Chapter Text
The triplets’ fifth birthday is certain to be a special one—this Alma knows from the three golden doors that appear beside her own the morning of the celebration. How kind of their Casita, to create space for her children to grow, to make each of them a room of their own, as it had made for her. Certainly, the three of them could not live in the nursery forever; the nursery itself being a new addition she discovered shortly after the triplets had outgrown their bassinets. But so soon!
Ah, well. All such things feel too soon, when they come to pass.
Her door had been golden too, though she hardly remembers it, lost as it is in the fragmented moments of that horrible night. No, it’s still there—her hand on the knob, the warm pulse of magic, the carvings etching themselves into wood. Her face rendered serene in the brown grain, even while its living counterpart stands before it tearstained, pale and drawn with anguish. She clutches the miraculous candle and her babies both, though on the door there is only the candle. Alma, it says at the top, though later it will say Madre, and later still Abuela. She turns the knob, opens the door, sees a room so much like the room she has lost forever—the room she shared with her Pedro, who she has also lost forever—no cradles, and the window overlooks not a city street but the trees that stand between the house and the guardian mountains, and the walls empty in a way that hopes to invite possibility but invites only despair—
Well. Some things will always feel too soon.
She has asked the town’s photographer to attend their little party. She would like to remember this night as a special one, as the night her children received a gift from Casita beside the presents she herself has prepared for them. For Julieta a little apron, as she is old enough at last to help her mamá with the cooking, like she’s been begging to do for months. For Pepa, a brilliant kite painted with little golden suns and butterflies, to help her sometimes-fretful little girl keep her eyes on the sunny skies. And for Bruno a vibrant green trompo to wind and toss and spin in the cobbled streets and squares—perhaps get to know some of the boys in town, children who will be willing to overlook his darting eyes and his insistence on things being just so in favor of such a handsome toy—a little top as joyous and free as she knows him to be. If Casita had told of her plans, though, if she had been able to communicate beyond oft-inscrutable tapping and clinking and creaking, perhaps Alma would have saved these gifts for another occasion so as not to upstage the magic of their miracle. Then again, the children are unlikely to mind receiving two presents.
Speaking of. She ought to check on them, make certain they aren’t getting into any trouble, anything that will dirty their lovely white birthday clothes and mar tonight’s pictures—or their image in the town. The children will have to learn, soon, that their actions as Madrigals have a greater impact than those of any other family in the Encanto. Yes, with time passing so quickly, they will soon be grown enough to join their mamá in her rounds throughout the village and help with the labor in town, the building of new houses and the little tasks of daily life. In a few years, she thinks, she’ll be able to send them off alone—once she’s certain they will act according to the importance the townsfolk have placed on the Madrigal name—and the neverending work of her two hands will become the merry work of eight. Perhaps each of her children will find something that only they can do, given time and the chance to explore. A role all their own.
Alma adjusts her mourning shawl and straightens her chatelaine and opens the plain blue door to the nursery and—“Ay, rumpled already?” Bruno and Pepa stand together in the center of the room, rumpled indeed, their chests heaving in incontrovertible evidence of recent wrestling and the grins on each of their round faces only confirming Alma’s guess. They separated as soon as they heard her hand on the knob, no doubt, but they are only four—five, today, five—and hardly little masterminds. Julieta looks appropriately remorseful, but her blouse is untucked and her ribbon askew. Alma kneels and addresses her, reaching out to re-tie the ribbon in her hair. “My Julieta, my nenita, I know you know better than this! I almost expect it of the other two,” she nods to her little wrestlers, quietly pleased to see them hastily attempting to straighten each other’s clothing, “but you are my big girl, are you not?” She brushes out Julieta’s wavy hair with her fingers, cups the girl’s cheek in her palm. Julieta’s eyes are huge, her lip stiff. She understands.
“Now, I was going to see if any birthday girls or boys wanted to help me mix the arepa dough for their lunch… But I must have wandered into the wrong room,” she announces to the air as she straightens up, “because these little ones are acting awfully young for it to be their fifth birthday, hm?”
“No, Mami, no, please—”
“We are five, we—”
“We’re sorry, Mami, we didn’t mean—we won’t—”
She silences them with one gesture of her palm, lets the moment drag on for a few interminable seconds, and breaks into a smile before Julieta can break into tears. “Oh, there they are! Mis bebés , I have been looking for you! Bruno, Pepa, come here and let me straighten your clothes.” They tried, certainly, but it takes a mother’s eye and a mother’s hand for such things. “ Then we can all go and make some arepas, yes?”
Forming cornmeal dough into balls can be enticingly messy work for a child, but the triplets are slow, and careful, and by the time the arepas are sizzling on the stovetop, there is not a smear or stain to be found between them.