by Loriel Ryon
“What, then?” Sonja’s mouth was open, but there was worry behind her eyes. It was clear that she cared what Yolanda thought.
Yolanda closed her eyes. “You both left me. You are both leaving me.”
“What?” Sonja’s brow furrowed. “You abandoned us. You abandoned Welo!”
“I was trying to save him!” Yolanda yelled.
“But he couldn’t be saved.” Sonja shook her head at the ground. “And you missed out on the little life he had left.”
Yolanda’s chest ached with grief. Hearing the truth that she knew in her heart out loud was so painful.
“We didn’t mean to leave you out, Ghita and me.” Sonja stopped and tried to put her arm around Yolanda. “We thought you wanted to be alone.”
“I did. I did want to be alone,” Yolanda said. She felt like her chest was cracking open, the grief pouring out of her. “But I don’t want to be alone anymore.”
Forty-one
WELA WOKE again, shaky and weak. Even the wings of the butterflies in her hair seemed as though they were growing listless. Yolanda helped her sit up and take a sip of water. Then she continued her story.
A few months later, another letter arrived from Benjamín. I snuck it from the mailbox and opened it before anyone else saw it.
Mi amor Violeta,
I am heartbroken you never came. I know what you must think about me, but I promise I had not planned to fall in love with you. It just happened. I hope one day you can forgive me for not telling you the truth about my work.
After you did not meet me in Dallas, I decided to go to war. There is no point in my life without you in it, so I am writing to you from a ship somewhere in the middle of the ocean. I’m on my way to fight the Nazis.
Please forgive me. I cannot live and I cannot die knowing you are angry with me.
Te amo, Benjamín
I had to write him. I had to tell him what happened to her.
I told him my sister, his love, was gone.
He was devastated, of course, like the rest of us. We wrote back and forth like that, in secret. No one in the family knew I was writing to him. That would have been a betrayal to them. And through those letters I learned Benjamín loved my sister very much.
Over the harsh desert winter, Mami rocked back and forth in her rocking chair and stared through the window at the pecan tree on the butte, never saying much at all. Raúl had grown sad, like the rest of us, but this was more. It was as if he held the sadness right inside his heart like a living, breathing thing.
I couldn’t bring myself to look at the tree anymore. It was too much. When the first buds began to sprout in early spring, Papá packed up the house and moved us. We had to leave before the orchard came back to life.
As we left, my papá repeated Mami’s words under his breath. “It’s a strange land.”
We moved to a nearby town, where Papá and Mami opened up a small grocery store and made a meager living.
They were never happy again. Not really.
As the years passed by and I grew up, we went through the motions of life, but we were never the same. A family never is after a tragedy like that. As soon as I was eighteen, I went to college. I came home a few times a year to visit with them, but it was always Mami rocking in her chair and Papá never saying much at all. Sometimes Raúl and I would sneak over to the pecan orchard and ride to her tree, enveloping ourselves in the beauty of it all. The orchard had finally started to come back to life after the fire, but Papá didn’t want to hear about it. Raúl went to fight in Korea in 1951, and shortly after he left, Papá died first and then Mami a few months after. Raúl wrote me and said it was because they were left alone with each other, living in sadness.
* * *
Many years later, in 1964, after I gave birth to your Mamá, Welo and I were living in an old apartment in Albuquerque by the university when a package came. It was addressed to me, Josefa Rodríguez. It was the will and testament of my brother, Raúl.
Dear Josefa,
If you have received this letter, it means I am gone. There isn’t much left to be said. I don’t think I ever recovered from the loss of our sister. And the war did me no favors. I’ve tried to hang on, but I couldn’t. I’m so sorry.
Her tree is standing, tall and proud, just like her. It blooms every spring and drops the sweetest nuts in autumn. The rest of the orchard is trying to come back, but I could hardly leave the house, let alone take care of it on my own.
I’m leaving the orchard to you. Maybe you won’t want it. Maybe you will sell it, but I hope you find it in your heart to keep it. Papá and Mami are buried there, next to Violeta, as they wanted. All I ask is that you have me buried there too, per the family tradition. Maybe one day you can bring it back to life and it will be fruitful again. I wish we could have seen each other more, but the nightmares kept me home most of the time.
I am at peace now.
Te amo, Raúl
For many years, I thought Papá had sold the orchard, but he hadn’t. He had given it to my brother in secret. It had been in Mami’s family for so long there was no way she would have wanted anyone else to have it.
Raúl died thirteen years after he came home from Korea—shell shock they said. But I knew the nightmares filled his house, his life. He never recovered from Violeta’s death or his time in the war. It ate at him, bit by bit, every day.
And so your Welo, your mamá, and I moved out of our tiny apartment to the orchard. It was an absolute mess, and you couldn’t really call it an orchard anymore. There were a few young pecan trees trying to sprout, but the house was in shambles. I knew with some time and care we could bring it back to life. We spent years fixing the outside, painting the shutters and working the land. I became good at helping the young pecan trees grow and coaxing the blood sage to return.
We had a mostly happy life.
