Sofia Santiago did not leave her bookstore for five years.
She didn’t leave when it rained for two weeks straight, and the bottom two rows of every shelf drowned, the books seeping like tea bags. She didn’t leave when she got a fever so high the chills chipped her bottom tooth. She simply dropped herself into a bathtub of ice and bribed both the town doctor and the dentist to make a house call the next day. And every time something new and marvelous occurred, and all the other residents of Lovelace, California rushed out to take pictures and remind themselves why they chose this town, why they were special, Sofia walked the rows of books and told herself she already had all of the wonder she could ever need, right there.
The first year was the hardest. Everyone called it a phase that would pass if only they humored her. Sofia had always been so reserved, even as a child. Besides, the Lovelace residents had seen stranger things. Concerned mothers of forgotten childhood friends settled for bringing casseroles and whole roasted chickens and rainbow-dyed pasta. To bring some color back into her life, they said. And yes, when it became clear Sofia was serious, they tried to host interventions, of sorts. They had town meetings. They worried it would be distracting for Lovelace to have a teenage recluse. But eventually they moved on to brighter things.
One day, about six months in, Sofia came out of her bedroom in the apartment above the bookstore to find Mr. and Mrs. Melline seated at her breakfast table. The elderly couple owned the building, and when Eva, Sofia’s mother, had first arrived in Lovelace, it was the Mellines who took her in. By every measure but blood, they were Sofia’s grandparents.
“So you meant it?” Mr. Melline asked.
Sofia poured herself some cereal. She smelled the carton of milk in the fridge. It was sour.
“Yes,” Sofia said.
Mr. Melline rested both of his hands on the table. He squinted at her. By now, she was used to his squinting.
“And we can’t change your mind?”
Sofia took another bite of dry cereal. She shook her head.
“Well, that’s settled then.” He was going blind, but he refused to wear glasses. This was a man who understood stubbornness. He was also a man who, in his own grief, had lost his will to fight.
After that, the three of them developed a system. On weekdays, when Mr. Melline worked the bookstore with Sofia, they all ate dinner together and watched the evening news. For the rest, Mrs. Melline brought her groceries. In return, Sofia did all of the opening and closing of the store, all the cleaning chores that came at too high a cost for Mr. Melline’s joints. For her sixteenth birthday, they bought her a gym kit, and they insisted she do daily exercises. You’re too young to let your body go, they said. At night, Sofia studied with a tutor—the Mellines had also bullied her high school into letting her finish the degree from home. All said and done, Sofia had no reason to ever leave the store again. And for five years, she didn’t.
Not until she met a girl who wore rain boots so yellow they offended the sun.
❖ ❖ ❖
Eighteen-years-old with a belly like rising bread, Eva Santiago was picked up by a Hostess delivery van somewhere outside of Bakersfield. Three hours later, he left her at a roadside diner with a bag full of Twinkies. She sucked on one as she watched him drive away. She was close to the town’s limits, and she could just make out the sign: “Lovelace, California—Where the Magic Happens.”
Eva first heard about Lovelace two weeks prior from a perky news broadcaster at her mother’s gynecologist. She watched the grainy television to avoid looking at her mother, Lucille, who was hovering above her like an anxious ghost. Eva wanted to close her eyes and squeeze her hands into fists and pick a theme, like summer fruits or winter vegetables, and make a list. The first time she did this, she chose something easy, shades of blue — periwinkle teal zaffree denim azure cerulean blue blue blue — and afterwards, she found bloody crescent moons on the fleshy part of her thumb. When she did it again, and again, those moons became scars, until it looked like someone had punched a series of half-open parentheses into her palm. A story of unfinished subordinate clauses. Lonely punctuation.
