“Papá.” The word left my mouth in a thin breath that barely touched my lips, because I couldn’t believe he was really there. Yet, as he waited there at the end of the long hallway, all the way past four bedrooms and a bathroom door, something small and fragile twisted inside of me, my tattered heart shrinking away from him.
We’d been so happy to see Mamá, so overjoyed at her loving, genuine reception, that we had, for a moment, forgotten we had a father. Being chased by witches and warlocks, battling monsters, even defeating demons, was nothing compared to the task of facing the reality of our father’s abandonment.
Instinctively, Pita left our mother’s side and wrapped herself around me, as if I and I alone could protect her from the stranger Papá had become. I draped my arms around her small shoulders and filled my lungs with air, waiting for his explanation. But instead of explaining himself, my father did the same thing he had always done when he’d come home from working out of town. As if his long, unexplained absence had been nothing more than another one of his trips, he took a small step forward, and with little fanfare, he opened his arms to us in a wide, welcoming arc and said, “Chiquitas, I am so glad to see you. Come, come, give your Papá a hug.”
The minute she heard his words, Pita unfurled. Like a dandelion seed — se desprendió de mí — she pushed me off and flew at him, almost knocking him backward as he went down on one knee to receive her into his strong, protective arms.
I have to admit for a small, deranged second, my erratic heart jolted in my chest and I almost did the same thing. I almost ran into his open arms. But then I remembered what Abuelita had revealed to us and I knew Papá had not come home to be reunited with us. He was probably here to finish what he’d started when he first abandoned us. Maybe he was picking up the rest of his stuff. He might even want to know why we’d taken his car. But I knew, I just knew, he wasn’t there for us.
“Papá! Papá!” Pita squealed, calling out to him over and over again. Her voice filled the room with a heartbreaking desperation not unlike the twittering of a nest full of orphaned sparrows.
“Delia. Velia,” Papá whispered, his eyes imploring them to go to him, even as he hugged Pita to himself like she was his lifeline. “Please. It’s been so long. Come give your Papá a hug.”
The twins looked sideways at each other, but didn’t budge. They turned to look at Mamá. Her eyes were brimming with unshed tears. But instead of saying anything, she pressed her lips together, swallowed hard, and looked away.
“Mamá?” Juanita stepped forward and put her hand on our mother’s shoulder.
“What is going on?” Delia and Velia’s words mingled together in the air. They touched Mamá’s arm, and our mother did what I feared she might do under the circumstances. She waved her hand toward Papá as if to say, “Go. Go. I give up.”
“Don’t do it,” I muttered as I fought the urge to scream, “He’s faking it!”
“Papá? Please say — you’re not leaving,” Velia and Delia’s plea ripped through my heart and I wrung my hands, wishing there was a way I could expose Papá for the wretch that I feared him to be before the girls got too attached to him again.
“Mis cuatitas, my precious twins. No. I won’t leave again. I love you too much.” At his loving words, the twins took a step toward him. I couldn’t stop them, but I also couldn’t keep my mouth shut.
“You’ve been gone for almost a year. Where was this love all that time?” I asked, tasting the bitterness as the words left my insolent mouth.
“Odilia, hija mía, love doesn’t go away from one day to the next. Not a father’s love. It clings to our hearts and holds on so tight, it keeps us awake at night. Please. Don’t be so hard on your Papá.”
Pita wrapped her arms tighter around Papá’s neck and she kissed his cheek, while Delia and Velia stood their ground with their arms crossed over their chests. The twins’ eyes were blank, cold. But not me. No, I was so enraged, I wanted to slap Papá hard across the face. I wanted to break him, make him beg forgiveness for having left us without letting us know where he was or if he was even alive. But instead of hurling myself violently at him, I did the only thing I could do. I questioned his devotion.
“Is that true? Or is it just a line from one of your songs?” My spiteful words delivered their poison, and my father flinched. He blinked nervously, and for a moment, he was at a loss for words. Pita let go of Papá’s neck and turned to look at me, her eyes full of fear, and something else — doubt, I think.
