15. The Man Behind The Walls

Around her, the world stopped.

Literally. The people wandering about in the plaza vanished from her periphery, the sun’s heat ceased to exist, the flowers she had dropped in the dirt were suddenly forgotten, because all she could see was Ratón, no, Bruno, sitting right in front of her. Holding an hourglass with a fearful gaze, haunted, hollow, empty.

Meeting her expression of horror as all she found she could do was stare.

Minutes passed. Time lost all meaning. Because all that mattered, all that she could focus on, was the mural.

She would have stood there longer, stared longer, pondered longer, however, she was drawn back to the present, snapped from her reverie when she felt something soft nuzzle her arm. Looking down, she saw Skippy look up at her with large brown eyes, the concerned expression a laughable contrast to the sass he had been conveying all morning.

Are you okay? he seemed to silently ask in his own special donkey way, and in the back of her mind, it dawned on Mirabel why Luisa always held a morsel of fondness towards the donkeys, even when their constant escape caused her a great deal of unnecessary stress. Because this docile understanding, this gentle kindness was enough for Mirabel to feel an immense deal of guilt for what she was about to do.

“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice not much louder than a hoarse whisper, “but I’ll be right back.”

Leading Skippy out of the sun and back under the shady protection of the eve of the roof (because really, it was the least she could do), Mirabel left the town square, sprinting up the hill and back toward the house with such a rapid gait that it left her out of breath when she reached the top.

But there was no time to be tired! Forging forward, her heaving reaching a desperate, frantic pitch as she barely contained her spiraling thoughts at this... this exposure of deception, Mirabel stormed through the house, her sprint slowing only slightly as she passed through the front entryway. The initial shock had worn off (partially due to the unwarranted exercise), being replaced with a potent mixture of bewilderment, indignation, and a dash of denial.

She could hardly believe it. All this time, after all they had been through together, and he hadn’t thought to mention to it to her once? His true identity? Why, he even had the chance to introduce himself to her as her Tío, and he had instead chosen to go with the stupid, contrived nickname of Ratón! A painfully obvious fake name, she might add, but what did it matter? She had still fallen for it.

She felt so torn. On one hand, the physical similarities were irrefutable, and yet, at the same time, she couldn’t fathom why Ratón would keep it a secret. Why he would conceal his identity, when Mirabel had considered him a very close friend. When she had even gone so far as to call him her family.

Maybe it’s because you are actually family.

Mirabel batted away the unwanted thought as quickly as it had popped up. Stop that, she scolded herself. The last thing she needed was to start talking to herself, especially not here, not now.

Regardless, she was going to get to the bottom to this. One way or another, she was going to uncover the truth.

Her mom was in the kitchen, cleaning up after lunch. The extra food had already been placed off to the side, and she was now working at washing the dirty plates that sat in stacks beside the sink. Distantly, Mirabel felt her stomach grumble, registering that she was hungry after missing lunch, but the pressing matter on the front of her mind, her recent revelation, shoved these sentiments to the side. 

“Oh, Mirabel!” Julieta exclaimed, hearing her daughter enter because to be completely honest, after running up the hill, her labored breathing wasn’t exactly discrete. “I didn’t think that you would make it back in time for lunch. How was it? Did you have fun, amor?”

Ignoring her mother’s questions, because if she were to acknowledge them, then she would be forced to admit that no, it wasn’t fun, as well as confront the fact that she had abandoned the task halfway through. And the last thing Mirabel needed to do was worry about that, not with the weight of what she was currently presented with bearing down on her shoulders.

“Mom,” she started, her frantic voice breathless and barbed with an edge of desperation. “I need you to tell me about Bruno.”

Julieta’s expression fell. “Mi vida, I thought we agreed that we weren’t going to speak of him anymore.”

“Mom, please.”

 Julieta’s lips pressed into a thin line as she glanced at Mirabel out of the corner of her eyes, giving the plate she was holding a vigorous scrub. “I told you everything there was to say. He left because of a vision he had. But no one knows what the vision was, and he’s now been gone for—"

“No, no,” Mirabel said, cutting her off before she could repeat what she already knew. “I don’t want to know why he left. I need you to tell me what he was like.”

Julieta placed the dish on the stack of clean plates positioned by her elbow, where it clattered with a harsh clang of ceramic. The action was uncharacteristically abrupt, given Julieta’s gentle demeanor. “Mirabel….”

