The Ofrenda

The marigolds came in on Mamá Reyna's hip, two enormous paper sacks of them, and the whole kitchen smelled like warm pepper and rain.

"Out of the way, out of the way." She set them on the table and flexed her fingers. "Sixty-two dollars. The man at the stand said I could have them for fifty if I smiled at him. I did not smile at him."

"You never smile at him," said Marisol, who was eleven and understood commerce.

"He knows what he did."

They built the ofrenda the way they built it every year, in the front room where the window faced the street, because the dead come home the way everyone comes home: up the walk, through the door. Three tiers. The bottom for earth, the middle for the living, the top for heaven. Reyna's late husband had built the wooden risers thirty years ago out of scrap pine, and they had gone soft and pale at the corners from being handled.

Elena carried out the box.

It was a Converse shoebox, still printed with the size (men's 11), and the tape on it had been peeled and restuck so many times it had gone gray as skin. She set it down. She did not open it right away.

"Okay," said Marisol. "Me first."

"You always go first."

"Because I'm the youngest and I have the most to lose."

Elena laughed, which surprised her. It still surprised her, every time, three years on.

Marisol took out the photograph. Her father at twenty-four, before any of them, grinning in a Padres cap with his arm around somebody who'd been cropped out so long ago no one remembered who it was. She propped it against the top tier, where the light would find it.

"Hi, Papi," she said, the way you'd say it coming in from school.

Then the rest, one at a time, each with its story told out loud even though everyone knew it, because that was the point. The saying was the point.

The little tin of Vicks, because Rafael had believed Vicks cured everything, including a broken radiator and, once, a parking ticket.

("He rubbed it on the ticket. He said it couldn't hurt."

"Did it work?"

"He paid the ticket, mija.")

A guitar pick worn concave on one side. He'd played badly and constantly.

A pair of reading glasses with one arm held on by electrical tape. He'd been forty-one and furious about needing them.

A domino, the double six, from the set he'd never let anyone else shuffle.

His wedding ring, which Elena wore on a chain most of the year and took off for three days every November, and the taking off of it was always the worst part, and she never told anyone that.

And last, up on the top tier, a glass of water, because the journey is long and the dead arrive thirsty. Salt in a dish. A candle for each of them and one extra, Reyna said, for anyone who came alone.

The marigolds went down in a path. That was Reyna's job, and she would not let anyone else do it, not since the year Marisol had gotten "creative." Petals from the ofrenda to the front door, and then, with Reyna out in her slippers and not caring, down the walk to the curb, a crooked golden seam in the dark, because the smell is what they follow. The color is what they see. You make it loud so they don't get lost.

"There," she said, coming back in and brushing petals off her hands. "Now he can find us."

"November second," said Marisol.

"November second," said Reyna. "He's a grown man. He comes with the grown ones."

Elena made the mole. It took five hours, and she did it standing up and crying some of it, and that was fine; that was expected; the recipe was Reyna's mother's, and Elena had never once gotten it right while Rafael was alive to complain about it. She plated it at eleven at night, the chicken under the dark sauce, sesame seeds across the top in a crooked line because he'd done them crooked on purpose, and she set it on the middle tier where the living meet the dead.

"Goodnight, flaco," she said.

Then she went to bed, and the candles burned, and nothing happened at all.

***

October thirty-first. Marisol came down at six-forty in the morning for the ofrenda check, which was a thing she did and pretended not to do.

The plate was untouched.

It was a stupid thing to be hurt by. Elena found her sitting on the floor in front of it with her knees up, not crying, just sitting there in her school clothes looking at the cold mole with the sesame seeds in their crooked line.

"It's the thirty-first, mija."

"I know."

"He comes on the second."

"I know." Marisol wiped her nose on her wrist. "It just looks like he didn't come."

Elena sat down on the floor next to her daughter in her work clothes, and they looked at the plate together for a while. Then Elena said, "Your father was late to his own wedding," and Marisol laughed wetly, and that was that.

