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When you know someone is going to die, you fetch the Madrigals with the shameless fear of the desperate and the frigid grief of the hopeless.
As always, they answer the call. They come to wherever the dying are, easy as breathing, sure as the sun rising.
(Ever since a candle bloomed to life between Alma's palms, ever since her pain and loss coalesced into stone to make them a mountainous home, she had been their hope. The northern star guiding them to safety. The sun poking out at the edge of the darkest night they had ever survived.
Every single day, she would help them with every need they had, without asking for anything in return, without uttering a single complaint at the end of a day full of hard work. As her children grew so, too, did her responsibilities—so, too, did her expectations for them.
Soon enough, Alma was their candle, their very own Encanto, while her children were the stars gradually lighting up the night sky. Their shine kept the people of the town alive.
None of the Madrigals ever got a choice over whether or not they'd become a part of the constellations Alma wove for the town. None of them ever got the chance to wonder about their purpose beyond bolstering the flames of the candle.
They just rose with the sun and shone down upon the town, weaving themselves into a perfect necklace of rope and setting themselves aflame to give their people light.)
Though the combinations and the circumstances shifted like the sun, there were—as with all things in life—always constants.
(There had been constants piling up in the Encanto since the triplets turned five. First, it was Pepa's rain, her thunderstorms, her hurricanes. They all began as a soft thundering, a gentle drizzle. The first lesson they learned was that it was far easier to fan a catastrophic forecast out of her than it was to keep her rainbows glimmering.
Then it was Julieta's soft smiles and her soothing presence, her cozy recipes and the scent of her cooking in the town square. Wherever there was somebody in need, there was Julieta with a warm meal in her hands and herbs sticking to her palms. And though there wasn't a single person who spent longer than a day injured in town since she opened her door, there didn't go a day where her hands didn't sport burns and cuts she had long since given up on bandaging.
And then Bruno, poor Bruno, always stuck fulfilling people's wonder and watching as it darkened into resentment. There was always someone who craved a prophecy, someone desperate for a peek into their future, begging at Bruno's heels for a taste of fate. Their enthusiasm never lasted long, though. Their ire was all Bruno was left with—people always did love shooting the messenger, did they not?
Through it all, Alma was the biggest constant of all, there to steer her children down a path of servitude. There to remind them they could work faster, try harder, do better.
Always there to look over their heads and never into their eyes, no matter how desperately they tried to be seen by her firm gaze.)
Death is one of life's constants. This, not even the Encanto could prevent. It was something nobody could outrun, something nobody could defeat. It was as familiar as an old friend and as nostalgic as a lover, as adamant as a father and as relentless as a mother. It was certain in the way nothing else was.
And when it came, the Madrigals did as well, in different parades every time.
If someone's life is to end, Julieta will come to them. Sometimes, because the desperate find their faith and those in the Encanto found it faster, long before Julieta even said her first word. The faithfully desperate still hope, even when they don't, that there is still something to be done. That Julieta can do that which God has denied them all, and stop death, if only for a day. There's so much she can do, so much she has done.
(Even as a tiny little thing, a five-year-old with bandaged fingers and burnt forearms, with ugly red blotches from a day spent in the kitchen, Julieta had pieced them all back together, one buñuelo at a time. She had healed every scrape, every broken bone, every single cut and every burn; she had healed everything but the scars left by time and grief, the ones she had wanted to heal most.
She had wanted to heal her sister's sadness, the one that would keep her barricaded in her room as her sorrow buried the town in pearly layers of snow. She had wanted to heal her brother's loneliness, the one that made him jump at shadows and shrink under the town's whispers, dizzy under the weight of his visions. She had wanted to heal her mami's wounds, the ones that kept a distance in her eyes and made the laugh lines on her face hard, the ones that made it so she danced with a ghost she had loved dearly more often than not.
She had wanted to be seen. )
But there are things even Julieta, el ángel del pueblo[1], could not do, and as such—
More often than not, the hopelessly desperate become the hopelessly lost.
