Summer of the Mariposas Read online

  “I mean, I don’t know exactly what’s happened or why you are traveling alone,” Cecilia started, blinking nervously as she spoke. “But I know if you were my daughters I’d never part with you. If you were my daughters you’d be safe at home, eating delicious things I’d baked, and wearing nice, beautiful clothes I’d made. I sew the most exquisite dresses. If you were my daughters, I’d dress you up like pretty little China dolls.”

  “Well, we’re not the dress-up types,” I said, picking up another sugary petit four and biting into it to stop myself from defending Mamá’s honor to the point of being rude to our hostess.

  After we ate, we started to drift into a sedate sleepiness again. All I could think is that we were so emotionally drained from listening to the news and worrying about Mamá that even sugar wasn’t able to pick us up, and so we drifted into that deliciously dreamy stage before falling completely asleep. Seeing us lolling our heads like droopy violets, Cecilia told us to go upstairs and pick out a bedroom to sleep in.

  “Go on now,” Cecilia insisted. “You need your rest.”

  “We really need to get going,” I said, my eyelids resting heavily over my eyes. “We need to get to our abuelita’s house.”

  “What you need is a long, relaxing bath. Come on. It will clear your heads.” Cecilia got up and started for the stairs.

  We bathed in luxury. Cecilia, singing harmoniously as she went, filled all three tubs in the upstairs bathrooms with bubbles. We dozed blissfully in the scented water until we looked like prunes, and then, because we could hardly walk from the drowsiness brought on by those hot, delicious baths, we headed right to bed. Pita slept with Juanita in a lusciously decorated pink bedroom, while the twins shared a sunny yellow room. I picked a heavenly blue master bedroom with a king-sized bed and French double doors. All those little windows in the French doors allowed the shimmer of moonlight to come in and kiss everything in the room with a glittering silver dust.

  After my bath, I slipped between the soft, crisp bedsheets, happy and content. And for the first time in a long time, I didn’t pray for Papá to come home. I didn’t pray for Mamá to start paying attention to us either. I didn’t even pray for my sisters, because somehow, I knew we were all going to be all right. For the first time in a very long time, I thanked God for a warm, comfortable bed in a nice, safe home.

  I awakened in the middle of the night. Moonlight streamed in through the window, and though my vision was hazy, I could see the curtains billowing back and forth as the mal aire came into the room in mischievous gusts of wind that toyed with my senses as they entered my lungs and played with my sanity.

  “Going . . . never again . . . home is an illusion . . . home is where you’ve never been . . . never again . . . never again. . . .” el mal aire said as it spoke to me, whispering and sighing, murmuring incoherent things, jumbled words, rambling thoughts I could not understand. Remembering where I was, I tried to get up to go look for Cecilia, but I couldn’t focus, much less keep my eyes open. When I tried sitting up, my head spun and I fell back on the bed, dead weight on my pillows. That’s when I finally understood what was going on.

  “Something’s wrong,” I whispered. I went through the events of the day in my mind and realized that Cecilia never promised she would help us get to Hacienda Dorada. She’d acted so kindly toward us, but her lack of interest in our plight, our need to get to Abuelita’s house, frightened me. But wasn’t it a given? She knew what we were going through — she showed us the TV news. Right?

  I tried to clear my head. “Wake up. You have to get out of here.” But my voice sounded like a distant storm dying, waning in my ears. I tried to pick up my hand, to touch my head, to reach the ear pendant. But my hands were made of lead. My arms were wooden.

  “Llorona?” I called out in a breathless voice. “Can you hear me, Llorona? Something’s wrong. Llorona . . . please . . . help me . . .”

  LA ARAÑA “Una araña entre más

  hermosa más ponzoñosa.”

  THE SPIDER: “The prettier the spider,

  the more poisonous it is.”

  I passed out even as I called out to La Llorona. She awakened me what I guessed to be a few minutes later, not with ghoulish wails as might be expected, but as a mother would wake up her beloved child. She sat at the edge of the bed and called my name softly, gently, as she stroked my hair.

