I Lived on Butterfly Hill: List 3

I walk with sleepy eyes from the tarmac to the noisy metal carousel where luggage from the flight is turning round and round.

I walk cautiously through two big swinging doors, and immediately I spot my redheaded Tía Graciela among the throngs of people waiting.

She changes the subject brusquely.

“I kept the tarot a secret from Mamá,” my aunt confides in me, “because I was going through my rebellious teenage years. You know the magician at Café Iris, of course?” I nod, intrigued.

“I’m sorry, but I can’t. Something El Mago taught me is that magic exists, but it is we who create it.” She laughs ruefully.

Every flat surface—the bureau, the windowsill, the night table—is covered with conch shells.

“But why do you have to go out to see them? Isn’t all that driving tiring?” I ask her, tucking the last tendril beneath her turban.

Their peals of nasty laughter sting my eyes.

They are like delicate pink bells with yellow clappers inside them, and they looked like earrings hanging from her ears.

Sometimes when I repeat the word “euphoria,” I feel great sadness, which is the very opposite of the meaning of the word. But I can’t imagine feeling euphoria until I am back in Chile with my family and friends.

I look at her skeptically. She must be joking.

“Oh no—they are much too refined for burned leftovers! I bet you they turn their wobbly beaks up at it.”

I wake up this morning the way I often do, imagining that Tía Graciela’s alarm clock is the doorbell, and that I hear my parents’ voices saying, “Where is our little star? Where is the celestial Celeste?”

Kim brushes the grass off her legs and, with her gait that is more like a pony’s trot, heads toward the trailer park.

“Little Star, where are you?” a sweet melodic voice beckons from the south.

“Hey,” he says, his voice coaxing, “I’ll even let you borrow my boogie board and teach you to ride the waves.”

I hear the noisy banter of my classmates who are already inside.

The grass is dry, and there are no longer any bicycles, children’s toys, lawn chairs strewn around the trailers.

All that remains is the smell of incense and orange blossoms.

So I followed Guillermo on his dance tours for a while, all over Chile, Argentina, Brazil. And when he was invited to join a dance troupe in Montreal, I was thrilled by the chance to move to Canada.

“I moved to Juliette Cove because I needed some place, any place, to be alone and recover from my heartbreak. I picked this spot because the name reminds me of my favorite Shakespeare play, the one about a love that lasts forever. And I did recover...slowly...and I think I grew to like being in a place where I can be just as eccentric as I please...even though the price of freedom is loneliness.”

“I can,” she concedes.

I stand at the window and see the pale crescent moon. It is a slight, fading sliver, waiting for the sun to completely erase it from the sky.

It is Meg, the queen bee of the class herself, with her twin brother, Charlie, a few steps behind, a sheepish half smile on his face.

Valerie and Meg exchange quizzical glances.

All week I am absorbed in preparations—trying to remember Delfina’s recipes, looking up the words for ingredients in English to make a shopping list in my notebook, scouring the aisles of the grocery store with Tía Graciela, and watering the blue hydrangeas in the front yard every evening so that they bloom into the perfect table centerpiece.

“Me too,” Valerie adds, her blue eyes wistful.

“No, not—at—all,” I stammer, then give a conspiratorial wink back.

“Why are you here when they are back in Chile?” Charlie looks at me intently.

Her eyes with the look of yearning for home.

Sometimes it makes me frustrated to hear words like “censorship” and “hunger” and “disappeared” over and over again.

Subversive. I remember Gloria saying it as well. It sounds sinister, all twisted like a serpent.

“Then autumn on Juliette Cove is a burnished viola bursting with the sounds of yellow, orange, and red,” I say.

At first they only exchanged a courteous hello, but as months turned into years, Tía Graciela and the mailman John Carter became friends.

In my sleep I stood aboard a small wooden sailboat with billowing sails whiter than the moon.