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Dolores loves the Encanto, honestly. She could do without some of the petty gossip she has to hear all day, but nothing beats watching the sun paint the sky a fiery red as it sinks beyond the mountains.
She only has one complaint: why is everyone in town so fond of a game that involves explosions?
Papá says you can tell a lot about a person by the way they play tejo, and she supposes there’s a kernel of truth in that: take Tío Agustín, for example, who has probably not won a game in living memory and still keeps at it, never once acting like a sore loser. Or Abuela, who has never personally touched the game that she can remember, but is somehow capable of taking one look at it and quieting down any rowdy, drunken disputes in a way that makes everyone happy. (Or just too scared to contest her ruling, depending.)
Then what does it say about her that she only threw a tejo once in her life, sagging in relief when it landed in the soft clay with an anticlimactic splat without scoring a single point?
Spoilsport. Killjoy. Stick-in-the-mud. Fragile little princess who has the whole town bending over backwards to accommodate her delicate sensibilities. It’s just some tiny bags of gunpowder set to go off like harmless firecrackers when struck, no need to act so dramatic, it’s not the end of the world. They’re considerate enough to put their games on hold as she passes by, but she knows what they say as soon as she’s gone.
Dread pools in her gut as she hears a game getting started around the corner. So much for a simple trip to town with her father and the twins.
Dolores has only recently been promoted to leaving the house again without going mad with worry, one ear on her surroundings and one on Casita, always half expecting to have to turn tail and run. They have been blessed with another child, Ada, who somehow unearthed her grandmother’s fiery red hair from an unseen corner of the bloodline and has only now begun to pull herself to her feet and take a few wobbly steps, and Dolores is more grateful than ever to have a squadron of babysitters to lean on.
Having another baby on Celeste’s watch has been… an experience. She is enamored with being a big sister in way she never was with the boys, probably due to the fact that she has no solid memories of a time before they existed, and she has taken to the role like a fish to water, mostly because Ada is ‘easy’, a tiny thing surrounded by one or two bright, simple colors at a time, unlike the grown-ups, who have room for a whole world of shades and nuances and layers that she’s still a long way from decoding completely. Dolores takes comfort in knowing that her youngest daughter’s default state in Cece’s eyes, unless she’s hungry or fussy, is a lovely shade of peach, a soft amalgamation of pink and gold that says that she finds her arms to be the best place in the world. Which isn’t saying much, considering that her experience of said world is very limited, but she’ll take what she can get.
The twins are beside themselves with excitement to see that things are going back to what passes for normal and they can finally have mami to themselves again from time to time, especially if it involves being out and about: they hate being cooped up inside too long, much preferring the bustle and chatter of the busy streets to an afternoon spent entertaining themselves at home, and even when they are confined to Casita, they’ll sooner be found kicking a ball around the courtyard or playing a house-wide game of tag than sitting quietly with a picture book.
And then there’s the fact that with their Abuelo by their side, who can hardly put one foot in front of the other without being stopped for a friendly catch-up, going out for a stroll is even more of a treat: if it weren’t for Camilo’s easy charisma, she would genuinely wonder if the whole ‘being good with people’ thing skips a generation. It’s not that she doesn’t understand people; quite the opposite, in fact. Her gift taught her more about human nature than she ever wanted to know, especially the ugly parts. But with the noise pressing in on all sides and making it ten times as hard to even process what’s going on in front of her nose, any inclination she might have had to be a normal, functioning member of society is usually exhausted by the time she’s had breakfast.
Let her be known as the quiet one, the shy one, the one who speaks so little you forget she’s even there, the one who will get distracted in the middle of a conversation because something else is happening a mile away; she’s used to it all.
Just please, please, adopt something else as the national sport. Like chess, or poker, or anything that doesn’t involve blowing things up.
Splat. Splat. Her fingernails dig into the palm of her one free hand as Javier pulls her insistently towards the friendly ribbing of the gaggle of players who have so far mercifully failed in their objective. Pedro is right behind them, similarly running ahead as much as the length of his grandfather’s arm will allow, and the identical grins on their faces speak for themselves.
Splat. Bang. Dolores winces as the explosion elicits a collective shout of celebration, but the twins, if anything, are even more determined to stay and watch the proceedings. The next player grabs his puck with an entirely unnecessary amount of swagger as he realizes he has an audience.
“You like that, don’t you, kiddos? Watch this.”
And he sends it sailing across the street with all the confidence in the world, blushing red as a beet when the explosive bullseye he was hoping for never happens. Dolores is… well, she’s not nearly as disappointed.
“Ah, come on, the kids can do better than that, and they’re what, four?” his friend jokes, rolling his shoulders as he walks up to take his turn.
“Four and three quarters,” Javier promptly corrects. Which, fair enough, is an important distiction when you’re not even in the double digits, and even more important when your last name is Madrigal.
“Almost grown up,” Pedro chimes in, and God, she hates that five is considered ‘grown up’ in their little minds, but considering what’s coming, she doesn’t have it in her to correct him.