  “Odilia, wake up, m’ijita,” she whispered with maternal warmth.

  “I can’t,” I said, opening my eyes slowly. They felt heavy and swollen with sleep.

  “You have to,” she said softly. “It’s important that you get up and purge yourself from this sweet emptiness.”

  My stomach was aching dully, and my head felt like it was wrapped in layers and layers of gauze. “Something’s wrong. I don’t feel well,” I complained. Everything around me looked foggy and dark.

  “Odilia, I need you to drink this.” La Llorona lifted my head off the pillow and put a warm glass to my mouth. “Drink, child, your life depends on it.”

  It took all of my strength to open my mouth and sip the warm liquid in that glass. It was bitter and tasted like rancid grapefruit juice. Cringing, I started to spit it out, but La Llorona coaxed me until I swallowed the rest of it down.

  Suddenly I felt it, the need to puke. I flipped the sheets aside, jumped out of bed, and ran into the adjoining bathroom. My rubbery legs almost giving way under me, I reached the toilet just in time to empty the vile contents of my stomach into it.

  “What did you give me?” I asked. I turned on the bathroom light and rinsed my mouth in the sink. I was so weak, I had to rest my upper body on the vanity. “I’ve never been so sick in my life.” I felt like something ill was festering in my stomach, and my head felt like a piñata stuffed with cotton balls.

  “It’s Cecilia’s sweetness,” La Llorona explained. “It took control of you. The goddess sent me to give you a little bit of help to make you expel it.”

  “We need to wake my sisters.” I made my way back to the bed and sat on the edge because the room was still spinning a little. “Where can I get more of that stuff you gave me?”

  “Come, follow me,” La Llorona commanded from the doorway. Now that I could notice more than my own sickness, I saw that her hair was not white anymore, but dark and just as disheveled as it had been when I’d first seen her on the riverbank. Her eyes were deep hollows, and her cheeks were gaunt, but she wasn’t scary. She just looked like a tired woman again. With a wave of her hand, the door opened and La Llorona went through it. She was the only one who could help me now, so I followed her out of the bedroom.

  She walked down the stairs without making a sound. My own feet felt as light as feathers as I stepped over the floorboards, and I wondered if it was her miraculous tonic making me feel so weightless and swift.

  Quietly, we made our way through the spacious living room and past the formal dining room, guided by the bright light coming from the far end of the house. La Llorona stopped just short of entering the kitchen. We stood hidden in the shadows of the hall, La Llorona in front of me, with me looking over her shoulder.

  Someone was moving around in the kitchen. “Who’s that?” I asked quietly, so as not to be heard.

  “Cecilia, en su gloria, in all her spectral splendor,” La Llorona whispered as an ancient, haggish woman walked into view. “This is her true form. The woman you see by day is an illusion reflected by the sunlight. It is created by the potions she mixes in this kitchen and then secretly adds to her special treats.”

  It seemed unreal to me, but the woman in the kitchen was wearing the same clothing Cecilia had worn that morning. Her hair, however, was as gray and dusty as moth wings, and her sagging wrinkled skin almost hung off her face like a worn leather sack. She was grinding out something hard in a big black three-legged mortar. The molcajete’s legs kept thumping against th
e table, making an ominous rhythmic sound. Her discolored tongue poked in and out of her prunish mouth, and she puckered and twisted her craggy lips as she ground a coarse white substance into powder with a big fat pestle just like the one Mamá uses to make her homemade salsas.

  “What is she doing?” I asked.

  “Getting ready for tomorrow,” La Llorona whispered, pushing me deeper into the shadows of the hall. “Cecilia is baking for you and your sisters. You have become her special pets.”

  But that wasn’t any ordinary baking Cecilia was doing in there, because unlike Mamá, she wasn’t swallowing any of the powdery concoction herself as she tasted it. Instead, every so often, she would test its consistency by rubbing a pinch of it between her thumb and forefinger, put a little on the tip of her tongue, and immediately spit it out. When she was done grinding the unusual ingredient, she spooned its fine white particles into a miniature sieve and dusted the top of four freshly baked pies with it.

