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"I was so stupid, really," he says.They sit at the very edge of the glowing marigold bridge, legs dangling over the edge into nothingness. There is nothing but empty space below them, nothing but the blackness of a night without stars, except down below, at the farthest reaches, where there is a glimpse of orange bleeding into the black. Like there's another marigold bridge, way down there.She isn't afraid. She's with her family, after all.Her family refused to let her go beyond the bridge. They didn't even bring her into the building beyond this side of the bridge, the one everyone enters and exits from, the one everyone seeing her had recommended they take her to. "Quickly," they'd tsked, "Find out how to send her back to the Land of the Living, before..."Before.But her family already knew how to send her back to the Land of the Living. They'd taken petals from the bridge itself, half a dozen glowing at once, pressing them upon her, shouting at her to take it, take it quickly.But her brother had begged to talk to her. "I've never been able to," he'd said. "Just a little." And the family had agreed, but they had still refused to allow her entry into La Tierra de los Muertos. She could go no further than the bridge itself, and the rest of them stood nearby, watchful."You may speak with each other, but no later than midnight," Mamá Imelda had decreed. "Then we send you back, Socorro, no matter what."She had nodded, and he had nodded, and Mamá Imelda had looked down at them both with a face full of regret, so unlike her proud photograph that stood in the place of pride on the Rivera ofrenda. She had ruffled her great-great-grandson's hair gently, whispered something inaudible, and then took a few steps back to allow them privacy, standing beside her daughter."I thought-" he says now, and falters. He swallows, even though he's nothing but bones, big brown eyes in a skull topped with a mop of black hair the only things the same as the smiling dimpled boy in the pictures she's seen of him; with no tongue and no throat but the top of his spine, he should have nothing to swallow with. But the rules of the dead do not work like that, it seems."I loved music," he says."I know," she says. She's discovered his hideout in the attic; covered in posters, filled with record players and CDs, who else could it belong to? Nobody else in the family was remotely interested in music. They hated it, for taking her brother away. She knows the stories of him sneaking off to the plaza, of him trailing after mariachis, of him fiddling around with the radio when he thought no one could hear him. She knows about the guitar."I got cursed," he says. "I took the guitar from de la Cruz's tomb, just like you did.""You did?" she asks. "Why?""I wanted to play in the talent show, and I didn't have a guitar." A shrug. "That's it, really. Just for a talent show I probably wouldn't even have won. I could have taken a guitar from one of the shops. I could have asked more people, maybe waited until some of the mariachis finished performing and then asked them again. I could have-" His skull-face contorts in a grimace of grief and self-hatred. "I was so stupid," he says again.She reaches for his hand, his skeletal hand, hard and bare of flesh. It is cold, and she feels all the cracks where the bones connect. She represses a shudder.His hand lies there limply, then suddenly twitches and wraps around her warm one. How long has it been, since he's held a living hand? She knows the answer."Why did you take it?" he asks."I wanted..." She hesitates. Día de los Muertos was always the saddest time of the year for her family, and she always tried to spend as much of the holiday as she could out of the house. Her parents never let her, though, terrified that she would disappear like their son had. But their protection and love was stifling, and she'd leaped at the chance to go to the graveyard to bring offerings to the seven Rivera graves. She'd been unable to resist the lure of the mausoleum. "I wanted to see what you were so fascinated with about him.""I loved him," he says, and his voice is venomous. "I looked up to him. I thought of him as, like, an abuelito. Always encouraging me to play music, always telling me to do what I thought was right, to seize my moment..." His hand, the one not in hers, clenches so hard she hears faint clicking sounds."You don't anymore?" she asks."Never," he hisses. "Not for twelve years."It comes as a jolt, to realize he is twelve, nearly thirteen, years older than her. For her family, he is still, always and forevermore, twelve years old. All the pictures she'd seen, from an infant cradled in her namesake's arms, through toddlerhood, preschool, a gap-toothed second grader, following the progression of his life through photographs that abruptly stopped just over halfway through his thirteenth year.He is the same age she is now, and always will be. But in a year she will be older than him, and Rosa, only two years his senior, is married with a baby on the way, and Manny and Benny are older than he ever got to be, yet he is still twelve, and will be twelve, forever."But what happened?" she asks. What happened, that he was cursed just like she was, and yet never received a blessing, not from the six Riveras that were in the Land of the Dead then? What happened, that his living family never found out what had happened to him? What happened, for his disappearance to cast a