“Ah, well,” I sighed. I leaned forward to refill my glass one last time, stood a little shakily, and put the bottle on a side table beside the vase of oriental lilies. A little water slopped out of the vase and I wiped it up with the hem of my T-shirt.
“Messy, messy,” I said thickly.
By now it was full dark. I switched on the sea urchin lamp, the tiny bulb inside casting a rosy glow through the curved shell. A pink haze hung above the table, a lovely soft globe like a fairy lantern floating in the darkened room. I returned to the couch and lay back with my head resting against the kilim’s rough wool, the wineglass held between my hands, the sweet clear voices of the madrigal singers rising and falling in the room about me like the wind. Like the sea, like waves rushing and receding while I rested there, dreaming and untroubled in the sultry tropic night, while in the garden a single mockingbird sang.
Much later I awoke. The madrigal singers had been replaced by a man speaking in a very soft urgent voice about the need for a more efficient Capitol police force. I sat up, blinking, and put my empty glass on the floor. My watch said ten-thirty. Time for bed.
I hadn’t eaten dinner, but I wasn’t hungry, or even thirsty. The wine had left me with a feeling of drowsy well-being, as though I’d eaten that fairy fruit that eases all hunger and thirst and slows the passage of time. I yawned and started to get up, wondering if to was too late to call Baby Joe.
But at the edge of the couch I stopped.
The room was on fire. Shadows leapt across the walls, black and red and white, the air was thick with smoke, and I heard a persistent frantic sound like flames crackling. I stumbled to my feet and sent my wineglass spinning across the slate floor. I looked around, flushed with fear and wine: but there was no smoke, only the thick steamy mist that often appeared on the hottest summer nights. In the background the man’s voice droned on and the wind rustled in the leaves, a sound like rushing water. Weirdly colored shadows moved upon the walls, rose red, velvety black, amber. Tentatively I crossed the room, until I stood beside the harvest table.
Something was trapped inside the sea urchin lamp. Its shadow darted across the room’s walls as it beat frantically against the curved interior of its prison. The sound I had thought to be flames was its wings banging against the bulb. There was an unpleasant smell, as of scorched cloth.
I took the globe in my hand. It was quite hot, and I nearly dropped it. Very carefully I lifted it, holding it away from me so whatever was inside would fly out toward the open front door. For a moment or two it continued to thrash around. Then suddenly it emerged—very slowly, as though exhausted by its battle.
Antennae first, long as my forefinger and extravagantly feathered; then its long jointed legs, its thick brown-furred body and finally its wings. Huge wings, I was amazed there had been room for them inside. And how could it have gotten in there, surely the opening at the bottom was too small?
For a moment it poised on the sea urchin. Then it fluttered onto the table, landing beside an oblong drop of water spilled from the vase. I fixed the lamp, then squatted beside the table to watch it, marveling.
It was an enormous butterfly, a beautiful creature like a swallowtail, patterned with black-and-yellow stripes and dots. But the coloring was all wrong for a swallowtail—more orange than yellow, and the border around its wings was not black but a deep, rich purple. The edges of its wings were frayed from battering at the inside of the lamp. It opened and closed them slowly, as though trying to gather the strength to fly again. Then it fluttered up to perch on the lip of a yellow lily. After another minute it spread its wings again, and fluttered back down to the tabletop.
“Well,” I said, yawning, “enough ‘Wild Kingdom’ for tonight. I’m going to bed.”
I turned to close the front door, when something zoomed from the corner of the ceiling where the hornet’s nest was perched.
“Shit!”
I scrambled backward as an angry buzzing filled the room: An enormous yellow jacket, big as my thumb and striped black and red, dived through the air to land on the table. The butterfly quivered, but before it could move the yellow jacket seized it, crawling atop it with wings beating so fast they were a dark blur.
