What he wanted most was not to be a bother to these women who acted as though they were all his mothers and grandmothers. They had already taken off his clothes like he was a child, put him under water that washed the earth off his skin, given him clothes that did not belong to him, fed him without asking if he was hungry because they seemed to know he was.
In the same soap-bubbled water where the pan soaked, he washed the plate he’d eaten off of. Then the pan, scouring the cast iron with a stiff brush. He knew these things. His hands knew how to wash his face and knot the laces on his shoes and scrub an iron pan. He understood that around him in the garden valley were flowers, and he knew what flowers were, even if he could not remember the last time he saw them. Even if it seemed impossible that so many could crowd together in one place.
He was grateful for his hands, how they acted without waiting for him to tell them how. But they did not know what he wanted to know. He wanted to know things held not in his fingers but in memories so dull and tarnished he could not make out what they were.
He dried the plate and pan, and then stood holding them, realizing he did not know where to put them away.
A girl swept into the kitchen and whisked the pan and plate from his hands. She looked a little like the girl who had first touched him, but younger, and both taller and thinner.
“Did you disappear?” she asked.
He didn’t know what she was asking. He hadn’t gone anywhere but across the kitchen.
She put the plate away in a cupboard. “Did you disappear and come back?”
He shut the cupboard for her. Instead of risking giving her a wrong answer, he pretended he hadn’t heard.
“I know you can understand me,” she said, hanging the pan on the wall. “Don’t pretend you can’t.”
On his back, he felt the pinprick of telling a lie.
The girl pulled aside thin curtains, letting pale light in through a window above the sink. “Do you have any sisters?”
She gave him the time it took for the dust to settle in the streams of light before adding, “Do you want sisters? Because we’ll all be your sisters if you want.” She opened a drawer and gathered up a handful of forks. “But if you fall in love with the same woman as us, we’ll have to kill you. Five is already too many.”
He tried to keep the shock off his face. If the five younger girls were all in love with the same woman, who was she? He imagined a figure twice his height, her saint’s halo bright as the sun off the forks in this girl’s hand, some divine being only those who lived in this place could stand to look at.
The other girls filled the kitchen. The one in the green dress, and three others who looked a little older than she was.
The light through the kitchen window fell on the girl’s forehead and collarbone like it had in the valley, before she led him to this house. The hem of her dress brushed the leg of the wooden table.
“Azalea, no,” the girl in the green dress said to another girl.
“You told me to be nice to him.” The other girl—Azalea, he guessed—opened the cupboard. “They always make me feel better.”
“Yeah, and they make everyone else feel worse,” another, one of the two who looked oldest, said.
Azalea took down a thin box, shook it at her, and set it on the counter.
“Yes, perfect,” one of the oldest ones said. “Thank you for your valuable contribution to this situation.”
“Dalia,” the youngest one said to one of the oldest girls, but neither of the oldest girls turned. “He can hear you.”
Fel picked up the box. The words Instant Mashed Potatoes arced across the front, over a picture of swirled white fluff.
“But how do they get the potatoes in there?” he said to himself, jumping a little to hear the words in his own voice. Low, quiet, but spoken.
They didn’t seem to hear this voice that startled him. His own voice, which he had not yet used except to thank the grandmothers.
But the girl called Azalea noticed him looking at the box and brightened.
“You’ve never had these?” she asked.
“Azalea, don’t,” the girl in the green dress said. “Nobody likes those but you.”
“And maybe him,” Azalea said. “We don’t know yet.”
“Bay settled this last week,” one of the oldest ones, the girl called Dalia, said. “They’re disgusting.”
“She said she liked them,” Azalea said.
“She was being polite,” the other oldest one said.
“Don’t let them scare you off,” Azalea said, to him this time. “They’re the best thing to come in a box.”
She filled a pot with water from the sink.
This family had its own taps that ran inside. When he’d washed the pan and plate, he’d done it in the filled sink, one side soaped, the other clear, and hadn’t noticed.
Whatever place this was between death and the next life had water that ran inside houses.
Azalea added salt and butter to the boiling water. The girl in the green dress and the two oldest girls kept talking. The youngest one hopped up on the counter, smirking at him like she was enjoying catching what the other girls missed.
“What do you want to tell Bay?” one of the oldest ones asked.
“The truth?” the girl in the green dress said.
“All of it?” Dalia asked. “Really? Even the part about why we did all this?”
“Why don’t we just let Bay talk to him?” the other oldest one asked. “She can get anyone talking.”
“You could get him talking too,” the youngest one said, “if any of you were paying attention.”
She hopped off the counter. The slap of her bare feet on the ceramic tile drew all their attention.
“He just read that”—she pointed at the box—“so I think he can understand you.”
Azalea’s hand paused, a snow of white flakes falling from the open box.
“You can understand us,” Azalea said.
The youngest one nodded at him, slowly, leading him to imitate her nod and admit that, yes, he knew what they were saying.
That cautious nod started the questions.
“Where did you come from?”
“Where were you before this?”
“Did you disappear and come back?”
“Did you love somebody who looked like us a long time ago?”
“Who are you?”
“What are you?”
And, from the girl in the green dress, the question so soft it sounded breathed more than spoken, “What’s your name?”
“I don’t know,” he said, with the full, slow breath of telling the truth. Wherever he was, he had this on his side, that each of these questions could be answered with the same truth. “I don’t know.”
FIVE
Estrella had worried that the boy might resist the work of her grandmothers’ hands. But he had not fought. He had not wrenched out of their hold as they took his clothes or gotten up from the kitchen table when they told him to eat.
She wondered if he could feel in their hands how many times they had done this before. Not for boys who turned up in the sunken garden, but for their daughters whose lovers had vanished. For their mothers. For one another.
For Bay Briar.