  “What is that? Some kind of sugar substitute?” I asked, touching La Llorona’s shoulder to get her attention.

  “To be sure,” La Llorona whispered, turning to look at me. “Its sweetness comes from the seeds at the heart of the chinchontle plant. It is a sedative more potent than any sleeping pill you can buy at a farmacia.”

  “Do you mean — ” I started.

  “Yes, Odilia,” La Llorona whispered more quietly than before. “She is medicating you and your sisters, sweetening your thoughts, dusting your dreams with a sugar sedative so sweet and satisfying you’ll never want to wake up for fear of never feeling this happy again. Those pies are meant to keep you here forever.”

  “Oh my God,” I whispered. I couldn’t believe it. I had put my sister’s lives in the hands of a witch. It was like something out of a storybook, like Hansel and Gretel finding the gingerbread house in the woods. I should have remembered Mamá’s advice and been more wary. I should not have accepted food from a perfect stranger. But in this day and age, who would have thought fairy tales could come to life? Even those tales of razors in Halloween candy are just urban rumors. No one would have suspected Cecilia, not Mamá, not me, but especially not my sisters. They relied on me to keep them safe, and now I had to do just that. “We have to do something. We can’t stay here.”

  “For now, all we can do is wait,” La Llorona said. “She will be done soon. Come, we must hide and wait for her to leave.”

  We hid behind the French panels in the living room and waited. La Llorona was right, Cecilia was done within minutes. She turned off the lights and left the kitchen. When she was gone, and we were sure she couldn’t hear us, we crept into the kitchen.

  La Llorona removed the lids from the footed pie dishes, picked two of them up, and pointed to the others for me. I took the third and fourth pies, and we snuck outside quickly. Quietly, we walked across the lawn, all the way to the back of the yard, past an old orchard, where we came across a long row of pig pens lined up behind a small, weather-beaten barn.

  “Pig slop,” she said as she emptied the pie dishes into the trough inside the first pen. “Go on. They won’t bite.”

  “Won’t they get sick?” I asked, still holding the pies in my hands.

  “Not any more than you did. The potion’s not meant to kill, just keep you loopy and happy all the time,” La Llorona whispered, taking the pies from me and throwing them next to the others herself. “The worst that can happen is they’ll sleep through the day tomorrow. Now, about your sisters. They’re going to be groggy in the morning, and probably won’t want to get up. You’ll have to give them some jojotle juice.”

  I followed La Llorona along the garden paths that meandered around the backyard, winding in and out and around each other. “That bitter stuff that made me throw up?” I asked.

  “Sí.” She bent over to examine a dark, spidery plant growing along the fence to the left of the house. “You only need a few leaves, this much. You’ll have to soak them in warm water for an hour. Then, when the water turns purple, you take the sprigs out and make your sisters drink the potion. They only need a few sips. It’s a strong remedy, so don’t let them ingest too much.”

  “But what if I do it wrong?” I asked. “Why can’t you stay and give it to them yourself?”

  “You have to have faith, Odilia,” La Llorona said, putting her hand on my cheek in a motherly caress. “You come from a long line of curanderas, healers of the people. Your Abuelita Remedios has been using her gift all her life. When the time comes, you’ll know exactly what to do with this.”

  “Abuelita Remedios is a curandera! I remember now. She showed me her garden once,” I said, taking the sprigs of jojotle, turning them over in my hands, and bringing them up to my nose for a quick whiff. “This looks like yerbabuena, only it’s darker and more potent by the smell of it.”

  “Yes,” La Llorona said, smiling at me. “It’s a primitive herb, dating back to an ancient time, before the fall of our beautiful Tenochtitlan,” La Llorona said. “It is what we gave our escuincles, our little ones, when the mal aire had crawled in through our windows at night and bewildered them. But that was before the river ate my children, before the arguments with Hernán, when we used to be a family.”

