When the Moon was Ours

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  Sam sat up, pulling away from Aracely’s hands.

  “Sam,” Aracely said, his name emerging from one gasp and falling into another.

  The lovesickness rushed back into him. It stung every corner of his body. He was a river caught between water and ice. Frozen too much to move. Not enough to stand solid against the wind and the pull of the moons he had made.

  His body felt heavy with the lovesickness that had almost gone. Now it hooked into him, its hold deep and firm. It was an animal nearly torn from its nest, and he was the tangles of twigs and thread and grass where it made its home.

  If anyone tried to tear it away again, its claws would rip him apart.

  “I can’t,” he said, the words choked and small.

  Aracely’s eyes flashed red brown. Her hands still smelled like laurel and cloves. “Why?” she asked.

  “Because it’s mine,” he said.

  It was his. All of it was his. His body, refusing to match his life. His heart, bitter and worn. His love for Miel, even if it had nowhere to go, even if he didn’t know how to love a girl who kept herself as distant from him as an unnamed constellation.

  These things belonged to him. They were his, even if they were breaking him.

  He slid off the table.

  “Sam,” Aracely said, more concerned than calling him back.

  “I’m fine,” he said, not turning around. “I’m fine.”

  He left the wisteria-colored house, and crossed feather grass fields toward the woods.

  The feeling of Miel’s mouth on his turned so solid it felt like the chill of metal. It grew from the brushing of her rose petals to the sting of how the winds blew on the shortest day of the year. It took root in him, digging itself in harder for having almost been torn out. He felt her, warm and alive as the roots of a yew tree.

  The way he loved her was his, even if she wasn’t. His names were his, all of them.

  The moons he’d made were his, to hang or hide or wreck.

  From a scarlet oak tree, he took down one that was the dark blue of an indigo milk mushroom’s gills, the slice of a crescent moon almost lavender. From maple trees, he took down another the gray of an overcast but rainless day, and another the soft gold of the beech tree outside Miel’s window. He found the lilac and pink moons of late spring, the green and yellow ones of the planting season, the amber of fall and the crisp, pale blue of winter. He found ones so small Miel could have hidden them in drawers, and others big enough that he’d forgotten how hard the metal or glass had been to take up the wooden ladder.

  There were so many moons. So many lunar seas and shadowed valleys. When they filled his arms and he could not carry any more, he clustered them together at the base of a tree, trying to remember where he’d set each one down so he could come back for them.

  The ones near houses he’d leave, so sons and daughters could fall asleep sure the tinted light would keep away their nightmares. But he’d tear down every one he could find in the woods. They cropped up like the eggs he and Miel dyed at Easter and then hid in the church grass for children to find. The only time of year Aracely bought white eggs. One moon reminded him of the ones they colored green with yellow onion. One was the dusk color that came from blueberries. Another was the gold and soft brown of the eggs they dyed with cayenne and turmeric. The next was the deep turquoise that came from red cabbage so purple that the work of the dye seemed like a magic trick.

  The woods were grass and leaves, and he was a child trying to find countless eggs. He found one moon, and then spotted another, the trail of them leading him deeper into the trees, until the reds and rust colors were so thick he could barely tell it was daytime.

  lake of softness

  She fell deeper under the water. She was losing not just the bright gold of the trees outside the glass, but every light Sam had ever made. Those moons were how she knew him. Each year on his mother’s birthday, he hung a moon the yellow of wild marigolds. The greenish cast of a corn moon told her he couldn’t sleep. And a plain white moon, like clean linen, meant he was ready for a new year, breathing out the last of the December air.

  He spoke in the light that slipped in through windows. It was his language, his tongue. On her last birthday, he’d left a moon painted dark gold, a honey moon so amber that the light it let off made her sure she had woken up in autumn, months after she’d fallen asleep. When she had a cough so deep in her lungs Aracely would not let her leave her bed, Sam had brought one that looked like sun through lilac blossoms. And each year, during the season when the farms took in their harvest, he hung one that cast a blush over her whole room, to keep away her nightmares of the pumpkins’ vines and ribbed shells.

  Those moons had been his way of calling her outside. They’d slipped out of their houses each night to find each other. But now the air between them prickled with warning, and she was losing him. He was every light in the sky, and she was losing him.

  Cold air swept through the stained glass, and Miel surfaced to it. She floated toward it, the scent of damp leaves and earth flooding away the salt on her skin. She gasped and coughed like water had filled the panels. Inside these walls, she was, in every moment, slipping from her mother’s grasp.

  But now she was finding her breath.

  The lid struck the side of the stained glass coffin, and the impact rattled the frame.

  She thought she had made him up, this boy she had imagined out of shadow, the difference between dark and moonlight. His hair, so dark that at night it looked like blue-violet ink. The brown of his forearms and the back of his neck, the color of the cinnamon fiddlehead ferns his mother grew along the side of the house.