I yelled and grabbed a magazine, slammed it against the table. The butterfly dropped to its side, the yellow jacket still clinging to it. Shouting I banged the table again. This time the wasp fell from its prey. Before it could move I smashed it flat, hitting it so hard I had to grab the sea urchin lamp before it could crash to the floor. When I finally stopped the yellow jacket was a reddish smear on the table top, its legs still feebly twitching. The butterfly had wafted to the floor and lay there, dazed.
Shuddering I scraped the dead wasp from my table and shook it outside, then got a broom and very, very gently prodded the football-sized nest hanging in the corner, terrified that a cloud of yellow jackets would come pouring out. When the nest toppled and fell to the floor I shrieked and ran outside.
But there were no wasps. The nest lay there like a softly deflated grey balloon, its white honeycombed innards spilling onto the floor. When I was certain it wasn’t going to give birth to any more insects, I swept it outside, got some matches, and set it aflame. I watched it burn, the papery fragments disappearing before my eyes into the humid night air. Finally I went back inside.
The butterfly had flitted to one of the bookshelves. It was quite still, its wings stirring slightly in the draft. I left it and went to the harvest table to turn off the lamp.
“God damn it,” I swore beneath my breath.
Where the wasp had been crushed, the wood was puckered and blistered, as though something caustic had been spilled there. I moved the vase to cover the spot, turned to salute the valiant little butterfly, and stumbled off to bed.
When I went downstairs the next morning the butterfly was still there. On a whim I got out a Ball mason jar, punched a few holes in its lid, and went outside to pick a tiger lily. For good measure I threw in a frond of wisteria, sprinkling a few drops of water onto the greenery.
The butterfly didn’t move when I approached it. I was afraid it was dead, but its wings fluttered feebly as I slid it into the jar. When I got to the museum, instead of going directly to my floor, I went to see Maggie Lucas in her office by the Insect Zoo.
“Hi, Katherine. Care for a dead hissing cockroach?” Maggie held up an insect almost as large as her hand. “We’ve got plenty.”
“No hanks.” I moved a stack of magazines from a chair, plunked my jar on her desk, and sat down. “I want to make a donation.”
“Oooh, a butterfly! A pretty bug.” Maggie slipped the giant cockroach into a Baggie. She was a plump matronly woman in her fifties, a lepidopterist and assistant curator of the Insect Zoo, where in addition to the giant hissing cockroaches she watched over a beehive, a worm tank, numerous ant farms, bottles of pupating moths, an aquarium swimming with giant carnivorous water bugs, and a terrarium full of scarab beetles. “Now, what have we here?”
“I don’t know. It was in my house last night.” I told her about finding it inside the sea urchin lamp, and also about the yellow jacket that had attacked it. “I never saw anything so vicious—”
“Oh, that’s pretty common. Some kinds of wasps are carnivorous, you know, and some of them even lay their eggs on caterpillars. Now, let’s see what you’ve got—”
She opened the jar and gently shook the butterfly onto her hand. It fell into her palm and lay on its side.
“Did I kill it?” I asked in dismay.
“I doubt it. Sometimes these things only live for a day or two. Now this is interesting—”
She prodded it with a pencil, examining its wing markings.
“I thought it looked like some kind of swallowtail.”
She shook her head. “It’s not—wrong kind of tail hairs. Now this will sound kind of strange, but I don’t think this is a native species at all.”
“You mean not native to D.C.?”
“I mean not native t
o this continent. Unless I’m mistaken, this is some sort of festoon—”
She put the jar and the butterfly on her desk, crossed to a bookshelf, and pulled out an oversize volume. “Okay, let’s see—”
She rifled the pages and stopped, pointed triumphantly. “Yup, here it is! Zerynthia cerisyi keftiu. Zerynthia cerisyi, that’s the eastern festoon, and keftiu—that would be the subspecies from Crete.”
“Crete?”
She looked puzzled. “That’s in Greece, isn’t it? Can that be right? Here, look at this and tell me what you think—”
She put the book down beside the butterfly and pointed to a colored plate, and yes, there it was: the same insect, the same pied wings and extravagantly feathered antennae.
“It—it sure looks the same,” I said slowly.
