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The expectation that the pitter-patter of tiny feet will once again be heard through the halls of Casita has taken up residence like an additional, invisible member of the family. It isn’t something that’s talked about openly: there might be a renewed urgency in nagging Bruno about any interesting visions he might have had, or a pointed comment over breakfast about Abuela becoming a great-grandmother soon, but ‘we want you to have children’ is never spelled out in so many words.
The more time passes, the higher the frequency of the uncomfortable questions. Is everything all right? Is there something you should tell us? Are you trying hard enough?
Life goes on, and Dolores and Mariano slowly master the art of deflecting that line of inquiry. Of course it’s all right, they’re perfectly happy, and besides, they’re still young, perhaps it’s for the best. Dolores has even stopped blushing at the implications and would love nothing more than to clap back with details that nobody wants to hear, because they’re trying very vigorously, thank you very much, and it’s really best for everyone that the room doesn’t let a sound in or out.
When Dolores is twenty-three, Mariano finally surrenders to modernity and orders a typewriter to type up copies of his poetry to send to every place that will consider it, joking that they may not have a baby of flesh and blood, but they do have one of paper and ink. He’s not the best typist, and the thing is treated with the care of a holy relic because there’s nobody in the entire Encanto who knows how to repair it, but it speeds up the process considerably. Casita has to grow him an isolated alcove in a corner of the room so the rhythmic clatter of the keys doesn’t drive her insane as he types late into the night.
The first letter comes, and he tosses it dejectedly aside and needs to sit down and have a sip of something strong to shake off the eerie sense of déjà-vu. Knowing it would happen only makes it hurt a little less.
He descends for breakfast the next day and claps Bruno on the shoulder. It’s a testament to her uncle’s progress that the basic human contact doesn’t make him jump a foot in the air, but he hasn’t lost that look that reminds her of a lost rabbit expecting predators around every corner.
“Well, it’s finally started.”
“Huh, what… what’s started?”
“The first publisher said no. One down, God only knows how many more to go.”
“Uh, well…” Bruno gives him two thumbs up and puts on a tense grin. “Keep at it, and… congratulations in advance for when you get a yes?” He offers a handful of salt. “Just in case?”
“No, thanks.”
“Eh, more for me.” And he throws it over his shoulder with the ease of one who’s done it more times than he can count. More than one pair of eyes roll up to the sky at the familiar quirk. The frequency of it has slowed down a fraction, but by now, buying more salt than they actually need is an ingrained habit.
“Speaking of that, Brunito, are you sure you haven’t…?”
Dolores squirms. For the love of God, not again. It’s like Abuela simply refuses to give up hope that he will someday come down for the morning meal clutching a glass slate imprinted with the image of a whole brood of great-grandchildren.
“No, mamá, I’m sorry. You know what my policy is on giving visions to family.”
After the fiasco that led to a decade of isolation, and after everyone had come to their senses and realized that he was, in fact, allowed to say no, he had instituted a rule that said that family could only feature in his glimpses of the future if it was the direst of emergencies, or if the vision simply came to him without asking for permission. There is considerable overlap between the two, at any rate.
“How much longer until it qualifies—?”
Bruno pulls up his hood sharply.
“No.” He still has to pretend to be Hernando to say no to his mother without propping it up with an explanation or an apology, but it’s something, at least.
Meanwhile, Dolores is stuck on that unfinished sentence. How much longer until the conspicuous absence of a bump in her figure qualifies as a full-blown family emergency for Bruno to figure out by way of green light and swirling sand?
Her breakfast suddenly tastes like ash, and she’s pretty sure Tía Julieta’s cooking is not to blame.
All in all, she does a splendid job of keeping it together in the face of the mounting whispers. It’s not just the family anymore, she’s uniquely positioned to know that. The fact that the joyful announcement has failed to come has been at the center of the town gossip for a while now, and Dolores can’t see how it is any of their business, but she can’t single-handedly shut all of their mouths either, and so she keeps listening, increasingly unable to block out the gleeful malice of the insinuations that she, one of the perfect, magical Madrigals, is somehow less of a woman because she’s been married for some time with nothing to show for it but a ring on her finger.
But at night, when their clothes come off and so does all the pretense, she breaks, not with an almighty crash, but quietly, the only way she knows how, with a single murmured question.
“Mariano… do you think maybe there’s something wrong with me?”
He pulls her closer, skin brushing skin, as if his embrace could meld the jagged pieces of her back together.
“Never.”
“But—”
“Shh. We’ll keep trying, and even if it never happens, we have more than enough family to go around. Besides,” her ear is so, so close to his chest as it rumbles, “it’s not like trying is much of a hardship.”
