Summer of the Mariposas Read online

  “Perfume?” I asked. “Why would we need perfume?”

  Velia rolled her eyes at me. “Hello? He’s gonna start stinking.”

  “Oh, great,” I retorted. “So now he’s not just going to look like a prostitute, he’s going to smell like one too?”

  Velia gave Delia an elbow shove in the ribcage. “I told you we should’ve brought Papá’s Old Spice.”

  “It was almost gone,” Delia said, rubbing at her side.

  “So why not bring both?” Velia looked mad now.

  “I did,” Delia said, pulling out Papá’s old bottle of cologne with nothing more than a few drops left in the bottom of it. “See?”

  “People, please,” Juanita interjected. “Can we just move this along? We don’t have time to nitpick each other.”

  “That’s right,” Velia said, watching me intently with fierce hazel eyes. “Today we’re on a mission, and we shouldn’t let anything stop us from doing what’s right. Today, we need to work together. Otherwise, this whole thing could blow up on us.”

  “You mean, like we could get caught and end up in juvie?” Pita asked.

  Delia took off the apron and folded it carefully so nothing would spill out of its pockets. She put it in the trunk, where I saw more supplies. When had they gotten those out of the house? “They wouldn’t do that to us, would they?” she said, looking at Velia for reassurance.

  “Of course not,” Velia answered, sounding like an expert. “It’s not like we’ve broken any laws.”

  “Actually,” Juanita began, “improper disposal of a dead body, even failing to report it, is a crime. That’s why we’re doing things right, and taking it to his family, who can give him a proper burial. But no matter what happens, we are Five Little Sisters, cinco hermanitas! The Garza Girls! Together forever! No matter what!” Juanita exclaimed, and like every time one of us said those words, they all huddled together and hugged.

  That’s when I started to turn. Being left out of the circle of the cinco hermanitas was like becoming an orphan, or suddenly being homeless. I didn’t like the way that felt, didn’t want to be apart from them, ever, even if Juanita was changing the subject to avoid focusing on what could go wrong. So I did what any true sister would have done at a time like that. I stepped forth and let them pull me in.

  I wasn’t pretending either. At that very moment I changed my mind, believed in us as a team, believed that together we could get through anything. And for an instant, I wondered if maybe La Llorona was right and this journey was our destiny, our path to true happiness.

  So we all loaded our gear in the trunk and got in the car. Juanita rode in the front with me. Delia and Velia sat side by side in the backseat next to the “sleeping” drowned man while Pita wedged herself against the opposite car door trying to stay away from him. At the edge of the woods, before we turned onto El Indio Highway, I paused at the stop sign long enough to turn around to look at the twins.

  “What do you think?” I asked, shaking my head to make the argollas, the nesting rings on La Llorona’s ear pendant, rattle against each other. “Do I look stupid wearing only one earring?”

  “What are you talking about?” Juanita asked. “You’re wearing two of them. They’re a matching set. But really, where did you get them?”

  “Them?” To my surprise, I felt the weight of an ear pendant on my right ear even before I reached up and touched it. Feeling the coldness of the yellow gold within my fingertips, I looked at myself in the rearview mirror again. There it was, the other ear pendant, framing my face and winking at me. Its magical power was indisputable in the sunlight.

  “I found them,” I said, trying to satisfy her curiosity without giving away too much. She hadn’t believed me when I tried telling her about La Llorona anyway. “Well? Do I look dumb wearing these giant hoops?”

  “No,” Velia said, excitedly joining the conversation. “You look powerful, like a woman who knows what she wants out of life.”

  Delia reached over and flicked the golden rings with her forefinger, making them tinkle against each other. “Yeah, especially with your hair all wild like that. You look like a gypsy, a rebel with an eye for fashion.” I reached up and touched my hair. It was more than “wild.” It was downright ratted with knots because I hadn’t even brushed it once since we got out of the water yesterday, when we found the dead man. I wondered if there was a comb I could use later in Delia’s apron contraption.

