Marcia Preston - The Butterfly House

I shake my head. “You’re wrong. I have no power.”

Outside, it has begun to snow again. I watch the air thicken. From the windows of our sunporch the world is a Christmas card, the pines stacked deep with snow. Despite the warmth of the house, I feel winter in my limbs.

“She’s dying in that prison,” he says. “When the spirit dies, the body follows.”

Wrong again. I’m living proof. How can he be so naive? He’s twice my age, a war veteran, a Cherokee, as I remember. But I don’t bother to contradict him.

“Bobbie,” says this man I’ve never met before, using the nickname he has no right to use, the nickname his daughter gave me. “Do you know where Cynthia is?”

The question catches me unprepared. I stammer. “I hear from her now and then.”

“Why hasn’t she visited her mother?”

My eyes cloud and I tighten my mouth to keep my face blank. “You’d have to ask her that.”

“I’d like to,” he says. “I’d like to see my daughter. She doesn’t even know I’m alive.”

Cynthia Jaines’s husky, anguished voice on the phone six months ago echoes in my head. I picture the thin ghost who came to see me at Green Gables—a euphemism for the mental health facility where I lived for five years before I married David. Would seeing Harley Jaines save Cynthia, or push her, too, over the edge?

“She never gives me an address. I have the impression she moves around a lot. I don’t know where she is.” This is all true, so I meet his eyes when I say it. I’ve never been a good liar.

He nods, his face impassive. I can’t tell if he believes me. Where were you all those years, I wonder. Why did you let Lenora think you were dead?

But I don’t want to know his secrets. I don’t even want to know mine.

My mind flutters to the appointment I’ve made at the women’s clinic tomorrow morning and my stomach contracts. Will I be able to drive myself home afterward? What if I’m ill, or bleeding? What can I tell David that he will believe?

If Cynthia were here, she’d go with me. She’d take care of me, lie for me. Or talk me out of the decision I’ve made. I pull the afghan around my arms and take a deep breath. When Harley Jaines stands up, it startles me.

“I’ll let you know when the hearing is scheduled,” he says. “May I have your phone number?”

Perhaps if he can call me, he won’t come here again. I rise slowly, untangling myself from the afghan, and scribble the number on a pad by the phone. I hand him the paper without meeting his eyes. “Please don’t call in the evenings.”

He accepts it with cigar-shaped fingers that bear no rings. “Lenora doesn’t know I’m here,” he says, and pauses. “You tried to tell the truth once, but no one would listen. I’m asking you to try again.”

Suddenly I’m weary of his childish assumptions. My voice tightens. “Truth doesn’t set people free. Didn’t you learn that in the war? You have no idea what you’re asking.”

This time his dark eyes register some emotion, and I see them take note of the scars that snake down my jawline and flood my throat. He has no right to come here and ask me to rake those scars raw again.

A thought comes to me that his sudden appearance might be some cosmic punishment for the procedure I’ve consented to tomorrow.

But no. That decision is merciful. I’m sane enough, at least, to know that. If I never know another thing for certain, I know I have neither the right nor the skills to mother a child.

I lead Harley Jaines to the door, close and lock it behind him. But with my back pressed against the door, my eyes closed, I see a vision of Lenora as a young woman—Lenora, with the ocean-colored eyes, the person I’ve loved most in all my life.

This isn’t fair.

Then I remember Lenora seven years ago, in a cold room floored in cheap tile. Her face looked ashen against the orange prison garb, her long chestnut hair already dulled and streaked with gray. And I hear the prison guard’s comment behind my back as I stepped into the visiting room: “Ain’t she something? Come to visit her mother’s killer.”

Outside, the black Blazer’s engine bursts into life. I lean against the door until I hear the SUV drive away, then make my way back to the sunporch. Without turning on the lamp, I stand at the window and watch the snow.

Harley Jaines is wrong.

No one knows the truth about Lenora and Cynthia Jaines, Ruth and Bobbie Lee. Least of all me.

Shady River, Oregon, 1971

Cynthia Jaines’s mother kept butterflies in the house. Summer afternoons, from grade school to high school, I pedaled my bike up the steep, winding road to Rockhaven, where my best friend and her mother lived in an enchanted world of color and light.

The house clung like determined lichen to a forested slope above the Columbia River. Sweating my way up the incline, my leg muscles stripped and zinging, I would tilt my face toward the glassed-in porch winking above me and picture the kaleidoscopic flutter of wings inside. A Swedish immigrant named Olsen had built the house half a century before, but in the years I frequented its stuccoed rooms, Rockhaven cocooned a female existence—its single resemblance to the bleak frame cottage my mother and I shared in the village below.

Rockhaven loomed large and beautiful to me then, although now I realize it was neither of those things. Tunneled partway into the hillside, it had two windowless bedrooms that stayed cool in summer, warm throughout the winter blows. Dining and living rooms faced off in the center of the house, unremarkable except for their respective views of sunrise and sunset. The cockpit kitchen pooched out on the sunrise side in a bay of miniature windows. But the ordinariness of those rooms escaped notice, overshadowed by two distinctive features: a native-stone fireplace whose chimney rose like a lighthouse above the river, and the stilted, glass sunporch jutting from the hillside into green air. Below its windows, the teal-blue Columbia looked placid and motionless, except when flood season churned it to cappuccino.

After the fire, only the stone chimney of the house remained. Blackened and naked, it towered above the leafy riverbank, a monument to Rockhaven’s history.

Cynthia and I were fatherless. During the long, pajamaed nights of prepubescence, we lay wide-eyed in the darkness inventing romantic histories around the shadowy figures who’d shaped us and then disappeared. But when we first met, at age seven, neither of us had any idea of such commonality. I was the new kid in school, a lost puppy, and Cynthia was the matriarch of second grade.

During my first week at Shady River Elementary, Petey Small and his band of apostles approached me at the lunch table. I was sitting alone, considering whether it was safe to eat the taupe-colored pig in my pig-in-a-blanket without any mustard to sterilize it. Petey plopped onto the seat across the table from me, rattling the plastic “spork” on my tray. The others hovered close, watching. This couldn’t be good, I decided, and chomped a semicircle from my peanut butter cookie to discourage theft.

Petey twirled a black-and-white checkered ball in his hands. “Did you play soccer in Oklahoma?” he demanded.

Undoubtedly a trick question. I wasn’t falling for anything that sounded like “sock-her.” I shook my head vigorously.

That morning Mrs. Hanson had asked me to tell the class about my background, a ploy I recognized even then as an attempt to integrate the new girl into the fixed social structure of hometown kids. They’d all hushed to hear my voice, the first time I’d spoken aloud inside the classroom. I confessed, my face steaming, that I had lived in four different states: Atlanta, Oklahoma, New Mexico and now Shady River. Mrs. Hanson was tactful enough not to correct my geography.