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It starts as an ordinary morning, but this is la Casa Madrigal, and ordinary mornings never stay ordinary very long.
Had Mariano been only a little bit more observant, he might have asked Dolores why she kept sneaking glances at the calendar every time she walked by it, or what she seemed to be keeping an ear out for these days, but she’s more than willing to forgive him for being distracted, because she’s seen this pattern before. Another copy of his manuscript has been sent, and until he hears back, the suspense will keep eating at the back of his mind until there isn’t much room left for anything else.
Which is not to say that his quest to see his name on the cover of a book has turned him into a neglectful husband or father: since he introduced Celeste to piggyback rides, his shoulders seem to have become her favorite place to be in the entire world.
All she is saying is that when Mariano is focused on waiting breathlessly for a response from the latest publisher, he can’t take a hint unless it clobbers him over the head. He hasn’t said a word about how she has been steering around certain foods, how she has checked a little irrationally that the old, battered book of names hasn’t up and vanished from their shelf, how she balances on the edge of taking the floor and saying something at every meal and then prudently decides to hold her tongue until she’s absolutely certain.
Then she wakes up with an extra sound in her ears, and decides that today is the day. She’s about to open her mouth and put the pieces together for him and for the family at large, when the singsong call of the postman outside interrupts the sleepy breakfast small talk, and Mariano is suddenly wide awake before he has even touched his coffee. Great.
Usually, it would be Luisa who comes out to meet him, in case there are any hefty packages, but she’s only too happy to be usurped and doesn’t even motion to leave her seat, electing to make funny faces at Celeste in her high chair instead. The little one is the only member of the family who is allowed to call her Lulu without consequence: she started bristling at the indignity of it at just about the same time she opened her door, but now that there’s a small child in the house who doesn’t quite have everybody’s names down to a science, she doesn’t seem to mind.
The noise all around her is increasing in volume as the town slowly wakes up and starts the routine of another day, but Dolores only has ears for two things: the inane chitchat coming to an end as Mariano says goodbye to the postman, and the tiny flutter of a sound inside her that... is different from what it was five minutes ago?!
Papá has to thump her on the back as a sip of water goes down the wrong way.
“Whoa, there. Are you okay, Lola?”
“I... I think so. It’s... it’s nothing, I promise.”
It’s quite a bit more than nothing, but there’s only room in the conversation for one earth-shattering announcement at a time, and Mariano looks like he might be carrying one of his own. Or not, but the envelope sure does look like it came from the Outside.
He’s almost dismissive as he reaches for the nearest knife to slice it open. With how many sound rejections he has collected, there’s a definite air of not wanting to get his hopes up every time he reads a new verdict. The first hint that this particular letter might be any different is when his breath stumbles and resumes a little faster in the tense, suspended silence. He slumps disbelievingly in his seat, shoots a look at Celeste, and visibly backtracks out of saying something she shouldn’t repeat.
“This is it. I... I think I have a book contract.”
The relative quiet only holds for another instant before it explodes into cheers, thunderous clapping, and in one case, a private little rainbow. Even Celeste joins in, though whether she has suddenly mastered the concept of applause for the occasion or she’s just going along with the rest of them, that’s up for debate.
Bruno, for his part, shrinks where he’s sitting as the stares split between him and Mariano, earning himself two well-deserved, coordinated punches in both shoulders from his sisters.
“Give yourself some credit, hermano. It’s not just the bad ones that hit the bullseye,” says mamá, her rainbow only glowing brighter.
“She’s right, you know.” Mariano can’t quite look him in the eye, but there’s something in his tone of voice that quiets down the table once more. “If it weren’t for... that, I would have lost faith several rejections ago.”
“No, you wouldn’t, I—you—ah, this is hurting my brain. We should... we should celebrate! Let’s eat!”
How much longer, she wonders, will it take him to accept thanks for a good vision on its way to coming true as readily as he accepts blame for any tragedy for miles around? To discuss his power openly without becoming desperate to change the subject? His progress is evident in how he is less prone to shying away from affection and far less reminiscent of a bundle of sticks tied together in the shape of a man, but in some things, he is still the poster child for ‘one step forward, two steps back’.
