The Butterfly House

“I can’t believe it! This is so cool!”

“It’s not new, but it doesn’t have a scratch on it,” she said. “Look.” She reached over and squeezed the rubber bulb on an old-fashioned horn attached to the handlebars. It made a sound like a lost Canada goose.

The horn would have to go, but I didn’t say so then. Stamping my feet in the snow, my teeth chattering, I ran my hands over the silver handlebars, the red fenders. I still couldn’t believe it was real.

I never asked for specific Christmas presents because we were always short on money, but I wasn’t above hinting. For three years I’d dropped hints about a bike and finally given up. This year I’d started on contact lenses, though the eye doctor said there was no sense getting them until I was fifteen. I figured a four-year head start was none too soon. The bike proved my theory.

“Are you sure we can’t get it in the house?” I said.

Mom shrugged. “Maybe the two of us can.”

She brought the quilt while I rolled my new bike through the carport. We hefted it up the two steps and into the kitchen, where it left wet marks on the linoleum. The kickstand was missing, so I leaned the handlebar against the kitchen cabinet and inspected every gleaming inch of my incredible gift. Mom watched me, smiling.

I didn’t know how she’d managed the money, and I didn’t care. I didn’t want to know anything that might diminish my joy.

“Thanks, Mom. I love it.”

I hugged her, still looking at the red bike and thinking I could hardly wait to show Cincy. I’d learned how to ride on her bike.

But I couldn’t do that tonight, so we popped corn and Mom opened a bottle of wine while I wiped the bike tracks from the floor. We curled up in blankets on the sofa and watched television together until we fell asleep.

When I awoke it was light and a church program was on TV. Mom’s blanket lay empty at the other end of the sofa. I smelled bacon and waffles, and then I remembered the bike.

I wrapped my blanket around me and shuffled into the kitchen. “Merry Christmas,” she said. “Breakfast’s ready.” She ate her waffle dry, like toast, and had wine instead of apple juice.

By midmorning, Mom was beyond caring when I put on my coat and rode my new bike through quiet streets toward the river. Leftover snow lay in brownish-gray heaps along the roadside. Not a car was stirring, the children still inside playing with their Christmas toys.

O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie, the church bells played. The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.

On my new bike, in the crystalline morning with my friends’ house in view, I couldn’t have said why I was crying.

CHAPTER 4

Alberta, Canada, 1990

On Wednesday morning, the day of my appointment at the clinic in Calgary, I awake at 7:00 a.m. feeling nauseated. David’s side of the bed is rumpled and already cold. My limbs feel like pine logs and a dull ache pulses behind my eyes. I remember watching the clock’s red numerals flick to 2:00 a.m., then three, and four.

From beneath the warmth of my down comforter, I sense a coldness in the house and know that it’s snowing outside. Winter here is heartless and beautiful, and it lasts most of the year. David grew up in Canada and he inherited this house, his father’s summer place, in recompense for years of neglect. But David loves the house and these mountains; his few happy memories from childhood are here. After college he wanted to move back to the mountains, and I didn’t object. I had nowhere else to go.

I pull on my robe and fleece-lined slippers and squeeze behind David’s weight machine to look out the tall, narrow window of our upstairs bedroom.

A world of white assails my eyes. There’s no horizon, no sky or land or trees. Nothing but a blur of blinding whiteness.

The icy knot in my stomach expands. Calgary is a forty-minute drive in good weather, the first part over two-lane mountain roads. David will take his four-wheel-drive to work, thinking I’ll stay home as usual. I have a vision of my silver Honda sliding over a steep edge, nosing down into free fall with me gripping the wheel in stony horror.

At least I wouldn’t be pregnant anymore.

Downstairs, in our warm, country-style kitchen, I realize that once again I’ve calculated wrong. David is humming about in his navy sweat suit, obviously not ready for work. Even the baggy suit doesn’t camouflage his lean fitness. Surely he won’t run this morning, in all this snow.

Coffee gurgles into its glass carafe and I smell bagels in the toaster. The radio plays softly from a cluttered shelf opposite the white square of window. David looks up, brown hair askew and a shadow of stubble on his cheeks. He grins. “The pass is closed!”