“Ah, but are you grown up enough to play with the big boys?”
“Yeah, Félix, have you taught them yet? You gotta start training them up young.”
Ay, Dios, the conversation has just taken a very unpleasant turn. If the twins learn the game, she’ll never have another moment of peace. It’s made entirely of throwing things and hoping to make as much noise as possible, so they’re sure to become enamored with it.
“Well, I’m a little rusty…” he says, and she knows deep in her bones that he’s only trying to weasel out of it for her sake. He’s never one to turn down a friendly game or three, unless she’s around to cringe at every throw.
“Come on, Abuelo, please?”
God, they know he is chronically unable to refuse them anything when they ask in unison and make those puppy dog eyes that should be registered as a lethal weapon.
“Fine, but only for a little while, and just the three of us. We’ll go and find mami when she’s done with her shopping.”
Grateful beyond words for his mastery of the art of giving her an escape route, Dolores makes her exit with a vague: “I’ll just… go take care of the groceries,” and walks briskly (let it never be said that she runs) as far away from the game as her legs will take her.
She can’t imagine her life without those two little bundles of mischief, but what will they be like as a dynamic duo with brand new gifts to play with?
The thing about listening to her kids tell her about their day is that a lot of it consists of pretending to be surprised in all the right places. She usually already knows about most of it, if from a somewhat unique perspective. She will encourage them to tell her about what they saw and touched and smelled and tasted, just to flesh out the often incomplete picture she gets from keeping an ear out for their antics, but by and large, she knows.
She knows how Celeste’s gift has drained some of the enjoyment out of story time, because no matter how hard you try to make your characters sound devastated at receiving some terrible news, or frightened half to death by the villain of the hour, your performance has ‘all the wrong colors’ and just doesn’t hit the same as it used to.
She knows how the twins will try to weasel their way into any game of tejo they see, now that they’ve mastered the basics, just as long as the grown-ups are willing to let them stand a little closer to the target because their little arms can’t quite cover the full distance, and hasn’t had the heart to tell them that the only reason most people in town let a pair of almost five-year-olds into their games at all is because the name Madrigal opens a lot of doors that would otherwise remain closed.
She knows that Celeste’s favorite color is now officially yellow, if for no other reason than because it’s what she sees around happy people, and that grey immediately has her in a frenzy of trying to put a stop to it in any way her seven-year-old mind can conjure up; she doesn’t quite have all the intricacies of her daughter’s blessing down to a science, but then again, neither does Cece, though she does frequently have her and Mariano blushing and spluttering when she describes their feelings as ‘red, but the nice kind, not the scary kind’, and promptly asks when she’s going to get another sibling.
And most importantly, she knows what the twins’ new favorite game is, and contrary to popular belief, it isn’t tejo. Oh, they will still come home with clay under their fingernails, chattering her ears off with a detailed play-by-play, but once they’ve been marched to the bathroom to wash their hands, they will happily entertain themselves just by imagining what their soon-to-be gifts will be, locked in a constant one-upping competition that has so far featured highlights such as flying, running from one end of the Encanto to the other as fast as they can run across a room, and in one particular fit of wild imagination from Pedro, creating a lifetime supply of candy.
It is, surprisingly, the quietest game they’ve ever played. And even more surprisingly, or perhaps not surprisingly at all, it terrifies her.
“I bet we’ll get to breathe underwater like fish!”
“Boring! I think we’ll get to climb straight up the walls like spiders!”
This round, which is rather monopolizing their dinner conversation, seems to have a definite theme. Antonio meant well by trying to distract them from their fixation on their upcoming big day with every age-appropriate book on animals he could find, really, but it only seems to have given them more ideas. (Dolores can hardly believe her hermanito is already a lanky teenager with ‘colors all over the place’, which is Cece’s turn of phrase for the turmoils of adolescence, but that’s another story.)
Dolores catches her mother’s eye to see her same concern reflected on her face. Not her imagination, then. They both stay behind after the meal with the excuse of tidying up, but the heaping pile of dishes and cutlery is the least of their problems.
“Mamá, can we talk?”
“So you’ve noticed too, then?” The cloud has yet to start pouring, but it’s there, a private patch of shade in the already dwindling evening light.
“They keep assuming their gifts will be the same. It’s always ‘we’, not ‘I’, and I… don’t know how to break it to them.”
“I can’t blame them, they’re so used to doing everything together, but look at the three of us, we’re triplets and our gifts couldn’t be more different if they tried.”
“Exactly. If Javier and Pedro were the first pair of twins in the family, I could understand, but they have your example, so—”
“I suppose it doesn’t help that Bruno, Juli and I are not identical. Looking at us, it’s so much easier for them to grasp that different people get different gifts, but…”
“Do you think we haven’t done enough?”
If the cloud were hers, it would be pouring hard and fast; as it is, Dolores looks up at it and finds it to be a mismatch to the guilt and self-doubt churning in her gut.