“It’s not a line. I don’t even sing anymore. I left the band. I’m home for good,” Papá finally answered, tightening his hold on Pita as if to mark his words. “Odilia, I am your Papá. I could never stop loving you. Ever. Your faces are embedded in my heart.”
“Our faces? Really?” I moved slowly, deliberately toward Papá as I continued. Accusations roiled inside of me, swirling in my head like furling tornado clouds, until I thought I might explode if I didn’t let them out. “What about our feelings, Papá? Did you ever think about what your disappearance would do to us? It seems to me like you think being gone for almost a year without even one phone call to let us know you’re alive is perfectly all right — but it’s not. It’s not all right at all.”
Mamá, standing behind me, was crying openly now. Her face was covered in tears, and her body shook as she hugged herself.
“Trust me, muñecas,” Papá continued. “Delia, Velia, Juanita, I have never stopped loving you, any of you. Not even for a second.”
His words were meant to charm, and the twins were wavering. Their lips were quivering. They were getting closer to each other in that connected way of theirs, as if trying to make up their minds. Then, suddenly, they broke the bond and rushed to hug Papá, who let go of Pita to hug them.
The twins huddled around him, towering over him. They’d grown so much in the time he’d been gone, yet they were still little girls, clinging to their childhood and their need for his love. I wondered if I’d ever been that innocent. I felt numb inside.
“Come on,” Juanita begged me, inching herself toward the familial scene before us. She grabbed my hand, but I shook my head. Something inside me was wounded. The pain speared my heart and the threat of tears blinded me, so I tightened my grip on Juanita’s hand, fighting the urge to scream, to cry, to run away from it all.
Then, just as reluctantly as the last leaf of autumn falls off a desiccated branch, Juanita’s hand slackened and fell away from mine. She walked away from me, leaving me alone with my anger and resentment. Papá’s arrival had done what Cecilia and her Evil Trinity could not accomplish. His empty promises broke the code of the cinco hermanitas. We were five little sisters, together no more — cinco hermanitas torn completely apart.
“Just promise you’ll never leave us again,” Juanita requested, and hugged Papá. His eyes misted with love as he broke free of the others and took her into his arms as if she was the most beloved of his daughters.
“You are my family,” he whispered, kissing the crown of Juanita’s head. “I would never tear us apart. We were a family once, and we will be a family again. If it kills me, I will never again leave your side.”
EL MÚSICO: “El músico no es torero,
pero sí sabe tocar y torear.”
THE MUSICIAN: “The musician is not a bullfighter,
but he does know how to play and deceive.”
I listened to Papá’s words with a suspicious ear. He seemed so sincere, so committed to us, that I almost put aside my reservations and allowed myself to be sucked into his whirlwind of affection. But I held back instead.
I couldn’t put my finger on it, but something didn’t feel quite right. Perhaps it was my intuition that kept me away, the suspicious nature I’d developed since our journey in Mexico. More than likely, though, it was that solitary figure of Mamá holding herself together, alone �
� apart from my sisters, apart from Papá, apart even from me, her firstborn daughter, the closest thing she had to an ally. I was pondering my resistance, when suddenly the twins’ bedroom door flew open.
Papá froze, took a deep breath, and then turned to look at the door to his left.
“What’s going on?” he asked, releasing my sisters to stand up.
Two pasty-faced girls walked out of Velia and Delia’s room. They couldn’t have been much younger than the twins, but they were shorter and very plump. Their dirty blonde hair was frizzled out, like unraveling kite strings dragged through too many hands, but they didn’t seem to be concerned about what they looked like. They were too busy carrying a huge plastic sack between them.
“Daddy,” one of them whined. “We don’t know what to do with this stuff. It smells bad.”
“Yeah, like cockroaches or something,” the first girl blurted out, her muddy brown eyes settling on us for the first time.
“What in the hell-icopter . . .” Velia started.
