The Butterfly’s Daughter

by Mary Alice

  “Well, okay then. Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll get in line, pay our toll, and go over the bridge to the Mexican side. If you’re lucky enough to get the coveted green light, we’ll keep on going. If one of us gets the red light that means you have to pull over for inspection. If that happens, the other car will just pull over on the other side and wait. Sound good?”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Luz replied.

  “My car’s parked right over there,” he said, pointing to a battered white SUV a few cars away. “I’ll pull out first and you can follow me.” He turned to go.

  “Excuse me! Billy?” Margaret called out.

  Billy stopped and swung his head around.

  “I don’t mean to be pushy, but since we’re going to the same place, and since the person you were waiting for didn’t show up, would you mind if I rode in your car? I wouldn’t ask, but it’s pretty crowded in that backseat.”

  He scratched his mustache, amused. “Sure. Hop in.”

  Luz followed Margaret as she went to the car to pull out her bag.

  “What are you doing?” Luz hissed.

  “I’m following the example of St. Stacie. I’m hitching my star to Billy.”

  Luz felt an irrational tug of jealousy. “You don’t even know him.”

  “Actually, I do. I took a class from him at the university. He just doesn’t remember me.” She looked over her shoulder and drew Luz a few steps farther from the others. “Seriously, Luz, I’m a third wheel. My being out of your car will give you and your mom a chance to talk privately. You need this time with her. And,” she added with a smirk, “the fact that it will be a whole lot more comfortable in his car than in that backseat is a bonus.”

  Billy fired up his car engine and tapped his horn.

  Margaret lifted her chin. “Be right there!” She hugged Luz tightly. “Hey, we’re still traveling together, right? See you on the other side!”

  Margaret trotted to the car with the eagerness of a child running toward a Christmas tree. Billy pushed open the passenger door. A blast of Mozart filled the air.

  “¡Vámonos!” he called out.

  They made it across the Pharr-Reynosa International Bridge without incident and only the usual delays. Billy led them through bustling border towns with dusty streets, elaborate plazas, and shop after shop burgeoning with tourist items. Street vendors approached their car at stoplights aggressively trying to sell trinkets “cheap, lady, very cheap!” Children peddled chicle gum. The towns emptied out into a long, deserted stretch of desert. Luz and Mariposa followed Billy’s car in a deep silence, each lost in her private thoughts as they made their way through the hardscrabble terrain.

  “How do you know Margaret?” Mariposa asked, breaking the long silence.

  With that question, they began to talk. Luz began with Tía Maria’s fateful phone call a month earlier and the sequence of events that unfolded that led to Luz’s decision to bring Abuela’s ashes to Mexico. She didn’t leave anything out: the car trouble in Chicago, Ofelia and Angel, the baby being born in Kansas, picking up Margaret at Hidden Ponds, the chance meeting with Billy, and finding the scribbled phone number in Abuela’s address book.

  “All along, the one constant was that I felt Abuela’s presence in the car with me,” Luz said softly.

  “I do, too.”

  “You do?”

  “Without question. She’s here with us.”

  “After Abuela died,” Luz began in a soft voice, “I felt so alone. I didn’t know how I’d go on. I prayed for her to give me some sign that she was still with me. The next morning, I discovered a monarch, just emerged, in her workroom. It was such a surprise! It was so late in the season and I’d completely missed the chrysalis. But there she was. And what was so amazing was that the butterfly didn’t fly off when I brought her to the garden. She stayed with me, almost like she wanted me to pay attention. I had this overwhelming conviction that Abuela had come to me in the form of this monarch. It was the sign I’d prayed for.”

  Mariposa was silent.

  “You probably think I’m silly.”

  “I don’t think you’re silly at all,” Mariposa said. “Many, many people have told me similar stories—a butterfly appeared after the death of someone they loved. Or a butterfly sat on their shoulder when they were sad or depressed. Most moving to me was reading about the discovery of hundreds of drawings of butterflies carved into the walls of the children’s barracks at the Majdanek concentration camp, probably with pebbles and their fingernails. Imagine those tender fingernails, carving dreams into their only canvas, a wall. For millennia, all around the world, there have been myths about butterflies. Personally, I whisper a message to the gods each time I release a butterfly. I don’t think your story is the least bit silly. We have a special connection to them.”

