Archive of Our Own ^beta

20 days later

—

Pepita has been absent since Miguel returned home.

Héctor catches Imelda looking out the window with eyes that dart past towers and gondolas and linger over corridors of air. When she draws the curtains closed, her shoulders rise.

She looks lonely, he thinks.

(was this what it was like — ?)

Alebrijes cross between worlds without rules. Héctor has studied their habits and concluded that most migrate for food. For all they are spirits sustained by magic, the instinct to feed remains strong even in the land of the dead—for the alebrijes. Héctor mostly sticks to drinking, himself.

Hungry alebrijes are hard to persuade. Héctor has tried. His best attempt was with a homing pigeon that had taken to roosting on one of the Shantytown catwalks. After it had tired of flapping away, he had managed to tie a little note to one sharp foot. But it had flown away altogether before he could teach it to home in on Coco.

The expectant curve to Imelda’s back, the tightness of her grip on one curtain, the way she holds the other far enough away to seem to be gazing into a void—it says something. Héctor has never had the opportunity to observe a family alebrije before. All he knew of Pepita before was the blur of color and the taste of fear.

They’re messengers, he knows. Not that he’s ever had his own. He’s never connected that deeply to an animal. Dante, who kisses his hands and curls at his feet while he sits and writes at the desk in the guest room, more properly belongs to Miguel. Héctor is thinking about writing a ditty. There’s something about being pitied by a street dog, he thinks.

(The one time Héctor attached a letter and a collar around his neck, Dante destroyed them both. Clawed the leather straight off, ate the paper. Héctor hasn’t attempted to send him back to Miguel again.)

He thinks about writing — and writes about that thinking — and never can quite manage to write anything worth sharing. Since his death he’s carried a packet of poems and letters and drawings for Coco. What started as a notebook that fell apart some seventy years ago has become a mass of stained, folded, and wrinkled pages held together with blackened rubber bands and found string. He’s managed a single sustained paragraph since his last failed attempt to see her, the fragment of the beginning of an account of how he met Miguel. Somehow it's easier to scribble illegibly in the margins of the page — half-formed descriptions of things Miguel would do and say that Héctor only remembers because he finds himself missing them — than to tell the whole story.

Héctor spends most of his time wondering whether his daughter would even want to read anything he's written.

Every night he leaves the desk and pulls back the curtains Imelda draws shut every morning, then opens the window. When he swings himself onto the ledge, and scoots to the very edge, he can see unfamiliar details of the winding staircase that connects this level of homes and shops with the church and copse of dead trees below and the next layer of dwellings arranged like tiers of candles above. How often he'd climbed that path in hopes of a glimpse of Imelda! But this was never her window. The de la Cruz tower sits like a snuffed torch in the distance. While he kicks in its direction, Dante sniffs at him from behind, leaving cold trails on Héctor's spine.

The ambient light is too strong, he thinks. Even as he continues straining his eyes, he knows the only way he’d see the catwalks would be if they caught fire.

Still, wherever he looks, he can see families.

Smoke rises from the electric plants. Steam from the factories. Fog glides off the lake and collects in layers that both obscure and reveal, shifting like cotton pulled down to the threads, and there comes a point when he feels as though he were dissolving with it.

Like this, he forgets he belongs anywhere.

Sunrise announces itself so abruptly he’s always surprised; so does Imelda. She knocks on the door before entering every morning and he still startles like she was unexpected. Something shoots through him when he hears the cool tap of her feet on the tiles. That energy he’s come to associate with the idea of crossing the bridge.

The charged smell of earth after rain.

It’s different for her, he knows. She’s only there because she has a routine. Once she must have come into this room to dust and wipe down the furniture. Now that he occupies it, she's taken to inspecting the grime settled between the fractures in his bones.

Her greeting is always a variation on the same. "Why don’t you sleep?" she says today.

The question never fails to make him uncomfortable; he leans backwards from his perch instead of answering. He knows this makes him look ridiculous.

"Did I marry a monkey?" she'd snapped the first time, making something in his chest swoop. "Get down from there at once."

"Stop acting like a child," she says each time after that; he tries to pretend he heard the word marry and not child. "And close the window."

Somehow he always complies. Somehow he ends up holding his wrist and pulling out the chair (staring at its reed bottom, the flowers painted onto the wood), making himself small in it while she spreads out her tools on the desk. She’s always armed with something: dental picks, pincers, scissors, horsehair brushes of varying stiffness, combs of translucent horn, rags, white setting tape, bone polish, bleach powder. Leave it, he wants to say, only that he doesn't want to sound ungrateful. Talk to me, he thinks to her averted gaze, only that it isn’t his place to push. Flirtation seems out of the question, not that he would even know where to start. She picks over minute cracks in his arms like a mortician who sees not a dead person but a job.

He could appeal to her as a patient, he thinks, treat the truth like a set of symptoms. I'm afraid of disappearing in my sleep, he could say. So I don't. Sleep, that is. Not since the day I woke up here.

And — there's something else . . . I don't know. I can't move right. Everything feels wrong. Stiffer than it should be. Maybe if you stopped picking at me, it would go away ...

But he doesn't want her to feel guilty.

He wants to fold in half for even thinking it. He wishes he'd apologized sooner.

"I'm sorry," he says, even though her shoulders will rise and send phantom pains through his middle. The accompanying image — steam collapsing into shoes, into gleaming black horses streaking away from him in the darkness, into the devastation of knowing he's powerless to stop them — is nothing. The notion of escaping horses was a trick played on him by his dying mind. Even this replay is only an illusion, easily banished with a word.

"Imelda," he says, and finds himself disoriented anyway. Searching for guidance through a beat, then another.

When he remembers what he wanted to say, the resolve sends a shake through his limbs. "Imelda, I —"

She's yanking his arm into its former position before he realizes he's forgotten to keep speaking.

"Stop fidgeting," she snaps.

As he watches, she bends over to pick at the sand that has accumulated in a groove.

The loss of his chance always leaves him stunned. He stares into her hair, seeing nothing but its deep black gleam.

Eventually it occurs to him to wonder how they always end up here. Memory stirs, reminding him that if there's been one constant, it's that he's always been an idiot.

He just wishes she would look at him. "Imelda —"

"You live in my house now, Héctor."

The discord of it — how completely unrelated her words are to what he'd wanted to say — leaves his jaw hanging.

"You need shoes and proper clothes," Imelda says, reliably skirting over the issue of his bones that never heal; the bones she somehow always then begins to appraise with an intensity bordering on viciousness. "What will Coco think if you show up to her arrival looking like vagabond?"

"You mean like I did with you?" he almost said once. "I don't know if I'll even last that long," he almost said another time. "Isn't that what she expects?" he finds himself always thinking but has still managed not to say.

Thank you, he's learned to say after the silence becomes oppressive between them, even though it makes her shoulders swell like waves preparing to crash. I hate that you won’t look at me, he always thinks as he says, Thank you for —

What was it he was going to say?

A distracting rhythm has crept over his thoughts — the thumping sound Dante's tail makes when it wags against the floor. Bewildered enough to turn and watch, Héctor sees that Dante's wings have unfolded.

Something new is happening, he thinks, almost feeling like he could be interested.

As he continues to watch, Dante's ears perk in the direction of the wall. His tongue slips into the air like a smile. On a hunch, Héctor glances at the window.

He's not sure why he's surprised. "Imelda," he says.

"Can't you see I'm busy?"

He looks at her bowed head and thinks about remaining silent. Remembers the rise of her shoulders.

Glances at the window and is once more rewarded by color. "Isn’t that your alebrije?"

"What?"

She turns — their eyes seem to meet —

Suddenly Imelda is dropping the sand-pick into her apron, scrambling to her feet. Héctor reaches out to steady her on instinct, but doesn't manage to touch.

She's already half-way to the door.

"Can I get up now?" he asks her retreating back only to watch her disappear into the hall.

The room seems to resonate with jealousy.

Of course he can’t compete with a cat. "Am I supposed to just sit here?"

Dante offers no answer, seemingly caught up in the process of realizing that Imelda has left the door open. Without another glance at Héctor, he bounds to his paws and half-flies, half-scrabbles his way out of the room.

Héctor thinks about following him out. He's halfway to his feet when he hesitates.

It doesn’t feel right, abandoning Imelda’s ritual. Even though he doesn’t understand it, even though it makes him feel like he's a grubby child in her eyes, a husband she no longer wants but thinks she has to care for out of some overdeveloped sense of duty — even though she's the one who's just walked away —

Even then, he thinks. He was the one who left when it mattered.

(There’s something too about not knowing how any of it started. The missing origin. What little he remembers has only returned to him in fits and spurts, mostly from sitting in the window. That is to say, he remembers the window — remembers stumbling to the window of an unfamiliar room with a strange dog — Dante, but he hadn’t known that then — trotting at his heels. The room had smelled overpoweringly of powders and pastes. Imelda had appeared, somehow. I don't want to wake up, he thinks he said, because he also remembers her expression like stone. Maybe that’s how it started, with him raving like a lunatic. Or . . .)

A creak from rafters overhead; he looks up to see dust floating from the ceiling. Pepita, no doubt.

He can already guess her direction. Héctor has never been inside Imelda’s room, but he’s been told that Pepita likes to perch on the balcony rails.

Surely he can get up for a moment. He wouldn’t even have to leave the room. Just for a peek around the corner. Just —

"Ay, Pepita!" he hears Imelda saying right as he sticks his head into the hallway. "I was so worried!"

The door is open, he sees, revealing some of the room he’s wondered so much about. The room set at a perpendicular angle to all the rest. Imelda herself is hidden by walls, but he can see a segment of her open window, the curtains billowing in the breeze.

He doesn't see Pepita, which is ideal for his purposes. Nearest the door, he sees, Imelda keeps a wooden washstand. He can see the rim of the basin and a pitcher stored on a shelf beneath — colorful tin-glazed earthenware in contrast to the plain iron in his room. Partly-burned candles rest on the stand in a pottery tree of life; it's a stand-out piece, making Héctor pause to note how the interlocking branches of the tree rise from a skull base adorned with brightly-painted calaveritas, owls, and marigolds to form the three candleholders. She still likes beautiful things, he thinks as he looks beyond to a commode with a sewing machine. Black with gold lettering, somehow also splendid to look at, with purple fabric laid out beside it — she must be making a new dress, the pattern doesn’t match her current one . . .

"She was with Coco."

Héctor is startled to see Julio. How and why Julio came to be standing across from him in the hallway are not the only mysteries. The wistfulness in his voice says more than Héctor can currently process.

"With Coco?" he repeats, and blinks several times as his mind sorts the useful from the nonsense. Imelda has been here the whole time, unless she has magical powers . . .

"Good girl," he hears Imelda say, sounding both pleased and like she’s only just holding herself back from giving a scolding.

