Summer of the Mariposas Read online

  “Well if he does watch the news, he should be embarrassed,” Juanita retorted through the ponytail holder clenched between her teeth. “Leaving without saying good-bye — I don’t know why I’m even surprised.” She spat out the rubber band and bound up the bottom of Pita’s braid. “Did you know that seventy percent of men aren’t as attached to their female children as they are to their sons? It’s true. I read that somewhere.”

  Delia let out an exaggerated sigh and rolled her eyes. “Can’t you ever talk like a real person? I’m tired of listening to you quote stupid stuff!”

  “If you two taradas are done arguing, we need to go home and change before going up to customs,” Velia said, taking the focus away from Papá and back to the situation at hand. The body was still floating gently in the same place. The way the current worked here, once something floated into an eddy it had to be pushed out again.

  Juanita smacked Velia in the back of the head, then pushed her away. “If you call me tarada ever again I’m gonna show you just how ignorant I am by kicking your behind all the way across the river.”

  “Knock it off,” I said, stepping between them. If we kept bickering, we’d never make a decision about the dead man and what it meant for the future of our swimming hole. After a quick glance at Juanita, I turned my attention to Velia and Delia. “What’s wrong with you all? A man is dead in the river and all you can do is fight? We should be pulling him out and going to get help.”

  Delia didn’t look at Juanita. Instead, she turned to look at the drowned man. His blue shirt clung to his back in a crumpled mess. It was still semitucked into his belted jeans. He was wearing brown cowboy boots that were probably made from rattlesnake skin, like the ones Papá had on his feet the morning he walked out of our lives. “We could push him out again and move him downstream, then cut him loose in the water down there.” She pointed downriver.

  “Or we could just lug him back out to the deep end, have the river carry him further away, then call someone,” Delia said.

  “I think pushing him out there is a good idea,” I said. “So who’s going to help me here and who’s going up to customs to report this? Remember the rule of the five little sisters — cinco hermanitas, together forever, no matter what! No one’s allowed to go off on their own, so we’ll travel in packs. Delia? Velia? What are you two doing and who are you taking with you?”

  “Now hold on,” Juanita interrupted. The twins waited in the water a few feet from the dead man, caught between their older sisters’ argument. “We’re not calling anyone. We can’t turn him in to the migra. They’ll throw him in a hole somewhere and forget all about him.” The concerned look in Juanita’s eyes told me she truly believed the rumors. Like Juanita, I’d heard the horrible rumores from the comadres in our neighborhood too. They whispered about unclaimed bodies in sacks and shallow unmarked graves. I was sure the rumors were grossly exaggerated, but we had no way to know one way or the other.

  “They throw them in a hole?” Pita stood behind us, away from the riverbank as if afraid of getting too close to the corpse. “Why?” she wailed. Her plump face twisted with anguish and her eyes brimmed with tears.

  At the sight of our baby sister in distress, I put an arm around Pita’s shoulders, hugging her to my side. “They don’t treat them like animals. They bury them,” I corrected, trying not to scare her any more than she already was.

  “Maybe we should just let them do that,” Velia said, inching back toward the shore. “I’d rather not touch a dead body if I don’t have to.” She didn’t come out of the water, though.

  I tried to signal to Juanita with widened eyes that it was enough, but she either didn’t get the hint or decided to ignore it. “Hello?” she burst out, arms flailing. “Those customs agents are ruthless! To them, illegals are no better than stray dogs. They’d shoot them before they’d help them.”

  “You’re so full of it,” I said, shaking my head. “Customs agents are government workers. They have to take care of the bodies they find.”

  “Shows how much you know,” Juanita mumbled, looking at the dead man floating in front of her.

  “And what makes you such an expert?” I demanded, still hugging Pita. I pulled her closer, turning her away from the sight of the dead man. “One of those stupid books you read all night. No, wait. You were just born knowing it all. Sorry. I forgot.”

  Pita scrunched up her face, on the verge of sobbing aloud. “I’m scared.”

