Summer of the Mariposas Read online

  “So what’s the plan for tomorrow? When do you want to take off?” Juanita asked in the darkness. I settled in beside her on the floor by the window seat, and we snuggled under the comforter together.

  “I don’t know what time the family is going to wake up.” I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “But we should hit the road as soon as the sun comes up. This whole thing has gotten too complicated for my peace of mind.”

  “I know,” Juanita said. “Today didn’t turn out the way we pictured it at all, did it?”

  Velia turned over on the window seat to face us in the dark. “Who would’ve thought this guy had abandoned his family?” she said, joining our conversation. “He looked so happy in the picture. I thought for sure they’d be waiting for him.”

  “Nothing’s ever the way it seems, is it? I mean, look at Papá,” Juanita whispered at no one in particular. She sounded distant, sad.

  I hated hearing the pain in their voices when my sisters remembered our missing father. “Let’s not talk about him,” I said.

  “Okay. But I’m very disappointed,” Velia continued. “I thought for sure this guy was different. I thought he cared about his family.”

  “I thought they’d be happy to see him, and us.” Juanita pulled the comforter up and covered half her face with it. The thought of Papá had made us all gloomy again despite the refreshing showers.

  “You’re telling me,” Velia whispered. “I thought we’d be heroes. Instead, I feel like the grim reaper. You were right, Odilia. We should have left well enough alone.”

  I turned away from Juanita and settled into a comfortable position on the floor. “Well, what’s done is done. No use lamenting it. Let’s get some sleep,” I said, yawning. If I had been more like Juanita, I might have said, “I told you so,” though.

  “Odilia, are we really going to see Abuelita tomorrow?” Velia’s voice was quiet from her spot on the window seat, as if she was afraid to ask the question. “Please say yes,” she whispered.

  “Yes,” I said, and to my surprise the rest of the girls on the bed sat up and hollered with happiness.

  “Yay! Yay!” they hollered. I shushed them and reminded them we weren’t at home.

  “People are mourning here,” I chastised them. “Now settle down and go to sleep before I change my mind.”

  After the girls fell asleep, I lay awake for some time listening to their soft breathing, thinking about going to Abuelita’s house and what might happen once we got to Hacienda Dorada. There were so many scenarios running through my mind, I was completely overwhelmed by them. Would Papá be there? And, if he wasn’t, would Abuelita know where he was? Would she even recognize us?

  The truth was, I didn’t know what to expect. After the day we’d just had, I realized we had no way of knowing what tomorrow would bring. What if Abuelita wasn’t home? How could I keep the girls from getting their hearts broken if she didn’t even live there anymore? Worse yet, what if she had passed away and nobody had bothered telling us?

  I went to bed feeling utterly conflicted and, for the first time in years, I was scared for us. But even as bad as I felt that night, it was nothing compared to the shock I received the next morning.

  It all started well enough, with us waking up to the aroma of homemade flour tortillas wafting through the house. As we rolled out of our makeshift bed and looked around the sunlit room, we found our clothes washed, neatly pressed, and laid out for us. We scrambled into them gratefully, and as we entered the kitchen, our hostess turned to smile at us.

  “Good morning, señoritas,” Inés said, her smile curling over her lips and creasing the corners of her eyes. “Would you like some breakfast? I can make some chilaquiles. It will only take a second.”

  “That would be amazing,” Velia and Delia sang out, simultaneously, even as they scrambled into the nearest chair.

  “Odilia, would you do me a favor?” Inés asked, as she turned on the stove and put a black iron skillet over the bright blue flame. “Can you please run down to the puestecito at the corner and get me today’s paper? Just tell Don José to put it on my tab.”

  “Sure,” I said. But as I left the house, I told myself I should be quick with the errand. We really needed to get out of El Sacrificio before the spell was broken and someone decided to call the authorities.

  At the store, I picked up some chips and sodas for the road, walked up to the counter, and laid everything down in front of the cashier. The newspaper fell open before me, and I froze as I read the headline over the top of the front page.

