Chapter 19

MAMA: Mirabel where are you?

MAMA: Mirabel answer your phone

MAMA: Mirabel please

MAMA: Mirabel just tell us where you are

PA: Mirabel, where did you go? You haven't answered your texts, you're not answering our calls and we are all worried sick about you. Please just tell us where you've gone

TIA PEPA: Answer your phone

TIA PEPA: It's late, it's dark, it's storming

TIA PEPA: We are looking everywhere for you

TIO FELIX: Come back to us, Mirabel. Everything will be okay, but you need to come back

"You… you can't hide here forever."

Mirabel keeps her face against her knees.

There's several ways she could respond to that.

She thinks of saying, I sure can.

She thinks of saying, Leave me to die in peace.

She thinks of saying, Why not, that's what you've been doing the last ten years.

She thinks of Bruno's face were she to say any of those things to him.

So instead she says, without lifting her head, "Watch me."

Silence. She can almost envision Bruno drawing back, probably twisting his hands or rubbing the side of his arm. She hears a curtain being shifted aside. "They're – they're all looking for you. I can see them. Down there. They're looking for you."

Mirabel presses her head harder into her leg. It's one of the few things she can feel, after Bruno had grabbed her and held her after she'd hurtled into his apartment. He'd bandaged her hands and arms where she'd held the metal candle holder and had wax splash over her, had washed her eyes of the hot ash that had gotten into it, cleaned the soot from where it'd drifted all over her hair and clothes, laid a hot cloth over her chest where the portrait frame had smacked into her, and given her something to dull the pain. The last is probably what's making her feel numbed down to her core.

Maybe if she exerts enough force, her kneecaps will wear through her skull. It's the only thing that will wipe the last few events from her brain.

The floor creaks near her. "Can you – do you want to sit over here?"

She doesn't want to do anything but stay in Bruno's apartment until she dies or her family forgets her, whichever comes first. So she keeps her head shoved against her knees, under the towel he gave her to dry herself off, on his chair which she's curled herself on, the same chair where she did all her homework, where she and Bruno would debate and create and come up with their stories.

How long ago that all seems.

A gust of breath being released. "Okay. Okay, um – come on. I mean – come here?"

He's not very good at being comforting, that's for sure. Nor is he very good at getting her off the chair – he certainly doesn't do anything besides halfheartedly touching her shoulder – and Mirabel has a feeling that if she were to stubbornly plant herself there, he'd retreat as he always does and leave her alone. Part of her wants to do exactly that.

But the other part of her, the part that aches for any kind of comfort, won't allow that. And it's that part which wins out. Which is why, when he tugs hesitantly at her arm again, she lets Bruno guide her off the chair and over to the sofa a mere five feet away. She has to lift her head then, he's not going to carry her, but she keeps her eyes closed, and feels, not sees, him adjust her glasses, which she'd pushed up when she decided to plop her face into her legs. She hears him move things aside, and then he's pressing her down to the sofa, where she proceeds to ball herself into the fetal position again.

Really, he might as well have left her on the chair for all the change this made.

The sofa moves under her, which means he's sitting by her, but he refrains from holding or touching her. Probably because he wouldn't know what to do. It's a good thing, because it means Mirabel can resume squashing face-planting and wallowing in self-pity.

Except she can feel Bruno shifting around – the sofa keeps changing position under her, so she knows he's working his way up to saying something. She desperately wants him not to. He'd spent the first few months of their visits adamantly refusing to say anything about his condition to her, so why is he now being so pushy with her?

After a few minutes, he asks, "Can you say something? Or, um, talk about it? About what happened after? I mean… tell me about it?" It all comes out in a rush, like he couldn't figure out which one to pick and so went with all of them.

"No." Yes. Actually, no. Maybe.

That silences him for a few seconds, makes him go very still.

Then: "Do you want to vent or do you want advice?"

What. It's so out of the blue that she actually lets out a teary snort. "Seriously." Lifts her head just barely. "Where did you – you found that off the Internet or something, didn't you."

"Yes," he says miserably. She can actually feel the sofa deflating under him.

Mirabel pushes her face back into her knees. "You're not every good at this."

"I know." Even more miserably.

Which just makes her feel more bad. On top of completely wrecking her family and their home, now she's hurting her tío's feelings.

The silence lengthens, until finally: "Can you tell me? Even just a bit?" Looks like for once, Bruno is not actively retreating from an uncomfortable situation. "It might – it might – make you feel better?"