“Enough for what?”
“To teach the boys that they are each their own person, not some sort of… of package deal.”
This time, the rain does start coming down softly, dripping and splashing all over the dishes they were supposed to be cleaning. Well, that’s one way to get the job started.
Years and years of experience have taught Dolores that with her mother, rain does not always mean she is sad: you have to watch, feel, and in her case, mostly listen for a myriad little clues. A gentle, misty drizzle that does not extend any further than the room she’s in is one thing, a full-blown rainstorm large enough to transcend her personal little climate and begin affecting the town at large is another; a sudden, heavy downpour complete with biting cold winds is not the same as a brief spray that leaves the air feeling hot and heavy and humid in its wake.
And this one… this one is complicated. Even Celeste would have to go through half the spectrum before she pins it down. They’ve made something of a game of it, matching abuelita’s frequently shifting colors to her weather, but the big, bright, simple chart they’d started from has long run out of space.
“Oh, Lola, you did the best you could, both of you. And the boys are different, they just haven’t realized it yet.”
“Hmm?” That sure is a strange way to put it.
“What I’m trying to say is I get it. At that age, we were thick as thieves. If we had been expecting our gifts at all, you can bet we would have expected the same, but we were the first, so expectations were sort of out the window back then.”
How quickly that changed, is what goes unsaid. Bitterness sounds like droplets pouring down faster on the china; regret smells faintly like petrichor.
“Do you think maybe you can…?”
“Of course.” The cloud breaks apart into wisps, and there’s a determined edge to how she shakes and squeezes the excess water out of her braid. “Mind you, I’ll have to catch them first, but leave it to your mamá.”
Dolores knows that Celeste’s art has taken a definite turn for the surreal since her gift went and shifted her entire perception of the world: she will still practice drawing people and animals and just about everything you’d expect a child her age to put on paper, but she has a growing collection of pieces she doesn’t fully understand, things produced when she was upset, for the most part, or when the riot of color emanating from other people’s feelings was too much to process and she needed a bit of help making sense of it.
But this… this has hit a new high. As far as she can tell, her latest masterpiece is a distinctive hodgepodge of shapes that make up her best rendition of Casita, but where most children would have painted the sky blue with a big sun peeking from the corner, she has given the heavens above the their home two suns, pale yellow things with long rays barely piercing through an ominous expanse of purple.
“That’s… interesting,” she says noncommittally. “Cece, is something wrong? That’s a lot of purple.”
“It’s what the house feels like right now. Javier and Pedro are excited about their birthday,” she points to the suns as she speaks their names and it clicks, so easily and naturally that she could kick herself for not making the connection, “but everyone else is really purple about it.”
Despite herself, Dolores has to smile at her curious turn of phrase. Since the day she received her gift, she has adopted a strange, mixed language where colors and feelings are more or less one and the same. They’ve made an effort to correct it, but it will still slip out from time to time: people will be ‘yellow’ about receiving good news, for instance, or ‘red’ when they are stewing in anger. She has been better, lately, at choosing words that won’t leave her audience confused and unsettled, but it’s a work in progress.
“Especially Mira. She looks like this all the time.”
Celeste points at a spot on her messy palette where she has clearly tried to blend purple and black, unsatisfied with the paints she had. And if her room leaves her unsatisfied with the seemingly endless array of shades of color at her fingertips, well… Mira must be very purple indeed.
She has been doing a decent job of putting on her usual cheerful smile, but it is the worst-kept secret in the house that she has been counting down the days to the twins’ birthday with no small amount of trepidation, staring at her reflection in the mirror and giving herself little pep talks. Dolores vows to keep a better ear out for her. She, better than anyone, knows the curse of the good listener: somehow, people tend to forget that they also need to be listened to.
If there’s one thing Dolores is particularly good at listening for, it is footsteps. She knows the sound of running, of stomping up the stairs in a huff, of sneaking somewhere you shouldn’t be going, of limping to the kitchen trying not to put weight on an injured leg and bouncing back after a snack, and she always knows who’s coming without looking, because no two people walk exactly the same way.
A change in the sound of your footsteps can mean any number of things. Perhaps you’re dragging your feet to somewhere you don’t really want to go, perhaps you’re carrying something that weighs you down, figuratively or literally. And sometimes, more than your steps themselves, it is the little sounds that come with them that change: a different dress that doesn’t swish quite the same way, a pair of brand new shoes that squeak as you go, or in one particular case, a private cloud chasing you with rain.
When Dolores first hears the change in Mirabel’s footsteps, she thinks nothing of it. It’s a soft, intermittent jingle keeping time with her feet as she goes knocking on every door to start the day: her first thought is that perhaps she’s experimenting with wearing an unusual amount of clinking jewelry. She certainly wouldn’t put it past her.
But when they gather for breakfast, there are no jangling additions to her neck or her arms that she can see; then Abuela rises from her seat for the daily brief, and she sounds exactly the same.