Mirabel’s bottom lip quivered. “Please,” she whispered, hating how her voice trembled, how it wavered like the miracle candle the night the cracks had appeared on the walls and shook the doors on their hinges. “Please, mom, I need to know.”

Julieta finished wringing out the cloth she had been using to wash the dishes, slinging it over her shoulder as she turned to fully face her youngest daughter. She sighed, the anguish in Mirabel’s voice enough for her to relent and entertain the unwanted conversation. “What do you want to know?”

“Everything. His quirks, his habits, his personality….” Anything to help me determine if Ratón is actually Tío Bruno, or if I am just hallucinating the similarities and this is all some sort of ridiculous, contrived fever dream!

She was thankful her mother didn’t question why she was asking. It would be a nightmare to try to justify her sudden interest in her uncle, with how she felt like she was barely able to conjure up coherent, grammatically correct sentences. Speaking was a struggle when your whole world was turned upside down and inside out!

“Let’s see,” Julieta started, tapping a finger to her chin as she looked off in the distance, trying to collect her thoughts. “Where even to begin? I suppose I should start with his gift, hm? He had the power to see into the future, something that was a great burden upon him. He rarely slept and was always on edge because of it.”

“Yes, yes, I know about his gift, but there had to be more to him, right?” More things that can serve as an indication to the fact that they’re the same person, because as far as I’m concerned, Ratón has never had a vision in front of me. Or maybe he has. Ugh, how would I know?! This is all so confusing!

“However, despite this, he had a playful side. A mischievous side. He was always a child at heart, even with his gift that brought about so much devastation and destruction.”

Mirabel gulped. That sounded awfully similar to Ratón. But, plenty of people were like that, right? Burdened by adulthood, family, expectations, the pressure of having a gift that allowed you to see into the future, only to have a secret fun persona. Nothing out of the ordinary here.

At least, that’s what she tried to tell herself.

“What else?” she pressed, desperate to know more. “Did he have any hobbies outside of having visions?”

“Oh yes, he was obsessed with telenovelas. Couldn’t get enough of them, he loved the ridiculous plots and drama. It was ironic, though, because of how much drama his visions caused, you would think that he would have his fill of it. I always thought that he liked them because it helped him escape from the pressures of his gift.”

Mirabel nodded in mute numbness. “Uh-huh,” she said in blank, bland agreement, her mind racing. Telenovelas are so popular, though, that’s hardly indication….

“Oh! And his rats, how could I forget about his rats. He adored those things so much, I swore he liked them more than Pepa and I,” Julieta laughed, shaking her head as she relived the memory. The sadness in her eyes had reduced, now mingling with fondness.

Mirabel grimaced. The rats were pretty damning evidence. Although, she reasoned with herself, the small part of her that was fighting the losing battle in insisting that Ratón and Tío Bruno were two separate people, that could be anybody. Because Ratón explicitly refers to his rats as—

"Well, actually,” Julieta said, interrupting Mirabel’s train of thought. “If I recall correctly, he didn’t call them rats, he called them mice. And he would get very upset if you were to imply that they were anything other than that.” She laughed again. “But I mean, they were basically rats, because what was the difference? I could never tell, but he would always insist that it hurt their feelings, so I would always play along.”

Mirabel blinked. Oh. Never mind, then.

With each piece of information that Julieta revealed about Bruno, the more it solidified in Mirabel’s mind that he was Ratón. And the more it solidified, the more her world crumbled around her, the more her stoic visage slipped as the shock and panic began to morph into something a bit more volatile.

Despite this, however, she wasn’t done. Wasn’t yet convinced. “Anything else? Any, uh, quirks?”

Julieta tilted her head to the side, deep in thought. “Quirks? I suppose you could say that his superstitions were a quirk… he was always so paranoid. Knocking on wood, throwing salt and sugar over his shoulder, avoiding stepping on cracks….”

Yep, yep, and yep. Ratón did all of those things, all the things that Bruno did. And just like that, Mirabel concluded that her realization, her connection was accurate. It all lined up, everything was too related, too convenient for it to be a simple coincidence.

In front of her Julieta paused, concern replacing the reminiscence that had filled her expression mere moments earlier. “Is there a reason you ask, Mirabel?”

Mirabel froze, her mind and heart racing as her eyes flitted up to meet her mother’s, the sudden corner she found herself backed into only exacerbating the accelerated pace.

Oh haha, you know! Just the fact that your long-lost brother is actually not that lost at all, in fact, he’s hiding in the walls right now, right at this very moment! And he’s been doing that for ten years! That’s why I ask, because I’ve been meeting up with him for weeks now, and I just realized the connection!