The shine in his brown eyes makes me think of the first time I met them across a worktable at school. He was smiling then, too, and I felt something like an electrical shock, a buzzing in my fingertips. His major was history and mine biology. We might never have met if we hadn’t been assigned to the same practicum at the Museum of Natural History in Tacoma, where we were students at Puget Sound University. The first time I saw him he asked me on a coffee date. I said yes without even thinking. I was nineteen and had never been on an actual date before.

I smile back at him now. “Lucky you.” I look away quickly to hide the glaze of panic that stiffens my face.

I’ll have to cancel my appointment. How can I phone without his knowing?

David is a curator of exhibits at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary and he loves his work. Still, he’s as happy with his snow day as a kid out of school. He hums around the kitchen, pouring orange juice into a glass, which he sets at my place on the wooden table.

“What would you like with your bagel, ma’am, besides creamed cheese? An omelet? Fruit?”

I slide into the wooden chair, feel the coldness of its carved spindles against my back. “Just coffee, thanks.”

David looks disappointed. The toaster ejects two sliced bagel halves and he stacks them on a small plate and inserts two more. He sets the plate before me along with two cartons of creamed cheese from the refrigerator—strawberry and maple pecan.

I look at the food with a mixture of hunger and nausea, thinking only a pregnant person could have both sensations at once. I take a moment to wonder at this phenomenon and a niggling regret etches through my chest. Some primordial part of me wants to experience pregnancy, some part that’s genetically programmed to preserve the species. I picture a small, warm body in my arms. I imagine telling David he’s going to be a father, and seeing the innocent joy on his face.

It can’t happen. I’d mess up the child for life, leave it an emotional cripple like its mother.

My fingernails rake the scars on my forearms. After all these years, they still itch every morning. Tears have welled at the corners of my eyes and to hide this from David I rise and pour coffee into two oversize mugs. Coffee slops over the edges.

“Be right back,” I say, and head for the bathroom.

During breakfast, with no newspaper today, David wants to talk. “This omelet tastes great.”

I glance over at his eggs, speckled with bell pepper and mushrooms, and my stomach rolls.

“Want to share?” he says.

“Um. I’m not that hungry.”

He wolfs down another forkful. “So what are you up to today?”

A bite of bagel clogs my throat. I cough, take a sip of scalding coffee to wash it down. “Nothing really. Just my needlework, I guess.”

“Want to put on snowshoes and go for a walk? The mountain will be spectacular in all this snow.” He lifts his eyebrows hopefully.

“Um. Maybe later, if it lets up. Right now we could get lost, it’s so heavy.”

“Nonsense,” he says heartily. “I’ll drop bread crumbs.”

When I don’t respond, he leans his arms on the table. “You ought to get out of the house more,” he says, his levity gone.

I don’t want to have this conversation again this morning. Finally he shrugs and turns the radio up a notch. The news is mostly about the weather. They expect the snow to keep up until early afternoon. The snowplows won’t bother trying to clear the pass until it stops.

David will be home all day. What if I don’t call, and simply don’t show up for me appointment? They must be used to that—young women having second thoughts, changing their minds. I don’t know this doctor and will never see him again afterward. His name and the number of the Calgary clinic were given to me by a women’s hotline. They promised me anonymity. If his nurse won’t let me reschedule, I can always get another name. But I can’t wait too long.

Another thought freezes me: if I don’t show up, will someone from the clinic call here? I try to remember if I gave them my number. I think I did. Yes, the woman who scheduled me insisted, in case the doctor had an emergency on the day of my appointment. What if they phone here and David answers? I can’t take the chance. Later, when David’s in the shower or outdoors, I’ll have to call.

I glance across the table at my husband, a good man, an honest man. He deserves more than he’s getting from this marriage. I wonder why he stays.

David and I were drawn together by mutual loneliness camouflaged as sexual attraction. I never hid from him the fact that I was living at the sanatorium, voluntarily. I had a private cottage by then and could come and go as I pleased. Staying on the grounds was an anchor for me, someplace I could pretend was home. And I still met twice a week with Dr. Bannar.

