Butterfly Soup

“Maybe she needs time alone. Some people do.”

Rose turns off the main road and pulls over at the end of Helen’s dirt driveway. The tree branches hang so low in Helen’s front yard it’s hard to see the brown bungalow Helen’s grandfather left her. Her sunflowers and zinnias are spiking up already in the one sunny spot in the yard, the planter box over the septic tank. Gopher, Helen’s chocolate Lab, comes bounding out to the car, tail wagging so hard his body wriggles all over.

Helen gets out of the car, patting Gopher with the hand holding her cigarette. “Flim Flannigan died last night. Did you know?”

“I knew someone had. He’s suffered so long. And he had to be lonely after Louise died.”

The dog’s tail beats a knocking rhythm against the car door, and Rose fears dents. She wishes Helen would discipline her dog. Helen bends over to look in the window. “It’s too bad you have to go right now. Rob asked for you.”

Rose waits anxiously by the window for the deliveryman. She has cleaned the little room off the den that stores miscellaneous items: the boxed-up Mr. Coffee, albums of old photographs, a file box of bank statements and insurance records, a noisy window fan, two antique chairs with broken-out cane seats and three boxes of Christmas decorations. It took ten minutes to move the stuff to one side. Then she hung a picture of Our Lady with a mother-of-pearl rosary draped over the frame and a photo of Valley and herself stuck in its bottom corner.

The truck turns in, crunching gravel. Two men come to the door carrying the frame and spring between them. She leads them to the storage room and points to the corner where she wants it set up. They hand her the Mary Theresa tag, lay the metal spring between the head and foot frames and screw it together. They make a second trip to the truck and return with a thin mattress. This they lay in place, performing their duties solemnly, as if part of a ritual. Rose wonders where such men come from—men who don’t roll their eyes at a woman’s faith. Such a man would sit beside her in church. He would lead her up to Communion. Pray aloud at the dinner table. She can’t imagine how that would be. It’s not marriage as she knows it. She’s not sure what it is. First Communion practice maybe, at age six. The boys and girls processed up the aisle, and the priest putting Necco wafers on their tongues so they could practice holding the host in their mouths without chewing.

Rose watches the men leave, then makes the sign of the cross over the bed.

She looks at the tag. Under Sister Mary Theresa’s name is a quote in cramped handwriting: True love grows by sacrifice, and the more thoroughly the soul rejects natural satisfaction, the stronger and more detached its tenderness becomes—St. Theresa, the Little Flower. It’s uncanny—exactly why she bought the bed. It even came with directions, in case she didn’t understand.

This room, the simple bed, feels removed from her doubts about a God she cannot see. She covers the mattress with line-dried white sheets and smooths the rumples. She covers the sheets with a white-on-white quilt from her hope chest. It’s one she made in Home Ec before she learned how to piece. Never before has she used it. The stitches are big and clumsy, but there’s an innocence to them that helps her begin again. She tucks the overhanging edges under the mattress with perfect hospital corners. A clean envelope it is, and she the letter that will fit inside. A petition. To Jesus.

Rose kneels down and runs her hands over the quilt top. The fabric is soft like the batiste of her First Communion dress. After the service, her parents gave a party with a cake covered in white frosting roses. A photographer followed her around that afternoon, telling her to smile and snapping her picture in her white dress and lace veil. The veil was gathered on a plastic headband that pinched over her ears and made her head ache.

When she and Everett eloped, her only veil was the lace curtain she’d swiped from her mother’s linen closet to wrap herself in for their first night at Beetley’s Hotel on Indian Lake. She wore it wrapped sari-style and flung over her shoulder. Everett had unwrapped her gently, handling her like fragile lace, as if she, too, needed to be returned, untorn. Everett was different from Rob.

Oh, Rob. Only her head had been above water when they got to kissing. She had hardly noticed when the straps of her two-piece slid from her shoulders. They never found her bathing suit top, and she’d worn Rob’s T-shirt home, her beach towel wrapped around her shoulders so her mother wouldn’t notice.

Rose shakes her head. This is why she bought the bed—to purge those memories. She’ll stay in this room and pray to the Holy Mother who bore a child and yet was without sin. She’ll persevere until her heart is pure, not divided. Until her flesh is subdued. Maybe Rob will leave town meanwhile so she’s not tempted. That would be a mercy as great as Everett’s having left town for the day. That in itself was a miracle.

