“Today Preston comes on the bus, and I know you are a nice lady here.”
“Well, thank you. You all can go up there and look at the butterflies any day you want to. No charge. That lady you talked to doesn’t own them.”
The girl translated, and they all smiled. Dellarobia wondered if they meant now.
“The only thing is, I’ve got a baby here napping, so it’s not a good time right this minute. We can go later this week, if you want. Could I get a phone number, to call you?” She tore a page from Preston’s drawing pad and handed it to the little girl, who handed it to her father with instructions. He removed a pencil from his pocket, wrote a phone number, and handed it back: ten digits, local area code, but the tidy numbers were foreign-looking. He crossed his sevens, like t’s.
“So,” she said, folding the paper in quarters. “You’ve already seen this, back where you come from? Where the butterflies all gang up together?”
“In Michoacán my father is a guía for the mariposas monarcas.” The girl was warming up, bouncing just perceptibly on the sofa and speaking a little breathlessly. “He takes the peoples on horses in the forest to see the monarcas, he is explaining the peoples, and counting the mariposas and other things for the, for the científicos. And my mother makes tamales for the lot of peoples.”
Dellarobia cupped Preston’s head gently in her hand, turning his face upward. “Did you all talk about this at school? The butterflies?”
“Miss Rose said something to Miss Hunt, but not to us,” he said. “Josefina asked me if I ever saw the butterflies before, because she did. She said they make the big things all over the trees.” He glanced from Josefina to Dellarobia, looking as usual as if he feared he had done something wrong. “That’s why I wanted to see them too.”
“Shoot! I can’t believe this,” Dellarobia said, hardly knowing where to start with her questions. “Do you have these butterflies all the time in Mexico? Or do they just show up sometimes?”
“Winter times,” the girl said. “In summer days the monarca flies around everywhere drinking the flowers, she flies to here to your country. And in winter she all comes home to Angangueo. My town. Every year the same time coming.”
“And that’s how your parents make their living? From working with the butterflies, and the people coming to see them?”
“They come, they did came . . .” Josefina paused a moment, her eyes fixed on the middle distance while she worked out words in her mind. “The peoples came from every places. Every countries.”
“You mean tourists from all over the world? Like how many were there, a hundred?” She wondered whether a child so young could possibly know the difference between dozens and hundreds.
“Thousands of peoples. One hundred millions butterflies.” That answered that.
“How do you know how many butterflies there are?”
The girl looked a little annoyed. “My father is a guía. I help him riding the horses.”
“You can ride a horse?” Preston asked in a reverent whisper. He must think she was the second coming of the Powerpuff Girls.
“If you don’t mind my asking, why didn’t you stay there?” Dellarobia asked.
“No more. It’s gone.”
Dellarobia leaned forward, hands pressed between her knees, strangely dreading what might come next. Miracle or not, this thing on the mountain was a gift. To herself in particular, she’d dared to imagine. Not once had she considered it might have been stolen from someone else. “Do you mean the butterflies stopped coming?” she asked. “Or just the tourists stopped coming?”
“Everything is gone!” the girl cried, in obvious distress. “The water was coming and the mud was coming on everything. . . . Un diluvio.” She looked at her parents, asking several questions, which they answered, but she did not say more.
“A flood?” Dellarobia asked gently. She thought of the landslide in Great Lick that had taken out a section of Highway 60 in September. On the news they’d called it a maelstrom, the whole valley filled with boulders and mud and splintered trees. She made a downward tumbling motion with her hands. “A landslide?”
Josefina nodded soberly, her body shrinking into the sofa. “Corrimiento de tierras.” The mother lifted the girl onto her lap, folding both arms around her protectively. The whole family now looked close to tears.
“I’m sorry,” Dellarobia said.
The father spoke quietly in Spanish, and then Josefina said simply, “Everything was gone.”
“What was gone?”
“The houses. The school. The peoples.”
“You lost your own house?”
“Yes,” the girl said. “Everything. The mountain. And the monarcas also.”
“That must have been so terrible.”
“Terrible, yes. Some childrens did die.”
Dear God, she thought. Terrible was a word with many meanings. The landslide at Great Lick had taken a stretch of highway and nothing else. No school, no lives.
“When was this?” she thought to ask. “What year?”
The girl asked a question, and the mother replied with a word that sounded nearly like February. Josefina repeated, “February.”
“Of this past winter? So you remember all this? It just happened, what, ten months ago? So you all came here to Feathertown after that, in the spring?”
She nodded. “My cousins and my uncle is working here already a long time.”
“Oh, I see. Working the tobacco,” Dellarobia said.
“Tabaco,” both parents repeated. The man pointed to himself and said, “Tabaco,” and something else. He must have been following the conversation to some extent. Her sense of the family kept shifting. They’d had a home they preferred to this, and jobs, scientific things of some type to assist. Now he was evidently hustling for day labor. She felt abashed for the huge things she didn’t know. Mountains collapsing on people. Tonight she and Preston would go over to Hester’s and get on the computer together.
She handed back the folded piece of paper and asked, “Would you mind writing down the name of your town for me, where you came from? So I can . . .” What was she going to tell them, that she’d Google it? It sounded ghoulish, like voyeurism. Which, to be honest, was what the daily news amounted to. You could feel more decent watching it when the victims weren’t sitting on your sofa.