“ . . . were you doing in our room?” Delia finished her twin sister’s thought, looking at Mamá for an explanation.
“Sarai!” Papá called out to someone who came rushing out of Juanita’s bedroom to the left of us. Shock ran up my spine and jolted me into awareness as I watched a tall, narrow-hipped blonde woman walk past us in the hall like she owned the place. She went to stand next to Papá in front of the kitchen door and clung to his arm as if to show that she had possession of him now.
“Ernesto,” the woman said, her eyes glittering with something like malice or spite as she looked at each of my sisters and then settled on Mamá. “There’s no use dragging this on. Por favor, diles — just tell them what’s going on and be done with it, amor.”
Papá’s eyes made contact with mine, and then he cast his gaze downward to the floor, as if he were embarrassed. “I thought we talked about this,” he said quietly, almost inaudibly. “Now is not the time.”
Suddenly, I understood everything: the arguments with Mamá, his inappropriate riddle for La Sirena the last time we had played Lotería as a family, the disconnected phones, his unexplained disappearance, it all made sense now. Papá had been having an affair with this woman, and now he had brought her here — to our house!
Looking at her dispassionate face, I wondered how Papá could’ve traded our sweet, loving Mamá for this cold woman. What hold could such a manipulating woman have on him?
Thick, molten hot anger welled up inside me as I waited for an explanation. “Now is not the time for what?” I asked Papá in a terse voice, barely suppressing the rage simmering inside me.
“Now is not the time for this.” Papá pointed toward the woman’s daughters, who were still holding the huge plastic sack between them. “We have to talk about the situation, let everyone get used to the idea,” Papá snarled at the blonde woman from between clenched teeth, the way he always did when he was running short on patience.
“I know. I told them, but you know how they are,” the woman whispered into Papá’s ear, smiling slyly at Mamá, who put a hand over her mouth and shook her head in shock — or maybe it was disbelief or embarrassment. I couldn’t tell which.
“Girls, please put that back,” Papá asked.
“But we’re cleaning our room. There’s too much stuff in there,” the little one said, pointing to Velia and Delia’s room.
“What?” Velia said.
“You mean this is our stuff?” Delia demanded, reaching for the huge plastic sack and yanking it away from them.
The girls held onto the sack while Velia and Delia pulled with all their might. The tug of war ended almost before it began as the sack ripped and articles of clothing spilled everywhere.
“These are my clothes,” Velia said. Disgusted, the woman’s daughters threw the ripped sack on the floor in front of the twins. Velia gathered up an assortment of jeans, shorts and shirts, holding them in front of her like they were misplaced treasures.
Delia pointed to the sandaled feet of one of the girls. “Hey, those are mine! Why are you wearing my chanclas? Take them off, you fat little thief!”
“They were in my room, but you can have them!” The girl slid the pretty white sandals off and tossed them with her feet in Delia’s direction. The sandals landed in front of Delia with a thud. Without taking her rabid eyes off the thief, Delia kicked both sandals aside. I could tell by the violent nature of that kick that she would never wear those chanclas again.
Juanita stooped down and picked up the rest of the clothes from the floor and handed them to Velia. “You can’t stay here. This isn’t a hotel!”
“Ladies,” Papá said. He disentangled himself from the blonde woman and came to stand between the twins and the woman’s daughters. “Let me explain.”
“Yeah. Tell them, Daddy. This is our house now!” the older of the two sisters said, tossing her disheveled hair back with a flick of her hand.
“It is not! This house belongs to us!” Velia stepped behind the strange girls, threw her clothes inside her room haphazardly, and closed the door to her bedroom to punctuate her words. “Stay out of there if you know what’s good for you.”
“You have no right to be here,” Delia said, kicking at the girl nearest to her. She didn’t make actual contact, though, because Papá put his hand on her shoulder and held her at bay.
“Your house stinks like a lice farm,” the older of the strange girls said. No sooner had she spoken, than Delia slipped out of Papá’s grasp, and both Delia and Velia threw themselves on the invading sisters, who were knocked to the floor. Papá reached in to stop them, but the twins were too fast for him.