Dolores takes a steadying breath and clinks her fork against the side of her glass for attention. This is either the best possible timing or the worst, and it’s a risk she’s going to have to take. She is not usually one to steal another’s thunder, accustomed as she is to hearing everything while often remaining unheard, but she’s going to explode if she holds it in a moment longer. Her only concern is that Mr. Published Author might need smelling salts.
“Since we’re all making important announcements,” she begins, knowing in her heart of hearts that it won’t soften the impact at all. “I didn’t say anything until I could confirm it with my own ears, but... I’m expecting another child, and—”
They explode before she can finish the sentence. Mariano definitely looks like he’s had too many shocks in a single morning already. She silences the chatter and cheers with equal parts anticipation and dread, unsure of how he might take it today, of all days.
“Can everyone please shut up for two seconds? I need to make sure of something.”
It’s hard to say at a table full of heartbeats marching at the rhythm of their own personal drums, but Dolores takes that precious moment of almost-quiet and uses it to center herself on the one that’s fluttering within her, tapping its accelerated pace softly on the table... and she finds that she can’t quite keep up with it with just one finger.
“There. I wasn’t sure I’d heard it right, it’s so unexpected, but... I think there might be two heartbeats in there.”
Mariano clutches the edge of the table like a drowning man might scramble for a rope.
“Twins? I think I might need something stronger than coffee.”
Dolores’s stomach drops somewhere in the region of her feet.
“You’re... you’re not happy?”
“I... I think I will be, I just need a minute. This is wonderful news, Dolores, honestly, but... there’s something you should know.”
“Mariano, you’re scaring me.”
She had thought them to be on the same page on the matter of having more children—now that the pressure of having their firstborn was off their shoulders, they would welcome them if they came and smother Celeste with undivided attention if they did not, but knowing the family’s track record, stopping at one sounded unlikely. Had something changed his mind?
“Shh, querida, it’s nothing to do with the babies, I promise. Just... I’m going to have to work closely with the publisher now, and I don’t think they can go through the whole process of getting the book out without meeting me in person.”
“You mean... you’re going to have to leave?”
“It’s easier to find your way back now, leaving for a while doesn’t mean forever. I just feel like the worst husband on the face of the Earth. To leave you here, pregnant with twins... do you think I should say no to the whole thing?”
“Don’t you dare. You worked so hard on this, Mariano. You deserve it. How do you think I’m going to feel knowing that I’m holding you back?”
He squeezes her hand under the table, perhaps in thanks, perhaps to steady himself in the face of the wider world beyond the village.
“One moment, please,” says Abuela from the head of the table, carrying herself very stiffly all of a sudden. “Talking to your publisher is all well and good, I can see the necessity, but this would be your first time Outside, correct?”
“Yes, it would. Is that a... problem?”
“I wouldn’t call it a problem.”
Correction, Dolores mentally amends, adding one more item to the list of things she’ll never say: she wouldn’t call it a problem now. The separation between the ‘before’ times and the ‘after’ times is the one crack that will never be patched up.
“But do talk to me after breakfast, we ought to set some ground rules.”
They delay it as long as they possibly can. The bump in her abdomen is growing faster than it had with Celeste and correspondence from the Outside is coming more frequently than ever, but there comes a point where the work can no longer be done by exchanging letters. There is now a veiled displeasure in the missives from the publishing house that’s harder and harder to miss: he’s too young, they seem to say, and too new at it to be able to afford cultivating the image of a mysterious recluse.
“Have you checked your suitcase?”
“Three times.”
“Map and compass?”
“Got them.”
“Camera?”
“I’m just grateful we found one that doesn’t take ages to set up.”
“Will you write to me?”
“Every chance I get.”
“Good luck.”
They kiss hungrily, neither wanting to break it off first, squirreling away the feeling like animals hunkering down for winter.
Dolores walks him to the very edge, and she can almost fancy she can feel a shiver down her spine the second he steps over the unseen boundary where the miracle ends and the Outside begins. But that’s just her imagination, surely.
A stupid, irrational sliver of her wants to run after him, shouting that where he can find accommodation for one, he can find it for two, but she can almost physically feel her ties to this place rooting her to the spot. Celeste, who can probably survive missing her daddy if they all work twice as hard to keep her distracted, but cannot afford to miss both of them; the twins, whose double flutter inside her dictates that she be treated even more like a delicate glass figurine on a shelf than last time; and if she’s honest with herself, a paralyzing fear of the unknown.
