Disclaimer: I do not own Encanto. This story is not for profit.


Chapter 18

October 28th

Family Dinner

The evening was mild, so dinner was had outside in the plaza. The villagers seemed to enjoy making every night a party, celebrating the hard work being done on the Madrigal home and the survival of the Encanto with no miracle to protect them.

Abuela gathered everyone for dinner. "Good evening, everyone. Please, tell me about your day. Let us start this time with Pepa. Pepa?"

"Aside from the stupidity of the Padre thinking he can ask everyone in the village to be nice to Bruno and it will magically happen, I'm fine," Pepa said.

Julieta looked surprised. "Aren't you glad Padre Agudelo intervened?"

"I think it will make it worse," Bruno said as he served himself salad. A rat popped out of his sleeve and stole a chunk of tomato. "Not to mention the effect it had on Antonio. I think the man's a menace. And I'm aware of the irony that he's declared in the past that I'm the menace. You know what they say: whenever you point your finger at someone, there are four fingers pointing back at you. That's four-fifths, so 80%. I'll accept being 20% of the menace, but only if he admits to being the other 80."

"He did imply that you look like a vagabundo," Camilo said.

Bruno flicked his hand. "Oh, that. I do look like a vagabundo. No, that wasn't what was insulting." He took a bite of salad. "What was insulting was going over my head and asking God to forgive them, as if that's going to make it okay with me."

"Brunito," Abuela said.

Bruno shook his head. "No. No way. Forgiveness as to be earned, and as of yet, no one has done anything to earn it."

"But you've been working with the other men of the village so well," Julieta said.

"Yeah, with my family standing right there. That doesn't count, Julieta. A-And with me not having my Gift anymore. A-And besides, what happens if none of you are right there to catch it? I'm not safe around these people."

Bruno's declaration seemed to cast a pall over the table.

"This isn't something that can be fixed overnight," Mirabel said. Everyone stared at her, but she continued. "We're talking about years of abuse here."

Abuela's brow contracted in concern, and there was a flicker of panic behind her eyes. "Abuse? Abuse is such a strong word, Mirabel."

"Strong words for strong situations," Mirabel countered. "The word abuse exists for a reason: to describe when one person has so much power over another, and instead of using that power wisely, they use it to harm."

Abuela flinched and inhaled sharply, her hand flying to the pendant around her neck that held Abuelo Pedro's picture.

Mirabel gestured with her fork, frowning. "The villagers were granted all the power over Tio Bruno, because in your eyes, the miracle was a precious gift that needed to be bought. Hard work, and not the grace of God, maintained the miracle. But if that were so, then the miracle would never have left us. I'm sorry, Abuela, but your theory has to be wrong. Dios el padre did not want us to pay for the miracle with hard work. I can believe that He wanted us to share the bounty of our miracle with our community, but what happened is that we became at the mercy of the community. And Tio Bruno suffered. We have all suffered from this, in different ways and in the same ways." Grappling with Bruno's powers of prophecy and starting to see the sense of Casita falling pulled on Mirabel's defeated sense of atheism. She saw glimmers of a mind behind the seeming chaos. But that mind was surely at odds with Abuela's way of thinking. "The villagers were allowed to hurt Tio Bruno for nothing."

Absolute silence met her, a cocoon of silence despite the villagers around them at a distance talking, laughing, eating, dancing, playing instruments and singing. All it felt detached from la familia Madrigal.

She took a deep breath and lowered her fork. "And Tio Bruno can't be rushed. And he shouldn't be rushed. Because these are his feelings. Working together on a single project, having a single sermon aimed their way, isn't going to change how Tio Bruno feels. You might all move on, the village might move on, but the person who can't move on is Bruno. Because there's no healing yet. He still has a cracked heart from what they did to him."

Her revelation spilled out of her, and she couldn't, and wouldn't, stop it. "Like Casita's cracked heart. And her cracked heart killed her. Casita witnessed so much damage that this family did to each other that she died. She died of the heartbreak. She loved all of us equally, but we couldn't love each other."

Mirabel placed a hand over her heart. "And I am not above or exempt from what I'm talking about. None of us are, except Antonio." Antonio was rubbing his eyes with one fist, trying not to make any noise as he cried. "I loved Mamá and Papá and Luisa and Antonio, and though the pain of being rejected was immense, I loved you too, Abuela, but I couldn't bring myself to love Isabela until it was too late to save Casita, and I feel as if I don't know you, Tia Pepa, Tio Félix, Dolores, Camilo. Casita split apart because we're all split apart, and that broke her heart beyond repair. An entirely new house, a house built on love, is being built. But who is laying the bricks and the tiles? Who laid the foundation? We all need to help each other, and that means confronting the villagers on Tio Bruno's behalf and not letting them do to him what they were doing to him before. We must be strong for each other. Loving the Encanto does not mean being abused by the Encanto."

Antonio nodded, putting on a small, determined smile. Camilo looked at Mirabel squinting, as if he didn't recognize her. Isabela was breathing deeply, but smiling a real smile, a sharp smile. Dolores' brow was furrowed. Luisa's lower lip was quivering. Abuela stared at Mirabel as if she could see inside of Mirabel. Bruno looked queasy and unfocused. The others' heads were bowed.