That's unlikely, she thinks to herself. She says nothing, hoping he'll get the hint.

He sighs. "Okay. All right, then." He's silent for a few seconds, during which she imagines him wringing his hands. "Can I sit here?"

She shrugs. It's his sofa. His apartment, really.

So he sits there, refusing to move, and for a little while the only sound is the constant drumming of rain on the roof and the distant boom of thunder. Bruno's not holding her or hugging her or anything, so Mirabel thinks that it would be quite easy to ignore him, but for a man who has been hiding his existence from his own family for a decade, it's surprisingly hard to do so. His presence itself feels like a pressure against her, urging her to tell him what happened.

And maybe, maybe she does want to tell him.

He had told her the truth once, even thought it had clearly pained him to do so. She owes him that much.

And who else is there to talk to?

So after a moment, she leans in towards him – and almost topples over before he realizes what she's doing and hurriedly scoots over; apparently he'd been sitting farther from her than she thought. Once he has her – meaning once he's awkwardly wrapped an arm around her shoulders, muttering apologies for sitting so far away and then yelping and apologizing more when he so much as brushes against her bandages – she speaks. She picks up from when she disconnected the call, tells him everything Abuela said. Everything she said. The candle. The portraits. The fire. At some point she feels him remove her glasses and place them on the side of the sofa, but otherwise he's silent and still, letting her talk. Before long, there's wetness soaking her cheeks and the fabric of her jeans.

By the time she's finished, he's wrapped both arms around her, which is less comforting than it would seem, since one of them has to go around her knees and it's mashing her face into her own legs. Which, she supposes, is what she was doing anyway, but it's different when someone else is doing it to her. She's surprised he can understand her by this point, between her voice being muffled and the fact that she's crying.

"I just wanted to make my family proud," she whispers. "I didn't mean to hurt any of them."

Or maybe she had. Maybe Abuela was right. Maybe she, Mirabel, had been right so long ago when she thought everything was her fault. Maybe she had persuaded Isabela to buy that shop out of jealousy of her accomplishments, maybe she had pushed Dolores into Mariano's arms, maybe she had messed up Luisa and Camilo and Antonio out of her own selfish desire to make them... make them… make them like her. Not special and not talented and not wanted.

As if hearing her thoughts, Bruno grabs her arms, making shushing noises.

"I just wanted them to be happy," she says. Pleads, really, for understanding. Please understand me, I didn't mean it… "To be proud of me. I didn't think I'd… break them."

He presses against her. "Oh, Mirabel… you didn't hurt them. Or… I don't think you did." He's silent for a beat. "And – nothing you did could have broken them. The family… the family was broken already, I think." He rubs her shoulders, a bit rougher than is strictly comfortable, frenetic in his movements.

She leans in closer to him, finally daring to lift her face. Everything is blurry, but Bruno is close enough that she can see him, as she had guessed, twisting his fingers and looking around rather frantically. She's not sure why entirely – then he glances down and grabs at his own sweater and presses it to her face.

Does he not even have any tissues in his place?

"I messed everything up," she sniffles, as he attempts, clumsily, to wipe away her tears. The embroidery is rough against her cheeks. "Abuela was right, wasn't she? That it was… me. It was all because of me. Dolores will have to break up with Mariano. Isabela's life is ruined. Luisa is so confused. Camilo doesn't know what he's doing. You left because of me. And then Casita… Everything bad that's happened, it's because of me."

He grabs at her then with his other hand, and she feels the arm on her shoulders tighten painfully. "Don't say that," he says quietly. "Don't you ever say that. Just – just don't. Not you. You didn't. I don't – I don't believe you made anything bad happen. Not you, Mirabel."

She wipes her eyes, and notices, as her vision clears, as that his hands are raw in a way they hadn't been since she witnessed his anxiety attack, the skin scraped off his knuckles. That just makes her cry more. She'd gone into that dinner hoping, so badly, that Abuela would be happy with all the members of her family… that she'd finally look at Mirabel the same way she looked at everyone else… that she could tell them about Bruno living just across the street… that she could finally see Bruno look happy, the kind of happy she'd never seen when he was around her… that they'd all look at her the way they looked at Isabela and Dolores, Luisa and Camilo and Antonio…

But it hadn't worked, and she curls up against him, wrapping her own arms around his body and closing her eyes. He feels so skinny, but for once he's not trembling. She'd tried to take him back to their family, but now he's the only one she has left.