She’s never been any further than the river, standing on the banks in reverent silence every year when the anniversary of when it all started comes back around. They don’t know what happens if one of them walks beyond that, what the miracle would say if a little cog were to be missing from their well-oiled machine. Mariano is so much braver than she’ll ever be to even consider taking that leap of faith, but then again, he doesn’t have the double-edged sword of a gift to contend with. If she left with him, then perhaps they would finally come back with the answer to a riddle that no one has yet had the courage to solve—would their gifts be preserved no matter where they are in the world, or are they tied so deeply to this land that leaving would be like the rebuilding all over again?
But somehow, that was never even up for discussion. It is a given that Dolores will stay. Another in her place might feel trapped, the limited boundaries of the village and its petty small-town mentality closing in on her, but she knows her lot in life. She carries a share of the miracle with her, and the miracle must remain whole. They have played around with their gifts plenty, in a paltry attempt to understand that which defies understanding, but tearing the family asunder just to see what happens is too foolish an experiment to try.
Dolores stands there until Mariano disappears round a bend, and it is only then that she can persuade her feet to begin the lonely walk back home. The closer the familiar shape of Casita comes, the more a cold, persistent sense of dread and wrongness pools in her gut. It is silly, she knows, to miss him so much when he has barely been gone at all.
It takes her several minutes of staring out a window and wondering what new sights he’s seeing by now to realize why she feels his absence so acutely: he’s out of range. It’s like the whole, varied tapestry of sound at the edge of her consciousness is missing a thread. Of all the obstacles that ever came between them, she’s never had to deal with simply not hearing him.
Dear Dolores,
I hope this letter finds you well. You will no doubt be wondering what the Outside is like, and to that I can only answer that the world has well and truly moved on and left us behind. I have not been here very long at all, and already I have lost count of how many times I turned around to point out to you some amazing piece of modern technology that hasn’t yet made its way to the village, only to find empty air beside me where you should be standing. At the same time, though your absence is keenly felt, a part of me is glad, for your sake, that all you’ll have of the Outside is pictures, soundless mementos that do not convey its never-ending cacophony. The Outside is, simply put, a very loud place, and if it’s loud for me, I can scarcely imagine what you’d make of it. I suppose it is true, after all, that you don’t know the value of a thing until you lose it, and in my case, the thing I lost is silence, though with you, silence is always relative. I did not realize how quiet our village really was until I was given this new and terribly noisy basis for comparison.
One thing has been eating at me that I cannot resist asking: people in the big city become positively starry-eyed whenever telenovelas are mentioned, but I got the impression that they regard the idea of them as something fairly new. Has your uncle conveniently forgotten to tell us something?
(Don’t tell your grandmother that I dared to put that in writing. With how protective she is, it amounts to high treason.)
Keep me updated, especially where Celeste is concerned. The first few years of a child’s life are a time of such astounding growth that I fear I’ll find a virtual stranger upon my return. How many firsts have I already missed?
With all my love,
Mariano
Dolores giggles. She’s read the letter three times already, almost to the point where the words have lost their meaning and she derives comfort from simply looking at the shape of his handwriting, and it never fails to make her laugh. Dios, how she misses him.
“Tío Bruno, did you cheat? I thought the word telenovela was just something you made up.”
“Huh? Oh, they caught up already? I-I mean, uh... fine, consider me busted.”
“You surprise me. I would hardly call that a life or death situation. Did you really...?”
“That was before... eh, before a lot of stuff. I stopped eventually, but I suppose by then I was a little bit addicted to the drama—”
Dolores laughs outright, a rarity for one who generally doesn’t like to contribute to an already noisy world (though if Mariano is to be believed, the general hum and chatter of village life is nothing compared to the big city).
“Pot, meet kettle. Don’t you dare laugh when you’re the first to hound me for the next episode as soon as a new one is out.”
“Would you do it again? Have a vision just for... fun?”
There’s a long, painful pause as they both appreciate the fact that those two particular words have not been used in the same sentence for decades.
