by JJ Flowers
Since this news, your father has called my mom many times. I got to talk to him for a long time. He wanted to know everything about you. Juan Pablo it made him, a grown man, a professor, cry.
Dolores has talked to him many times, too.
Now, like all of us, his heart is sick with worry.
Call us, Juan Pablo.
I love you, Juan Pablo.
Juan Pablo read this three times. He tried to make sense of it, of the idea that his abuela had kept him away from his father all these years. Could it be true? Could his abuela have done such a thing?
The idea of his abuela lying seemed as impossible as the sun rising in the west. She just wouldn’t, couldn’t, never had, never would. And yet . . .
She had lied to him and it had not been a small lie.
All his life he had known how much his abuela loved his mother; she had told him a thousand times. Juan Pablo, your beautiful mother played that piece. I remember it well. She was sitting right there, too, wearing shorts and a red T-shirt.
Your mother used to play in the meadow, too, every day.
This was my favorite piece your mother played.
That is just what your mother said when she saw The Sound of Music for the first time.
I remember the first time I took Julieta to Mexico City to hear the symphony
One time: I thought I understood death and loss and grief, but—she had shaken her head—if not for you, Juan Pablo, I could not have borne the loss of your mother. You are my sun now.
Juan Pablo sat up straight in the darkened storage room, illuminated now by the light of his iPad. The warning buzz sounded loud in his ears as he considered this, the terrible idea of what his abuela had done. Not to him. He had known only love from his abuela. She had given him everything a person could want: his music, a good education, books, Rocio, his love of the butterflies. No, her crime had been committed against his father, his real father.
She had stolen a son from his father.
Oh, Abuela! How could you?
He tried to think this through, to reason it out. She had so loved his mother, her only child, a bright and shining star. She had been accepted at such a young age as an apprentice to Mexico’s National Symphony Orchestra. Your mother, Juan Pablo, there was so much life in her. She was so beautiful. Then she died to give him life.
As his thoughts spun over this information, he felt he brushed against understanding. His mother’s baby, her grandson, how could she hand him over to another? To a man who would take him not just a thousand more kilometers away, but into another country. A foreign country.
A light blinking interrupted his thoughts and he looked down. A voice mail had just come in.
He clicked it on and Rocio’s voice filled the silence:
“Juan Pablo, listen to me,” Rocio’s voice sounded into the darkened room.
Juan Pablo straightened, alerted by the fear in her voice. Something terrible had happened.
Whispers, pleas, static, and then:
“They are here! The men chasing us. We were eating dinner by the phone, always by the phone, waiting for your call and suddenly they were here. In the apartment! They hurt my mom, knocked her unconscious. She’s lying in the bed. I am staring at their gun as I speak—no, no—”
“Twenty-four hours to contact this number with the location where to find you.”
Click.
Pure adrenaline shot through Juan Pablo. His heart began a slow, steady escalation. The buzzing grew as loud as a full symphony heard from the front row.
He was facing the finale. This was it. The end.
All of life seemed the cruelest joke.
First his mother died when he was born.
Then his abuela stole him from his father.
Finally, on her deathbed, his abuela told him to follow the path of the butterflies to sanctuary at Pacific Grove, California. Here, she promised him, someone would be waiting for him.
All this time he had thought it would be someone who would rescue him. Like his father. Or Dolores. But it wasn’t.
It turned out the person waiting for him would be the man with the red boots. The man who would end his life or Rocio’s or both. The Hunter would be a harsh and ugly crescendo on an otherwise beautiful symphony that was his life.
He had learned he could accept his death, but he could never accept Rocio’s.
He sat in the darkened room trying to think of what to do, but he couldn’t come up with a way to change the ending. He wanted a happy ending.
Any happy ending meant Rocio was saved.
He had to save Rocio. Always, he had to save Rocio.
He texted back: I will be at the butterfly sanctuary in Pacific Grove tomorrow before sunset.
Ask the Sky People!
I love you with all my heart, Rocio.
He hit send.
There; it was done.
As he grabbed his violin and stuffed his iPad into his backpack, he asked the Sky People for help one last time. Not for him. He was doomed, he saw that now, but help for Rocio.
To that end he knew he had to make his way to the butterfly sanctuary.
At what point did he realize the Sky People were helping?
By the third car that stopped to give him a ride on his journey north.
The gray Ford SUV looked normal as it pulled over on the northbound Pacific Coast Highway off-ramp. Feeling dazed, numb even, going through the motions, Juan Pablo looked into the passenger window as the driver, an older man, leaned over. A blue baseball cap topped his gray hair, a thick mustache sat atop a mischievous smile. “Hey, partner,” he said, his voice warm and friendly. “Where you headed?”
“Pacific Grove.” He said the words like a question.
“Ha! Now there’s a coincidence. That’s right where I’m headed.”
His abuela said there was no such thing as a coincidence.
“If you don’t mind my sidekick, hop in.”
Sidekick? Juan Pablo knew no translation. The great wonder of English was its millions of words. Words for every imaginable thing in the world and many things he had never imagined and would never have imagined until he heard the word.