And so they keep trying, whether the project is one that Mariano is pursuing by himself or one that takes two to complete, and slowly but surely, their marriage begins to be measured in years. Dolores has recently turned twenty-four, and there’s always an extra bite on her plate, just to make sure everything’s in order down there.
The first time her breakfast refuses to stay down, she blames it on the world being too loud. She’s no stranger to her noise-induced headaches going hand in hand with vomiting, and Antonio’s animal companions are a ready scapegoat.
But it just doesn’t stop, even when her little brother vows to keep his friends quiet, and not even Tía Julieta’s treats seem to fix it, when they don’t come right back up, that is.
By the third failed arepa, the women of the house begin to exchange strange looks. By the fourth, she’s staring at a calendar whispering numbers that don’t add up. By the fifth, she knows.
She doesn’t dare say anything until she hears it. There’s a reason she was never surprised when a new baby was announced. When it does come, one evening while they’re getting ready for bed, she has to wrestle to convince herself that she hasn’t finally gone off the deep end and isn’t hearing things that aren’t there. It’s almost hard to locate, a steady rhythm that is less like the thump-thump she knows and more like the frantic flutter of the wings of a little bird that isn’t yet very proficient at flying, sourceless until she comes to terms with the beautiful and utterly terrifying fact that it’s inside her.
“Welcome home, mi pajarito.”
“Hmm? Who are you talking to, amor?”
“U-um, well, you know how sometimes I listen to your heart when everything’s too noisy?”
“Yes?”
“You’ve got competition.”
He’s never moved so fast from confusion to heartbreak to realization to unbridled joy.
“Does that mean…?”
“Uh-huh.”
“So we’re going to…?”
“Uh-huh.”
He picks her up and spins her until she doesn’t know which way is up.
“We’ve got to tell everyone.” He looks ready to run out of there in his pajamas and pound on every door.
“Tomorrow, at breakfast.”
He’s the first to drift off to sleep. Dolores lies awake a little longer, listening to her little bird, until exhaustion prevails.
There’s a shuffle of feet behind them as they walk down the stairs the next morning, and Dolores turns around to see Tío Bruno, lets out a squeak, and runs for her life. There are more questions suddenly crowding her mind than there are stars in the sky. When will it happen? Will it be a healthy baby? Will it be a boy or a girl? How badly will she mess up as a mother?
“Dolores, what… wait!”
Her uncle’s confused, forlorn “What’s gotten into her?” chases her all the way to the kitchen. He’s had quite enough of people turning and running when they catch sight of him.
They wait for everyone to stumble sleepily down for breakfast, sit dutifully through Abuela’s daily brief, and then stand up, look at each other, and come to the simultaneous realization that they have no clue what to say.
“You go first,” they start in accidental unison, and their stellar beginning is met with snorts of awkward laughter. Dolores can see the connection being made on a few faces before they’ve even spoken.
“No, really. You heard it first, you get to say it. It’s only fair.”
In her mind, she gives the news in a very dignified manner, standing up straight and keeping her voice level; in reality, she realizes halfway through the sentence that she’s never actually said the words out loud before, and it all comes out in a breathless, squealing rush.
“Mariano and I are having a baby!”
There’s a tension in the air that feels like counting the seconds between lightning and thunder, and then the family explodes into chatter and applause. Mamá gasps and makes a rainbow big enough to span the table from one end to the other. In the general confusion, Dolores finds herself only shielding her left ear, because her right hand has drifted to her abdomen, where her little bird is still flapping its wings.
It’s silly and she knows it: the baby is a tiny thing that probably isn’t even done growing a proper set of ears, why would the merry burst of noise be something from which they need protection?
Then she looks at each of her loved ones’ faces, and everyone at the table who has ever been a mother is staring at her belly with eyes that say I know.
Dolores and Mariano have well and truly managed a takeover of all topics of breakfast conversation. No sooner have they sat back down than Isabela casually remarks: “Do we even have room left on the wall to update the family tree?”
Mirabel makes a show of staring at the painting through an imaginary camera made out of her index fingers and thumbs. They’re all painfully aware of what used to be behind that wall, as well as praying they will never have cause for the house to do such a thing again.
“It’ll take some doing, but I think I know how to squeeze in the little guy. Or gal. I just need—”
“Forget the family tree,” Luisa pipes up, probably anticipating having to carry the cans of paint, “we’ll have to update the entire mural outside!”
“—as I was saying,” Mirabel’s voice cracks as the more creative endeavors keep piling up on her shoulders, “I just need some name ideas. Any clue what you’re going to name the baby yet?”
Her stomach drops at the terrifying practicality of the question. She has barely come to grips with their existence and she’s being asked to name them? She seeks rescue in Mariano’s face, only to see her same blank panic reflected in it. Great, they haven’t even given the announcement ten minutes ago and they’re already falling behind schedule.
A knowing look flies between mamá and Tía Julieta. “It’s in your room, Pepi, you used it last.”