She couldn’t do that now, though, because the doctor had both of Eva’s hands clasped in her own. She was reciting Eva’s “options” through cracked lips. Lucille, in response, chanted, “We can fix this” under her breath like a poem, and then, “Get rid of it.” Hearing that finally set into motion Eva’s leaving. And a town with magic? A town set on a lake covered in mysterious mists, a town where anything could happen, where her mother’s wishes wouldn’t, a place where extinct birds reappeared and spirits lived amongst the living and the mists, all that green-glow glory, the mists above it all—she bought a ticket two weeks later. She left carrying a suitcase with clothes, thirty dollars, the lucky charm bracelet Danny Serrano gave her in the fourth grade, and a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude.
It took her another hour before she made it into the thick of town. The first thing she noticed was the mailboxes. All of them were painted different colors. The second thing she noticed was the mists. It was so much more than she had seen on television. So much more than she could have hoped for. Stray moisture clung to the bus benches and potted plants perched on wildflower lawns. The air got heavier as she walked towards the famous lake, glimmering in the distance.
She stopped just short of the shore. The water lapped at her toes, and her stomach felt heavier here too. She had always been drawn to water. She was born in it, in a guest bathroom at a corporate holiday party. Her mother had been desperate to get to the hospital, but the snow, the snow was too much. And so Eva slithered out of her mother’s belly into a stranger’s bathtub, and the first thing she saw was a stranger’s safety razor hanging above the faucet.
Eva rubbed her own stomach now, soothed by the hard roundness there. She thought of how different it would be for her baby. She would make sure of it. A town with cool, green waters for her to swim in. A town where she could be anything.
“This is our place, Sofia.”
❖ ❖ ❖
Sofia was about to lock the front door of the store when, there, at the back of the romance section, a flash of yellow. A girl in highlighter rain boots snored softly from Sofia’s favorite reading chair. The one her mother had rocked her in as a baby. Now, she used it to read picture books to Ms. Powell’s kindergarten class. Sofia could smell the other girl, all Lysol and rosemary. While she decided on the most tolerant way to wake the stranger—what was less intimate, a tap on the shoulder or the back? Should she rock the chair?—the girl snapped awake.
Sofia sniffed.
“Your shoes are making the floor wet.”
The girl looked down, mortified.
“I’m so sorry, my socks were damp, you see, and your store hummed to me, it hummed with warmth—” she laughed and stood up, “—and my name is Aubrey, and I’m leaving.”
The girl, Aubrey, walked down the rows to the front of the store. At the door, she turned back and waved. But once again, she was too fast for Sofia. By the time Sofia had decided whether or not to wave back, Aubrey was gone.
❖ ❖ ❖
Sometimes when the customers only stumbled in for the shade or the heat or the dry, Sofia told herself a story, and it went like this:
There was once a girl made of glass. The sun danced through her prismed skin into a hundred rainbows. She lived in a plush palace with her parents, the king and queen. Every surface was slick with fur and every corner coated in padding to protect her. The girl longed to go outside, to feel the ground crunch beneath her fragile feet. But her parents decreed that the world was not safe for a girl made of glass. One night, she waited until they fell fast asleep, and she snuck past the guards snoring at their posts. Just as she was about to step outside, she tripped over a rug in front of the door, and she shattered.
❖ ❖ ❖
After a week of musty motel living in exchange for cleaning the other rooms, Eva found work at the town’s bookstore. Eva believed in signs, and this one meant she belonged in this town. When Mr. Melline, the owner, asked if she liked to read, she launched into a word-for-word recitation of Les Misérables. She didn’t stop until he had offered her the vacant apartment above the store too. Mr. Melline found it odd, of course, that his newest employee requested her paychecks in cash, and he didn’t believe for one second that she was twenty-five, as she claimed. But he shared such thoughts only with Mrs. Melline in the privacy of their bedroom. And when it became clear that Eva was eating for two—he didn’t remark on that either. The girl was clean, she showed up on time, and she charmed the customers by reading bedtime stories to their children, always in the romance section rocking chair, always with one hand cradling her own stomach.