Enlightenment came as he opened the door and he was greeted by a hundred or so pounds of a furry, blond dog. A warm tongue brushed the side of his face and despite every worry, Juan Pablo found himself smiling at the goofiest, friendliest dog in the world.
“Meet Kipper,” the man said as the car pulled onto the freeway.
“Ah, your sidekick?” Juan Pablo asked as his hands greeted the sociable creature.
Sidekick meant a companion dog.
“Is that a violin?”
“Yes.”
“You any good?”
“I try.” Juan Pablo only pretended to be modest.
As he drove onto the freeway heading north, they exchanged names. The man introduced himself as Bill. “So where are you from, Juan Pablo?”
“El Rosario, Mexico’s monarch butterfly sanctuary.”
“Wow! Butterflies. My wife loved butterflies. She was always planting, what is it, those seeds . . .”
“Milkweed seeds?” Juan Pablo finally stopped petting his new friend, who now covered the entire back seat. He stared intently at the man.
“Yes. She was always planting those, you know, to attract the migrating butterflies.”
Another coincidence. Juan Pablo felt a strange tingling on his forehead.
“She passed away recently,” Bill said, his voice changing and looking distantly ahead. “Married forty-five years, two kids, grandkids, the works. To tell you the truth, I’m kind of lost without her. Kind of?” He questioned his own words before shaking his head. “I am seriously lost without her.”
Studying the man, trying to make sense of all he was feeling, Juan Pablo touched his sadness, apparent in every word. “I am sorry for your loss,” he replied softly. “It is a very hard thing to lose someone you love.”
This received Bill’s full attention. �
�You sound like you know from experience,” he said.
He nodded. “I recently lost my grandmother who raised me,” Juan Pablo said.
The silence filled with a revisiting of loves lost.
“Well, look at us,” Bill broke the spell with a chuckle. “Aren’t we a pair?”
Juan Pablo felt on the verge of tears. Crying would do no good, he told himself. He wisely thought to change the subject. His abuela always told him to ask people about their work, that whether it was good work or bad, people never realized how much adults liked to share this important part of their lives.
“What kind of work do you do?”
“Retired cop,” he said. “I still do security consulting,” he added, making quotation marks in the air around the word. Juan Pablo had seen this gesture in movies; it meant there was something pretend in the sentence, but he was not thinking of this now. For his next thought startled him.
Bill launched into an explanation of the security work, mostly for very rich people. He could write a book about the 1 percent and anyone who thought millions made one happy was dreaming . . .
Juan Pablo no longer listened because in the moment Bill said he was a retired cop, he understood what was happening. The loud and clear message that was being sent to him. He had been hitchhiking since early morning. He had caught three rides and all were from policemen: The first man was a Laguna Beach policeman who was picking up his daughter at the University of California–Santa Barbara, where she was a student. The second ride was from a military policeman on his way back to his base in northern California. And now Bill, the retired policeman who had just lost his wife who happened to love butterflies.
There is no such thing as coincidences, his abuela said a thousand times.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Rocio couldn’t believe this was happening; she just couldn’t.
Anxiety piled up in Rocio’s mind as she sat with the two armed banditos. That Juan Pablo would be killed. Her mother would be killed. She would be killed.
Her head was about to explode.
She tried to think of how to escape.
She clasped her hands tightly, as if praying, but it was no prayer, all desperation.
Yet, without any real awareness, she sent a frantic prayer to Elena’s Sky People.
“Will you really let us go once he has Juan Pablo?”
“Shut. Up,” the tall one who had hit her mother said without even bothering to look at her. He wore Levi’s, boots, and a jean vest over a black T-shirt, even though it was about a hundred degrees outside. His gun rested on his leg as they waited. He looked about thirty, tall, thin, and nondescript, except for a missing index finger and a scar that crossed his high cheekbone. He smelled faintly of rotting meat and flowery cologne, all mixed up.
“Shhh,” the other man said, adding a terrifying smile. He, too, wore Levi’s, along with a loose white T-shirt beneath a leather vest. He had a shaven head and a tattoo on his neck that said “rebel,” but because he was overweight, even obese, the first two letters folded on themselves and appeared to read “feeble.” Feeble, the English word for “dimwitted.” Juan Pablo would have found it hilarious. This man, too, was missing an index finger. His gun rested on the coffee table, next to a glass of water. She kept staring at it, imagining picking it up in a flurry of bravery and turning the table on them.
How did they find two men, both with missing fingers?
The answer did not seem worth dwelling on.
They said nothing else to her, as if she were invisible.
She tried to determine if they were even watching the old movie. The Untouchables. Their faces never changed, whether someone was shot or saved. They just stared blankly at the screen.
They both looked crazily out of place in her mom’s warm and colorful American apartment. Since arriving here, she dreamed of the day she would show Juan Pablo the grounds: the swimming pool, the manicured lawns, and the tropical landscape kept alive by a near-constant mist spraying over them, like a fairy tale, only real. There was also the empty “club house,” a huge lodge with a couch and chairs, a TV, and a pool table. And the movie theaters!