“At least it won’t get wet this time.”
That’s the trouble with having a set of triplets in the family: Dolores looks on, long used to missing important pieces of the conversation when it comes to the three of them.
“I’m sorry, but…?” Mariano interjects, voicing her own confusion in her stead. His puzzlement is met with gentle laughs.
“The book of baby names. We bought one when Isa and Lola were this big.” Julieta shows a frighteningly tiny length with her fingers, less than a handspan, and Dolores’s stomach flutters with a foreign feeling. “And we’ve been passing it back and forth since.”
“You wouldn’t happen to have a How to Be an Uncle manual lying around too, would you?” says Camilo in his trademark winning tone. Dolores may well be the only one to have heard his tiny falter. “We’re going to be uncles, Toñito.”
He crowns the statement with a grotesque flourish of morphing his face into strange, warped images of both his uncles that don’t quite match his body, ending on a slightly rearranged version of himself that would be right at home hanging in a museum. It’s reminiscent of the time the house was cracking, but coming from him, it only brings up laughs and squeals of disgust rather than memories best left buried.
“I think that just broke my brain.” He taps the side of his head as if to jostle his face back into its natural state. “Dibs on being the fun one! Sorry, Antonio, you’re stuck being the boring uncle, be a little faster next time.”
“Hey, that’s not fair! I’m fun too, right, Lola?”
“Don’t worry, Antonio. Between the two of you, my little bird is going to have no shortage of fun uncles.”
It’s only when half the table bursts into a teasing ‘aww’ that she realizes that her private little nickname has slipped out. She stumbles through her reasoning for it, and it absolutely does not help.
“Every baby in the world has had a nickname like that, Dolores. You’re not strange or silly for it,” says her mother, knowing exactly what she needs to hear. “Where do you think ‘my little sunshine’ comes from?”
“Are you sure your gift isn’t reading minds?”
“Nah, I just know you too well. And anyway, if you’re so quick to come up with a nickname, the baby’s name will be no problem at all.”
“Dolores, a word, please?”
Despite everything, Abuela still has the power to change the atmosphere in a room with a look. She is better, now, at recognizing the difference between respect and fear, but everybody knows that when she speaks, that’s when things get serious.
“Yes?”
“If it’s a boy—” she starts strong, as she always does, but she chokes on the rest of what she meant to say. Dolores has more than an inkling of what it might have been anyway.
“I know. We’ll… we’ll consider it.”
Dolores is intimately acquainted with how fast news can travel. There’s no need to announce it with great pomp and fanfare: all they have to do is send Luisa out for a particularly heavy load of groceries, let her comment to some passers-by that someone’s eating for two, and the whole town knows in what feels like a span of five minutes. The downside, she thinks bitterly, is that she can’t walk more than ten steps outside her home without every man offering help she doesn’t need and every woman pelting her with advice she never asked for. Nearly everyone she meets seems to have an opinion on what she should eat, what she should do, how she should be preparing for the baby’s arrival, a deluge of wise counsel that leaves her with more questions than answers.
“I’m not even showing yet, and they already feel like it’s their sworn duty to teach me how to be a mother. I wouldn’t even be complaining, God knows I have no idea what I’m doing, if only they could actually agree on something. One tells me one thing, the other says the exact opposite, and I don’t know who to believe anymore.”
Mamá lets her vent in silence, and then simply says: “Maybe that just means that there isn’t only one right way. Their children all survived, didn’t they?”
That… doesn’t help as much as she probably hoped. “You think that’s what I want? Survival? You can survive and be miserable. I want them to be happy.”
Dolores claps her hand over her mouth, bitterly regretting how much it sounds like an accusation that she never intended. If her mother noticed, she gives no indication of it.
“Then you’re fully equipped already. You’re going to be a wonderful mother, I just know it.”
It’s only the happy kind of drizzle, but somehow, they don’t get wet. Perks of running to her mother’s room to whine like a little girl: the canopy of her four-poster bed always has a way of coming between her and her cloud.
“No, you don’t. Wrong triplet.”
“Well, I don’t need any crummy old sand. I have faith in you, mija.”
“I’m scared,” says Dolores, her voice small, just like when she used to run into her arms to hide from the noise of a world that didn’t make sense.
“Alright. What’s the thing that scares you the most?”
She doesn’t answer, because the truth is so shallow and petty and stupid, and she doesn’t think she has it in her to lie. Silence, she finds, is often the best policy.
“Come on, it can’t be that bad.”
“Promise you won’t think I’m a terrible person?”
“Dios mío, Lola, you sound like you’re about to confess to murder. I can’t believe I have to say this, but… promise.”
