracking its own green shell. He felt grown into this patch of ground, the two of them becoming twin trees that shared roots.

  He wanted to thank Adán for how his face had never shown disappointment or judgment, not even when Fel had gotten the scars that marked him as a criminal. He wanted to say, because he had never said it before, that he had never thought how Adán loved was some sin or trespass. He wanted to tell Adán that he knew this was only the way his heart showed itself, careful and slow as the moon.

  But Fel was silent. These things would not leave his tongue.

  At Adán’s hands on him, Fel startled. They were not children, and he felt it in their bodies. They hadn’t been since they left their home of esparto-covered hills and frost-wrecked olive trees. They were both men grown by their country and broken by this place.

  Adán’s skin was damp from the earth. When he laughed, it was the humming of caballucos’ wings.

  He felt the hitch in his brother’s stance and remembered that his right leg was just a little shorter than his left. Not enough that anyone noticed, but enough that after six days in the quarry he could not move enough to attend church on Sunday. The hem of one pant leg frayed to threads while the other held.

  Fel remembered the times he’d tried blinking away the feeling of tears along his eyelashes, saying I’m not crying. Adán always held a kind laugh under his words when he said, Yes, you are. Not an accusation, an assurance that Adán thought no less of him.

  Adán pulled away, hands still on Fel’s arms, like he wanted to get a better look at him.

  The other men found their footing on the ground, as though they had stepped off ships and needed their bearing on still land. When they saw Adán pulling Fel into him, they echoed it. They threw their arms around each other as though they were all brothers. The Nomeolvides women laughed because they could not help catching their shock and their joy at existing above ground.

  The Nomeolvides grandmothers watched, clasping their hands as though they were praying but keeping their eyes open, small smiles lighting their faces.

  Fel turned his head, finding the girl who’d touched him when the night sky was all blue horses. She was the wild will in this ground, her fingers both making and wrecking oceans of petals.

  “Estrella,” Fel said. “This is my brother.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  The first things to come back were Gloria’s glass earrings, Azalea’s pewter spoon, Dalia’s empty perfume bo
ttle. They found them in the sunken garden, earth-darkened, but whole, the earrings set next to each other like they’d been left on a nightstand.

  Then, Calla’s paper flowers turned up like they were blooming from the hedges. Gloria’s apron and Estrella’s old dress washed up, drifting on the surface like floats of lily pads.

  The Nomeolvides girls took these as signs that the land was forgiving them. These returned offerings were the ground’s silent way of letting them go.

  But then came things they did not recognize. A watch with a braided wristband caught on an arbor. A pair of dark velvet shoes, embroidered gold, appearing on the stone steps. Tiny jars of saffron threads and chili powder.

  None of their mothers or grandmothers would claim them. Not the necklace of silver leaves. Not the carved wooden comb with the scrolled handle. Not the satin purse embroidered with sea-colored beads. It made Estrella and her cousins wonder how many generations of Nomeolvides girls had done the same thing. How many hearts had lived with that same hope.

  Now they had all pulled the work of their hands from the ground, and all the Briars except Bay had abandoned La Pradera. Even Reid would not come back, fearing this place now that he knew all his family had done, and all the wrath it held.

  The Nomeolvides women would watch over this land. They would tell the truth of what had happened here, and they would let this land reclaim the acres of grass and flower borders and stone fountains. They would guide this place out from under more than a hundred years of betrayals so deep the Nomeolvides girls could not have imagined them.

  Bay had told Fel and Adán and the other miners that they would live in the Briar house until they knew where they wanted to go next. “No arguments,” she said. They would stay until they could chart their paths on maps, or find the far descendants of family members they’d once known.

  When they had all blinked at her, she told them, “It’s what my grandmother would have wanted.”

  The miners would tell their story. Bay, the girl who’d grown up as the Briar bastard, would help them. The truth of what this place had been before it was La Pradera would be spoken.

  Each day Estrella and her cousins kept their eyes ready to find what La Pradera had given back, like they were spotting dyed eggs hidden in the grass. But then, one damp, chilled morning, Calla’s father appeared in the low beds at the edge of the sunken garden. Then, days later, the traveling salesman Abuela Flor had loved showed up in the courtyard of blossoming trees. Then the map collector Gloria had counted as her father.

  La Pradera gave them back, along with the possibility of who else might return to them.

  It wasn’t just men with bodies who slowly came back. Some nights, Estrella and her cousins caught faint silhouettes lifting off La Pradera like shadows, the spirits of those lost so long ago they were more ready to leave this world than join it again. They rose into the air. Some fled across the sky like winged creatures skittering off water. Others joined the shapes of women who seemed to appear from the highest magnolia branches. Heartbroken women already gone from this family.

  “Why?” Calla asked, and in that single word they all understood the question. Why were these men not coming back to walk this ground like the miners? Why were they not reclaiming their bodies and lives and turning up in the gardens?

  “Because everyone they want to follow is gone,” Gloria said, her hand on Calla’s shoulder. “It’s been too long, so there’s nothing else here for them.” Her words were soft, not mournful. More like she was telling them all a nighttime story.

  “It’s a good thing,” Azalea said, her voice so quiet and sure that she sounded like Gloria. “They’re going off to find everyone they love.”

  The five of them watched the shadowed spirits rise from the gardens. Then the shape and faint light of them disappeared into the gray sky.