“Congratulations,” Dolores whispers before the instructions for the day can start in earnest, and blood rushes to Mira’s cheeks, her hand flying reflexively to her waist. Clink, clink. Abuela halts her speech mid-sentence at the exchange.
“Ah, yes. As some of you may have noticed, I,” Casita pitches in with a protesting chorus of tiles, “or more accurately, we have decided to provide Mirabel with a copy of my châtelaine. It’s only practical, really.”
There is a dissonance between her words and her voice, her announcement laced with a soft, subtle pride she doesn’t know how to express.
All eyes snap to the new ornament hanging at Mira’s hip. It’s no surprise that Dolores noticed it by sound before she did by sight, because really, a thing like that stands out against Abuela’s more somber style of dress, but on Mirabel, what’s one more butterfly?
Julieta is the first to break, one hand flying up to cover her mouth where it has dropped open.
“I’m so, so proud of you, mija. That’s a big step. What have you decided to put on it?”
Mirabel gives each dangling chain a light touch as she goes, reciting the inventory almost like a prayer.
“Watch, emergency sewing supplies, skeleton key, free space. Haven’t decided what to do with that one.”
“I never did understand how that key works,” says Agustín, bursting at the seams with pride.
“It’s—” Mirabel stops, catching Abuela’s eye as if expecting her to slide in and explain it better, but she makes no move to intervene. “It’s like a universal key. Anything in this house that has a lock, it fits. Somehow. I, uh, won’t be needing it most of the time, but Casita, well, no offense, but it can be stubborn sometimes. Having the key is… kind of like having the last word.”
“And there are two of those now?” Camilo slumps in his seat, one hand on his forehead like some melodramatic hero. “Bye-bye, privacy.”
Mirabel shoots him a sideways glare and he straightens as abruptly as a puppet whose strings have been given a brisk tug. She’s definitely been getting lessons in more than just household management.
“It’s for emergencies, you absolute—”
“Okay, okay, I get it!”
There are a few snorts of laughter at their antics, but Julieta’s next words are sombering.
“Ay, God knows I hate to rain on your parade, Mira, but… mamá, why now? Has… has something happened? Are you feeling all right?”
There’s a chill in the room that has very little to do with the cloud darkening over one side of the table. As much as they all hate to say so, there will come a time when even healing food is powerless against the passing of time, and that’s what makes Mirabel’s training a double-edged sword: she’s progressing in leaps and bounds, taking on more and more responsibilities by the day as Abuela takes a deep breath and learns to delegate her duties, but for every milestone, there’s a pang of fear; for every achievement, there’s a reminder of Abuela’s mortality.
“I’m fine, mija. The house decided it was the right time, and for once, I thought it wiser not to argue.”
“Maybe the house just knows it’s going to have so many doors that two master keys are better than one.” Bruno lets out a sheepish little laugh, hand twitching in an aborted attempt to knock on the underside of the table as several pairs of eyes look at him questioningly. “Uh, nope. Not a vision, just common sense.”
He can claim that statement was not the product of his gift until he’s blue in the face, but it turns out to be prophetic all the same. The addition of Celeste’s door was inconspicuous enough that the heavy sleepers in the house only noticed it the next morning, but when the twins’ doors come, the whole family is up and stumbling out of their rooms in the middle of the night to watch it happen, pulled rudely from their beds with sleepy, confused thoughts of an earthquake.
The third floor of Casita, for as long as anyone can remember, has only been a thing in its infancy: out of all of their rooms, Bruno’s was the only one that saw fit to grow upwards into a tower rather than outwards into a magical space that gave no visible sign of being any bigger than a common bedroom. Other than that, the only thing daring to stand higher than the second floor was the candle, overlooking the hustle and bustle of their lives with its serene twinkle like a miniature lighthouse guiding the way.
But now, as they all seek one another’s bleary eyes in the darkness for reassurance and hold on for dear life to a railing that bucks like a wild animal, that may no longer be the case.
“Is the house breaking again?”
Antonio has entirely forgotten that teenagers are too cool to hold on to their daddy for comfort; Dolores, for her part, claps both hands firmly over her ears, and even so, she cannot entirely escape the tidal wave of noise that the house makes as it trembles from the very foundation with the strain.
And it is perhaps because she cannot escape it that confusion and dread and not again soon turn to awe: this is not the snapping and cracking and rumbling of a structure coming down, but the triumphant groan and grind of something going impossibly up, of wood and brick and stone growing out of the chilly night air, of familiar patterns of light and shadow changing before their eyes as the shape of the building itself swells and shifts, of a new flight of stairs click-clacking into place step by laborious step.
And somewhere up there, they know deep in their bones, on the whole third floor that wasn’t here at all yesterday, must be two shimmering doors, standing in pride of place in the white expanse of a freshly made set of walls in desperate need of decorating.
“Wow. I thought this house was done surprising me,” is the first thing Dolores hears as soon as her whole world stops shaking, and she smiles through the wild beating of her heart, because leave it to papá to say it better than anyone could.