"I'm sorry I broke our family," she murmurs into his side. He squeezes her spasmodically. "I'm sorry I couldn't bring you home."

Bruno stiffens.

Slowly, he leans back. She feels him staring down at her.

Then he draws her back into the circle of his arms, rocking her like she's a child, pressing his face against hers, stroking her hair with a determination that she's never felt from it. And when she just cries some more, he gently kisses her forehead, and her cheeks, and the tip of her nose, still smoothing her hair, and there's an odd familiarity to it, though she has no conscious memory of him doing it to her before. Over and over he does it, like one of his rituals, as if he might rock away her guilt and her shame and her loneliness. She doesn't quite understand it beyond that, doesn't really know what he's doing or why he's doing it, but it she relaxes into it, into that feeling of being wanted, the feeling that her comfort is the most important thing on his mind.

And even when he stops he still holds her like she's his lifeline, or he's hers, still gently cards her hair with his fingers (which are bleeding, she recalls, but she doesn't care too much about that in the moment). By the end she's blissfully mindless with it, the memories of the disastrous dinner and her own shame tucked into some other corner of her mind, drifting on the waves of him soothing her.

It had to be past midnight when he finally ceases threading his fingers through her hair, stops rocking back and forth. "Okay," he says, drawing back slightly, "come on. Come on. You need to sleep."

She doesn't want to sleep – she doesn't want to do anything much at the moment, except sit there and let him continue to cradle her like she's a five-year-old in need of calming – but she lets him pull her upright without protest, and lead her to his bedroom. He takes her glasses with them, leaves them on the table. She didn't bring any of her own clothes, so she has nothing to change into, but she's merely damp by now, not drenched, so it's not too uncomfortable to kick off her sandals and slip beneath the covers. Once beneath them, Bruno sits on the bed, at her back. He puts a tentative hand on her shoulder.

This isn't so bad, really. Just her and her tío, living in exile in his apartment. Her chest aches with the thought of separating from the rest of her family, but at least there's one member here, one person who doesn't blame her for everything. She'll just live with him, she thinks drowsily to herself. She'll move in with him, and she can go drop out of school so that she won't have to see Camilo or Antonio. Bruno's smart, he can homeschool her until she graduates. She pictures her graduation with him, buying some cheap black robes and a cap and celebrating in his apartment. She could go to community college so she could stay close to him… get her driver's license with him in the car and not her pa… get a job nearby, and if it pays well, she could help him see someone to help with his anxiety… and so many other milestones… just him and her, the two outcast Madrigals, the two unwanted Madrigals…

Maybe she says something of this out loud, because he suddenly clenches her shoulder.

"Go to sleep," he says. "You sleep, Mira. I – I promise, things will be better in the morning."

MILO: were all looking for you

MILO: youre not at B's place or whatever r u

MILO: i know who he is mira dont make me tell mami and abuela

MILO: i swear ill do it

MILO: mira

MILO: mirabel

MILO: come on mira this isn't funny!

MILO: answer your phone!

TONIO: Mira

TONIO: Mira

TONIO: Mira

TONIO: Mira come back

DOLORES: Mirabel you better not be where I think you are

Bruno waits until Mirabel is asleep before leaving her bedroom.

He shuts the door when he's outside, holding himself rigid the entire way, not even knocking against the doorway or sprinkling some salt on the floor, because he doesn't dare wake her, not after everything she's been through. He dodges a crack in the floor when he gets outside.

And then the jitters fully take over and he starts to pace, tugging at his sweater.

I'm sorry I couldn't bring you home.

He's wearing a hole in the floor in his agitation. He can't do that, if it makes more cracks, he'll have to keep jumping, and if he keeps jumping, it'll make more cracks, and he'll have to dodge them and if he wakes Mirabel… He starts flipping his phone in his hands instead, but he misses it twice, and it makes the worst banging noise when he drops it and that will certainly awaken her, plus he's going to end up breaking the screen, and a broken screen is seven years bad luck, and they really don't need that.

So he puts it down, working very, very hard to keep it quiet, because even though the door is closed, Mirabel is just a few feet away, and she's tired, and emotionally drained, and still damp from the storm that's pounding against the roof, and he'd covered her up with a blanket but she might still get a cold, and if she got a cold it might become an illness, if it becomes an illness it might travel to her lungs, if it travels to her lungs she might get pneumonia, and absolutely none of this is helping him right now.