She ticks off the items she’ll need for her retreat and rises obediently to collect them. Her missal is in the drawer of her bedside stand, dog-eared and stuffed full of the holy cards her mother collected at funeral homes and tucked into her birthday cards. They spill out on the floor—haloed images of Mary in blue drapery, Jesus with a lamb slung over his shoulders, Saint Francis feeding the birds and Saint Clare, barefoot and wearing sackcloth, placing the Blessed Sacrament between a soldier and the convent wall. Rose puts Clare on top to keep her marauder away.

The screen door bangs shut down in the kitchen.

“Valley? Is that you, lamb?” she calls down the stairs.

“Hi, Mom.”

“How’d you make out with Joey?”

Valley appears in the doorway, pulling her fingers through her sweaty hair. “He puked all over me. I’ve got to take a shower.”

“Babies spit up all the time. Especially formula-fed babies. That’s why breast feeding is best.” She likes to talk about these things with Valley, to pass on the womanly arts.

“Mom? How long can a person survive without oxygen?”

“How would I know that, lamb? I’m not a doctor.”

“I just thought you might have read it somewhere. You’re always telling me stories about kids getting shut up in old refrigerators or car trunks.”

“Were you thinking of hiding in the trunk?”

There’s silence for a moment, then Valley giggles a bit too loudly. “Bach didn’t know that flutists need air. I wondered how long I can play without breathing. You know, without brain damage.”

“I told you to take the summer off, lamb. You need a break sometimes.”

Joey’s mucous is all over the front of Rose’s dress. She puts it in with the dry cleaning, removes her slip and looks down at the bulge of flesh pooching from the waistband of her satin panties. They’re not exactly nun’s underpants. As she peels them down her body, her belly protrudes with its silvery stretch marks, as if she’s swallowed a winter squash. She pokes through the snarl of undies in her drawer, burrowing beneath the skimpy nighties Everett buys, and picks out a modest white cotton bra, panties and a plain half-slip. She stands behind the door to put them on, in case Valley should come barging in with more silly questions, then chooses a shirt and denim skirt as closest to what the nun’s wear now that they’ve shed their habits. She likes skirts anyway. It’s not that she thinks it’s wrong to dress like a man, though her mother didn’t own a pair of pants. It’s that jeans dig into her waist and hug her thighs when she sits down. She’s cooler and more comfortable in a skirt.

Her best rosary is under her pillow, one her mother kept draped over the radio through the fifties when Bishop Sheen came on every day to address the faithful. It was made by a monk in Normandy after World War II and feels like a piece of history. The beads are made of melted-down bullets, and large iron nails form the cross. The contorted Body is hammered from brass and welded to the nails at the hands and feet. As a child she liked to finger it, to peer through the tiny space between the Body and the cross.

Downstairs, she lays her supplies down on the table, next to the fabric she’d been cutting for a Jacob’s ladder quilt. Planning it seems long ago, though it was really only a day. She had been excited about the project, so excited she’d forgotten to eat lunch while she’d graphed it out. Then she made a cutting mistake on a flocked purple remnant she had been saving for just the right quilt. She won’t get the ladder out of it now, and she feels like throwing it all away. She takes up her kaleidoscope, hoping another color combination will capture her. But every time the purple falls in with the blues she feels complete. There’s nothing else she likes as well. It’s all ruined. Tears spring to her eyes, and she swallows again and again. She’d been tired when she made the mistake, too tired to think straight and distracted by the boy who’d come for Valley.

She hopes Valley stays upstairs, because it’s stupid to cry over a quilt. She’s thankful Everett’s gone. Neither of them understands that it’s not just a quilt to Rose. It’s the death of a perfect idea. Now, no matter who raves about the quilt—even if it takes another first at the county fair—it will always look second-rate to Rose.

She hears water rushing through the pipes. Valley is in the shower. Rose goes into the kitchen to get sandwich bags for her little piles of triangles and squares but forgets what she’s after and opens the refrigerator. The sliced turkey will only go bad if she doesn’t eat it. Everett isn’t coming home and Valley doesn’t like it.