Eva, for her part, found the sort of father she’d always wanted in Mr. Melline, who was gruff in an affectionate way, and a mother in his wife, who folded Eva into her arms like dough. She had access to more books than she could ever read and a town with enough magic to keep any eighteen-year-old pregnant girl from getting bored. As she crept closer to her due date, she took to taking long walks along the lake. There, some wobbly table within her felt balanced. She could tell the baby liked the water, too. The first time she ever kicked, it was by the shore.
❖ ❖ ❖
Three weeks after they first met, the girls sat with their backs to the romance shelves. Aubrey drank rooibos tea and glued Polaroids—of the mists, of the birds, of Sofia when she wasn’t looking—into a photo album. Sofia was lost in book three of a fantasy series. Something about a girl with wings who was scared of flying. Every couple of pages, she frowned. Aubrey hypothesized this was a look of concentration rather than unhappiness, but she wasn’t sure.
“So, you like reading fantasy, but you refuse to explore the fantastical world right outside your door?”
Sofia sighed. It was definitely a look of unhappiness now, Aubrey thought.
“I’m in the middle of a chapter, Aubrey.”
“Why won’t you come with me to the lake? That’s the whole point of me befriending a local, isn’t it?” Aubrey smiled. “To get the insider perspective.”
Sofia folded her book over her knee, careful to preserve the page. She looked up at Aubrey. Sofia wasn’t ready to admit this, not yet, but she liked this girl. Aubrey might be a tourist, but that didn’t stop Sofia from noticing the wildness in her eyebrows. The fact that she smelled like clean laundry. She wondered if her skin would be as warm as freshly tumbled clothes. She wanted to find out.
Still, Sofia had made a promise. And she told herself that she wouldn’t break it, not even for this wild girl.
“Go with someone else.”
Aubrey struggled not to react when frustration gave way to anger, trickling between her ears. She came from a town where parents put puppies in strollers and toddlers on leashes. The most exciting event to ever happen was the release of a new Frappe flavor at Starbucks, which was two towns over. She had to travel two thousand miles to come to Sofia’s town, to see what it was like to live amongst magic, real magic.
“Have you even seen the lake for yourself?” Aubrey asked.
Sofia picked up her book again. She stared with a look of practiced enrapturement.
“You haven’t, have you?” Aubrey turned away from her.
Sofia carried her stress in her hipbones, and they ached. She’d allowed herself to forget, these past three weeks. But no more. She reminded herself that she didn’t deserve any of it—not the mists, not the lake, and especially not Aubrey.
“I was fine before you came, and I’ll be fine after you leave. So just—” Sofia paused, “—just leave, Aubrey.”
❖ ❖ ❖
Sofia was thirteen when she stopped recognizing her mother. She found Eva’s journal hidden in a bag of cleaning supplies under the kitchen sink. Her mother was always the one to do the dishes. Sofia stayed up that night reading, hurt and horrified and unable to stop.
“You told me I didn’t have any other family,” Sofia said. She clutched the journal to her chest now. “You said you were an orphan.”
Eva clenched her nails into her palms. But she knew she couldn’t disappear, not like she did as a girl. Not with Sofia looking at her in that unfocused way. Those eyes like grey chalk, water dust waiting to spill out.
“I ran away for a reason,” Eva said.
She tried to reach for Sofia then, but Sofia shook her head and stepped back.
“You lied to me,” Sofia said. “All this time, you’ve been lying to me.”
It was selfish of her to think she could parcel up her past and ship it back without a word. Eva knew that now. But her first day in Lovelace, standing at the edge of the lake—she felt freshly-peeled. Ready for a new life, for her daughter. Sofia didn’t know what it was like to go unloved by those who bore you.
“I know, sweetheart. But this doesn’t change anything.”
“How could you say that?” Sofia let the tears flow freely now. Didn’t bother to wipe them away. Her mother deserved to see her pain.