Pepita was with Coco, he realizes. Of course — and yet. "How do you know?"

Julio's expression is hidden beneath his hat and mustache. His silence seems to say that he knows in the same way Héctor ought to know, that Héctor would know if he'd only never left home to play music for the world.

"Does ... does she send messages?" Héctor says, aware he sounds desperate and not able to care. Is that how you know? he thinks to himself.

"She watches over the living family from time to time," says Julio. "But . . ."

Héctor sees steam and horses gleaming. He nearly forgets to breathe.

"You don’t say," he says, because part of him is conscious that Julio has said something about Imelda and control and that he is expected to respond.

The rest of him has loped off and is plotting. Pepita, if he remembers hearing correctly, sleeps on the roof — right over his own head. Pepita travels to Santa Cecilia — Pepita heads straight to Coco . . .

"Hey, you okay there?"

"What?" Héctor says, irritated by the interruption.

Fortunately, he's trained his smile to be automatic. This gives him enough time to reconstruct the question.

I wish you were Coco, he thinks. "Ah, don't you worry," he says, squinting against the sense that his eyes have revealed too much. "I feel great! Couldn’t be better!"

He winks for good measure, fully aware that every border guard in the land of the dead would now be on high alert (or rolling their eyes). Julio seems merely unsettled. Probably concerned for his health.

Who cares, Héctor thinks as he retreats to wait for Imelda and her sand-pick. He settles himself in the chair, crosses one leg over the other, and folds his arms behind his head. As a thought occurs to him, he can’t help but smile winningly at the window.

Finally, a plan that will work!

//

This has to work, Héctor thinks as he climbs out the window that night.

His plan is very simple. It’s also probably illegal, but he’s not worried about that. All he has to do, he tells himself, is convince Pepita. And why shouldn’t she be convinced? From what Héctor has gathered of the news, Pepita is an excellent judge of character. Any grudge she might have felt against him in the not-so-distant past . . . belongs to the past. Héctor has moved on, hasn’t he?

Pepita has as well, he thinks confidently. She’s not Imelda’s alebrije because she’s stupid.

Flinging himself over the iron railing is easy. Righting himself in a way that accounts for his bad leg is harder. Seeing Pepita in actuality—horned, winged, clawed, gigantic, and glowing like a haunted train compartment—sends him stumbling, flailing for a moment before he can stand before her, slouched and wincing, as a supplicant.

She's lying on her side with her belly protruding like she's treated herself to the moon. Relaxed, he tells himself. That's good, isn't it?

She also looks like a dragon in the dancing purples and golds of the city lights, a dragon jealously guarding what is precious to it. Héctor lowers his head to limit the image. "Hola, ah, Pepita," he hears himself say.

Pepita doesn’t move, except for her ears, which twitch in his direction.

He never actually planned a speech, he realizes. Somehow this always happens; as always, he has no choice but to barrel on. He opens his mouth to think of something and hears a nervous chuckle. "I heard you were ... in Santa Cecilia?"

Héctor can feel the artificiality of his smile. Pepita seems unimpressed as well, her tail swishing once in what might be irritation.

"Look," he says, hoping she thinks his tone sounds more serious than cajoling. Years of subsisting on pity have only made him more of a beggar, and no amount of self-awareness seems to change that. "I, ah, . . . have a favor to ask. If you’re not too busy," he adds on sudden, ridiculous impulse. "If you can . . . understand."

As he says the last word, he shuffles forward. Just a little, just to see — there, her tail curls and lifts, the feathers spreading like knives in a performer’s fist.

Héctor’s mind is prone to producing pictures, and has now supplied him with the image of Pepita swinging that tail like a sea-serpent bashing a ship. "You see," he continues, and is proud of how his voice doesn’t waver, "it’s about Coco. I wrote her a letter, just in case . . . you know, I might not get to see her, and I thought . . . eh, maybe you could take it to her?"

Pepita's tail swishes, reminding him even more of a snake. Give her a reason! he thinks past his sense of dread.

"Por favor?" he says, at a loss — and for want of words, reaches into his vest pocket for the letter and the ball of twine. They seem heavy in his hands, the thick paper only Imelda's money could buy and the ball that scratches against bone. And yet when he glances down at them, imagines them against Pepita's bulk, they seem like nothings.

Nothings that remain to him priceless. He looks to Pepita with eyes widened by recollection. "I asked her to make you the most delicious dinners once she gets this. You want it, you got it! The biggest fish in all of Santa Cecilia! Only ... the best of the best for Pepita ..."

Héctor starts at a sensation like a paper cut over his ribs; he's been cradling the letter like he would a forgotten red hoodie, too tight and too close. First the letter, then the twine slips from his hands as he fumbles on his bad leg — he keels forward to juggle both —

And lets out a strained laugh as he straightens with prizes recaptured. His little blunder has led him far too close to Pepita. Close enough, he thinks, that she could kick him off the roof if she wanted, or smash him into the wall that surrounds it, the base of the next house, or . . .

He’s not Ernesto, he tells himself, and tries for a smile he hopes she can hear in his voice. "So . . . what do you say, eh?"

Pepita seems unmoved. Her ears are no longer even directed at him, flicking instead in every other direction. Watching this display of indifference, it occurs to Héctor that he could have been smarter. Unwilling to risk another letter-eating incident, he’d locked Dante out of his room. Now he sees no reason Dante couldn’t have come with him. Even a letter-eater has uses. In fact, Dante might have even known how to put Pepita into a sympathetic mood!

Idiot idiot idiot, he thinks. Perhaps he should return indoors, fetch Dante, maybe search the house for leftover snacks from a previous Día de Muertos — he doesn’t think they’re one of those families that receives more offerings than can be eaten right away, if that were the case they’d have a kitchen — and he doesn’t know the house that well, there’s a risk to being caught rummaging where he shouldn’t — but — knowing Imelda, knowing how she always keeps a reserve on principle, maybe there’s a pantry somewhere —

Movement slashes across his thoughts like claws to the face; he staggers backwards instinctively and hears a sound like coals hissing in a steam engine that trips him up even further. Pepita, he realizes with his bad leg still seesawing through the air, his balance on the other leg managed only through experience.

She’s looking at him. Héctor holds onto this thought as he finds stable ground. Somehow she’s transformed from the fat, contented beast of a moment before into a sphinx. He almost expects her to bare her fangs and issue a riddle.

"Pepita?" he says, feeling almost lighter under her gaze. The steady beam of it. He clutches the letter to his heart, flattens his hands against it like a vassal asking a boon of his queen. "Will you help me?"

Had he a heart, it would be pounding. Her pupils encompass nearly a third of each eye; they’re oddly soft. Somehow this makes him feel especially vulnerable. He can feel his own eyes darting, fleeing direct contact but still seeking her consideration. Please, he thinks.

She turns her massive head. Gazes past the railing with the same serene contemplation he’d thought was for him. Could’ve kicked him in the chest, for all the difference he feels.

Can’t even convince a cat, he thinks. Even a kid could’ve done better.

"I know I don’t deserve it," he says past the bitterness. "Believe me, I know that even better than you. But if you would just try and understand . . ."

He thrusts out the letter that she doesn’t see. The sight makes him recall some of what it actually says. The secrets that had poured out of him earlier that day in anticipation of this moment.

(Your mother is trying to make me presentable. I think she's worried I'll scare away her customers. She shouldn’t worry. Don’t you start worrying, too. I haven’t set one bare toe in the workshop. Promise. Actually I don't want to see it, Coco. Not because I’m not proud of your mother. I am, very much so. She’s remarkable. You know, when I found out she became a zapatera, I wasn’t surprised. Don’t make that face — I really wasn’t. Your mother is like the earth . . .)

The point isn’t what the letter says. The point is that it’s his own flesh-and-blood heart and that Coco deserves to know she has it. "This letter . . . it’s for Coco. Not for me, do you understand? I can’t change the past. Even if I could, I’m not . . . I make mistakes. I’ve made too many mistakes. The past is the past. This is for the future, Pepita."

Héctor closes his eyes.

He’s never needed an audience to perform, but this isn’t a performance, it’s a confession. And Pepita could well be made of stone. "You see, at least, with this, she would know."

(The day you were born was the happiest day of my life. Wanting and failing to come home to you — has been my prison.)

"She’d know . . . she’s always been loved."

Nothing.

The absence of reaction from Pepita sends his mind spinning, drifting through the silence in search of any input, any input at all. It’s not quite a defeat if he can write another letter about it later, a letter about how Pepita taught him to listen to the forms of sound. The wind and all it carries. Strains of music. Y me muero por volver. He likes that song, he thinks, picking up on distant laughter and the rattle of the copse of dead trees.

(Your mother tells me you love to dance.)

He’s picturing that movement — his daughter in her favorite pink dress, twirling and grinning like an imp — when he hears a new element, hard and resonant.

Claws and wings.

His eyes fly open.

Pepita, shimmering like torches in the rain.

She’s standing, he realizes, head bowed like an invitation — and he doesn’t think another second before springing onto her back.

The hope in his chest feels like something wriggling, alive. A butterfly held captive.

Incredibly, Pepita isn’t trying to claw off its wings.

He touches a hand to her fur, unable to quite believe that she’s tolerated his boldness. Fear that she’ll toss him off in the next second reminds him to act. "Muchas gracias," he says, feeling overwhelmingly grateful and exceedingly reckless as he leans forward to tie the letter to one of her horns. "You don’t know what this means to me . . . heh? Wait! No, no, wait —"

Héctor has enough presence of mind to stuff the letter back into his vest.

"— wait, wait, Pepita wait, stay down, please — wait — no!"

One hand is still caught in the pocket when he’s hurled forward — he can see and smell nothing but fur. Some preservation instinct has him nonetheless finding a hold on her neck.

The next thing he knows, they're shooting into the sky.

She can’t take me with her, is his horrified thought. The twine is swept out of his fingers before he can react, twirling for an instant in the corner of his eye before an invisible vortex sucks it out of sight.

If this is for something I did, I'm already sorry, he thinks but feels too sick too say.

As though she could hear him anyway, Pepita reacts with a forceful beating of her wings. Suddenly they're angling into a corridor between towers — slicing into a bank of fog so thick Héctor becomes convinced they're going to crash into something and has to force himself to close his eyes — Pepita's fur has become clammy from the water, harder to cling to and somehow that much smellier — he can't look —

— can't breathe —

Eventually the terror subsides enough for him to become aware they're still flying. All at once he realizes that the air has become much colder — that he can no longer hear the towers swaying and creaking, not even the bells and whistles and cables of the gondolas.

Pepita, he thinks, has not made a sharp turn in some while. He chances a glance beyond where his hands are gripping her fur and sees that her wings are spread for gliding.

Where is she going? he wonders.