The day went the way the day before November goes. Trick-or-treaters, a plastic bowl of fun-size Snickers on the porch, Marisol out with her friends as a very convincing dead astronaut. Reyna sat by the window with the bowl and the door open, handing out candy and judging costumes, and the marigold path lay there glowing under the porch light while children trampled it.

"Don't step on the . . . ay, the flowers, the flowers . . ."

"They're flowers, Mamá."

"They're a road."

At nine-fifteen the last of the trick-or-treaters went home. At nine-forty the candles on the ofrenda went out.

All of them. At once. The front door was closed.

Elena stood in the kitchen doorway with a dish towel in her hands and felt the hair stand up on her arms, and then the smell came: Vicks and cheap cologne and motor oil, the exact smell of his shoulder, the smell she had been chasing in laundry and closets for three years and had finally stopped finding anywhere.

Marisol dropped her helmet.

"Papi?"

And Reyna, from the window, said, "It's the thirty-first."

Nobody heard her, because the glass of water on the top tier was empty, bone dry, a faint ring at the bottom, and somebody had sat down in Rafael's chair, the recliner nobody sat in, and the cushion was pressed low with weight.

Elena was crying so hard she had to hold the doorframe.

"He couldn't wait," she said. "Look at him. He couldn't wait."

***

It was, for about four hours, the happiest night of their lives.

They turned the lights down and lit the candles again, and they talked to him, all three of them at once, over each other, the way they'd talked at the table when he was alive. Marisol told him about her science fair and the dead astronaut costume and the boy at school who was a liar. Elena told him about the truck, which she'd kept, which still made the noise. The room was warm in a way the room had not been warm in three years.

And he answered. Not in words, but in the small ways the dead are supposed to answer. The guitar pick turned over. A soft knocking in the walls, three slow, which was how he'd always knocked on Marisol's door. The radio in the kitchen came on by itself playing nothing, just a low hiss, and then a song she'd forgotten he loved.

"Okay," Elena said, laughing, wiping her face with the heel of her hand. "Okay, show-off."

Only Reyna stayed in her chair by the window.

She had known Rafael since he was a boy on her street with scabbed knees. She had buried a husband, two brothers, and a daughter in her seventy-nine years, and she had built an ofrenda every single November of her life, and she watched the front room now the way you watch a dog you don't know.

Because the marigold path ran from the altar to the door, and whatever was in the room with them had not crossed it. Not once. It moved around the path (she could tell by where the candle flames leaned, by where the cold came from) the way you walk around a hole in a floor.

At one in the morning Elena went to the kitchen for water and came back holding the plate.

The mole was gone.

Not disturbed. Not stirred. Gone: the sauce wiped from the china in long dragging smears, the chicken reduced to bones, and the bones cracked open lengthwise and sucked clean.

Elena sat down on the floor holding the empty plate against her chest and sobbed like something had broken loose in her, three years of it, and Marisol kneeled and put her arms around her mother's head, and they rocked there in the candlelight.

"He ate it," Elena kept saying. "Mamá, he ate it."

And Reyna stood up out of her chair very slowly, with both hands on the armrests, and said, "Elena. They don't eat it."

The room went quiet.

"They take the scent." Reyna's voice was thin and flat and absolutely steady. "The steam. The soul of the food. That is why the plate is still full in the morning. That is why it is always still full in the morning, every year of your life, mija, every year of mine."

The candles leaned.

"Something in this house is hungry with a mouth."

***

What happened next happened fast, and afterward none of them could agree on the order.

The smell changed. It soured. The Vicks went rotten sweet; the cologne curdled into something like wet pennies. The knocking in the walls came again, three slow, and then kept going, four, five, six, faster, wrong, no longer a father at a door but something testing drywall for a soft place.

Marisol said, "Papi, say my name."

The knocking stopped.

"Say my name," she said again, louder, and her voice cracked on it. "You used to do the thing. With the two names. Say it."

Nothing. The thing in the room did not know. It knew the Vicks and the guitar pick and the knock, everything on the altar, everything they had laid out for it like a map, like a menu, and it did not know the dumb private name he'd called his daughter since she was four.