“Never. Only next time, I’d like a surprise that’s a little less… shaky.” And of course Tío Agustín was the first to drop like a sack of potatoes: steadier men than him would have lost their balance. “Juli, I think I just got seasick. On land. That’s got to be a new one even for you.”
“You did great, Casita,” There’s a soft, tender tap-tap-tap as Mirabel pats the railing like a beloved animal that has just given birth to her litter.
“But,” Cece’s objection is punctuated by a yawn, but given the circumstances, she’s more than entitled to be out of bed, “why couldn’t the house just find some space next to me?”
“Maybe it just didn’t know where to put two doors at a time,” says Camilo with a shrug. “Ask Mira, I don’t speak house.”
“Is it safe to go up now?” asks Antonio to nobody in particular, and the twins don’t even wait for an answer.
“Race you!”
And they take off running, tearing giddily up the newly made stairs and coming to an abrupt stop in front of their doors.
Dolores chases after them, reaching the new landing just in time to see their faces fall. They knew, on some level, that there would be two doors, if only because of the triplets’ example, but it is plain to see that the reality of it is only now sinking in: two doors mean two rooms, two rooms mean being separated for the first time in their lives, and that, far more than any idle bets on what their gifts will be, marks the beginning of a new path, one that they won’t be walking together.
One by one, the rest of the family file up the stairs to join the twins’ excitement and awe, and one by one, they find it tainted by uncertainty.
“Well, that just won’t do,” says mamá. “Juli, Bruno, I think this calls for some extra special triplet magic.”
Javier and Pedro are ushered back to bed, squirming and twisting to keep their doors in sight for as long as they possibly can, and if Dolores conveniently forgets to close her door as she bids them goodnight, if she lies awake listening to whatever comfort the triplets can provide, well, what difference does another secret make?
“So. Two doors, eh?” Mamá goes straight to the point. “One for each of you. I bet you’re so excited you can’t even go back to sleep.”
The boys’ agreement is a little slow to come, a little less enthusiastic than it should be.
“Why can’t it be our birthday already?”
“I can’t wait to find out what our gift will be.”
But they’re not bouncing off the walls quite as much as those statements would imply.
“Yeah, about that…”
Bruno can’t even finish the sentence before he is pelted with questions.
“You know?”
“What is it?”
“Why didn’t you tell us?”
“No, it’s not… it’s not like that. Sometimes, uh, sometimes the miracle decides to keep some things a surprise, even to me. But one thing I can tell you for sure, and that’s something you don’t need any sand or anything to know: whatever your gifts end up being, they’ll be exactly right for each of you.”
“That’s right. Whether they’re the same or different—”
“What do you mean, different?” Javier cuts Tía Julieta off in utter dismay.
“We’re twins!”
“Being twins doesn’t mean you’re exactly the same,” she soldiers on as if they’d never interrupted her. “It just means you grew in your mamá’s tummy at the same time, like the three of us did. And our gifts are all different, aren’t they?”
“That doesn’t count,” Javier insists with the ironclad logic of a boy on the cusp of being five years old.
“Yeah. Your gifts are different ‘cause you’re different.”
“Hmm.” Mamá pretends to take it into serious consideration. “That sounds about right. Different people, different gifts. And even though you two look so much alike that people in town still get your names wrong half the time…”
“I know that Javier is a morning person, and Pedro always asks for five more minutes,” Julieta slides in seamlessly, knowing exactly where her train of thought was going.
“And I know that Javier likes scary stories the most, while Pedro wants the funny ones.”
“And I know that Javier’s favorite weather is rain because he loves splashing in puddles, but Pedro’s favorite is snow because he’s the best at snowball fights.”
Several doors away, Dolores smiles into her pillow. See, it’s not that hard to tell them apart; she only holds the distinction of having been able to do that since they were little more than wailing bundles in their cribs, but the more they grow, the more the subtle differences between them become apparent to anyone who bothers to look.
How hearing Javier say ‘I have an idea’ is usually reason enough to drop whatever she’s doing and go put said idea right out of his head, while Pedro is generally content to be the muscle of their two-man team rather than the mastermind; how it began to emerge as soon as they could grab a toy with their pudgy little fingers that Javier favors his right hand, and Pedro his left, a rarity with twins, but a dead giveaway if you watch them for longer than a minute.
The differences have always been there; all it took was a little nudge to notice.
“Oh.” The realization comes in perfect, unrehearsed unison.
“But we still don’t want two rooms!” says Pedro.
“We’ve never, ever been in different bedrooms before,” Javier heartily concurs.
“Neither had we, when we first got our rooms,” says Tía Julieta. “And do you know how we solved that little problem?”
Dolores can hear their curls bounce as they shake their heads.
“Sleepovers. Lots and lots of sleepovers,” says Bruno, and Dolores doesn’t even need her ears to know their faces must be stretching into identical grins. “We may have had three rooms, but it was a while before we actually used them.”