She makes herself a turkey sandwich with cheese and lettuce, spreading mayonnaise to the edges of the rye bread with her favorite spreader. A bite at a time, she savors each mouthful as if it’s her last. Rob asked for her. Helen said so. She washes her sandwich plate and pictures his backlit figure walking toward her down the sidewalk. A gold chain glints at the neck of his green T. His jeans bulge slightly at the zipper. But it’s that moment when their eyes met she wants to capture. Her insides flutter as they had in junior high—before a test, when a cute boy walked by or whenever she saw Mary Sue Horton come toward her. “Stop it!” Rose says aloud to the dish brush. She dries the plate, puts it back on the shelf and hurries to her cell as if Rob is in hot pursuit. The air is close in the little room. That’s okay. It’s part of the discipline.

Kneeling beside her bed, Rose bows over her rosary. She says the Apostle’s Creed on the crucifix—fingering the sharp angle of Christ’s knees, the prickly points of the thorns on his brow—a Hail Mary on each of the little beads and an Our Father and Glory Be on each of the larger beads. She repeats them for Mr. Flannigan’s soul. All of it is exhausting, her crying, her praying. She wonders if it’s wrong to pray lying down. What did sick people do? Stroke patients? Mr. Flannigan? He certainly hadn’t knelt. She lies flat on her back, her palms together, upright over her ribs. Her shirt absorbs the sweat on her back. She recites the questions and answers of the Baltimore Catechism, drilled into her by Sister Mary Thomas beginning in second grade. “Who made the world? God made the world. Who is God? God is the Creator of heaven and earth and of all things.” When she’s repeated all of lesson one, she repeats the Ten Commandments, the seven sacraments, the seven virtues and the seven deadly sins. She intends to confess on each one, beginning with gluttony and citing the box of chocolates, but before she gets to lust, Rose dozes.

In the dim light of consciousness she sees bicycle wheels turning, turning, revolving so fast the spokes become a blur and disappear. Valley is a baby, strapped into a child seat fixed to the rear fender. Rose is naked, perched on the seat, steering. She rounds a corner, bicycle leaning until it tips over and the curb reaches for the two of them, smacks her in the jaw and dislodges her teeth. She wriggles each tooth in turn, finds she can remove it, looks at the disgusting V-shaped root, then fits it back into its socket. Valley is sprawling on a lawn overgrown with enormous dandelions that make soft yellow pillows for her head. “Poor baby,” Rose says, picking Valley up, but Valley cannot hear her. Rose looks in her ear. There’s a dandelion inside. Rose plucks at it with her fingers first, then with tweezers, but only manages to shred it. Fragile yellow fibers stick to the tweezer tips like duck fluff. She digs deeper into Valley’s ear, gouging at yellow, tweaking, pulling. But the dandelion is stubborn. It gives up its nap, but it will not budge.

CHAPTER 5

P ort Clinton is new to Everett, but the AAA magazine has a good map. The air is much cooler by the lake. Drier, too. Good thing with the dog. Everett drives to the docks, parks in the shade of a large tree, rolls the windows partway down and pats the dog. “I won’t be long. You’ll be fine,” he says in the singsong of doggy talk. She wags her back half, barks once and watches while he grabs a jacket from his trunk.

Everett buys a ticket to Put-in-Bay on the Jet Express, a jet-powered catamaran said to cross the harbor in twenty-two minutes. Onboard, he stands with the other tourists and watches wake spew from the engine before churning back into the bay. The passengers wear colorful windbreakers, orange and yellow, green and pink. Women pull hoods up over their blowing hair. Everett leaves his jacket hanging open. Cold is a woman thing.

Up ahead, the Perry Memorial rises from the center of downtown Put-in-Bay like a giant pencil, poised to connect the plump clouds into meaningful patterns. Everett thinks like that—connecting poles, configuring electrical circuits, though he rarely insists the patterns have meaning. Not like Rosie, who finds significance in every event. He finds her interpretation of coincidence silly and trivial—the abracadabra of child play, like expecting sense of nursery rhymes or jump-rope chants.

When the Jet Express docks and its engines shut down, the organ band of Kimberly’s Carousel—noted in the AAA guide for its all-wood horses—mixes with the seagulls’ laughter. At King’s Island Amusement Park Valley used to cling to the carousel pole, her neck craning to spot Rosie every turn round the circle. That’s not what he came for.

He spies the parachutes billowing from their anchors down on the beach. He hurries to the dock to register, but when he arrives there’s no line. The air is too chilly. He won’t bother changing into swim trunks.