David seemed unfazed by this, even when he came to visit me there. Later I learned that his mother had spent time in psychiatrists’ offices; maybe he thought all women did. He was interested in my past, but not morbidly so. He had some shadows of his own, he said. I never asked, but after we’d dated for a while, he told me.

He’d had a brother, only a year older. Michael was athletic and tall; David slight from bouts of childhood asthma. David had worshiped Michael and followed him everywhere. The day Michael drowned in the ocean, sucked away by the undertow, David was playing twenty feet away in the shallow waves.

They were ten and eleven. “If I’d been stronger, like Michael was, I might have saved him,” David told me, lying on his back in bed in his apartment, after we’d made love. It was a single bed and his arm was hooked underneath me to keep me from rolling off.

“Probably not,” I said, picturing his thin, boy’s body knee-deep in the water, in the horror. “It’s hard to save anybody in the ocean. Especially if they’re bigger than you are.”

“I was scrawny then,” he said, “but I never cared until Michael died.”

I ran my hand over his muscled chest and understood why he lifted weights and ran every morning in the dark, what he was running from. I rolled on top of him and we made love again.

Our lovemaking was always urgent, but gentle, too. Neither of us could get enough. He would trace the scars on my neck with light kisses. Dr. Bannar told me sex could be a healing experience. David and I joked about that. “How about a little physical therapy this afternoon?”

When he asked me to marry him the spring he got his degree, I still had three semesters to go. But I agreed, knowing he was worthy of love, knowing I didn’t quite love him because I was afraid to. Hoping I might grow into it.

On this snowy morning, as David gets up to refill our coffee cups, I ask myself if that has happened. We’ve been married almost five years.

The news over, the radio has switched to music and David turns it down. He picks up his empty plate and gestures for mine. I shake my head; three-quarters of my bagel still sits on my plate. He takes his coffee and leaves the room.

I feel great affection for David. I respect him and would miss him terribly if he were gone. Is that what loving a man is supposed to feel like? I’ve loved only women—Lenora and Cynthia, and maybe my mother when I was small. Love mixed up with pain.

I think of Lenora—and remember, like an electric shock, the visit yesterday from Harley Jaines. I’ve been so fixated on my appointment in Calgary that I’d blocked him out.

“I believe you have the power to set her free. You tried to tell the truth once … I’m asking you to try again.” Heat rolls through my stomach like lava. I don’t even know if this stranger is who he claims to be.

But that’s rationalizing. Those eyes, that chin … yes, he is the man in the picture, Cincy’s father. He’s back from the dead and he obviously cares about Lenora. It can’t be for money, because she has nothing. If she is paroled—or pardoned—would the two of them live together, happily ever after?

The idea seems so childish I can’t even hold it in my mind. I decide to ignore the resurrected Harley Jaines. Maybe he’ll disappear like a wisp of my imagination. So many things will go away if you ignore them long enough. Like that line from a poem, “The face of the mother with children/ignores and ignores….”

But unlike old memories, a pregnancy can’t be ignored. This I must deal with immediately. Dr. Bannar would be proud of my ability to make a firm decision and take action, whether she agreed with the action or not. “Take responsibility for your life,” she kept saying. “Take control.”

Would she agree with abortion? I wouldn’t know even if I could ask her. She always turned the hard questions back to me.

After breakfast, David stands in the closed-in back porch and dresses in thermal coveralls, ski mask and snowshoes. “Come with me,” he urges.

“Maybe later.”

I am glad his ski mask hides his disappointment. I tell myself I will go out after I make the phone call. As soon as David steps out into the snow, I go upstairs to the telephone in our bedroom.

As so often happens, all my worrying has been over nothing. The doctor’s assistant is understanding when I tell her the pass is closed and I have to cancel. Why wouldn’t she be? The blizzard isn’t my doing, after all; it’s an act of God. She cheerfully reschedules me for two weeks later. I hang up the phone with a buzzing in my ears as loud as the dial tone. My heartbeat jolts my chest.

Downstairs, I pull on my own thermal coveralls, boots and hood. I lash snowshoes onto my boots and step awkwardly out the back door into the white wilderness.