  But then the dark flash of his hair and his hands turned to the warmth of him. It turned to him setting her arms around him when she couldn’t feel them enough to do it herself, and him pulling her out. He had the gravity of the moon in the sky. He could pull on oceans and rivers. He could drag lakes across deserts. There was enough force in him to turn the river that held her to light. He drew the water out of this place where she was forever slipping from her mother’s hold and drowning in the dark.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  She breathed in the warmth that clung to his skin, her forehead on his shoulder, her cheek against his shirt. If she stayed this close to him, he was the whole world. There was no stained glass, there were no pumpkins turning clear and brittle, no gradations of red sweeping through the dark. There was no lost moon, not when he remade it so many times. There was just the strength in him from all those nights taking the wooden ladder from his mother’s shed and into the trees. She could feel it in his hands and his arms. She could feel it when she slid her palms over his back.

  “Who did this to you?” he asked, his arms crossing her back.

  But she only half-registered his words. Her body was sore from fighting the glass, and her skin was stinging with dried salt, and she held on to him hard enough that she felt him startle, his breath catching between them.

  “Hey,” he said. “It’s okay.” And for the space of his words, they were small again, her soaked in rust-darkened water, and him, the one boy she didn’t scare.

  She set her mouth against his cheek, kissing him where she’d slapped him, her grasp at taking it back. She would let her whole body turn to roses in exchange for making those few seconds disappear, how she’d struck him when he was hurting.

  The steadiness came back into him. He understood. Her hands in his hair or clutching the back of his shirt, the I’m sorry folded into how she touched him. And she felt it, how him holding her, his palms making her feel her own body again, this was his I know, his so am I.

  There were apologies too heavy for their tongues. Even too heavy for any one set of their hands. So this one, they shared. They carried it together. They interlaced their fingers, hers against his, and held it in their palms. They wore it on their skin. They guarded it in the breath of space between their bodies.

  And this, their first apology in a langu
age they were still learning, was a thing they stammered and halted through. But it stopped them from spinning out and losing each other. It kept them in each other’s fields of gravity, finding each other.

  lake of dreams

  Still holding on to him, she’d begged him not to take her home. “Please,” she said. “I don’t want her seeing me like this.” She didn’t want this to be the way Aracely thought of her, shaking and still trying to get her breath back, her skin pale with salt.

  She’d already wrecked everything with Sam. He’d seen the worst, cruelest places in her.

  But with Aracely there was still a little left to salvage. She was still the girl who handed her blue eggs and lumia lemons. They were still something a little like sisters, standing at the stove together, melting the piloncillo into their coffee.

  So now she lay on her stomach on a sofa in Sam’s living room, her cheek against the cushion.

  Sam sat next to her, his hand on her back as he asked her, “What happened to you? Who put you in there?”

  She couldn’t drag her eyes up to him. She stared at the woven rug under the coffee table, the knotted wool in reds and creams and deep blues.

  It was so quiet in this house, empty except for them, and the two of them barely talking, that Miel could hear Sam’s next breath out.

  He pulled his hand back, and Miel couldn’t move enough to tell him she wanted it.

  His fingers slid off her. “What I said…”

  Don’t, she tried to say. They had settled things, made their apologies, with their hands and their bodies. You don’t have to say anything.

  “What I told you,” he said. “I didn’t…”

  She heard him blow a slow, soft breath out between his lips.

  Her heart felt like a thing becoming glass, its flesh turning hard and fragile. She’d wanted this since the day he turned her skin into a brown sky dotted with pale constellations. But now she was too broken and brittle to take it. She wasn’t a soft place he could fall. She was all edges, all fierce rivers and panels of stained glass. Only joints of rose brass held her together.

  He sighed, standing up. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him slipping his hand into his pockets.

  “Do you need more water?” he asked.

  She shook her head. She’d already stood at the tap, drinking out of her cupped hand before Sam could hand her a glass.

  “Are you hungry?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  “Miel,” he said, and heat pinched the wound where her roses burst from her skin. “Miel, please say something.”

  She needed to think about Sam’s hair and skin, instead of the deep colors of that stained glass.

  She needed to think of Aracely’s soft gold hair instead of the brazen yellows of those trees.

  She needed to think of her father’s hands cutting a length of bandage, and not her wondering about where he’d gone, the hesitation that tinged her memories of him. She needed to remember her mother’s laugh instead of her screaming, her soft voice instead of the rush of water over stones in a drought-stripped river.

  That last one, her mother’s laugh and voice, sparked a memory so strong Miel felt the air around her turning, everything becoming the flowered wallpaper of her mother’s kitchen. She remembered the pattern even better than her mother’s face, the flowers that must once have been yellow but that had faded to cream. That kitchen had held more of her mother’s laughter than anywhere else in the world. It was where her mother sugared violet petals with fingers as skilled as a silversmith’s. She added cinnamon and cayenne to mole. She let Miel and Leandro cover their hands in flour and powdered sugar when they made alfajores, the shortbread they spread with dulce de leche.

  Finding that memory was as bright as catching trees bursting into bloom. It was a memory from when Miel was barely old enough to make them. After that, she would turn three, and four, and the roses would come, and they would take everything. But she could hold on to this, her hands and Leandro’s pale with sugar and flour.

  Alfajores de nieve, coated in powdered sugar so each looked made of winter.

  She didn’t have Leandro anymore, or his hands, smooth and dark as finished wood. But she had Sam, this boy, and his brown hands.

