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Change is not something that happens overnight. It creeps up on you in a myriad little ways until you look back at how things used to be and you’re not sure when exactly they became what they are now.
For Dolores, change comes primarily through sound, because of course it would, with ears so attuned to the slightest blip in the familiar soundscape of the Encanto.
It is Mira measuring every dress twice and muttering about a mistake, because surely, surely they can’t have ordered it so short.
It is the constant banging and clanging of new construction sites at the edge of the village, to accommodate the new families who came through the crack in the mountains and simply never left.
But most of all, it is the chatter of television, that big box of canned noise that everyone seems so fascinated by.
Now, the Encanto was a little late on schedule getting those at all, so she supposes it’s only natural that people have a lot of catching up to do. The technicians came and went (pity none of them stayed, they could have used an expert), and now the chance of seeing a little of the Outside is all anyone ever talks about.
There were only a handful of devices in the village to begin with: they’re becoming more common now, no trip beyond the mountains seems complete without the returning traveler lugging one around to install in somebody’s home, but Dolores remembers when the only chattering boxes in the Encanto were in the hands of a few select families, or in public places where everyone would gather to watch.
They were among the first to get one, and it has changed the way they spend their family time in ways she is not sure she likes, though she does adore the way Tío Bruno insists on watching telenovelas and then spends half the episode poking holes in their lazy, predictable writing. They don’t know why he keeps watching them if he’s so convinced he could do better, but he always says that critiquing them is half the fun and makes comically disgusted faces at anyone who accuses him of knowing all the plot twists ahead of time because of his gift.
“Really? You don’t need visions to see that coming, anyone with half a brain would have figured it out.”
Of course, television is not the only sign that the impenetrable barrier between the village and the Outside is now a little less impenetrable, but some of the wondrous feats of technology that seem to have taken the rest of the world by storm just aren’t made for the Encanto.
What’s the point of learning to drive a car when most of the streets are narrow, winding paths of dirt or cobblestone meant for human feet or modest carts pulled by beasts of burden, never designed for the great roar and sputter of motor vehicles at all? Only people who have frequent business on the Outside even bother with those monstrosities, and frankly, Dolores can only count her blessings.
What’s the point of having a telephone in every home when you’re sure to see your friend tomorrow and tell them in person, when some of their gifts offer... unconventional ways to get a message across town if the need arises, when so few people have any living acquaintances or relatives to call beyond the Pass? (Funny how all you have to do to name a place around here is slap a capital letter on it, and everyone will know exactly what you’re talking about.)
Cheap drama is not the only thing that having a TV set brings into their home. It’s strange, Dolores thinks, how she moans and grumbles every day about the things she has to hear people say, but the heaviest burdens in the end are always the things left unsaid.
The family – or most of it, anyway, the younger kids don’t need to see this – is gathered in front of the screen, and the air is heavy with words that won’t come out. There are enough elephants in the room to make a circus, and she hates it.
She hates how Abuela sits enthroned in the middle, flanked by her children and grandchildren on either side, and no one is acknowledging that her next birthday will be her ninetieth and they should be preparing for the very real chance that it’s her last.
She hates how the blaring voices from inside the box bring news that have their guts twisting in fear, every day a painful reminder of what the gifts were originally intended for.
How she’s always straining her ears just in case the stirrings at the border are something more sinister than another family coming to stay. How Isabela’s latest experiments are less about cross-breeding orchids and more about things that sting and poison and tangle your feet. How Luisa, whenever she isn’t needed to carry bricks and lay down shingles, is always taking long walks that just so happen to take her to the vicinity of the Pass, pacing back and forth in a way that isn’t at all reminiscent of a sentinel, of course it isn’t.
The thing about growing up in an isolated village that is always more or less run by the same handful of families – though that may be changing soon, Dolores has heard how the word ‘village’ is fading away from conversation, how the Encanto is being promoted to a town once and for all with every settler taking possession of a new house – is that sometimes you listen to the TV and you’re not sure it’s talking about the same world at all.
Isolation has been a blessing in almost every sense of the word, but now that news of the Outside can filter in at the turn of a knob, Dolores feels like she has been thrust in the middle of one of her uncle’s complicated storylines and she has missed about twenty episodes’ worth of information.
She knows what voting is, she’s not that stupid, but the most important thing she remembers voting for is what the family should have for Sunday dinner; she has very little understanding, and frankly even less interest, in the groups of tiny people in the box squabbling about how the country should or should not be run.
She knows, in theory, that somewhere out there the squabbling has turned into gunshots and people are dying in the name of one banner or another, but until the sound of shouting voices and marching feet comes close enough to hear, well, it’s going to be another elephant in the room.
(They all look for a hand to hold when Tío Bruno marches up the stairs. And then he comes back down, and he collapses on the steps and says “Not yet,” and the house releases a collective breath, and his hair has more grey in it than it used to. Rinse and repeat.)