  “Shut up. We don’t have time for crybabies.” Juanita scowled at Pita. The dead man continued to float in front of us like a giant water-logged voodoo doll — a bad omen to be sure.

  Juanita paced along the bank, agitated. I let go of Pita to sit down on a rock, the weight of the decision we needed to make unsettling my stomach with a queasy feeling that no matter what we decided, our lives would change.

  “I’m telling Mamá!” Pita wailed, but when she started toward the bikes, Juanita pulled her arm and forced her to face us.

  “No you’re not, you little snitch,” she said. “We’re not telling anyone anything. We’re going to do the right thing.”

  I didn’t like where this was heading. Knowing Juanita and her quixotic ways, this could turn into one of her many harebrained schemes. Next she’d be starting some kind of crusade to prevent the drowning of illegal aliens in the waters of the Rio Grande. “And what’s that? What is the right thing, Juanita?” I asked, exasperated. Arguing with her always had a draining effect on me.

  “Help me pull him out,” Juanita said as she waded into the river. “Water quickens the rate of decom — decomp — decay. So we need to hurry up.”

  “I’m not touching that,” Pita announced, stepping behind me.

  “Him. You’re not touching him,” Juanita hissed at Pita, who pressed her face against my back. “He’s a human being, even if he is dead. Now help me pull him out. Pita, you go sit over there if you can’t handle it.” She directed our little sister to a chinaberry tree with giant overhanging branches a few yards away. Obediently, Pita went to sit under the designated tree. Delia and Velia looked at each other, shrugged, and followed Juanita deeper into the river where the body was still floating in the gentle water.

  “We should call the authorities, Juanita,” I said, trying to control the situation like Mamá would’ve wanted. “I don’t think we should pull him in. No telling how long he’s been dead.”

  As usual, Juanita ignored me. Although she was only a year older than the twins, who were thirteen and full of cuss words and spite, Juanita was much taller and more muscular. Next to them, she looked Amazonian. Like the female warriors in Greek mythology, she could’ve pulled in the man’s body without help from any of us.

  I stood my ground.

  Delia and Velia stood waist deep in the river and stared at me with the exact same expression on their faces, an expression that said I should do something.

  “What?” I asked them. “I’m not helping her. She’s crazy. Always has been.”

  “I’m not crazy. I’m compassionate. No, I’m more than compassionate; I’m . . . considerate,” Juanita said, using the word correctly. Unlike the twins, who were having fun exploring the criminal side of language, Juanita had recently discovered the pocket-sized dictionary, and big words flew out of her mouth every day. Most of the time, I complimented her on her vocabulary, but at that moment her consideration was making me sick to my stomach.

  “He’s heavy,” Juanita huffed as she pulled the dead man toward her by his right arm. Delia and Velia screamed when the body made contact with their midriffs. They sprang out of the water like sleek mojarras — two slim, delicate fish flying out of the river. So Juanita ended up bringing in the dead man by herself. I only helped her when she was having trouble dragging him over to sit him up against the trunk of a mesquite tree.

  Juanita moved his arms up and down and side to s
ide. “He hasn’t been dead very long,” she hypothesized. “See, no rigamorphus.”

  “Rigor mortis,” I corrected. “You still have some work to do on those dictionary skills.”

  “Whatever,” she said, sounding embarrassed. “I think he just drowned, like a few hours ago. He doesn’t smell and he’s not swollen.” But I could tell he was definitely dead, to the point where I was sure pumping on his chest wouldn’t have done him any good.

  “Drowned? What do you know about drowning?” I asked her. While I wasn’t sure she knew what she was talking about, I was relieved to hear the news. Even if she wouldn’t listen to me, at least Juanita wasn’t exposing the other girls to some super-decayed dead man’s germs.

  “Hello. I watch Crime Dawgs. It’s like my favorite show.” The sight of her turning the body over and pressing and prodding at the head and torso with her bare hands turned my stomach. Juanita had nerves of steel. I had to give her credit for that. “Besides, it’s obvious he drowned. There are no other signs of trauma, no bullets, nothing. See?” She flipped the body onto its back again.