“Too soon, I think. But did he say it in the letter? That I can—”
“Have a little faith. He’s a writer, he knows how to imply things without saying them.”
“Phew. If he had, that wouldn’t have been a pleasant welcome when he comes back.”
“And I get it, really, but not even mentioning the magic in a letter?”
“I mean, she’s not wrong. She has the right idea, it’s the execution that’s a little... much.”
“That’s an understatement if I ever saw one. Is Abuela expecting the mail to be intercepted?”
“She just worries, and, well... we all know what happens when she worries.”
The split in the mountains, and the increased frequency of visitors with it, brought a new wave of concern that some of those visitors might one day have ill intentions, but Abuela’s fears seem to have undergone a shift: anyone who leaves the village for a visit to the Outside is treated to the same speech about taking great care not to reveal the nature of the miracle to anyone, lest they start an endless string of greedy men who want a piece of it for themselves. As far as anyone on the Outside is concerned, this is a perfectly normal, humble little village where nothing magical or mysterious is going on at all.
“I know, I know. I’m not saying her heart isn’t in the right place, I just wish we could write to each other a little more freely. I didn’t notice how much we talked about the magic until we couldn’t.”
She flips the paper to the other side, where she knows she’ll find Mariano’s latest contribution to their constant back-and-forth on the twins’ names, the only part of the letter she’s better off not reading out loud to anyone, or they’ll swoop in with a hundred unsolicited opinions. The question of what to do if at least one of them happens to be a boy is still hanging heavy over their heads.
“Oh, naptime’s over, I think.”
As if proving her point, Celeste’s stirrings from the nursery put a swift end to the conversation. The gifts, she reflects as she hurries to get her (as much as her belly will let her hurry, at any rate), are such an integral part of their daily lives that being forbidden to mention them openly makes composing a simple letter more akin to an obstacle course, and one they’re navigating very poorly at that, forever bumping into things and having to steer a different way.
She stops at the threshold to look at Celeste. There are days she still can’t quite believe she’s there, learning and growing in leaps and bounds, her little voice stumbling its way from syllables to words to stringing together proper sentences any day now.
“Mami, up! Up!”
Of all her limited arsenal of words, Dolores thinks ‘up’ might be her favorite. There’s nothing she loves more than to look at the world from the perspective of someone taller. It’s all Mariano’s fault, really, and she misses him more than ever. With her daddy suddenly unavailable, Celeste has taken to begging piggyback rides from every adult she sets her eyes on, though she has a clear set of hand-picked favorites: Luisa, who is by far the tallest, has the most room on her comfortable shoulders, and can make a ride last close to forever without getting tired; Agustín, though Dolores strongly suspects that Celeste just enjoys the chaos that comes with half the family watching the spectacle and making horrified bets on how long it will take them to topple down like a house of cards; and her grandpa, who may not be as tall, but took the title of Abuelo like a mission.
Dolores would hoist her up herself, but with the twins on the way, she has more or less been banned from any activity that’s more strenuous than lifting a fork to her lips at mealtimes. Explaining pregnancy to a child who has yet to figure out how the world works in general is a tall order: they can tell Celeste until they’re blue in the face that mamá’s belly is growing because there are new siblings in there and she’s going to be a big sister, but they doubt the full weight of it has hit her. All she knows is that mami is getting told ‘no’ a lot, and everyone looks at her belly when they do it and they sound scared.
Perhaps it is because she doesn’t have Mariano’s shoulder to lean on, figuratively and literally, when it all gets too much, but Dolores is finding the experience of her second pregnancy more restrictive than the first had ever been. Abuela, in particular, is preparing for the arrival of the twins like she’s getting ready for war. She doesn’t blame her for a minute: the woman delivered triplets and describes it to this day as the best day of her life and one she wouldn’t wish on her worst enemy, it stands to reason that she would look at Dolores’s belly and see a mirror of her own.
“Did you have a good nap, chiquita?”
The expression on her face is a work of art. While Celeste is still a long way away from being able to get through the day without going down for a nap, she has plenty of ways to make it clear that she considers it an utter waste of time. Why sleep when there’s just so much world to see?
“Up!”
“All right, all right, let’s go.”
Celeste smiles, and the void in her chest aches more than ever. God, she needs him. They need him. How many smiles has he already missed?