The rats squeak as he passes by them. Princesa, the most inquisitive, sits up, whiskers twitching, while her sisters huddle behind her. Andrea minds her own business, as usual. He ought to do something to reassure them, let them run along his shoulders, scratch their ears, but he can't even find the calmness in himself. There's certainly not enough of it for his friends.

I'm sorry I couldn't bring you home.

Why had she done that? Was that what she'd been doing all this time? How long had she been planning it? All those texts she had sent about how she was helping her sisters and cousins, the afternoons when she would fly into his empty apartment and delight over what she had done, spilling it out and looking up at him for approval, so much like the little girl he had left a decade ago… insisting that he listen to tonight's dinner… had it all been to work up to bringing him home?

How had he not noticed that?

And why would she do that? For him?

Did she truly miss him that much? Want him around that much? The worry-half of his brain insists on no, no, of course not, nobody in their right mind would want him around, why would they want him, they barely put up with him when he was there, it was why he left, it was better for everyone…

But everything else says yes, because she's Mirabel and all she's ever done is show an unrelenting kindness, even for him at his lowest, when he kept expecting her to get up and leave. All she's ever said is how much she wanted to help her sisters, her cousins, her family, him, putting herself at the bottom of her priority list every time. She's broken herself from her own family in a selflessly misguided attempt to help him, and it's all his fault, his fault, because he hadn't noticed and hadn't told her to stop, that it wasn't worth it, because all he's ever done is hurt his family and now he's hurt her and he wants to sink through the floor in horrified shame.

I'm sorry I couldn't bring you home.

His hands sting as he wrings them; he should put something on them. They scare him, what if he gets an infection, and he gets sick, and it becomes a fever, and then gangrene, and then, and then, and then… but most of all, what if Mirabel sees it and it scares her? He knows it scares her, he sees the way she reacts when she sees them, and it sickens him, it makes him want to shrivel up under her sight.

You are fifteen, he had told Mirabel. You are fifteen, you are fifteen, you are fifteen – and if he had been able to finish his sentence, if the thought of quenching Mirabel's happiness, her new-found purpose, hadn't felt like cutting his own heart out, he might have finished it with: you are fifteen years old, it is not up to you to help me, it is not up to you to fix this family. He is the grown-up here, he is her tío for God's sake, if it should have been up to anybody, it should have been up him, not Mirabel, barely more than a child herself, and he hadn't because he was too cowardly to be the adult, too blind to see what was so obvious, too selfish to tell her to leave because… because…

Because he had loved her visits. Loved seeing her sitting at his table almost every afternoon, as comfortable as if it was her own home. Loved listening to her talk about their family, starving for any scrap of information. Loved her.

It had been on the tip of his tongue to tell her to stop, to stop trying to solve every mess in their family. But when she had flown into his room, curls bouncing, glasses almost bobbing off her cheeks with pure exuberant joy, and declared that she had finally found her place in the family, she had finally figured out how to make them proud of her… how could he tell her to stop? How could he wipe that brightness from her? How could he speak his fears into existence and watch it turn someone else cold and dreadful? He would rather exile himself all over again than erase the smile from her face.

I'm sorry I couldn't bring you home.

And she was doing it for him. Everything she had done was to help him. For her wreck of an uncle who can't even walk down a street to talk to his own family. He was the one she had been trying to help all along.

And now she thinks she's at fault. Her, a teenager. It had been like a slap in the face, hearing her words – I messed it up. I broke the family. You left because of me. It was because of me. He wanted to scream at her then, to tell her no. No, how could it be her fault, how can she think that?

He knows why she thinks that. Because of him. Like a sickness, even his own self-hatred has infected her, because how many times has he thought that of himself? How often had he said it to himself to justify why he was hiding here? And now she thinks it too, like she's imbibed his wrongness by being around him, his inability to just fit in, to help, to be of use, but she can't, not her, never her. None of it's her fault but it was like she couldn't hear him, she was sucked too deep into the morass of her own despair, and oh, did he understand that.

And what he hated was how he could not pull her out of it, because he was always useless at that, useless Bruno, whose only way of doing anything was to sit there helplessly and try and try and try to convince her, to no use. Defective Bruno, bad luck Bruno, always making bad things happen, and this was the worst of them all, that all the blame that should have fallen on him has fallen on Mirabel, and it's not, it's not her fault. Somehow with all his stupid worries and nibbling anxieties, he had never foreseen that, because if he had, he would have dived into the nearest hole and never emerged rather than let Mirabel ever meet him.