  “I think it makes you look older,” Juanita observed. “More sophisticated.”

  “Good. Good. I like that,” I said, putting the car into gear and turning onto El Indio Highway, toward the border. I’d need all the sophistication I could muster to make us believable when we attempted to cross the bridge.

  Crossing customs on the American side is always fast and easy. There’s a toll to pay, so Velia put the three dollars in the dead man’s right hand and rested it on the right shoulder pad of the driver’s seat. She pressed her own shoulder under the dead man’s arm to make it look like she wanted to be close to her daddy, when in reality she was keeping his arm from slipping and falling into her lap.

  When we pulled up to the tollbooth, the duty officer didn’t even look at us. Peripherally, he must have seen Velia take the money from the drowned man’s hand and reach over me to pay, because he took it from her without once glancing at us, unaware of who or what was inside the car.

  That’s how much he cares, I thought.

  At that moment, I had a choice. I could make him care by informing him that the man sitting rigidly behind me was actually a corpse, or I could just keep driving. As I watched the duty officer straighten up and look at the next car, a brazen breeze picked up around us. It passed through the car, dragging a small bevy of tiny brown mariposas into the car. The butterflies flittered around us, beating their wings gently against the windshield then sitting prettily on the dashboard. At least a dozen of them had flown into the backseat and settled on Pita. Four of them clung to her hair, opening and closing their wings in long, luxurious strokes, while the rest of them crawled delicately along her arms.

  “I think they like us,” Pita said, smiling and sitting as motionless as humanly possible, trying her best not to disturb the delicate butterflies. With one of the mariposas climbing up her nose, staring at her eye to eye, Pita looked like Bambi, right before the hunters shot his mother.

  The image of Pita looking so innocent and young made me think of the dead man’s children, sitting at home, wondering what happened to their papá. At that moment, I realized what would happen if we were caught with a dead man’s body in our car. These people would call Child Protective Services and that would lead to a full-on investigation of Mamá. They would label her neglectful and make her look like an unfit mother.

  It felt like I deliberated our journey for hours, when in reality, we were there for only a few more seconds. The people in the cars behind me started honking, and the toll booth attendant looked into the vehicle for the first time since we drove up. He glanced suspiciously at the sleeping man behind me. Terrified that he might catch us with a corpse in the car, I snapped into action. I reached up and gave my left ear pendant a vigorous spin and asked it for help, low enough for the girls not to hear me, “Aztec queen, Tonantzin, Holy Mother of all mankind, give me your magical assistance. Distract this man, make him forget what he has seen.”

  “That’s a nice pair of earrings,” the attendant said, mesmerized by the sight of the whirling argollas humming against my cheeks. “Where’d you get them? I’d like to find something like that for my wife.”

  “They were a gift,” I said, watching as the man squinted to avoid the glare of golden light emanating from La Llorona’s ear pendant and glinting directly into his eyes, momentarily blinding him.

  “They’re beautiful,” he said, still too entranced by them to do much else.

 
“Is that it?” I asked, as I watched the officer stare at my earlobe.

  “Ah, sure, go on,” he said, waving us off in a dazed state of mind.

  The spell worked! I knew La Llorona was real, but for her promise of magic to be real too was more than I had expected. I was so exhilarated by the realization that I did the most unexpected thing in the world. I listened to my inner nut and sped out of the caseta, leaving behind everything that was familiar and normal and full of life and crossing over the threshold into the darkness of a dead man’s life.

  We drove the few miles across the international bridge with the windows down, the wind whipping our hair around our faces, until we slowed down and drove into the aduana, the Mexican customs station. I pulled into the center booth and waited for the officer to come over to speak to us.

  The Mexican official was scary. He was a big fat man, older than the moon, with huge, bulging eyes that devoured our female frames. When he saw that our “father” was asleep in the backseat, he looked from one pretty girl to another and licked his lips like an iguana. I wanted to sink the gas pedal into the floorboard and peel out of there, but he had other ideas. He looked at my small chest for a long time, and then he smiled knowingly at me.