“I wonder how it got here?” she mused. “Did someone just send you this lamp as a present?”
“No—I got it ages ago. I mean really long ago, almost twenty years.”
“I was thinking maybe it had pupated inside—”
“Could it have been doing that for all this time?”
Maggie shook her head. “Beats me. I guess it could have, but I’ve sure never heard of anything like it before.”
I looked back down at the illustration. On the facing page, there were plates showing several Greek amphorae, a small round seal like an irregularly shaped coin. I drew closer to the page and read.
In Mycenae and ancient Crete, butterflies often represented rebirth and the souls of the dead…
Maggie’s voice made me jump. “Do you mind if I keep this? I’d like to study it—”
I pushed away from her desk, my heart pounding. “S—Sure,” I stammered. “Listen, thanks, Maggie, but I’ve got to get to my office.”
“Anytime! Hey, better stop and get a soda—I hear the air-conditioning’s down in the west wing.”
“Oh, great.”
“Let me know if you change your mind about the cockroach.”
I fled upstairs. Maggie was right: the a/c was down. When I reached the third floor the heat was like a solid red wall. I stumbled past the security guard at the west desk and continued on down the corridor with my head bowed, so that I almost bumped into Laurie Driscoll.
“Katherine! Your intern’s here—”
I groaned and slapped my forehead. “Oh, god, I completely forgot! Has she been here long?”
“Not really. Twenty minutes, maybe, they all had breakfast at the Commons but—”
“Okay, well thanks, I’ll take care of her—”
I swept into my office, tossing my briefcase onto the desk and pausing to run my hand across my forehead. Then I put on my best formal expression and took a step toward the figure gazing out the window. She was tall for a woman, leaning on the sill to stare out at the Aditi already in full swing even in the sweltering heat.
“I am so sorry,” I began, holding out my hand. “I had to drop something off on my way in here and I just—”
Slowly the figure turned to me. A lock of dark hair slipped across his forehead, his mouth curled into a crooked smile as he gazed at me and I stopped, paralyzed with the purest coldest terror I have ever known.
“Hi,” he said softly, and brushed the hair from his eyes. “I hope you got my message.”
“I—ah—ah—” I staggered back until I bumped my chair. “No!—”
It was Oliver.
He stared at me with wide blue eyes, holding his hand out in greeting. When I didn’t move he frowned, glanced down at his extended hand, and then at me again.
“I’m sorry?” he said anxiously. “Is this—I mean, I called your voice mail and Dr. Dvorkin said this was—”
I slumped into my chair, clenching my hands to keep them from shaking. “Who are you?” I hissed.
“I’m Dylan Furiano. My mom says she knows you—Angelica Furiano, she says you’d remember her maiden name, Angelica di Rienzi—”
“Angelica?”
“Uh, yeah. I’m your intern—I wasn’t on the original list because I was doing a semester abroad, in London. I’m at UCLA, studying film ethnography. My mom says to tell you hi.”
“Angelica.” There was a roaring in my ears. “Angelica is your mother.”
He nodded. “See, originally I thought I had this summer fellowship at Sundance, but when that fell through my mom pulled some strings—my grandfather was good friends with Dr. Dvorkin, so Mom called him and they set this up—”
“Your grandfather.” I seized on the notion like it was all that stood between myself and the abyss. I took a deep breath and nodded, my words spilling out breathlessly. “Your grandfather, I knew your grandfather—”
Dylan looked at the floor. “Yeah. He died a few years ago—”
So the Benandanti could die. “I’m sorry,” I said softly, and meant it. “He was—I only met him once, but he was very kind to me.”
“He and my father—they were out sailing together, there was this freak storm and the boat went down. They never recovered the bodies.”
“God, how awful. I—your father?”
“Rinaldo Furiano. He was sort of this entrepreneur—well, it’s kind of hard to explain what he did. We lived in Italy until he died. After that my mother and I moved here, to California. I guess probably you didn’t know him.”
“No,” I whispered. “I—I don’t think so.”
