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The first time Bruno holds his daughter, his heart is breaking - for the love he lost and the new one bundled in his arms.
She is crying fiercely, and Bruno thinks that if she can come into the world fighting like this, so small, maybe he can, too.
She’s perfect.
She’s wrinkled and wailing, but she is perfect, and if Bruno does one good thing in his life, he is going to make sure the world she has come into is perfect for her.
“What are you going to name her?” his sister Julieta asks him softly, the corners of her eyes crinkling in concern as she lays a hand on his arm.
For a moment, his daughter quiets to stare up at him.
There’s only one name that will fit her, that describes what she is to him.
“Mirabel,” he croaks. “ Mirabel .”
…
When he carries Mirabel around the shops and houses, the villagers give him suspicious looks, so he takes her to the forest to chase after butterflies instead.
…
“Please, Papá, one more story,” Mirabel begs, clinging to his arm. “Just one more.”
“I’ve already told you two, mi ratoncita,” he says, holding up the same number of fingers and wiggling them, but he is already coming up with another one.
Her eyes wide, Mirabel clings to every word. Halfway through the daring adventures of Gonzalez the rat, her head starts drooping, and she snuggles in close to his side.
When Bruno is sure she’s asleep, he tucks her in underneath her blanket and presses a quick kiss to her forehead. Then, he tiptoes out.
Outside the nursery, Alma is standing in the hallway, disapprovement etched slightly into her features. “You spoil her,” she says.
The world is full of disappointments. She needs to learn she doesn’t get what she always wants, she doesn’t say, but Bruno understands.
He ducks his head.
When he looks up, his mamá is gone.
…
The first time Mirabel sees Bruno having a vision, she hides behind Pepa’s skirts and refuses to come out again until he promises her four stories.
…
The week before her fifth birthday, he gives her a present.
“What is it, Papá?” she asks, practically bouncing up and down even though she’s sitting next to him on the bed. She’s always full of energy, fluttering around like a butterfly that’s just found its wings.
With a lopsided smile, he nudges the package towards her. “Open it.”
She tears into the paper, and when it falls to the floor to reveal its treasure, her face lights up.
“Just like yours! I’m going to look just like you!”
It’s a plain ruana with little rats around the hem.
It isn’t much, but Bruno’s fingers are decorated with enough needle pricks. Seeing Mirabel’s delight makes every single one of them worth it.
…
The night before Mirabel’s fifth birthday, he gives her a tight hug and promises everything will be all right.
…
Everything is not all right.
The door disappears.
Bruno has a vision.
He sees his daughter, older, alone, and La Casita cracking.
Instead of giving the plate to Alma, he breaks it into tiny pieces - and with it, the perfect world he hoped for Mirabel.
This is your fault.
Your visions hurt Mirabel.
You hurt this family.
It’s your fault she doesn’t have a gift.
This would have never happened.
This is because of you.
It’s easy to put the blame on him - it’s what happens every time someone asks him for answers, every time something goes wrong, every time he says or knows something - and Alma is angry, angry at him, and when she turns and looks at Mirabel, the same horrible disappointment is directed at his daughter.
Tears streaking down her face, she wilts.
Because of him.
The truth is leaking between his fingers like sand, and Bruno cannot allow any more of it.
He will not let Mirabel be ostracized like him.
He would not let Mirabel be cast out and hurt more because of him.
He won’t.
This is your fault.
This is because of you.
You hurt Mirabel.
He believes it.
Later, he won’t remember if Alma orders him to or if he just does, but he leaves.
He listens to her crying through the nursery wall, his own tears making their way down his face.
It’s for the best.
This is for Mirabel.
This will hurt her less.
He chants the words like a mantra under his breath, over and over until he realizes what he’s doing and stops, but the words still turn around and around in his mind.
It’s for the best.
This is for Mirabel.
This will hurt her less.
Instead of her papá, Julieta tells Mirabel a story before bed to distract her.
…
While the nursery is being cleared out for Pepa and Félix’s baby, Mirabel’s ruana is shoved into a box and carted away.
She outgrew it, Bruno tells himself as he retrieves it that night when he comes out from the walls of the house. He can make her another one that fits.
He puts up a special hook for it on his wall.
…
The silent steps he once used after putting Mirabel to sleep are now for stealing food from the kitchen.
…
Over the years, Mirabel forgets him.
Augustín becomes Papá.
Bruno finds it hard to sleep, hard to stay awake, hard to eat, like his head has been buried by the ever-falling sand, but cracks have started appearing, and he’s going to patch them up to protect Mirabel even if she doesn’t know it - know him - anymore.
…
Behind the walls, he directs rat telenovelas, telling himself it’s practice for later.
But Mirabel is far too old for stories now.
Sometimes, he stares at the wall instead, humming her favorite songs to himself.
…
Mirabel embroiders.
At first, her stitches are awkward and uneven, like Bruno’s, too loose and too tight, but she practices, her brow furrowed in concentration and the tip of her tongue poking out from between her teeth.
She improves.
She’s good at it.
But it isn’t a gift, not to the rest of the family who have magic in their veins and can do almost anything they want.