“The crying,” she finally blurts out. “I’m… I’m scared of the crying part. When my siblings were little, I-I couldn’t even… I’m going to go insane with the noise, mami, I can’t—”
She finds herself engulfed in a hug. “Shh, shh, shh. We’ll find a way. You’re not in this alone, remember? You’ll have more help than you know what to do with. I’m not going to lie and say it’s going to be easy, but we’ll get through this, okay? Together. Crying included.”
“Gracias, mamá.”
Her mother lets go of their embrace to give her a long look from head to toe that lingers suspiciously on the region where her little bird is growing.
“I can’t believe I’m going to be a grandma. I swear, the first time that child calls me Abuela, I’ll turn around to check if my mother is behind me.”
Despite herself, Dolores lets out a weak chuckle.
“Oh! Hold on a minute, I never did give you the book.”
Her mother takes off and returns moments later with the promised book that, to hear her tell it, has helped name a generation. It is old and well-loved, its cover faded, its spine cracked in a few places, its pages yellowed with time and wrinkled with water damage.
But the best part, she soon finds, are the notes, a tapestry of familiar hands writing a history of question marks and maybes in the margins before settling on the one. The names are sorted alphabetically, and she flips to the Ds without thinking, finding ‘Dolores’ circled and underlined so heavily that she can feel the bumps pressed into the other side of the page.
Hands trembling, she finds the boys’ section and cracks it open at the Ps. The entry for ‘Pedro’ is almost entirely swallowed by comments added and then crossed out to the point of being unreadable, the ink bleeding with old, dried-up rain. All she can decipher is a tiny scribble in her mother’s hand, asking too soon?
And that’s the crux of the problem, isn’t it? Some were surprised when neither of the boys in her generation was named after their celebrated grandfather, but ultimately, knowing what she does now, Dolores thinks it was for the best. She can scarcely imagine what Camilo or Antonio’s fate would have been with a different, heavier name to carry—revered as the second coming of the Pedro who was lost, or forever compared and condemned never to measure up?
Now, though, with a little more distance and time and healing in between, she thinks maybe Abuela can bear to have another little Pedro running around without crying, or worse, expecting him to be the reincarnation of a man who never existed, a flawless hero standing on a pedestal built out of love and loss.
The weeks trickle by, and she finds herself staring in the mirror at the place where her figure begins to swell. With a visible bump comes the added annoyance of a multitude of demanding hands thinking they have a God-given right to a belly rub, and there’s a village-wide betting pool on the baby’s gender. She has counted seven people who blithely assumed she already knows and tried to ask for insider knowledge, ‘what with your uncle and everything’, and of those seven, three offered the same old wives’ tale about guessing it by the shape of her belly, ‘if he really insists on not telling you’.
People in general are utterly exhausting, but she consoles herself by clinging to a tiny little fact that left her floored with its terrifying beauty: by now, her little bird can hear something of the outside world. Mariano, who is editing his manuscript and thrilled at finally having an audience of two, takes it as his cue to read through his entire collection, always finding little snags and improvements to be made and thanking the baby for each one as if talking to a highbrow critic.
She’s sitting on a couch, reclining against his shoulder as he drowns in papers, moving them to and fro and occasionally asking the baby for their expert opinion on how the poems should be ordered, when she hears it: a familiar yet chilling call like a saw pushing through wood, then the sound of heavy paws on the tiles. She tenses. Even with Antonio’s tempering influence, a jaguar roaming around the house is no joke, and she’s always wary of him when ‘his human’ is not in her direct line of sight.
They both barrel into view one after the other, Antonio sounding a little breathless from the merry chase. The jaguar is a little less energetic now than he was when they first met, but right now, he might as well be an oversized kitten.
“Parce, no, you can’t play with my sister, there’s a—” The feline cuts him off with an indignant snuffle. “What did you just say? Aww, of course it does.”
“Whoa, hey. Care to translate?” Antonio’s one-sided conversations always leave her feeling like she’s missing a step.
“Oh, Parce says he knows there’s a human cub in there, I mean a baby. And a cub needs protection.”
The residual knot of tension in her body melts away. “Then tell him that the baby could always use an honorary uncle.”
Antonio does more than that. He puts a gentle guiding hand on Parce’s powerful shoulder and leads him to her for a deep, investigating sniff. The large beast’s nose nudges her baby bump with unexpected care. Slowly, hardly daring to breathe, she exposes it, letting him inspect her bare skin, and squeals in surprise when she feels a great raspy lick that nearly knocks her into Mariano’s lap. She laughs at the foreign sensation.
Parce rests his heavy head in her lap. She freezes, unwilling to ruin the moment. She’d like to see a random passer-by try to touch her belly now: he’d sooner bite their hand off than let them.
“That’s incredible, Antonio,” says Mariano, surveying the scene with no small amount of trepidation. “How can he tell?”
