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Claudia Quinteros died on a cold, wet morning in the middle of the rainy season, two years and fifteen days after her husband. Claudia’s daughter was asleep on the floor beside her bed, just like every night of the last two years, when she passed. When the morning came for Claudia’s lifeless body, her daughter did not speak. Instead she sat silently, unmoving as the fog melted from the fields, contemplating her orphanhood.
Noon brought the day’s only visitor: Claudia’s nephew Danilo Garcia, the newly minted town physician (an occupation which, though rendered almost entirely moot by the town’s miracle, he clung to with the fury of a man justifying his own existence). It was his daily visit to check in on her and assist his cousin in cleaning the bedclothes, and should have been perfectly routine.
That cold, wet noon, his knock went unanswered. He let himself in, and took one look at Claudia before he knew. Once roused to action, he set about confirming, with sterile efficiency, what they both already knew.
Once the medical formalities had been fully observed, Danilo sat on the floor near his cousin. There, they passed some time in silent coexistence. Danilo’s father—Claudia’s brother—had passed away unexpectedly two months prior. Of the entire family, only they—Danilo and his cousin, both wordless and aimless on the packed-earth floor—remained.
It felt as if their violent lifelong antagonism now occupied a physical space in the room, coiled and uncertain between them. It was sated, for the time, but they knew from that moment on that its care and feeding—or its demise—was in their hands, and theirs alone.
When Danilo stood, he placed one hand on Viviana’s shoulder and left without a word.
#
The funeral was brief, but well attended. Claudia had nourished the entire encanto; her boxed lunches fed the laborers, and a household sickness, or the arrival of a new baby, or the death of a loved one was always marked by a basket of food on the doorstep. The townsfolk mourned her, and the condolences they gave Viviana seemed raw enough and quiet enough to nearly be genuine.
Viviana, for her part, did her best to say the appropriate words. But with each song of praise, Viviana’s mind was crowded out by her mothers voice, clear as the noon sun and twice as harsh. She heard, over and over again, the words of her freshly-widowed mother, delivered in a tight whisper at her father’s graveside.
“Why did you decide to be an embarrassment?”
But with her mother laying sanctified and prone, Viviana was bound. She couldn’t let this reality loose upon the world. Nor could she explain that her mother had, in her decline, turned from the reserved but sturdy woman who delivered care packages into a cruel, mindless figure who shrieked curses upon her daughter all day and moaned nonsense all night. Nor could she tally her nights alone in those two years, few enough to fit on both hands—and God preserve her from the guilt with which even that crumb of freedom weighed her down.
These forbidden slanders were only for the ears of her family that lived in the once-abandoned house on the edge of town. They already knew; they had watched every bruise, every breakdown, the aftermath of every blow and every epithet from her childhood onward unfurl in real time. They moved along well-trod orbits of comfort and reassurance, presence and space, patience and questioning.
Their house was on the outskirts of the village, a once-empty thing that had been colonized years ago by a pack of feral teenagers who remade it into a refuge from their own loneliness. When Viviana arrived there, she was met in the garden by a freshly set tejo board, unopened beer, and the silent, steadying presence of Javi Rivera leaning against the garden wall. Aleja Navar emerged with warm tea and uncanny timing, and gave Viviana a reassuring touch on the arm before retreating inside. The sound of Nico Diaz’s guitar wafting through the window eased the tension in her shoulders.
The uneven, tremors that had gripped Viviana’s chest steadied and subsided when Javi held out a tejo puck. She took it, and he gave her a look of silent understanding before putting his hand on her shoulders.
“We’ll be inside when you need us,” he said, and brought his lips to her forehead. He pressed them against the small, hairline scar that marked the spot where, over a year ago, her mother had struck Viviana with a kitchen pan in a fit of delusion.
When he pulled back, his eyes were full of sorrow, and rage, and understanding. His grip tightened quickly on her shoulders before he released her, and headed inside.
And because she loved them, they did not judge the sobbing screams that poured in from the back garden.
#
It was four years and another death before Viviana sold the Quinteros farm.
Señora Moreno died in her sleep. It was an appropriate end to her 74 years of wonderful, robust, quietly baffling life. Viviana was, as before, asleep in the room when it happened—though this time with the benefit of an actual mattress, dragged to be near her employer’s (friend’s) bedside. She had awoken during the night to help Señora use the dented chamber pot, her strong arms cradling the older woman’s insubstantial form and holding her nightclothes clear of the mess. As Señora had climbed back into bed, she had smiled and thanked Viviana with a firm pat on the cheek. It was so routine, so warmly familiar that she had, in the moment, thought nothing of it.
