When the Moon was Ours

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  “Come downstairs,” his mother said. “You need to eat.”

  He didn’t have it in him to argue. He followed her down to the kitchen, where blood oranges, stems on, clustered on the counter next to a bowl of olives.

  It had been one of his favorites before they moved here, orange and olive salad. Once it had made him think of his father, of the little town he came from on the Gulf of Salerno. The stories his mother passed on. Groves of hundred-year-old olive trees and orchards of figs that smelled of caramel when they fell. Lemons in blue-glazed bowls. Hillsides so steep that from the water they looked like straight drops into the sea.

  He wondered how his mother thought of his father now, maybe as some vibrant, shimmering visitor who stopped by a few times for dinner and then disappeared. A man who belonged to them so little she did not miss him.

  But then that wondering got crowded out, and all he could think of was the whispers in their old town. Even if he was so small he only half-understood what they were saying, he caught the tone. The glances toward him as if he could not see them looking, even when he was staring back.

  His mother snapped the stems off the oranges. “Are you going to tell me or are you going make me ask?”

  Sam pushed at one of the oranges, letting it roll away and then back.

  “Something happened with Miel,” his mother said. “At the lighting.” No hint of a question in her voice.

  The lighting. He wondered how much of this town was whispering about Miel rushing into the water, tearing the lids off the lanterns, or if they had been too busy helping their children give the current the pumpkins they’d carved together.

  Whenever the weather turned cold, people grabbed at gossip quicker, as though they could spin it like wool, wrap themselves in it. Back in their old town, it had been a bare-branched winter when his mother had made the mistake of talking about Sam’s father. With a trusted friend, she’d shrug off the story like flicking cigarette ash away from her fingertips.

  But that friend couldn’t resist telling a few of her friends, and soon the town had hummed with whispers.

  “I don’t think Miel and I are friends anymore,” he said. “I don’t think we’re anything anymore.”

  His mother snapped off the last stem and set down the orange. “I doubt that.”

  She cut the tops off the oranges, and set each one on its flat base.

  “Your father taught me to make this,” she said.

  “With fennel,” Sam said. “I know.”

  Most of what they made in this kitchen was from his grandmother’s recipes. Aloo baingan made with almost-blue eggplant. The warmth of a half-dozen spices lacing under the saffron and rose in Kashmiri chai. But a few his mother had learned from his Campania-born father. Dishes with lemon leaves, and wild arugula so sharp it felt cold on his tongue. They set their peaches and plums in a bowl Sam’s father had given his mother, ceramic glazed as deep blue as a cloudless sky. His mother hadn’t wanted to accept it, this piece that had been in his family for three generations. But his father thought it was meant to be with her, that blue he considered a darker shade of her eyes, so he’d hidden it at the top of her closet, knowing she’d find it only after he’d gone.

  But the gossip in their old town had reduced all this to something as cold as trading olive oil or raw marble. You want a green card, and I want a baby. They called it a bargain his mother made to sleep with a man she didn’t love, as many times as it took to have the child she wanted. How they were married for only a couple of years, how she was the only divorcing woman who, seven months pregnant, wished her husband well as he left her.

  How Sam existed because his mother and his father thought little of trading things others considered sacred.

  By the time they moved here, his mother knew better. She kept quiet about a story she always considered proof of how much she loved Sam, how much she had wanted a child even if there was no man she wanted as her husband.

  But he never forgot. He existed because his mother set out to make him exist.

  Sam turned one of the oranges in his hand. The flush of deep red thinned along the peel, and then faded.

  “I made a mistake, didn’t I?” he asked.

  “Probably,” his mother said. “We all make them every day.”

  “No,” he said. “I mean, coming near her that day. When the water tower came down.”

  His mother ran her knife over a row of olives. “You don’t really believe that.”

  She held out a knife, her fingers cupping the blade, handle toward him.

  As a child, this had been one of his favorite tasks, the first thing his mother had let him do with a knife on his own. Slicing away the pith. Using the tip of the knife to nick the seeds away. Making rounds of deep red fruit so thin they were almost translucent, while his mother sliced olives as purple as tiny plums.

  “Do you know what kind of child you were?” his mother said, a laugh under her words. “To say there needed to be a man of the house and that you were going to be that man? To declare you were going to be a whole new person so that everyone would know there was a son taking care of his mother?”

  Sam set the knife against the orange. He could do this. If he could do nothing right with Miel, at least he could do this for his mother. Slice perfect rounds of blood orange. Arrange them on the plate like the bright tiles of their roof, and know he had managed this one small thing.

  “And just think.” His mother smiled, and the wrinkles around her eyes looked as fine as the silver necklace his father had given her. She wore it only with her good dresses. “You wouldn’t have existed if it weren’t for that squid.”

  He offered as much of a laugh as he could. When he was seven or eight, it used to make him laugh every time, the reminder that his father had wanted to come to this country because of the squid that defied him. He’d been born into a family of fishermen famous for their skill catching squid as red as wine-colored velvet. They rose close enough to the surface to catch only when the moon was a dark ring in the sky, and his father’s family was known throughout Campania for night fishing, filling the hulls of their boats before sunrise.