Yeah, no. That would never work.

So, she decided to do her best to deflect Julieta’s question. “Uh, no reason! I’m just curious!” She let out a nervous laugh. “Thanks for answering my questions, mom, but I’m not feeling very well right now. I think I’m going to go upstairs and lie down.”

Before her mother could stop her, she was gone, flying from the kitchen at such a speed, it actually made her excuse of not feeling well more believable. That, at least, had somewhat been the truth; this whole situation was causing a knot of nausea to twist and turn around in her stomach that made her very tempted to follow through with her claim and go lay down in her bed to fight it off.

That had been pretty comprehensive. Everything lined up. The things about Ratón that were so endearing, so unique to him, were also things that apparently Bruno did as well. If that didn’t prove their correlation, then what else would?

Still. Mirabel found herself with a smidge of doubt lodged in the back of her mind, despite her heart knowing the truth. Because even with all of the evidence piled in front of her, there was only way she could confirm it.

Well really, only one person who could confirm it.

Luckily for Mirabel, she happened to be around the house right after lunch. Which naturally meant that the person she was seeking would be nearby, lurking on the periphery of the kitchen, waiting with thin patience before converging upon it with a ravenous appetite that could not be sated with one measly meal.

She found him loitering outside his room, slouched against the wall as he studied his nails, biding his time for Julieta to vacate the kitchen so he could sneak in and scarf down all the leftovers unfortunate to be left out on the counter. She knew this, because she had seen it happen countless times before.

“Camilo!” she called out to him.

She never thought that she would be this excited to find into her turd of a cousin. However, desperate times called for desperate measures, and that didn’t even touch the fact that Mirabel’s mind was so frazzled that she was not thinking straight at all.

That’s how she would rationalize it later, of course.

Camilo paused, turning to face her. “Yeah?”

“I need you to shapeshift into someone for me.”

“You want me… to shapeshift?” he asked, the incredulity portrayed undeniably in his features. Mirabel never asked him to change forms, only for the prominent reason that his shifting usually put her on the receiving ends of his pranks. To Mirabel, Camilo’s ‘gift’ was more of a nuisance than a benefit.

However, these were no ordinary circumstances. “Yes,” she said. “Please.” The latter word was tacked on as an afterthought, Mirabel hoping that Camilo would oblige her request with that paltry offering.

Unfortunately, she seemed to have run out luck that day. Not that discovering that there was an incredibly high chance that Ratón was Tío Bruno was considered lucky, by any means, but having her mother divulge some details about her mysterious uncle had certainly been a stroke of good fortune she hadn’t been anticipating.

“Hm,” Camilo mused as he cupped his chin in his hand, deep in contemplative thought. “And what’ll I get in return if I do this for you?” he questioned, tilting his head back so that he was looking at Mirabel down the length of his nose, folding his arms pensively over his chest.

Mirabel’s face fell flat. Part of her wanted to say, consider it payback for the time you stole that mug of chocolate santafereño. Or the time you snatched and read that note from me. Or really for every day that you make my existence a living nightmare, but she resisted the urge, knowing that it wouldn’t win her any favors and would only place her farther from her goals. “I’ll, uh…” she began instead, snapping her fingers as momentarily struggled to procure a suitable trade. “Let you shapeshift as me to get my portions of food as seconds for a day?”

Camilo snorted. “Make it a week.”

Mirabel let out a hissing growl in response. Camilo…! she mentally seethed, her nose scrunching at his counterproposition. That was a horrible deal. However, she refrained from bartering, because she didn’t have the time for this and she needed to know what Tío Bruno looked like now.

“Fine,” she settled on grumbling, waving it off with a dismissive gesture to propel the conversation forward, for what she actually required from her cousin. “A week. Now will you shapeshift into someone for me?”

At her relenting, Camilo celebrated with a tight fist pump and an elated “Yes!” However, he was quick to regain his composure, flipping his hair out of his eyes as he schooled his expression into one of aloofness, all business. “All right then. What—who—is your request?”

Mirabel, despite knowing how taboo the name she was about to say would be, didn’t hesitate, barely letting Camilo finish his sentence before she interjected with her reply, accented with an animated motion of her hands. “I need you to shapeshift into Tío Bruno for me.”

Camilo visibly drew back; clearly he hadn’t been expecting that name to be the one spoken. “What? Why?”

“Hey, our deal didn’t say that you could ask questions!”

