Summer of the Mariposas Read online

  Pita ran into Juanita’s waiting arms, and we all stepped back. I stood in front of the girls, ready to protect them from the witch’s rage.

  “You’ve ruined everything!” she screeched as we huddled together in the corner of the kitchen closest to the door. “Now pick it up and eat it! Or else!”

  “Or else what?” I asked. “You’ll put us under a spell? Do you have some magical words, some curse you plan to use on us now that we won’t eat your medicated sweet bread?”

  “Are you crazy?” Cecilia asked innocently, her face twisted into an indignant expression that was too fake to be effective.

  “That’s right! We know what you’re doing,” I said, my voice cracking momentarily. “But we’re too smart to be lulled to sleep by your lies anymore. I saw you baking last night. I saw what you put into those pies. But we’re wide awake now and we’re not going to eat anything you try to feed us. That’s why we gave those tortas to the pigs. You don’t believe me? Go see for yourself. Your pigs are probably snout down in the mud by now.”

  “You’re being ridiculous,” Cecilia scoffed. “I didn’t put anything into the sweet bread. Now clean it up, before I get really mad!”

  “No! You clean it up! We’re not your slaves!” Juanita yelled.

  Cecilia lifted her left arm with her palm wide open, ready to slap her.

  “What, are you going to hit her?” I asked. “Not while I’m alive!”

  Then, to make my point, I unsheathed a butcher knife from its marbled stand and wielded it in front of her face. “Now listen carefully, and don’t interrupt me. If you don’t help us get home, we’ll go straight to the cops when we leave here and make you wish you had. You see, Pita here is very good at crying. She can make anyone feel sorry for her. Not that she would be pretending to cry. She’s scared enough as it is.” Pita was sobbing even now into Juanita’s embrace. “And there’s enough evidence in this house and in our veins to prove that you were drugging us.”

  Braced against the counter, Cecilia eyed the knife and then us, taking in our determined faces. She slumped back, defeated. “What do you want me to do?”

  “We need the keys to your car,” I demanded.

  “I don’t have — ” Cecilia began, but I didn’t let her finish her thought.

  “Don’t mess with me,” I threatened. “This is a very nice house you’ve got here. Too nice to belong to a lowly police officer. Your husband had money. So I’m sure there’s a car parked somewhere.”

  “And if there isn’t?” Cecilia’s eyes were brimmed with tears, and suddenly she looked ancient. I resisted feeling sorry for her. What if this was another of her tricks?

  “Like I said, we’ll call the police. We’ll tell them we were abducted and brought here where we’ve been fed chinchontle powder until we were almost out of our minds.”

  “I’m sorry,” Cecilia said, hanging her head. “I didn’t want to hurt you. I was only doing it because I have no family, no husband, no children to play with. It was my dream to have daughters, many of them. But things went wrong for us long ago. My husband angered the ancient ones and I’ve been paying for it ever since, doomed to dwell in this empty shell of a house. When you leave, you will see it for what it really is, a ruin from the past. As for a vehicle, I don’t have one. Really, I don’t. I don’t have any money either. Everything I need, everything I have, I have carved out of the dirt with these tired old hands.”

  “She’s lying!” Velia said from behind me. “Don’t believe anything she says.”

  “Let’s just go,” Juanita said, her jaw firm. “She’s not going to help us anyway.”

  “Oh yes, she will,” I said, reaching up to spin La Llorona’s ear pendant almost violently before Cecilia. “Aztec queen, Tonantzin, Holy Mother of all mankind, give us your magical assistance! Make this witch tell the truth so we can get to Abuelita’s house!”

  At my words, Cecilia fell under the spell of the spiraling circles of the earring. Her pupils were so dilated that her eyes glittered and shone, becoming giant orbs of darkness.

  The witch’s eyes and head bobbed side to side, following the light emanating from the ear pendant much like a cobra follows the movement of a charmer’s flute. “That’s some talent you’ve got there,” Velia whispered.