Mirabel gives Isabela a purple scarf with plants and tiny animals on it for her birthday. Amid the other presents, Isabela barely even looks at it, and by the end of the day, it’s been forgotten in a corner underneath a pile of trash that no one wanted to pick up after the rich food.
Although she says nothing, Mirabel goes to bed with a slump in her shoulders.
That night, Bruno retrieves the garment. He runs his fingers over the tiny stitches of the flowers and wishes he could tell her that he sees her, that she is important, that she is the most amazing Madrigal.
But it’s too late.
This is your fault.
This is because of you.
You hurt Mirabel.
He has messed up again, he realizes.
Mirabel is still hurting.
And once more, it’s because of him.
He tucks away the scarf with the outgrown ruana.
…
The first time he sees her again, face-to-face after ten years, he feels like he is choking on sand.
This is all he ever wanted.
But he can’t do it. He can’t see the disappointment that will be on her face when she realizes that he is nothing like the rest of the family, that he’s let her down all these years.
He turns and runs.
“Hey, wait!”
…
She’s grown.
She’s not as tall as him, but it’s still more than he expected from watching her through the crack in the wall.
“Tío Bruno,” she says, and he doesn’t know whether to be happy because she hasn’t totally forgotten him or to despair because she really has forgotten him.
“ Is that…is that the scarf I made for Isabela?”
He pushes her towards the door as soon as he can. It’s better if she doesn’t see him like this, pathetic, living amid plaster, wood, stone, and dust. Julieta and Augustín have been good parents all these years, haven’t they? She doesn’t need him in her life.
He tell himself that he isn’t going to mess this up again (knock on wood), he isn’t going to ruin things for Mirabel again (knock, knock on wood), he isn’t-
Just when he thinks things are going to return to normal, she bursts through the door once more.
“Have another vision!” she demands, pinning him with the same pleading eyes she used on him when she was little.
And he caves.
…
This time, as the sand swirls around them, forming senseless and solid shapes, she does not hide in fear.
Instead, she takes his hand and pulls him along through the chaos as she chases the butterfly.
…
They hide behind a flower pot together like they’re playing hide and seek.
If he were braver, he might give her a hug before sending her off to foist one onto Isabela.
But he isn’t, and he doesn’t.
Instead, he slinks back into the walls like a rat to knock on wood and pray.
…
His prayers are not answered.
“Casita, get me up there!”
The house is breaking, too fast for him to patch up again and again, and he realizes that this is it - La Casita is dying.
The foundations are shaking.
The wood is cracking and splintering, and the lights swing wildly as though caught in the throes of a hurricane.
Rocks and rubble start raining down on him, and he barely manages to save the rats and get himself through the weakening wall.
With an oof, he hits the grass, and the helmet on his head falls off.
He looks up.
As Mirabel goes for the candle, she and Bruno make eye contact for one split second before she reaches and the tips of her fingers kiss the enchanted wax.
Having spent everything it could, the house crumbles in defeat, sending up a cloud of sand.
“Mirabel!”
Ignoring everything else, Bruno scrambles over the rubble, throwing chunks of stone to the side and scraping his fingers on the rough surface until they’re scratched and bleeding in his haste to reach her.
“Mirabel!”
“ Bruno?”
“Come on, come on,” he mutters, throwing the mangled remains of a chair to the side.
She has to be alive.
She has to be alive.
She has to be alive.
Underneath an askew door, he spots a scrap of teal and purple fabric.
Mirabel.
He heaves the door off her. When it hits the ground, it sends up another cloud of dust that makes him cough and his eyes water.
Mirabel.
On the ground, she lies like a rag doll, her head lolled to the side and a stray curl across her dust-coated face.
Her cracked glasses and the blackened remains of the candle rest next to her.
The encanto is gone.
Mirabel.
Her forehead is cut, her temple is bruised, and her eyes are closed.
“Come on, ratoncita, wake up,” he begs, kneeling next to her.
He doesn’t know whether to shake her, to hold her, to check for a heartbeat because if there isn’t one-
She’s lying so still, like the remains of the house.
This is your fault.
This is because of you.
You hurt Mirabel.
“Mirabel?”
As the rest of the family gathers around, closing in, constricting around them, Bruno reaches a shaking hand forward. Before his fingers touch her, he hesitates.
Weakly, Mirabel coughs, and Bruno falls over himself in his haste to scramble backwards as she props herself up.
For a second, she blinks, confused, turning her head side to side.
Eventually, she narrows in on him despite her broken glasses, her forehead wrinkling as though she’s trying to remember or puzzle out where she is and what happened.
Holding a hand to her bleeding forehead, she murmurs something to herself, too low for him to hear, and then removes her hand to examine it.
He feels trapped, like sand in an hourglass being tossed back and forth, and he doesn’t know what to do or which way to go. Although his skin is itching like it’s been bitten by ants, he refuses to leave.
Not until he makes sure his daughter is all right.
The encanto, Alma, none of it matters at the moment.
He isn’t going to abandon her a second time.
Never again.
“Mira?” he asks hesitantly.
She looks up.
“Papá?”