But when the following morning blessed that pat with the aching weight of finality, she wondered if it had been meant as a goodbye.
The funeral for Señora Moreno was a more elaborate affair than her mother’s had been, though Viviana hadn’t planned it that way. Señora Moreno had no children, and had left written instructions for Viviana on how and where she wished to be buried, and who was (and was not) to be in attendance. The letter was brusque, and thorough, and occasionally so absurd that Viv had to wonder if Señora was fucking with her from beyond the grave. (Flower arrangements were to be few, small, and composed of whatever Milena Flores could spare from her garden. Nico Diaz was to be put directly beside Alma Madrigal in the front pew. Chepe Velasco was to be seated in the last row, next to the broken censer that spit smoke uncontrollably sideways.)
Viviana’s grief, on the other hand, was a simpler affair. She was an ugly crier, loud and unsuitable for mass, so she employed every trick in the book to keep herself from breaking down in moments where mourners came to her with their condolences. Her small family orbited her closely, slotting in beside her when she felt her stamina waver. Their hands took turns holding hers, one after another throughout the mass and the reception afterwards. Those touches held the tears at bay, and she drifted to sleep that night on their couch, held by arms and hands and the weight of gentle reassurance.
Monday came, and with it the will. Señora Moreno had been nothing if not diligent with her affairs; she had left a letter detailing her final wishes with the town archivist, an unflappable woman with piercing eyes whom they all knew simply as La Maestra. With no living relatives, Viv was the only person left to open the letter, and so she found herself sitting awkwardly on a bench inside La Maestra’s home, on the receiving end of a sealed envelope and an uncomfortably interrogating gaze.
The contents of the letter were brief. After a few formalities and the settling of outstanding debts, all of Señora Moreno’s earthly possessions and holdings—including the ranch, its contents, and the stretch of valley upon which it sat—were hereby bequeathed to Viviana Quinteros.
La Maestra joined, that day, the exceedingly short list of people who had seen Viviana cry.
#
The farm was sold to a large family who were combining households, and needed more space than the village itself could provide. Viviana asked, almost casually, if they would like the house—four years neglected and beaten into decrepitude by the elements—taken down before they moved in.
They said yes.
So one warm, dry afternoon, Viviana and her small family packed up their entire liquor cabinet, bought as much extra beer as they could carry, and hiked the edge of the valley up to the old Quinteros farm. The small farmhouse was still standing, but only in the most generous sense of the word. It stood akimbo against the lowering sun, its foundations listing but still holding a position that could, by a dedicated optimist, be described as vertical. The paint had flaked down to the wood-and-earth construction beneath, chunks of the ceiling had fallen in, and the glass windows had long since blown out. Grass was peeking through the crumbling foundation as if the valley itself was impatient to just swallow the place up.
She braved the inside of the house almost as a formality. Everything useful had left with her after her mother’s death, and was now split between the house in town and her own small hovel out by the ranch. (She could not bring herself to move into Señora Moreno’s house, with its delicate brickwork and full kitchen and open patio. Maybe she would, some day; but for now, it was too big, and too empty, and she could not sleep in it while the woman’s ghost lingered on the rumpled sheets and in the fluttering of curtains.)
Nothing about the house had meaningfully changed since Viviana’s childhood; there were two cramped bedrooms, a central room with a stove and a wood-fired oven, and a decrepit table and chairs tucked in a corner. The roof above her parents’ bedroom had caved in, leaving a large, jagged hole just above the patch of packed earth floor where she had spent two years pretending to sleep as her mother was violently wrenched from reality. Pulverized roof tiles covered the spot, and she aimlessly nudged one with the toe of her boot.
“Viv?” Javi’s voice, gentle but nearer than she’d expected, brought her from her trance. He stood at the window, peering in. “The sun’s going. You about ready?”
Viv nodded. Nico, Aleja, and Javi had dragged a large log well clear of the building and set their supplies to rest against it. Past them, off by the tree line, Danilo stood with a pack slung over one shoulder.
As Viv approached, he held the bag out to her. Inside were glass bottles that clanked loudly against one another, filled to the brim with clear alcohol, and a thick stack of rags. It was an offering; not of peace, but of ceasefire. For one night, their lifelong war of attrition could wait.
