The Butterfly Sister

by Amy Gail Hansen

  Out then in, out then in.

  The epitome of woman.

  Meryl.

  Ducking under the sill, I lost my footing and fell into a snowdrift, singeing my skin on the cold. My heart shattered with the realization: Mark really had gone back to his wife. And there, tucked in the alcove beside the house, was proof. The body of the car blended into the night. But in the moonlight, I could tell it was black, could make out the license applied for plate. Beneath my fingertips, the word Jetta graced the bumper. Obviously Meryl had driven up from Washington, D. C., to spend the holidays with him.

  The sight of Meryl through the window, her car in the driveway, sent a heat through my chest into my throat. My cheeks flared. My hands, however, were frozen by that point, and I reached into my pockets to keep them warm. There I fumbled with my key chain and began to run the tips of my fingers along the jagged edges. And soon, I brought the key with the sharpest ridges to Meryl’s driver-side door and dug it deep into the finish until it caught in the groove. I did this more times than I can remember before the key finally slipped in my frozen hand, and I sliced my knuckle.

  Sucking on the wound, I drove down the country road, away from Mark’s cabin.

  It is a devastating taste—the bitterness of blood, the saline of tears.

  I drove around for an hour but didn’t know where to go, so I returned to Tarble, parked my car in the lot, and walked back to the dorm. The lake appeared wild with rage that night. Thick, gray waves—topped with a white foam that reminded me of a dog with rabies, a sure sign of an impending winter storm—pummeled the rocky shore. Despite this, I decided to take a detour to the frozen sand beside the unruly waters.

  Down on the beach, the wind off the lake, coupled by the spray of waves, seemed to drop the temperature another twenty degrees. After a few minutes, the cold actually felt warm against my exposed skin, as it burned my cheeks and mouth, and somehow, lessened the pain throbbing my gut. I was all out of tears by then, my eyes almost swollen shut from crying. I could barely see where I was going, and I didn’t care. If I tripped and fell into the water, so be it. The waves would carry me out to sea. I imagined loading the stones from my windowsill into my coat pockets, just as Virginia Woolf had.

  I was halfway down the beach when I sensed I was not alone. And from a distance, I made out a figure walking toward me. Man or woman, I could not say at first, thanks to the veil of night, my swollen eyes, and the spray of water. But as it grew nearer, my pulse quickened at the form I eventually discerned.

  It was a woman. Dishwater blond hair curled up on the sides, 1950s style. Even at night, her lips appeared dark with what could only be red lipstick. She was wearing a camel-colored peacoat.

  I stopped, stared down at the sand, then looked up again. I shook my head, stomped my feet, even grunted, trying to make her disappear. But she came closer, and unlike Woolf and Gilman, she spoke to me.

  “Ruby,” she said.

  And that’s when I ran. I’m not sure if she chased me, because I never looked back, not until I arrived at the front steps of North Hall. By that time, no one occupied the sidewalk behind me, as far as I could see.

  But the image of a young Sylvia Plath remained.

  Don’t try to talk just yet,” the nurse whispered, her full lips pursed like a mother ready to kiss the forehead of a baby. “They pumped your stomach. The tube bruised your vocal cords. Your voice is probably hoarse.”

  I saw the nurse write something on a clipboard, what I assumed was my chart, then made eye contact again. “You have a visitor,” she added. “But perhaps you should rest a bit more before seeing anyone.”

  A visitor. Mark. He had heard what happened, had rushed to the hospital to apologize, to tell me he’d made a mistake. He’d almost lost me forever.

  “Who is it?” I tried to sit up but lost energy.

  “Trisha, your resident assistant. She was the one who found you and called 911.”

  “No one else?”

  “Your mother will be here shortly, and a few girls, about five of them I think, came right away, but we told them to go back to the college. We didn’t know how long it would be. They said they would come back.”

  “Any . . . men?”

  The nurse’s eyes filled with pity. “I’m sorry.”

  A few minutes later, I watched the door inch open. My mother’s eyes were a bright green but softened around the edges by sadness or fear or maybe anger. When I saw her, I unraveled. I closed my eyes, but the tears continued to break through the barrier.

  “It’s okay, sweetheart,” she said, getting into bed with me. Soon her arms encircled me fully. She squeezed me, held me in the strength and security of a mother’s love. “I’m here.”

  We sat like that, me tucked into my mother’s body, and drew breaths in synchrony, like we must have done when I was an infant still learning how to breathe, still learning the rhythm of life.

  “I’m sorry,” she said into the silence. “I knew something wasn’t right with you, but I just assumed you were stressed about writing your thesis. That’s why I wanted to take you to Paris. I thought you needed to relax. I didn’t realize . . .”

  “I’m sorry about Paris,” I said. “Can you get your money back?”