Perhaps it's the thinner air, but Héctor is suddenly confident that he's not going to fall off at the slightest move. With the sort of caution he expects he would have developed into a habit if he'd lived to Imelda's age, he lifts his upper body into a proper sitting position. This turns out to be much less difficult than imagined, so he leans to the side as much as he dares.

The sight makes him feel dizzy.

Not because he is dizzy — because he can see the pyramids for the bridges. The bridges are gone, of course, the space where they should be a watery ravine. Even so . . .

They're flying over bridge-space like it’s nothing.

Numbly, he observes. Seen from the air, the edge of the world is almost unimpressive. The pyramids look like layered cakes, the stations atop them — Héctor’s dizziness grows as he notes pink bienvenidos, the accursed blue glow of each set of domed roofs — like baubles at a child’s birthday. Taken together, the entire assemblage reminds him of the rays of a stylized sun.

(A thought that would pull out memories of Imelda's white guitar if he let it. He doesn’t.)

He can see a number of alebrijes. There are less of them out here than he’d have expected. Of course they’re still well-fed from the holiday. Still. If he were an alebrije, he’d be crossing all the time. Like that blue blob there. It wiggles and wriggles, wiggles and wriggles, wiggles and wriggles and wriggles and wriggles as it flies over the water, never once seeming to doubt that its wings will hold its weight.

Feeling returns to Héctor as though he’d been scalded. Of course it’s the dumb animals that get to cross, he thinks to himself.

Just looking at that thing, that lucky, lucky, lucky whatever it is — it makes him raise a fist and shake it. For a moment, he can’t help but look at his own hand, wishing it held actual power.

When he glances back down at the lake, the alebrije has disappeared.

"Hey!" Héctor says to the universe in general. It crossed and I didn’t see, he thinks as he slams his fist into Pepita’s back.

Everything crosses without me.

A change in the sound of the air makes him glance behind him. Maybe he shouldn’t have punched Pepita, he thinks. Her wings have started flapping in an ominous way. Except that his was such a little punch. How would she have even felt it?

He twists, trying to see past the blue whorls of her horns to her eyes, her muzzle, to some form of expression. He sees nothing, but she seems calm. If her muscles are twitching beneath him, that’s probably just because she’s going to —

tilt —

swerve —

plummet —

"You crazy cat!" he shouts, one cheek buried in her neck and his eyes closed. The air rushes past his skull like it intends to scrape off a layer of bone. If he hadn’t managed to somehow grab hold — he doesn’t want to think about it, actually —

By the time Pepita evens back into a glide and Héctor has realized he isn’t going to lose his head to the wind, the blue blob is forgotten. Héctor is even feeling a little proud of himself. He’s managed to hold on so far, hasn’t he? Maybe he can learn to fly.

Dream on, músico.

Better than what Imelda would say if she found him splattered on a pyramid, he thinks, then shakes his head. He doesn’t want to know what Imelda would have to say about any of this, and . . . he bites down on his jaw to clear the image, then pushes himself up for a better look at the new surroundings.

Impossible.

That’s not air.

Héctor finds himself reaching out before he can think better of it. He doesn’t touch anything — they’re not close enough — but somehow he knows that if he touched that, it would feel like honey.

The barrier.

The barrier between worlds.

Like a curved black mirror it reflects them in flight, Pepita a rush of luminescence, his own figure a shadowy blur. Héctor has a regular aversion to the sight of himself as a skeleton. He prefers to remember himself as he was alive. But when he looks into the reflection, the barrier somehow becomes clearer.

Somehow — for the first time — he feels like he can almost understand it. The nature of his cage.

Wind rushes into his skull and sweeps through his hair. He closes his eyes, relishing how it almost feels like being touched.

When he opens them again, he sees the spread of Pepita's wings, visible down to the smallest bones in the glow of peacock markings. The vanes of her feathers barely flutter as she glides. He looks at the mirror and thinks he can see smooth streaks from the air she’s moved. (Paint against paint, he thinks.) Flickering between the lines — like an accident, a flashlight aimed in the wrong direction — is a bluish haze with holes for eyes and a nose.

I have a face, he thinks.

I still have a face.

How strange.

Something rises in the place where he once had a stomach. Once he used to write songs about this feeling.

If only he could reach out and — touch —

Touch it and become air.

Suddenly he’s frightened.

Watching Pepita glide is no longer breathtaking; instead, he sees her for what she is, a creature from another plane. She could be flying without him right now, he thinks as he leans forward, as he scratches her neck in an urgent rhythm.

"Hey!" he yells. "I can’t cross, remember?"

Either his words don’t carry or she doesn’t understand them. There has been an emotion building in Héctor and he’s suddenly conscious of it, of the shift in him like water that has begun to simmer.I can’t, he thinks. I can’t cross I can’t cross —

Pepita dips, briefly sending him floating in his seat.

She’s carrying them even closer, he realizes as the vertigo subsides. Without me, he thinks. Pepita will fly through, leaving him to bounce against the barrier like a rubber ball, then fall . . . all the way down to the lake . . .

Phantom pains arch across his middle. He lifts a hand and pushes down on his head, thinking it will be the first part of him to separate. The wind flowing into his eyes is no longer comforting, and he finds himself closing them against the stream.

At least there are no horses here, he tells himself.

No shoes. No earth, either. Water will swallow him once more, but it will be different from when he swallowed poison. And the clouds.

They won’t seem so far away, he thinks, when he’s falling through them.

Imelda, he thinks with renewed ache.

Coco.

But his daughter’s image won’t come.

Each night we are apart, Héctor thinks past his surprise. He presses his eyes more firmly shut, thinking darkness could help. As he continues to sing in his head, the words finally conjure — two black eyes grinning up at him from under the bed — giggles, the best reward —

— Julio’s wife, an unimaginable category — don’t think of that —

— Miguel’s confidante — no, this is wrong — she forgets things, says Imelda — a toothless old woman, confined to a wheelchair, says Victoria — papá, she used to say so sweetly — you know, she isn’t a child any longer —

(unlike you)

— you need shoes and clothes, and she doesn’t —

His eyes spring open.

The wind drives his eyes back into his skull, reminding him where he is. This is nothing like dying, he thinks as his teeth begin to grind. For one, he already knows what’s going to happen. For another, dying was faster . . .

Out of some sort of morbid curiosity, thinking he might as well see where he’ll end up splat, he glances to the side.

One of Pepita’s wingtips has slid into the barrier.

Héctor is only distantly aware of his hand falling from his head to his side. Like metal pushing through mercury, he thinks, fascinated in the same way he used to be with picking his own scabs while alive.

The double pleasure of eliminating a barrier and satisfying an itch — and this is no easily unveiled scab, and yet somehow — somehow the barrier is thinning where Pepita’s wing touches it.

Shimmering away in all directions like water divided by a magical staff.

Impossible, he thinks as he sucks in a lungless breath of air. Beautiful, as he lets it out slowly through his teeth.

There are lights behind this magic waterfall.

Héctor knows the punishment of lifting the veil without permission — he’s failed to reach the bridge enough times to collect stories. All magic has a payment. A photo for passage on Día de Muertos. But not even he would risk cheating, dare crossing outside of the designated window.

And yet.

It’s right there.

The world beyond lies under cover of night. It’s so . . . saturated, the darkness. A black mantle that makes him conscious of the flood of city lights behind him in a way he hasn’t quite been before.

He'd forgotten, he thinks. He'd forgotten what nights could be like in the land of the living.

What else — what else —

Pepita sways beneath him, a brief loss of control that makes him aware of the air between his skull and wig. Before he can reach up to pat the wig down, she's angling even closer, her feathers sinking deeper into the barrier. Like fire eating at paper, larger thin patches appear around her wing.

Héctor no longer has room in his heart to be frightened.

"That’s —"

Because he would know that belfry anywhere — the plaza lit for the night —

"Pepita!" he shouts, uncaring that she must already know. "It's Santa Cecilia!"

Pepita makes a snorting sound, her head moving like she can't believe it took him this long. Héctor could almost kiss her on the neck. Instead, he falls into a free position, legs kicked out wide from her sides and arms raised above him like points in a star, and laughs.

Laughs again, both from disbelief and awe.

What he’s seeing — it’s straight out of a dream.

A dream.

You dreamer, Imelda used to say. When will you get your head out of the sky?

I’m in the sky, he thinks dreamily.

There — he feels himself straighten, his grin becoming a guffaw — an illuminated series of interlocking red and white roofs that can only be part of the mercado, the permanent market. It’s gotten so big! And he doesn’t need the large painted letters to know the hotel on sight —

"Look at all those cars!" he shouts. There aren't many of them, but he'd never thought to imagine even one. "Unbelievable!"

Most are red or yellow streaks at the town perimeter; a few glitter at him from under lamps. Light glances off these rarer creatures like a skittish cat evading a petting. Héctor can't even begin to formulate a comparison to his own world of gondolas or trams. 

How much he’s missed!

(and for what)

Something in him deflates, which is no good.

I still know my way around, he tells himself. How many people can say that after a hundred years?.

"Watch this!"

Pepita completely misses the puff of his chest, his broad gesture at the streets. But Héctor doesn’t need an interested audience to perform. "I can name them all!"

He points, clicks his fingers at the calle principal. Grins to offset the lingering remnants of that deflated, despairing feeling. "Calle Miguel Hidalgo, Calle . . ."

In the space between waiting for recognition to activate and realizing that he might have forgotten the name after all, it occurs to him that he doesn’t know where Coco lives.

What if he’s passed her already?

Imelda wouldn’t have kept their house, he thinks as he starts searching for it in what suddenly seems like a photograph of black race-horses taken in pitch darkness. Assuming the house still exists; from here, everything looks so damn similar he can’t be sure. But even if it does — where the devil is Calle Aurora — he expects it belongs to someone else. Imelda must have found something better . . . something further away from the plaza, perhaps . . . unsullied by his memory, purely hers and theirs . . .

( Your mother has a house of doors and walls. You never have to see anyone else, not if you don’t want. Even the windows keep out sound when you close them.)

The more certain he becomes that he’s missed the house, the house that could be Coco’s, the antsier he becomes. The less of the world he sees.

I tried, he thinks, and not hard enough.

What is he supposed to do?

Maybe they have a directory on the other side, he thinks. He could . . . attempt to cross, and if it works . . .

It could never work.

But it’s the only idea he’s got, and so easy to picture — starting slow and careful, testing the barrier first . . . he’s fantasizing now about taking off one of his arms with the other, leaning over as far as he genuinely dares, and reaching past the window Pepita has created with his extended double arm. If he touches air instead of solid wall . . . if he doesn’t dissolve . . .

You’re loco, he tells himself. Alebrijes aren’t bound to the same rules; that’s why Pepita can have an effect on the barrier. Even if she could still fly on the other side, she wouldn’t be able — he wouldn’t be able —

So what. He has to try and — and —

(and what?)