Camilo shifted awkwardly from foot to foot. “I’m not so sure if I should…” he started, the uncertainty blatant in his tone. “Mom made it pretty clear that shifting into Tío was off-limits, especially after the, er, pranking incident.”

Ah, yes. Mirabel had heard of this infamous occurrence, the time that Camilo had decided it would be funny to hide in the kitchen pantry disguised as Tío Bruno and jump out to scare the next person unfortunate to open the door to grab some food. The next person being Pepa, who had nearly had a heart attack at the sight of her ‘brother’ jumping out and yelling “Boo!” This had been years ago, back when Camilo had first gotten his gift. He had been grounded for a week afterwards, or really, five days, because there came a point where the town’s complaints and requests for his shapeshifting skills had become so unrelenting toward Abuela, that she had cut the punishment short.

Mirabel, of course, hadn’t been unfortunate (or, in light of her current position, fortunate) to witness this entire debacle firsthand, and afterwards, Camilo had been irrevocably banned from shifting into Bruno ever again.

Which might have been fine for the greater good of the family, she couldn’t argue against that, but it certainly wasn’t doing her any favors right now.

“Come on, Camilo, please?” Any last shred of dignity was thrown out the window, her desperation palpable.

“I don’t know…”

“There’s no one watching us right now,” she tried to reason, gesturing around the empty hallway. “I don’t see Tía Pepa anywhere.”

Camilo hesitated, clearly torn.

“And,” she hastily followed up with a despairing lift of her finger, sensing his indecision and seizing the moment to pull him onto her side of the fence he was proverbially sitting on. “I won’t tell anybody about this. Not a single person.”

He bit his lower lip in derision as he debated, Mirabel holding her breath in anticipation. “Two weeks of food,” he eventually said, after an excruciating, nail-biting pause.

Mirabel’s eye twitched in displeasure. “Fine,” she hissed, even though that had not been part of the original deal, and a simple cost-benefit analysis would have indicated that this was severely out of her favor.

Nodding in acknowledgement of the new terms of their deal, Camilo took a step back, rolling out his neck and cracking his knuckles as he did so. “Here goes nothing,” he muttered under his breath after doing a quick check over his shoulder to make sure that nobody was a witness for the act of debauchery he was about to commit.

Watching Camilo shapeshift was always a marvel, a blink-and-you-miss it sort of ordeal. But this time, Mirabel had made sure to keep her eyes wide and peeled, staring at Camilo with such an intensity, it was clearly making her cousin nervous with how he averted his eyes to avoid her scrutinizing gaze.

However, even though she watched with undivided attention, it still didn’t prevent the breath from being stolen right from her lungs as Camilo, no, Tío Bruno stood in front of her.

There was no mistaking it. The man that Camilo presented as being Tío Bruno was none other than Ratón.

There was a tiny, tucked away part of her that had to stifle a laugh; Camilo’s Tío Bruno was such an unflattering portrayal, it was almost comical. With neon green eyes that pierced her soul and glowed even in the light of the hallway, grayed skin with eye bags that were somehow more pronounced than the ones that Ratón already possessed, a spooky, maniacal grin that bared his teeth, even the hunched, diabolical posture that made him look like a conniving villain straight out of a children’s fairytale, Camilo’s interpretation of their uncle was borderline insulting.

The person in front of her looked like it could be Ratón’s evil twin. Which didn’t really make much sense since, in light of some new revelations, Ratón already had some twins (or rather, triplets), namely in the form of Julieta and Pepa.

However, Mirabel didn’t laugh, could not laugh, because Camilo’s transformation confirmed her horrifying suspicion, nearly knocking her flat on her back with the sheer shock that she felt shoot icy tendrils down to her core.

So. It was true, then.

Ratón was Tío Bruno.

All Mirabel could do was gape, her jaw hanging slack as she stared at ‘Tío Bruno,’ and he stared back with those ghastly green eyes.

Unfortunately for her, Camilo didn’t give her any time to process this, for her mind to catch up, because he was already moving on to the next thing as he shifted tracks instantaneously. “Ooh, and listen to this!” he said, and all Mirabel could do was gawk as ‘Bruno’s’ lips moved in a way that was unmistakably reminiscent of Ratón. “I even wrote a little song about him!”