shadow over his family, both the living and the dead, forever? What happened, that he never came home.He stares down into the abyss, face unreadable, eyes in shadow. "Mamá Imelda gave me a blessing to go home," he says finally, "but on condition that I gave up music.""Oh," she says, and resists the urge to turn and look at her great-great-grandmother."She didn't mean it," he says forcefully, turning to face her, and his face is fierce, desperate. "If I'd refused to take her blessing, if I said I didn't want that condition, and it was getting too close to dawn, she would have given it to me anyway. She told me, she promised me. At the end, before - she gave me her blessing without that condition, only to remember that my family loved me. But then-" He takes in a shuddering breath and shakes his head."So you wanted to get a blessing that would still let you play music?""I wanted to get his blessing." With his free hand, he yanks a petal off the bridge and throws it over the edge. They watch it drift down. "So I ran away to find him.""De la Cruz?""De la Cruz." He turns to face her again. "Do you understand what I did?"She blinks. "You ran away to find de la Cruz?""I ran away for music," he corrects. "I valued music more than my own life.""Oh," she says again."I refused her blessing just so I could play music," he almost snarls, furious with himself. "I was willing to die if that meant I could still play music. I did die so I could still play music!" He is shouting now, and behind them there are murmurs, but none of their family come forward to intervene. Both of his hands clench into fists now, and she flinches in expectation, but to her surprise there is no pain, no uncomfortably tight grip on her hand. She looks down, and sees that his hand is intertwined with hers far too tightly for comfort, but she barely feels it. She can scarcely tell his hand from hers, both of them white bone entangled with each other.At her gasp her brother looks down, snatches his hand away, and buries his face in both of his.She stares down at her bone fingers, taking comfort in her racing heartbeat. "I - I have until midnight, right?""Dawn," he corrects without looking up. "You'll only be a complete skeleton by dawn, and then it'll be too late. But you should go back by midnight, just to be on the safe side. I should send you back now.""No," she says, and now he does look up, confused. "If - if I get back before dawn-""By midnight," he insists."By midnight," she agrees. "This - " She gestures with her hand. "- will be fixed? I'll be back to normal?""Yes," he promises."Then I want you to tell me, first," she finishes. "Tell me the rest, tell me what happened. So I can tell Mamá and Papá."He closes his eyes for a long moment and mouths something she cannot hear. When he speaks aloud, it is to say, "I thought Mamá Coco's papá was de la Cruz. So I thought I could get his blessing, and of course he wouldn't say I couldn't play music.""De la Cruz? He's the walkaway músico?""No!" His face twists, pure white, vivid against the glow of cempasúchil and colorful lights of celebration filling the black sky. "It wasn't him! And he wasn't walkaway, he wanted to come back!""What?"He takes a deep breath; he has no lungs anymore, nothing but the rattling of a rib cage, but it seems to calm him. "De la Cruz wasn't Mamá Coco's papá," he says clearly, with effort. "Héctor was. I met him in the station. He'd been trying to get over the bridge, but he couldn't because nobody had put his picture on an ofrenda. Nobody ever did. He said he knew de la Cruz, and he would bring me to him to get a blessing if I put his picture on our family's ofrenda.""You didn't know he was Mamá Coco's papá?""No. I still thought it was de la Cruz. But then I found out-" There is a grinding noise that she realizes is the clenching of his teeth. She hesitantly reaches out to touch his shoulder, but he continues speaking before he can."All of de la Cruz's songs were really Héctor's. Héctor wrote them all. De la Cruz wanted them, so he killed Héctor and stole his songs and never told Mamá Imelda and Mamá Coco that he was dead. So they thought he left them for music. So Mamá Imelda made the no music rule, because she didn't want music to hurt her family again. And she didn't talk about Héctor, and Mamá Coco didn't talk about Héctor, and then nobody remembered him anymore and he got forgotten."The walkaway músico hadn't abandoned his family; the beloved de la Cruz was a murderer, her family's century-old tradition was based on a false misconception; she was speaking with the dead, a fitting fate for tonight of all nights; and her unknown, vanished older brother was dead, despite her parents' hopes, and speaking with love and guilt of an ancestor named Héctor."What do you mean, forgotten?""Forgotten," he repeats. "The dead only exist as long as they are remembered by the living. As long as someone, somewhere, remembers you, you exist. Once the last person who remembers you dies, or forgets you, then you just....fade away. I saw it, twice. We call it the Final Death.""So you die...again?"A nod.She shudders. "That's why it's so important to pass down the stories..." This was why you had to remember your family, your people, your dead. Even if only on Día de los Muertos, telling others of them would keep their memory alive."Exactly! But no one remembered Héctor. Everyone remembers de la Cruz, but no one remembers Héctor." He puts his chin in his hands and leans out over the abyss, staring