“Where’s papá?”
Dolores’s heart stutters. Maybe... maybe she can neglect to inform Mariano that that was his daughter’s first fully formed sentence. A little white lie never hurt anyone.
My dearest wife,
I hope everything is progressing well at home. For my part, getting the book in print is more work than I ever anticipated, and it involves some unusual forms of promotion I never even considered. Don’t go and tell everyone I’m suddenly rubbing elbows with the cream of society or anything, it isn’t nearly as big as that, but some of the old foxes at the publishing house pointedly suggested that going out for drinks with the right people sells more copies than a hundred advertisements, and there might be some value in that advice.
But oh, every conversation is riddled with pitfalls. I think I’m doing a decent job of following your Abuela’s rules, but I can’t count the number of times I had to bite my tongue. I won’t write any more, but suffice it to say that I’ve considered switching to prose once or twice, because the way this country’s literature is going, I could easily write a truthful account of our lives and pass it off as fiction. I have a gut feeling that it would sell like hotcakes.
I haven’t quite caught up with all the latest artistic trends (as much as I love our little village, living in such a remote place has done me no favors in that regard), but Señor Lozano thinks we can spin it as ‘an old-fashioned charm’ and ‘a return to tradition, unusual in one so young’. I may not always like him, but the man knows how to sell a book.
He asks very pertinent questions, too: he wanted to know if I had a particular reason to use predominantly auditory imagery in my work as opposed to visual. I think my impression of a gaping fish could have rivaled your brother’s. It’s something I only do half-consciously, from always hearing you describe things as sound first and sight second. I tried to say something clever about wanting to give my readers a unique perspective, but it took me all of a minute to crack and admit that it reminds me of someone I care about. I didn’t spill any more than that, I promise. Señor Lozano’s immediate assumption was that that someone must be blind, and I did consider letting him believe it, but I didn’t want anything grossly inaccurate to end up in the foreword of the book, so I had to disabuse him of that notion.
The excitement of the big city is definitely beginning to wear off. I miss you all deeply, and I can’t wait to be told I’m finally free to go.
Give Celeste a kiss from me,
Mariano
PS: I would be lying if I said that Señor Lozano’s conclusion didn’t give me any ideas, but as I’m assuming you will be reading this out loud to the family, I’ll save them for the privacy of our bedroom.
Dolores is not blushing a brighter red than her skirt, no sir, nothing to see here, move along. A child later and two more on the way, and he still knows how to make her blood run hot. The implications of that are making her miss him in a completely different way than she usually does.
“Ay, Dios, I’ve created a monster.”
And that is the cold shower Dolores sorely needed. It’s supposed to be Mirabel’s turn to spoil Celeste rotten, and she cannot think of anything in the world that could make her utter such a terrifying statement.
The scene that meets her as she barges in on them is really nothing out of the ordinary for Mirabel’s standards—an explosion of color fit to make her eyes water. Except that this time, said color is on them as well as around them, and her cousin glances up at her from the mess on the floor looking extremely sheepish.
“What is going on here?”
“I, uh... thought I’d introduce Cece to finger painting?”
“I am going to hold you personally responsible for bath time,” says Dolores, but only half-heartedly.
Celeste has paint in places that should definitely remain paint-free, but one bright, beaming smile from her and any inherited trace of mamá’s famous temper melts away.
“How’s the masterpiece coming along?”
The ‘masterpiece’ is a collection of splotches of paint that doesn’t resemble anything found on this Earth, reds and yellows and greens fighting for attention on the paper and even a little bit beyond, where Celeste didn’t quite understand the concept of stopping at the margins. But there is one spot where she very clearly dipped her whole hand in blue paint and stamped her signature, and that makes it worthy of any art gallery as far as Dolores is concerned.
They gather the family to ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ over it as soon as the paint is dry, and Celeste positively preens at the attention. Only Antonio, who hasn’t quite learnt the finer points of the art of tact yet, almost says what he really thinks, but a swift elbow to the ribs from Camilo averts the incoming disaster.
“We’ve got another little artist!” It’s hard to say which has more dazzling colors, mamá’s rainbow or the painting itself.