He smirked, clearly thrilled about having an audience for his antics as he prepared by pounding a fist to his chest to help clear his throat. And then, with an extravagant motion with his (no, Bruno’s) arms, twisting and snaking around to accentuate his words, he belted out, “Seven foot frame, rats along his back—”

However, barely into the song, he trailed off, noticing that Mirabel wasn’t enjoying his performance and was instead just staring at him in poorly concealed mortification. His posture straightened, the ludicrous grin on his face slipping as her uncle disappeared and Camilo was left standing in his place, giving her an expression of pure bewildered concern.

“Mirabel… are you… okay?”

Mirabel’s mouth opened to respond, but no words came out. “I… I’m…” she finally managed to choke out. I’m not okay! Our Tío has been living in the walls for the past ten years, and none of us knew! I didn’t even know who he was and I befriended him, and I just discovered that our entire friendship is based on a lie!

But she couldn’t say that. She wanted to get it off her chest, to rant about it (even if it was to Camilo, of all people), but the words were lodged in her throat.

“Mirabel?” Somehow, Camilo sounded even more concerned than the first time around, saying her name with such worry, Mirabel felt as though she was obligated to share her tumultuous feelings with him.

But she didn’t do that. She didn’t express any emotions. “I need to leave,” she blurted out instead, deciding that extracting herself from the situation was the most intelligent thing to do.

And with that, she was gone, doing an about face turn and practically fleeing to her room, where she slammed the door shut and locked it. Well, there wasn’t a lock, since her room was technically the nursery, so Mirabel’s version of locking it meant taking the chair at her desk and wedging it under the door handle so that nobody could open it.

Once she felt like she had properly sealed her room, she flopped face first onto her bed, not caring about the fact that her glasses were smushed against her skin and that she would need to likely clean off the foggy smears when she got back up.

But that wasn’t an issue at the moment. Mirabel was perfectly content to wallow with her face buried into the pillow for the rest of her life. Because if she got back up, she would be forced to face the truth. The harsh reality. She would have to confront the fact that Ratón was Tío Bruno.

You’re an idiot for not realizing sooner.

The thought leapt unbidden into her mind, a betrayal of her inner psyche. What do you mean? How was I possibly supposed to figure that out on my own?!

Great. And now she was talking to herself.

This wasn’t helped by the fact that the small voice in her head responded, scathing and severe and ringing in her skull. Are you kidding me? There were so many hints dropped along the way, it’s a miracle that you didn’t pick on them sooner. Maybe those kids were right; maybe your gift is denial.      

Mirabel frowned, the expression difficult to perform due to the way her face was still squished into the pillow. Hints?! What are you talking about, what hints?

Let’s just go through the list then, shall we? the sour voice snarked.

Mirabel groaned into her pillow; she really did not want to do that. To fully grasp the extent of just how stupid she had been. But now, with all of this new information, what did she have to lose?

For starters, his presence in the wall was a pretty major one. Back when she first discovered him, he had rationalized that he couldn’t be all that bad if Casita had decided that he could stay. At the time, Mirabel hadn’t questioned the motives of her sentient-house-friend, trusting that if Casita didn't want him there, then he would have been removed with very little trouble. But now, it seemed obvious that the reason he was allowed to stay because he was technically a Madrigal.

And speaking of Casita, the house even knew how he liked his chocolate santafereno! What seemed like an odd coincidence at the time suddenly made a lot more sense, if it was actually how Bruno liked it, seeing that he had lived in the house for decades before his ‘departure.’

And the ruana. Oh man, the ruana. In Mirabel’s defense, she had been pretty close to reaching the forbidden conclusion at the time, but had been talked out of it by Ratón’s slippery words. He had made a fairly convincing case... at least, it had been convincing at the time because now it seemed impossibly flimsy and contrived, but Mirabel digressed.

Those were a lot of hints. Innocent and trivial on their own, but when viewed as part of the larger picture, their significance was hard to deny. And there were plenty of other smaller things, miniscule side comments (such as how he claimed to have always loved Julieta’s cooking, or the parallels between the “family” he described leaving and the Madrigal family) that helped contribute to the correlation. Things that when isolated, meant nothing, but together, were pretty darn condemning.

At least, that’s what Mirabel told herself to make herself feel better about not realizing it earlier. Individual, separate events with hidden meanings impossible to decipher.

But now, she was deciphering them. And sooner or later, she would have to confront Ratón. Or, she should say, Bruno. Ugh, that was going to take a bit of time to get used to.

However, for the time being, she was perfectly content to remain lying down with her face stuffed into her pillow, her senses stifled so that the only things she could focus on were her incoherent, broiling thoughts. Because even though she now knew the truth, it didn't make it any easier to accept.