But even if nothing can be done, if there is no fix for that which cannot be cured, cannot be stopped—she can make it palatable to watch. She can make it comfortable to experience. She can make death pleasant, can make one's last moments soft and sweet and nostalgic. She can heal the fear of the dying, even when she cannot stop them from leaving.
One last buñuelo, a couple rounds of goodbye, and finally, shut eyes.
More often than not, a comfortable death is the best she can do.
(It's a better courtesy than Pedro was afforded.)
More often than not, there is nothing Julieta can do other than make their last supper their favorite meal and have them content before sending them off to a land where she will no longer be able to help them.
(Almost every single time, all she can do is sit on her hands with that soothing little smile, helpless even after all the years she has spent working faster, trying harder and doing better.)
Sometimes they send Isabela, too, with the lacy hems of her soft dresses dyed black with grief and her perfect smiles softened into perfect lines of sympathy. She can make the grimest room into a paradise with a wave of her hand, blowing a myriad of marigolds[2] and hyacinths[3] to life. Seas of chrysanthemums[4] and blizzards of stargazer lilies[5] flood the deathbeds of the dearly beloved, soft watercolor petals fluttering to the ground like ash.
There is little that Isabela cannot make lively. There is little she cannot make pretty. She is the jewel of their town, a diamond as beautiful as any tulip[6], and it is easy for her to spin glory out of their sorrows.
(She is sharp, the rough edges she frantically smoothes to compliance begging to catch on the skin of all who come near. Isabela is a red spider lily[7], so very beautiful and so deadly still, ready to ensure they never ask her for that which she cannot give ever again.
But.
For all her cruelties and all her fantasies, for all her petty jealousy and the green hue of her envy, Isabela would prefer to remain chained at their feet, a lovely sacrifice, than to see them suffer.
She is her mother's daughter more than she is her grandmother's child.)
Isabela comes bearing pink carnations[8] like a soldier marching into war, wielding walls of gladiolus[9] like machetes, holding up blue irises[10] like shields, like if she cannot heal their wounds, she can give them new ones. All roses have their thorns, no matter how lovely.
(All beauty has a price. Isabela wishes she could forget hers.)
Isabela makes gardens out of private mausoleums with a benevolence born from compliance. She leaves something pretty, something tangible, something real for the grieving. One day their tears will dry up and their beds will grow cold, and no amount of marigolds will keep their ghosts home. When that day comes, they will have nothing left except for empty rooms and loss. They will have nothing more than an empty shell that used to be a vessel for all their love.
(Isabela would know. She has seen her abuela roaming Casita's halls like she herself is the ghost, talking to a man that is no longer there, forever grief's prisoner and love's victim.
She is bereft even now, even five decades later, even as she has so much warmth where there only used to be cold.
Abuela has her grief and Isabela has learned to know it well, for the price of perfection is to know the one who carves you into its likeness best.)
When that day comes—and it will come, because it always comes—they will lift their hands and they will find petals instead of death. They will find color in all the gray and they will find a glimmer of hope in all the darkness. There will be hydrangeas[11] in their walls like there used to be laughter in their halls, and the daisies[12] puddling at their feet will remind them of all the music and the dancing.
Isabela cannot heal them like her mami can. She cannot steer them like Abuela. She cannot carry their burdens like Luisa.
But she can ensure that they never forget how beautiful the world is, one little flower at a time. Every petal is a token of her symmetrical sympathy, a manufactured apology for their grief. Isabela herself is a symbol of grace in a world that is often not so great. A fantasy swathed in lavender silk and lace.
(Her flowers are real, though. Her little gardens of grief are as real as they come, and that is why they only ever die when the lost can survive without the vibrancy of a marigold.)
Sometimes, the grief is not quiet. It is not ugly. Instead, it is ferocious. It is loud.
That's when they send Pepa, with the sun in her dress and its vermillion fall in her hair, with a cloud over her head that has been her companion for as long as she can remember.