There’s a man in a crisp suit talking, giving a tally of the dead and the wounded in some skirmish too far away to hear. His matter-of-fact voice washes over her, listing pawns knocked over in a game she doesn’t know the rules to, and suddenly the screen erupts into white noise.
Dolores whimpers. She’s not sure what exactly is ‘white’ about it, she just knows she despises it, with that odd, crackling, unnatural shh that doesn’t even let her hear herself think.
At least it’s amusing, she privately acknowledges through gritted teeth, to watch the men try to fix it. The signal has never been great in the Encanto, at least according to the reports of those who have somewhere else to compare it to, though it’s hard to say whether the magic is somehow unfriendly to the invisible forces that make the TV come alive, or whether it’s just because they’re a tiny town hidden behind the mountains that’s lucky to have television at all, so these sudden interruptions are all too common, and everyone has a different approach to them.
Tío Agustín is the one who sighs and goes to fiddle patiently with the antenna, not knowing exactly what he’s doing beyond hoping the transmission will come back if he gets the angle just right; papá is more in favor of percussive maintenance, or punching the thing until he scares it into submission; Camilo just shifts into whoever was talking (he hasn’t mastered making himself look black and white, so he just dresses everybody in ludicrous oranges, purples and pinks that are completely made up) and picks up where they’d left off with his own silly improvisation. They all groan at the stupidity of it, but better that than listening to reports of people dying for banners that all look the same in shades of grey anyway.
“Where’s Ada when you need her?” says Mariano only half in jest.
“Pretending to sleep,” says Dolores without missing a beat, one ear on the nursery to escape the continued cascade of noise from the TV.
It’s not even her birthday yet, that’s tomorrow, it’s why they’re here in the first place, begging at the altar of the TV for a distraction from the thought of what’s to come, and already they can’t believe her natural aptitude for all things shiny and new. They allowed her to mess with the antenna once as a joke, after Agustín gave it up as a bad job, and it’s become a running gag that the four-year-old (now almost five!) can accomplish in seconds what several grown men couldn’t do in minutes.
It’s a small wonder she hasn’t yet managed to open the device and take it apart for the simple pleasure of seeing what makes it tick. Out of all her children, Ada was the one who began speaking in full sentences the earliest, and when she did, her ‘why’ phase never stopped. Puzzles and brain teasers and things with pieces to pull apart and slot back together have her face lighting up in joy, and there’s just no bottom to her reservoir of questions.
Getting her to bed tonight was nothing short of a herculean task: with the opening of her door only hours away, Dolores could swear she asked a hundred questions a minute without ever drawing breath. Even now, she’s tossing and turning, very clearly awake and wondering about tomorrow, a stark contrast to Gabriel, who is out like a light.
She still catches herself listening to his breathing, in and out, in and out, and praying it doesn’t stop. He is their miracle baby in a way that has little to do with the literal miracle. He made his screaming entrance into the world too early, bringing hours of pain and fear and a dwindling stack of food, and as he lay there on Dolores’s chest, too tiny, but alive, the air in the room grew heavy with the silent agreement that unless fate had other plans, he would be the last.
Sometimes, Dolores holds him tight and half expects him to vanish in her hands like smoke. No more, not like that, not if the miracle of life must have so high a cost. She has reached and passed the great, invisible barrier of being thirty, and if you ask her, she’s done quite enough to keep the family name alive.
“Dolores, do we have a date?”
“Tonight. He wants five babies.”
She thinks about that often, bursting into unexplained giggles that everyone thinks are because of something funny she’s heard ten houses away. Destiny has a strange, circuitous way of doing what it pleases sometimes.
Gabriel probably won’t remember a version of his sister without her gift, whatever it may be: he’s a tiny, babbling, chubby-cheeked thing that has only just mastered stringing two or three words together at a time, and anyone who’s old enough to remember swears he’s a copy of his father at that age.
Finally, after much fiddling and cursing, the images on the screen come back. They’ve missed the tail end of the chilling report, but it’s no great loss. It’s not how anybody wanted to end the eve of another ceremony, at any rate. Nobody is sure who or what decides the nature of a new gift, and with dark clouds gathering over the horizon that have nothing to do with mamá, it’s all they can do to force a big, wide smile and scramble to keep the day untainted.
When the day does come, Dolores feels as though she hadn’t slept at all. She is so, so tempted to turn the other way and never open the door to let the noise in, but open it she must, and it’s not even the most important door that will be opened today.
Ada, it goes without saying, is vibrating with excitement, nearly forgetting to feed herself in her rush to get more words out than Dolores has ever heard.
“Mami, what do you think my room’s gonna look like? Is it going to be all soft and quiet like yours? I don’t think I want that, I want something fun. Do you think it’s gonna be fun? I want a bigger bed for sure, and a bookshelf as big as papi’s, and...”
“Whoa, slow down, there, chaparrita,” says Mariano. “If you want all those things, you’ve got to make sure the house can keep up.”