  “I just hope it works,” Juanita said, pushing the twins back. They all backed up, widening the space between us and Cecilia, and I advanced on her.

  I turned my head to the side so that the revolving rings could work their magic to their full potential. “Tell us how to get back home,” I demanded of the witch.

  “I can’t help you,” Cecilia said. “The ancient ones have decreed it. I cannot leave this place. I am to dwell on this island in the desert for the rest of time. It is my fate, my doom. But I know someone who can help you. The old fortune teller, Teresita. She lives up in the cerro, the hill behind the house. She has the gift. Even though she has cataracts, she can see beyond our limitations.”

  “Is this a trap? Are you sending us to another sorceress? Is she evil, like you and your kind?” I pushed the tip of the butcher’s knife against her jugular vein. The movement felt foreign to me, but we needed to know. I didn’t like the harshness in my voice, but I was desperate to save my sisters, and the faster we got out of there, the better. “Tell the truth, old witch, or I’ll cut your throat and then you won’t have to dwell here anymore.” Even as the cruel words left my mouth, I felt terrible about their callousness.

  “No. It isn’t a trap. The best thing you can do is see her. Teresita won’t hurt you. She works only for good. It is her wisdom that finds the lost and turns the wicked.”

  “If she’s a witch, how can she help us when you can’t?” Delia asked.

  “Teresita is not a witch,” Cecilia protested. “She is a prophet, a seer. She’ll know what to do. If anybody can help you, she can. You must go, take the white goat in the barn, the young cabrito, as a gift for her troubles. She will be glad to receive it. Walk along the empty bed of the dry creek; her house is two miles beyond the crest.”

  There was a moment, just after we’d tied a rope around the goat’s neck and were pulling it out of the barn, that I wondered if we wouldn’t be better off just walking to the next town. Sure, it was hours away, but then we’d be sure we were in the real world and not some wacked-out fairy-tale wormhole. Nevertheless, this felt right to me, like I was taking the path I was meant to take to bring my family together, the one La Llorona had told me about just two days ago at the river. I don’t know how I knew it, but I was sure of it.

  Cecilia didn’t lie about one thing, at least not after I “hypnotized” her and forced her to tell us the truth. When we walked away from her house and started to climb the hill with the goat in tow, we dared to turn around and look back at it. What we saw was not the same house we had believed we had inhabited if only for a day. The dwelling at the bottom of the cerro was an old shack beyond repair. Just a few dry, weather-worn boards leaning haphazardly against a crooked frame, showing daylight through to the cracked furniture within.

  For a moment, I felt sorry for the old, broken-down woman whose loneliness had turned her into a bruja — a fate worse than death, a fate I wouldn’t wish on anyone, least of all Mamá. But then the earring’s spell must have broken, because Cecilia, looking as old and wretched as her house, hobbled out of her shack. Thrusting a fist to the sky, she screamed that we would pay for threatening her.

  “What happened to her?” Velia asked, pulling on Delia’s arm and pointing at Cecilia.

  “Whoa! Someone got a wicked makeover!” Delia said, bursting into peals of laughter.

  Cecilia let out another horrific scream before she yelled back at us, “Don’t laugh at me! You horrible brats! You have no respect for authority! But don’t think you’re going to get away with this!”

  “Shut up, you nasty old witch!�
� Juanita screamed back, bending over at the waist to shout as loud as she could. “You deserve everything you got!”

  “Run, run, as fast as you might!” Cecilia yelled at us. “But you won’t get far. No one leaves here without my permission! And no one — absolutely no one — is allowed to mock me!”

  “Oh, we’re so scared!” Velia and Delia taunted. “A craggy old witch is after us! Whatever should we do? Wherever should we go?”

  La Llorona’s words of warning echoed in my ears. “You and your sisters must remain pure of heart on this journey, Odilia. Be courageous but remember to also be noble and everything will be all right.” I hope it wasn’t too late for me to heed her warning. I had to minimize the damage we might have already done.

  “Stop it!” I said, grabbing each of the twins by an arm and pulling them back to follow me. “There’s nothing she can do to harm us now. She’s a broken old woman. No need to torment her.”