(She doesn't consider it a friend. Far from it. It is a pest, a necessary evil, a curse that does not know how to leave her alone any more than she knows how to live without it.
Pepa has lived in the clouds for as long as she can recall, dancing in their soft mist and drowning in their thunderous cries. She has been their prisoner and she has been their guest. She is their master and their servant.
She has lived in the clouds for long enough that she can't tell if her mind has always been fogged up, or if it's an unpleasant result of pulling open her door. Maybe she's always had white spots in her head. Maybe she always lost time, even before the lethargic sorrow—the yawning emptiness seeping like ice into her bones—made it snow.
Maybe she's always been caught between the warmth of the rainbows and the cold of the snow, twirling through the hail and the thunder, chasing away the rain.
Maybe Pepa has been her only friend and her worst enemy forever.)
Grief is a wound. There are different reactions to the burn of its festering ache, different battles to wage against the storm on the horizon. Sometimes it's snow. Other times, it's a tornado. Occasionally, a drought.
More often than not, though, it's a hurricane. That, Pepa can work with.
(Since she was a child, there was comfort to be found in knowing the world could not overlook her if she poured hail upon them. They could not forget her if her anger drowned them, if her sorrow froze them, if only her contentment could thaw them to salvation.
She did not want to be alone with the things in her chest, so much bigger and wilder than her, growing like weeds in her brain. She could not stand their whispers as they encroached upon her day in and day out, taking all the color from her world, leaving her with monotonous blurs of lost time that turned to lost years.
Pepa could not stand for the one color in her life to be fiery red, splattering upon her gaze when she least expected, when a slight stumble sent her heart into a rampage.
She needed something more, something else. She needed to be seen. She needed to be heard.
When she opened her door, she was heard, alright. It is difficult for your woes to go ignored when they now trouble the entire world.
Somehow, it didn't seem as wonderful as she had imagined.
Somehow, the more time passed, the sadder it made her.
Somehow, forcing them to care was worse than them not caring at all.)
Pepa is not a fountain of comfort. Most of what was not drowned by her youth escaped her in Bruno's clutches, and what was left was showered upon her family. It was the best she could do, though it was not much.
(She could not heal them. In fact, she was quite adept at hurting them.
How many times had Dolores heard her cry? How many awful, awful things had she heard during the blizzards of lost time? How many times had Camilo changed into every shape in the world and done every trick, no matter how dangerous or humiliating, just to get Pepa to smile when the snow began to harden? How many times had Antonio been comforted by Felix and Camilo because Pepa didn't have the faintest clue how to keep her clear skies? How many moments of their lives had she missed while trapped inside her room, encased in a cocoon of pale cold?
The answer was simple. As many times as her own mami had been trapped inside her own head and the horrors she saw there, clutching a wedding ring and a unity candle like a miracle.
Her miracle.
Their miracle, in due time. Even though it never really felt like it.
Maybe Pepa got it from her mother. Somehow, that made it worse.)
Pepa does not need to comfort the people she is sent to. She does not need to express her deepest sympathies and listen to their woes, wipe their tears and soothe their cries, hold them and tell them all will be alright. If they wanted that, they would ask for Julieta. She is gentle in ways Pepa could only ever hope and pray to be, like she was born looking for the recipes to bring about peace and serenity.
Pepa cannot provide what she has never known. It is impossible to help them find peace, to lay them down in a pool of serenity, when she roils in turmoil like it's a tango.
She doesn't need to, though. Sympathy is not what they seek. They do not want her tenderness. They do not want her tears.
They want her misery, bone-deep and real, and they want the storms beneath her skin. They want the crackling electricity in her veins and the hail in her lungs and the fury in her gut. They want the hurricane building in her heart, rising and falling with every pump, like the tide is contained in the muscle. They want the gray skies and the cold seeping through the walls, the lightning splitting trees and mountains in half and the water flooding the town.
They want what only Pepa can give and then some, and she is happy to provide.
(Not really.