That reduces her to silence remarkably quickly, which is quite the feat. While Celeste has always been a little bit partial to Dolores, and the twins are simply too caught up in their own world to take sides, Ada has been an incurable daddy’s girl since day one. The question of Gabriel, who is ready to graduate out of the well-used high chair any day, has become something of a competition.
After breakfast comes the waiting. That’s the problem with your fifth birthday when you’re a Madrigal: it’s the most amazing day of your life, but only after the alarm clock rings. Before that, it’s the most boring birthday in the history of birthdays. Dolores isn’t sure why the moment must come at seven o’clock tonight and not a second earlier, but it’s tradition, and if there’s one thing the family does well, it’s keeping traditions. It just might be a little harder to keep it when the birthday girl is an unstoppable ball of impatience that nobody knows how to entertain, because compared to the enormity of getting a gift, nothing they can come up with can hold her attention for longer than a minute.
That is, until Luisa scoops her up like she weighs less than a feather (which, to her, she probably does) and goes to march her out the door.
“Right, we’re going to the Montero site. You coming, boys?”
“I thought it was all hands on deck for the party,” says Dolores, unused to missing a piece of information unless it’s from the TV. “What do the Monteros need doing that can’t wait until tomorrow?”
“Eh, we’ll find something. Oof!”
Javier and Pedro respond to her call by trying to hang onto her shoulders, just for the thrill of seeing her carry them both, and their sister for good measure, with barely a grunt of surprise.
“Better that than watching her go out of her mind with boredom. Wanna come?”
Now, Dolores is sorely tempted to stay home and keep an ear on the excursion from a distance. It’s not that she is opposed to the upswing in population, exactly, but given the choice, the construction site for the new Casita was the only one she’d ever visited and she’d much rather keep it that way. The place was loud even in the brief interval without her gift, let alone with it.
But Ada and the twins being let loose on a place other than home? That definitely qualifies as the sort of thing that requires two adults. Luisa’s gift is strength, not ubiquity.
The birthday girl, as she always does, peppers them with questions all the way there. They say she got her infinite curiosity from her mother, but Dolores doesn’t quite agree. Sure, she spent much of her early childhood with her ear stuck to a closed door or another, throwing colossal tantrums at the indignity of being excluded from important adult conversations and deprived of her inalienable right to know (which should have been a sign, in hindsight), and she does see a little of herself in Ada’s fierce hate of the phrase ‘You’ll understand when you’re older’, but there’s a fundamental difference.
At that age, Dolores was all about people, trying to find the elusive key to figuring out the world by scrambling to keep abreast of who was who and what they were saying and what they were doing; Ada, on the other hand, has an endless fascination with how things work and how they’re made.
In a curious turn of events, she has accepted the presence of the gifts as a sort of everyday wonder that no longer makes your jaw drop after the hundredth time, and yet she looks at Mirabel like she hung the moon and stars simply because of her ability to grab needles and yarn and create something that wasn’t there before, stitch by careful stitch. Sure, Isabela is impressive, but when you take more delight in watching a thing being made than in the thing itself, she becomes old news rather quickly.
There are those who look down upon her magnetic attraction to anyone who works with their hands: it’s fine as long as it is sewing or embroidery, but it is hardly ladylike, the way she pulls at the hand of whichever adult is in charge just to go watch one of the rare car owners in the village opening up the innards of their vehicle, or stops and stares at someone hammering away to build a shed.
Ada either doesn’t know or doesn’t care about any of it. There’s no better game than following papi around when he isn’t writing, passing tools and chattering away when he is called upon to do odd bits of repairs around town. Not everybody’s house is magical, after all, and there’s so much to learn by shadowing people at work.
Case in point, she hasn’t stopped grilling Luisa about the ins and outs of construction for several minutes now (“Do you have to be really strong like you to build a house? But then, how does everybody else do it? Can Tío Bruno teach me how to mix the spackle next time?”) and has shown no interest at all in who’s going to live in it, which is rather a change of pace for the future occupants, to be sure. When you settle down in a place like the Encanto, being the talk of the town is part of the deal.
The Monteros, in particular, have caused quite a stir: they are a pair of newlyweds who seem to be under the impression that they are doing the town a favor with their very presence, largely because he, as he will remind anyone who will listen, is a doctor, and they were quite shocked to find that patients weren’t flocking to them in droves, and were apparently choosing arepas given out at a stall in the square over the latest innovations in medical science.
They are not unwelcome, precisely: Dolores has heard the whispers about learning to make do with the young upstart because Tía Julieta won’t be around forever, and as much as her heart constricts just thinking about it, they aren’t wrong.
It’s just that they seem to have a very clear idea of what their place should be, and it is not a half-built house at the edge of town. The doctor’s wife has a perennially bored air about her as she struts around the site pretending to help, and she has been caught looking at the profile of Casita up on the hill as if she found a house like that much more befitting of their station. Dolores is not alone in hoping that life in the Encanto will knock them down a peg.
You can guess at the shape of the house by now: the site is full of half-erected walls just waiting to be completed in your mind’s eye, snatches of off-key songs setting the pace of the work, people calling out orders and keeping slackers on their toes.