“That looks very nice, Cece,” says Bruno, and somehow, it doesn’t sound at all like that exaggerated way that adults have of sounding impressed at the exploits of children. It makes her heart ache for times long past, when she would sit in his lap and listen to his stories and never for a minute feel like he was talking down to her on account of her age. “Think I can commission a portrait next?”
“The only one who should sit for a portrait is me and you know it,” says Camilo. “Infinite practice.”
There’s an odd twitch in her brother’s limbs that suggests he was going to shift into someone and thought better of it at the last second. Celeste is less befuddled by it now, and her little mind is definitely beginning to grasp the fact that the ever-changing face of her tío will always be back to normal eventually, but he’s still holding back a little. Shapeshifting makes for an especially thrilling version of peekaboo, but she does need a little help keeping up, and he’s better, now, at understanding that he can be a fantastic babysitter even if he isn’t wearing any appearance but his own.
The only thing that poisons the moment is that Mariano should be here to see this. Dolores hates to think of how he’ll beat himself up for missing it.
She doesn’t know how long they stay there, trading banter and passing around the pint-sized artist until she’s exhausted from going from shoulder to shoulder, but she doesn’t remember having this much fun in a while.
The pain comes in the middle of a fit of laughter, plunging the room into ice and her mind into a panicked spiral of wrong and too soon and he’s not here. They’d done the math so meticulously, trying their best to ensure Mariano would be back by the time it happened, and this feels like Mother Nature making a mockery of their plans.
Celeste is crying her eyes out, her grandpa’s entire arsenal of funny faces powerless to soothe her, and Tía Julieta is nowhere to be found, gone in a flash to fetch half the emergency stores and shove them in her direction; the midwife, bless her, has been instructed to come running if she finds a particularly insistent toucan pecking at her window.
It takes some time, and a couple of arepas just in case, for them to realize that the pattern isn’t quite right. Casita helpfully provides a clock, just like last time, but unlike last time, the minutes crawl slowly by and there’s no sign of the waves of pain growing stronger or more frequent. The wild thump-thump in Dolores’s chest is at odds with her mother’s private cloud, which lightens and dissolves into wisps of cotton candy with every tick of the clock.
Eventually, the contractions subside, and Abuela takes one look at her face and immediately takes over the task of apologizing to the midwife for making her come all this way for nothing. She doesn’t think she has it in her to be a graceful host right about now.
Her one thought as her heart settles is that he needs to know.
“False alarms like this are more common than you think,” explains Julieta kindly as Dolores’s eyes dart around, lamenting the absence of pen and paper. “I had them all the time with Mirabel and they never get any less terrifying, but they don’t necessarily mean anything is wrong.”
They all know, from the way Bruno’s jaw tightens and he marches upstairs without another word, what’s going to happen next.
Dolores,
Señor Lozano can go pound sand. I’m coming home.
Mariano
It’s little more than chicken scratch, a quick note scrawled on the first piece of paper he came across just to have the decency not to blindside them with his unexpected return, and it’s hard not to stare at those last few words. He’s coming home.
Tío Bruno has not said a word about the day he barricaded himself in his room after her false alarm, which she wants so desperately to interpret as good news. After all, it’s Bruno, and they all know by now that he will periodically fall back onto the misguided notion that good tidings will somehow pop like a soap bubble if he speaks of them, leaving the rest of the family guessing at the outcome by knowing smiles and cryptic hints.
She never intended to tell Mariano to pack up and leave, but her hurried message cobbled together in the aftermath must have sounded more panicked than she thought. A part of her feels bad for cutting his trip short: it was hardly a holiday, and she hates the thought of somehow disrupting a dream that’s been simmering in the back of his mind for all of his adult life. But for now, let her enjoy the relief and anticipation, selfish though they might be. She breathes in long and deep, and she could swear her lungs haven’t been quite this full in weeks.
With how viciously protective the rest of the family has become, it’s a bit of a negotiation even just to come and meet him halfway, where all the gossipers loitering outside their homes can be witness to their reunion. Luisa (some things never change, after all) is playing guard dog for her and valet for him at once, ready to swoop in if she so much as thinks of engaging in such an extreme sport as helping him with his luggage.
Mariano looks appraisingly at the size of her bump, as if estimating just how much growth he’s missed, then shrugs it off and embraces her anyway, so gentle, so solid, so real, filling her ears with a hushed, infinite litany of “I missed you”.
