She didn’t know about the comparison, this boy likening her and her cousins to animals. But before she could object, an idea flickered on with the garden lamps.
“How do you know about horses?” she asked.
He looked at the grass beyond the flower bed. “I don’t know.”
“Did you work with them?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
Estrella slid her hands back into the earth, as much habit as a way to make him less conscious of her watching.
“Fel, I’m going to ask you something, and I really want you to think about it,” she said.
“Okay.”
“Were you ever in love with anyone?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Anyone who looked a little like all of us?” There was no softer way to ask this. She wanted to know if he had belonged to a Nomeolvides woman neither she nor her cousins nor their mothers had been alive to know. Their grandmothers had no memory of a boy like Fel, even in stories.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Did you ever love anyone?” she asked.
He shut his eyes. “Yes.”
“Who?” she asked.
He shook his head. She was learning this was his shorthand for I don’t know.
“Someone who took care of me,” he said.
“Do you remember anything about her?”
He watched the borraja, the blue bright against the earth.
“No,” he said.
She let the silence draw out. This was a place she couldn’t press too hard. He was soft here. He would feel the pressure as pain and turn quiet.
“Did she give you the horses?” Estrella asked. “The wooden ones.”
More borraja sprouted, first leaves, then stalks, then down-covered purple stems and sharp-petaled flowers.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Do you know anything about them?”
“I know I loved them very much,” he said. “But I don’t know why.”
He looked wound, coiled, even when he breathed out.
“It’s okay,” she said. “This isn’t a test.”
“Yes, it is,” he said.
Now he looked at her. The light had turned from gold to blue, and the warmth in the brown of his eyes cooled.
She picked a borraja flower. “You can eat them, you know.”
She held it out on her palm, the five petals opening into darker blue.
“Try it,” she said.
“I don’t think I should,” he said.
“Why not?” She ripped away a handful of them, the starflowers breaking from their vines. “I do it all the time.”
Fel cringed like she’d torn out a lock of her hair. “But they’re yours.”
“And I’m giving these ones to you.” She took his hands and let the confetti of blue petals rain into his palms. “So now they’re yours.”
TEN
He did not sleep, not more than a little at a time. When he did sleep, it was shallow and dreamless, the darkness reminding him of all he did not remember.
If he did not dream of this empty place, he dreamed of a cord of heat breaking him open, marking him with all he had done.
When he woke in the dark, his fingers found the blue borraja Estrella had set in his hands, and that he’d left on the bedside table. He grasped at them like they were slices of water. He felt struck with the certainty that they would let him sleep, make him sleep. It overcame how odd he felt putting into his mouth something she’d grown in front of him. He set the first flower on his tongue, the taste clean and cold, more like ice than something living.
He fell asleep with one in his mouth. But it only made him dream of her fingers brushing his lips. He startled awake, shivering like the air had fallen into winter.
How little he slept left the daylight hours in a haze as heavy as smoke. Maybe it was because he wasn’t doing enough for these women who were looking after him. He wasn’t wearing himself out enough by the time night came. His hands wanted to thank them in ways more than peeling potatoes or drying forks.
But the mothers shooed him away from helping them with the laundry, flapping dish towels at him and reminding him that he did not know how to work the machine. The grandmothers took brooms out of his hands in ways that made him remember that this was their house, not his.
His hands still wanted to work. So he worked on things that had gone unnoticed. A crosshatch of wood was crumbling under the weight of rose vines, so he strengthened its base until it did not wobble. The paint on a bench was peeling away, so he searched through dust-covered cans until he found the shade that matched. He replaced a few flat stones that had come loose from a path.
“You’re a good boy, mijo,” the woman who insisted he call her Abuela Magnolia said. “Bay’s grandmother never missed a stone out of place, but ever since she died”—the woman clucked her tongue—“that girl…”
Fel waited for her to finish the sentence. She didn’t. He understood. That was the weight of Bay losing her grandmother, a loss too heavy to name. Bay was mired too deep in it to notice small things falling apart.
He knelt at a crumbling stretch of low wall, checking whether any bricks were missing or if they were just out of place, when Calla grabbed his arm.
“I need a favor,” she said.
She was the first to notice that he understood what she and her cousins were saying. So he didn’t dare stop her when she pulled him toward the house up the hill. When she shoved him through the door and into the hall, he didn’t resist.
The inside of the Briar house looked more museum or palace than home. Portraits of white-haired men and gown-wearing women stared down from the walls. The rugs had been woven so finely Fel didn’t want to walk on them. Even the ashtrays looked like some kind of glittering stone, maybe marble or quartz. Did people really stub out live embers in there?
Everything in the Nomeolvides house looked handled and used. Cast iron pans. Books with worn edges. Even the brass of an old kaleidoscope shined with the oils of their fingers. He liked this about them, about their home.
Calla shoved him down the hall, where Reid was coming toward them, eyes on a set of papers in his hands.
“Go talk to him,” Calla whispered.
“What?” Fel asked.
“You’re a man and he’s a man,” Calla said. “So just talk to him.”
“About what?”
“Do I have to do everything?” Calla took Fel by the shoulders, which made him feel like he was a child she was crouching down to, even though she was younger and shorter. “I just need you to distract him for ten minutes while I go look at something.”
She dashed out of the hall, leaving him in the path of Reid’s stare as soon as he lifted his head.
“Oh,” Reid said. “Hi.”
The space of the few seconds made Fel forget what to do with his hands. Before he’d been sent here, what had he always done with his hands?
“I was”—as soon as the words came, Fel wished he hadn’t said them so fast. If he’d waited to start the sentence, he would’ve had a few more seconds to think of the end—“just looking at these.” He tilted his head up to the portraits.
“Oh,” Reid said again, but this time a laugh brushed the word. “They’re something, aren’t they?”