  Luz smiled but kept her eyes on the road. “Well, anyway, that’s the one constant in this Canterbury Tale. I’m following the signs.”

  “No one knows what signals the monarchs use to navigate their way. For you, it’s Abuela.”

  “And for you?” Luz asked, glancing at her mother.

  Mariposa settled back in her seat and closed her eyes. “I’m following you.”

  Mariposa took her turn at the wheel when the sky darkened. Luz let her head rest as the wheels hummed beneath them. She felt the rhythmic bump like a heartbeat.

  She turned her head to look at the dark silhouette of the woman driving the car. Her hair was pulled back at the neck; her tan skin was untouched by makeup. On the left side of her face, a small, jagged scar traveled the length of her smile line. Who was she? Luz wondered. All her life she’d had an idealized version of her mother. The woman in the car beside her was a stranger. Luz wondered what her life would have been like if Mariposa had not left. What experiences would they have shared? Would they have been close, or would they have been like Maria and Abuela, loving each other but not getting along?

  Mariposa turned to see Luz staring at her and smiled. “Are you tired?”

  Luz blinked heavy lids. “Very.”

  “I hope he turns off for a hotel soon,” Mariposa muttered, still not enamored with their guide. “Every fool knows it’s suicidal to drive in Mexico at night. The stories I could tell you.”

  Luz turned her gaze back to the road. She wondered about those stories. Of all Abuela’s stories, the biggest whopper was the one about her mother.

  The following day they started out early after breakfast at their modest hotel of chilaquiles—delicious strips of fried corn tortillas simmered in salsa and served with cheese, eggs, and beans. Clouds were rolling in but the sky was blue, and they’d planned on a full day of travel. Mariposa took the wheel as they plowed up and over the Sierra Madres. She was like a trail driver of the Old West, urging a tired and struggling El Toro, grinding gears ruthlessly and using her tongue as a lash. As the incline steepened, the VW began to lose speed and the engine labored, groaning in a low octave.

  “Come on, Toro. You bull! You can do it!” Luz shouted, rocking back and forth in her seat to help it along.

  Mariposa laughed and joined in the chorus. “Go, go, go . . .” Luz knew that Billy wasn’t laughing in his car, however. He kept pushing on far ahead, only to have to stop and wait for El Toro to catch up. If she were a betting woman, Luz would bet that Billy would rue the day he’d asked them to follow him.

  The mountainous landscape was beautiful. They wound around verdant forests and overpasses with breathtaking views of the valley. Once things leveled out again, Luz took the wheel and they fell into an easy conversation.

  “One of the girls I met on this trip, Ofelia, made me think of you,” Luz told Mariposa. “She was really sweet and I loved her. But she had this mouth.”

  Mariposa turned to look at her from under raised brows.

  Luz rolled her eyes and chuckled. “No, not that way. It was more that she was the same age you were when you had me.”

  “Was she the one who was abused by her boyfriend?”r />
  “Yes. She was pregnant and alone in a city she didn’t know. For you it was Milwaukee, for her Chicago. It made me wonder. Did my father beat you?”

  Mariposa kept her eyes on the road and didn’t reply for a full minute. “Well, honey, I’ve been beaten,” she replied. “More than a few times over the years. One guy gave me this scar here.” She pointed to the faint scar near her mouth. “And another a scar here.” She reached up to open her blouse wider to reveal a thick, jagged scar high on her right shoulder that looked like a stab wound. “I’ve been beaten by women, too. It’s not always just the men.”

  Mariposa shook her head, making Luz think she was brushing away memories that were still painful to recall.

  “But Max, your father—it’s odd how we never say his name—he never laid a hand on me. He hurt me much deeper than any physical scar when he left me.”

  “I don’t know anything about him, other than what I saw in a photograph. I don’t even know his last name.”

