“Can you get back, please?” she said, vicious. Cello stood still and watched as she crouched to the ground, her toes at the new plot’s edge. She yanked fistfuls of grass out by the roots and tossed them to one side, exposing a bald ring of earth. She scratched at the tiny, living fibers with her fingers, turning the soil beneath them. Cello had watched Joanie and Letta do the same thing dozens of times, but there was something different, less resigned, about Marcela’s movements. He wondered if it would even work.
“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” he called out.
“Of course I do! Letta makes us practice every month when we bleed.”
Cello inched closer, split between curious and afraid. “I don’t know—I think Joanie and Letta do it different. What happens if you don’t do it right?”
“Oh, my God, I’m doing it right, Cello. Plus, I’m bleeding right now if you really must know, and that’s pretty much a guarantee that it’ll work.”
“Oh,” Cello said, flushing.
“Yeah, oh—why else would Letta make me do this today?” Marcela’s hair hung around her cheeks in sweaty clumps, and her skin seemed to glow with concentration. She lifted handfuls of the soil out and around the shallow ditch she’d made, and pressed her fingertips around the insides, coating the interior with her touch. She spat once, and then again, as if to double down on the intention—but there was nothing loving or caretaking in the gesture. Sweat dripped from Marcela’s face, tapping into the ground.
“Are you sure that’s right?” Cello asked before he could stop himself.
Marcela glared at him and stepped over the boundary Cello had pressed into the grass with his feet. Marcela kicked the dirt she had removed, violent and sloppy, back into the shallow grave she’d dug for her saliva, and then stamped on the mound. Her skin flashed the scorched red of a sunburn, just as Letta’s and Joanie’s skin reddened when they did the Work, as though they were burning from the inside out. Marcela waited a moment, and then jumped on the pile of earth again. Her movements were the incongruous, joyful little hops of a small child, but her face brimmed with exhausted fury.
Cello held his breath and waited—each time he’d watched Letta or Joanie complete this ritual, the results were immediate—but there they stood, and nothing.
“Well?” Marcela shouted, not to Cello, or herself, or to any human being, but out to the world’s widest parts. She was answered with a rumble. The earth shook gently beneath them, as though a massive swarm of bees bounced and buzzed on the other side of the ground. “You see?” Marcela said to Cello, accusing and out of breath. “I told you.”
The swirls of grass and weeds within the new plot began to gleam. Marcela waited until the entire shape intended for the fresh planting was coated in a uniform skim of radiance before she stepped back, outside of the lines. Cello blinked, and the grass was just grass, lit only by the strong summer sun overhead.
“Wow, good job, Mar,” he said, and meant it.
“Shut up,” she replied, and plopped back onto the ground, scooting back into a cooler patch of shade. Her face looked suddenly drawn, and the space beneath her eyes formed two purple crescents, dark enough to look like some kind of injury.
“What does it feel like, when you do that?” He’d never asked Joanie or Letta. Cello had always accepted the Work as just another part of tending the Vine. It was a normal part of their lives, the same way he never asked Sil what it felt like to sink a new irrigation line. Marcela looked so different from her usual self that the question climbed out of his mouth before he could stop it.
“It feels like dying. Like the worst fever you ever had.” Her breathing was audibly shallow, like a sick kid’s. “Please don’t tell Sabina I already did it, okay? Just say Letta wants to do it herself or something.”
“Yeah, I will. If that’s what you want.”
“It’s what I want. I also want some water. Please, I’m so thirsty.” She turned her face away from Cello and collapsed back into the grass as though her body had been wrung out by the ritual.
Cello winced, and shaded his eyes against the sun, even though the sun had nothing to do with his grimace. “Okay, I’ll get you some.”
He told himself that by taking those cuttings in the early morning, he hadn’t taken anything away from Marcela or any of his foster siblings—he had only really stolen from Letta. But as he watched, he began to understand how much, and from whom, Letta and Sil were stealing.
3
Joanie stood and swayed by the rusted water heater in the yard. She held the baby pressed to her chest, his body limp with sleep.
“Hey, you alright?” Sabina asked, jangling the keys to the mower.
“Shh, I just got him down,” Joanie said.
“He’s still so little.” Sabina ran her finger across the baby’s dangling bare foot. “You sure he’s growing enough?”
“Of course he is. Why would you say that?” Joanie turned more deeply into a patch of shade. “He’s fine,” Joanie said softly, speaking against the crown of the baby’s head. “Here, can you take him for a minute? I’m sweating like a hog.” Joanie handed the baby off to Sabina, nestling him into the crook of her elbow.
“How could you not love this tiny thing?” Sabina fanned at his flushed face with her hand.
“Girls!” Letta’s voice called out into the yard from her trailer’s open window. Sabina and Joanie shared an efficient, worried look.
“I’ll go—just wait here a minute. I’ll be right back,” Joanie said, striding across the grass. She knocked on the scorching trailer door.
“If I didn’t want you to come in, I wouldn’t have hollered for you, would I?” Letta said, her voice sharpened by some irritation other than the heat.
Joanie pushed open the door, turning her own anger up, too, just so she would feel stronger. “What is it?” she asked, sliding into the trailer’s humid, stinking interior.
“Light one for me, baby, will you?” Letta gestured to the squashed pack of Grand Prix Mediums beside her linty, slippered foot.
“Is that what you called me all the way in here for?” Joanie stamped over and took up a lighter from the coffee table. She flicked one of the Grand Prix alive and passed it to Letta before lighting one of her own.
“No, smart mouth,” she snapped. “Something is off today—do you feel it?” Letta massaged her jaw, loosening it back and forth. “I can feel it in my teeth. Like something’s missing.”
Joanie froze for an instant only, before blowing a concentrated stream of smoke in Letta’s direction. “Nope,” she replied—simply, harsh. “I don’t feel anything like that.”