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When her abuela died, Elena didn’t cry until it was all over.
There was too much to do - the funeral to organize and by God, however frugally Abuela had preferred to live, they would give her one fit for a queen. She and Victoria had done most of it: their mother was too lost in her grief for the woman who’d raised her on her own, their father was glued to her side, and their tíos were sort of wandering lost like a compass without a North. Tía Rosita had tried, she truly had, but she’d burst into tears more often than not.
Franco had helped, silent as he often was, though his main contribution had been holding her back before she maimed the idiota who had dared ask what sort of music they would want for Abuela’s funeral. Such an insult warranted the reaction, Elena would maintain for years to come. And, after all, she could handle grief better than she handled anger. Victoria had disappeared around the same time to come back looking almost perfectly calm, if not for the redness in her eyes. Many people thought her cold, like they thought their grandmother to be made of ice, but they didn’t really know her, did they?
They didn’t know her at all.
When Tío Oscar and Tío Felipe died, together as they were born, Elena laughed before she cried.
They all did - laughed until they cried and cried until they laughed again, marveling at how they had lasted precisely three months without their sister. They had tried to convince them not to try building a car on their own, but of course only their sister had ever put enough fear of God in them to stop their crazy projects in their tracks.
To be entirely fair, their car had worked perfectly, if not for the detail they both had forgotten to give it brakes.
Elena liked to think that somewhere, somehow, her abuela was giving them a piece of her mind.
When Tía Rosita died of something the médico referred to as meningitis, Elena cried together with her papá, who looked like his heart had been torn out of his chest.
He’d lost a sister and so had her mother, who’d always wanted one and found her in Rosita - with her delicious food and bright smiles and incoherent noises when excited, the smothering embraces and too-powerful pats in the back that made you nearly topple over.
People grieved for her outside the family as well. They all were respected and rather liked, but she had been loved: the day of the wake their house had been full of people who’d known her, as well as every single owner of a market stall where she’d stopped by to chat every week while buying groceries. With so many strangers at home, Elena had forced herself to stop weeping, and she hadn’t started again.
Rosita was just the kind of person you remember with a smile.
When her papá died, Elena put off crying as long as she could.
There was a lot to shoulder now, because Victoria had helped last time and now she couldn’t, her own health in decline for reasons doctors didn’t seem able to figure out. Walking for long left her winded, and all she could do was looking after little Berto. Their grieving mother had disappeared in the workshop, and hardly came out, so Elena struggled to stay afloat, to organize everything.
Without Franco stepping up - quiet and reliable Franco, so much like her father, she only truly noticed it now - she might have drowned. It wasn’t something she’d admit, but it was known and understood. Finally resting on the bed with him, little Berto between them, Elena thought back to her mother emerging from the workshop with shoes she had made for her husband, polished with all the love in the world, for him to be buried in.
She cried herself to sleep, and her husband stroked her hair without saying anything.
When Victoria died, Elena was too stunned to cry.
It was not sudden or unexpected: she had been sick, they had known it was coming. But the sense of unreality was still there, making her feel like she was moving underwater. She’d been prepared to bury her grandmother, her uncles, her aunt, her father; each loss, painful as it was, was bound to happen sooner or later. But a sister, barely a few years older than herself - no.
She hadn’t been prepared for it; she hadn’t been prepared for the gut-wrenching cry of grief that would leave her mother before she fell silent, too, gaze empty and fixed ahead. If Elena hadn’t been prepared to bury her sister, their mother hadn’t been prepared to bury her daughter. No parent ever really is.
Elena let Franco step in with organizing the funeral and stayed with her mother. She helped her dress Victoria in her best Sunday attire, put on her best shoes, and they sat together in silence. With an arm around her mother’s shoulders, her son clinging to her leg and a new life already growing in her, Elena grieved for her sister and prayed she would never know the sort of grief her mother was going through now.
When her mother died, she still had a smile on her lips.
It was the smile of someone who’s ready to go; someone whose past was no longer shrouded in fog, who could look back to her life and at the faces of her family, and move on with the knowledge she had no regrets.
There was music at her funeral, the first such occurrence in a century for their family. Elena had yet to grow fully used to it, but it no longer felt like an insult: it was simply their parting gift. She was sure her grandmother would understand.
So she closed her eyes, listened, and the vise-like grip around her heart began to loosen.
I miss her too.
Miguel doesn’t speak but ah, the arm around her and the way he leans in tells Elena exactly that. And Elena doesn’t feel like crying now, not really, however fresh the loss is: her mamá is smiling at her from the photo and oh, she’s gone so many years without seeing her smile. She cried the first time her mother failed to recognize her - thought she’d lost her - until the little man by her side brought her back, somehow. They got more time together, and she feels it was enough.