  ¡DESAPARECIDAS!

  The one word said it all: MISSING. Plastered across the width of the paper was a giant picture of us — my sisters and I huddled together under last year’s scrappy little Christmas tree, happy as mariposas, our bright smiles belying our alleged situation.

  We were officially missing children.

  LA SIRENA: “¡La Sirena — la mujer que se quiere

  llevar a tu Papi! ¡No! ¡No la dejaremos!”

  THE MERMAID: “The Mermaid — the woman who wants

  to take your Papá away! No! We won’t let her!”

  It wasn’t easy getting out of Inés’s house without letting her know what was going on. First, I had to buy all the newspapers at the puestecito and put them in the trunk of our car so nobody else would see them. After I got back to the dead man’s house, I told Inés they were all out of newspapers, then we ate breakfast in record time. We split before any of the neighbors had shown up for the wake, leaving behind most of the dead man’s money inside the container of sugar on the table, tightly wrapped in its plastic bag, like a great big tip for our hostess. I only kept enough for us to buy food and gas for the trip home after visiting with Abuelita.

  “We’re in trouble. Big trouble,” I told Juanita and the twins once we got down the road in my father’s beat-up Nova.

  “What do you mean?” Juanita asked. She was sticking her head out the window, admiring her new hat in the side mirror. Inés had given it to her at breakfast, when Juanita had complained about how much her skin hurt because she’d gotten too much sun on the way down to El Sacrificio. It was one of those fancy white summer straw hats you see brides wear at their wedding receptions. Only this one wasn’t so fancy, with a clump of saggy old silk flowers hanging off to the side. It was so big on her, Juanita had to hold it on with both hands. But she didn’t care that it was old. In fact, she loved it.

  “Here,” I said, keeping an eye on the road as I reached under the seat to pull out a copy of the day’s newspaper. “Look for yourself. We’re all over the front page. I bet by now every channel on TV is running the story about our abduction. ‘Cinco hermanitas, the Garza girls, taken from their home in their own father’s car.’ ”

  “Where did you get this?” Velia asked, snatching the paper out of my hands and sharing it with her twin in the backseat. Juanita turned around and leaned over the front seat to read along.

  “‘¡Desaparecidas!’ Ay, Dios mío! What are we going to do?” Delia pulled at a corner of the paper to get a closer look.

  “We have to go home,” Velia whispered, horrified. “Poor Mamá. She must be worried sick about us.”

  “I’m sure she is,” I said, keeping my hands on the wheel. “But Mamá’s got problems of her own.”

  “Is she all right? What happened to her?” Juanita’s voice trembled almost as much as the sad-looking flowers on her hat.

  “Cálmate. She’s all right,” I said. “Nothing’s wrong with her, at least not physically.”

  “Oh, thank God!” she said, putting a hand to her chest and breathing out gratefully.

  “You know, I can’t take you seriously with that ridiculous thing on your head,” I said, looking sideways at her. “You look like the Mad Hatter.”

  Juanita took the frumpy hat off and
threw it out the window. “I don’t care about the stupid hat. What happened to Mamá?” Behind us, the hat spun out into the morning air in a white blur, like a miniature flying saucer, and landed right smack in the middle of the highway.

  I watched it get smaller and smaller until it disappeared from sight in the rearview mirror. “Litterbug! You know that’s against the law, don’t you?”

  “Stop stalling!” Juanita ranted from her seat at the far end of the car. “What’s going on with Mamá? Why did you say she’s got problems of her own?”

  “Mira.” With one hand on the wheel, I took the paper from Velia in the backseat and handed it back to Juanita, pointing at the newsprint at the bottom of the front page. “It says it right there. She is a person of interest in the investigation of our disappearance. As of last night, she’s not allowed to leave the country, so she can’t come to Mexico to look for us. Papá’s in trouble too.” I’d never seen a newspaper back home say such things about people possibly involved in crimes who hadn’t been arrested, but Mexican papers were quick to report speculations. They took information from anyone willing to talk and didn’t hold back crucial details the way US papers sometimes did.