  Without ever speaking of it, the older Nomeolvides women called back to them the lovers they had once sent away, fearing they might vanish. The cousins hadn’t heard anything about it from Azalea’s grandmother until they saw her at the front gate, meeting a man as old as she was, their smiles shy. Then, close to sunrise, Estrella caught from her window the sight of Calla’s grandmother embracing a woman whose hair was a mix of red and gray.

  Estrella watched for Luisa, the woman whose name her mother had left unsaid for so long. She could not find the words to ask her mother, so instead she waited. They all waited, with the hope and wonder of how this land was thawing and warming to them.

  All the grandmothers prayed into the grass beneath their feet and the sky above them, as grateful for the lovers returned to them as they were hopeful for others. When Estrella and her cousins and their mothers joined them under the darkening sky, she felt the force of all of them, true and heavy as some small star.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Estrella left him every caballuco she had, with a note saying he and his brother should keep them.

  These carved wooden horses were what he had left, not just of his and Adán’s wish that they would not die in the quarry, but of the dreams his brother had kept. Adán had always loved horses, from these figurines he played with as a child and the myths that came with them to Andalusians cantering over red earth.

  Fel still was not sure how to speak to Adán. He’d wanted to see him again so much that now, when he could, he had no words to give him. Instead, he brought him the caballucos, wrapped in cloth that showed those flashes of yellow and orange, red and white and purple. The green one Estrella had found in Fel’s pocket. The indigo one she had buried, bringing him back to life; it had turned up in the wrecked gardens, covered in dew that looked like drops of glass.

  Estrella. This girl whose neck reminded him of the color of buckskin horses. This girl who’d done so well at avoiding him lately that new bursts of borraja were the only way he knew she hadn’t run from La Pradera. The Nomeolvides women still had petals in their hands, but now they let them grow like wildflower fields, not ordered gardens.

  Fel set the cloth in Adán’s palms. Adán turned each small horse in his hands, his fingers tracing the dragonfly wings on their wooden backs. Their coats of paint had chipped, but their colors still showed.

  Adán laughed. Fel did not understand why until his brother reached into his pocket and drew out an eighth caballuco, this one painted as black as their hair.

  The one Adán kept in his pocket each day when they went down into the quarry.

  Now Fel laughed with him, if for no reason but that his throat needed to remember how. He needed to fall back into how his laugh threaded with his brother’s, two almost identical sounds. Like the Nomeolvides girls all talking at once.

  He and Adán had no family anymore. They had only these things they could hold, and the stories they could tell.

  Their Rifeña grandmother, born just outside Ceuta, had come from a family of flounder fishermen, always looking to the sea. Adán remembered her talking about it, when Fel had been too small to remember. The port sat so far on the tip of the peninsula that from the hill of her childhood home their grandmother could make out the far-off green of la Costa de la Luz. Later, she would tell her grandsons how she looked out on that horizon and knew her future husband was just beyond the land she could see, a young man harvesting cork in Cádiz.

  Few believed her, this woman whose sisters called her dream-eyed, sentimental. While she halved lemons in the sunlight for leems, she would forget what she was doing, her fingers pausing on a yellow rind as she looked for shapes in the clouds.

  But the Nomeolvides girls would have believed her. They would have seen the truth of it in the skill of her hands, so gentle she could rinse los azahares for orange blossom water without bruising the petals.

  This much was still Adán’s, and Fel’s. Their hearts were nuez moscada, seeds encased in shells of red. Their bodies were maps of their family’s blood. They were Cantabrian dragonflies and Andalusian oaks. They were the teal water of Ceuta’s harbors.

  They were Adán’s dreams
of horses.

  Adán set the black caballuco in Fel’s hand.

  “It’s Alejandro,” he said.

  “What?” Fel asked, for a second thinking that Adán had named each caballuco, one more thing that had not yet come back to Fel.

  “Your name,” Adán said, a laugh in his voice. “It’s Alejandro.”

  Alejandro. He remembered it, but hadn’t thought of it. He had been Fel, and when his life before La Pradera came back to him, it had been with so much else that his name had fallen under.

  “I’ve heard the women here call you Fel,” Adán said. “And I like it. I like that you kept that part of our name. But I want to make sure you didn’t forget your own. The one that’s just yours.”

  THIRTY-NINE

  All colors of torn-out flowers dotted the hills. Every stripe of color had been broken. Fountains stilled and trellises shrugged away their coats of climbing roses. Trees shed their blossoms, growing toward the sky. And in the days after, the land turned wild.

  The stories Fel had told Estrella grew and flowered. Cherry and almond trees sprouted from the ground and wore coats of white and pink petals. Cork oaks spread from saplings into thickening trunks. Wild olive trees broke through the green hills, their leaves growing in like feathers.

  Indigo mushrooms and stalks of unfamiliar flowers rose in their shadows. They grew tall and straight, the tan stems giving way to tiny brown flowers.

  In all this new life, La Pradera had given Fel and his brother back a small piece of the land they had come from. A little of the life they’d had before found its way into these gardens. In these shade-growing flowers. In the perfume of almond and cherry blossoms. In the warm green and dust smell of olive trees.

  Estrella knelt to the stalks of brown flowers. They looked like snapdragons, but spindlier. Instead of reds and yellows, these were all in tones of brown and gold. They looked photographed in sepia. Some were closed, their tops like hyacinth buds or tiny pinecones. But they were all drawn in those same browns.