  “Come on, old woman, what are you waiting for?” Juanita yelled from behind me, to which Cecilia responded with a bloodcurdling wail that made us all stop. “Come on, give it your best shot!”

  “Children of the dark, children of evil! Your mother has been humiliated! Come to me now, come back home. Punish these insolent girls! Unleash your wrath upon them! Make them suffer! Avenge my wounded pride!” Cecilia hollered. She lifted her arms to the sky and screeched. The act made thunder explode in the distance and lightning flash all around us as sinister black clouds began to swirl directly overhead. It was enough to make us all run away as fast as we could, up the hill without looking back, for fear of the evil Cecilia had set upon us.

  LA GARZA: “Parada en una patita, la garza

  mira y admira a mis gemelitas.”

  THE HERON: “Standing on one leg, the heron

  watches and marvels at my twins.”

  By the time we arrived at Teresita’s house, towing the bleating goat by a mecate, an old rope, tied in a sailor’s knot around its neck, the sun was completely out. I figured it was eight or nine in the morning. Already the heat blazed down on us with a vengeance, and we were so dehydrated our tongues felt like thick, dry parchments in our mouths.

  We didn’t have to call out. An old man with a sun-weathered straw hat and faded overalls unbent himself from his chores in the garden to nod our way as we walked up to him. We couldn’t talk, we were so winded and fatigued from the long trek. Seeing our state, the old man walked over to a well, unhooked a tin pail, and dropped it carefully down into the water.

  “You look dried out,” he said, as he pulled the pail back up by the cord attached to the handle. “Come have some water. This is the best well in all of Mexico. It’s so cold and fresh, it could wake up the dead.”

  For a moment, I was wary of the old man and didn’t take the cup of fresh water. Instead, I looked down the well and saw nothing but the dark river water flowing freely, appetizingly on its way to some unknown destination.

  With my sisters standing a few feet away from us, looking scared but hopeful, I took the cup of water and sniffed it. It smelled like nothing and everything. It smelled like the freshness of spring and all the joy that it could bring. It smelled like a promise. Gingerly, I tasted it, letting the coolness of the water sit on my tongue while I decided if it was okay to let the girls have some. It tasted better than it smelled. It tasted like summer, like fun, like innocence in the Rio Grande; so I swallowed, and the purity of it was divine.

  We drank greedily from the pail, not bothering to talk or even look up at the old man, who seemed to be enjoying the scenery while he waited for us to get our fill.

  “That will do you,” he said, dumping out the rest of the water into the cement trough attached to the well. The splash scared off a scorpion who’d been sunning himself in the morning light.

  “We’re the Garza girls. We’re here to see Teresita,” I said as I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. “Is this her place?”

  “What took you so long?” he asked, waving to the front door of the shack. “Come in. She’s been waiting for you for ages. ”Teresita was not who we expected. For starters, she didn’t look like a woman. She looked like an old man dressed up like an old woman. There was just nothing feminine about her. Her floral print cotton dress hung on her rail-thin body like a discarded flour sack. She looked like a praying mantis, bent over, sitting at her table, rubbing her hands together. When she waved us in, we saw that her hands were big and bony with huge knuckles. The tips of her fingers were blunt, squared off, and tapered like those of a working man. Her nose, too, was unusually masculine. It was big and swollen and riddled with crevices and white, scarred blemishes. It hung like a bulbous mushroom in front of her face.

  But that wasn’t the worst of it. No, the worst of it was her small, naked head. Except for a few gray strands of hair, she was as bald as a baby pigeon, which gave her the appearance of being a very old man with enormous, wide eyes. The only feminine thing about her was the huge pair of silver earrings, which hung so low on her thin, elongated earlobes, they touched her shoulders.

  “Come here. Let me look at you closely. My eyes are not as good as they used to be, thanks to these miserable cataracts,” Teresita said, her skeletal fingers waving us in, urging us closer. As we neared the table, we saw what she meant. Her pupils were clouded over, opaque, and she seemed to not know exactly where we were standing in the room.