  She shook her head, as if to say that money should be the last of my worries. And then she took my hand and held it, securing me to her like the clasp on a mountain climber’s rope. “You are alive. By the grace of God, you are still here.” She looked into my eyes once more, tucked a hair behind my ear.

  “I didn’t mean to do it, not really.” My voice was hoarse like the nurse had told me it would be. But it was also monotone and robotic, lacking an element that made it sound human. “I just wanted to sleep, so I took my pills. And then I took more. And then I couldn’t stop myself. I just kept swallowing pills.”

  That was true. The sleeping pills were at first a practical idea. I wanted to escape the pain, hoping I’d wake up, and it would all be a nightmare, that Mark would still love me, that he hadn’t gotten back together with Meryl. I remembered taking pill after pill from the bottle, placing each on my tongue, counting the pills in my mind. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen.

  How far had I gotten? I couldn’t remember. I only remember seeing Sylvia Plath on the beach. Had she inspired me to do it, to kill myself just as she had?

  I knew from my research that the notably bipolar Plath committed suicide at age thirty by sticking her head in an oven full of gas. Many blamed her suicide on the infidelity of her husband, the English poet Ted Hughes. But Plath had tried to kill herself before. While a student at the all-girl Smith College she had swallowed sleeping pills—forty-eight of them—in a failed suicide attempt. She later based her only published novel, The Bell Jar, on that experience.

  Mom tightened her grip. “Why, Ruby?”

  If I revealed who I really was, a woman without morals and values, a woman who sleeps with married men, my professor no less, I feared my mom might never look at me the same way. There would be a small speck of black in her green eyes, a shadow, a deep pocket of disappointment. So I told her everything then, just not about Mark. I told her how Heidi moved out; how I’d been feeling anxious and sad and depressed the past few weeks; how I’d left my dorm room door wide open and collected random objects like the rocks; and how I’d received a D on my thesis, a paper I’d given up a whole semester of my life to write.

  “Maybe you can rewrite it,” she offered. “Resubmit it next semester?”

  I bit my lip. Mark had to have heard the news by then, and he hadn’t come. I realized then that things would never be the same. Could I go back to simply being his student? Could I go back to Tarble, now that everyone knew I tried to kill myself?

  I looked into my mother’s soft, forgiving eyes.

  “No,” I told her. “I’m dropping out.”

  December Diary Three

  December

  I remember a girl in high school did it. A cheerleader, the prom queen type.
She took some pills—her mother’s Valium—and ended up in the ER. And the hallways buzzed the following school day with a burning question: Did she really want to die, or did she feel like she didn’t want to live? There’s a difference, apparently. The former is indicative of a much deeper problem; the latter understandably associated with a response to a traumatic event.

  If I can’t be with Mark, if he doesn’t love me anymore, I don’t see the point to living. Over the course of our romance, perhaps every day we were together, I imagine I cut a piece of myself off like a strip of fabric, and worked that section of myself into and over and under him, so now, there is no way I can break away.

  We are woven together.

  It hurts. It hurts to get pulled apart by the seams, every thread exposed, every fiber raw. The only way I can end the pain, the only way to medicate myself, is to stop my heart from beating, stop my lungs from breathing, stop my brain from thinking.

  I want to die. And I feel like I don’t want to live.

  I don’t understand the difference.

  Chapter 9

  I could not see Lake Michigan from the road, could not distinguish where the murky sky met the steely waters, but as I neared Tarble College on Friday afternoon, I sensed its presence like someone standing behind me; my arm hairs danced, and a cold tingled the canyon between my shoulder blades. Low temperatures and a mistlike rain—as characteristic of a midwestern autumn as amber leaves—had fogged the window of my Corolla by then, and I had to roll it down to view the school from the road.

  The Tarble campus was no more than a half mile long, but it stood proud upon its cliff, overlooking the lake to the east and the road to the west. Removed from the main road and a good mile from town, it long reminded me of a miniature village within a snow globe—a utopian world protected by a bubble of glass.

  With white knuckles bracing the steering wheel, I approached the school’s main entrance. It boasted no fence or gate, just a large stone insignia surrounded by mounds of manicured mums, eye-popping paint splatters of yellow, orange, and red. On instinct, I brought my foot to the brake pedal but didn’t press, my boot suspended in air, my leg muscles taut. I watched the windshield wipers whip before me, squeaking each time they doubled back.

  You don’t have to do this, I thought.

  Go home.

  Go home.

  Go home.

  I turned anyway, at the last possible second, a swervy skid onto campus drive. Because it was the onset of Reunion weekend, and classes were still in session, I had to park at the far edge of campus. It was a heart-pumping uphill walk to the academic buildings from there, but I embraced every step, every breath of sand and silt and seagull air before inevitably losing my anonymity. Ahead I saw a herd of students nearing Langley Hall—I recognized their backpack-weighted saunters—and my stomach cartwheeled up my throat. Because some girl will spot me, I thought. Some girl will stop me. Some girl will say “What are you doing here?” And then, before I even answer, her memory will kick in, and her head will flop to the side with pity, and a hush will ensue as she pictures me in a straitjacket. And I will stand there, still and silent in the midst of those buzzing, whirring students, and regret ever coming back.