He shrugs. “Animals know a lot more than it looks. Come on, Parce, that’s sweet of you, but you can’t be her bodyguard forever.”
The jaguar all but whines in protest. Even Antonio is hard-pressed to persuade him, but he eventually leads him away with a stream of tempting promises of treats now and getting to meet the baby later.
“See? Everyone loves him already. Or her.”
He sighs. That has been something of a point of contention. Perhaps it’s because her own gift is a heavy load to bear, but out of the two of them, she’s been doing a far better job of suppressing her secret desire to know. Many prospective parents have asked Tío Bruno whether their child would be a boy or a girl: according to him, that’s one of the most popular questions, and generally a safe one, unless you count the times they were disappointed with the answer, or the times he ended up seeing what no parent wants to see.
They haven’t asked yet. It’s not worth hearing his heart beating wildly in fear of seeing the worst. But the question is hanging in the air all the same, and she knows from listening to him vent to his rats that he is secretly beating himself up for having that answer and many more at his fingertips and, in his own words, being too much of a coward to go looking for them.
“Aren’t you even a little bit curious?” asks Mariano for what feels like the hundredth time.
“Aren’t we all? But you know him, he… doesn’t like to use his gift unless it’s information we can’t live without.”
“… it’ll just ruin everything…”
“Hmm? Ay, let me go get him, he’s going to talk himself into a panic again.”
It’s a curious thing that her gift does sometimes: she can hear everyone, all the time, a constant maddening babble at the edge of her awareness, but she has found that when she’s thinking of someone in particular, that someone will come barging to the forefront, demanding attention, and right now, she doesn’t like what she’s hearing.
Her uncle’s room, while not as thoroughly insulated as her own, is somewhat protected from her admittedly invasive power by the steady shh-shh-shh of falling sand running interference, but it’s not nearly enough to stop her from hearing his frantic rambling as she marches to his door.
“… it all comes down to that stupid cat,” he’s mumbling half to himself and half to his audience of rodents. That gives her pause. What does a cat have to do with anything? “Until you look, the cat is alive and dead at the same time, but if you look and find it dead, how do you know it’s not your fault for looking?”
His breath is starting to come in dangerously choppy. She knocks, but he gives no sign of having noticed.
“Casita?”
The house swings the door open, only to leave her faced with the hourglass-shaped opening full of falling sand. Only he has the ability to stop it, but right now, he’s too deep in his own head to realize he has a guest. She holds her breath and pushes through.
“Tío Bruno!”
“If I don’t look and something bad happens, it’ll be my fault for not warning them, but if I do, it’ll be the same old thing all over again.”
He’s facing away from her, arms flapping dramatically for emphasis, and there’s a long trail of overlapping footprints in the sand that tells her he’s been pacing.
“Tío Bruno, stop, it’s okay, we weren’t even going to ask, we—”
“Ah!”
He jumps out of his skin and whips around to face her, his eyes wide and spooked and shining bright, not seeing her at all.
An instinct forged from far too much practice kicks in and she rushes forward with open arms, ready to support him if he sways on his feet. This is a long one, she notes with a stab of worry: they can last anywhere between a few seconds and several unbearable minutes, and this time, the glow doesn’t seem to stop. The sand at his feet stirs with an unnatural breeze, but fails to gather enough force to cocoon him fully in an artificial whirlwind.
He moans low in his chest, reaching out with one hand that doesn’t quite stretch far enough to touch her, utterly blind to the present. She is used to it the way one eventually gets used to something that was once terrifying.
His hand drops limply to his side, and she lets herself believe it’s over, but the vision doesn’t yet release its hold.
“It’s… mmm…”
Great, he’s talking to himself now. It’s not the first time, they’ve heard him speak in slurred bits and pieces in the middle of a vision before, but Dolores is more aware than ever that she’s alone with him and largely powerless to help if things go south.
“… beautiful…”
The light stutters and winks out of his eyes and he pitches forward into her arms, a boneless thing heavy with exhaustion. He only seems to take in her presence when he crashes into her.
“Dolores? How… how long have you been watching?”
“A while.”
Even after all this time, he shrinks in, ashamed to have been caught, as if being watched having an involuntary vision were on par with being seen naked.
“Come on, up you get.” She gently guides him upright and counts the seconds until he seems to regain his bearings enough to answer the dreaded question. “What was it?”
He stares at her for a few long moments, then he throws his head back and laughs and laughs and laughs until he’s wheezing. She lets him. This was a big one, he has every right in the world to sound a little bit drunk. It takes her longer than it should to realize that his laughing gasps of breath have turned into sobs.
“Hey, hey, hey. That bad?”
“No, it… I… oh, God.” He’s staring at her, but his line of sight is landing quite a bit lower than her face. “She’s… she’s amazing.”