Eva walked over to the bookstore windows. The mists were thick like syrup that day, sweet and sticky. Locals and tourists alike slowly weaved through the streets with flashlights. Some wore neon orange vests. From above, it looked as if the town was pockmarked by little bursts of fire.
“This is the only home that matters,” Eva said. “You were born here.”
Sofia knew this part of the story, at least. How at first, Sofia refused to be born. How she didn’t want to leave her mother’s warmth. That there was no moon at her birth, only the glow of the mists. Her mother liked to say that Sofia sucked the moonlight from the sky with a straw, leaving her eyes silver. But when Sofia leaned into the bathroom mirror, all she ever saw was dishwater swirling down the drain of her pupil.
“I know,” Sofia said. She felt herself softening, and she fought it. She didn’t want feelings like cotton balls. Not now. “But I had a right to know.”
“Why don’t we go for a walk around our favorite part of the lake?” Eva made as if to grab Sofia’s hand, but Sofia pulled it back. Eva’s arm hung limp between them. Thirteen years of lies pushed it down.
“I’m not leaving,” Sofia said. “You chose this town. It’s your lake, not mine.”
❖ ❖ ❖
Eva ran her hands through her mother’s Grandifloras. She admired their sensual stems, those perky pink petals. The way the roses reigned over the rest of the garden. For the better part of five years, her mother had lusted after the chance to host the annual Guardians of the Garden Ladies’ Lunch. Only the home with the most exquisite of gardens was given the honor. In response, Lucille flew in a flower expert from the Botanical Gardens on a private plane. She hired a live-in gardener. Twice a day, he ambled out of the tool shed to count the roses. He kept track of the bud numbers in a leather-bound notebook monogrammed with Lucille’s initials.
And here was Lucille’s own daughter, seventeen-years-old and threatening everything she had worked for. Lucille nearly growled.
“Eva Lucille Santiago, you wouldn’t dare.”
Eva thought of the gym membership Lucille gave her for her eleventh birthday. She remembered Lucille’s alarm when, at fourteen, she widened from waif to woman. Even at fifty-five, Lucille was the type of skinny where clothes didn’t fit her—they overcame her. And she expected nothing less from her daughter. Eva tried to remember the last time her mother had touched her. She couldn’t.
Eva held these thoughts tight in her head until she became dizzy with the force of them. And when it became too much, when it felt like her brain might burst and her heart floated out of her body like a balloon, Eva pulled until the garden became a massacre. She pulled until rose carcasses covered the dirt bed like lost lovers. Until her hands were raw and bloodied and thorned. Only then did she stop. When at last she opened her eyes, she saw that her mother had sunk to the ground. All Eva could think was, be careful, Lucille. You’ll get your dress dirty.
Charles, Eva’s father, opened the patio doors. He took in the scene before him—his wife on her knees. His daughter with rivulets running down her palms. Pink petals everywhere. After a moment, he simply turned and went back inside to finish the morning paper.
❖ ❖ ❖
Two days after Sofia learned the truth about her mother’s past, two days of desperate phone calls and Mr. Melline marching to the police station in his terry-cloth robe and tears, so many tears—they found her. Or rather, two tourists found her. A couple who had decided to be adventurous on their honeymoon, to do something different, not cliché like their friends that chose Paris. They were exploring the lake that day, the new-wife in a paisley headscarf to protect her hair (it was too soon to flash frizz) and the new-husband in an excessive ski jacket and over-priced boots. At first, they thought she was part of the attraction. Or a snorkeler. Or a sunbather. Please understand, the mists were so thick that day, it wasn’t their fault. But then they saw that she was face-down in the water, and the leaves rotting in her hair, and the bird perched on her head. They saw white limbs and no movement and the wife screamed. The husband called the police, the police attached fishing hooks to a row boat, and Mr. Melline dropped the kitchen phone. He stared at little Sofia, thirteen-year-old Sofia, now motherless Sofia, and he cried.