“We spent the first night all piled up in Juli’s room, the second in mine, and the third in Bruno’s. Just so we could say we’d tried them all.”
Soft laughter fills the nursery at the memory of it.
“But in the end, you know what? We each thought our own was the best thing ever,” says Julieta fondly.
“And the same will happen to you, I just know it. Nope, not in that way, I’m just very smart. We all know who the real brains of the operation is around here.”
Bruno gets a pair of playful smacks for that, flawlessly synchronized.
“Now let’s get you to bed, you little rascals. It’s really late,” says mamá to an immediate chorus of buts.
And when their protests turn into yawns and their little bodies slide softly into the gentle rhythms of slumber, Dolores can finally rest easy. Extra special triplet magic, indeed.
Now that the doors are here, the hours until it happens seem to rush right past them in the blink of an eye, and Dolores finds herself once again staring up at a staircase built just for the occasion, the trek longer than ever.
Mirabel hasn’t stopped bouncing on her feet all evening, the châtelaine going clink-clink at her hip.
“You’re… not up there,” says Dolores, half a statement, half a question.
“No. I can learn the speech, I can carry the candle, I can learn all the steps, but the story… nobody tells it like she does.”
“I’ll just… I’ll just tell you when to go get them.”
It’s the same as always, and yet different. There are entire generations of people in attendance who have never seen more than one person at a time being blessed with a gift, and that, it seems, means that the excitement goes double.
Breathlessly, Dolores watches Mirabel go through the motions of a speech rehearsed in a whisper night after night, not mumbling in fear under a mountain of blankets this time, but loud and clear, her head held higher than it’s ever been. Abuela is waiting for her at the top of the stairs, a curious role reversal from last time—watching, listening, knowing how tempted she must be to seek her out for guidance and correction, and just how much willpower it takes to keep her eyes firmly on the twins and put off the thought of her unforgiving review until later.
There’s a brief, suspended instant, just before they touch their doors, in which they look at each other rather than at what’s ahead. Who will go first, wonders the murmuring crowd, and what will their blessings be?
And while Dolores will have to wait for the latter answer like the rest of them, the former is obvious: together, as in all things. The double flare of light is blinding, almost a strain on the largely unknown limits of their miracle, and the boys are left blinking afterimages away, staring in awe at a world that will never be quite the same again.
But nothing seems to happen, and the townsfolk buzz like angry bees at the deviation from the familiar script. Where’s the miracle, they each ask their equally confused neighbor, what’s going on, where’s the gift?
There’s a clickety-click of tiles at their feet, and Mirabel fills her chest with a long, deep, greedy breath, and fills it, and fills it until she feels moments away from bursting, staring out at the assembled villagers, and then—
“Everybody stay calm! You’ll have your demonstration. The boys just need a little help from the house.”
Dolores has never known her voice to carry quite like this. She has a mean set of lungs on her when the situation calls for it, but this… this is different. Or perhaps the difference is not in the sound itself, but in the half shocked, half curious hush that descends on the crowd in its wake.
It is the difference, Dolores knows all too well, between being heard and being listened to, and this time, Mirabel does shoot a rapid sideways look at Abuela, eyes wide, looking for that tiny, secret nod like she would scramble for support as the ground drops out from under her.
And Casita… Casita comes alive (well, more alive than usual), ejecting something from the nursery one level below with a great clatter of floorboards and bump-bumping it upstairs to the general confusion of the onlookers.
To their amusement and utter puzzlement, what comes skidding and bouncing along the recently created floor is the one overflowing box of toys they haven’t yet sealed away, still waiting to collect the last few things before the move.
The twins’ faces are something for the ages. The thing about receiving a gift is that it might take you anywhere between days and years to refine it, but deep in your bones, you know. You’re just not sure how you know.
Javier springs into action, one hand flying out towards the box, looking for a moment as though he has forgotten in his excitement that if he wants something to play with, he has to walk over and get it.
Except that perhaps he doesn’t, because the ball they’re always bouncing around the courtyard comes whizzing out and soars in a great arc towards the crowd, all without being touched.
And then, impossibly, just as the people below brace for impact, hands flying up to guess where it will land, it changes its trajectory in mid-air and knocks the breath out of Pedro as he makes a clumsy grab for it with waiting arms.
“We have a new gift!” Mirabel’s voice rings out, because that’s what they expect, but Dolores can hear the hesitation in it, the confusion—is it one, is it two?
They watch the doors settle into their shape, and it is once again a little mystery carved into the wood: gentle patterns of curving lines following the shape of their bodies in the twin portraits, all manner of simple, abstract shapes suspended in them at their command. Where the lines meet an obstacle, they warp around it in concentric circles like ripples in a pond that’s been disturbed by throwing a stone. But what truly stands out is that the engravings are clearly meant to be observed together: the pattern is incomplete if you only consider one, stopping at the very edge and never resolving, but if you look at the other, there’s the missing half, matching and mirrored.