Everyone with the slightest bit of experience building a house is chipping in, even Juancho, who is always working with one hand and chugging coffee with the other. Only a little older than Antonio, the kid has grown into a tall, lean, twitchy specimen of a young man who simply couldn’t wait to be seen with a cup of his beverage of choice without every adult in sight looking at him funny, and the implicit permission that came with growing up has done him no favors. The poor guy hasn’t properly slept through the night in... eh, she’s lost count.
“Wasn’t expecting you today.” He takes another sip as if deciding that he deserves it after a surprise like that. “Aren’t you getting ready for the party?”
“The rest of us are,” Luisa explains, “but our birthday girl over here couldn’t stay cooped up in the house another minute.”
“And I suppose you’re here to give us an invitation?” says the young Señora Montero, who’s been ‘overseeing’ the nearest wall as if fearing it would grow crooked. “I understand you’re making a bit of an event of it.”
She seems skeptical, and frankly, Dolores can’t blame her. The Monteros have not entirely stopped jumping out of their skin watching their house being built half by sweat and half by magic, let alone attended a ceremony, so why would she, a fully grown adult, be excited to attend a birthday party for a five-year-old? Surely someone must have explained the gist of it, but you have to see it to believe it.
“You don’t need one,” says Luisa. “It’s a gift ceremony, it’s a given that everyone will be coming.”
“Oh.” Señora Montero sounds disappointed, as if the fact that the party is not exclusive made it less appealing all of a sudden. “Well, I suppose if everyone is coming...”
“Now, dear, weren’t you saying just yesterday that nothing interesting ever seems to happen?” says her husband placatingly, and Luisa casually lifts an unreasonably large sack of lime just to prove him wrong. They may have been learning their lesson about being more than their gifts, but let them have a little pride. “Apart from, well... that.”
“Oh, fine, I suppose we’ll come see what it’s all about. Is there a dress code?”
“We’re not as fancy as that, I’m afraid,” says Dolores sweetly. “Think of it this way, your plainest dress probably outshines everyone else’s Sunday best by miles.”
Señora Montero either misses or wilfully ignores the strained sound of her over-the-top humility.
“Hmm. I’m sure I’ll come up with a little something.”
She gives a dainty little shrug and goes back to her all-important overseeing duties, calling out “Careful!” and “How’s that coming along?” at what she deems to be appropriate intervals and otherwise giving no contribution at all.
The twins, for their part, are only too happy to prove to the Monteros that they are indeed interesting, and promptly launch into work in their own peculiar style, that is to say, without touching the material with so much as a finger. They have been squabbling less since the opposite and complementary nature of their gifts forced them to apply their capacity for teamwork to something other than silly pranks, but coordinating perfectly is still something they need to work on.
“You’re going too fast!”
“I’m not going fast, you’re going too slow, tonto!”
And here we go. Left to their own devices, they will end up with more fresh mortar on their clothes than on the walls. Thank goodness they haven’t changed into their good ones for the party yet.
“Let me stop you right there.”
And Luisa, with the long-suffering air of one who’s done this a thousand times, picks them both up by their collars and lifts them squirming and kicking off the ground, her long arms keeping them too far apart for their flailing limbs to land a hit. There is scattered laughter among the workers: maybe the twins are not yet a shining example of efficiency, but at least they keep everybody’s spirits high.
Dolores finds herself sitting by the sidelines with Ada, giving what little running commentary she can, because that, at least, is quieter than being in the thick of it. She’s no expert on the finer points of construction, and her unending questions soon begin to stump her; when Ada realizes that perhaps mami is not the best source of information on the subject, she changes her tune, but even then, Dolores is hard-pressed to provide any answers.
She can see how Ada longs to be helpful, how she observes the hustle and bustle of the construction site with hungry eyes and wishes it were a few hours later so she could do something, how she plays listlessly with the hem of her specially made dress and hates that it keeps her away from the action, because dust and grime and sweat are, of course, the sworn enemies of a frilly white outfit that must survive until seven o’clock tonight without a single speck.
“What do you think my gift will be?”
And there it is, the one question that was bound to come.
“Nobody knows. We’ll just have to wait and see, and trust that our miracle knows you well enough to choose one that’s just right for you.”
Ada is mightily displeased with that answer that really isn’t an answer at all.
Dolores’s palms are sweating. That’s one thing she has in common with her daughter, at least: she can hear her little heart hammering from all the way downstairs, her breath coming in quick and shallow as she stares upwards, looking frightfully tiny.
It is an unspoken rule that the responsibility of offering a newly gifted child the candle, guiding them loud and clear through their vows, has now passed down to Mirabel, who has almost mastered the trick to pretending not to be scared, but Abuela still insists on being there, set apart from the crowd.
The house, Dolores noted, was kind enough to carry her to the door without putting her through the strain of climbing on her own legs, the steps shifting helpfully underneath her. It’s been happening more and more often, but they’re all pretending not to see it.
