Frozen Butterflies

by Simona Grossi

  “Just scream!” He said. “Scream!” He shouted.

  “Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!” he screamed. “Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!” he screamed again.

  “Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!” I screamed.

  “Louder,” he said.

  “Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!” I screamed and screamed.

  “Louder!” he shouted.

  And I finally did it. I screamed as I had never screamed, I cried as I never had.

  “Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”

  I screamed, vomiting out my pain, my anger, the lies I had been told, the ones that hurt me, my wounds, my insecurities, my fears, my harm. I screamed and screamed. I scratched, cracked that silent sky, my throat. Something started bleeding.

  “It’s OK, Susan. Stop. Enough. That’s good,” he said. “Stop. That’s enough. Susan, stop.”

  I didn’t.

  Nick waited. He waited for me right there. And I screamed until I lost my voice, I screamed until I fell on the cold stone of that roof. Didn’t feel the cold anymore. Didn’t feel anything anymore. I had emptied myself. There was just pain in me. Nothing else.

  I looked up, and the sky was now darker with my pain.

  Nick took me in his arms, looked at me, and I fell in love.

  Day Eight

  I woke up at eight in the evening and saw Nick standing in front of the window, looking outside.

  “It’s dark,” I said.

  “Yes, it is. Did I wake you?”

  “I’m glad you did. I must have crashed at some point.”

  “You did. You looked exhausted. How do you feel now?”

  “Better,” I said, and meant it.

  “Are you hungry? Would you like some food? Eggs?”

  I smiled. I liked when he cooked for me.

  “Eggs will be great.”

  “I was reading Lies,” he said and showed me a copy of the book. “Joe brought this last night, while you were sleeping.”

  “Can I see it?”

  He handed me the novel, and I started leafing through the drawings and the words sketched in the little balloons. Andrew’s style was clean and pure.

  “I like it,” I said. “I want to read it.”

  “You will. Let’s eat first.” He bent, kissed my forehead, and then went to the kitchen. I could hear the fork beating the eggs. For a second, I felt as if I had lived that exact moment before. Many times over. I felt confused. It was my mother making eggs for me, my grandmother, someone, somewhere . . . I could not remember. Except that sound, its comforting warmth, felt familiar. I left my memories and looked for Nick. I could see his face from the bed. He looked upset.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “I was just thinking about the story I read . . . so intense. And the lies theme . . . Do your lies ever seem real to you? They sometimes do to me. It’s scary . . . Does it happen to you?”

  Does it? Did it? I could not say.

  He poured the eggs into the pan and, without taking his eyes from the food, said, “I think everyone’s worried that Andrew might have killed himself. Do you think that’s possible?”

  “No,” I said, and wanted to believe it. I needed Andrew to be alive. To continue whatever we had, for our search, for my own. Would it all be over if Andrew were dead? I was afraid.

  Then Nick came to bed holding two plates with eggs and bacon, and we laughed when some of it fell on the blanket.

  “Perfect. My attempt to seduce you miserably failed.”

  “Actually, I think it perfectly succeeded,” I said, and pulled him toward me. He kissed me, undressed me, fed me, and we made love. Not exactly in that order. It all seemed to be happening at the same time, and perhaps it was. And this time it lasted longer. I was exhausted, and I placed my head on his chest. I could hear his heartbeat. It was loud.

  “I don’t want to own you,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t want you to be with me because I’m your partner, boyfriend, husband. I want you to be with me when and how you want it. And I want to do the same. I want us to be together when and how we choose to.”

  So he wanted an open relationship. His words should have hurt me, but they didn’t because they were just lies to me, ones he couldn’t help but tell himself and me, somehow to protect us from something. They were just lies, yes they were, and so they didn’t matter much to me. I knew what I had, I saw what I had. What I saw was real. It must have been.

  I rose to go to the bathroom, and when I returned Nick was at his desk, reading the letter from Andrew’s journal. Once he was done reading, he handed the letter to me.

  August 3

  * * *

  My dear Emily,

  * * *

  I’m leaving. I’ve been waiting for your return but it seems that’s not happening, so I’m leaving. I’ve finished the novel and my agent doesn’t like it. It’s not light enough, he says, it won’t make people laugh, he says, and so, he thinks, it won’t sell. I know I haven’t sold much in the past few years, but I had the feeling this was different. I gave a copy to Ed and Joe, but at this point, it doesn’t even matter what they think about it. I need to move on. I love you. I’m sorry for all the lies I told you. I wish I had added this truth to them. Maybe you would have stayed.

  I turned the page, but there was nothing else, and so I turned to Nick. He was hoping to find something more in that letter and was disappointed. I wasn’t. That letter gave me hope that Andrew was alive.

  “We should go check this,” Nick said, pointing to the address on the envelope. “It’s an hour by car from here.” Of course we had to. We cleaned, had some more wine, talked about Nietzsche and lies, and in the first hours of the day, we finally fell asleep. As soon as we woke up, we left, headed to the address on the letter.

  “Do you want to know what happened yesterday? I mean, with the homeless guy?” he asked, as he was driving.