  Mariposa glanced at Luz, then turned her gaze back to the road. “It was Stroh. Maximilian Stroh.”

  Luz rolled the name on her tongue. It felt foreign.

  “That’s not your name. We never married. You know that?”

  “Yes. Didn’t you ever want to get married?”

  An enigmatic smile played at Mariposa’s lips. “I was eighteen. I don’t know if the thought of marriage crossed my mind when I first ran off with him. Later, when I found I was pregnant, yes, I did want to get married. I even expected that we would. Demanded it.” She paused and Luz waited, breathlessly, for her to continue. “Max did not.”

  “He really just left you?”

  Mariposa nodded soberly. “I had a job as a waitress at a local club. One evening I came home from my shift and he was gone. He left a note and what little money he could. Pitiful, really.”

  “What did the note say?”

  “Not much. It was a scribbled note on lined paper. It said ‘I’m sorry.’”

  “That’s it? Nothing more?” Luz felt outrage against him. “What a bastard!”

  Mariposa slowly nodded her head.

  “How could you fall for a jerk like that?”

  “Oh, he was charming,” Mariposa replied. “Max was different from any of the other young men I knew at the university. He was a foreign student from Germany and he was so handsome with his white-blond hair, his blue eyes, and his smile . . .” She glanced at Luz and stopped.

  Luz wasn’t smiling. “Did you love him?” At the very least, she’d always thought her mother must have loved her father.

  “Yes. Very much. For all that I knew of love at eighteen. I felt for him what I’ve never felt for another man before or since. He was my first lover.” She paused. “I hope that doesn’t shock you.”

  “Please,” Luz replied with a short laugh.

  “It would have shocked my mother.”

  Luz thought of Abuela and all the conversations they’d had about her and Sully. “Maybe not. Abuela was old-fashioned, but she was hardly a prude.”

  “She hated Max. There was no doubt about that.”

  “I thought she never met him!”

  “She and my father met him when they came to visit the university. We had lunch. I remember Max drank German beer and my father drank Mexican beer. Mami thought he was a phony intellectual, vain, self-centered. All of which was true. She liked nothing about him, not even the way he held his cigarette. You know the way, between the thumb and index finger, like this.” She lifted her hand and demonstrated his old European smoking technique. Luz had to laugh, imagining it.

  “Why would she say she never met him?”

  “Did she? Poor Mami. She either blocked him out of her mind or, more likely, hated him so much that she didn’t want you to have any information about him, not even negative. Luz, he wasn’t evil. He never beat me or abused me in any way. When we were together we laughed and had a wonderful time. But he was twenty and didn’t want to be saddled with a wife and child. And by the time he left, we’d started arguing about money and the baby. So, like the spoiled little boy he was, he ran home to Germany. It’s pitiful that I don’t even know what town he was from.”

  “Good riddance.”

  “Yes. But I’m ashamed to admit he broke my heart. But what was worse, he broke my spirit. Some might say it was good I got my comeuppance. But carrying his child with him leaving so unceremoniously, with no support—it was humiliating. I was devastated.”

  Luz nodded her head and lowered the window, taking a breath. “That’s enough for now,” she said in a soft voice. She looked out the window at the scenery passing by and thought that knowing this about her father didn’t change anything in her world. She didn’t have any desire to seek him out or to meet him. He left nothing of himself behind, not even his name. In contrast, Luz was hungry for more information about her mother’s life—her decisions, reactions, emotions. She felt a visceral connection to her that she couldn’t understand, especially since she’d left her, too.

  “This boyfriend of yours,” Mariposa said. “Has he ever abused you?”

  “Sully?” Luz cried, incredulous. “No! Never. He never would.”

  “Good.” Mariposa ran her hand through her hair with a sigh. “You know, that was the one thing I never could reconcile about the monarchs. I love just about everything about them, except the way the males treat the females. They’re bullies. The males don’t use pheromones to attract a mate, like other butterflies. When a male monarch sees a female in the air that he likes, he knocks her from the sky and mates.” She looked at Luz. “I hope that you choose your mate for love. Sex without love means nothing. Your young man, your Sully. Do you love him?”