Everett pays his fee and signs the waiver before he loses his nerve. Out in the water, the boat motor revs while bare-chested boys with Greek letters on their caps snap him into a life vest. The boy maneuvering the boat keeps it pointing into the wind. The motor settles into a glubbing gurgle Everett can hardly hear over his heartbeat. He is about to do it. To take off…to fly…to soar with the seagulls—free of earth, gravity, his body. The boys tell him to step into a harness. He threads one leg, then the other through the leg straps. His bare feet look white. One boy tightens the cinch belt under his gut and adjusts the strap that runs between his legs. A red-yellow-and-blue chute billows out behind him, not yet clipped to rings on his harness. The wind riffles the edges of the chute. His mouth is suddenly dry. Two boys clip his chute on, holding him down with all their weight. “Hold on to those straps by your ears,” the tall one says.

“Have fun, big guy.”

They halloo to the driver. Release him as the boat takes off into the wind. Cold air rushes his face as the chute lifts him into the air. His weight settles into the sling seat. His knuckles whiten around the handholds. The beach disappears and he is over water. The waves reach for his feet, then curl into white fringe. He kicks his feet at the nothingness that suspends him. The water drops farther below. The waves look like ripples. He glances back. The shoreline forms a crescent behind him. The Perry Monument is not so tall after all. The red-and-white carousel awning rotates slowly, its pie-shaped wedges emerging from a stationary center point. Its calliope is silent now. Even the noise of the boat motor has faded away.

It is very still.

The article hadn’t mentioned stillness. His skin breaks out in goose bumps. He’d expected rushing wind, rocking him in the harness swing, his hair blowing every which way. Everett has never heard such silence. Even in farm country in the middle of winter there are sounds—the echo of a car door slamming, a train whistle, the snap of icicles, the wind wiffling across stubbly fields or snapping frozen branches. The silence threatens to swallow him. He can’t relax and enjoy the view in the face of such calm. How does he know he’s still living? That he hasn’t died of heart failure? Maybe he was wrong about heaven—all his visions of angels and cherubim, the many-headed monsters from Revelations, the only book of the Bible he’s read. Maybe the giant throne room, the old man speaking in a booming voice amidst sulfur and magical creatures and terror and judgment is Oz, not heaven. Maybe heaven is a lot of nothing. A total void.

“Anybody home?” Everett calls into the stillness. The question goes nowhere. Maybe it’s trapped in his head, like the sound of his voice when he plugs his ears with his fingers. Maybe he hasn’t spoken at all. He lets go of the strap and holds his ears with his palms, then hollers.

The boat down on the water speeds around in circles. To his right a gull flaps its wings a few times, then glides, riding an updraft before circling around and descending to the water. For a minute it grazes the surface, then splashes and disappears. It surfaces and flaps off with a fish in its mouth. Everett envies its fluid movement, its freedom. He caws like the gull and flaps his arms. He pictures himself bailing out, as he had from swings when he was a child, then jackknifing into free fall, arms and legs spread wide to embrace the approaching earth like skydivers in James Bond movies.

Everett quells the urge. From this height, he’d never survive. Suicide is the coward’s way out. But if he were closer to the water…the boat heads toward shore. He’ll descend soon. He doesn’t have much time. The buckles are locked into each other. He kicks his feet and plucks at the webbing threaded through the buckles on the crotch strap. Finally he pulls it free. The waist strap is all that remains. It’s tight, and he can’t see it over the bulk of his life jacket to loosen it. While he fumbles with it, jerking and cursing, the boat slows down. Everett’s chute drops like a reeled-in kite. His time is short. The wind blows him toward shore. The beach approaches. The frat boys gesture, pointing and waving their arms. They holler and motion to pull down, like a train engineer on the whistle. He pulls all right—at the strap under his gut.

The boat idles offshore. The chute drops farther. The engine glubs. The calliope frolics. He’s almost too late, too close. Then the strap gives and he’s free. He thrusts his head out to propel his weight forward, spreads his arms and legs, then smacks on the blue-gray mirror.

When Everett regains consciousness, a frat boy’s face is enlarged in the center of an expanse of sky. “He’s coming to.” The boy’s voice is soprano and distorted. Other faces appear in a circle around his. Water runs from the kid’s sun-bleached hair down his neck and chest. The seagulls’ cries no longer sound like laughter. The clamor of the calliope mocks at his pain.