“I missed you too. But the book...?”
His chest rumbles with laughter, and he still refuses to let go.
“I can turn around and go back if that’s the kind of welcome I get,” he says, but she, better than anyone, can peel back the layers of soft teasing in his voice. “We’re not quite done, but it’s nothing I can’t do by letter, honestly.”
“Let’s go home.”
“God, you don’t know how much I wanted to hear that.”
Celeste’s high-pitched squeal of “Papá!” as he crosses the threshold is a little too loud for comfort, but her heart swells to see him scoop her up like she weighs nothing and study her face greedily, covering up his joy with mock confusion.
“Who’s this?” he says, falling smoothly into playing pretend without so much as a blink. “That can’t be my Cece, she’s so little, this is a big girl!”
And if a tear or two roll down her cheek, well, she’s the best at keeping secrets.
Now that the family is whole again, the empty, aching hole in her ribcage has promptly been filled by the fluttery feeling of twofold anticipation. It’s hard to say which will see the light first, the twins or a book to page through in physical form, and it has become a playful sort of race between them, though it’s unclear what prize the ‘winner’ will get. Mariano brandishes every letter from Señor Lozano like a trophy, bragging that his baby seems to be progressing rather faster than hers, and the whole family is making it a point to split into teams, cheering for the book or the twins in turn and sticking their tongues out at each other across the table.
She has been tempted, once or twice, to ask Tío Bruno about it, but as a rule, she doesn’t go to him for such petty reasons, and at any rate, he would probably just dodge the question and say he’s useless at determining the order of events most of the time, as they tend to come to him all jumbled up. Excuses, all of them. It’s obvious he already knows, or he wouldn’t be playing fair and staying out of the competition. If he picked a side, the opposing team would immediately jump ship, and then it wouldn’t be fun for anyone anymore.
Not that his lips are completely sealed. While her dealings with some of the townspeople have grown rather frosty on account of the part they played in chipping away at her uncle’s opinion of himself, she can sort of see why the more impressionable folk developed a misplaced belief that even his casual remarks were prophecy: he has an incurable habit of dropping tidbits of the future completely by accident, slipping them into the conversation without even fully realizing he’s talking about things that have yet to occur. It happens more often when he’s had a rough day—if he’s nursing a headache or asking what day it is like he has lost track of time, it’s only a matter of hours until he gets mixed up.
“Not long now,” says Mariano teasingly one night as dinner winds down. “Face it, mi amor, I’ve got you beat.”
Bruno looks like he bitterly regrets joining them for the meal. The teams immediately break into another round of animated chatter, with only Abuela turning her nose up at the childishness of it all, and he grimaces. On his worst days, his tolerance for noise is only a tiny bit higher than hers.
“Did you have to turn it into a race?” he whines. “At least I know where the boys get it from.”
Dolores has never heard the room move so quickly from chaos to stunned silence, or whatever passes for silence in her life anyway, and she takes a split second to bless her uncle and his extraordinary talent for putting his foot in his mouth before focusing on what really matters.
Mariano looks as though the remark has drained the competition right out of him.
“Excuse me, what did you just call them?”
“Ah, miércoles, I’ve gone and made it a tradition, haven’t I?”
Mariano is already halfway out of his seat before he remembers his manners. “May I be excused? I, uh, have a small matter to settle with the publisher.”
He refuses to say what the ‘small matter’ is, regardless of how much Dolores pleads and pouts, and eventually, after the hundredth “You’ll find out,” she puts it out of her mind. She has more pressing concerns anyway: she has definitely crossed over into a phase of her pregnancy in which the miracle of life is less a miracle and more a collection of discomforts big and small, and if he wants to be stubborn about this one thing, she can’t find it in her to out-stubborn him. Perhaps he enjoys being able to keep a secret for once.
As callous as that sounds, Dolores hopes it’ll be over soon. If asked, she will say she simply can’t wait to meet the boys, which isn’t even a lie, but there are days when the reason for her impatience is a lot uglier than that.
And then she wakes to the slightest noise feeling like a nail being hammered into her skull, turns on her heel, and burrows right back into bed with a groan. It’s going to be one of those days.