"It read the ofrenda," Reyna said. "We left the door open a day early, and something came up the road."

The cold came off the ceiling then, all at once.

Reyna crossed herself and shouted at the thing in the old language, in words Elena had only ever heard her use at funerals, and she took the salt dish off the top tier and threw it in a wide arc, and the room screamed. Not sound, exactly; the windows did it, a long bowing groan of glass about to go.

"Mamá, what do we do?"

"We finish it!" Reyna's hand clamped on Elena's wrist. "It got in through the ofrenda. It can only be sent out the same way. You have to close the door, mija."

Elena understood, and shook her head.

"No."

"You take his picture off the altar. You tell him goodbye. A true one." Reyna's eyes were streaming now, and that was the worst thing Elena had ever seen. "Not 'see you next year.' Not 'come back.' We welcome the dead, Elena. We never invite them to stay. For three years you have been holding that door open with both hands."

"I can't."

"And something smelled it."

The light bulbs went. All of them, in sequence, a run of small pops from the back of the house to the front, and in the dark the only things left were the candles and the gold of the marigolds and the shape standing just off the path, taller now, wrong in the shoulders, wearing her husband's smell like a stolen coat.

Marisol was screaming.

Elena walked to the altar. Her legs did it. She reached up to the top tier and took down the photograph of a twenty-four-year-old man in a Padres cap with his arm around somebody nobody remembered, and she held it against her chest, and she said, "Rafa."

The thing moved toward her and stopped at the edge of the flowers.

"Rafa, you're dead." Her voice came apart, and she kept going. "You died on the fourteenth of June, and I have been . . . I have been keeping you. I kept your razor. I kept the voicemail. I kept the truck and the noise it makes, because if I fixed it you'd be gone, and I knew that, I knew that." She was weeping so hard she could barely shape the words, and she shaped them anyway, because this was the last thing she could do for him, and it was the hardest, and that meant it was probably love. "You don't live here anymore, mi amor. This is our house now. Ours. You go on. You go on, and you rest, and I will see you when I see you. But not tonight."

She turned the photograph facedown on the table.

And then, with both hands, she swept the marigold petals off the floor and away from the door and shut the road.

The thing came apart like smoke in a draft. There was a sound like a long breath going out of a house, and the cold went with it, down the hall, out through the back of the place where old air goes, and the candles stood up straight and burned clean and yellow.

The clock in the kitchen said 2:04 a.m.

It was November first.

***

They slept until noon, all three in Elena's bed like refugees.

November second they went to the cemetery.

They brought everything. Fresh marigolds, three buckets of them. New candles. A folding table and a tablecloth with the stain on it from Marisol's eighth birthday, because there was no point pretending. Reyna brought pan de muerto in a bag on her lap and ate a piece of it in the car and said nothing about it to anyone.

They cleaned the stone. They put the photograph up, faceup, in the light, the way it belonged. They set out the glass of water and the salt and the dominoes, and Elena made the mole again, the whole five hours of it the day before, and she got it right, and she said so out loud: "I got it right, flaco. Finally. You can stop making that face."

The plate stayed full. The steam came off it and went wherever steam goes.

And they ate, and they argued about the double six, and Marisol told the dead astronaut story again, better this time, and by four in the afternoon the three of them were laughing so hard on a blanket by a headstone that an old man two rows over came to see what was funny, and stayed, and told them about his wife.

It was dark when they got home. Elena carried in the empty dishes and the folded table and set them down, and she was tired in a clean way she hadn't been in three years.

Reyna stopped in the front room.

On the windowsill, inside the closed and locked window, lay a single marigold. Fresh. Whole. Still wet at the stem, as though it had been picked that hour.

The three of them stood and looked at it for a long moment.

"We didn't bring any home," Marisol said quietly. "Did we."

"No," said Elena. "We didn't."

Reyna reached out and touched it with one finger, carefully, the way you touch a sleeping animal. Then she smiled, a small, crooked, complicated thing.

"Then it's a gift," she said. "Leave it."

She turned off the lamp.

"And lock the door."