“We’ll go help mamá,” Miguel says, and walks out, jostling little Coquito in his arms and causing her to giggle. Elena smiles, and turns back to the ofrenda. Her gaze pauses for a moment on the man she’s never known, and hated regardless most of her life, but she finds she has nothing to say to him. He was the first loss, before she was even born, but she only knows him through songs and her mother’s few memories, and it doesn’t seem enough.
Maybe one day, after she is dead as well, she’ll know more of him. For now, she only turns to the people she has known, and loved, and buried.
“You’d be proud of him,” she says. “You’d be proud of them all. They’re a lot like you, you know?” she adds, and she realizes how true it was only as it leaves her lips.
She sees Imelda in Miguel’s stubborn streak, and Rosita in Gloria’s smile, and Victoria in Rosa’s composure and remarks. She sees her uncles whenever Benny and Manny build a monstrosity out of leather scraps, and she sees her father in the infinite patience Abel has with them, in his meekness. She can even hear her mother’s girl-like laughter, the one she had in times long gone, whenever little Socorro laughs. She always believed firmly that the dead do visit, once a year, their loved ones. She still does - but she knows now that they have never truly left.
With preparations for Día de los Muertos ongoing, Elena still finds a few minutes to go upstairs and have a quiet cry.
When Franco dies, he goes quietly as he’s lived; so quietly, in fact, that Elena doesn’t realize he’s gone until she shakes him to wake him up.
“Just a siesta,” he said, “before I finish up those soles.”
No soles are finished up that day. Or the next. Or the one after that.
She organizes no funerals this time. She can’t. Her last clear memory is shaking her husband to awaken him; all that follows feels like a dream, images and sounds drowned in static.
Soon enough she reasons, she will open her eyes to find herself shaking Franco’s arm, and he will open his own. Lo siento, he’ll say sheepishly, I overslept.
She’ll roll her eyes, but tell him to take it easy that afternoon - that she’ll ask Enrique to finish the job for him. There is no such thing as retirement in their household, not as long as one’s able to work, but age has crept up on them and it’s best to be careful on hot days like this one. It can take so little for one’s heart to give out, and-- and--
Coquito’s fiesta de quince años. She turns fifteen next month. He’s going to miss it.
The thought tears through the fog in the mind, through denial and through her heart. It drags her back to a reality where she’s sitting in their living room with her family around her - all of them except for her husband, who lays in a casket in the next room. It’s almost enough to break her.
But there are arms around her, several pairs, holding tight enough to keep the pieces together. They will never fit together quite the same way again - they never do, each time there is something that’s just missing - but for now, it is enough.
When Elena dies, she… freaks out.
All things considered, she’ll reason later, no one could blame her. Firmly believing in an afterlife is one thing. Going to bed in the evening to wake up someplace she has never seen to be greeted by skeletons is another entirely.
“Stay back!”
“Señora Rivera, por favor, let us explain--”
One of the skeletons dares peer at her from behind the desk, only to get its skull knocked clean off by a flying stapler. He yelps, and the other speaks quickly in a small radio. “Ignacio, I think we need reinforcement here!”
“Feisty new arrivals, huh? How many?”
“One.”
“... You can’t handle one--”
“Send reinforcements and shut your face!”
Oh no, Elena thinks, if they think calling up a few more bags of bones can take her down, they are very much mistaken. She bares her teeth in a snarl, reaching to grab the closest object to hurl it at the skeleton staring at her from… from…
Elena stills. The world stills. The paperweight falls from her hand, a skeletal hand, as she keeps staring at the object they’re holding up in front of her like a shield. Except that it’s no shield. It’s a mirror.
“Oh.”
“Please, listen to us. We mean you no harm. You’re in the Land of the Dead.”
Ah. So she… died. She blinks, and slowly lowers her arm. The skeleton in the mirror does the same.
“So, er. We have informed--”
“I’m dead.”
“Sí.”
“I-- you-- why didn’t you just say so?”
“What-- we tried, if you just would listen--”
“I have to go back.”
“Excuse me?”
Later she will see it was an entirely impossible demand, more than slightly unreasonable. Right there and then, she doesn’t even think of it. I must go home, is all she can think.
“Just a week or-- you don’t understand, my youngest granddaughter is going to university. We were all going to celebrate together, Miguel was going to be back from his tour, so you’ll send me back or else--”
“The dead cannot go back, señora - except for Día de los Muertos, that is. I’m sorry. But, we have contacted your family on this side. They will be here soon, and we’ll sure that will make the situation much easier to handle.”