Héctor has already twisted in his seat, both hands planted like a gymnast preparing to spring from a pommel. A century spent trying and failing to cross won’t end with him forfeiting his first and only real chance, he thinks. Santa Cecilia — Coco is already racing past him like horses he has to catch, black and gleaming and writhing like distant smoke —

He shakes his head clear. Grabs his left arm.

The ripple of Pepita’s muscles shifting beneath him sends him buckling in his seat, scrambling for a hold. In that moment, he sees the future.

"No!" he shouts.

(she only listens to Mamá Imelda, you know, said Julio)

Like firemen emerging from a burning house with charred bodies in their arms, like everything wrong that comes into the world, Pepita’s wing surfaces from the barrier — taking the window with it.

"Bring it back!" he says, throwing his leg to position himself so he can pound on her neck with all the little strength he has. "Bring it back!"

Pepita’s answer is to plunge.

"How can you be so cruel!" he shouts, uncaring that he’s barely clinging to her neck. If he could shed tears, he would be howling. "I hate you! I hate you! I —"

//

"— hate you," he says as they land on the roof, too dizzy and too defeated to speak in more than a mumble.

Pepita sniffs the air as though she were an innocent kitten and had not just spent the entire journey back pulling crazy aerial stunts and deliberately frightening Héctor out of his wits.

Blue smoke curls from her mouth. Her ears fold back, and she stares over the railing for some unknown reason, as there's nothing to see but strings of lights and the neighboring houses. Stone balconies and drawn windows, he thinks. Roofs made of tile instead of tin.

Héctor has already lost interest in finding out what she sees when it occurs to him to dismount. He doesn’t put further effort into the thought, simply letting gravity overtake his already slumped body. He slides down a wing with his eyes closed, loses his head on a snag — manages to catch it but not reattach it as he slams to a landing on his knees.

Distantly he wonders if he’s lost a rib.

He feels like he could sob. If there were water in him. The thought makes him feel empty. Like the time the floods had washed away his shack and all the books in it, the letters, the alcohol and hard-earned cigarettes, the lipsticks and his collection of plastic jewels — and the time after that, and the —

He lifts his head back onto his shoulders. Folds his arms around the cold comfort of his ribs.

Something rougher than sandpaper and smellier than a slaughterhouse seems to pick him up from behind — lifting him by his fraying vest —

— dropping him to slide up against the back of his head. "Hey!" he says, hands flying to his skull.

It’s no surprise to discover that Pepita has licked most of his wig into a standing position. Bad enough that Imelda thinks he’s a child, he thinks as he pats the hair right back down. He really doesn’t need her monster cat to think so too.

He must have muttered that aloud, for Pepita snorts like twenty horses that have galloped themselves sick. "Yeah, yeah," he says, picking himself up from his knees and dusting them off. "Such a good alebrije, ganging up on old Héctor like a —"

He hadn't realized he was turning in her direction. When he looks up from his knees, he finds himself looking directly into one of her yellow eyes.

" — don't eat me," he hears himself say as he freezes in place, because her eye is like magic symbol that will kill him if he mispronounces the spell, or banish the light from his existence, or flatten what has dimension until its essence is gone.

Under her gaze, he can only think about sprinting away. The strength he usually calls upon to escape from lenders and authorities seems like a memory as faint and absurd as the thought of having muscles and veins.

If you eat me, Imelda will . . .

But maybe this is what Imelda wants, he thinks. Maybe she’d even be happier if he were banished and gone. The thought sends phantom pains through his middle, makes him have to shake his head free of horses.

Pepita’s eye, he thinks, is like the slitted window of an old fort; arrows might shoot out at any moment. Metaphor is how he thinks, and right now he’s thinking of a possible defense.

"Okay, so I don’t hate you," he says.

To his surprise, he finds that he means it. The reason becomes obvious when he thinks about it. The true cause of his misery is not Pepita, he realizes: the true cause sits in a prison cell across the lake, no doubt wishing he’d thought to poison a child’s drink.

Héctor feels the burning shame of belatedly coming to know what he becomes when he isn’t fully himself. It’s almost as bad as realizing what a horrible example he’d been setting for his own great-grandson.

You’re an embarrassment.

Of course Imelda doesn’t want this.

He reaches up to ruffle his hair. "You know, emotions, you say things you don't mean — ah —"

Pepita has lowered her head as though she plans to lick him again, making Héctor forget what he was going to say. Disgusting blue tongue, he thinks as he backs away.

Something’s wrong, he thinks as he feels a joint bend the wrong way, shifting his weight to his wobbly leg. Somehow he’s miscalculated again — there’s something about the magic holding him together, he’s sure of it — it feels stiffer than when he’d thought he was really dying, yet somehow far more stifling —

(like age, real age)

— instead of vaulting away as planned, he’s teetering in place like a drunk trying and failing to dismount a horse.

How much dignity is it possible to lose in an evening?, he wonders once he’s balanced, reaching up to adjust his hat.

He touches air.

Right. He’d left his hat behind to climb the balcony.

There’s something about reaching for a hat that isn’t there that makes him realize how silly he must look. When he glances at Pepita, she blinks with the slowness of a mimic exaggerating a gesture.

She’s laughing at me.

What’s new, he thinks as his hands drop to his sides. "You know what?" he says, wishing once more that he’d come better prepared. Bribes sometimes made someone shift from laughing at you to laughing with you. "It’s late! I should be getting back, you should be getting your beauty rest . . . "

He puts on a smile that feels crooked. He thinks about the letter, about how out-of-sorts he feels. He’s not gonna convince Pepita to take it with her, not tonight, even if he already knows he’ll spend the hours until morning thinking about how he could.

She’s stopped looking at him anyway, staring instead at something beyond the railing. Some other alebrije, he guesses. He takes this as his cue to leave, and is standing before the railing when he realizes what he hasn’t said.

"Hey, ah . . ."

Thanks for showing me the sights.

Her ears flick as though she’s annoyed. "See you around," he says.

Not what he’d planned on saying, he thinks as he swings himself over the railing. You idiot, he thinks as he shinnies down a pipe. Pepita had shown him Santa Cecilia. What demon had possessed him to say he hated her? And then he’d barely apologized!

Héctor is standing on the window ledge when it hits him: he could go back and apologize. Properly, this time. The night is still young . . . he’s not feeling nearly as tired as a moment before . . . if he does things right, Pepita might be motivated to take him back . . . to take his letter . . . why hadn’t he thought of this before?

He curses aloud.

"I was wondering if you would come back."

The sound of Imelda’s voice should probably be sending him into a panic. Instead it makes him feel numb.

She’s been waiting.

Héctor can’t process that thought. He clenches his teeth, ducks into the window, and drops onto the floor.

The room is duskier than the outdoors. He struggles for a moment to make her out against the shadows cast by the washstand, the dark masses of the desk and the bed. Then he realizes she isn’t wearing purple, that she’s seated on the bed in a white nightgown he’s never seen before. Dimly he notes a darker shade — orange, perhaps — sewn into the patterned collar.

Her posture could be made of stone.

How long have you been waiting here? he wants to ask. "I thought you were asleep," he says.

"I was," she says, "until your dog came and woke me."

"Ah," he says, fighting the instinct to slouch. Leaving Dante behind had not just been stupid, it had been royally stupid. "You know, I . . . I wasn’t planning on leaving the house."

"Of course," she says in the voice he remembers, that horrible voice from the day he left. "That’s why you went to the roof."

"Well, yes, but —"

"That’s also why you had to climb out the window like a robber instead of taking the stairs."

Héctor should not be setting his lips like a stubborn child. And yet he is. "How was I supposed to know you have stairs?"

"You could have asked."

Héctor’s eyes have adjusted to the point where he can make out her expression. She looks like he imagines he’d feel if she’d told him she was in love with another man.

His jaw works for a moment.

The words come out in an unplanned burst. "You can stop assuming whatever it is you’re assuming."

Her eyes flash. "And what is that?"

"The worst," he says, and hates that he sounds petulant. There’s something wounded and pacing inside of him, something he usually keeps caged in writing.

Don’t let it out, he thinks.

He straightens and pretends he doesn’t see her brow darken at the same time. "I was just talking to Pepita."

"I see," she says, sounding for all the world like he’s just confessed to gambling all their savings away. "You were talking to my alebrije. Naturally you couldn’t ask me first."

Naturally, he thinks, and has to open his mouth and stretch the corners several times to combat how it’s written all over his face. "I didn’t want to wake you."

"I’m your wife!"

"That’s not —" he feels his knees buckling, his posture collapsing, and runs a hand over his eyes. There’s something hot and bitter forming in his middle. "You wouldn’t understand."

"Oh? I wouldn’t understand? I know exactly what you were up to, Héctor!"

Then what’s the problem? he wonders. "You do?" he says.

"You think I wouldn’t hear you stomping all over the roof like a lout, sweet-talking my own alebrije?"

Héctor feels his mouth fall open. Not only does Imelda think even worse of him than he’d realized, he also doesn’t understand how she could have heard him and still be drawing such conclusions. "Sweet-talking?"

"You’re lucky you’re not floating in pieces on the lake! And then you tried to fly! You fool, what if you’d fallen off?"

"I didn’t want to fly," Héctor hears himself say as he sags even further into himself. Would it be better if she thought the worst of him and left him alone, he wonders, or better if she thought the worst of him and still worried herself sick? "I wanted to send a letter to Coco."

"For what? Your daughter is not your imaginary friend. She will be here, Héctor. Here, with us, in this home. Not off in the sky with the rest of your head!"

Ah.

He doesn’t like this bitter feeling, the hot spread of it. And yet some things about him, Imelda has just never seemed to understand. "Yes, but she isn’t here now, and —"

"How old are you, twelve? You have to wait like the rest of us."

He lets the words reverberate. Tries to acknowledge the good intentions behind them. Wraps his arms around his ribcage, holding in the bitter tracks left in his middle by his by trains of thought.

"Imelda, I don’t know if I can."

"Of course we know! Miguel promised to take care of it. How can you have so little faith in your grandson?"

"It’s not that," he says, even though it’s true he doesn’t believe Miguel can 'take care of it’. That it is the problem, he thinks. Héctor has every faith in Miguel. But he can also tell that Coco only remembers him in odd fits.

His bones aren’t healing; if Imelda’s daily ministrations have revealed anything, it’s that. Something is wrong with him besides; he’s losing control of his body, becoming stiffer and wobblier and who knows what else. In short, what they’ve asked is the impossible. Miguel may have toppled a century of deeply rooted beliefs, but he can’t cure dementia.

"Then what?"

Héctor has been staring at the floor; his gaze snaps up in time to see Imelda stand. Her expression is as dark as the time she’d found him folded up with a bottle of tequila on the path below, and her finger wags in the same way it had before she’d grabbed the bottle and threatened to smash it over his skull.