  “No,” I said. I really didn’t want to. I wasn’t afraid, angry, or sad. I just had the impression that what I had lived was a dream. Some of it had been dark. Some of it had been scary. Some of it had been poetry. And I wanted to remember the poetry now. Just that. I looked at his hand. The bandage was still there. “How’s your fist?”

  “Better. I can move it now. No big deal.”

  I placed my hand over his and lowered head to kiss it.

  “Thanks for yesterday,” I said.

  He turned away and freed his hand from mine. Then he turned on the radio.

  “Do you like jazz?” he asked. “This is Miles Davis. It helps me relax.” He raised the volume and continued to drive.

  The music did do that. I saw the muscles of his face slowly loosen up, and his eyes, following the music, reaching somewhere beyond where I could see. And even if I wasn’t with him wherever he was, I felt I was moving toward it.

  “This is the house,” Nick said when he stopped, double-checking the address on the envelope. We had arrived. Almost too soon, I thought.

  The house had two floors, a nice rooftop, and a courtyard with a basketball court on the left and an old turquoise Cadillac parked in front of a small garage.

  “It looks like a family home,” I said.

  “Yes, it does.”

  We walked to the front door, and I knocked. We heard someone’s footsteps approaching, and finally a lady in her late sixties came to the door. She smiled and studied us for a while, perhaps trying to remember if we had already met somewhere.

  “Good morning, Mrs. . . . ?” Nick said.

  “Mrs. Ross.”

  “Good morning, Mrs. Ross. I’m Nick Levitt, and this is Susan Blanc. I write a blog, and she’s a psychology teacher. We are writing about Andrew Pratt and would love to ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind.”

  “Andrew?” She looked deeper into our eyes, as if she were looking for Andrew too, right there, in our eyes.

/>   “How is he doing?”

  “We don’t know. We thought that maybe you could help.”

  She studied us for a while, seemingly unsure of what to do, but then invited us in. She walked slowly, slightly bent over herself, as if she were carrying some heavy weight on her back.

  “I apologize for my posture. All those years at the piano have left their mark.”

  She stopped in front of the living room, invited us to sit, and said she’d be back with some tea.

  The room was beautiful. There were three big couches nicely arranged around a fine glass-and-marble coffee table. The couches had an elegant, flowery design made with velvet and cotton, and they seemed to be antique, but they were not worn. There was an upright piano in the corner of the room, close to two big windows covered by heavy curtains of a design and texture similar to the ones of the couches. And even though it was a sunny day, that room was almost dark. I loved the shadows and the intimacy they created.

  “What a nice room, Mrs. Ross,” I said, when she returned.

  “This is where I used to practice piano for hours. Andrew loved it. Sometimes he would come and wait for Emily to wake up. He wanted to be left alone, and so I let him stay here, seated on the couch, the one where you are now sitting. He would work on his sketches and stories.”

  “So . . . how do you know Emily?”

  She smiled.

  “Emily was my daughter. As you probably know, she died of cancer last year.”

  She stopped to breathe, and then continued.

  “It was brutal. We found out she had cancer in May, and she died in early June.”

  “What?” Nick looked at me, confused. We both were.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Ross. Did you say Emily died last year in June?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she stood up and went to the piano to choose one of the photos she had placed there. “This is Emily. Wasn’t she beautiful?”

  Yes, she was. She had long, dark, straight hair. Her skin was pale and her lips red, just as Andrew had described. She had big and sad green eyes, and she looked fragile, elegant.

  I looked at Mrs. Ross again but couldn’t see the resemblance to her daughter.

  “Emily was adopted,” she said, somehow reading my mind. “But I loved her as if she were mine.”

  “So she died in June?” Nick asked, as if he still found it hard to believe.

  “That’s a month before Andrew started writing his journal,” I said.

  “What?” Mrs. Ross asked.

  Nick told Mrs. Ross about the journal, and she listened without asking questions.

  “Andrew must have suffered tremendously for Emily’s death,” Nick added.

  “He did. We were all worried about him. He disappeared for a few days after the funeral, but then came back and visited me a few times.”

  “Did you notice anything odd in his behavior?”

  She smiled.

  “Well, Andrew was never an ordinary man. He’s an artist, you know that. But there were a few things, something I noticed. Only I’m not sure whether I had simply not noticed those things before.”

  “What was it?” I asked.

  She lowered her head, perhaps trying to decide whether she should share what she knew or not. She then turned to the window and began to stare somewhere beyond the room.

  “Andrew would wash his hands as soon as he entered the house,” she said, “and then again if he had touched any food. And then a few more times during our conversation. And then again, right before leaving. I believe he was casual about diet and sleep before Emily died, at least that had been my impression. But after her death he became obsessed with both things. My impression was that he was depriving himself of both. He quickly lost a lot of weight, not that he was overweight or anything . . . He didn’t need to. I was worried he might be starving himself.”

  She took a breath and then continued.

  “Sometimes I had the feeling he considered himself guilty for Emily’s death. Hard to understand why.”