“So it is the same!” the boys squeal in delight, and they shoot each other one last look before entering.
If Dolores wondered how to follow one into his new room without doing the other a disservice, well, Casita has solved that problem for her: the wall between them is nothing but thick panes of glass, with a third door, forever shimmering with magic, already thrown open to connect them.
And the rooms… it is only because she can see into both of them at the same time that she can truly appreciate it, but it’s like looking in a mirror. They are identical and yet not, with a careful symmetry to them like the wings of a butterfly, and they are quite possibly the strangest thing she’s ever laid eyes on, a curious display of driftwood and rough-hewn stone mingling with polished metal and reflective glass, a motley collection of materials and shapes to explore. Great pendulums hanging from the high ceiling waiting to be set off; strange shapes suspended in the air on all manner of cables and wires as if asking for a breeze to swing them to and fro; a near-endless array of oddly formed weathervanes and wheels ready to be spun. It’s all perfectly, breathlessly still, until it isn’t.
Javier and Pedro take off running at the same time, and suddenly, it’s all a strange symphony of motion on either side of the glass. They never touch the peculiar installations once, but all it takes is a gesture, a look, a little push given with something other than their hands, and everything is whirring and clicking and clattering as the crowd spills inside and watches in awe. There’s an odd sort of harmony to it that makes the sudden influx of noise more bearable than she hoped, like music, perhaps: for one with little tolerance for too much sound at once, she has always been partial to music. All the flurry of activity isn’t going anywhere, she can tell: it is motion for the sake of motion, a peculiar form of art in which movement itself is the thing of beauty to be admired, and the twins couldn’t have asked for more if they tried.
She leans on the frame of the open connecting door, watching the two halves of the party get started; it is only when Javier and Pedro, as she should have known they would when presented with glass coming between them, start playing at being each other’s reflection, that she sees it.
Where one pushed a pendulum as far as it could go, the other pulled it and released it into an equal and opposite swing; where one set wheels spinning clockwise, the other had them moving counterclockwise. For every nudge to the right, there is one to the left; for every strange object flying away from Javier, its counterpart is being irresistibly attracted to Pedro.
It takes them a few attempts at involving their new gifts in their impromptu game of mirrors to notice: no matter how hard they strain and sweat, knitting their little brows together with single-minded purpose and repeatedly showing each other how to do it, they can no longer copy each other perfectly. By all appearances, their gifts are the same, and yet they only operate in opposite directions: like the ends of a magnet, one repels, one attracts, and there doesn’t seem to be a way to reverse it that they’ve found.
“It’s the same and different,” says Javier as the truth sets in.
“Then who was right? Us or abuelita and our tíos?”
“Both, I guess.”
“That’s so cool.”
And there is dancing, there are adults getting tipsy rather too fast and being switched over amid much teasing to the fruit juice for the little ones, there’s another ever-growing family picture, and there’s Mirabel taking the local photographer aside for a quick whisper lost in the crowd to everyone but Dolores.
“Would it be possible to have a copy made in miniature, about this big?”
Well, now she knows what’s going onto the last hook of the châtelaine.
“Get the willow tea, Juli,” says Bruno, watching the empty seats where the twins should be sitting. It’s a tried and true tradition to be late the day after, too wired to sleep a wink until the wee hours of the morning and dead to the world while everyone else is having breakfast.
“Headache? You didn’t look like—”
“Not me. But what the boys are doing has to do with their minds, they’ll be begging for it before lunchtime.”
“Nah, I think it’s more physical,” Camilo counters. “You thought you had it bad with me? They’ll eat us out of house and home.”
Going by the way they descend on the food like ravenous locusts, giggling madly between one yawn and the next, Camilo seems to have won this one, though it is perhaps too early to discuss the pesky matter of side effects.
They seem to be arguing good-heartedly about which version of their shared and mirrored gift is cooler, the pushing or the pulling, and Dolores can see this becoming yet another eternal point of contention, like the age-old problem of who popped out first, which was Javier, and why it definitely shouldn’t matter, at least according to Pedro.
“Nuh-uh, just give up, I win,” says Pedro mulishly.
“Why?”
“Because of this.”
And he deftly pulls an extra arepa from the top of the precarious stack, grinning as his brother’s jaw drops at the unfairness of it all. His lips haven’t even touched it when Javier slaps it out of his hand, all without so much as brushing it with a finger, and sends it flying far out of his reach. Pedro pulls it back before it hits the ground, and Dios, this could become a vicious cycle very quickly.
“Boys, no playing with your food,” says Dolores, but it goes, as they say, in one ear and out the other.
Push. Pull. Push. Pull. They seem to be having so much fun with it they’ve forgotten to be hungry at all.
That is, until their established rhythm falters, their perfect timing fails, and they attempt to push it and pull it at the same time, and the result is… somehow both and neither.
The arepa simply stops, suspended in the air like some fat, cheese-filled hummingbird, and the whole table stares, the twins first among them.