"Ever since you came home," she says as he remembers how he’d simply shot to his feet and bolted, "you've been wrapped in your own head. Never leaving this room unless asked, writing god knows what to Coco, sitting in that damn window like you can’t stand to be here . . . tonight Victoria asks you a question three times before you answer!"

Something has been simmering in him for a while.

Suddenly it’s boiling. "It's like you don't even see us!" she continues. "If you can't be here for this family, Héctor —"

"And what do you want me to do?" he hears himself shout. "Go along with your little fantasy? Lie to all of you? Would that make you happy?"

"What?"

You want a nice, happy, family. You want me to look the part. But you don’t want me, he thinks and somehow can’t say. "How am I supposed to be here if I'm about to dissolve?"

"Nonsense!"

"It isn't nonsense!" he says, grabbing at his hair with both hands. "Everyone has forgotten me. Miguel didn't even recognize me until it was almost far too late! And you think that’s going to change because Coco managed to hold on just a little longer?"

Somehow he’s begun pacing. He throws up his hands. "She's already forgetting again, Imelda, I can feel it . . . and there's no picture. My time is up!"

"What, so you think you have to give up as well?"

The boiling something shoots through to his skull. "Give up? I never give up. I never, not once —" he shakes his head, amazed once more by how little she understands him.

Bitterness offers a strange clarity; it also unleashes thoughts he prefers to keep chained in darkness. The more he thinks them, the less conscious he becomes of how similar he must look to when he’d rounded on Ernesto and Miguel. "And don't lie to me. None of you want me here! You’ve all got your own routines, your perfect lives. Who needs Héctor except for a laugh? Rosita pities me. Julio’s decided I’m a lunatic! Victoria — Victoria barely speaks to me — and she wasn't asking me a real question, you know, she just wanted me to pass her a magazine! So I made a sad joke about it, so what? I am sad! You — you're my wife, and you can’t even bring yourself to touch me unless it’s with a sharp instrument!"

He becomes conscious that he’s shaking. "I see this family. I see far more than you think! You’re all deluding yourselves if you think you want me here except to feel better about your own guilt!"

What did I just say.

As the walls absorb the echo of words — words he can’t take back, words that have soured the air — Héctor realizes he doesn’t know when Imelda's expression turned from anger to horror. But her wide eyes, the tremble he sees in her lashes and shoulders —

She looks small, he thinks with the numbness of watching the beginnings of a flood. I’ve hurt her.

The flood-waters are already catching up to him. I’ve hurt her, he thinks, and wishes the floor were the flower-bridge, that it would swallow him whole.

"I didn’t mean that," he says.

"You did," she whispers.

"I . . . shouldn’t have said those things," he says, only to realize this sounds like a confirmation. "I’m sorry."

The words — completely inadequate, he thinks — seem to reflect back at him from the walls, to further poison the silence.

(Your mother called me the love of her life. Miguel was there too. Maybe you could ask him I think I was hallucinating. She sang, too, so it must have been a dream. Do you remember how beautifully she used to sing when we were all together?)

He looks to his bare feet, seeing for the first time how wrong they must seem to her. Imelda takes pride in her shoe-making. It must unsettle her to be married to someone who could seemingly care less.

(My shoes lost their soles, so I sold them to a man who wanted them for his art. There’s a pun in there somewhere, mija.)

"I know you're doing your best," he says past the thick ring that has somehow formed in his voice. "And I'm grateful for that."

Silence.

He’s shot himself in the foot, he thinks, and feels his brow furrowing, resisting what he knows he has to say.

It had been easier to die, he thinks as his eyes sink shut. "If you want me to leave—"

—then I will, he’d wanted to say. But the sound of Imelda’s inhale on the want, ragged all the way to the leave, had left him gulping air instead.

(As the echo drifts into silence, he recalls the beginning of someone else’s poem. ¿Palabras? Sí, de aire, y en el aire perdidas. Octavio Paz, Héctor thinks, you had it right.)

Imelda takes in another breath.

"I wanted you to say something," she says in a voice like a burning stick being snuffed in water. "I’ve . . . been waiting for it."

Waiting? he thinks. Repeating the word in his head makes it only slightly less confusing.

He knows she’s been waiting. But for something else, he thinks. For Pepita to appear in the window. Unless — the thought unfolds with the same clarity he associates with finding a good rhyme — waiting is the same to her as crossing the bridge is to him. A never-ending state.

He doesn’t like the parallel. Something in him actively resists it, and his eyes fly open as though to clear the images —

Imelda, he sees, has buried her face in her hands. He reacts before he can think, taking a step in her direction.

"Imelda —"

She lets out a sound too close to anguish. His leg buckles like someone stole the tibula; the rest of him, including his outstretched arm, has stopped dead.

You were right, he thinks, letting his arm fall. I haven’t seen you. Not really.

Otherwise he would have anticipated this.

Héctor is brought out of his thoughts by an ache in his leg; he can feel annoyance passing over his face as he is forced to shift his weight to the other one.

Get your head out of the sky, he thinks, both because Imelda was right and because he wants to banish all further thought of his disintegrating bones.

"It was wrong of me to yell," he says, and finds himself reaching around his middle. "It was — all of it, it was wrong of me. Perdóname, Imelda. "

She turns away with a jerkiness that speaks to pride. The line of her shoulders tells a different story.

When he feels the spark of phantom pain, he thinks it deserved.

"You sound like a broken record," she says in a voice that makes it sound like she’d been smoking through pleurisy. "Don’t you understand how tired I am of your apologies?"

The words surprise him like a pike in murky water. He hadn’t anticipated them, and their immediate presence sends a shiver down his back. "What?" he says, wrapping his arms more tightly around himself. "What are you saying?"

"I —" She twists towards the bed, showing him shoulders plated together like a shattered mountain.

"I don't know," she says.

Héctor watches her lower herself onto the edge of the mattress; in the slow motion of the act, he sees an old woman.

Here we are together, and I only make you lonely, he thinks, looking to the hunched curve of her spine, the way her elbows dig into her nightgown to support the hands shielding her face.

"I do want you here," she says. "But . . ."

But what? he wonders, and finds himself thinking back to how he’d found her sitting on the bed, wondering if he would ever come back. Does she really think I don’t want to be here?

The question sparks something restless and unsatisfied, but it also gives him an idea. He reaches into his inner vest and removes the letter. Coco’s name on the front has become smudged from condensation. Just as well, he thinks.

He isn’t going to think about what the letter contains. "If you won’t hear another apology," he says, "at least consider taking this."

Imelda hasn’t dropped her hands from her face.

"The reason I left tonight," he says, hearing a tremble in his voice.

As he steps forward to somehow see the plan through, she unfolds — chin and spine lifting, eyes appearing in narrow slits — like a queen whose mere presence has transformed a rock into a magnificent throne. He hesitates, unsure now whether to hand it to her (is he brave enough?) or to set it beside her on the bed.

Imelda’s hand comes to hover over the space to her left. She pats it once like she’s issuing a decree.

"My clothes —"

"Sit."

He sucks in a breath. Imelda hates it when his street clothes touch her freshly washed linens.

"It can be washed," she adds in the tone that used to make potential suitors claim she was the coldest woman on earth.

She wouldn’t bother with that tone if she wanted to get rid of him, he thinks. After what he’s pulled, Héctor knows better than to hope — and yet. He can’t help it. Her hand is like a butterfly that he wants to catch; he keeps his eyes trained on it out of fear she might suddenly change her mind, leaving him to bumble after her without a net.

Blind to what his own hands are doing, he uses habit to pull two sheets of writing paper from the desk. Somehow he manages to lay them out on the bed at a respectful distance and seat himself upon them.

When he hands her the letter, she takes it.

Fixes her gaze on the edges as she turns it over in her hands. "You can read it," he says.

(He knows this is a bad idea. Some of the things he’d written should never have seen the light of day, least of all been addressed to Coco. But he’s willing to take a gamble for symbolism. Imelda, he also thinks, would never open Pandora’s box.)

She sets the letter on her lap, fingers resting around the smudge of Coco’s name. "You've written me many, many letters," she says.

Héctor bites down on his lower jaw. A jitter runs through his middle, visibly displacing bones, and he covers it by stretching out his legs.

Not this subject, he thinks.

His instincts cry at him to deflect. Instead he finds himself taking the bait. "You read them?"

"Not a single one," Imelda says.

This is a blow.

One he should have seen coming. He doesn’t know why he expected anything else. He looks down at his hands and grimaces.

Fool. Of course she threw them away.

"That is, at the time," she says. "I’ve started to read them now."

Héctor feels himself start. He turns to look at her with a dim sense of shock. 

"You have?"

She kept them, he tells himself. She kept them — she’s reading them —

Imelda seems to be looking out the window, but her eyes are distant. Héctor knows that look from himself, knows she sees nothing but the past and the words turning in her mind. He knows better than to pry.

"Why?" he hears himself say.

Something passes over her expression like a veil. Héctor finds himself tilting backwards in his regret, his hands pulling at his hair. She cared enough not to throw them out — but that wasn’t enough for you, was it — no, you had to make her feel guilty —

"They’re not very good," he says, running a hand over his eyes. "I mean, I knew you weren’t reading them — I said a lot of stupid things." He inhales as though the air could give him strength.

Looks down until he can gather his hands in his lap. "As usual."

Imelda snorts.

Héctor turns, somehow thinking he might see a smile. Instead, she stiffens under his regard. The straighter she sits, the remoter she seems.

"Your letters say when and where you died but not how," Imelda says in the voice she must use when she oversees the workshop, when she finds disorder in someone’s work. She sneaks over a glance, too brief for him to catch more than the gleam of her eyes.

Didn't you know? she seems to be saying.

No, I was blissfully ignorant, he thinks, feeling something twist through his skull as Imelda continues, "I want to know how he did it."

Does it matter? he wonders. I was criminally stupid either way.

"Poison," he says.

He can feel her shock even while staring down at his hands. She'd been expecting something else, he thinks. They’ve been living in separate worlds for so long, she doesn’t even know he’s the infamous Chorizo. Even Gustavo had made the leap.

I’m so sorry, man, he’d said in his postcard, the postcard signed by the entire orchestra. Héctor’s biggest concern had been how they’d found out his new address; the last thing he needs is for that knowledge to become public. If we’d known it was real poison — we’d never — I swear —

In hindsight, Héctor thinks he couldn’t have been more oblivious. Cheech had died of food poisoning. And it had taken hours for him to die.

Not minutes.

"How, Héctor."

He kicks into the air before he can stop himself. Runs his upper jaw against the bottom teeth.

"Only for you," he says before he even realizes he’s speaking his bitterness. He ignores how her brow furrows.

Looks to the window and the dark tower in its frame. The way his eyes slide shut, he feels like a wounded animal dragging itself into a dark cave. "I don't know where Ernesto got it or what it was," he says. "We'd been fighting for weeks. I was homesick. I . . ." he trails off against the ball of frustration that has lodged in his phantom throat.