Elena’s words - I need to go back to my family - die in her non-existent throat, realization finally dawning in. She is dead, but so are they. They are here. Her family is here, too.
“Where--” she begins, but never gets to ask.
“Elena?”
Heart leaping in her throat - and never mind she no longer has either - Elena spins to see… more skeletons.
The group comes to a halt a few steps past the doorway, eyes - why do they have eyes? - shifting to look across the devastated room, at the skeletons still hiding behind the desk. Elena stares, but has no time to try imagining familiar features over those bones: almost right away one of them steps forward, closer to her. And that mustache, the eyebrows-- she’d recognize those anywhere.
“Ah,” he says, giving a gap-toothed smile. “Here’s mi esposa.”
“... Franco?”
“Yes,” the smile wides, and he takes a step forward. “Ay, I’ve missed--”
“A siesta, you said!”
He recoils. “Well--”
“And then you went and died on me!”
“Lo sient--”
“Not even a goodbye!”
“I just fell asleep and--”
“You were there and then you weren’t and--” Elena’s voice cracks, which is bad because her voice never cracks; but then Franco is holding her and that is good, even though it’s bone on bone and unlike anything she’s felt before. Something is still familiar at a deeper level, and she clutches him back.
“Estúpido.”
“Lo siento.”
“I missed you.”
“Missed you t--”
“Awww, look at that!”
“Like when they were kids!”
Elena blinks, and pulls back just enough to look over Franco’s shoulder to a pair of tall, identical skeletons with very, very familiar voices. And very, very familiar grins.
“All that’s missing is a shoe on her head!”
“Or any shoes, really.”
“Died in your sleep, huh?”
“It would also explain the nightgo--”
“Do you mind? I think they’re trying to have a moment here.”
Victoria.
It is her, it has to be her. Elena stares, stunned, and this time she can actually see her features over the skeleton; her voice hasn’t changed, nor her posture, nor that tilt of her head before she speaks. Her hair is all black - it brings home, truly, just how young she was when she died.
“Hola, hermanita,” she says, and Elena finds herself muttering the first thing that comes to her mind.
“... I look like I could be your mother now.”
“Ah, I believe I still hold that role.” Someone steps forward, and there’s no mistaking who she is, nor the man by her side. She holds out skeletal hands, and calls out. “It’s so good to see you, mija.”
The next several minutes are a blur. There will be time to think of the living family she left behind, to miss them, but right now all she can think of are the people she just got back. There are hugs and laughter and pats on the back, plus some full-on sobbing from the imposing skeleton Elena recognizes, after a few moments, as her Tía Rosita.
It’s a whirlwind of questions and emotions and oh do they have so much to catch up with - and it takes a while for Elena to realize that something is missing. Someone, more accurately.
“Where’s Abuela?”
The question causes everyone to fall silent. They look at each other. The collectively roll their eyes and turn to the door. Now that it’s quiet, Elena can finally hear her voice just around the corner… and a voice she doesn’t recognize at all.
“Por Dios, Héctor, come on and meet your granddaughter!”
“Waaaait wait wait wait wait. Wait. Wait.”
“What?”
“What if she doesn’t like me?”
“She will, everything was cleared up.”
“Wait! You forgot one thing!”
“What!”
“... What if she still hates my guts? Because if she comes at me with a shoe--”
“You don’t have any guts, and I’ll protect you.” Mamá Imelda’s voice sounds more amused than annoyed, now. “Come on, walk-- no, let go of that door… ay, it’s like trying to bathe Pepita!”
“I-- can’t.”
“Héctor.”
“Call it stage fright. How about I go home and wait-- no, no, wait--”
There is a smacking sound, and suddenly a skeleton tumbles through the door and into the room, landing at Elena’s feet with a yelp. She blinks. He looks up and grins sheepishly, showing off a golden front tooth.
“Huh. Hi?”
“... The músico,” Elena hears herself saying. His smile wavers.
“Yeeeeah, well, I am aware there’s been some bad PR from my part, but-- you see, here’s a funny story-- when Miguel was here--”
“What Miguel was-- what?”
“One thing at a time, Héctor,” the familiar voice of her abuela rings out, causing Elena to look up. There she is, composed and dignified as she remembers, minus of course the skin. And flesh. And nose and other bits. But the smile, that rare fond smile reserved to her family - that has stayed the same.
“... Hola, Elena,” her grandmother says. “It’s good to have you back.”