Fly High, Butterfly

Chapter Fourteen

Alma is seventy five and she is sharing a sleeping pallet with her son. He is here, he is paler than she'd like and far too thin and he walks hunched and looks tired but he is here. After ten years he is here. After she has long since stopped praying for his return and instead started praying for his safety, his happiness, wherever he might be. She doesn't know what she has done to deserve so many miracles.

She loves Bruno so much, loves him with everything that she is, but that is no different than usual. There has never been a single moment in which she has not loved Bruno Madrigal.

She loved him when he talked to himself and jumped from tile to tile in public and her people looked at her with unease and reproach. She loved him when he retreated into his room or his own mind for hours on end and ignored his family's tearful pleas and she was scared with no idea how to reach him. She loved him when he had looked at Señora Marquéz—who had brought her older sister food every day for a month after their mother had died, who had cried during the vows at her wedding, who had come to their house on that night with bag she had packed for them and said that she would be right behind them—and he had told her that she was going to die choking on her own blood in the night. She loved him when the warm light that emanated from the carving on his door had gone dark and her daughters had wailed and wept and her grandchildren had been subdued and tearful, understanding that something was wrong even if they didn't exactly know why their parents were so upset. She loved him when she had forbidden anyone to enter his room and when she had silenced her familia with a glare at the mention of his name and when she had wondered, heartbroken and angry, how he could have left her when he knew that the loss of her husband had devastated her.

Alma has always loved her son, even when she didn't understand him. This is something she was aware of. But for the first time in almost a decade she allows herself to acknowledge how much she has missed him, a part of herself ripped away from missing him. She never wants to let him go again. She had known as the family prepared to bunk in the church that she wanted him to sleep near her that night.

It's something they used to do all the time. For the first few years there had only been one room, one bed that her little half family had shared with Pedro's absence like an impression left in the sheets, the ache like a hand clenched around her lungs. When the children were given their gifts, they received doors to their own bedrooms along with their new abilities, but that hadn't entirely dispelled with the stays in her room. Sometimes one of her hijos would have a bad dream and pad quietly across the hall to stand at her bedside and shake her shoulder. She would pull back the quilt and let whoever it was, usually Bruno, crawl in next to her. Some nights the roles would reverse. Some nights Alma would shoot awake with a frantic gasp, choking on decade-old smoke through her shallow breaths with her Pedro's last kiss still tingling on her lips. She would push the palms of her hands against her eyes in a vain attempt to force away the image of Pedro with his hands raised in clear surrender, Pedro stabbed through the chest with a single brutal stroke, Pedro's blood soaking the river a dark murky red dios mio suficiente no más. She would rise shakily, collect each of her children from their rooms and bring them back to share her bed, holding them close to reassure herself that yes, here they were and they were alive and they were safe and she was gone from that place and her children were with her, until at last she could rest.

But over the years the frequency of even these nights dwindled and eventually stopped altogether. This was partly due to her children getting too big to fit all four people in a bed, a tangle of limbs and someone would inevitably fall off the edge in the night. But if Alma is honest with herself, it mostly stopped because of Bruno. When she put her children to bed, she would kiss them each on the cheek, a part of the routine. With Bruno it was more elaborate. If she kissed him on one cheek she had to kiss him on the other and on the forehead and on the chin, for symmetry, and she had to do the whole thing three times, for luck. And if she did it wrong—Bruno would often inform her that she had done it wrong—she had to do the whole thing again. It was an arduous enough process on its own but when her family was sharing a bed Julieta and Pepa would clamor for her to do the same for them, their need for fairness between them bolstered by the trifecta of being ten and being siblings and being triplets. She was sure it wasn't her imagination that it always took a lot longer for her to "get it right" when Bruno's sisters were present. She would lose her patience and snap that it was enough, Pepa and Julieta would pout and Bruno would stay up shifting anxiously and knocking on the bedpost incessantly, convinced she had left off uneven, which would keep everyone else awake. She stopped calling her children into her room after her nightmares and they stopped coming to her after theirs. It was just not worth the trouble.

Now Alma curses herself for ever treating Bruno's fixation as anything other than what it was; a gift, the opportunity to kiss her children a few times more.

Bruno begins to stir fitfully beside her, making strangled little whimpers, and Alma feels something inside her shatter when she realizes that she can still recognize what her son sounds like when he's having a nightmare but she can't remember what he sounds like when he laughs. She strokes his dark curls and sings sana sana under her breath, wishing more than anything that she could take away his pain as if it were a scraped knee.

He wakes with a sharp inhale, his body freezing in fear almost instantly. His eyes are shifting rapidly, full of confusion and panic. Alma can't bear it, laying there, inútil, waiting for her son to remember where he is, when he is, that he is safe and home. She clocks the moment his gaze finally focuses, comprehension flickering in his expression. Wetness is gathering in the corners of her eyes but she forces herself to smile reassuringly.

"Hola, Brunito," she whispers. Her throat is clogged with emotion and her attempt at speaking burns.

"Buenos dias, mamá," he replies, voice hoarse from sleep. He looks around and seems to register the darkness that still cloaks them, their familia sprawled around them still fast asleep, that it is very clearly not the morning. "Er, well, I-I mean..."

"Yo se." Here they have reached familiar territory again. Bruno tripping over his words, foot in his mouth and Alma exasperated and endeared. He smiles bashfully after she cuts him off but doesn't duck his head like he would have ten years ago. Familiar, but not too familiar. She doesn't quite know him anymore. She knows the shape of him but he is blurred at the edges.

It is devastating, and Bruno must see that in her face because he takes her hands and says, sincerity in every syllable, "Está bien. Estamos bien."

"Are we?" Alma asks breathlessly, her eyes searching.

"Estaremos bien," Bruno amends, soft but sure. Alma's chest swells with an encompassing warmth. Here he is, her son, resilient and generous and kind. Here he is, her son, the best of her. Her flesh and blood and milk and joy. Her Pedro's crooked mirror. Her shadow and her light, her pain and her pride. Her son. Her son.