Casita, however, is not about to extend the same favor to a five-year-old about to embark on the most important climb of her life, and so Ada begins her trek, slowly, carrying the weight of everybody’s stares on her shoulders. Even the Monteros have deigned to show up, resplendent in their big city finery and plainly wondering what it is that makes tonight so deserving of the breathless anticipation in the air.
With the twins, the highest landing had been a little empty, hastily covered in Isabela’s best attempt at decoration, but fresh and new and visibly having sprouted into existence only recently; now, on the contrary, the streamers and flowering vines have to contend with a varied landscape of potted plants, hanging pictures, and general knick-knacks and signs of being lived in.
Ada, however, only has eyes for one thing, standing ramrod straight as she listens to the speech and never tearing her gaze from the shifting motes of light about to settle into a visible symbol of her gift. Eager, reverent hands touch the sides of the candle, carrying a fraction of its ever-burning force to the doorknob emblazoned with a perfect A, and even she, despite her best attempt to witness the moment with her eyes wide open, has to squeeze them shut against the blinding light.
The crowd holds its collective breath, caught in the inevitable instant of now what? that precedes the manifestation of a new gift, and then—
Crash.
Dolores’s heart jumps into her throat as the tiles at their feet buck wildly for no reason at all, tipping over a large potted plant standing nearby in a burst of soil and broken shards.
No. Not again. The murmur of the assembly below echoes her own mounting panic. What have they done wrong this time, why are things breaking, are they condemned to lose and regain it all in endless cycles until they reach a different kind of perfection?
But Ada is seemingly unbothered. If anything, she is staring at the wreckage as if it had personally challenged her, fearless as only a child born after the fall can be, and she sinks down to her knees in front of the disaster, studying it intently, forgetting that the soil and her pristine party dress are not a good mix.
“It’s just like a puzzle,” she breathes as if she’d just had a revelation, and she picks up two of the smaller pieces, heedless of their sharp edges, looking carefully for the place where their irregular shapes fit snugly together.
“Careful, you’re going to cut—”
The warning born of motherly instinct dies on her lips, because those were two pieces, she could have sworn, and now she’s only holding up one.
“Mami, papi, look, I can fix things!”
As if on cue, the swirling, shapeless light explodes into its final form: her figure standing tall, her head surrounded by a strange, angular halo that is really a cog like you might find inside a machine, a little mechanical angel wreathed in a jagged pattern of cracks that, Dolores reminds herself, do not represent something breaking, but something coming back together.
“We have a new gift!”
Mirabel’s announcement rings crystal clear in the evening air, but Ada isn’t listening. It is less than customary for people not to spill immediately into the new room, but she’s still doggedly working on melding the pieces back together, studying them until they go click and simply stay in place as if they’d never fallen apart, and it’s clear that she’s not going to open the door until she deems the task done.
Then, finally, she looks back at the fallen plant and the scattered soil, shrugs, and decides that at least the vase is whole, so she deserves a treat. The door opens, and her squeal can be heard across the entire house.
Besides a cozy sleeping space tucked away in a corner like a last-minute addition, Casita has seen fit to provide her with a large worktable and a vast, wall-mounted collection of all the tools and odds and ends her heart might desire, a space fit for a maker of things, whatever those things may be, and the rest of it... Dolores has no idea what she’s looking at, but it certainly is the ultimate puzzle. Strange tracks winding round and round the room, toys and books and other items reasonably found in a child’s bedroom mingling with ropes and pulleys and a myriad bits and bobs that are not playthings at all, displayed along the walls and even across the floor and over the furniture in a way that seems entirely random.
That is, until she follows Ada’s gaze and sees that her eyes are bouncing along the arrangement trying to find a purpose to it all, and then her little face lights up and she topples the first in a long, sinuous line of dominoes at her feet, and suddenly the whole room is in motion.
Unlike the twins, whose growing collection of oddities was meant as a practice ground for their gifts, Ada’s is a practice ground for her mind, which is nearly the same thing. Instead of running around pushing and pulling at the display with an invisible force, she watches as her one simple gesture sets off an entirely natural chain reaction of things falling and bouncing and rolling, of weights and counterweights interlocked in a calculated dance, of objects interacting with one another in ways that only a child’s imagination, or a magical house, could have come up with.
A toy train runs along a diminutive ledge to its final destination, which is a small container poised to tip over with the impact and send a handful of marbles spinning down a funnel, and so on and so forth until, to the uproarious laughter of the bemused crowd, the intricate installation ends up doing nothing but push the needle of a gramophone onto a record and Mirabel, catching on with a grin on her face, calls out: “¡A bailar!”.
(And what’s more, with a little help from Casita, the wreckage of fallen tiles and popped balloons can be rebuilt in a thousand combinations whenever Ada sees fit in an infinite game of overly complicated solutions to the simplest of problems. But that’s a discovery for another day.)