  Miel pulled her eyes from the knotted carpet, and looked up at Sam. “I think I am hungry.”

  “Yeah?” Sam’s smile was slight, but without caution. “Anything in particular?”

  Miel pushed herself up on her hands, her body stiff as if she’d slept on it wrong. “Have I ever shown you how to make alfajores?”

  The way his smile shifted, she knew he didn’t know the word. He probably thought she’d made it up, like one of her stories about stars. He’d had the alfajores she and Aracely made and brought over on New Year’s Eve. But they’d never made them together, not like she’d shown him how to make recado rojo from achiote seeds and cloves and a dozen other spices. He didn’t even recognize the name alfajor.

  She slid off the sofa, and the air felt thin and yielding, like she’d been walking in waist-deep water and now crossed dry ground.

  She and Sam both knew where to find anything in each other’s houses. He knew how Aracely arranged her spice cabinet. Miel knew the patch of the side garden where Sam’s mother let borraja grow wild, the starflowers blooming pink and then turning deep blue. She picked handfuls, and hundreds of five-pointed blossoms still brightened the green leaves and wine-colored buds, covered in what looked like a coat of white down.

  Sam followed her like they were dancing and she was leading him. He held the starflowers in his hands, and brought them inside with her. She pulled down flour, and he brought out the eggs. She looked for milk, and he set out the vanilla.

  They washed the borraja flowers, patted them dry, brushed them with egg white and covered them in sugar. They mixed butter and flour until it formed into dough, soft and pale.

  “What were you doing out there?” Miel asked, adding cinnamon and ground cloves like her mother had, not just to the dulce de leche but right into the dough. “Shouldn’t you be in class?”

  Sam worked in the dark threads of spice with the heels of his hands. “Woods sent me home.”

  “For what?” she asked.

  He cringed, his shoulders rising. “I might’ve gotten into a fight.”

  “With who?” she asked.

  “Does it matter?”

  She touched the candied borraja flowers, checking if they’d dried. The sugar gave the pink and indigo petals the look of unpolished crystal.

  “What were you fighting about?” she asked.

  “Forget it.” Sam folded the dough over onto itself. “Point is, I’m supposed to be cooling down.”

  Miel stirred the sugar and milk on the stove. It started off pale as the moon, and the longer they let it cook the darker it turned, deepening to gold and then amber. Aracely let hers cook for hours, until it was brown as hazelnuts.

  Now heated, it let off the scent of the vanilla seeds she’d scraped into the pot, warm and sweet. She couldn’t remember if it had been Sam’s mother or Aracely who’d first taught her how to slit open a vanilla bean. It hadn’t been her own mother. She’d been too young to hold the knife.

  Miel’s thoughts had barely flitted toward Sam’s mother when they landed on three words, said in her voice. He’ll get there. Those words had done nothing but frustrate Miel. His mother’s calm and patience had not made her calm and patient. They’d made her unsettled, more in a hurry for Sam to see that bacha posh were not words that would make him something other than what he was. They were not a spell in a fairy tale. They would not make him want to be a girl once he was old enough to be a woman.

  He’ll get there. Miel could still remember his mother’s face when she said those words, her pale, dark-lined eyes full of a concern that was more care than worry.

  He’ll get there, Sam’s mother had tried to tell her. But Miel hadn’t let that calm and that patience find its way into her.

  Inste
ad, when she and Sam had fought, she’d thrown it all at him. She’d forced him up against things he wasn’t ready to look at.

  She was no better than Ivy, no better than the Bonner girls sliding Sam’s birth certificate across that wooden table.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  Sam looked up.

  “I shouldn’t have…” She stopped. She didn’t know how to apologize without doing the same thing again. Bringing it up enough to apologize meant shoving it all toward him again.

  Sam didn’t move. He just watched her, his face open but a little tense.

  “I shouldn’t have pushed you that hard,” she said.

  His jaw tightened, the way it had by the river.

  “If I ever don’t tell you something, it’s not because I don’t want to tell you,” he said. “It’s because I don’t know.”

  Maybe no one else would’ve caught it, but in that flinch, she saw it, the fact that all this was breaking him.

  The truth slid over her skin, that if she loved him, sometimes it would mean doing nothing. It would mean being still. It would mean saying nothing, but standing close enough so he would know she was there, that she was staying.

  Sam took his mother’s wooden rolling pin from the freezer, where she always put it, a trick she swore by for rolling out roti, but that Sam said his aunts considered just shy of sacrilege to the family recipe.

  Miel felt the conversation evaporating, like water vapor boiling off the milk on the stove. She let it. If Sam didn’t want to talk about this, she wouldn’t force it. Maybe there was nothing else she could do for him right now, but she could do this, be there whether he wanted to stay quiet or wanted to speak.

  He leaned over the counter, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, putting the weight of his shoulders behind his hands. The line of the muscle in his forearm stood out as he worked the rolling pin.

  He caught her watching him. “You’ll never look at me the same way after this,” he said.

  “Are you kidding?” she asked. “There’s nothing more alluring than a guy who knows how to work a rolling pin.”