“Whoa.”
“You didn’t know this, I take it?” asks Abuela, ever unflappable, moving a piece or three on her mental chessboard at the new information.
“We never tried,” says Javier through gritted teeth, eyes firmly on the floating treat, redoubling his effort when it seems to lose height.
“Stop talking, tonto, it’s wobbly.”
“You stop talking, you’ll make us drop it.”
“At least you found out now, instead of sixteen years too late,” says Isabela with just a touch of bitterness. “How far does it go? Does it just stay there, or can you control it?”
All they give as an answer is to share a nod and a grin, and it comes bobbing through the air towards their waiting hands, slower and gentler than anything they saw last night, a far cry from the rapid, zooming motions from before. Alone, they have power; together, they have finesse.
“It was mine in the first place,” says Pedro.
“Was not!”
“Was too!”
“Oh, honestly, just break it in half,” says Mirabel. “It’s fair to both, and it’s extra practice.”
Sharing grins all around the table, they watch as the dough stretches and tears in the air under their combined pressure and the arepa splits cleanly down the middle, held together by thin, precarious bridges of melted cheese.
It’s a splendid new development, until the very last string of filling snaps and the two halves go flying at high speeds, one nearly slapping Pedro in the face, the other going splat against a wall as far away from Javier as it can get.
“See? I still win,” he says, biting down with shameless abandon.
“Not fair.”
“We… need to talk about how this changes things.” There’s a hesitation in it that wouldn’t have been there before, a touch of caution in Abuela’s words before she jumps immediately to finding the best way to put this new and improved blessing to use.
“We’ve already had proof that the gifts were always meant to be used in synergy—”
“That means as a team,” Mirabel slides in without missing a beat, seeing the twins’ eyes glaze over at the lofty words beyond their understanding, and it’s a testament to her progress that Abuela takes the correction in stride.
The most marked difference between then and now, however, isn’t even that: it is that her face is not the only one at the table that’s calculating. As much as they’re all wary to admit it, this new information does change things, open up new avenues of exploration, of… usefulness. A dangerous word if wielded incorrectly. Mirabel’s mind seems to be running frantically through a carousel of scenarios as the twins take turns practicing their more refined gifts by painstakingly feeding themselves without touching their utensils, and Luisa…
Screech. Clink.
Her fork is a dead loss, and she hasn’t lost her iron grip on her strength like that in years.
“Stop that. It’s your first day out on the town, you’ve got to learn to pace yourselves.”
All eyes turn to her as she tries fruitlessly to make her massive frame as small as it can be, which isn’t very small at all.
“What was that, Lu?” says Mirabel, who clearly heard her perfectly the first time.
“Nothing! I’m… I’m just saying, if they’re already like this at breakfast… you know how people can get… gotta conserve your energy, or… okay, shutting up now.”
“No, Luisa, that’s a good point. Boys, that’s the coolest way to have breakfast I’ve ever seen, but I’m going to need you to eat like the rest of us for a minute and listen, okay?”
Javier and Pedro look immensely disappointed, but they switch back to using their hands like mere mortals.
“Today is a very important day. Almost as important as yesterday,” she begins, and Dolores can’t deny feeling a pinch of jealousy even as she smiles. Mirabel has always had a way with children. “People will want to see your gifts a lot. They’re not just new to you, they’re new to everyone else too, and when something is new, everybody wants a piece of it. But if you’re ever too tired, or if they ask you to do something you don’t want to…”
She stops, eyes sliding over to her sister expectantly, and Luisa looks about ready to swap her superhuman strength for invisibility.
“It’s okay to tell them no, or that it can wait until tomorrow.” She says it in a rush, as if expecting the words to hurt on their way out, but she says it, and coming from her, it is its own little miracle. “No need to be rude about it or anything, just… it’s easier to learn that now than when you’re all grown up.”
“Okay.” Javier shrugs and goes right back to demolishing his breakfast. It’s plain to see that the full import of it hasn’t hit him yet, but there will be plenty of time for the lesson to sink in.
“Luisa, do you think we’ll be able to lift the whole church like you do if we work on it together?” asks Pedro.
“Won’t know until you try. But you’re not trying today. You haven’t even had your gifts for twenty-four hours, and I don’t think Padre Flores would like that. We’ll… we’ll work up to it.”
Now, Dolores considers herself something of an expert at reading into the subtle layers of what people say, and she can’t help but take note of that we. Call her an incurable optimist, but she likes the layers of that.
“Hey, you know what else we can do to practice?” says Javier with a sudden competitive glint in his eye.
“What?”
“Beat everyone at tejo. It’s going to be so much easier now.”
As Bruno starts in on the inevitable lecture on fair play – ‘you don’t gamble when you can see the outcome’ is just about in the same realm as ‘you don’t use telekinesis to trounce everybody at throwing games’ – Dolores’s heart sinks.
That stupid game is just never going to leave her alone.