Mariano is the only presence she can tolerate at the moment, and she has the sneaking suspicion that he’s the only one who can tolerate her in turn. A lesser man would have lost patience with her long ago, but he’s still here, bringing her breakfast in bed, of all things. Between her ears and the babies clamoring for attention, that’s becoming an everyday order of business rather than a rare treat.
“How much do you want to bet,” says Dolores, picking at her food, “that they’re going to take after my dad?”
“We don’t make bets in this house,” says Mariano, barely above a whisper in deference to her Bad Day with a capital B and D. “You might have had insider information.”
“I didn’t.”
“Then what makes you say that?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she deadpans, one hand on her belly, “maybe the fact that they’re having a party in here?”
Mariano, bless him, remembers not to laugh too loud, but laugh he does, stopping only when her eyes grow the size of saucers.
“I could be wrong, but I think they just turned.”
“Stay here, I’ll let everyone know.”
He takes off, closing the door behind him to shield her from the noise and leaving her to nibble impatiently at her breakfast. Is her perception of time somehow muddled, or is he taking considerably longer than he should? Surely he hasn’t taken it upon himself to tell every single member of the family; tell one, and the others will know soon enough.
The spectacle that meets her eye when he, or rather Casita, opens the door again is truly a sight to behold. He can barely see where he’s going, juggling Celeste on one arm, a bulky box in the other, and not one, but two pairs of scissors poking out of his belt for lack of a third limb to carry them.
“Is that...?”
“I sort of bumped into Luisa carrying this inside, so then I went to grab Cece, but then I realized I didn’t have scissors, so I asked Mira and now I think she’s going to murder me because they’re fabric scissors and you’re not supposed to—”
“Slow down.”
It takes some doing to put down Mariano’s precious cargo, discard the remains of Dolores’s breakfast, and get ready to tear into the box to see a dream come true.
“Hey,” he says, a little winded, “do you know what this means?”
Dolores rolls her eyes fondly, but goes along with it anyway. “What?”
“I win.”
He opens and closes the scissors as if testing them, snip-snip, and is an inch away from getting started when she stops him in his tracks.
“Wait. I think Tío Bruno deserves to see this in living color.”
Mariano half persuades him, half drags him bodily to their room, and the poor man watches disbelievingly from the threshold, his short, shallow breaths a fitting backdrop to a sight seen long ago, knocking desperately on the half-open door so it won’t disappear. He makes a great show of leaning casually against the doorframe, but he’s not fooling anyone: Dolores can read his body like a book, and she can’t blame him for going a little weak in the knees.
They come at the box from two different sides, nearly slashing it to ribbons in their hunger to see what’s inside, and only stop to let Celeste do the honors, taking great care to keep her tiny fingers well away from any sharp blades.
“What do you say, Cece? Wanna help mami and papi open the big box?”
She claps in delight, and somehow, the sound doesn’t even set Dolores’s teeth on edge.
And they launch their attack, six hands battling a cardboard enemy, just like last time, only with a few more colors other than green. Dolores keeps an ear out, but it seems that Tío Bruno’s heart has not decided to give out just yet.
The tablet, she knows, is lying somewhere at the bottom of a drawer in Mariano’s bedside table for him to pull out and look at when it all seemed hopeless. He scrambles for it now, not for reassurance, but for comparison, and holds it up only half in jest for Bruno to see.
“Right on schedule.”
“Uh, well, e-except for the boys. They, uh, weren’t part of the plan.”
The content of the box is obvious, and yet the knowledge does nothing to stop the tears from welling up in her eyes. She looks at Mariano, only to find him in not much better shape.
“Mamá, papá, don’t cry,” Celeste pipes up, and Dolores is struck by the bizarre thought that deciding that the moment deserves a whole sentence must be her way to recognize its importance.
“It’s okay, chiquita. Sometimes people cry when they’re happy too.”
Mariano breaks up the arrangement of carefully packaged advance copies to hold one with the reverence one would give to something sacred. Taken individually, the books are slim, but he might as well be holding the weight of the world. Dolores takes another, not wanting to ruin the moment by snatching his, and opens it up. She almost drops it.
To Javier and Pedro, so they can have a third brother.
“You didn’t.”
“I did. After all, they’re almost triplets.”