  “Yes. I do.”

  Mariposa turned her head and her eyes studied Luz’s face. “Good.”

  It started to rain when they reached the modest hotel that Billy frequented in the small town of Maravatío. It was a colonial building on the charming town square. The innkeepers, a kindly elderly couple, ran the inn with their children. They greeted Billy like a prodigal son.

  It rained all night, a soft, nourishing rain that made music against the tin roof. They woke up to an overcast sky; the rain had stopped and the winds were pushing the clouds out. Billy was ready to roll early, eager to get to his destination.

  “Keep an eye open,” he told them as the caravan took off. “It’s a good day for monarchs.”

  By midday Billy turned off the main highway and took a narrow, rugged road that cut through the rural landscape. As they drew closer to Angangueo, Mariposa expected their conversations to turn to the jagged personal landscape of their histories. Luz had been quieter than usual since their conversation about her father the day before. Mariposa knew it was a lot for her to take in and she had yet to process it. Sam had spoken to her at length about allowing Luz the opportunity to ask questions, no matter how awkward or painful they might be to answer. She wished Sam were here with her now. She missed his quiet, steadying hand on the reins.

  But Luz didn’t ask dangerous questions. She sat quiet, even tense, anxious about meeting her extended family in Angangueo.

  All morning they’d been spotting more monarchs. Two here, three there. In the past hour they’d begun to appear more and more, one after another. Luz kept her eyes on the sky.

  “There’s another one!” Luz cried excitedly, pointing at the sky.

  “I can’t see it, unless you want me to drive off the road. I’d better keep my eyes straight ahead.”

  Luz continued to cast quick glances into the sky.

  Mariposa saw that Billy had flicked on his turn signal and was pulling off to the side of the road. She hit the brakes, muttering with disgust, “What’s he doing now? That man is driving me crazy. He’s always stopping to look at something. And Margaret eggs him on, pointing out this plant or that flower. They’re two peas in a pod.”

  “Well, it is his job, after all. They’re both researching.”

  “I know it. I’m
just getting testy. I’m anxious to see the family and we’re so close. Each stop is an aggravation.”

  By the time Mariposa pulled over to the side of the road, Billy was already out of the car and standing at the edge of a precipice, looking at the sky with his binoculars. Margaret was rounding the truck, looking up at the sky under the shield of her palm.

  Luz grabbed her binoculars from the back of the car. “What are you looking at?”

  Margaret pointed to the sky.

  Luz saw a monarch fly by at eye level, her ragged-edged wings pumping the air. “A monarch!” she exclaimed.

  Mariposa came from around the car to her side. “I saw it. And there are another couple over there,” she said, pointing. “We’re going to start seeing more.”

  “Hey, ladies,” Billy called out, lowering his glasses. “What are you doing? Look up!”

  Mariposa and Luz looked again into the cloudy sky. What looked like the front edge of a dark cloud was moving faster than the others across the sky. Mariposa lifted her hand, shielding her eyes and squinting. Way up in the sky she saw the unmistakable shape of dozens of butterflies, flying under the dark cloud. She smiled and glanced at Luz. She saw her jolt and whip her hand into the air, excitedly pointing. “Oh, my God!” Luz cried out.

  Mariposa craned her neck to look to the sky again. At that moment the sun moved from behind a cloud and the sky overhead seemed to explode in orange glitter.

  That was no cloud.

  “Woohoo!” Luz cried exuberantly, jumping up and down like a schoolgirl.

  Mariposa laughed aloud, exhilarated at the sight. Above them were thousands and thousands of monarchs riding a current across the sky. It was impossible to guess exactly how many there were. She felt humbled watching them. These fragile, heroic voyagers, each following an age-old instinct, formed a magnificent river of purpose flowing across the sky.

  For a brief moment, Mariposa remembered the caterpillars. Each egg that hatched to an eyelash-size caterpillar survived the odds to grow and be resurrected as a butterfly. Each metamorphosis was a miracle. And here they were—thousands and thousands of them, jubilantly flying to their sanctuary. She felt awash with hope.