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered. My heart suddenly ached for her, and I wondered if this sadness, this pain that seemed to overwhelm La Llorona, was what Mamá felt after Papá left, when she went to bed at night and cried alone in the dark. Did she miss having a family then? Was it the family and not Papá she had mourned? Had we misjudged her sorrow? I knew she was missing us now, afraid she would never see us again. The guilt of it stabbed at my heart as I considered all these new facts, and I felt a great pain in my chest. Standing next to La Llorona in the darkness, I suddenly felt ashamed.

  “Come,” La Llorona said, rubbing my arm with her cold, dead hand. “There is no time for regrets. The beautiful dawn, la aurora, will be here before you know it. You must prepare yourself for the confrontation that will ensue with her arrival. It will take more than cleverness — it will take courage to get away from the sorceress.”

  La Llorona walked away from me then, and I watched as she disappeared into the darkness. Suddenly cold, I ran back up to the house and tiptoed upstairs to the bathroom in my room. I put the sprigs of jojotle in a glass of warm water, hid it under the sink, and then slipped back into bed in the blue room.

  I didn’t go to sleep though. I stayed wide awake, staring up at the full moon outside the wide, arched windows next to the bed. I’d never noticed it before, but the silhouette of a woman was outlined in the brightness of that moon. Her hair was flowing in the wind, and she appeared to be looking back at something or someone behind her.

  I felt I could learn something from the woman in the moon. From now on, I would look over my shoulder at every turn. I would make sure I knew who or what was lurking around me, waiting to harm us when we least expected it. For many people in this world were not who they claimed to be, and evil dwelled where you least expected it. It had certainly been that way with Cecilia, the beautiful butterfly who had turned out to be a poisonous wasp.

  The moon made me think about Mamá too, looking over her shoulder, crying for her loss, waiting for the day when she would see us walk through the door again. I knew she was frightened for us, because even with as much crying as she had done over Papá the last few months I could tell this crying was different. When she looked into the camera in that interview and begged for our safe return, I could see how much not knowing where we were or if we were even alive was killing her.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered to the moon before I closed my eyes and cried for Mamá as I faced my guilt.

  A few hours later, when the dawn started breaking over the horizon outside my window, I did as La Llorona advised. I tried waking up the girls, but they were dazed and disorientated and wanted only to be left alone, to linger in bed a little longe
r. I forced them to drink the jojotle juice. They coughed and complained about the bitter taste before they ran one by one into the restroom and threw up the nastiness in their stomachs.

  After the initial side effects wore off and they had stopped cursing my name, I told them what I had discovered the night before. I made them promise not to listen to anything Cecilia said to them. Then we all got our things together and made our way downstairs to face the bruja.

  Cecilia, looking like a vibrant mariposa in a purple tunic, her hair blossoming with sprigs of lavender, was fluttering about the kitchen looking confused and agitated.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked, as if I didn’t know what was wrong.

  “Oh, nothing,” she said, smiling nervously. “I woke up late, and I just don’t know what to make you for breakfast. How about some more of that sweet bread from yesterday? I think there’s still some left.”

  “No, thank you,” I said, trying not to let my emotions show on my face. “We have to get going. Our grandmother is waiting for us.”

  “Here it is,” Cecilia singsonged as she pushed a tray of day-old sweet bread across the counter.

  Delia pushed the tray back toward Cecilia. “We’re not hungry.”

  “Here Pita, have a piggy. It’s delicious,” Cecilia said, picking up the front end of a piggy and waving it in front of the girls while she made cute little snorting noises. Pita tried to step back, but she faltered in her resistance. Cecilia took her face in her hand and tried forcing the sugary treat into her mouth. Pita flayed her arms and grunted from behind clenched teeth, resisting the witch’s poison.

  “Let her go!” Velia screamed.

  “She doesn’t want any!” I shrieked, pushing the tray of sweet bread off the table. It clattered to the floor, startling Cecilia, who turned around to look at the mess with wide-eyed amazement.

  “Now look what you’ve done!” Cecilia’s voice suddenly changed. It was no longer sweet and melodic but menacing and intimidating. I had a feeling the rest of the girls were about to meet the real Cecilia, and it wasn’t going to be pretty.