❖ ❖ ❖
Sofia hadn’t talked to Aubrey in a week, not since their fight, when all of a sudden—Aubrey burst into the bookstore, all wet hair and muddy shoes and face scrunched stern.
“Close the door,” Sofia said.
“I know, Sofia.” Aubrey left the door open. “I visited the historical museum, to learn more about the lake, and I found these old newspapers—”
Sofia crouched on the floor with a shoebox, trying to coax inside a small, unremarkable black bird. A Mysterious Starling, Aplonis mavornata, to be precise. She recognized it from last week’s community newsletter. The birds had come soon after the mists. The Mayor insisted that the Lovelace residents refer to them by their Latin names, to attract “those scientific types.” And he was right—the scientists came, all panic and ruffled feathers and water-logged notebooks. Apparently, a gaggle of Harvard graduates had recorded the last confirmed sighting of the starlings in the Galapagos, 1987. Thirty-one years was a long time to be considered dead. Sofia didn’t really understand the fuss, though. She had never liked birds, not since one attacked her as a child. She still had a scar under her right eye. It itched whenever it rained, which was often.
“I could have saved you the trouble,” Sofia said. “Recommended a book instead.” The bird looked up at Sofia; it looked at the books; it perched on a copy of Love in the Time of Cholera.
“You wouldn’t have. You hate talking about the lake and the mists,” Aubrey said. “But it’s okay because—”
The bird started to peck at the book’s spine. Sofia hissed.
“That’s Márquez, you illiterate, zombie ingrate.”
Aubrey pried the shoebox from Sofia’s hands and sat with her back to the shelves. She tapped her fingers against the edge of the box, and the starling obediently hopped inside. She deposited it outside the store before rushing back inside. Sophia stood up to close the door.
“—it’s okay, because I understand now,” Aubrey finished.
In that moment, Sofia wished the bird was still inside the store. She wanted something, anything, other than this conversation. She looked around for another distraction, but the store was quiet. They were alone.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sofia said, at last.
“One of the articles was about a young woman who drowned at the lake—” Aubrey took a deep breath, “—and the daughter she left behind.”
Aubrey leaned so close, Sofia could see the freckles on her nose, the blond tips of her eyelashes, the sliver of space between her two front teeth. Sofia imagined the mists curling down their throats, swallowing them, strangling them. She thought of the swampy lake filling their stomachs until it leaked out of their eyes.
Aubrey looked at her friend, crumpled against the shelves.
“Sofia, you couldn’t have known.”
Sofia shook her head.
“Look at me, Sofia.” Aubrey placed both her hands on the girl’s shoulders. “You were thirteen, you couldn’t have known.”
And then, of all the marvelous things that could have happened, Aubrey kissed her. In the softness of her lips, Sofia could taste the mists. Her mother used to tell her to drink them in, and she would. But this was so much better. This was Aubrey, all salt and lemon and rosemary. Soft, soft Aubrey with her soft, soft lips.
When Aubrey finally pulled away, she saw that Sofia’s smile was like split atoms, like crashed atoms, like atoms fusing into one atoms.
Sofia, suddenly shy, looked down at her feet. She laughed.
“Do you ever take those boots off?”
Aubrey smiled.
“Only for special occasions.”
❖ ❖ ❖
The girls stood at the edge of the lake, enveloped. Acrocephalus yamashinae, Turnagra capensis, Greygone insularis … all around them hopped the birds. Aubrey took a step forward, then stopped. She looked back at Sofia, still frozen on the shore.
“Do you feel it, Sofia?”
Aubrey pulled one rain boot off, then the other. Her sweater, her shirt, her floral skirt—she stripped until she was shivering in silver socks.
Sofia laughed. She laughed herself naked. She felt the water in her pores, felt the mists seep deep inside of her, and her skin glowed translucent. Just like her mother said. The color of the moon. The color of bone. And in that moment, an understanding coalesced within her. It wasn’t complete, not yet, but it was something.
She stepped forward, and together the girls walked into the mists.