It’s fantastic, until it isn’t. Señora Montero’s precious dress snags and rips, and she’s tugging at the edge of it among her scandalized shrieks until the tear is gone; Tío Agustín manages a glorious faceplant that cracks his glasses and she’s there, clearing her throat and demanding to save him a trip to the optician tomorrow; someone’s drinking glass shatters and there she goes, enlisting the careless partygoer in a tipsy hunt for the missing pieces, no matter that she needs a snack afterwards because there’s blood on her fingers.
By the time the party winds down, she’s yawning and looking at her new bed with undisguised longing, and Dolores is furious.
She holds it in all day, somehow, doing her level best to smile as Ada skips happily out the door the next morning looking for things she can fix, but if there’s one lesson she’s learnt, it’s that secrets have to come out eventually. It takes all of one question from Mariano and she cracks, sinking onto their bed and ranting undisturbed in the magical silence, because that’s the thing about being the quiet one: you spend half your life swallowing your words, until one day they all explode out of you with the destructive force of a broken dam.
“What’s wrong, mi vida?”
“What’s wrong? Our daughter has just signed her life away, that’s what’s wrong. Do you have any idea how many things break every day? I hear every single one of them, every snap and crack and crash, and if I know these people at all, and trust me, I do, she won’t even have time to breathe, let alone be a child. They’ll be even more careless now, because if something breaks, it doesn’t matter, we’ve got a universal fixer who can come running and put it right!”
“I’m sure she will—”
“And with all these new things coming in from the Outside! Did you know that almost every household has at least one thing that everybody treats like it’s made of glass, because no one has a clue how to fix it if it goes wrong? Guess whose job it is now!”
“Dolores, please—”
“And don’t even get me started on what some people will think. I’ve lived here my whole life, listening to them all, and believe me when I say that there are fully grown adults in this place who are not above hating a child for ‘stealing their jobs’.”
“I understand where you’re coming from, but—”
“Half of them will spit at her and the other half will worship at her feet, and just... just... no. That’s not the life I wanted for her, that’s not what anyone wanted. What crime has she committed, to spend the rest of her life at everyone’s beck and call?”
“Dolores—”
“That can’t be the right gift. I want a do-over.”
“What? Is that even possible?”
“I don’t know, and frankly, I don’t care. We spent so long trying to learn that our lives were more important than our gifts, and now Ada gets a gift that won’t let her have a life? No. I can’t accept that.”
“She seems to love it so far...”
“She may love it now, but give her a week and she’ll be calling it a curse.”
“Call me an incurable optimist, but I don’t think it’s going to be quite that bad. You’ve come a long way, all of you. It may be harder to see it from the inside, but if I may, as someone who came into this family just when things were at their worst and watched them grow into what we have now, I have faith that she’s going to be okay.”
“Oh, yeah? Since when are you the one who knows the future?”
“I’m not. But it sounds to me like it’s not the future you’re concerned about, it’s the past. Specifically, the possibility of the past repeating itself, which it won’t. You’re all very different people now, people who can remind Ada to take breaks and say no and tell any haters that if they want their jobs so badly, they can still have them, because her job right now is to grow up, and that’s a hard enough task in itself.”
He sits down next to her, the soft mattress sinking with his weight, and in their embrace, they fit together exactly as well as the pieces of one of Ada’s puzzles.
“I won’t lie and say it’ll be easy. I can see how it could be a hard gift to bear. But you know what? I may not be the leading expert in all things concerning the miracle, but as far as I can see, it has never yet been wrong.”
Dolores sits up, his words striking her like lightning.
“Uh, what? Was it something I said?”
“If you’re not the leading expert, then maybe it’s time to talk to someone who is.”
In another lifetime, it might have been harder to corner Abuela for a serious conversation, busy as she was having a thousand other serious conversations, but one side effect of her slow, gradual process of letting go and allowing her myriad responsibilities to trickle down to Mirabel is that she’s suddenly more available now, less likely to decide that your pressing concerns aren’t really that pressing after all.
There is still a certain distance, an ingrained habit of taking their customary places at the dinner table and watching her slide into the seat at the head as if she owned it, but at least the air isn’t heavy with the inexplicable feeling of being in trouble that seemed to follow her everywhere before. Much.
“Abuela, I think we need to talk about Ada,” says Dolores all in one breath, as if getting it over with quickly made it any easier. She seeks Mariano’s hand to squeeze for support.
“Oh? She seems quite happy with her new gift, as far as I’m aware.”
“We all were, when they were new,” she says, only realizing mid-sentence what a glaring lie that is, and amends: “Even if they did take some getting used to.”
“Have you heard something that concerns you?”
“Not yet, but I’m afraid it’s only a matter of time. Fixing things... it’s useful, and I can see how it suits her, but it’s likely to be in high demand.”
She puts emphasis on ‘useful’, skirting along the very edge of being blasphemous, praying it will get the message across without making her spell it out. Things are... better, now, but appearing to be ungrateful for the miracle they’ve received is still the highest offense.