He breaks into a low murmur of self-deprecation, wiping tears away and berating himself for crying like a baby when she already has one baby to worry about, but she lets it all slip into background noise, stuck on repeat on the one thing she isn’t entirely sure he meant to say.
“Did you just…?”
He blinks slowly and reviews what has just spilled out of his mouth. “Um. Oops?”
“Never mind that now. Can you tell me more?” She probably shouldn’t ask, but the temptation is too strong.
“It—it was all… eh. Didn’t have the decency to happen chronologically. But she adores you, Lola, her… her door was lighting up and you were the first person she turned to.”
The implication lodges in her throat and stops her breath. “You saw that far ahead? What…?”
She never says the word, but there’s no need. It is perhaps greedy to jump immediately to asking what her gift will be, but they both know the spirit in which the question is asked. Please, God, let it be more of a blessing than a curse.
“I couldn’t tell. She… she looked at you, then out towards the crowd, and all she said was ‘it’s beautiful’. Then I came back. Lo siento.”
“You heard her? What did she sound like?”
“Ah, um, no… no sneak peek on that, I’m afraid. I mostly just get pictures. But do it for a few decades and boom, suddenly you’re a master at reading lips.”
“Thank you.”
She pulls him into an embrace, hating how it still takes him a fraction of a second longer than most to figure out what to do with his limbs, as if the concept of being hugged didn’t quite compute.
“I thought you didn’t want to know.”
“I did, sort of. I just… didn’t think it was worth giving you a headache. You okay?”
“Mostly,” he mumbles into her shoulder. “You’ve really got an idiot for an uncle. Every time I don’t want a vision, I manage to overthink myself into one.”
“But this one didn’t sound like it was… you know.”
He squirms out of the hug. “All doom and gloom? No, but it could have been. I shouldn’t have risked it.”
“How many times, tío? We know you can’t always help it, and even if you had seen something bad, at least we’d be forewarned. Come on, let’s get downstairs and tell everyone.”
If he leans on her more heavily than he normally would on his way down, Dolores makes no mention of it.
The original plan is to make a beeline for a snack to take the edge off what he calls a ‘vision hangover’; even magic food can never do much against pain that comes from the very same magic, she knows that first-hand, but at least a bite can dull it to something more manageable. That, or the small comfort helps them forget about it.
The plan never comes to fruition, though, because they enter the kitchen to find a most unusual picture: Abuela, mami and papi locked in a standoff, each sitting on a different side of the table and glaring daggers, her mother’s cloud rumbling menacingly and about to unload over their heads.
“Hey,” says Tío Bruno, leaning into the word just long enough to make it awkward. “What did we miss?”
Wrong move. All three glares are now directed squarely at him.
“Not now, Bruno,” says mamá, her hair frizzy with static.
Dolores can think of only one way to shock them all into a truce.
“I caught Tío Bruno having a vision and he may have sort of accidentally called the baby a she.”
The reprieve only lasts long enough for them to burst into congratulations, and for papá to joke that he is well and truly outnumbered. Looking at him, she knows where her brother gets it: the theatrical posing, the comically wounded expression… with blood like that in her veins, her little bird is bound to be a drama queen.
“That doesn’t solve the problem,” says Abuela.
“I’m afraid to ask,” says Bruno, “but, uh… what problem?”
“Someone,” explains her mother very pointedly, “has always been the first person after the parents to hold every single baby born in this family, and she went and assumed it would be the same this time.”
Dolores tries not to laugh and fails miserably. “Honestly, this is all very touching, but you look like you’re about to go to war over it.”
“We are! I’m her grandmother, for God’s sake!”
“Out of the question. There’s a reason we’ve always—”
“Félix, say something!”
“All right. There’s only one possible solution to this.”
And he warps and shifts where he’s sitting, his short, stout figure lengthening into that of a young man with an unbearably smug grin on his face.
“I’ll hold her first, so neither of you gets first dibs and everything’s fair and square. Besides, I’m the best sitter in town, I know a thing or two about holding babies.”
“Camilo Madrigal! You just spent the last ten minutes arguing ‘grandfather rights’!” The cloud cracks ominously with thunder.
“Honestly, that should have clued you in from the start. Papi’s way too chill to get mad about a thing like this. It’s not life or death, people, we’ll all get a turn eventually.”
“I—” She can see the flare of Abuela’s nostrils as she exhales loudly and swallows her tirade. “I suppose we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
Dolores really should say something about the momentous peace treaty that has just been signed, but any semblance of an intelligent response flies out of her mind as an odd fluttery feeling erupts in her abdomen, something like… movement.
“Oh!”
Every set of eyes in the room turns to her in alarm.
“Is everything all right, mija?”
“I… I think she just kicked.”
“See? Even the baby agrees with me!” says Camilo, his self-satisfied smile back in full force.