The cold makes me gasp. Tears form in my eyes and immediately turn into frost on my eyelashes. I scan the yard for David, but he’s out of sight.

The mountainside is eerie as a moonscape and incredibly beautiful. I start off toward the hiking trail David maintains, which winds through our acreage and up the steep slope behind our house to a meadow that overlooks the valley for miles. I hope this is the direction he’s gone; why didn’t I ask?

On the trail, the trees become trees again instead of white mounds. Their trunks are packed with snow on the north side and branches droop like the oily wings of cormorants I once saw along a northern coast after an oil spill. I slog along the trail, listening to the whirring silence of snow sifting through fir and pine, and my own labored breath.

After a few minutes, I stop. Trees surround me, and I can no longer see David’s tracks or where the trail has gone. I search for landmarks, but any familiar deadfall or boulder is buried in snow. Everything is changed, as if I’ve never been here before.

Perhaps I haven’t. I turn a circle but can’t see the house. I don’t even know which direction it is. This slope catches the wind, and my tracks, too, are fast disappearing. I begin retracing them but come to a halt when the space ahead of me seems to fall away steeply. I don’t remember this drop-off….

I look straight up through the trees. “The woods are lovely, dark and deep/But I have promises to keep/ And miles to go before I sleep/And miles to go before I sleep.”

“David!”

My scream sounds muffled in the snowy silence. I draw a deep breath and try again.

“David, I’m lost! David!”

CHAPTER 5

I stand rooted to the snowy slope like the fir trees around me, screaming David’s name. My snowshoes sink inch by inch into foot-deep powder.

I listen hard into the rushing silence but hear only the sigh of the wind through the trees. My eyes strain to see past the flurry of whiteness until even the distinction of vertical pine trunks disappears, and I am snowblind.

Vertigo gathers momentum like an avalanche in my brain. I take deep breaths, fighting it, but lose the battle. The sky spins. I summon all my strength behind my hoarse voice.

“David! Can you hear me?”

Then I am falling.

Not through snow, but into a wall of leaping flames. The hillside, the sky, the world is engulfed in fire. Bright wings beat wildly inside my head, fighting to escape. I am running through flames … glass walls explode … my foot connects with something soft, something human that shouldn’t be there. And I am falling through fire….

When my eyes jerk open, I’m lying in the snow. An unbearable nausea, like seasickness, washes over me. Cold burns my face.

I hear a muffled sound. David’s voice?

My elbows tremble when I push myself up and struggle to my feet, clinging to a tree while the world swims around me. I hold my breath and listen.

“Roberta! Keep yelling so I can find you!”

Heat floods through my stiff limbs. His voice sounds far away, but I fix on its location and the vertigo disappears.

Keep yelling, he said. I can do that.

“I’m here! Over here!”

Breathless but weirdly elated, I suck in air and call out again. I struggle to move but am stuck in the snow.

A dark shape materializes from the whirl of falling flakes—Sasquatch in a red ski cap. An overgrown redheaded blackbird. I start to laugh.

By the time David wraps me in his insulated arms, I’m giggling wildly. I feel his warm breath against my cheek, but he isn’t laughing. He holds me tightly until I quiet down. Then he turns me away from the drop-off and guides me through the trees with a gloved hand.

His breath comes through the red mask in steamy puffs. “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming out? I’d have waited for you.”

I don’t answer. I don’t remember the answer. It doesn’t matter anyway. What matters is that he knows how to find the trail. My knees tremble lifting the clumsy snowshoes.

“Maybe we ought to mark the path with yellow flags or something,” I suggest, trying to sound normal. But my voice shakes so that when I hear it, I start to laugh again, but only a little.

“Good idea. If I’d realized how low the visibility is, I wouldn’t have come out until later. I nearly got lost myself.”

This isn’t true, of course. He’s trying to make me feel better about my helplessness. David grew up in these woods; he came here with his parents every summer of his first eleven years. In the winter they used to cross-country ski here. After his parents divorced, he even came back once with his dad, before they gave up trying to talk to each other.

When I see the outline of the house ahead of us, my heart makes a painful leap that catches in my chest. If it were possible in snowshoes, I would run.