  “Cecilia said — ” Juanita said, pulling the bleating goat behind us.

  “I know,” Teresita said, a genuine smile lifting the sides of her thin, shriveled mouth.

  “We brought you this cabrito. For your services,” I said.

  “Sí, sí, gracias,” Teresita said, taking the goat and untying the knot at its throat. She picked it up, stroked it, kissed it, and then let it go. The goat ran off and made her way out the open door, bleating happily the whole way. “Sit down, sit down.”

  I sat down on the only other chair at her little table. Juanita scooted in beside me, and the rest of the girls huddled behind us.

  “You want to know how to get to your abuelita’s house,” Teresita said, picking up an old deck of cards with unusual images on them.

  “Lotería!” Pita cried, exultantly. “Oh, goodie. Can I play?”

  “Not quite,” Teresita said, waving the cards in front of us before shuffling them expertly in her manly hands. “These cards are more ancient than your Lotería. More powerful. They will help you reach your destination, the home of your ancestors.”

  “Our car broke down,” I said, being careful not to divulge too much information.

  “I know,” she said, leaning forward and looking at the deck spread before her. “You’re going to have to travel by foot the rest of the way.” She picked up a card and almost pressed her globular nose to it to look at it closely. Then she did the same with five other cards before she straightened up and sighed.

  “How much farther is it?” I asked.

  “It is a difficult road you’ve taken, one riddled with hardships and painful ordeals, but then again, you are difficult children.” She smiled as she said it, pointing a crooked index finger at us. “Unfortunately, the road ahead is full of trials and tribulations. You have angered the witch and now you must pay for your transgressions.”

  The doom of her words dragged me down, anchored me in misery at the knowledge that I could have avoided what was coming. “Pay?”

  “Yes,” Teresita said, looking at me closely now. “But then again, you knew that already, didn’t you?”

  “Knew what?” Juanita asked, turning back and forth between me and Teresita, waiting for answers that we were both reluctant to disclose.

  “Cecilia has called upon evil to plague you,” Teresita proclaimed, putting her hands over three of the cards on the table before us. “They are coming this way, the children of the night, traveling f
orth from the ancient world, coming from far and wide to avenge their mother.”

  “Cecilia has children?” Velia asked, leaning down to look at the cards. “But she said she didn’t.”

  “Not children like you.” Teresita turned the three cards on the table upside down and leaned over to get a better look at them. “Adopted children. Immortal children crafted by the devil himself and loosed upon this earth to aid in its destruction. Cecilia is a crafty, skillful sorceress. She has survived through the ages by cultivating that which lives and breathes in the darkest part of our fearful minds. In her greed, her need for power, she has cultivated three of our greatest nightmares, nurturing their dark souls and sustaining their evil spirits by feeding them only malevolence and sin. In a way, she is more their mother than their own creators, and that is the problem. Your arrogance and conceit has called upon her wrath and now you must face that which she has beset upon you, the Evil Trinity.”

  Velia put her hand on my shoulder to get my attention. “And you knew about this?”

  “Why didn’t you warn us?” Delia demanded.

  Petrified in my seat by Teresita’s horrible prediction, I could only blink away my fearful tears. “I didn’t know she was real,” I finally admitted. “I met La Llorona at the river. She warned me about all this, but I was too skeptical to believe her.”

  “Wait a minute. La Llorona is real?” Juanita asked.

  “Yes, but she’s not evil. She’s actually trying to help us,” I continued. “I tried telling you about it, but you didn’t believe me. So I dismissed her warnings — until this morning, when you started taunting Cecilia and I heard her curse us. I’m sorry. It’s my fault. I should have told you everything from the start.”

  “I wanna go home,” Pita cried, reaching for Juanita, who took her in her arms and kissed her forehead like Mamá soothes us.

  “You can’t run away from this,” Teresita said, touching the cards and looking at the ceiling blindly. “This time you have to face your nightmares.”