“I’m sure we can find a reasonable compromise, at least while she’s still so young,” says Mariano, squeezing back to signal I’m here. “It’s an amazing gift, but there’s a very real risk that she’ll be run off her feet all day, and we wanted to take precautions.”
“That, and I wanted to know why,” Dolores blurts out, emboldened by his steady presence beside her. “Ada’s gift could have taken so many forms—why this specifically? You’ve seen so many by now, is there a... a pattern, a reason that we don’t understand?”
“I wouldn’t call it a pattern,” says Abuela pensively, the ghost of a fond smile on her lips. “The only pattern I’ve ever been able to discern is that no one was ever able to guess the nature of an upcoming gift correctly, but once it manifested, everybody said ‘I should have known’. Ada is much the same. The gifts do cater to each person’s interests and disposition, just not always in the way we expect.”
There’s a pause, a moment’s hesitation that Dolores only catches because she’s trained by long experience to read silence as fluently as she does words, and then Abuela continues with a heavier heart.
“Although, come to think of it, there have been other factors at play. It may be just because of all the new settlers, but these days, I’m often reminded of what it was like at the very beginning, when the Encanto was new.”
She says it with the voice of a practiced storyteller, and despite herself, Dolores is hooked. She has very little idea what those first days were like, reduced to piecing together an incomplete picture from little hints inadvertently dropped by mamá and her siblings. There seems to be a tacit agreement to make it sound like the Encanto sprouted fully formed from the earth exactly as it is now, with none of the blood, sweat and tears it must have taken to build it, and hearing the truth of those early times of uncertainty is a rare privilege.
“You must understand, most of us had left with nothing. We were fortunate enough to be a diverse group of people who could bring most of the necessary skills to the table—building houses, tending to crops, raising livestock. And what little we didn’t have, we learned, or added to our skillset as more early settlers joined us. But starting from scratch... that’s not easy for anyone, even a master of their craft. Even a minor setback could have far-reaching consequences. Injury, drought, or any one of a thousand obstacles we weren’t prepared for—”
Abuela nods as Dolores’s lips form a silent ‘oh’ of understanding.
“Even I don’t presume to have a complete understanding of the workings of our miracle. But from what I’ve seen, who you are as a person is only a part of what determines your gift.” She holds out a hand, palm up, as if representing one half of a scale. “The magic also takes into account what the community needs the most.” She holds out her other hand, completing the picture, and takes a deep breath before driving the metaphor home.
Dolores isn’t at all sure she wants to hear it, but it makes more sense than she cares to admit.
“In times of peace, the balance tips one way,” the first hand dips a little, as if adding more weight to one side of the scale, “but in times of great change or upheaval...” the scale tips sharply the other way, stating the obvious.
“We knew the opening of the Pass would have consequences, some good, some bad. And now that we’re truly starting to feel them – new people, new technology that most of us don’t know how to use, let alone repair – the miracle saw a bright, intelligent child and found her to be fertile ground for a magical form of the technical knowledge we currently lack.”
“I get it, Abuela. But you said it yourself, she’s a child. I can see how her gift is suited to the times we live in, but her workload—”
“—will be proportionate to her age, if the rest of the family has anything to say about it. Thank you for bringing this to my attention.”
They part ways with a nod that is really a promise, but Dolores is slow to leave her seat, her limbs sluggish with a pleasant sort of shock.
“That went well, I think,” says Mariano.
“Yeah, that went well,” she echoes numbly.
Even after all this time, it’s still hard to believe that a conversation like that, one that comes dangerously close to questioning the miracle and its mysterious ways, one that almost dares to suggest the magic might have gotten it wrong, could possibly remain civil, never devolving into shouting – oh, how she hated the shouting – and even ending in a ‘thank you’.
It’s a difficult balance to strike. Ada is so, so pleased with herself, full of stories of the myriad ways she can finally be of use and grinning from ear to ear as she gives a detailed account of every little thing she’s fixed, but her tales are punctuated with great yawns, and she has taken to retiring to her room for a nap after her day is done. She had given up naps bright and early, too full of irrepressible energy to waste even a minute of her day to sleep, and the fact that she has fallen back into the habit has Dolores’s guts twisting with worry.
Better this than saddling her with so many tasks she doesn’t have time for a nap at all, she tells herself, but does it mean that the reasonable schedule they’ve hashed out for her isn’t really that reasonable? Should they cut back even further? It seemed so smooth and efficient at first: Ada is only allowed to fulfill a limited number of requests per day, and if the object in question is small enough to be carried, then it falls upon whoever broke it to pick up the pieces and bring them to Casita, so she at least only has to run around town for the things that are too bulky to be moved. (Exceptions can be made if Luisa is available to do the carrying, but with several construction sites still going strong, her own schedule is rather full.)