Isabela rolled her shoulders. "If you're done, sis, I want to speak."

"Sure," Mirabel said, aware that Isabela was asking her permission and not Abuela's.

Isabela swept her gaze around the table. "We are not our Gifts. The candle's flame went out, and we're still here. And it might surprise you to know the village likes us better when we're ourselves. No one likes being talked down to, and the villagers felt like they were being treated like infants. It's time for everybody to grow up. We don't want the bad old times of malaria and soldiers and crop failure. But the villagers forgot so much of what they knew, or gave up what they used to do, because of us. The ranchers want to herd their own donkeys. The architects want to build more bridges! People want to grow flowers for their homes without feeling like they're competing with me. And these are only the examples I know about. We need to let go of holding on too tight to the village. As long as we maintain power over the village because we feel superior, we aren't a part of the village. And that's so sad, because we're missing out on our own social lives. We need time to make friends and have fun. We need time to be 'un-ceptional'." She let out a small laugh. "What if I want to be normal? What if I like it that my Gift is gone, because I got so sick of being nothing but my Gift? Those flowers covered up a woman, a woman who wants to be human. I want to stop being an idol."

Abuela looked at Isabela with a tired expression. She had probably never expected her perfect grandchild to speak out against her, and definitely not so eloquently.

Mirabel noticed that Isabela swept under the rug her initial grief at losing the magic she'd only begun to experiment with, but she thought that was wise, since Abuela would have used that to ignore the rest of what Isabela said.

Camilo's voice cracked as he said, "Abuela, I can't find myself if I'm too busy being other people."

"I had no peace as long as I was forced to constantly be vigilant for others' sake," Dolores said. She spoke almost at a normal volume now, apparently adjusting to no longer finding her own voice painful due to its close proximity to her ears. "I have been doing so much thinking, because now I can hear myself think. The only person in the Encanto I never heard after I received my Gift was me." Tears welled up in her eyes, but her expression was otherwise stoic.

"Have all of your Gifts negatively affected you?" Abuela asked. Deep lines of raw pain and shock appeared on her face.

"If it weren't for Julieta's cooking being magical, I would have given myself hypothermia and died a long time ago," Pepa said, raising her head. "I keep raining and snowing on myself. What do you think that does to a person, Mamá? I have been miserable, soaking wet, more often than I have been dry and warm, since the day I turned 5 years old. And I have to worry about electrocuting myself or others. And the hurricanes! I'm sick of all the weather responding to my mood. Having the weather be like this even though I'm angry and frustrated is so freeing!" She gestured at the sky. "Not a cloud! Here I am, devastated to hear what the children have been going through, and I haven't rained on anyone. I've woken myself up countless nights from a nightmare, raining on myself! I can sleep through the night without having to wade out of a soaked bed and try to get the rain to go away and change into a fresh nightgown and try to go back to sleep, knowing I might start raining on myself again."

Abuela looked to Julieta. "And you?"

"I think more than anything else my days have been numb," Julieta said. "I turned into a machine that makes arepas. I am so sorry, Mamá. I just started feeling more and more alone. I didn't speak up because the Encanto needed me. But I lost my inner life. Even now, I feel numb. I can tell you what happened to me, but I can't feel anything. Pepa is all emotion, and I am all action. I feel like – I feel like I'm not even real inside."

Bruno picked apart an arepa in his hands, his shoulders hunched, watching his sisters and mother nervously. "I-I-I don't even wanna talk about mine. What would seeing horrible things, things you know you can't stop, every day, to everyone you've ever cared about or-or loved, do to you? Mamá, I want you to think about what it would feel like to have known Papá would die and not be able to – able to – to do – a damn thing."

Abuela's remaining stoicism cracked, revealing fully the rawness of grief underneath. She wept. "Why would God do this?"

"God didn't," Mirabel said softly. "We did it to ourselves. He gave us blessings and we turned them into curses. I think He took the Gifts away at last because we had suffered too much with them. They no longer did more good than harm."

"But He had to have known this would happen!" Abuela cried out, sobbing.

"There's a lot I don't understand about God," Mirabel said. "Maybe, like the vision of me, showing the cracks and then the cracks disappearing, we had two futures. By everyone's actions, I'm sorry, we chose the worse one."

Abuela sobbed even louder, first into her hands, and then into a handkerchief, hiding her face.

"But God is mercy and God is love, and I do believe He loves this family," Mirabel said, despite the fact that she didn't feel connected to God at all or even sure He really existed. But if He does exist, then… "He struck down the soldiers and helped you build the Encanto and gave us magic to try to protect us in this new Garden of Eden. It's just that we brought the trauma of the past in with us, and we couldn't keep from abusing each other. So we have to try all over again. Because we don't have to be perfect. We are allowed to be human. And God loves us anyway."

Stunning Mirabel, everyone climbed out of their seats, gathered around Mirabel, and hugged her and each other. She ended up in the middle of a family hug. She hugged everyone she could reach. This was the first time she had ever been the center of attention in a good way.