My confidence returns as we get closer to home, though I don’t let go of David’s arm. At the back porch I turn to look out across the white wonderland. The snowfall has lessened for the moment, the sky lifted. Mountain peaks shrouded in clouds angle downward in frosted slopes that sink away toward the valley.

Severely beautiful. We stand a moment in silence.

“How about some hot chocolate?” I say, as cold seeps beneath my layers of clothes.

“Sounds good. After I feed the birds, I’ll come in.”

Not many species of birds winter here, but David feeds the hardy ones every day. From our sunporch windows I can watch them gobble seeds and suet, insulating their tiny bird bones from the cold. Sometimes I spend entire mornings watching them scratch and peck atop our picnic table and beneath it. I wonder where they sleep in the subzero Canadian nights, and how they manage not to get lost.

That evening the TV weatherman says the blizzard is over and the pass has been cleared. I digest this news with mixed feelings.

The next morning David gets ready for work. “Why don’t you get dressed and go with me?” he says. “You could poke around the museum this morning.” He knows I love spending time there alone, especially in the Rungius gallery. The artist’s wildlife and landscape paintings are breathtaking; I never tire of seeing them.

“At lunch I could drop you off at the shopping mall,” David says. “Or the library.”

“I’ll be fine here. Really. I don’t feel like going to town today.”

He gives me a quick goodbye kiss before he goes out the door. I hear his Jeep start up and plow down the unshoveled driveway.

When I’ve cleaned up the breakfast dishes, I settle on the sun-porch with my needlework. The butterfly on the pillowtop blooms yellow and black, its stripes vibrant in the warm cone of lamplight. The colors are satin beneath my fingertips. Secure in this familiar way, I let myself think about my postponed doctor’s appointment, and about what happened yesterday morning in the snow.

The dreams of Rockhaven come less frequently now, just as Dr. Bannar predicted. Except for the nights when I don’t take the sleeping pills she prescribed. Sometimes those sleepless nights are a refuge, a time zone separate and unconnected to my repetitious, panic-filled days. In the quiet dark, I take out the past like an old locket and turn it over and over in my hands. I try to believe that when I’ve done this a specific but indeterminate number of times, I will be able to put it away forever.

It isn’t working. How long can I live this way before I step over the edge again?

At midmorning David phones, ostensibly to ask if I want anything from the store. I know he’s checking on me; he’s such a worrier. I list bagels and milk and whatever fresh vegetables at the market look edible today.

By lunchtime I have finished embroidering the orange-and-blue spots on the butterfly’s hindwings. I am rethreading with black, looking forward to outlining the teardrop-shaped swallowtails, when the telephone rings again. Impatient, I pick up the receiver intending to tell David I’m not a child and he doesn’t need to keep calling.

My stomach lurches at the sound of the bass voice that reverberates across the line. It needs no identification, but he gives one anyway.

“It’s Harley Jaines.”

The embroidery needle pierces my fist and a red droplet rises instantly on the knuckle.

“I’ve just come from the prison,” he says. “Lenora wants to see you.”

I watch the red drop swell on my hand. “I’d like to see her, but I don’t think I can.” I sound helpless as a child and hate it.

“I could drive you. I’ll come this afternoon. Or tomorrow, if that’s better.”

“No! No. I can drive myself.” But it’s a long way to Spokane, more than four hundred miles. “Maybe next week, if it doesn’t snow again.”

In the long pause that follows, I bring my knuckle to my lips and suck away the blood.

“You’ve got to help her, Bobbie. You have to come to the hearing.” His rumbling voice is gentle now; I am only imagining the menace behind his words.

“Maybe it would help you, too,” he says.

The house ticks its irregular heartbeat in the silence. I think of Lenora’s pale face in the sterile prison, then see her tanned and animated among the tangled vines of my childhood. I force deep breaths to stop the spinning in my head. “I’ll talk to Lenora about it.”

“When?”

“I don’t know!”

He waits a beat. “If you don’t come down by Monday, I’ll come to get you.”

“Don’t threaten me! And don’t come back here.”

I jab the button on the portable phone so hard it flies from my hands and clatters to the floor. My hands are shaking.