Pepa is happiest with her soft drizzles and her rainbows, the ones she doesn't get very often. It feels like cheating to wallow in her misery to make another feel better about theirs. It feels wrong to find fulfillment in loss.
She wants peace. She wants something other than carnage in the hole that fuels every snow.
She wants to be heard not because of what will happen if she is not, but simply because of what could happen if she was.)
There is comfort in knowing the world rages along with you, that the sky cries the tears burning down your face, that when you scream the winds do, too. There is comfort in knowing your world is ending and so Pepa will bring the world ever so closer to collapse, even if only for a moment. There is comfort in knowing you are not alone. There is comfort in knowing there is a storm with your name on it ravaging your home and that, someday, you might be able to look back on it and feel something other than fury and loss.
Pepa knows this. She knows it well. She is the storm and she is the rage and she is the person crying for help in the middle of it.
She has been for long enough that it is comforting to let the sky wail for someone other than herself.
Sometimes they send Agustín to play the piano while the last breaths are drawn and the cries begin. Soft, languid notes, sometimes melancholy and sometimes not, sometimes nostalgic and sometimes lost. There is heart in every key, in the arch of his spine and the dedication in the line of his shoulders. There is quiet even as he plays, gentle sounds that soothe the soul, if not the heartache.
(Agustín is prone to accidents. Half the blood that has been bled in these mountains has been his. This will not change until he is dead. He doesn't particularly care, really, because pain has its perks and most of them are a direct result of the fact that a life without pain is a life where there is often no meaning.
He is not a magical man. He never will be. He's not omniscient, either.
But there is magic in his fingertips and the way he can feel the music before he hears it, and that is worth every crimson drop his wife cannot give him back.)
Mirabel is with him more often than not, sitting by her father's side and embroidering gifts for the mourning. There is always a kind, comforting word ready to unfold from her tongue and gently knock your world back on its axis, even when it has been sideways for longer than you could stand. There is her mother's kindness in her sad eyes and her father's fiery certainty in her brows. There is hope and courage in her smile.
It is hard not to find some measure of comfort in the tapestries of happy families she hands the weeping, when she does it so gently.
There are few constants in life, though they may seem like many. There is life, there is death, there is joy, there is pain. There are people. There are a thousand things that all amount to very little. There are few true constants you can rely on with certainty.
One of them is that, where the dead are, Camilo Madrigal is sent for a visit at once.
He's not like the family members of his that visit those on their deathbeds. He isn't a storm harnessed between skin and bones como su madre[13]. He isn't peace's devotee and guardian angel like tía Julieta. Nor is he the picture-perfect gardener Isabela. He's not Mirabel and her everyday miracles, he isn't Abuela and her endless history, he is not tío Agustín and his bleeding heart.
He's wild the way storms and cunaguaros[14] are. Mischievous, walking the tightrope between daydream and nightmare, forever on a trapeze between what he could be and what he is. He's a torrent of trouble and a splatter of chaos wherever he goes, a walking circus compacted into an ever-shifting smile.
He will not stop until he makes you laugh. He'd burn himself to the ground for a good joke.
He's a clown, an actor, toeing the line between honesty and deceit in the most innocent of manners.
(Camilo's fake it till you make it in a can, a person perpetually distorted into a funhouse mirror, and he's been faking for long enough to know that the last time he didn't was when Mirabel and him slept in the same room. They were best friends, then, two halves of a whole with forever in the horizon; they'd called themselves twins, double-trouble, a giggling pair of mischief and curls and doe eyes.
And then he opened his door into an ever-changing mass of reflections, and hers had turned into dust between her fingers.
He got a gift and she did not, and nothing was ever the same afterwards.
Camilo tried to make her smile afterwards. He turned into everyone he knew and every character he'd ever made up and he made new ones, too. He made a fool of himself and he spilled his guts, he made promises and he made offers, he begged and he bargained.
All he got out of her were tears.