  “Where are you young ladies going?” he asked.

  “We’re going to Chihuahua,” I lied in perfect Spanish, a task that was not difficult, since Spanish was our first language.

  “We’re taking him home to — ” Pita interjected.

  “Our grandmother!” Juanita exclaimed, smiling nervously. “We’re going to go see our grandmother in Chihuahua.”

  The girls’ lies cut through me with the sharpness of an obsidian knife. The mention of our grandmother made me physically jerk in my seat — it was so reminiscent of what La Llorona had said I should do. I turned around and whispered, “T.M.I.,” with an I could kick you look on my face. Inside, I was fighting the urge to cry. The thought of going right up to my paternal grandmother’s residence, sitting down at her table, and tasting her cooking more than saddened me. I wondered how she would receive us after only having seen us twice in her lifetime? Would she even know who we were?

  “It’s our birthday. Me and my twin’s,” Delia continued, pointing at Velia.

  “My grandmother’s throwing us a party,” Velia said, batting her long eyelashes.

  “There’s going to be a live band, Los Coyotes,” Delia invented, showing her perfect teeth as she smiled. “You can come if you want.”

  Where are they coming up with all this? I asked myself as I watched them lie shamelessly to the dirty old man. The more unsolicited information we provided, the more he might suspect something.

  “He can’t come. He has to stay here and take care of business,” I said, turning to give them a look like the one Mamá gives us when we’re being bad. The look worked, because after that they just looked at him and pouted in mock disappointment.

  “Your big sister’s right,” the old officer said, laughing. “I have too much work.”

  “You see. He can’t come,” I concluded, staring straight ahead.

  “But thanks for inviting me,” he said. “You girls have fun. Maybe I’ll see you on the way back.” And with that, he winked, an act that turned the sandwich I’d had the night before into a revolting slime that churned and festered in my stomach.

  “Bye! Bye!” Both Velia and Delia waved at the officer as we drove off past the aduana and into Piedras Negras. My heart was racing and my head was hurting, but the girls were whooping and hugging each other in the backseat. Juanita just sat back and looked at me smugly, a tiny bit of sisterly pride glinted in her brown eyes, but I didn’t acknowledge it. I stared at the road ahead instead.

  “We did it!” Velia yelled. “We got through the freakin’ border!”

  “Don’t celebrate yet,” I told them as I veered around the plaza. We circled around El Santuario de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe and promptly crossed ourselves at the sight of the old church. We may have been wild and rebellious, but our mother wasn’t raising complete heathens.

  “You might want to go in there and pray,” I continued. “We have a long, challenging road ahead of us. We’ll be lucky to get past the checkpoint outside the city limits. This guy was the least of our problems.”

  “Hey, if we can get past that fat bobo,” Juanita said, “we can get past the checkpoint.”

  “Whatever,” I mumbled under my breath. They had no idea how much of an effort this was going to be, but I figured they’d find out soon enough. No use bursting their sopapillas quite yet.

  EL MUNDO Mundo: “El mundo pudiera estar

  parado y nosotros bien mareados.”

  THE WORLD: “The world could be standing

  still, and we’d all be just as dizzy.”

  We drove around Piedras Negras, getting a few more things for the road. Except for the initial shock and anxiety of seeing so many sospechosos, idle young men, conspicuously posted outside prominent buildings or lounging on stone benches in the plaza, we felt confident enough to go about our business. Although we did our best to make it fast. We didn’t want to call attention to ourselves in case they were members of any of the border gangs, who had been abducting people along the Frontera, the border between Mexico and the US.

  I bought a huge bag of tortilla chips, some peanuts, and some water bottles from a street vendor. Velia and Delia purchased piping hot ears of corn on a stick, wrapped in their own leaves and enveloped in newspapers to keep them warm. Juanita bought some raspas, icy fruit-flavored treats, to cool us down. I drove with one hand while I ate mine before it melted.