“Back off, everybody,” the kid orders. The perimeter of faces clears out. “You okay, mister?” His eyes look earnest, as though the answer matters.

Yeah, Everett mouths. He has no air in his lungs. His head aches. His skin stings all over.

“What the hell were you trying to do? Are you fuckin’ crazy, man?”

Everett gasps to breathe. There’s a crushing weight on his chest.

“That life jacket saved you. Lie still. The ambulance will be here soon.”

Everett heaves himself partway up. The kid pushes on his shoulders to lay him back down, but Everett resists. “No hospital.” He shakes the kid’s hands off. “I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine. They have to check you out. Insurance stuff.”

“Hell with insurance…They’re not…checking me out… I’m outa here…soon as I get…my breath.”

A siren is coming toward the docks. Everett rolls onto his hands and knees, struggles up and staggers in the sand. The kid is on his tail, fussing at him.

Everett waves him off. “Beat it, kid. And while you’re at it, get a real job.”

“Crazy bastard.”

Everett grabs his duffel off the sand and heads for the bathhouse. When he looks back, the kid is staring after him. Everett hates the boy’s sculpted chest and taut, square jaw.

Back in the car, Everett cuddles his dog. The wind was cold on the trip across the bay, and the afternoon sun feels good, baking him through the windshield. Now that he’s been to Oz and back, he’s decided to name the dog Kansas. She puts her front paws in his lap and licks the sweat from his palms. Her tongue massages his calluses, but its grainy texture feels a bit removed until she moves to the skin on his wrist. His skin stings all over where he hit the water. His stomach is sour, his saliva bitter, but he’s not sorry he did it. The way that boy fussed to save him, maybe there’s something of his life left to salvage.

CHAPTER 6

V alley stops playing scales on her flute and listens. The house is so quiet her mother must be out weeding. She puts the flute down on her bed, crawls across it to the puzzle portrait and lifts it off the wall. Her father hates this picture. They had it made at Sears when they were all dressed up for Mother’s Day one year, but he had refused to do it again. He couldn’t stand the photographer tapping his chin to adjust the angle of his head and telling him to smile. And he didn’t like the way Valley’s hair stuck up from the duck barrette. “You just don’t know what’s cute,” her mother told him one night when they were both in her room, kissing her goodnight.

“Hair doesn’t grow up,” he said. “She’s cute the way she is.”

Maybe the picture is why he never comes in her room anymore. She doesn’t blame him. She can’t think why she’s left it up. She turns the picture over and removes the clips and the cardboard to get to the puzzle itself. Once it’s free of the frame, she props it on her pillow for a last look, makes a fist and punches through her baby face. A puzzle bracelet circles her wrist.

When Valley withdraws her hand, her pillowcase shows through. Her mother’s lap now holds a white balloon. Tears well up in her eyes, and through their watery blur, it is young Mrs. Harper sitting there with a hole in her lap. And Joey’s body without a head. She screams, but no sound comes from her mouth. It stays trapped in her head.

She sweeps the picture off her pillow and puts her Sebastian bear there instead. Frantically she searches for a place to hide it. The closet and bureau are no good; her mother will find it when she puts the laundry away. The mattress. She puts the ruined picture under it and drops the mattress. It will do until she can find a better place. She straightens the quilt. Pieces of her face still lay on the quilt top as if somehow part of its bear-paw pattern. She tries to fit them back together, but where her fist struck, the cardboard tongues are bent backward. She puts them in her top drawer under the balls of matched socks.

If only she could go back to a time when she didn’t know about today. One day would do. She’d been a better person the day before. A strange pressure in her chest, like a giant spring winding ever tighter, threatens to uncoil and wang her all over the room. She reaches for her flute, as if it might anchor her, prevent her from hitting the walls.

A Bach bourrée is on her music stand, but the endless eighth notes are more than she can face. She turns instead to a sinfonia, a slow, dreamy piece she can almost play by heart.

As her breath funnels through the cylinder, Joey is seated before her, propped on the pillow in place of Sebastian. At first he is huge, a burden she must drag behind her through humid air and acres of boggy farmland. She slogs through the complications and resolutions of the melody until her tone becomes full and the music takes over. She allows its power to lift her to the peak of each phrase before falling freely down the backside. Joey is now light, full of helium. He floats up from the bog and is borne aloft on the sound of her voice. Eyes closed and body swaying, she woos him, leaning into the phrases, rocking him gently on the melody.