He didn't surrender. He continued for days and days and days, and the issue was that he was trying to help and he was going about it in all the wrong ways, reminding her everyday that he had what she had been denied.
It had come to a head, one night. She had said something, though what, he couldn't remember. Or, rather, she didn't remember and he wasn't going to remind her, and so they'd both forgotten, for all intents and purposes.
Except he'd never really forget, because that was the first time he faked a smile and the first time he didn't call her Mira when he said goodnight. It was the first time he said his favorite lies— I'm fine, it's okay —and went to sleep with a heavy heart.
He woke with tears soaking his pillow.
After that, he never stopped lying.)
Fakers aren't the right people to have by your side on the day nobody wants to see arrive.
(Camilo's the best liar in town.
The most solicited boy on their mountains, called to every house in the Encanto so he could slip into someone else's skin. Always ready with a smile on his mouth and a witty line on his tongue, slipping through people's grips like water, blending into every surrounding and quickly finding his footing in every situation. Iridescent like a pearl and fractured like a prism, with so many facets that even he forgot which was which.
He was fast to grow, though, fast to become essential to their community. He was small, but Abuela said honoring their Encanto and earning its miracle was the most important thing in their lives. She said they had to devote themselves to the task, that they were responsible for the well-being of the town, that they could always work faster, try harder, do better.
Camilo sat and he watched and he grew, learning that to be himself was to be a liability and to be flexible was to be useful. From then on, it was a slippery slope of putting people together before they'd even realized they'd begun to fall apart, of saying the right things at the right time in the right skin.
It didn't matter who he was, but who he pretended to be and how good he was at it.
He was the best.
A genius in the art of humanity, if only because he lived in their skin more than in his. He was a quick study in all its intricacies, a vault of information, a curious scavenger.
A faker.)
The fact of the matter is, however, that there is nothing insidious about Camilo's antics. He isn't cruel and he isn't devious, he isn't selfish and he isn't self-serving. He doesn't use people. He doesn't discard them.
Rather—Camilo is kind. Blisteringly kind, like sunbeams upon bare skin, flushed red and cracking with pain. The type of kind that landed him in many a fight he could not win with the kids in town before he was able to grow thrice as tall and twice as big in seconds to fight them off, just so they wouldn't touch a hair on Mirabel's head. The one that meant that he would make everyone that ever broke Dolores's heart pay.
He is kind enough that he'd make the grumpiest people in town smile even when they made him cry at night. Kind enough that there wasn't a single person he had yet to forgive, even if more than one had blamed him for something he hadn't done, simply because his papi once said that was a good way to be.
Kind enough he has spent every day of his life being told he wasn't enough, that he wasn't wanted for who he was, that he needed to be someone else—and never resented anyone for it.
Kind enough to hold someone's hand and smile at them with the face of the person they love most in the world, the person they had to see go, and pretend it doesn't kill him to have to watch the lights blink out of someone else's gaze.
The first time, he is twelve and he doesn't know what he's doing. It's an accident, really, as much as anything that happens to the bearers of a miracle can ever be an accident. It's a knee-jerk reaction, as instinct as pure as the light in Antonio's eyes; something embedded deep in his veins, burrowed in his chest, says, help them. Make them happy. They'll leave soon. They don't have a lot of minutes left.
Make them count.
(He has spent every single second of his life since receiving a gift memorizing the behavior of every single person he knows. He has spent every moment trying to work faster, try harder, do better.
Making it count is all he knows and he's starting to think it's his gilded cage.)
He reaches into the depths of his memory, mercury currents he wades through warily, trying to find within it an answer to his queries. It's easy; la señora Valeria is a widow, having lost her husband before Camilo was even born and her daughter three years ago. She is kind, sharing her jam with everyone in town and always offering lemonade to the children that walked past, always ready to lend a helping hand, always content to see others' happiness.
(Her house had been an empty graveyard for long enough that Camilo disliked its halls, and maybe that's exactly why he spent plenty of his time there, keeping a woman who had lost it all company. He had drank her aguapanela[15] and told her jokes, listened to her stories and her nostalgia and her grief, the same grief in Abuela, the same cold loss in mami.