  This time the girls were right — getting through the checkpoint outside Piedras Negras on Highway 57 was easier than getting past the old officer at the aduana. The guard at the depot didn’t ask us where we were going or what we were doing in Mexico. We gave him the same story about our grandmother, but he seemed uninterested.

  Actually, the officer, a young skinny guy in his early twenties, was more about making a buck than doing his job. When he asked us for our travel permit, he rubbed his fingers together and rested his right hand just inside the door as he looked away toward the road behind us. Velia, Juanita, and I looked at his hand dumbly.

  “Ahem,” Delia cleared her throat. We turned to look at her. The dead man’s hand was propped back on the headrest of my seat, holding a crisp, neatly folded twenty dollar bill between the index and middle fingers. “The permit is in the glove box, remember?” she continued, arching an eyebrow to emphasize her point.

  “Oh!” Juanita’s eyes sparkled with understanding. Then she searched the glove box and pulled out a piece of paper. She looked at it for a moment, then offered it to me. I stared at it dumbfounded.

  Velia took it, reached over me, and pressed the money and the paper into the man’s hand and smiled at him. I’d seen Papá do this many times before, but it would’ve never dawned on me to try it. If it had been left up to me, we would have gotten hauled into a Mexican jail that day.

  The skinny officer took both items. He pretended to read the piece of paper as he discreetly stuffed the twenty dollars into the cuff of his long-sleeved shirt. After a few seconds, he handed the “permit” back to me and waved us through. I handed the paper to Juanita and drove off. The whole incident took less than two minutes, but it was the longest, most stressful two minutes of my life.

  “Ah, the power of moo-lah,” Juanita said, resting back against her seat and laughing out loud as we drove off.

  “I can’t believe we pulled that off,” I said, letting out a long-held breath. “What was that? What did you show him?”

  “I don’t know. An old receipt of some kind,” Juanita said, looking at the piece of paper in her hand. “Doesn’t matter. It could have been my Christmas list for all he cared.”

  After driving for hours in the
hot morning sun without stopping, past Nava, past Allende, past Nueva Rosita and Sabinas, we hit a long stretch of open road. The day was hot and sticky and we were drenched down to our socks. The old Nova’s air conditioner had never worked, so our only source of comfort came from the open windows. At the first signs of civilization, we veered off the road and stopped at an old gas station just south of Monclova.

  Juanita went into the convenience store to pay for the gas. I kept an eye on her as she looked around for goodies to bring back to the car. The peanuts were running low, and the water and chips were long gone. After I finished pumping the gas, I went in to hurry her along. I wanted to make sure we were on our way before other travelers showed up and saw the dead man propped up against our back window.

  “Let’s go,” I said, as she picked through the bottles of Mexican fruit pop in the beverage cooler. “Papá is getting upset.”

  “Stop telling me what to do,” Juanita ordered. “Can’t you see I’m busy here? Man, you made me lose count . . . three, four, five. There. We can go now.”

  I picked up a pineapple soft drink. “Six,” I said, handing it to her.

  “No,” she insisted, putting the bottle back in the open cooler. “We don’t need so many. There’s only five of us.”

  “No,” I corrected her. “There are six of us.”

  Juanita lashed out at me. “You always do this, Odilia. You always think you know what you’re talking about, but you don’t. You’re just a big fat bully who doesn’t know anything. Count ’em! ¡Cinco hermanitas! Five. There are five of us!”

  “Don’t forget Papá,” I said, nodding to the shop owner and his wife staring at us from the counter.

  “Oh,” Juanita said, her ego deflating like a tire. “I forgot about Papá. He’s probably dying of thirst. Here, let’s take two for him,” she said, picking up a seventh soft drink.

  “Whatever,” I said, walking away. “Let’s go. You’re making us late.”