The book of names is now a constant companion, sneaking its way into the conversation at odd moments until they’ve crossed out all the contenders but one. Satisfied, Mariano rips the shortlist to shreds.
“What did you do that for!?”
“Destroying the evidence.”
“We’re choosing a name, not committing a crime. Come on, let’s go tell everyone.”
“Why, so they can tell us how much they hate it and send us back to square one? Trust me on this one, amor, we’re keeping the name a secret until the baby has popped out, and if they don’t like it, they’re just going to have to deal with it.”
“But—”
“Look, honey, I know how much your family’s approval means to you, but if we were to take everyone’s opinions into account, this child would have a thousand middle names, and they’d be liable to start a feud over which one comes first.”
Despite herself, Dolores snorts with laughter. “Okay, point taken. It won’t even be the only secret I’m keeping, anyway.”
Mariano frowns minutely. “What do you mean?”
“The others… they only know that Tío Bruno saw a girl. I never told them what she was doing exactly.”
“Oh. But wasn’t it a good thing? It’s confirmation that she’ll have a—”
“Shush. Don’t even say the word. The you-know-what happens when she’s five years old, and I don’t want the first four to be all one long waiting game. I don’t want them to dismiss her first smile, her first steps, her first word, just because opening that door is the only first that matters.”
“Wise words.” He rests a hand on her now rather impressive belly. “You all worked so hard on putting the people first and their gifts second, it would be a shame to undo it all now. And speaking of people… what do you think she’ll be like? As a person, with a gift or without it.”
“I… I’m just trying my best not to have any expectations, God knows those did a number on all of us. But I can’t wait to meet her.”
There’s a flutter in her gut that has nothing to do with the baby’s stirrings. The tiny life growing inside her feels one wonderful, terrifying step closer to being real. Not that she wasn’t before, but calling her ‘the baby’ or resorting to nicknames was an abstraction, a way to keep her distance and not think too hard about the fact that she will soon have an actual human being in her arms and she’ll be expected to keep her alive and happy. Giving her a name has broken down that last barrier.
God in heaven, don’t let her screw this up.
Time has a way of ticking by whether you like it or not, and for Dolores, time means turning more and more into a big ball of discomfort with each passing day. Even though her relationship with her gift is… complicated, she is glad, now, that it was her lot in life to receive a power that can be used almost as gainfully from her home as anywhere else, and not one like her mother’s, which requires going out on long treks out to the fields to bring whichever localized weather they need most. Squeezing her swollen feet into her shoes has become a harder task than she ever anticipated, to say nothing of the fact that, as if her ears weren’t enough, she seems to have acquired a nose to rival the sharpest snouts in Antonio’s band of rascals.
The closer the day comes, the more the house is caught in a frenzy of planning. The village midwife is already on high alert, Tía Julieta has taken to checking the state of her emergency stash with worrying frequency, the nursery has been aired out and dusted to perfection (and if Mirabel’s contribution consisted less of helping and more of silently wondering at the fact that the place had even been allowed to gather dust, no one’s talking about that).
It is perhaps ironic that, after all the preparations, the first to respond when it starts is the house itself. When Dolores grunts with the first wave of tightening, twisting pain, it is Casita, bless wherever it is that it keeps its heart, that springs into action with the bump-clang-bump of floorboards shoving the nearest alarm clock under her nose as a reminder that they ought to be timing the intervals between one and the next.
“Always – oof – a fan of punctuality, that one,” she pants.
Mariano springs from his seat as if it were burning hot. “Is it time?”
“Hold your horses, muchacho, this is only the beginning,” says Tía Julieta, sounding very world-weary all of a sudden and pushing a basket of buñuelos in her general direction. “Conserve your strength, sweetie, you’ll need it.”
Dolores has half a mind to ask her if she’s been taking tips from her brother, because that turns out to be remarkably prophetic. The beginning, it seems, involves enough pacing to dig a trench in the poor house’s floors, occasionally looking at the alarm clock to verify what she already knows, that is, that the periods of quiet in between feeling like her insides are being squeezed by a vice are getting shorter.
Then, out of nowhere, Julieta, who keeps her hands busy by cleaning when she’s not doing it by cooking, puts down the dish rag and simply says: “Now.”
With how quickly everybody snaps to their assigned tasks, she might as well be a general who has just given the signal to charge at the enemy. Luisa scoops her up and plops her into bed without a word, and Antonio hops onto Parce’s back and takes off for the village at breakneck speed, shouting for the midwife. (He’s grown enough that he prefers to walk beside him than to ride him now, but when you need a message delivered quickly, a jaguar’s mighty paws are still your best bet.)