He learned that her husband had been a good man with one too many scars, and she had been a simple woman with one too many losses. He had carved wood into beautiful, intricate shapes that did not bring anyone any pain. She, who came from a long line of bakers, had memorized every single recipe she had ever been taught with obsessive dedication and recreated every dessert to perfection.
They had been broken people with plenty of love to go around, and then they'd had their very own miracle between the mountains of one.
Her daughter's name was Sofía. A dancer. Wide-eyed and bubbly, with all the light life had stolen from her parents, with all the joy and the dreams and the whimsy. With all the hope.
She cracked her skull open during a fight after a performance in town. It happened too fast and they called for tía Julieta too late. There was nothing she could do with a body, not when its heart did not beat and its lungs did not breathe.
Sofía had died in her favorite dress, layers of burgundy and patterned red camellias, with ribbons woven into her hair and her makeup running down her cheeks.
Valeria had not said anything else that day.)
It is not difficult to settle into a skin as unfamiliar as it is familiar, golden-brown skin and dark brown hair arranged tightly at the back of his head, dangling onyx earrings and long, filed nails. Green eyes and bushy brows. Petite feet, delicate hands, small shoulders and long legs. Her father's grin and her mother's dimples. Heavy skirts and long, flaring sleeves.
Burgundy and camellias.
Camilo waltzes in as a woman's child, a child that she hasn't seen for years, laughing and smiling and bursting with sunshine the way Sofía always was, like all the stars in the sky were burning in the constellations of her freckles. Her laughter is raucous, somewhere between snorting and tinkling bells. Her smile feels easy and comfortable, tugging at his borrowed face in the most familiar of ways.
Dancing is easy in this body, and he makes every careful step carefree, makes sure la señora Valeria never sees the doubt before every move and how they burn against his soles even through the shoes.
He is an entertainer. A clown. He'd burn himself to the ground for a good show.
He spreads his arms, then, black lace and patterned flowers, bangles clattering at his wrists, skirts swishing against his ankles as he spins to a stop before Valeria.
(From the corner of his eye, his abuela has turned purple with fury, eyes wide and hard and fists tight by her side. His mami has gone pale with terror, a dark cloud hovering over her head and twisting into ominous shapes, the first drops of rain beginning to patter against the rubber of her dress. Tía Julieta has gone stiff with horror, pressing her hands over her mouth and—
Ah.
He knows that look.
Tía Julieta is looking at him the exact same way she did the first time Mirabel declined playing with him and he smiled through the crack in his voice as he said that was fine.
He doesn't look at them, though.)
Camilo stares straight at Valeria, trying to keep his chest from stuttering, even as his shoulders convulse with lack of oxygen. His cheeks feel sunburnt with the exertion, throat burning softly, but he keeps his arms wide open and his body poised like a statement.
(Sofía was a dancer. Her body was her language. Her mother knew that.
Her mother spoke it and Camilo knows it, because he had seen it in her eyes when she said her daughter danced like she was born for it.)
The recognition doesn't settle into Valeria's eyes so much as it crashes through them with all the violence of impossibility. Tears form like pearls in her dull green gaze, a gasp turning into a cough in the dry tunnel of her throat, and she's pushing herself up on her elbows and trying to scramble into a sitting position before Camilo can blink.
(Mami makes a choked sound, the cloud thundering softly, but nobody intervenes.)
Camilo squeaks in horror, a sound that comes out tiny and panicked, hands fluttering this way and that as he presses her back down gently.
"Ay, mami, no, don't overdo it," he says hurriedly, a frown tugging at his features. "It's just me, no?"
Valeria stills for a moment, looking at the likeness of her daughter with a wide, tearful gaze, full of sorrow and love and amazement and loss—and finally the tears spill over, waves of pure relief washing over her tired features. She throws her arms around Camilo with surprising strength, crushing him to her chest in a trembling embrace, and though he grunts, he doesn't hesitate to return it, rubbing gentle circles into her back.