Raining blows, como molinos, Delia and Velia were two demonic lechuzas shrieking out their outrage in Spanish and cursing the intruders for their transgressions.
“Stop it! Stop it right now!” Papá yelled, taking each of the twins in turn and peeling them off the two other girls, who were wailing miserably on the floor.
Mamá, who up to now I assume had been too embarrassed to speak, was suddenly standing right in the middle of things. She was holding Velia and Delia in front of her, arms wrapped around them, securing them. “Girls, I’ve told you before. No matter how mad you are, fighting doesn’t solve anything.”
“They started it,” Delia spat out, straightening her shirt.
“Yeah,” Velia continued. “They mess with our stuff, they mess with us.”
Mamá let go of the girls and made the twins turn around to face her before she spoke again. “Please apologize.”
“I’m sorry,” Velia mumbled to no one in particular.
“Sorry,” Delia whispered halfheartedly as Mamá stroked her arm and held her and Velia close.
“Delia, Velia,” Papá’s tone of voice was downright stern. “You can’t mistreat Alison and Ashley like this. They’re going to be part of our family from now on, and we don’t hurt our family.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “What do you mean they’re going to be part of the family? Are they . . . yours?”
“They’re my stepdaughters, or they will be as soon as the divorce goes through,” Papá said. He took the strange girls into his arms and hugged them to himself. His words, delivered so swiftly and with such disregard for our feelings, cut through me like the blade of a guillotine. My stomach lurched and tightened and lurched again. Abuelita said that Papá was divorcing Mamá, but she didn’t mention that he had another woman and two other daughters. She told us he wanted to start a new life, but she neglected to inform us that he had a whole other family that did not include us.
“Now let’s try this again,” Papá cooed into the two pasty girls’ ears as he kissed them and then turned around to look at us. “Ladies, this is Ashley,” he said, placing his hand on the younger girl’s head. “And this is Alison,” he continued, referring
to the older girl. “They are going to be your stepsisters, your hermanitas, and we’re all going to live here together, so please, try to be nice.”
“Live together?” Juanita’s eyes sparked with derision. “Here? You mean you all, us, and Mamá? Who do you think we are, the freakin’ Brady Bunch?” The whole thing was beyond ridiculous. Even the Brady Bunch only had one mother and one father.
The girls’ mother stepped forward and reached for my hands, as if she and I could ever be friends. “I know this must be very hard on you girls.”
“Hard?” I asked, feeling the boiling anger rising up in me again. I pulled away before she could touch me and moved back to stand next to Mamá, who had retreated from the familial scene and was standing by the front door, looking more and more like a ghost of a woman. “Lady, this is beyond hard. This is absurd. What did you think, that we were going to just hug and kiss and act like this is all right? No. No. It’s not all right. None of it. Not the surprise reunion, not the home invasion, and certainly not the fake sisterly love. And what about Mamá? Where does she fit into this picture-perfect story of yours? Where is she supposed to live, Papá?”
“Well, we can’t very well all live here,” Papá said, looking at his new woman. The intimacy of that look made my stomach tighten again. They had secret plans — plans that didn’t involve Mamá!
“You’re such a — ” I started, but then I had to stop because the tears were rolling down my face so heatedly that I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to control myself. I needed to be in control of my emotions if I was going to help Mamá not get thrown out of her own home.
“Say it,” Papá taunted, his fists at his side, as if ready to strike. “Don’t be afraid to say it. I’m such a what, Odilia?”
“You’re a jack-a — a jack-a — ” Velia began, stumbling on the word, too upset or maybe too hurt to spit it out.
“A jack-o-lantern!” Delia yelled, her face stained with tears as she backed away from the scene. She stood with her back pressed against the paneled wall of the narrow hallway between her bedroom and the kitchen. “You have that big old grin on the outside, but inside you’re all hollow and empty.”
Summer of the Mariposas Page 24