  But not his father. When his father went out with his brothers, the squid scattered like minnows. The brothers returned at dawn, their boat light and bobbing, to the taunts of other fishermen.

  Sam used to think that was a stupid reason for his father to leave where he was from. But then he thought of his great-grandparents, their fields, the skill it took to plant the corms. This had been their family’s trade. There would have been shame in their brothers or sisters lacking the skill to grow those crocuses, or having hands too clumsy to pluck out the saffron threads that cost more for their weight than gold.

  His father had come to this country both to escape from what he was not and to discover what he might be.

  “What if…” Those two words, and Sam’s mouth felt as dry as when he woke during a fever, his tongue parched. He had to force the words out.

  His mother looked up from the olives.

  Her gaze, neither indifferent nor intent, made him look down at his shirt.

  Bacha posh were words he’d first heard from his mother’s mother. If he didn’t follow the path set out by those words, he might forget her drawings of saffron crocuses, or how sure her hands looked separating mint leaves from their stems, the green never bruising. He’d been so sure he could become Samira if he gritted his teeth hard enough, wished it hard enough, pressed his fingernails into the heels of his hands so hard his knuckles paled. And now, if he didn’t, he might forget how his grandmother sat with him, spread out his set of crayons on the kitchen table until she found the deepest gold and purple, showing him the shape and color of those crocus petals.

  He would have to admit that whenever his grandmother told him the story of the two lovers at Saif-ul-Malook, he’d thought more often of being the prince than of being the fairy.

  He wondered if it would be a kind of betrayal to his grandmother, shrugging aw
ay the name she had asked his mother to give him. If he lived his life without it, if he altered it even by one letter, he worried that part of him would disappear. He would become someone his grandmother would not recognize. The blood he shared with that old woman he loved even though he barely remembered her might drain away like dust and ice and light stripped away from a comet.

  But he wouldn’t know unless he said it. His grandmother wasn’t here to listen, but his mother, his grandmother’s daughter, was.

  “What if I”—his breathing was turning shallow—“wanted to”—now it was stinging his lungs—“stay”—the words would come only one or two at a time—“this way?”

  “What?” his mother asked, those fine wrinkles appearing again, this time with wondering instead of smiling.

  He tried to even out his breathing. But it stayed quick and gasping, and he had to tear the words out. “What if I wanted to stay this way?”

  The words came out in a rush of air, and he started coughing. His mouth felt like orange pith, bitter and wrung-out.

  He folded his tongue against his teeth, bracing for her questions. Her asking what he meant, and him having to tell her that he wanted not to go back to being Samira, but to go forward as Samir. That being a bacha posh had been a lie he told himself to pretend he was like the girls whose mothers and fathers dressed them as boys, but who then grew up to be women. That he had made the mistake of believing his discomfort would be like theirs; theirs was less often a wish that they could be boys, and more a longing for the way boys were allowed to take up as much space as their bodies could fill.

  But he wanted both. He wanted to be a boy who grew into a man, and for there to be space in the world for him.

  His mother set down the knife. “Is that really what you want?”

  Sam’s mouth was still too dry, his breath too used up from saying the words all at once, to answer. The inside of him was cracking and crumbling like the glass and paper frames of his moons.

  Later, they would have to talk about this. They would have to talk about how he did not know if he wanted to change his body but he knew he wanted to change his name. How they would have to change his papers to say what they had made everyone believe they already did.

  How there was no letting go of Samira, because now she felt like a friend he had imagined to fill the empty space before Miel. But he could not be her.

  There was still a part of him, spinning and wondering, that wanted to know how long his mother’s calm and patience would stand, how long until it fell or crumbled beneath everything he was. Would it hold if, one day, he drew closer to the faith of her father’s family, or her mother’s, both these faiths she’d rejected because she was so sure God was bigger than religion? Would it stay if, one day, he left this town to hang moons every place on earth there were trees, or if he never lived anywhere but this place his mother had given him? Would it stand no matter what he became or did not become?

  But for right now, that one sentence—What if I wanted to stay this way?—was all he had in him. He’d used up all his words.

  So he nodded.

  “Good,” his mother said.

  With that one word, the space around them felt lit with the violet petals and gold threads of all those crocuses. He couldn’t see them, not straight on, but he could sense their shape, the soft lines of the flowers and the wisps of glowing orange. They were halfway between living blooms and the arcs of colors his grandmother had drawn him so many years ago.

  His mother’s nod looked like a surer, quicker version of the one he’d given her. That was his mother, forever taking hesitation and making it into something clean and finished.

  “People should know what they want,” she said.

  bay of dew

  Miel was on her knees in Aracely’s closet, pulling at her clothes. Aracely’s favorite nightgown, black velvet trimming copper satin, heavy and long enough for fall nights. The linen of her morning-glory-purple skirt, the hem stained from how she wore it to work in the garden. The skirt she put on to go out, covered in so many glass beads it looked jeweled with sprays of seawater.