"Ya, ya[16], I'm here now," he assures, this voice he's only ever heard before in passing and in Valeria's recounts quivering through his throat.
"It's you," Valeria sobs. "Ay, mi Sofí, como te he extrañado[17]."
(She had been a very lonely woman. Camilo had tried to rectify this. It had taken him a remarkably short period of time to realize the impossibility of the task.
He never did give up trying, though, even when it made him feel as cold as his mami's snowy spells.)
He softens, something hot in his eyes as he whispers, "Me, too."
(Valeria weeps and weeps and calls her daughter's name like it's the only prayer she still remembers. It's a possibility. The thought haunts Camilo.)
They talk for hours upon hours. About childhood memories Camilo stumbles through with remarkable finesse, about a dead father and a dead husband that Camilo has never grieved for, about an art he has only ever loved in turns. It's not easy, not exactly; it's tricky and nerve-wracking and Camilo is halfway certain he'll be sick. But it's familiar, too, the charade and the play-acting and the laughter.
Camilo does everything Valeria wants, the perfect little doll, becoming the daughter the woman had lost the same way he became the cousin Mirabel couldn't quite stand to look at anymore; agonizingly, painstakingly. Lonely, too.
He becomes what the woman needs most with seamless precision, giving her last hours the color that Isabela's flowers had not been able to give her back. The light tía Julieta had been unable to restore in that wrinkled face. There is hope in her eyes, green as moss and just as clean.
It'd been a gamble, a reckless one, but it pays off.
(Camilo did the impossible and made dying bearable by virtue of pretending to be something he was not. Funny, how that's what he did best, how it comes as easy as breathing does to him these days. How he was born to be someone else, same as tía Julieta was born to help everyone else.
He wonders if he'll always be the best liar in town. If he'll always have to earn smiles and trade skins and fake grins. If he's nothing more than a harlequin.
He discards the thought.)
It works.
He sits there and he talks and he smiles. He twirls around the room and puts flowers in his hair and weaves her a flower crown she dons with an indulgent smile, the same she wore every time she talked about Sofía. He laughs. He holds her hand.
He does not cry.
He listens to her last words, instead, attentively. He feels her grip begin to go limp and gently squeezes back, cupping her frail hand between both of his small ones. He watches the stars blink out of her eyes. He watches her chest stutter.
He forces himself to maintain the comforting curve of his faint smile, the gentle nudge of his gaze.
He feels her fingers twitch around his once, twice, and then go loose. Go still. All of her goes still. Her smile is gone. Her green gaze is duller than it ever has been, glazed over as it is.
(She looks happier than she ever has before.)
Slowly, silently, Camilo gently puts her hand down over her chest to join the one that had been there since he walked in. He adjusts her blanket. He fixes the flower crown, brushing a stray gray curl behind her ear.
Gently, with fingers he keeps steady, he closes the woman's eyes, digits becoming longer but nonetheless smaller than that of her daughter. Her dress lightens back into his trousers and shirt, her bangles smoothing out into the bracelets Antonio had made for him with Mirabel's help. The weight of her earrings leaves him, as does the tightness of her sandals around his ankles, the pressure of the dress against his abdomen.
His curls loosen back into place, falling into his eyes in a way Sofia's hair had not, in a way Valeria probably would not have liked. The flowers join the bed of its peers on the floor.
Camilo reaches into the garden Isabela has made out of the bedside table and its drawers, gently assembling a bouquet of Isabela's crimson camellias and pressing it into the Valeria's grip softly, hands curled over wet stems.
She had liked those. Had said time and time again that they reminded her of her daughter, with the embroidery on her sweeping sleeves and wide skirts. She said she wished she would've grown them outside instead of the roses.
He wonders who’ll water those, now.
(Her last words were, "I love you. Let's make tres leches[18] when I wake up, okay?")