She’s been reading your letters, she knows your excuses."It doesn't matter. He knew I wanted to leave. The day I packed up my bags was the day he poisoned me."

From the completeness of the silence, Héctor can tell Imelda expects him to continue.

He runs his teeth against one another, listening to the clacking of enamel, the popping he associates with aches. The dentist who’d replaced his cracked tooth with the gold one — what was his name? a charitable sort of fellow, he’d accepted the charro suit as trade . . . whatever. You’ve been gnashing your teeth, the dentist had said through a glistening mouth. Even the markings around his skull had been a blinding white. Memory isn’t everything, amigo. Keep this up and you’re going to ruin your —

"I told him," Héctor makes himself say, "to hate me if he wanted. Somehow I knew he already did. I should have . . . but he proposed a toast. To our friendship. And I thought . . . no, I wanted him to mean it."

He doesn’t see any of it as he speaks. The empty tower in the window is illustration enough. "I didn't taste the poison. He walked me to the train station. It was like we’d never fought . . . I saw the steam coming from the train and the shoes you bought me for my birthday . . ."

A flash of white in the corner of his eye, like a moth. Imelda, Héctor realizes.

He looks down and sees her feet rising and falling in their slippers as though she were practicing sliding in and out of heels. Her nightgown flutters with the erratic movement.

"— and then I was here," he finishes, uncomfortably aware that he somehow managed to drag the story out.

It’s odd. Telling her the truth has somehow made it less of a weight, yet it also seems to have transferred that weight to her. He knows this makes sense but can’t quite wrap his head around it. What makes him uncomfortable isn’t the cold reality of the past, it’s that he can tell they’re reacting differently and somehow can’t seem to feel it.

Has he upset her? The question at least suggests an action, and he finds himself craning his neck forward to catch a glimpse of her face.

But Imelda doesn’t want to be read. She’s gazing down, expression concealed by the proud curves of her cheekbones. Héctor looks to her hands for guidance. They’re spread out like dead starfishes over the letter on her lap.

Whatever she’s thinking, he decides, he can’t let her think it.

"I went to the Department of Records, you know," he says, managing to keep his voice even.

But his sense of calm suddenly feels brittle, like a surface that only belatedly registers the crashing of forces below.

(Back then, he recalls, he’d still thought of Ernesto as a friend. No longer as his best friend, perhaps, no longer even as a friend he’d want to see more than once a year, but still —

He should have realized the truth the moment he'd seen the anonymous death certificate, the place and manner of burial.)

"Ernesto never identified me," he continues, looking at her stiff fingers to remind himself why any of it matters. "So . . .

I’ve never blamed you, he thinks but somehow cannot say. Suddenly this whole detour feels presumptuous. Because you wouldn’t have known to put up my photo doesn’t at all have to mean you would have put it up if you’d known.

He can’t shake the idea that she’d felt happier, freer — more empowered without him. "I guess he left us both in the dark," he hears himself say.

"He left you to rot in the streets," she says with the sharpness he associates with that time Coco had thrown a tantrum and smeared his best suit with her breakfast. "He left —"

Héctor is glad Imelda doesn’t finish the sentence. He sits back, feet briefly bobbing in the air.

At least she seems to be feeling better.

"The poems you wrote me," Imelda says.

Tone registers before words. Héctor hears an edge that suggests both a question and a demand.

Then her meaning hits him, scattering all other thoughts. "What?"

"There were trains in them, and . . . horses made of clouds," she says, helping him realize that she means the poems he’d sent in this world. "Shoes," she adds with the same hesitancy he remembers from when they used to read poetry together, the hesitancy he’d attributed to humility at the time. Now he hears insecurity — fear that she hasn’t understood, that she isn’t clever enough. That his is somehow a form of speech beyond her.

Somehow he suspects she’d felt that way in life, only that he’d never seen. "I know, they’re dumb," he says.

He wishes she hadn’t brought them up. The last things he’d seen in life, in his mind they rhyme. Steam and shoes — gleam and accuse — (lose and booze, train and pain) — they’re connections. Weak connections, sure. Words. Together a bare-bones skeleton.

(window and widow and limbo, he’d scribbled in the margins of the letter. He hasn't written a full poem since he gave up music some twenty years ago; something in him has fossilized, making it harder and harder to think in meter and connect stony nouns with lively verbs.)

Not even a real skeleton, those words, not even a thing — at best a spirit skeleton, held together by will and air and ink on paper. Still better than nothing. Together they'd banished the memory of dying, helped him remember where he wanted to be and why.

He’d never dreamed that his way of expressing that to Imelda would also make her feel insecure.

"Héctor . . ."

In spite of himself, he feels defensive. "They’re just poems."

"Beautiful poems," she says.

Héctor hears the words as though he’d slipped off a rotten catwalk into the lake and could make out laughter from above. He shakes his head to try and clear it.

"You were trying to tell me something," Imelda continues.

Something, he thinks as his teeth clash.

"I wish I could have listened," she says. "Perhaps we would . . . But I wouldn’t, I couldn't believe. Because how — how could you still want me, Héctor?" He shakes his head again, several sentences behind. Is love a something? he thinks.

Imelda is still speaking. "It was easier not to know."

Her voice evokes pictures of pain. He sees her collapsed against a black wall, supporting herself on unsteady legs.

Or maybe he’s just projecting.

Suddenly he wonders if there’s even a difference between what will hurt her and what she wants to hear. I don’t know how you can even think that question, he could say. What more do you want me to do to prove that I love you, he could say, but that’s even worse.

"I’ve missed you," he hears himself say. "Since the second you kissed me goodbye. You were right the whole time. I shouldn’t have left. And I wish . . . Imelda, I wish I’d listened."

The memory of her face — pinched with suppressed anger and unshed tears, his last of her in life — decides him. Whatever made her think whatever strange things she thinks, he was the one who’d made her think them by leaving in the first place.

After all the harm he’s caused, he really should have more to say for himself. You’re right, I’ve been everywhere but here, he should say. Could say. I see that now. I want to change that. If you’ll let me. If you can understand — I can’t always be here. Not because of you. Because I have to think about the future, because there’s no future with me in it. I want a life here with you, Imelda, more than anything in the world, but even if I could somehow deserve it . . .

Against his hand, something tentative. Like a kitten exploring its surroundings for the first time.

Thoughts too scattered to continue, he glances down. The glance turns into a stare, for he’s unable to quite believe — her hand atop his own, reaching down to lift his fingers.

"I’ve missed you too," she says, and when he looks up from their hands he sees her gazing at him with a trembling mouth.

He reacts before he can think, lifting her hand to his mouth. The bone feels strange against his skull as he kisses it.

"Imelda," he says.

He hasn’t kissed someone since the day they said goodbye. Perhaps Imelda can tell, for the spell seems to break — she turns sharply towards the window as though she can’t bear to hear her name from his mouth. At least she’s still holding my hand, Héctor thinks past the sinking in his chest.

He can feel it showing on his face. What now, he thinks, wishing he had someone to offer him guidance. He settles their hands on the neutral space of the mattress and feels like a puppet drooping from slack fingers, about to collapse into himself. With a wobbly smile that hides nothing, he reminds himself that Imelda is not a prize to be won. She’s given enough, he thinks as he follows the direction of her gaze.

To his surprise, there’s something to see. A wobbling, wriggling, luminescent blur of color in the air.

Dante, Héctor realizes as he registers the sound of barking. No other alebrije on the planet looks that much like a wind-up toy sputtering in a bath.

"He’s going to crash," says Imelda, sounding breathless.

A yelp from outside.

Héctor reacts without thinking — pulls his hand free and leaps. He manages to arrive in front of the window in time to see Dante skid past the frame with his snout raised like a terrified elephant —

Héctor’s bones have scattered across the room before he can process the impact.

"Ay!" he can hear Imelda saying as he blinks himself back to awareness. "I told you to bring him back, not to break him."

Héctor would shake his head if he could; as it is, he concentrates on pulling himself back together. Firm hands on his hair tell him that Imelda has chosen to help. He closes his eyes, wondering if he should pretend to be slower at this than he really is.

She’s twisted his head back onto his spine and stepped away before he can decide. He tries to keep his expression light and finishes the job in a sitting position.

The room is filling up with the sound of Dante’s panting, reminding Héctor of Imelda’s words. Bring him back, she said, he thinks as he opens his eyes.

Imelda is kneeling with both hands planted on the ground, her gaze directed under the bed as though she’s checking for missing bones. Dante stands beside her with his tail down but wagging. One ear cocks up and his eyes seem to widen as he notices Héctor watching them.

Suddenly Héctor is holding an armful of wriggling dog. He buckles under the weight, but his hands manage to slip under Dante’s ears and scratch them. Guess we’re even, he thinks.

As he ducks a lick aimed at his eye, he catches sight of Imelda smiling.

There’s a monkey flying in his chest. If he isn’t careful, his mouth is going to snap like a string stretched to its limit around a tuning peg.

He welcomes the distraction of Dante’s next lick, and can’t help it — he laughs. "How come she doesn’t get kisses?" he hears himself say as he pats the dog’s snout.

Héctor only realizes what he’s said when he sees a streak of white in his peripheral vision.

"Imelda —"

Watching her march to the door, he can’t find the words to stop her. He can feel his hands dropping to his sides. The dim awareness that Dante has retreated out of his line of sight.

Did you ever love me? he wonders.

Imelda’s wrist-bones rotate as she twists the door handle. Héctor finds himself dully surprised when the handle doesn’t crack under her grip.

When she takes a step back instead of following the door’s outward swing, he assumes —

"Mamá Imelda!"

"And just what do you think you’re doing?" says Imelda.

Héctor realizes that his jaw has fallen open.

The open door has created a black rectangle, and when he peers at it — remembering to shut his mouth in the process — he can see reflections. Spectacles, round and opalish — that soapy sheen of glass eyes recently washed for bed . . .

Imelda isn’t going anywhere, Héctor realizes.

. . . familiar outlines that begin to set themselves apart from the black.

"Explain yourselves."

The tone of Imelda’s voice makes Héctor feel like someone has dunked him into a warm bath. He knows this posture — remembers it from when Imelda would catch him sneaking Coco sweets. It’s easy to fall into picturing the exaggerated rise to her brow, the way her eyes have become big and knowing beneath her lashes. Ready to pierce through lies like searchlights aimed into fog.

"Well you see —"

"— in our defense —"

Here we go again, Héctor thinks, carried by that warm, watery feeling into forgetting when he is.

"— you were very loud —"

"— we thought we heard a crash —"

"— so we were just about to knock!"

Rosita, he realizes with a start. She wasn’t there when he was alive.

She sounds too perky for his tastes as she continues, "You know, to make sure everyone was alright!"