  “We should really go up to customs and get some help,”

  I began.

  Juanita’s brown eyes were warm and dark with the genuine concern she was so proud of. “I wonder where he came from. If he has a family . . . do they know where he went? Did he tell them?”

  Because I knew exactly where this was coming from, I put my arms around her shoulder and pulled her close. “He must have,” I assured her.

  “Papá didn’t,” Delia whispered to Velia as they stared at the drowned man. His brown hair was slicked back from his face now, as if he had just gone for a swim, and his face was expressionless, serene, as if he were now sleeping in the hot sun to dry off. Except, of course, that he was still fully clothed.

  Juanita ignored the twins and crouched back down to inspecting the body. “He’s soaked.”

  “Duh,” Velia said, rolling her eyes toward Delia.

  “We should take off his clothes,” Juanita suggested. “Let him dry out before he starts to grow fungus or something.”

  “Gross! I’m not doing that!” Velia and Delia exclaimed in unison.

  I pushed Juanita gently away from the corpse. “We should leave him just the way we found him.”

  “We should have left him in the water, babas,” Delia said, thumping Juanita on the shoulder with the back of her hand.

  “Watch your mouth!” I warned. I was tired of the twins calling everyone stupid. Delia mumbled an apology under her breath.

  Ignoring my command to leave the drowned man alone, Juanita tugged at the dead man’s left boot and yanked it off his foot, almost falling back in the process. To everyone’s surprise, a tightly wound plastic bag fell halfway out of his sock. Juanita pulled it all the way out and looked at us before she opened it.

  “Money,” she whispered as she pulled out a huge wad of rolled up American bills and laid it down beside the drowned man. Velia snatched it up and started sorting it, divvying it up between herself and Delia.

  “Look at this. Hundreds, fifties, twenties,” Velia announced. She and her twin unrolled the bills, laying them in neat stacks over a flat rock a few feet away.

  Their announcement piqued Pita’s interest. Like a curious kitten, she crawled out from under the chinaberry tree and came over to join us. She picked up a hundred dollar bill and turned the foreign object over in her hands. “He was rich.”

  “There’s a wallet, with an address,” Juanita whispered, pulling the man’s Mexican driver’s license out of the wallet and staring at it. “His name is Gabriel Pérdido. He’s from El Sacrificio, across the border.”

  I stood up and stepped away, wiping my hands on my wet shorts. My palms suddenly felt sticky and dirty, and I couldn’t breathe right. “We have to turn it all in — the wallet, the money, everything,” I said resolutely.

  “We can’t do that to him,” Juanita said, looking up at me with those big brown eyes.

  I felt like a jerk for not caring as much, but I had to be reasonable. “We don’t even know this guy, so stop acting like we owe him anything.” There had to be something we could do that would be right, but also not get us in trouble with Mamá. If she realized we’d been swimming so close to the deep end of the river all summer, she’d never let us come back here. On the other hand, we had no other choice but to report the poor man. Mamá would be even more upset if she found out that we didn’t. And knowing Pita’s loose tongue, Mamá was bound to find out sooner or later. We were doomed either way.

  “He’s probably got a wife and kids, and they’re worried about him,” Juanita insisted. “And right now they’re wondering what he’s doing, if he made it across all right.”

  “We don’t know that.” I snatched the driver’s license from her. “Look. His driver’s license expired six years ago. He probably doesn’t even live there anymore. Truth is, we don’t know who he is or what he does, or even if he has a family.”

  “He has a family!” Juanita yelled. She threw his worn-out wallet at me. Pita picked it up and looked at the picture flap inside, which started her tears again. Velia and Delia took it away from her and stared at it too, but they didn’t say anything.

  “He has a family and a home and a life,” Juanita said as she took the wallet back from the twins and passed it to me. Behind the plastic, on the right side of the beat up wallet, was a picture of the man with his family. “We can’t just leave him here. We’ve got to find a way to take him back to his family.”