  She turned and hid her tears.

  “And most of all, the strangest thing was that he would talk about Emily as if she were still alive, as if she had broken up with him.”

  So my instinct was right about Andrew.

  “I talked to some of my psychologist friends,” Mrs. Ross added. “They explained that sometimes these reactions are normal after a strong shock. They told me to leave Andrew alone for a while. They thought it was too early to consider treatment, and that he might feel better at some point. Emily’s death was too big of a shock for him. He needed time.”

  She looked at me, seeking my approval.

  “But I slowly lost contact with him,” she then added. “He first came every other day, then once a week, then he disappeared. He mentioned a few times that he wanted to go to New York. I believe he said he had an offer from a publishing company to color their comics. You know he was from there, right?”

  No, we didn’t.

  “He said he wasn’t excited about the job, but thought that perhaps changing his environment might help. He wanted to go home.”

  She paused again and the continued.

  “After Andrew disappeared, the police contacted me. Andrew had been reported as missing. I told them what I knew, what I’m telling you, and they eventually decided to stop looking for him. They thought he had chosen to disappear.”

  “They thought Andrew had left,” I said, “but what do you think?”

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t excited about Andrew leaving. Wasn’t sure he was OK. I tried to persuade him to stay or at least postpone. He said he would do so, but then he vanished. Perhaps he did go to New York as he said he would.”

  “Did he mention anything about a new novel he was working on?” I asked.

  “Yes. The last time I saw him he said he had just started working on it. He said it was about his story with Emily until the separation, as he used to call it.”

  “Apparently his agent didn’t like the new novel, and Andrew might have left soon after,” Nick said.

  “And it would make sense,” I added, “because he might have felt that his life here had become meaningless, that he needed to leave and start earning some money. Or, as you said Mrs. Ross, he just needed to go home.”

  Mrs. Ross’s eyes moved from Nick’s to mine. At times, she seemed to trust us, and at times she didn’t.

  “Do you happen to remember the name of the publisher he mentioned?” Nick asked her.

  “No. But he said it was a big company that would pay well.”

  Nick checked the time and said we should leave.

  “Mrs. Ross, thank you for helping us. It means a lot. Emily must have been a beautiful human being,” I said, holding her hands in mine.

  Mrs. Ross smiled.

  “We’ll keep you posted and let you know as soon as we find anything,” Nick added.

  “I appreciate what you’re doing. In a way, you’re also helping my daughter. She loved Andrew. They were different from each other, argued sometimes, but I know they deeply cared about each other.”

  Nick shook Mrs. Ross’s hand, I hugged her, and we left.

  It was almost Thanksgiving. Nick mentioned that on the way home, and I was surprised. I had completely lost sense of time. I looked outside the window, and for the first time, I saw some red and yellow leaves on the trees and on the streets. A taste of fall, a small one, offered as an unexpected gift to L.A. and its endless summers. How could I miss that?

  “Have you planned anything?” Nick asked.

  “You mean, anything with my family? No. My mother died when I was seven. My father might be in New York or travelling with a new girlfriend. I haven’t talked to him in a long time.” I kept looking outside the window. Yes, I really had missed fall. “What about you?”

  “My father also died a long time ago. My mother lives in New York. Last year I promised her I would visit her this Thanksgiving, but I haven’t decided yet. Quite frankly, I’d rather avoid that.”

&nb
sp; “Why? You—we—could go to New York and look for Andrew?”

  “What? No, I don’t think so.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why should we do that?”

  Because it’d be nice to go somewhere together, I thought.

  “Because we started this and I want to take it to the end,” I said.

  He stopped the car.

  “Are you serious? Do you really believe that there is any chance we’ll find this man?”

  I didn’t know what I believed. I knew what I felt. He called Jack. When he hung up, he turned to me and said,

  “We’d better find something worth writing about over there.”

  Thanksgiving Eve

  The last week of school went by fast. I finished my last class early and waited to see if anyone had questions. I didn’t see John in class, and I asked some of my students if they knew why he had missed so many classes in a row.

  “John who? I don’t remember anyone with that name.”

  Nobody knew who he was. I went back to my office to check the roster, but there was no “John” in there. So . . . who had I met that day? Maybe he was in my class but then dropped? Nobody informed me though. Did the registrar send me an email? Did I miss it? I checked my emails but didn’t find anything from, to, or about a student named John. Who was that guy? And why had he pretended to be my student? Had he in fact done that? Did I misunderstand what he said? I was very tired that day. I could still remember his face and his broken smile. Now that I thought about it, he seemed more mature than his colleagues, but I had had some older students in the past, so his appearance didn’t strike me as odd.

  I sat on my couch and tried to remember as much as possible of the meeting. In fact, he hadn’t said he was a student. He merely said he had attended my lecture. So he might have been a visiting scholar, someone who was there to check on classes and teachers, perhaps before deciding whether to enroll. But if that was so, why didn’t he tell me? Did I dream the meeting? After a while, I felt tired. I was about to turn off the computer and leave when Nick called.