She took the bag, walked it toward the log where her family gathered, and began to unpack the bottles. Danilo lingered by the trees, watched her with an almost expression that on anyone else would have read as approval. Aleja slotted silently into place at her side, efficiently dividing the rags into piles so that Viviana could soak them through with the alcohol. The two carried on in perfect, silent tandem, soaking and dabbing and placing the bottles back in the bag until their supplies were exhausted. When the last rag was laden and dripping, they gathered them up and placed piles of them around the house. The last remaining rags were knotted around a fallen tree branch and carried back to the group.
The two men stood patiently in the orange sunset, watching them work. When the women approached, Javi looked at Viviana with the same terrible weight as the night of her mother’s funeral. A long beat of meaningful silence passed between them before Javi broke it with a simple “Ready?”
Viv met his eyes. Her voice was sturdier than she’d expected. “Yeah,” she said. “I am.”
He traded her a matchbox for the makeshift torch, and held it for her as she touched flame to rags. The fire flickered, sputtered, then caught with a rising glow of warm orange flames. As Viv reclaimed the torch, Javi’s eyes locked onto hers. The wordless nod he gave her loosened something in Viviana’s chest, and she turned toward the house.
The torchlight bolstered the fading sun as Viv approached the husk of a building. In the flickering glow, the house seemed to weave in and out of reality: its half-remembered paint, the glittering of broken glass, the crooked way it leaned. Ghosts of her memory moved behind the empty windows, carving a path through the broken geometry of her childhood, and she knew their whispered words as well as she knew her own name.
Her throw was perfect. The bundle of flames sailed through the empty window of the room that had once belonged to her parents. The torch glow sunk out of sight; after a long moment, it rekindled as the flames found the alcohol-soaked rags. A quiet but distinct crackle of wood whispered out from somewhere near the floor. Satisfied, she turned back to where the others waited.
The first flames were already peeking over the windowsill when she reached Javi’s side. He handed her a beer, which she accepted without opening it. The four of them stood, drinking in companionable silence, as they watched the fire rise and the daylight fade.
“Hey.” Bruno’s voice, soft and familiar, came from behind Viv. The group obligingly parted to make room as the shorter man walked up to stand beside her.
“Hey,” she responded, quietly surprised. “Didn’t know you would be here.”
Bruno shrugged. “How could I not be?” And he twined his fingers through her own with a small squeeze and a private, sad smile. The feel of his hand in hers ran like a guide tether across the decades, and all at once she was beneath their tree on the hill, and dragging him away from bullies, and weeping into his shoulder behind his magical door, and watching flames lick uncertainly up the side of the Quinteros homestead. She distantly wondered if this was what his visions felt like, the past and present and future blurring together until, out of the entire universe, only he remained constant.
His green eyes creased warmly at her expression, and he squeezed.
A guitar strum rolled through the air. Viv glanced over to where Nico sat, twisting the pegs on his guitar. “What?” He met her quizzical look with an innocent one of his own. “Can’t let a bonfire like this go to waste.” He played a chord; apparently satisfied, he followed it with another. Viviana laughed despite herself, and he began to pluck out a chipper tune which Javi quickly supplemented with nonsense lyrics.
Bruno tipped his head at her still-unopened beer. “You gonna drink that?” Without waiting for a response, he took it from her and uncapped it before handing it back. “Drink,” he ordered in a tone that, in the gentlest possible way, brooked no disagreement. “I’m going to grab one for myself.”
Viv obliged and closed her eyes against the glow of the fire. It was the kind of beer they’d spent their teen years drinking at bonfires to which they hadn’t been invited, crisp and light and easy to get drunk on. It went down her throat like a memory, and a sigh wafted up from inside her. When her eyes opened again, they instinctively followed the thread of organized chaos that stitched her small family together. Bruno had wandered over toward the spot where Aleja was unloading and sorting their liquor. Javi and Nico had struck up a distinctly off-color duet about a woman named Juanita. Danilo lingered by the trees, though even from a distance, Viviana could see his hands wrapped around a bottle of the beer they had purchased that night.
The rising flames wavered and glowed, illuminating them all with the sanctity of a church window and the intimacy of a candlelit lover. Something fierce burned at the corner of Viviana’s eyes.
“Drinking already?”
