MARIBELLE
I begin with Sera.
I will forever be a Lucero and wear that name like a badge of honor, but in blood I’m a Córdova and a de León. This biological connection with Sera will bring me closer to her, to helping me better understand her psychic powers, which have passed down to me. But I’m resisting. Mama and Papa actually taught me how to use my powers. I was seven when I stood on the balcony of the house we were staying in and I told my parents I was going to jump and fly like them. They told me I wasn’t ready but I jumped anyway and before I could crash through the dining table Mama caught me. Her hands are the ones I want to feel around me now.
I can’t resist Sera. I don’t know how much she loved me, whether or not she wanted me, or if I would’ve been safe with her, but I have to accept her if I’m going to reach her. I can’t keep acting as if she doesn’t matter because she doesn’t have any bearing on my life today, or because I feel guilty I’m not honoring my real parents. Sera being my mother doesn’t mean Mama wasn’t.
In the darkness, I struggle forward as if there’s an actual road I’m traveling, one paved with guilt and grief. The more I think about Sera raising me, the more my senses feel out of control. It’s like I’m separating from myself, like I’m being reborn as the daughter I would’ve been if Sera hadn’t been killed. I believe I can smell the color blue—ocean waves crashing into each other, baths with Atlas where he would get carried away with shampooing my hair for his own amusement, clear skies I can now fly within. I listen to pain—when I was a girl trying to glide from one tree to the next and smacked through the river’s surface, the way my heartbeat was so loud in my head when I held Atlas’s corpse.
This is unlike any sensation I’ve ever experienced, so I must be getting somewhere. I trust my instinct and grow my senses. I feel lost and found inside a space that’s warm and cool and everything and nothing. There are whispers invading my head and heart and clarity strikes me like lightning. As suddenly and oddly sure as I am that my own birth felt like being woken up by starlight, I know the person I’m hearing is Sera Córdova even though her voice is completely foreign to me. I have no idea what she’s saying, it’s as if she’s expecting me to read her lips that I can’t see, but something about this space bridging our bloodlines allows me to understand the emotions behind her words—there’s love, there’s panic, there’s sorrow, there’s defeat. Then finally relief.
I think I’m somewhere near the very edge of her death.