But of course his father wasn’t Rinaldo Furiano! I thought of that night at the Orphic Lodge, of Oliver and Angelica coupling in the shadow of the dead bull. No wonder she disappeared, ran off to Florence or Rome or god knows where, to hide from us all and have her baby and…
And here he was.
“Dylan,” I murmured.
“Yes?”
I shook my head. “I’m sorry, I was just saying your name.” I laughed, a little shakily. “So, are you named for Bob or Thomas?”
He looked at me blankly.
“Bob Dylan or Dylan Thomas.”
“Oh! Neither, actually—it’s Welsh, it means ‘Son of the Wave.’ I was born on this island and my mom was reading about some myth or something and there was this guy named Dylan, and so—”
He waved his hands: pouff!
“—here I am. She’s into all this sort of weird stuff, my mom is.” He smiled wryly, tilting his head to gaze at me. “But I guess probably you know that already.”
Yeah, no shit, I thought. Now that I’d had a few minutes to calm down and look at him more closely, I could see how different he was from Oliver. His voice, for one thing—like Angelica’s, it was musical and slightly accented, though the accent was more British than Italian, no doubt smoothed out by a few years in California. And he was much more handsome than Pretty Boy Oliver, with an underlying shyness that contributed to his almost feral beauty, like someone unaccustomed to wearing clothes or shoes.
Maybe that comes from growing up in Italy. Maybe in, Angelica’s house no one ever wears clothes.
The thought of this particular kid not wearing clothes made me dizzy. I swallowed, forced a smile, and said, “Yeah, your mom is a piece of work.”
He laughed. He was not as tall as Oliver, but more muscular—he wore neatly pressed tan chinos and a white oxford cloth shirt, its sleeves neatly rolled to show smoothly muscled arms. A tie was loosely knotted at his throat and I could see the muscles bunched at his neck, flaring smoothly out onto his shoulders. He wore clunky black shoes like combat boots, with worn knotted laces. He was broad-shouldered, long-legged, slim-hipped—probably a bodybuilder, and god knows I had never seen Oliver lift anything heavier than a hash pipe. But he had Oliver’s nose, Oliver’s high cheekbones and piercing blue eyes, though Dylan’s were flecked with green. One of his ears had multiple gold studs in a little line, gold and malachite and a single tiny silver crescent. And his long hair, though jet black, cascaded in loose curls like his mother’s. He wore it pulled into a ponytail, but it kept escaping to fall into his eyes. His mouth too was Angelica’s, full-lipped and sensual. Whe
n he smiled, it twisted into Oliver’s canine grin.
He was smiling now. “My mom told me a lot about you. About how close you two were at school, and how much she always envied you and your boyfriend—”
“My boyfriend?”
“Yeah. That Oliver guy. My mom said that everybody was just, like, insanely jealous of you.”
“Angelica told you that?”
He nodded. “She said you were so pretty, everyone was in love with you—” He tilted his head and added shyly, “She was right.”
“Uh—whoa.”
I stared at the ceiling, bewildered and embarrassed. Angelica had told him some crazy story about Oliver and me? But it made a bizarre kind of sense, it was just the kind of thing I could imagine her doing; and maybe it made her feel less guilty about what had happened to all of us.
And it certainly seemed to have piqued Dylan’s interest. He was gazing at me so boldly that I blushed, although there was something innocent about his expression, almost childlike. As though he’d never been told it was rude to stare.
But then why should I be surprised? Shouldn’t I expect Angelica’s kid to act like this? Not even in the room for five minutes and already he was turning up the heat; not that we needed any more heat. I groaned and wished I was back home asleep in bed.
Maybe this is what they’re like in Italy, they’re much more open there, such earthy colorful people…
I felt myself flush. This was ridiculous, and dangerous, too: the museum had truly draconian rules against sexual harassment. Although at the moment I had no idea where I stood in this jungle, whether I was predator or prey; whether this was even Real Life at all, or some twisted hallucination brought on by the heat and a mild hangover.
Waking the Moon Page 39
