8. Pomelo #6
They had determined right away that it was most certainly the juice of this enchanted fruit that had restored Pilar’s ability to speak, but it had just occurred to Pilar now that perhaps her gain had been at her dear Pomelo’s expense.
If so, that would fill her with regret. For while being able to speak certainly made her day-to-day life of raising Pomelo with Alma easier, it brought her no real joy.
Certainly no more than silence had. Indeed, she had not let on to anyone else that anything had changed and certainly not her father, whom she had barely been able to look at since her quinceanera.
Though Pomelo’s arrival had distracted her, nothing had erased from her mind the revelation that she was trapped in this glass house.
Destined to live in service to her father for what she could see as no good reason.
Even if she wanted to be free, she could imagine no way out.
Everyone who worked for her father, Alma included, was afraid of him.
She had no money, not a proper education, she had never been taught how to drive.
And now she had Pomelo, whom she had to consider.
At least he brought her a certain comfort.
By his fourth month on the earth, it was clear that Pomelo had grown to his full size, though he still did not speak.
In theory, he was remarkably easy to hide from the man, as Alma was able to dress him as a groundskeeper, and the man, since the loss of his wife and teeth, was so often out carousing he barely kept track of the staff there anymore.
But Pomelo hated wearing clothes and undressed himself the second he was safe in the kitchen with Alma.
He was a great help to her there and had a natural ability with soups and desserts and, as he towered over her shrinking, aging body, she appreciated not having to use her step stool to reach for her better pots and pans.
Still, his nudity was a distraction, since for one thing, she worried constantly about him scalding and burning all that unprotected flesh and, for another, she was not dead yet.
While she cared for him dearly, she certainly did not think of this grapefruit man being any relation to her.
It was hard not to notice his statuesque physique as they maneuvered around each other in the kitchen, cooking side by side.
At night, his scent, still strong of grapefruit, wafted up to her from his cot on the floor beneath her bed, filling her dreams with a passion they had not had in years.
One night, in the sixth month since Pomelo had come to them, Pilar found herself being shaken awake in the middle of the night by Alma.
“Mija, you have to come to my room right away,” she whispered, “it’s Pomelo.”
Pilar felt a sinking in her stomach as she threw on clothes and made her way across the courtyard, into the kitchen, and then to Alma’s small room beyond that.
Pomelo was curled up in the fetal position, whimpering sharp cries.
“It’s his back!” Alma said, her voice full of urgency. “It’s burning up. His entire back is blistering!”
Pilar walked closer to examine him in the dimly lit room. His back was swollen into two large mounds, which, indeed, were covered in raised flesh, clearly filled with liquid, but something about the skin encasing them struck Pilar as odd.
“I’m sorry if this hurts you,” she whispered to Pomelo as she pricked one with the tip of her nail, rubbing her finger in the pus that oozed.
Before she even put her finger to her mouth, the fragrance of grapefruit juice hit the air, and indeed, when she touched her tongue to her fingertip, it was the same electric bright sensation that she had experienced the day Pomelo was born. Tears formed in her eyes.
“Alma,” she said, her heart breaking, “I think he’s turning back to a fruit.”
All through the night the women kept watch as Pomelo writhed on the bed in pain, beads of sweat forming against his terra-cotta skin as the mounds on his back grew.
At dawn, Pomelo began to scream and Alma stuffed a rag into his mouth to muffle the sound.
The mounds—massive now, blistered with juice sacs—were ripping themselves up and away from the flesh of his back, slowly expanding themselves farther and farther from his body until the mounds were fully unfurled and it was plain that Pomelo was not turning back into a fruit at all.
He had simply sprouted wings.
They were massive things when he extended them fully, so large that his wingspan could barely fit inside Alma’s room. They were covered in the papery flesh of a grapefruit wedge, veined with white fibers like those that had once nestled Pomelo in his fruit womb. They were beautiful.
The sun had long risen, and they could hear the man making his way through the house to the dining room for his breakfast.
“Your father!” Alma startled. She had completely forgotten about the world that existed outside her bedroom and Pomelo and his wings. “I haven’t even started his breakfast!”
Pomelo started to follow her into the kitchen, but Pilar held him back.
“Pomelo, stay here. I’ll help Alma. I… I don’t know that we can hide you in the kitchen now.”
Pilar fretted as she picked a grapefruit for her father’s morning juice over how she and Alma could keep Pomelo a secret now.
A man is easy to hide. A man with wings is a different story.
She had just sliced the fruit in half and was about to bring it down on the ceramic juicer when Pomelo gripped her wrist and pulled it away.
“Sister,” he said, his voice rich like marzipan, “no more.”
Alma, who had been plating the man’s breakfast, let the scrambled eggs drop to the floor, such was her shock at the voice.
“Sister?” Pilar said.
“Pomelo!” Alma cried with joy. “You’ve found your voice.”
He smiled at her warmly.
“Yes, Alma, I’m fully formed now. And thank you for helping raise me. And yes, Pilar, you are my sister. My half sister. We share the same mother, which is why we share the same face.”
“And my father’s tree is your father?”
“I have no father, Pilar. I was born of your mother, and my other mother is Earth. Your mother impregnated my mother when she washed herself away and was absorbed into the ground. My other mother placed me and the rest of our siblings in the nearest living thing she could find, the grapefruit tree.”
Pilar and Alma were both crying now. In the dining room, the man was calling out for his food and juice, and Alma went to placate him, picking the eggs off the floor, wiping her tears as she ran out of the kitchen. Pilar had so many questions but shock had almost made her mute again.
“When she was alive, our mother wished to have another child so that you wouldn’t be the youngest anymore, tied to this house and your father.
But she couldn’t conceive. She went to see a bruja, who told our mother that the only way for you to be free was for her to vanish herself into the earth. The bruja gave her a potion—”
“But you are older than me,” Pilar said. “How can you free me? The youngest is the one who must stay.”
“Why do you think my mothers gave me wings?”
From the kitchen, they could hear her father calling out her name, bellowing for his juice.
“But what about my father?” Pilar asked.
“One day Alma will die and return to my other mother, and the unacknowledged daughters of your father will by then have dispersed. Then the fog will return and your father will be here, left with his own thoughts and the consequences of his choices, and he will die alone. It was the witch’s prophecy. ”
“Pilar!” the man cried out again from the dining room. “What is happening in there?” But the siblings had already made their way into the courtyard, each kissing Alma goodbye as they ran out the door.
“How do you know you can fly?” Pilar asked.
“I just do.”
“Wait,” she said, running to the grapefruit tree, pulling off a stem, and stuffing as many grapefruits as she could into her dress pockets. “So we won’t be alone!”
And with that, her brother took her into his arms, began to flap his marvelous wings, and leaped into the air, the long absent scent of the grapefruits from the ancestral tree lingering behind, one final torment for the man.
As they rose through the air, Pilar looked down: at the sloped drive that led to the main road, at the city around that, at the river just beyond—and for the first time, the girl who had seen so little in her life could now see so very much.
Pomelo did as his mothers told him to do and flew them southward, back to where they had come from, back to a place untouched by man.