"We’re fine," Imelda says, and taps a foot impatiently.

"Of course —"

"— we can see that now —"

A cold nose nudges Héctor in the ribcage, making him realize he’s still sprawled out on the floor. Setting one hand on Dante’s skull, he uses the leverage to push himself off the ground.

Imelda says something about going back to bed that Héctor ignores in favor of calculating when to let go of the support Dante presents. He feels shakier on his feet than he’d like to be, but the deciding question is whether it would more embarrassing to be caught using a dog as a crutch or to be seen flailing for balance . . .

"Are you alright, Papá Héctor?"

Héctor lets go of Dante at the same time he nearly loses his footing.

Victoria, he thinks, and: she heard me.

It’s the only reason she would call him — the only reason she would — use that word.

When the floor doesn’t swallow him the way it should, Héctor finds himself looking everywhere but at the door. The shape of reproachfulness, he thinks. "I, ah . . ." He subsides into scratching the top of his head.

"We’ll talk about it in the morning," says Imelda.

Imelda makes it sound like Victoria is the one at fault. The idea that either of them could think that spurs him into action. "I didn’t mean any of it," he says, blindly stepping into one of Dante’s paws and eliciting a yelp. "Forget you heard anything!"

He waves his hands at the door like a hermit who only knows how to communicate with forest animals.

"Heard what?" says Victoria.

Almost simultaneously, the twins add:

"We were sleepwalking."

"Collectively."

"So we couldn’t have possibly heard anything," says the twin who can only be Oscar.

Héctor shakes his head, appreciating the effort and also hating it. He wishes he had spent the past century rehearsing apologies instead of excuses for the police. "I —"

But Dante has butted him in the leg, sending him swaying off balance. He spends a moment glaring before he realizes he was supposed to be explaining himself.

"Well, except for the crash, of course —"

"— because it woke us up —"

"I think we’ll be going now," says Julio.

"It doesn’t matter," Victoria says almost at the same time.

The two pairs of reflecting spectacles turn towards another, as though the twins are deciding whether to protest these interruptions. Then they shake to either side, becoming a shining blur.

"Right, we’re going back to sleep."

"Good night."

"Yes, good night!"

"Sleep well!" Rosita adds, and if Héctor didn’t know any better, he’d think she was winking.

Right before Imelda closes the door, Héctor sees a new set of spectacles — feminine ovals instead of the twin’s circles — turned towards the room.

He buries his face in his hands.

"It’s alright," says Imelda in a low voice.

"Why did I say those things," he says to himself.

"You didn’t say anything they didn’t need to hear."

"Yes, I did —"

"Héctor," she says in a tone that makes him drop his hands to see her. Her expression is hard to read. "You’re allowed to be angry."

"Angry?" he repeats, and not understanding the word, moves on. "I don’t think they needed to hear any of that, Imelda." Hands flying to his hair, he begins to pace. "Why does a house with so many walls carry voices so well. . ."

"I’ve been waiting for you to be angry," Imelda says. "I thought you should be."

"That doesn’t make any sense," he says. One of his hands has reached the back of his head; the hair there is brittle and waving away from his head, reminding him that Pepita ruined it. He considers pulling the wig off to smooth it all down, then finds himself irritated for even thinking about something so trivial.

"It makes perfect sense," says Imelda, her voice unusually flat. "You have every reason to resent me. I resented you."

Resented as in past tense, Héctor thinks. "But not anymore?"

She’s drawn back in a posture he recognizes as somewhere between wanting to roll her eyes at him and thinking she should slap him with her shoe. His expression must reveal too much. "I didn’t say that."

"I don’t blame you," he says, shrugging past the sting.

"You should."

He recoils at the idea, and yet bitterness bubbles up all the same. "I wish you hadn’t assumed the worst of me," he hears himself say. Even if I am an idiot. "But I can also see why you did. I’m not much of a prize."

The last thought comes even to him as a surprise. It feels right, though, he thinks as he frowns down at his hands.

Right, he thinks as he forces himself to toss his shoulders back. He should say something to diffuse the tension.

As he draws up blank, he wonders whether it would be smarter to leave. Imelda has been giving him so many mixed signals . . . he doesn't know what she wants from him.

He doesn't want to be angry. He doesn't want to leave, either, even if that's what he's proven himself best at. But he's also at his wit's end, and if Imelda can't make up her mind . . .

Héctor is so caught between the words that he somehow anticipates will be hurtful, even if they also seem necessary, and his own hurt, he doesn’t immediately take notice of the white flutter. When Imelda begins straightening his vest, he has to blink a few times before he can bring himself to glance down.

She looks like somewhere-betweenness herself. Her mouth could be tightening with the desire to murder someone in the next five minutes, but her eyes are clear like the lake-edge in sun.

"We’re a right pair of fools," she says.

He can’t help but smile at that, although it feels more like a twitch than something relaxed. She reaches up to cup his cheek.

"Enough assumptions," she says.

The light in her eyes — it takes him back in time. I’m tired of waiting for you to make up your mind, she’d said, close enough for him to see the smooth little moons under her eyes. Tired of me already? he thinks he’d said. Idiota, she’d said, staring him down as though daring him to run. He remembers thinking about it, thinking it might be better than facing the impending rejection. He remembers how she’d yanked him down by the collar, back into reality.

That same bravery — the bravery that had made her look straight into his eyes with the open windows of her own, made her initiate that first kiss — he sees it in her now.

Imelda.

Te amo.

One day, he’ll work up the courage to say it again.

"I smell like dog," he notes.

"You could use a washbasin," she agrees. "And some sleep."

Héctor smiles. Imelda tucks a lock of hair behind a nonexistent ear and smiles herself. They look at each other.

(Maybe it wasn’t a dream, Coco, he thinks.)

She makes him feel brave. He puts his hands on her shoulders, lets them slide to her neck and up to where her cheeks meet her hair. Thumbs brush where skin once formed little moons.

"I want to be here," he says, letting his touch linger. Once he’d chased this feeling, thinking it belonged in words. Longing had also been fear — fear that life without a form would simply slip through his fingers.

(He doesn’t want to think about all the times he’d abandoned a moment to run to his desk and write a poem about it. He doesn’t want to think about the consequences, the rotten years. Already he can feel the seed for a song germinating inside him. But not here, he thinks. Not now.)

He’s still afraid. When he looks at her, really looks at her, he sees her eyes closed, long lashes trembling.

She’s beautiful, but he doesn’t trust himself. Imelda as he remembers her was always so clear-eyed. What she wanted, she demanded and took. He can’t remember her different except on the days he’d left, when she’d communicated with puffy eyes and pointed silence. Her emotions had suffused the house like the smell of sulphur before an explosion. Idiota that he’d been, he hadn’t recognized the warning signs for what they were until everything was charred from the fire (until he was dead).

Suddenly no longer brave, he lets his hands fall.

She catches one with the speed he remembers from when they would dance their feet to shreds. There’s something both uncertain and like a promise in her eyes.

"I want you here too," she says.

Really? he could say. "I know," he says.

"Good."

She smiles, only a twinge self-conscious. Something rises in him, quiet like reverence and dizzy like awe.

Imelda, he thinks, clearly means fearless.

(warrior rhymes with courier, and he’s going to feed Dante that letter before he writes Coco a new one.)

He looks into her eyes, and — 

— and he wants to be here, Imelda thinks. After everything that’s happened . . . only Héctor would be loco enough to mean it.

Imelda thinks: he always made me a little crazy.

What she wants, she thinks, is the determination she sees when their gazes meet. Knowing she’s still got it — tightening her hold on his hand and watching his eyes flicker like a working camera, the desperate wish to leave no second unpreserved. This is what she wants, this moment, this now: watching him stumble over his own feet as she leads them to the door, the bubble that spreads past her chest. The buoyancy that lifts her from the toes.

Only Héctor.

Right before she turns the handle, Imelda glances out to where Pepita and Dante are chasing each other outside, pirouettes framed by the window.

Gracias, she thinks.

—

A few months later

—

"Not much further," he says.

Coco smiles. Holds his hand as she waddles up the steps. He tightens his fingers over hers.

Imelda pries open the door to the roof with the same kind of strength she uses to tackle murderers. As daylight floods into the staircase, Héctor blinks at how her figure becomes a silhouette emblazoned with dancing rays.

She strides out onto the roof with her boots clicking in the way that makes him think of charged earth. Ordinarily he would spring to his toes to keep up with her; today he hangs back to match Coco's shuffling pace.

His daughter's hand on his arm steadies him too, helps him appreciate the difference between having the time to see the world and sprinting past it — running into it blind. Between how he could live and how he actually has. The thought makes him look down to the shoes Imelda made for his birthday.

For when Coco arrives? he’d asked. For your feet, you dreamer, she’d said.

He can’t help but smile.

"I could get used to this," he hears himself say.

"Used to what?"

Coco speaks so rarely — Héctor tells himself it’s because the past few days have been so hectic, because she’s a natural listener, but he knows Imelda thinks it could be a function of age, that she might have even forgotten how to converse — he finds himself turning to her with greater sharpness than the words deserve. "Sorry, mija," he says, rolling his shoulders to loosen the tension that appeared there. "Sometimes I talk to myself."

"Sometimes I sing to myself," she says with such mischief he completely discards thoughts about age, about how she’ll never walk without reliving phantom aches, about how her eyes never seem to fully open. Suddenly he’s walking with his little girl as she clings to his hand and spouts the most charming nonsense ever invented under the sun, and —

He’s laughing. "No!"

"Oh, yes. Want to hear?"

"How could I say no?"

But Coco’s expression has sobered. He follows her gaze, thinking he might have to jump in and do something, only to realize she’s looking at Imelda and Pepita, huddled together up ahead.

"It’s alright," he says, and then wonders why he’s passing on the family habit of speaking about music only in whispers.

Idiot.

He clears his throat, hoping to project his voice to sound reassuring. "Things are different now, mija."

Coco remains silent.

How do I make her see, he thinks, that it isn’t her mother’s fault. That I gave up music too. That some memories are so painful, you can’t keep going if you’re constantly being reminded of them.

"Hola, Pepita," he says as they approach.

Rarely has he been so glad to see those yellow eyes.

Coco has yet to be properly introduced to her mother’s alebrije. She knows about her; Pepita had flown Héctor and Imelda to the Department of Family Reunions when ordinary transportation had seemed to them too slow. But Coco had gone home with Julio and the others on the tram, and things have been so busy since. This is the first time they’ve been able to come up to the roof.

"I remember you, gato," Coco says.

There’s an undercurrent to her voice that makes him glance over. Coco looks the way Héctor thinks he might feel if someone told him that a childhood rival was marrying into the family.

"You used to sit in my window," she continues. "And find me when I was dancing."