  “Papá?” Delia and Velia asked simultaneously, looking at me in the rearview mirror. “What’s he got to do with this?” Velia continued.

  “He’s a person of interest too,” I explained.

  “How? Why?” Juanita inquired, her eyes widening in disbelief.

  “Read the story,” I said. “It’s right there in the second to last paragraph.”

  Juanita unfolded the paper and began to read. “The authorities are looking for Ernesto Garza, the father of the missing girls. He is wanted for questioning in the unexplained disappearance of his daughters. Local police are also hoping to recover Garza’s vehicle, as it might provide crucial evidence as to the whereabouts of the girls.”

  “They think we’re dead,” Velia said, “and that Papá had something to do with it.”

  I adjusted the rearview mirror so I could make eye contact with her. “Not necessarily. They always investigate the parents first.”

  “Look at this,” Juanita said, after flipping through the paper. “There’s a story about Papá on page two.”

  I glanced at a picture of Papá but had to keep an eye on the road, so I couldn’t read the article beside it. “What does it say?”

  “Local singer wanted for interrogation in the case of missing children.” Juanita showed the paper to the twins in the backseat. “They used his publicity photo. The one of him in his mariachi suit. He’s going to hate that!”

  “Nah. He’ll be glad they used that shot. It’s a good picture of him,” Velia said.

  Delia leaned in to look at the picture. “I forgot how handsome he is.”

  “Oh, he’s handsome all right,” Juanita’s tone of voice told us exactly how she felt about him. She didn’t need to explain what she meant with that comment, but she did anyway. “Muy guapo, and he knows it too. Look at him mugging for the camera, like a possum with a mouthful of worms. Funny how I never noticed before how conceited he really is. Do they know where he is?”

  “No. But they’ll find him. Now that the FBI is involved,” Velia said after reading silently to herself for a few minutes.

  “The FBI?” Delia whispered in disbelief.

  “Yup. According to this, the National Center for Missing and Exploded Children is looking for us,” Velia continued reading on.

  “Exploited,” I corrected.

  “What?” Velia asked, looking at me like I was confusing her.

  “Exploi-t-ed, not exploded,” I explained. “The National Center for Missing and Exploi-t-ed Children.”

  “Whatever,” Velia said.

  “So what are we going to do? Turn ourselves in?” Juanita asked. She took the newspaper from the twins and took her turn reading it.

  “Well, we have to get back as soon as possible,” Delia told her. “To get Mamá out of trouble.”

  Velia slumped back in her seat and crossed her arms. “It’s our fault. We should have left her a note or something.”

  “Too late for that,” Delia said. “The best thing we can do now is get to Abuelita’s house and call her from there. If we don’t call home soon, they’re going to arrest her because I bet you a million dollars they’re not looking for us down here.”

  “Oh, yes they are,” Juanita said, shoving the paper at Delia. “It says here the FBI is working with both the border patrol and the Mexican Federales to try and find us.”

  The girls had the right idea. Calling Mamá and telling her we were alive and well and visiting with our abuelita would solve her problem. But there was still getting there. The way I figured, we couldn’t be very far — somewhere between twenty or twenty-five miles off.

  If I could find the exit.

  The biggest challenge was there was no official marker on the country road that led to Hacienda Dorada. We just had to follow an unpaved road beyond El Sacrificio, travel about twenty minutes, watch for the crooked fork in the road, and turn into it. From there, it was another fifteen miles on a dirt path — a straight shot to Hacienda Dorada.

  “Why are they going to arrest us?” Pita asked from the backseat. “I don’t want to go to juvie. That’s a really bad place.”

  “They have no reason to arrest us,” I told Pita, making eye contact with her through the rearview mirror. “We haven’t done anything wrong, so we have nothing to worry about. At least not so far.”