The trouble with preparing for this baby’s arrival, they all realized early on, is that Dolores’s room has been an excellent sanctuary until now, a place to hide those who didn’t need to hear the ugly realities of childbirth and then come get them when the worst was over. This time, with the room being otherwise occupied, there isn’t much anyone else’s door can do to shield them from it. It’s fine when the door is closed, but there’s a constant to and fro of women running to fetch this and that, or just taking it in shifts to get away from it all to preserve everyone’s sanity (and in one particular case, to avoid flooding the place), and that’s enough for the odd snatch of sound to filter out.
For the nervous assembly of men downstairs, all booted out and told to wait for an entirely different kind of miracle to take place without them, it is an especially refined form of torture. Bruno must have gone through the house’s entire supply of salt, his knuckles raw from knocking on anything he can reach.
“It’s weird,” says Camilo, trying for a cheerful tone and missing the mark by a hundred miles. He’s currently wearing Osvaldo’s face, just to burn off some excess energy.
“What?” says Félix, whose knee hasn’t stopped bouncing since she disappeared.
Camilo deflates back into himself. “To hear her scream. It’s like she’s forgotten not to be loud.”
“Is she gonna be okay?” asks Antonio, a capybara in his lap like a supremely disinterested teddy bear.
“That’s what we’re all praying for, hombrecito.” His father ruffles his hair, ostensibly to reassure his son, though it’s probably closer to the other way around.
As for the father-to-be… well, he hasn’t fainted yet, but that’s probably because he is entirely fueled by coffee. At ten minutes to midnight, after the third “Mariano, I swear I’m never letting you touch me again!”, he lets out a wordless, frustrated yell that’s fit for the animal whisperer to decipher and downs another cup.
At midnight on the dot, far past Antonio’s reasonable bedtime, the adults note dimly that the baby has officially switched birthdays and put on yet another pot of sweet, sweet caffeine. The silence from upstairs, with a magical, sound-blocking door preventing them from knowing what’s going on, is tense as a bowstring. Bruno’s lips are sealed. He hasn’t said a word beyond whispering nonsense to a couple of clandestine rodents riding in his pockets, mortally afraid of jinxing it.
“Hey,” says Agustín in a jaunty voice that’s really as brittle as glass, “no news is good news, right?”
It’s not very convincing, but countless variations of it are heard bouncing around the kitchen table for the next hour. If they say it enough times, maybe they can all collectively will it to be true. In a house as magical as this, it wouldn’t be the strangest thing that’s ever happened.
“She’ll be fine.”
“I’m sure she’s doing great.”
“If something had gone wrong, they would have told us already.”
The news comes, sometime after one o’clock in the morning, in the form of Abuela and the midwife stumbling downstairs, too exhausted to bother looking dignified.
“Congratulations,” says the matriarch, still holding on to her last shred of quiet solemnity. “It’s a healthy baby girl.” She will deny it until her dying day, but they’re all witness to the fact that she catches Bruno’s eye and adds softly: “Just like you said.”
“Right,” the midwife claps her hands, all business, and points at Mariano. “Dad first, the rest of you get in line.”
If a person whose last drop of strength has been wrung out can somehow be deliriously happy at the same time, then that covers about a tenth of what is going through Dolores’s head. Her throat is raw, her ears are ringing from her own screaming, and nothing will ever be the same again, but the second her voice was joined by her daughter’s first cry, the very sound she thought she’d never be able to stand, she started smiling wide enough to strain her face.
Mariano stands stock-still on the threshold, waiting for a permission she’s too tired to give, and then steps inside, pulled forward as if by a magnet.
She is a warm, curled-up presence on her chest, heart against heart, weighing less than nothing and more than the entire world.
“Welcome home, my little bird. Welcome home, Celeste Madrigal. Would you like to meet your daddy?”
The rest of the family finds them like that, Mariano holding the baby like he hasn’t quite processed that she’s real, drinking her in from the curls on top of her head (“Just like her mother’s,” he breathes) to her impossibly tiny feet.
There are too many heads trying to poke through for one doorway to fit them all.
“So… who is going to hold her first?” Camilo shrinks, perhaps literally, under the combined force of everybody’s glares.
Abuela takes half a step forward, but only half, because Dolores is quicker. Her eyes seek out the one head that towers over everyone else’s, and Luisa squeaks in surprise, a high-pitched sound of disbelief that has no business coming from her mouth.
“Me? But… I-I can’t…”
“No buts. I want it to be you because we’ve done nothing but tell you that you couldn’t.”
The contrast could not be greater if they tried. Luisa, so tall and wide and simply big in all directions, has spent half a lifetime being told that babies were delicate, precious, breakable, unfit for her large, work-roughened hands that were good for nothing but smashing and crushing, and Celeste is so small that it’s doubtful she can even feel her weight at all.
But her control is tighter than it has ever been, her strength locked in a cage inside a cage inside another cage, and the baby is still very much whole.
“Welcome to the family.”