Wind Blow, Soft Monsters

Five Years Later

“AL, DON’T PULL MY HAIR! I’M A PRINCESS!”

“Ugly princess.”

Something heavy slammed into my waist.

Something smaller landed on my stomach.

I opened one eye just as Gabriella climbed higher onto the bed and attempted to use my body as a ladder so she could launch herself at her brother.

“Dear God,” I muttered into my pillow. “Why did I get two? One would have been enough to test my faith.”

“Mommy!! He said I’m an ugly princess,” Gabby complained directly into my ear, her voice far too loud for seven in the morning.

Her curly black hair looked like it had just lost a war, her pink crown-print pajamas were wrinkled, and her big gray eyes were already filled with a level of outrage wildly disproportionate for someone who still had strawberry jam on her cheek.

Alvaro sat comfortably on my thigh like my leg bones weren’t casualties waiting for an ambulance. His dinosaur pajamas were on backward. His black hair stuck up in every possible direction. His blue eyes watched Gabby with the calm of a tiny criminal who knew he’d just started a fire.

“Because she is ugly princess,” he said. “Like frog. But with tiara.”

“I’M NOT A FROG!” Gabby immediately grabbed a fistful of his hair.

“AWWW—MAMI!” Al yelled, laughing at the same time. “G BITING!”

I closed my eyes again.

Gabby flopped half her body across my shoulder. Al used the opportunity to yank the pillow out from under my head.

“Stop,” I said, my voice still rough.

The digital clock on the nightstand read 7:14.

Outside the window, Washington was doing its usual morning thing: not quite raining. Gray sky hung low over the pine trees. Water droplets clung to the tall guest-room windows, and Papá’s backyard looked like an expensive real-estate ad that had lost all its saturation.

A place that was... fitting and desperate for a vacation. But anyway, I like Twilight, so fair enough.

Four nights. That was it.

Me, Al, Gabby, and three suitcases with more toys in them than clothes. Papá had already booked our tickets back to San Francisco for Friday, and I planned to use the last three days to sleep more than five hours, eat food I didn’t make myself, and let my kids bother someone other than me.

A perfectly reasonable plan.

But, they had decided to start the day with a light attempted murder.

“Mami,” Gabby said again, this time poking my cheek. “I’m pretty, right?”

I opened my eyes and looked at her. Round cheeks. Wild hair. Gray eyes that looked far too much like someone I had spent five years trying not to think about first thing in the morning.

“You’re very pretty,” I said, giving her bottom a gentle pat. “You’re pretty. He’s annoying. The world is balanced.”

“HEY,” Al protested.

I looked at him.

Those blue eyes stared right back at me with an expression far too innocent for a child who had just called his sister a frog in a tiara.

If AL had been born in a gray suit, black tie, and the ability to intimidate grown adults without changing his expression, he would have been a national problem. Luckily, he was only four and still terrified of the vacuum cleaner.

“Why did you call your sister an ugly princess?” I asked.

Alvaro gave a shrug. “Because she crying all the time. She is drama llama.”

“I’M NOT A LLAMA!” Gabby immediately started crying for real.

The bedroom door opened without a knock.

“Oye,” a male voice with a very obvious Bogotá accent entered first. “Why is this house already a telenovela before I’ve even had breakfast?”

Xavier stood in the doorway wearing a wrinkled black T-shirt and gray sweatpants. His hair was tied carelessly back, and he looked like someone who had slept too little but was still handsome enough to make every woman at a Seattle donor gala wonder whether he was single.

He is my twin. Sadly, he had been born with a level of patience that had somehow failed to pass down to me.

The second they saw him, my two little traitors jumped off the bed. “TÍO X!”

Al ran first. Gabby followed, still trying to grab the back of her brother’s dinosaur pajamas.

“Tío,” Gabby complained, her voice turning sweet in less than a second. “Al said I’m an ugly princess.”

Xavier crouched down and opened his arms.

Two little bodies crashed into him at once.

“Ay, Dios,” he said with a laugh as Al wrapped himself around his neck and Gabby climbed onto his waist. “A civil war before breakfast?”

“She bite me,” Al reported seriously, raising his arm to show a faint bite mark that probably hadn’t even existed five minutes ago.

Gabby huffed. “You deserve it. You call me ugly princess.”

“I said frog princess,” Al corrected. “Different.”

Gabby growled.

“Okay. Enough. You two come downstairs with Tío. Your mother needs five minutes to become human again.”

“I want hot chocolate,” Al said.

“I want pancakes with sprinkles and whipped cream and chocolate and strawberry and marshmallows and—”

“And insulin,” I cut in. “You get regular pancakes.”

Gabby glared at me. “You don’t love me.”

“True,” I said. “I’m raising you purely so I can watch you be disappointed.”

“You are mean,” she muttered.

“I know.”

Xavier chuckled. “You’re really proud of being the villain in their lives, aren’t you?”

“I’m necessary for their character development.”

“Come on, drama queen,” Xavier said, heading toward the door. “Come on, dinosaur. Breakfast.”

“HE IS A DONKEY!” Gabby yelled before the door closed.

“You’re a bigger donkey!” Al shot back without hesitation.

Then they were gone.

The sound of little feet, protests, and Xavier’s laughter faded down the long hallway of Papá’s house.

I dropped back onto my pillow.

Three suitcases still sat open on the chair by the window. My kid’s clothes, sweaters, leggings, tiny shoes, one Barbie head without a body that had somehow made it onto the flight from San Francisco, and Al’s plastic dinosaur collection, which outnumbered my emotional bandwidth.

I got up, walked into the bathroom, and looked at my reflection in the mirror.

I looked older than the twenty-five-year-old woman who had once stood in a Lake Como kitchen wearing an oversized Columbia T-shirt and threatening to poison her husband’s espresso.

My cheekbones were a little sharper now. My black hair had layers, mostly so it didn’t feel like a construction project every time I had to throw it into a rushed ponytail. The circles under my eyes had improved significantly since I discovered retinol and stopped believing three hours of sleep was a form of ambition.

My blue eyes were still the same.

So was my mouth.

Still too quick to say things I should probably think through first.

Five years ago, I left Lake Como with one suitcase, two positive pregnancy tests, and a sense of self-respect I had to rebuild piece by piece.

I went home to Bogotá first.

My mother cried.

My little sister hugged me too tightly.

Abuelo just sat in the living room with a face carved from stone, looking at my stomach before it had even started to show and deciding silence was the most elegant form of punishment.

Now I had two children who treated other people’s homes like wrestling arenas.

Maybe that was progress.

Or maybe karma just had a very expensive sense of humor.