Princesa scoots at Juana and Sofia, nudging them back into their hole; evidently they find his nervous energy just as wearing on them as it is on him. He hears the scritches of their paws in his walls, and then there's nothing left but the rainfall and his own footsteps on the floor.

He returns to the window, lifts the curtain again. Through the window, blurred with raindrops, he can see tiny pinpricks of light, scattered all across the street. One stays near the door of the Casita, the others are going to the buildings, venturing to the street corner, or down another block. He had heard Mirabel's phone buzzing incessantly before she silenced it, and knew why. It is past midnight and pouring rain, and still they are searching for her.

Whatever Mirabel thinks, her family does care for her. They do not blame her.

Nor do they know where she is. Only he knows.

And he is family.

Bruno straightens then, though his hands tremble, because he knows what he must do, if he only has the courage to go through it. He's known all along what he's had to do, he was just hiding himself from it, coward that he is. He ran away from the Casita rather than face his mother again. He refused to tell Mirabel about his condition because he was so afraid she would leave. Even when she returned, it was her who initiated the conversation, not him. Always, he had run away from his problems. But he cannot run away from this. It's far too late for him to ever rejoin the Madrigals, but it's not too late for Mirabel. Mirabel, who thinks her only option is to live with him; Mirabel, who had tried so, so hard to help him and only hurt herself in the process.

He won't let her be hurt because of him. Not again. Not ever.

He will help her. For once in his life, he will actually help her.

But he can't do it just by telling her it wasn't her fault. He'd said, over and over, so many times, and he'd seen her, he knew that it wasn't getting through to her, he knew that look because he'd seen it on himself so many times. He couldn't do anything, because he was not the one who could tell her that. There was only one person she would hear it from. Only one person who could actually reach her.

Now if only he can get his body to actually obey his brain.

That brings a bitter chuckle. If he could do that, all his problems would have been solved years ago.

When he finally has the phone in his hands, he flips through to his list of contacts. There's nobody there but Mirabel. He bought this phone after he left, and while he could have put in his family's numbers from memory, he had deliberately not done so – what kind of self-imposed exile would it be if he could text or call them whenever temptation beckoned him? And by now, he would assume that their numbers have changed, that the younger members, like Mirabel, have contacts he wouldn't even know.

But he remembers one. It's not a cellphone, she would never get one of those. And he's almost certain that the number would remain the same.

It seems to take a thousand years to type in the number. Or perhaps it is only a second. Time moves in dashes, one moment punching in the number to the phone, the next holding it to his ear.

The rings seem to go on forever. Maybe they do. He has some vague recollection of calling the number again. And again. And again.

Until at last, someone picks up. As soon as he hears her voice, his own dies to a croak, memories crowding in on him and pushing away any notions of speaking. He opens his mouth and nothing comes out.

The voice demands an answer. The very tone sets trembles all over his body; he's a kid all over again, looking up at for the approval that never comes, and he smacks himself on the skull to stop it, then again just for good measure. For God's sake, he's fifty years old and has been on his own for a decade, he can do this!

Silence. In a fury he rams his fist against his own head so hard he feels he might drive it through the bone and straight into his impotent brain, screaming at himself, so sick and tired of his broken mind – what the hell is he doing, what good is he if he can't even say hello for his own niece?

For whatever it's worth, the rage he aims at himself drives out the anxiety – for about two seconds. "Are you–" he starts to say, before his voice peters out again.

Do it! he shouts at his own worthless brain. Do it, do it, do something, just say something!

He thinks of Mirabel, sharing his lonely existence; he thinks of her walking through life without her family at her side; he thinks of her watching them as he does, never to be included.

At that, his voice cracks open.

"Are you still–" His voice breaks and he winces. Not even two seconds? He can't go two seconds without completely losing it? Come on, do something, say something. "Are you still looking for Mirabel? Do you – do you want to find her?" He waits for the response. "She's – she's – she's with – she's with me. I – I'll tell you… w-where to go."

LUISA: Mirabel, you need to tell us where you are

LUISA: Mirabel, come on

ISA: Mirabel, we've been searching all over. Mom is worried sick, Dad is terrified, Antonio keeps crying for you, and I don't think Camilo knows what to do with himself.

ISA: None of us blame you. Trust me. Please.

ISA: Just come back.