The rules they’ve instituted seem to be effective at reminding the townsfolk that repairs can often wait until tomorrow, and if they can’t, then they can still be made without magic, but Ada will still trudge back from her ‘big ones’ looking too sleepy to muster much excitement. Once or twice, Mariano, who is by far her favorite adult to play escort on her trips, has had to carry her bodily some of the way home, her head drooping irresistibly onto his shoulder. It makes Dolores uneasy. It’s not a side effect anyone is familiar with, but the message is clear: this is a gift that she has yet to grow into.
It was the same for Luisa, who was breaking things left, right and center before she learned control; for mamá, whose weather was often all over the place because children, by their very nature, feel things with their whole hearts, elated one minute and devastated the next with very little in between; it was the same for Dolores herself, to an extent, before she taught herself to compartmentalize and keep the noise at the edge of her awareness to focus on the here and now. The excessive drowsiness is just a unique, previously unseen way for her growing body to beg the magic to slow down and let her catch up.
That doesn’t stop Dolores from standing at attention on the threshold of Casita every time she hears her coming back, ready to receive her like the baton in a relay race and tuck her in.
“I don’t like this,” she says, her little voice slurring with sleep, still sitting up in bed and fighting it tooth and nail.
Dolores’s heart sinks as she seeks Mariano’s eyes. Here it is, the day she finally says it.
“I love fixing things, but I don’t like that the hard ones make me sleepy,” she amends. “Mamá, papá, do you know why it keeps happening all the time?”
“Not exactly,” says Mariano, “but we can figure it out together, eh, chaparrita? Just like one of your puzzles.”
She brightens a little at that, and Dolores can’t help but feel a rush of gratitude for his ability to make her smile.
“For example, if you think back to the things you fixed today, which one was the easiest, and which one was the hardest?”
Her eyebrows climb up. It wouldn’t be the first time that a person without a gift has brought on a breakthrough, a flash of insight, just by asking the right questions about a magic they’ll never have.
Ada’s own brows knit together as she mentally ranks the day’s errands. “Okay, I think the easiest was when Señora Sánchez brought me her broken plate, because she had all of the pieces and she even gave me obleas to say thank you.”
That is a natural limitation of her gift that it didn’t take them very long to notice: if something shatters and some of the pieces go missing, it will remain chipped no matter how hard Ada tries, as her ability to fix things does not extend as far as conjuring replacements for any lost parts out of thin air.
“Oh, and I know what a plate is supposed to look like when it’s whole. That helps.”
Dolores and Mariano exchange a glance. A direct link between her familiarity with the thing to be fixed and the ease of working her magic is something she’s never voiced before. It makes exactly as much sense as anything the miracle ever does—you have to know your way around something to fix it the old-fashioned way, so why would it be any different with magic in the mix?
“And the hardest was Señora Montero’s new dishwasher. She said it came over the mountains already broken, and she was really mad about it and kept telling me to go faster.”
“Did she really?” says Dolores, pretending not to have been listening to every second of it and seething. They’re going to have words.
“Yeah. But I don’t know how it works on the inside, so I had to...” her mouth cracks open in a yawn, “I don’t know how to explain it. It’s kind of like the difference between asking it to be fixed nicely and yelling at it? I don’t like yelling at things. It makes me tired.”
“I can see that, chaparrita. You did great, even if you had to yell at it. We’ll just leave you to your nap, okay?”
“Okay. Bye, mami. Bye, papi.”
They close the door softly behind them, leaving her halfway to dreamland.
“Phew. Remind me to read with her more,” says Mariano. “Someone’s going to be devouring every instruction manual she can find sooner rather than later.”
‘Yelling’ at any piece of technology more complex than Señor Aguilar’s broken rake soon becomes a household turn of phrase. Ada’s way of fixing things generally doesn’t involve any actual yelling, but the metaphor catches like wildfire.
One day, true to Mariano’s prediction, they find her curled up in a hammock frowning at the booklet that came with his typewriter so she doesn’t have to yell at it (“Honestly, where did she even find it? I lost it ages ago!”), which only causes him to pick her up and pepper her cheeks with kisses.
Another day, there’s an alarming thump from the living room, immediately followed by Javier calling out: “Uh-oh. Ada, come yell at the TV before Abuela yells at us, we really messed up!”.
Another day, it might be Julieta’s turn to groan and ask her to please go yell at her new stand mixer, not that she trusted the thing in the first place, she’s convinced deep in her bones that her food packs less of a punch if she takes any shortcuts and no amount of reassurances to the contrary will change her mind.
The more she learns, the less she catches herself nodding off. She’s not quite back to her usual energetic self, but every time she opens something up to try to solve the mystery of its insides is one less time she has to yawn and force her eyes open, her strength sapped by essentially having to work blindfolded.
It’s a long way away from perfect, but it’s viable, and at any rate, they’ve grown to despise the word ‘perfect’.
As long as some restrictions are in place, and a trusted adult is available to give a stern talking-to to anyone who chafes against said restrictions, Ada still has time to be the same old kid who solves puzzles, and asks a hundred questions in a single breath, and whoops and cheers and laughs when another one of the impossible contraptions in her room finally works, and that’s going to have to be enough.