Oh, Juan Pablo would love this place.
Now she would never see the amazement on his face.
She felt a prick of fury . . .
She studied the culprits. Perched casually on the pale lavender couch and chair respectively, their black boots looked foreign, out of place on the wood floors. The plan, they said, was to hold her until the Hunter had Juan Pablo, then they would leave.
What if her mother was bleeding in her brain? She could die!
But worse, they would only go once Juan Pablo was shot.
She had to do something.
“Sky People, help me.”
Ridiculously, she said the words out loud.
“Geezus. I said shut the fuck up.”
Rocio jerked at the harsh rebuke.
The doorbell rang.
Rocio almost screamed, but instantly the tall man aimed his gun at her and motioned for silence. The two men exchanged alarmed looks. The other picked up his gun up from the table and held it.
A loud knock followed. “Pizza delivery!”
Pizza delivery? Confused but not, Rocio thought of the Sky People rescuing her, and she improvised. “Our regular pizza guy,” she whispered to the armed man, wondering if they were that stupid. “Saturday treat.”
He exchanged glances with his cohort in crime and then nodded. Grabbing her arm, he lifted her up and moved to the door, gun aimed at her head.
They were in fact that stupid.
Rocio opened the door. She took one look at the hallway full of police wearing SWAT vests, even as a strong arm threw her into the hallway to safety.
At the exact moment gunfire exploded across the room.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The Hunter lit a cigar as he waited on the bench in the Monarch Butterfly Sanctuary in Pacific Grove. Towering eucalyptus trees on one side and sky-high pines on the other. No butterflies in the famous mists of central California, but it burned off by the afternoon and the ubiquitous California sunshine appeared on cue.
The moist air filled with the scent of pine and the ocean nearby.
Not a winged creature in sight.
Or any other creature. The park was deserted in the foggy afternoon.
He ignored all this; indeed, he was barely aware of his surroundings. He struggled several seconds to get a match lit in the drizzle, finally exhaling a fine plume of smoke that disappeared into the fog blanketing the coast. He dropped the match, noticing briefly the grass straining to grow between the pine needle–covered floor, struggling, like all of life, for a brief moment in the sun.
He returned to trying to decide if he should deliver the kid alive or just deliver the body. The bigger payout meant keeping him alive. But this was not a normal kid. He did not often exercise mercy, but he supposed he would now. The kid had escaped more than once. The young man deserved some measure of respect. He would kill him on the spot. Spare him the absurd barbarity of the torture that awaited him if he were to be delivered alive.
Besides, he didn’t need the money.
He texted the message to kill the girl and her mother.
A helicopter overhead interrupted the stillness of the afternoon.
The very stillness alerted him. It was too still.
The Hunter reached for his gun, even as his gaze darted to the side where he noticed movement. Before he came to his feet he was surrounded by twenty armed men. He almost laughed at the irony of him, the celebrated Hunter being taken out by the slim, dark-haired kid, a nobody, un don nadie.
Before he managed to fire a shot, he felt what he had always been waiting for.
The rain of bullets that signaled the end.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Juan Pablo arrived early at the butterfly sanctuary.
The police had reunited him with Dolores and he had been staying with her lively family until their
first meeting could be arranged. Only Dolores understood that it had to be here.
He would have liked to have Rocio here too, but she was at her mother’s bedside in the hospital while her mother recovered from the concussion. Rocio would not leave her. It didn’t matter. Rocio’s and his fates were entwined, like twin planets circling a star; the music of their lives was forever linked.
He said goodbye to Dolores, Bill, and Kipper in the car. As soon as he had told Bill of all that had happened to him, the older man went into action. The police and FBI were called. In America the police still caught the bad guys, Bill was happy to explain. In fact the police enjoyed nothing more than stopping the bad guys.
He would not be returning with Dolores or Bill. It turned out that Dolores’s daughter-in-law, Lisa, also a Stanford professor, knew his father. They had met six months ago at a faculty meeting. Because his father was understandably attracted to female musicians, and they had both been widowed, they had begun seeing each other before any connection to his life had occurred.
A coincidence? Juan Pablo found it hard to believe in such things these days. Did his abuela plan for him to save the whale and pull the padre back to the living after he delivered Rocio safely to her mother in America? Did she intend for him to end the life of a man wanted in two countries, a man responsible for over fifty deaths that the FBI knew of, a man on their most-wanted list? Or, did his abuela merely plan for him to meet his missing father in the butterfly sanctuary in Pacific Grove?
Save a life and slay a beast . . .
Was this happy ending orchestrated by the old woman, in the same way a composer writes the finest symphony?
He had talked to the man who was his father last night.
John had shared his abuela’s only letter to him, delivered just after her death:
John:
I will not apologize for what I have done to you. I never had a choice. As soon as I held Juan Pablo in my arms, trying to see him through my tears, I knew I held my heart. I had his love for the last years of my life; I have no regrets.
You will have him for the rest of yours.