* * *
Wela clutched the metal box in her lap, her gray hair hanging straight and dull. Yolanda took a swig of water and handed the bottle over to Sonja. Suddenly, a thought occurred to her. Welo had a long silver scar on his hand, the length of his palm. She used to trace it with her fingers as a child. “What was Welo’s first name?” she asked. Yolanda had only ever called him Welo, but something about Wela’s stories rang familiar to her.
“Benjamín.” Wela’s eyes darted to the ground.
The news shook Yolanda as she stared at Wela, incredulous at this revelation. “Welo is Benjamín? From your story?” Yolanda shook her head in disbelief.
“You married your sister’s fiancé?” Sonja asked, her mouth hanging wide.
“Well, yes. But you see, it was many years later and she had been long gone by then,” Wela said quickly.
Forty-two
LONG GONE. We were both devastated by her death for many years and wrote back and forth about our lives, unable to find anyone else who understood what we had lost. We clung to each other, forever bonded by her tragedy.
I saw him again when I went to college. He was a professor and I was a student. He had never dated anyone after Violeta. We started to spend time together discussing science, the butterflies, and different types of research I could do with them to hide the truth about myself.
I didn’t plan it.
Sometimes things just happen.
He was someone who understood my skill and someone I could trust. I didn’t have to hide it from him. He understood how I could use it and apply it to science, which is all I ever wanted. I loved science, but I had to figure out how to incorporate the butterflies into my career. If I wanted a semblance of a normal life, I had to draw attention away from myself and the skill.
But Benjamín wouldn’t give it up. He was as determined as ever to figure out how to explain the trait. He wanted me to live a normal life too. The difference was the tragedy with my sister made him stop chasing the rumors of witchcraft.
Once we had Alejandra, I asked him to stop studying the trait once and for all, but he couldn’t let it go. It was l
ike having a daughter made his obsession worse. He asked me questions about Mami’s family, her sisters, her mother. At first I would answer him and tell him what I knew, but after a while I grew tired and ignored his questions.
It was exhausting, I didn’t want to keep fighting with him, but when Raúl left me the house and the orchard, of course he wanted to learn everything he could.
Like clockwork, that spring, the tree—her tree—bloomed. And in fall we made our way to the tree and stood between the graves of my family to harvest the nuts.
Generations of the Rodríguez family were buried under the tree, their old, crumbling gravestones worn from the years in the harsh desert.
“So your entire family buried here was a Rodríguez?” Benjamín asked. “With the family trait?”
“Most of them had the trait,” I said. “Not Papá.”
Benjamín stood over Violeta’s grave. “She’s still down there.” He dug his palms into his temples. I didn’t know what he was about to do.
The next day Benjamín took a shovel out to the tree and dug until he reached her.
When he brought her bones to the lab, I screamed. “How could you? You loved her! She was my sister!”
He couldn’t look at me for a long time. I think he was ashamed of what he’d done. I didn’t speak a word to him for months, and he eventually moved himself into the old casita.
He scraped her bones, studied her cells, and performed test after test on them. He carved Punnett squares all over the inside of the old casita like a madman.
But he never did figure it out.
When he took her bones, the orchard died.
The drought came. The river dried up, the ditches emptied, and the few pecan trees that had started to come back, shriveled and died.
After he took her bones, the tree never bloomed again.
It’s not beautiful anymore. It’s eerie, the way it stands on the butte, its naked limbs twisting in every direction.
The town blamed me.
Everyone said it was me who cursed this place. They said it was me who caused the drought. But it wasn’t me.
It was him.
It was many years before I could even speak to Benjamín again.
Instead, I busied myself with raising your mamá and my own research—the butterflies.
One day, many years later, he presented me with a box. This box. He begged me to forgive him and take him back. He said he’d only wanted to help me and our daughter have a normal life. He told me he was sorry for what he had done and he’d had her cremated properly. He was going to bring her back to the tree and bury her.
It was a nice thought, but he never did.
I know because the pecan tree never bloomed again.
That’s what’s in this box.
Violeta’s ashes.
And we are bringing her back to where she belongs.
Forty-three
WELA’S eyes closed and the sisters were alone again, pulling the serape and trudging up the rocky terrain. The sky turned gray as the dark clouds rolled in. Thunder rumbled in the distance.
“I can’t believe Welo was Benjamín.” Sonja checked to make sure Wela was asleep.
“I guess I’m not surprised.” Yolanda held a corner of the serape and carefully picked her way across the trail. A few sunbeams radiated through the dark clouds, casting rays onto the rolling mountains way out in the distance. “They have a lot in common if you think about it. Science. They both lost someone very important to them.”
“But still, he was engaged to her sister.”
“I can’t believe he dug up her bones.” Yolanda shuddered. “I thought he loved her.” The revelations about Welo were shaking her to her core. She had a hard time imagining Welo doing such a horrible thing. He’d always had ambition, but she’d never seen him do anything that could be considered so wrong.
“Welo was always more interested in science than anything else. He spent hours in that workshop, filling notebooks.”