at whatever it hides."And Héctor...died? The Final Death, I mean?"He nods. "I was going to put his picture on our ofrenda so he could see Mamá Coco again," he whispers. "He'd always tried to see her, you know. He'd never gotten to cross the bridge, not once, but he kept trying to so he could see her again. I was going to remind Mamá Coco about him so she could remember him and he wouldn't die the Final Death. I was going to come home. I-" His fist clenches shut again, and he slams it into the soft marigolds, layer upon layer upon layer cushioning them, protecting his hand from injury, all of them perfect and whole."But he stopped us," he continues. "De la Cruz, I mean. He didn't want me to go home because I knew the truth about him. He didn't want Héctor to be remembered either, because Héctor also knew the truth about him. He-"He breaks off, shuddering, and cannot continue. His eyes are dark and haunted. When he finally speaks, his voice is a shadow of a whisper. "I still hate heights. I still have dreams."She doesn't understand what that has to do with anything, and some instinct, a knowledge that there are only so many things her brother can bear to talk about, keeps her from asking. Instead, she gestures to the chasm below them. "If you don't like heights, why are we here? We should go-" Go back to the center of the bridge, to safety, to the family that will send her back in moments."It doesn't bother me if I can't see the bottom," he explains. "It only scares me if I can see the bottom." He shudders again."Miguel. Socorro."They both turn. Mamá Imelda has taken a few cautious steps towards them. "It is five minutes to midnight. We are sending you home at twelve exactly, Socorro."She nods.They have only five more minutes, five minutes to exchange twelve years' worth of words, of feelings, of love, of life. Five more minutes, and then she will be given her blessing, and his photo will be taken off of the ofrenda, and the rest of the family will go back at dawn, and the next time her brother will see her is in a year from now, when she is older than he is, and she will never be able to speak to him again until her own death, not unless she gets cursed again next year, which she thinks her deceased family will do everything in their power to prevent."I was so excited," he says without preamble, "for you to be born. I was going to help Mamá and Papá as much as I could. I was going to hold you and feed you your bottle and carry you all around the house and never let anything hurt you. I was going to read you stories. I was making a picture book about our family for you." He closes his eyes again. "I wish I'd gotten to see you after you were born, even just once.""Mamá says," she whispers, and he opens his eyes, "that you would have been the best big brother to me.""I wish I had been," he murmurs."Miguel. Socorro," Mamá Imelda says again, and they both carefully scramble to their feet, knowing their time is nearly up."Would you like to give the blessing, Miguelito?" Mamá Imelda asks him as they rejoin the family.His jaw falls slack with surprise. "I - No, Mamá Imelda, no thank you. I don't know how - I've never - you do it," he stammers.But Mamá Imelda turns to her daughter, elderly, white hair still in the braids her child self bears in the ancient, revered photograph, whose life spanned a full century, who lived to see her great-grandchildren, who lived to see her namesake born and upon death was reunited with her youngest great-granddaughter's brother. "Coco. Will you give the blessing?""I will, Mamá." Mamá Coco steps forward, holding out a marigold petal, clutched in her hand as it's been for the past few hours, just like the rest of the family. "Socorro, mija, we love you. We all love all of you. Remember that - but that is not a condition."She nods."Socorro," her brother says suddenly, frantically, "tell them I didn't mean it."She looks questioningly at him."When I left," he explains, "what I said - they didn't tell you what I said?"She does not know what her brother's last words to the family were, no. She knows about his love for music. She knows about his lack of enthusiasm for shoemaking. She knows about the guitar. But she doesn't know what he said."I told them..." He doesn't look at the rest of their family, only at her, his voice an ashamed whisper. "I told them I wished I wasn't part of our family. But I didn't mean it, I really didn't, Socorro, tell them, please-" His hand grasps hers, bone against bone."I'll tell them," she promises. "I will." She does not know if they will believe her, believe the story of what has happened to her, of what happened to her brother, but she will tell them. She will not refuse the only thing her brother can ever ask of her, the one last message he wants to send to her - to their - family. And after all, what is Día de los Muertos for if not speaking to the dead?"Socorro," her great-grandmother says again. "I give you my blessing."The petal glows.She reaches forward, skeletal fingers grasping it.The last thing she sees is her great-grandmother's loving, sorrowful face, her great-great-grandmother turned away, the rest of the family's varying expressions of grief or relief, and her brother reaching toward her in a too-late attempt to embrace her for the first and only time.Then the world dissolves into petals, and she is standing in the grand, regal, dead tomb of Santa Cecilia's fabled, false hero, all her body solid and flesh once again, and she is alone.