  But Miel could not find Leandro. She could not find any trace of her brother. Instead of the pressed clothes their mother always put him in, there were these twirling skirts. Instead of the way he smelled, the strangest mix of wood and powdered sugar from their mother’s kitchen, there was the amber of Aracely’s perfume. There was none of Leandro left, not because Leandro had become Aracely, but because instead of choosing to be Miel’s sister, Aracely had chosen to be a liar.

  Everyone called Aracely the kind curandera. Other curanderas made the lovesick drink flaked deer antler, obsidian dust, and batata. That black milk would leave them sick for hours, making it easier to pry the lovesickness loose.

  But there was nothing kind about Aracely. Her gentleness was as much of a lie as her name. She could have given herself their mother’s name, so Miel would know her. She could have told Miel the day she slipped from the water tower.

  She could have been the sister who took her home, put a kettle on the stove. They would have passed back and forth aster honey crystallizing in its glass, the kind Aracely liked as much as Miel. She ate it like candy, and they shared a jar when they stayed up late talking.

  Even that memory wasn’t soft anymore. Now it was as rough as the crystals along the edge of the aster honey jar.

  Aracely’s perfume crept into the room, as strong and deep as aged whiskey.

  Miel didn’t look at her.

  Aracely, like Leandro, was the beautiful one of the two of them. Aracely was tall the way Leandro had been tall, even as a child. Aracely glittered with wry mystery the way Leandro glowed with kindness. But instead of Leandro’s dark hair, Aracely had so much gold flowing over her shoulders it looked like the crown of her head was spinning it.

  Miel knew Aracely as well as she knew the crescent whites of her own fingernails. She knew Aracely’s eyes, dark as Spanish molasses. But now Aracely was someone else. She was a woman holding the heart of the brother Miel thought she’d lost.

  She remembered the sense of Leandro, how he felt and how he laughed, the softness in his hands. But she didn’t remember him well enough to account for all of him. She could not number all the pieces that made him, and then find them all in this woman.

  “Do you remember the town we lived in?” Aracely said. There was a sigh under her words, like she didn’t know where to start and decided this was as good a place as any.

  Miel didn’t remember. She remembered more about their family’s kitchen than the place she was born.

  “It was further up the river,” Aracely said. “That’s why no one here recognized you.”

  “How did we end up here?” Miel asked.

  “It’s where the river widens and slows,” Aracely said. “The calmest point before it gets to the sea. Everything stops here.”

  Miel felt the flinch of wanting to argue with everything Aracely said, but she knew Aracely was right. The bottom of the river here was cluttered with old nets and washed-away branches and even little boats that had sunk and bobbed along the bottom until they rested here.

  “It’s where we washed up,” Aracely said.

  Now Miel remembered Leandro calling her name, looking for her, and then their mother wailing, screaming when the current stole Leandro, and he could not fight it.

  “I know you were trying to save me,” Miel said.

  Aracely stepped to the threshold of the closet. “But you don’t know how I lived.”

  The smile in Aracely’s voice—she could hear it—made Miel look up.

  “The water took me,” Aracely said. “It saved me.” Her face was full of a soft peace that made Miel think of the few minutes before the sun set. Aracely looked like she was talking about a lover she had parted from, but still thought well of. “It took me. And then it gave me back this way.”

  “What do you mean, this way?” Miel asked.

  “It let me die as a boy,” Aracely sai
d, “and it gave me back as a woman.”

  Miel set her folded hands against her chest. The depths she feared most had given back the brother she lost.

  If Miel shut her eyes she could see it, the water stripping her brother down to his heart and building him back up as this woman. It took every part of Leandro, and gave him the body that would become Aracely, building her out of the cold and the dark and the things she had once been.

  The water had finished her, spun her into a grown woman during the years she had belonged to it. It had been her cocoon. It had made the raw elements of Leandro into this woman.

  There had been so much more to the appearing of this beautiful woman than a summer of gold-winged butterflies.

  The butterflies had not brought her here. Yes, they might have turned her hair a color to match them. But they had not given her to this town the way the water had. They were a celebration of her emergence, a sign of her appearing.

  Leandro had reappeared as Aracely, an event marked by countless wings.

  Miel had fallen out of a metal tower filled with dirt- and rust-darkened water.

  “It’s not fair,” Miel said.

  “What isn’t?” Aracely asked.

  Miel couldn’t remember those years in the water. She couldn’t remember the rush of the water that held her being drawn from the river and into the tower. She felt only the dim light of knowing she had half-existed, not breathing because, for that time, she had no heart and lungs. They, like the rest of her, had been folded into the river.

  For a while, she had not had a body but had been made of water, before that water gave her back.

  “It made you older.” Miel had stayed the same as when the water took her, a little girl who did not grow until she again had her body and breath. “It didn’t make me older.”

  “It wasn’t about it making me older,” Aracely said, though the tightness in her face told Miel there was more than she was willing to say. But this, unlike everything else, was Aracely’s business, not Miel’s. “It just gave me back as what I was meant to be. And I was glad you were still little. I was glad the water kept you the way you were, that you didn’t lose any time.”