  “El Sacrificio?” I asked, the name getting caught in the back of my throat.

  “Hey, isn’t that close to . . . ,” Velia started.

  “Where Papá is from?” Delia finished Velia’s thought, looking at her twin first and then turning to me with an expectant look.

  “We can’t go to El Sacrificio,” I said. The idea of possibly encountering Papá terrified me. What if he didn’t want to see us? What if he walked away from us again?

  “Why not?” Velia asked.

  “Abuelita Remedios still lives near El Sacrificio, in Hacienda Dorada,” Juanita said, a plan to visit Papá’s mother forming vividly within the shine of her dark brown eyes.

  “We can’t go to El Sacrificio,” I repeated firmly.

  Velia and Delia clearly questioned my sanity, from the looks on their faces. “Why not?”

  “I’d like to see Abuelita Remedios again,” Pita whimpered, taking my hand in a silent plea. I felt sorry for her. She had only met our grandmother once before, when she was around three.

  “We can’t,” I insisted. I shook my head and let go of Pita’s hand. I stepped away and turned my back to them. I stared off into the woods, down the worn path that led back into town, wishing we’d stayed home today.

  “Look. It’s been years since we last went to Hacienda Dorada. I’d like to see Abuelita again too,” Juanita said, plopping down between the rock with the money and the dead man. “Experts agree children need to be close to their grandparents. It makes them feel secure, and when they grow up feeling loved they make better parents themselves.”

  “That’s a bunch of horseradish! I’m never becoming a parent,” Delia interjected.

  I held up my hands in a vain attempt to stop this runaway train of thought. “We can’t go because . . . ,” I began. Then, dropping the wallet on Juanita’s lap, I closed my eyes and fought past the raw, agonizing emotions that threatened to overwhelm me. It was painful to know that our paternal grandmother lived less than a day’s drive away and we had not seen her more than twice in our lifetimes. If only Papá had been more willing to do his job and make us a family, maybe El Sacrificio would be more than just an exotic name printed on a dead man’s driver’s license.

  “Because why?” Juanita demanded doggedly. “Give me one good reason.”

  “Because it�
��s all the way in friggin’ Mexico, that’s why!” I growled.

  Juanita waved the wallet up at me again. “Don’t you see? There’s a reason we found him instead of the border patrol. He came looking for us because he knew we could help him. It’s not a coincidence that he’s from the same place as Papá.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked. “You’re not making any sense.”

  Juanita continued passionately. “Don’t you get it? We were meant to find him, so we could go see our abuelita in Mexico again. It was fate that brought him to us.”

  “Do you even know what you’re considering?” I asked. The man was dead. There had to be a law against what she was proposing.

  “I know it’s going to be hard,” Juanita concluded. “But if this man’s family is ever going to see him again, we’re going to have to be the ones to take him back. And maybe while we’re in El Sacrificio, we can find out . . .”

  “If Abuelita Remedios knows what’s happened to Papá?” I whispered, more to myself than to them.

  My comment was met with silence. I hadn’t meant to make the connection, but it was too late. The thought was out there. Their eyes said it all. The same question had been on everybody’s mind, not just mine. I was about to take it back when something caught my eye. On the other side of the Rio Grande, on a hill, something moved . . . a woman?

  She stood still — watching us from afar. I tried to focus in on her face, but the sun’s reflection bounced off the surface of the water and her form wavered in the afternoon light. One minute her long, white dress was billowing against her legs, and the next she was gone. Disappeared. Like a ghostly apparition, she vanished into the surreal light of the fading sunset.

  “What is it?” Juanita asked, looking across the river.

  I thought of La Llorona, the legendary Weeping Woman said to have drowned her own children. Mamá says she roams the rivers of the world in search of them. Goosebumps rose on my skin and my body shook slightly. “Nothing,” I said, rubbing my arms briskly and turning my attention back to the girls. “Let’s get out of here. It’s getting dark.”