Miguel opened his eyes and saw Mamá Coco. She looked right at him, took his cheek, squeezed it. Smiled. Laughed a little.
"There you are, Miguel! Welcome home."
He fell face-first onto her lap and cried and laughed and lived. Miguel was finally, truly, back.
The rest of the day was an absolute panic. His mother heard him first and screamed, screamed like murder, and the rest of his family piled onto him and Dante like he would be swept up in the marigolds again. Miguel held tight to his Mamá and refused to let go, suddenly remembering after so many years how warm and wonderful a living body was. He missed it all so much, heartbeats and fabric and smells that were wet and fresh on his nose instead of wispy and dry and airy. He wouldn't budge from the sunlight shining through the window, so relieved to feel it searing his skin. All of the ogling his wings, the kisses and hugs, the shrieking and screaming in equal joy and terror went down right in Mamá Coco's room in front of her little wheelchair. He had so much to explain, everything to talk about, all while Dante was a plain brown dog at his feet happily wagging his tail.
The following days were a blur of motion. He ate like the hungry pinch in his stomach would never go away. He sunburned. He bathed for too long. He bumped his wings in every door and wall until he learned how to operate them properly. His Mamá and tías remade all his clothes so his wings would fit through them, and through all of it, people just kept coming to the shoe shop. Secrets didn't stay secret in Santa Cecilia unless they involved him playing guitar, apparently. Miguel made it work for him; he told everyone who asked about his wings to think of Héctor.
He told that story more often than he said the word "I". He spoke of Héctor and Imelda and Manny and Meche and Glottis and the Living Legends with their magic powers and massive wingspans. He lead the curious to places he saw on his long stays with Manolo, even when the De la Cruz fans cried and wailed and threatened that their hero would never do the things Miguel spoke of. It was impossible, they said. Baseless. A complete lie.
Miguel kept telling them, and evidence kept piling up. Coco's book. Miguel's testimony. Little reports buried by history. Inquisitive minds who dug just that little deeper into De la Cruz's version of events. Retracing Héctor's final steps, one by one, until at last… they found him.
They let Miguel see the bones. They were brittle and incomplete, lacking the life or the hair or the eyes of the Héctor he knew. But they were his.
The sight kept him up at night. Miguel never slept well, seeing his family living and unliving bursting into flowers if he slept too deeply. He never forgot LeMans' melting face or Lola's agonized whispers or the smothering inky water of the Edge of the World. Sometimes they were full-color memories of cold ship holds or burning blimps; sometimes they were just a half-second of searing fire. It never abated, nor did the constant letters from news people and investigators and… the school, demanding that Miguel resume going to class.
He almost wished he was still in the Land of the Dead if it meant he could avoid school another three years.
It was February when he received letters he wasn't expecting. Not all in February, just the first of them, but they arrived in the mail: pictures of living Manny, and Meche, sent separately by their own families. The more he spoke about the souls he met, the more pictures he got, some only hopefuls but others a perfect match. He made his own ofrenda for all of them, permanently installed in the little space in the roof where his shrine had been. His cousins were happy to help with upkeep, so long as he played guitar in the band they had formed.
It was the first time he could ever remember getting along with his cousins.
It was March when Mamá Coco passed on.
In a way, he couldn't be sad. He spent the funeral picturing how Héctor and Coco would meet each other and hug and be excited. Maybe Imelda would be there, and even if Miguel could never really separate her face from the fear she caused him for so long… he hoped she was happy too. She had a hard life and a hard death, and she deserved it.
Miguel grew fast. He was taller by June, and broader in the shoulders by July. He grew so fast that everything hurt, especially his knees but also his arms and his wings and his neck. His Papá did his best to try and keep him moving, to exercise away the pains, and in one warm week in August, he reached out to catch Miguel as he jumped up and over a table and missed. Miguel beat his wings four times and gained height with each beat. He could fly!
Then he got so hungry it distracted him and he fell on the roof.
Flying made him feel heavy and incredibly hungry, so he didn't do it often, but he could, and that was the amazing thing. People would buy shoes from the shop just so they could catch glimpses of him and his feathers. Eventually he just put out his guitar case and played for passerby, singing Héctor's songs and some of his originals and old standards that he played along with local mariachis. It made him some real money, money that he had no desire to spend. He had gone for so long with so little that everything else felt kind of silly and frivolous. By his own counting, he bought a lot of Coca-Cola.
Rosa at one point said he was probably part hummingbird, and Miguel couldn't really call her wrong. Sugary foods made him fly better. At least, that's what he told his Mamá.
Life was weird. He thought not being alive was weird, but no. Now that he was back, being alive was even weirder for how boring it was in-between. He just kept taking baths and eating breakfast and going to school (although his desk was in the back now which meant he could sleep, which was kind of great), even while his memories of the boring parts of unliving started to fuzz over. The important parts, the excitement and the joy and the violence, they all stayed. But the Rubacava spring in his little bed at the club, and the taste of the food at the Christmas fair, and the biting cold of the long hike to the End of the Line, they all started to fuzz away the more often he slept. He felt all right with forgetting at least a little, though: he'd written everything down, and by the end of the year, he'd have a new baby sister and a book deal.
Dia de Muertos was approaching, and his gut would twist whenever he reminded himself of it. Every day felt like just another notch counting down to Dia de Muertos, and he wasn't sure if it would be another absolute disaster that shook his life and rocked his little world, or something worse: a holiday where he and his family sat at the table, talked about old stories, and did nothing else.
If it was… he had a backup plan.
Because there on his shelf in his room sat his one prize from his time in the Land of the Dead: his black and green sugar skull, restored to full shape by Xibalba and tucked secretly into his hoodie all those nights ago. He had… touched it, to be technical, but he hadn't licked it, not a bit. He wasn't sure where it would take him, or how, and it scared him just a little to disappear from his living family again after three years apart.
But it was there, waiting for him, when he was ready.