  “We found a dead body and didn’t report it,” Delia whispered, more to herself than to the rest of us. “We should have reported it, saved ourselves and Mamá a lot of trouble.”

  I pulled over on the side of road, reached up, and pulled Papá’s road map off the visor. Unfolding it over my lap to read it better, I glanced at the mileage gauge and made a mental note to use it to measure our progress. If we traveled more than twenty miles ahead and we hadn’t found the exit, we’d most certainly passed it. I’d have to turn around and look for the fork in the road again.

  “We took Papá’s car without permission,” Velia said, looking over at me.

  “Well, if he was so interested in the car, why didn’t he take it with him?” Juanita wanted to know.

  “He didn’t take it because it’s older than dirt,” Delia said. “I’m surprised the thing still runs.”

  “We should turn ourselves in,” Pita said, touching my shoulder from behind to get my attention. “We wouldn’t go to jail, would we?”

  “None of those things are bad enough to get us arrested. Trust me, we’ve broken plenty of laws, but I don’t think we’ve done anything that would make us go to jail,” I said, maintaining a normal tone of voice with the hope of reassuring them. “The best thing we can do right now is get to Abuelita Remedios’s house as soon as possible and ask for her help. I think it’s about time we let an adult handle this.” We knew last night we’d gotten in over our heads when we’d crashed the quinceañera, but with the police and the FBI thinking we were kidnapped or dead, I wasn’t sure we weren’t in big trouble.

  I started the car and got us back on the road, but my mind kept churning it over. Juanita had first noted it before we left, and Delia had reminded us — failing to report a body was punishable by law. The question was, who would they punish, us or Mamá? Adults had a funny way of seeking justice. Would they go after Mamá? Could they make her responsible for this? If our actions had damaged our family in any way, I would never forgive myself.

  Juanita’s thoughts seemed to be on the same track as mine. “We took the drowned man’s money,” she admitted quietly. Then she put her hands over her face so we wouldn’t see her crying.

  “But we returned it. Most of it, anyway,” I said, keeping my eyes on the road.

  Velia pulled out a small wad of folded bills
from her pocket and handed it to Juanita. “Yeah, but we still have some of it, and who knows where it came from. Who it really belongs to.”

  Juanita threw the cash on the dashboard and turned away to look out the window at the tall desiccated trees that seemed to loom over us as we drove on. “It’s probably blood money.”

  Her words silenced everyone in the car, and for a while nobody said anything. I thought about La Llorona then and wondered if she knew how much trouble this journey would cause. She was from another place, another time. What made sense in her world did not make sense in ours. Why had I listened to her? I should have thought this thing through.

  As apprehension spread into every pore of my being, I did the one thing I could to quiet the guilt in my mind. I turned the radio on. But even with the sound of loud music reverberating through the car, I could still hear my conscience nagging at me. You could have stopped this, all of it, it whispered. This is more your fault than anyone else’s. You’re the eldest. You should have known better.

  Disgusted with myself, I quieted my thoughts and concentrated on driving the car. The sun was in full bloom, blinding me as I tried to look for a crooked fork in the road ahead. To make things worse, the air was hot and blistery, burning our cheeks as we drove on.

  We drove like that for a few more miles, everyone keeping her thoughts to herself, when suddenly I smelled something humid and foul. Actually, I tasted it before I smelled it. But then I saw it: the white smoke puffed out of the front of the car and crept in through the vents on the dashboard, penetrating my lungs and causing me to cough uncontrollably.

  “¿Que diablos? What the hell-icopter is going on?” Velia sat forward in her seat and stuck her face out the window to get a better look. The whiteness of the smoke was blinding. I could barely see the side of the road and nothing ahead.

  My first reaction was to press down on the brake with all of my weight. The car screeched to a stop on the side of the road, and I flipped the gearshift into park. But even without raising the hood of the car, I knew what was wrong. When water started pouring from the front of the car onto the pavement, creating a buzzing puddle inches away from our feet, I knew we were doomed. I’d seen this happen to Papá before. The radiator was busted.