Gentle fingers settle on his shoulder as the seconds pass and his silence does not lift, a touch so full of static as to be unforgettable. It tickles, a sharp shock against his shoulder blade, but he doesn't mind it enough to flinch from it. He doesn't mind much, really, even as the room grows colder, the soft chill of the wind warning him of the cloud's expansion.
(Out of the corner of his eye, he can see his Abuela frown, not with the previous disapproval, but rather with concern. It curls her mouth downward, the lines of her face setting deeper. She looks so much harsher. She looks so much older.
Valeria's just a couple of years older than her. Was. Was just a couple years older.
Camilo blinks, staring at the camellias. He can almost taste Julieta's worry in the back of his tongue, can almost see the tightness of her tired smile. He could summon it to his own face right now, if he wanted to.
Oddly enough, the thought makes his stomach churn.)
Camilo presses his small hand over his mother's elegant fingers, her skin cold and her wedding band colder still, even as the static carries over harshly. He doesn't flinch.
His mami's fingers twitch under his as he turns around.
Camilo offers up his widest smile, scrunched up nose and wrinkled eyes and dimples. "She looked happy, don't you think?"
His mami's face crumples, the porcelain features falling into disarray as distress sinks into every line, a flush spreading over her freckled cheekbones. Camilo watches with wide eyes as tears bloom in her green gaze, one of her hands coming to cover her mouth as the other cups Camilo's cheek softly.
"I'm sorry, mijo[19]," she mumbles, voice cracking as a few tears spill over.
The cloud spills its deluge silently, soft peals of snow beginning to drop into their hair and clothes in a slow declaration.
(Camilo's heart drops to his feet and then further down. He hates the snow. The rain, the thunder, the hurricanes, everything beyond and in-between—he can take it, happily and without sweating. But the snow is different. The snow is relentless. The snow is frigid.
The snow is slow and it's patient and it always, always wins.
The snow means mami doesn't leave her room for days. It means Camilo can't make her smile for the first day after she comes back out, if he's lucky. It means he'll be cold and lonely and his room will get...weird.
He hates the snow.
The snow is too familiar for comfort.)
Julieta's smile caves in over his mother's shoulder, her eyes squeezing shut like she's in some sort of pain. Abuela looks at Camilo strangely, like it's the first time she's ever met him, like she has never seen him before, like he has done something that has fundamentally changed the trajectory of the world.
Her mouth twists unhappily and, at once, he can see the same mournful void mami carries with her during the snowy spells in Abuela's eyes.
Tears burn in Camilo's eyes, apologies piling on his tongue, so many that they feel like a barrage ready to burst and spill out until they drown them all. His mouth opens in an inhale full of distress before he begins—
But his words are smudged into his mother's waist as she draws him into her side, wrapping her arm tight around his shoulders and rubbing at his bicep gently.
With a start, Camilo realizes he's gone stone cold, body beginning to shiver as his breath fogs up in pale little clouds. His arms settle around his own waist, trying to rub warmth back into himself as quickly as possible, before he catches a cold on the walk back to Casita.
The snow does not stop. It does not speed up, either, nor does it slow down. It just continues its gentle sprinkle, matching the tempo of Pepa's tears, as silent and as light as she is.
Camilo considers filling the silence. Desperately reaches into his mind for something to say, something that will make things right again. Something to make mami smile again.
But there is nothing. His voice seems to have deserted him, stuck in the yellow folds of his mother's gown, and the more he tries to find it, the deeper it retreats. He can't stop it. He can't change it.
The snow is unstoppable. It's patient. And it’s won again.
(As they walk past Valeria's neighbors, her late sister-in-law's husband and his son, crying in the comedor[20] as tía Julieta and Abuela quietly deliver the news, Camilo has a premonition.
He is the best liar in town. The most troublesome man in town. He is fake it till you make it in a can. He is kind. He loses to the snow no matter what.
He makes the dying bearable when nothing else is.
This will keep happening.
And the weight of it terrifies him.
He keeps smiling all day long.)