She turned, jarred; through the encroaching dusk, she saw Gustavo Pinheiro walking over the hill toward her, a bag slung over one shoulder. Her brow furrowed as he came to stand beside her.
“Why are you—?”
“Hello to you too,” he said, and handed her the bag. She opened it; inside was a bottle of tequila, and a small, pink sugar flower. Viv couldn’t help the smile that tugged at the corner of her mouth.
“Standing offer,” he said mildly, and shoved his hands in his pockets. After a moment, he asked, “You gonna offer me a beer, or what?”
“Get your own,” she said fondly, and took a swig of hers. As she lowered the bottle, Gus’s hand reached out and took it from her. “Hey!”
“Yours looks better.” He took a drink and sighed as the beer worked its way down his throat. He extended the bottle toward her, and she smiled at the gesture before reclaiming it.
“You doing okay?” When he spoke, his voice was low and private, pitched to stay within the radius of their bodies. In the flickering light, she could see the smallest crack in his carefully neutral expression, his brow knotted ever so slightly.
She considered that. “Yeah.” It was simple, and had the benefit of being honest. She glanced back; Bruno was covering his ears as Javi went full-tilt into a vocal solo, with Nico’s enthusiastic backing. “I’ll be fine.”
Gus followed her gaze and sighed. “Can’t say I understand them, but you’re lucky to have them.” It was, by a country mile, the nicest thing he’d ever said about their little cluster of idiots, and Viv nearly snorted. “And me, of course.”
The last words were rushed, tacked on almost as an afterthought, and Viv turned her face to him. He was not looking at her, instead focusing on the smoke pouring from the windows as the flames licked up the walls.
“You’re very lucky to have me,” he added emphatically. “Extremely. Others should be so blessed.”
Viv laughed at that, and caught the grin that flitted across his face. His elbow jostled hers, and she responded in kind. When their hands brushed, Viv’s pinky instinctively wound through his own. They stood like that, conjoined only by their littlest fingers and a shared space, for a long moment as the fire fully bloomed, consuming the walls in a high blaze.
“Over here!” A distant voice broke their reverie. Viviana turned, and her heart stopped. Cresting the hill was Carmen Rivera, and behind her came…
Everyone.
Dani Gallardo. Milena Flores. Emilia Delgado, arms laden with rum. Rodolfo Navar. Mateo Vargas, carrying his pitifully beat-up guitar. Hernando Cavazos and Paola Felipe. Raul Pastor. Pepa and Julieta Madrigal, with picnic baskets on their arms and Felix and Agustin at their elbows. People she recognized from the market, people she played in weekend pickup games, people who had known her since her head barely brushed the schoolhouse window sill.
“I think,” Nico said, sliding his guitar over his shoulder and coming beside them to watch the approaching crowd, “we maybe didn’t bring enough beer.”
In the distance, Emilia brightly lifted two large bottles over her head and waved them. Gus hummed. “I think you’ve got plenty.”
Nico’s broad, gentle hand came to rest on Viv’s shoulder. His voice was low and warm as he gave her a reassuring squeeze. “You’ve got more than you know,” he said, and Viviana knew he wasn’t talking about the beer.
Somewhere in the approaching gaggle, a guitar sounded, and Nico slapped his thigh. “Now we’ve got a band!” He pulled the guitar off his back and strummed a fast rhythm. Mateo joined him by the log, and within minutes the two of them were playing a cumbia. Viviana stood in stunned silence as people passed her, patting her on the back, sometimes with a squeeze, sometimes with a gentle word or two, before breaking off to join what had rapidly become a small celebration. Within minutes, the cracking and roaring of the collapsing frame was drowned out by the sound of laughter and conversation.
Viv felt the warmth of the blaze on her cheeks, and watched it insulate the crowd against the cooling night. Nico was right; you could never let a bonfire go to waste.
#
When Viviana woke the next day, she was swaddled in long arms and soft, worn blankets. Nico’s chest was warm against her back, and Aleja’s small, compact form tucked into the space between her arms. Javi had flipped upside-down sometime in the night, and his feet were very nearly in Viviana’s hair. It was tight, and it wasn’t strictly comfortable, but they interlocked with the delicate precision of clockwork gears. As one turned, so did the rest, a rotating choreography of dependence and care.
Yeah, Viv thought, and breathed in the scent of the afternoon breeze in Aleja’s curls. She’d be alright.