“I know, but I see him so differently now—knowing all of this.” Yolanda couldn’t accept the new knowledge and understanding of a man she had admired so much. It was unsettling. Had she been blinded by her love for him? She thought of how she had spent all of those hours in the library, desperate to find a cure to save Welo. They were so much alike, chasing scientific answers at any cost. Was it possible for him to be both a wonderful and loving abuelo and also a man who’d done some terrible things in his past? She thought back to when he was dying and had asked her to finish his work. He’d still wanted an answer. He had never given it up. Maybe that was why he never took Violeta’s ashes back to the tree. Yolanda shuddered again. She didn’t want to end up that way.
They climbed the trail, picking their way over boulders and rocks, carefully guiding Wela on the serape up and over the terrain. The pecan tree was getting closer. Sonja was agile climbing over the rocks and knew exactly where to grab to pull herself up. Yolanda slipped, skittering rocks down the mountainside.
They were about halfway up the trail, taking a rest, when the butterflies began to leave.
They landed briefly on Wela’s forehead, as if saying goodbye, and then one by one, drifted away as the blanket slowly lowered toward to the ground.
Sonja desperately waved her arms. “No!” she cried. She shut her eyes, concentrating, determined to keep the butterflies close, but her skill wasn’t developed enough. The bees couldn’t hold the weight of Wela alone, and before long they flew out from the serape and Wela was on the ground.
Wela woke and tried to summon her butterflies back, but she was too weak. She could barely raise her frail arms from the ground.
They had made it so far and were getting so close, but now everything was gone.
“Why would they leave?” Sonja touched a wildflower on the serape.
“I’m growing weaker, mija,” Wela said. “And they know it.”
“But how will we get you to the tree? We’re running out of time.” Yolanda gazed up the rocky trail toward the pecan tree.
Wela sat back on her elbows and placed the box next to her on the ground. “I think Yolanda can help.”
“Me?” Yolanda stepped back. “What am I supposed to do?”
“I think you know,” Wela said.
Yolanda swallowed hard. “So it’s true, then? I have one?”
“Have one what?” Sonja rested her hands on her hips, a small swarm of the bees buzzing noisily around her head.
“Yours came later, probably masked by your sadness,” Wela said. “The same thing happened with Raúl.”
“Raúl?” Yolanda knelt in the dirt next to Wela. “But he didn’t have a skill.”
“Oh, but he did.”
Forty-four
RAÚL’S skill eventually did come, though the sorrow we all felt hid it for a long, long time. But once he was a little older and after our parents were gone, he figured it out.
One day he met a girl in town. And she was a happy, delightful soul. It was the first time in a long time he felt happy too. Truly happy. And it was for no reason at all.
Raúl was an empath. He could feel other people’s emotions. If they were nearby, he felt it. In his soul, in his heart, in his mind. From his head to his heart to his toes. It was amazing, but also difficult for him.
Imagine carrying all the weight of the world’s emotions right inside your heart.
All the time.
That’s why the war was so hard on him. He took on all the death, the sorrow, and the fear.
And he couldn’t change it. He couldn’t do anything to ease the pain of others or himself. He just felt it.
Before Violeta’s death, Raúl was a quiet, soft soul. He did as he was told and never caused too much trouble. But after Violeta, and after his skill came, he took the feelings of our family—the sorrow, the grief, and the intense sadness—into himself.
It was too much for him in the end. He felt too much too often and couldn’t escape it ever. I felt sorry for him. It must ha
ve been so hard to live like that, with those emotions inside of him all the time. We were all sad. We were all grieving. But we didn’t have to physically feel everyone else’s sadness too.
I’m not sure why I never told Benjamín about Raúl’s gift. Maybe I thought he would try to dig him up too or exploit him in some way. I believe Benjamín loved us, but I also believe his ambition was something he could not control.
I think if things were different, maybe Mami would have been able to help Raúl cope with his gift.
But in the end he was on his own.
We were all on our own.
Forty-five
“SO, why is my skill here now?” Yolanda sat back on her heels. “Why all of a sudden did it show up on this journey through the desert?”
“Because sometimes it takes time.” Wela placed her hand on Yolanda’s arm. “It’s true, every person in our family has the skill. And every person’s skill came around age twelve, but it’s not perfect. Some realized their skills a little earlier, some a little later. Mami told me my tía Valentina was reading minds a lot earlier than she let on.”
“I don’t know—”
Wela grasped Yolanda’s hand gently. Her eyes were warm and pleading. “It won’t hurt to try.”
What if it didn’t work? What if she didn’t really have a skill at all? Then she thought of Mamá giving up her own life for Yolanda to live hers. She rose onto her knees and spread her trembling hands out, hovering them over Wela. If Mamá could do it, so could she.
“Deep breaths,” Wela said. It was the same thing she told Sonja when they worked with the bees.
Yolanda closed her eyes and took a deep breath in, her shoulders rising, and then let it out in one big rush. What if she couldn’t help Wela? The possibility of failure washed over her. They had come this far. She couldn’t give up now. She had to try.