Is that bad?, Héctor wonders as he tries to pin down the note of amused resignation — or is it tempered dislike? — he still hears in her voice.

When he looks to Pepita for clues, her ears slant downward as though acknowledging the words. Then she blinks in the way that always reminds him of mimes.

It’s a kiss, Imelda had told him. You’re joking, he’d said, because that possibility had never crossed his mind. I never make jokes, she’d said, and — he’s pretty sure she had been joking, because she’d rolled her eyes at his slack-jawed expression, pulled him down by the bandana, and kissed him. Like that? he’d asked in his daze. No, idiota, she’d said . . .

But this does not help him decipher what Pepita is trying to communicate at the present moment. She seems placid enough, but if there’s history between her and Coco, if for some unfathomable reason she doesn’t like Coco . . .

"Pepita has been watching over us for a long time," says Imelda.

She speaks with a slight edge, if not enough to convince him there’s a danger. Imelda would be warning Coco away if there were, he thinks. Instead, she’s petting a red patch of muzzle with her gaze fixed on her hands; there's almost a rise to her shoulders.

Defensive, he thinks, wondering if he should ask her about it later. Hopefully not because of me.

But when he imagines Imelda and Coco fighting for some other reason, the picture appeals to him even less.There has to be something we can all agree on, he thinks, stepping forward.

Pepita takes note, the black almond of her pupil sliding to follow his progress like a diva gliding across a stage.

"Good alebrije," he says as he touches a glowing yellow streak. Though cool on the exterior, the fur becomes warmer as his fingers pass down to that elastic barrier between him and her bones — her flesh.

(Look at this, Coco, he could say. Magic.)

He scratches the skin in the way that’s earned him purrs in the past. "Pepita saved Miguel’s life. Isn’t that right, Imelda?"

"More than once," says Imelda.

It occurs to Héctor that he’s no longer holding Coco’s hand. He turns and sees his daughter standing exactly where he’d left her. She looks small from here, and confused, the bone of her brow dipping into her sockets.

Perhaps she’s frightened, he thinks as he holds out an arm to her. And no wonder — who in their right mind would dare approach such a fearsome-looking creature?

"Don’t worry," he says, trying to draw her attention to his arm by stretching it to the limits of the socket. "She doesn’t bite."

Imelda clears her throat in a way that tells him he shouldn’t have brought biting into the picture.

"Pepita knows Coco," she says as he feels the onset of his automatic smile, the one that covers the most territory because it includes a shrug, a wince, and the makings of a charming grin.

Imelda glares when she sees it, adding, "There’s nothing to fear."

"I'm not afraid," says Coco.

Héctor turns to see her shambling forward, fingers pinching both sides of her dress as though holding it helps her stay balanced. She smiles as she takes his outstretched hand.

As she comes to stand beside him, her other hand settles on a tuft as green as a parrot.

"She must like you very much, papá," says Coco in a tone that can only be teasing. "Me, she only ever got into trouble."

He feels his mouth falling open. Trouble? he wonders as he finds himself staring at the markings on her forehead and cheekbones and chin, the markings that identify him as her father, because the symbols are exactly the same. My little girl, in trouble?

I wanted her to take after Imelda.

"Yeah," he hears himself say, even as his mind supplies him with one horrible scenario after the other. Drugs, breaking the law . . . "Pepita and I, we go way back . . ."

"Hardly," says Imelda.

The scoff in her tone could be wounding; to Héctor, it’s a call back to reality. When he glances her way, he sees a twist to her mouth. Hard to read, but there’s something to how her lashes quiver over her eyes. Like a butterfly, he thinks, opening and closing its patterned wings to stay warm.

She’s thinking of the past.

Suddenly he can no longer imagine Coco in real trouble. Imelda, he thinks, would never have allowed it.

Her scoff plays back in his mind, warming him to an idea. The more he speaks of the present, he thinks, the less they’ll dwell on what could have been.

"No, I’m serious," he says. "You wouldn’t believe some of the things we’ve done together. Eh, Pepita?"

Coco is smiling, so he pats the yellow streak for emphasis and continues, "Once we flew all the way to Santa Cecilia —"

"What?"

Héctor is about to continue the story when it hits him.

I never told her.

Imelda’s eyes are wide. Héctor can already feel his expression morphing into a crooked smile, his eyes falling into a squint. The less he sees, the easier it tends to be to come up with an escape.

"That was an exaggeration, of course," he says, wishing Imelda didn’t look exactly the way he’d expected she would upon learning how close he’d come to dissolving out of existence. "We were just looking at Santa Cecilia. You know, from a completely safe distance."

"There is no safe distance!" Imelda shouts. "Were you trying to get yourself killed?"

Maybe, he thinks, and realizes that the word must be written all over his face. Imelda seems horrified.

As his jaw sets into something more childish than he’d like, he finds himself avoiding Imelda’s gaze — by looking Pepita in the eye. This close, he can see red veins. The yellow looks like yolk, or like a glazed ceramic sun.

"Pepita had it under control," he says slowly, because it’s only just dawning on him now that this is true.

Far from ruining his dream, she might just have saved him from a completely unnecessary, unnecessarily horrible final death.

Why does it always take him so long to think of these things? he wonders, feeling his eyes expanding against the sockets. If he’d actually tried to cross — who knows if he’d be here — here with Coco and Imelda right now —

Imelda was right. As usual.

(And even now he still feels the longing to cross. Jealous of Dante, who gets to comfort Miguel over losing Coco. Héctor doesn't know why he can't ever simply be content with what he has.)

"I want to go flying," says Coco.

"What?"

"Great idea!" says Héctor, too relieved by the change in subject to think about what he’s saying.

"Héctor," Imelda says.

He turns and sees that Imelda is staring at him, her head tipped towards Coco’s feet and lips silently moving as though she thinks he wouldn’t get the point otherwise. She can barely walk, she seems to be saying.

Isn’t that exactly why we should do it? he tries to say with his eye sockets.

Imelda turns from him with a huff. "As I keep trying to tell your father," she says, "flying is not for everyone."

Héctor can feel his own frown. The thing is, he understands not pressing Coco into anything she doesn’t want to do. But this is something she wants. How long has it been since he could give her something she wanted?

For a moment he sees poems and letters, the package wrapped in shiny pink paper Imelda found at the market.

(He’s not afraid to give it to her, he tells himself. Even if Coco thinks less of him after she sees into his heart, he’ll be happy knowing she has the material evidence of his love. He’s just . . . waiting for the right moment.)

One thing after the other, he thinks. 

"I’ll go with her," he says.

As he turns to see Coco’s reaction, he notices that her hand is still gripping his. He looks into her eyes — so deeply recessed in the sockets, it’s nearly impossible to tell whether she’s fully aware or dozing.

But they seem to flash for a moment, as though to say I'm not everyone.

She also squeezes his fingers with surprising force. "I’d like that, papá."

"That's my girl!" he says.

If his voice betrays how nervous he really feels, he's too focused on what has to be done next to dwell. He pats Pepita's back to illustrate. "Here, I'll help you up."

"Héctor —"

Coco nods, letting go of his hand. He grabs her by the waist before Imelda can voice further protest.

"One, two, three!" Héctor swings her onto Pepita, marveling at his own ability to do so. The stiffness he feels has only become more pronounced with time, as though someone has been tying invisible bands between his bones while he's been sleeping. He still hasn't gotten used to it. Still expects his body to react one way, only to find himself off-balance when it doesn't. But the tradeoff — the strength he finds he possesses in moments like this —

Every second spent flailing like a maniac is worth having the power to help his daughter move, he thinks as he clambers up a wing to sit behind her.

She glances at him over her shoulder. When their eyes meet, she smiles like she means to spill a secret. You can’t tell anyone, she used to say. Her smile is exactly the same as he remembers. Only that her hair is now whiter than bone, and her mouth is almost entirely black, and her eyes are no longer bright and round, but horizontal slits peeking out of swollen sockets. And there’s something — a gleam when she looks at him, almost like a crow.

I must look like such a kid to her.

He smiles back, but somehow has lowered his chin so that his bangs flop into his eyes. There is no better reminder of his own shabbiness. Imelda had always been the one to cut his hair, and he hadn’t wanted anyone else to do it while he was on the road; now his hair is permanently too long, the physical reminder of his failure.

You deserved — you deserve — more.

Héctor distracts himself by looking to Imelda. She’s leaning into Pepita’s muzzle as though she’s kissing it.

"Imelda?" he asks, and reaches out with a hand even though he knows full well she doesn’t need the help, simply because he wants her to know she deserves every gallantry he can offer.

She doesn’t move.

Does she disapprove that much? he wonders, finding himself lowering his arm a little.

"Mamá," says Coco.

Imelda pats Pepita once. Steps away with a little nod, like she’s just concluded an act of business.

"You’re coming, right?" he asks, hating the catch in his voice.

When was the last time we did something together, all three of us?

"I didn’t think I was invited," she says.

"Come on, you know that isn’t true." As he hears his own words, he winces. That’s not how you talk to your wife.

Coco is listening.

He takes in a breath. Something opens as his ribcage expands, a rush of feeling that spreads as contrition across his face. "Please come with us."

Imelda has been pressing her hands together, rotating them at each touch. Now she looks at him with something dark in her eyes.

She’ll be getting me back for this later, he thinks as she reaches for his hand, and yet can’t bring himself to be worried. She swings herself up with the elegance of a professional dancer, treating his hand more as a hindrance than a help — and yet. When she slides into place behind him, he feels his shoulders begin to relax.

"Where are we going, papá?"

He opens his mouth and realizes he only has terrible answers. They can’t leave this world. Wherever they end up going, it won’t be the same as if she’d been able to leave Santa Cecilia while alive.

"Not to the barrier," Imelda says.

"Is there something you want to see?" he says to stall.

"I want to see the clouds," says Coco with the firmness she must have developed to deal with so many grandchildren. She doesn’t sound like a child in the least, and yet for a moment he sees her as she was — sprawled out on the floor with paper and pastels, biting her lip as she scribbled what she claimed to be trees and birds and sky.

"There are plenty of those," says Imelda.

The idea of touching the clouds with his girls — Héctor doesn’t know what to do with this feeling.

"You know," he says for no reason he can discern, "the others are afraid to fly. When they see how brave you are, maybe they’ll see they don't have to be frightened."

"Because we came home," says Coco.

Great going, he thinks, feeling his spine sag into a slouch. Remind her of how you never came home.

Suddenly there’s a hand on one of his — Coco is pulling it forward, placing it around her middle.

"I like that plan, papá."

Imelda has wrapped his ribcage from behind. There are no words for this feeling, this feeling as he puts his free hand over one of hers.

"Hold on," she warns.

Héctor squeezes both of their hands, and finds he can speak again. "I won't let you go."

Pepita beats her wings like she plans to shake the earth with her might — and then they're both touching ground and soaring.

—