  And therein lies the difference between words and actions. It had all seemed so easy—agreeing to Heidi when she insisted I stay in her guest bedroom instead of a room at the Lakeview Motel, asking Craig for the weekend off, telling my therapist yesterday and mother how excited I was about reconnecting with old friends at Tarble’s Reunion. But it was all talk. Only words. Easy for me to say but not actually do. Now that I stood on campus, in close proximity to Mark’s Jeep in the faculty parking lot and the red bridge where we used to meet and the beach where I saw Sylvia Plath and the dorm room where I overdosed on sleeping pills, I wanted to turtle my head inside my body. Thankfully, my oversize umbrella—Mom had checked the weather report and reminded me to take one—veiled me from possible stares and finger-pointing as I reached the main sidewalk and fell into rhythm with the other women’s steps.

  But the voices came after only a few strides.

  “They found her on the floor,” one female voice whispered.

  “Did she slit her wrists?” another asked.

  “Overdose,” the first said. “She took the whole bottle.”

  “Why did she do it?”

  “Why does anyone do it?”

  The voices, muffled by the white noise of rain, became trapped under the canopy of black umbrella fabric and swirled around my head like twittering birds in a cartoon. I continued walking on autopilot, though, my legs grounded and focused but my mind distant and floating. I tightened my grip on the umbrella handle.

  They’re talking about me, I thought. They’re already talking about me.

  “Are you talking about Julie?” A third voice asked.

  I turned then to see four students walking behind me in an iceberglike mass, their shoulders slumped and heads drooped in a recognizable act of gossip. Thanks to the spray of rain and lakeside breeze, none of them saw me peeking from beneath my umbrella. Their eyes were glued instead to the sidewalk as they braced the forces of nature with the tops of their sweatshirt-hooded heads.

  “You heard?” the first girl replied.

  “Everyone’s heard,” a fourth chimed in.

  Tipping my umbrella back, I studied the students lining the sidewalk ahead of me. They were all in clumps too, all consorting, all seemingly whispering on the way to class. The rain was only half of the white noise I’d heard; the other half, their murmurs as they swapped grapevines about Julie.

  Julie, Julie, Julie.

  Obviously, it was the day after.

  As I shook off my umbrella inside the lobby of Langley Hall, the murmurs died to a low humming buzz. The space was alive with people—students, alumnae, and faculty members with red cheeks, taut from over smiling. Scanning the lobby, I saw Heidi standing behind a red table-clothed table, under a WELCOME TARBLE ALUMNAE banner. She looked exactly as I remembered, which was expected after only ten months. Still, the time had passed so slowly for me—it had felt more like ten years—and somehow, I’d expected her to look different, older, changed. But she still styled her chestnut hair into a sleek bob, and her face was still round, her skin naturally pink and dewy, her eyes still a captivating brown.

  Only her gregarious smile and blithe spirit were missing. Even from a distance, she looked unusually stern, a wrinkle bridged her eyebrows. And the wrinkle seemed to deepen when she saw me approaching the table.

  “Ruby.” She handed her clipboard to the bored, name-tagged coworker beside her. “You’re here. Already.”

  “I said one o’clock, didn’t I?”

  “Of course, you did. Of course.” Gripping my shoulders, she moved me several paces from the table. The wet soles of my brown boots screeched on the recently polished floor. “It’s just so good to see you.”

  She hugged me then, holding me longer than necessary, as if saying good-bye rather than hello. She pressed me so hard, my nose smushed into the red fluff of her cashmere sweater, and I smelled grapefruit. She’d eaten one at lunch.

  “How was your drive?” she asked after our embrace.

  “Fine.”

  She eyed my umbrella. “It’s raining, isn’t it? Is it still raining? I was really hoping it wouldn’t rain.”

  I put my hand on her shoulder to quiet her nervous rambling. “Heidi, I know.”

  She cocked her head at first, as if about to lie, then exhaled a weighty breath, as if resigning to tell the truth. Her voice raised an octave. “You do?”

  “Julie,” was all I said.

  She sighed. “I was going to tell you. Just later, once you were settled.”

  “What happened?”

  Heidi scooted our conversation another foot from the table before saying more.

  “Julie Farris,” she said under her breath. “She’s a freshman. Smart girl. Sweet girl. Her RA found her unconscious late last night. There was an empty
bottle of Tylenol on the floor beside her. She’s okay. Alive, at least. She’s at Kenosha General. Word is, they’re admitting her to the psych ward later today.”

  I winced. It was the same ward into which I would have been admitted back in December, had my mom not requested I be relocated to the hospital in Oak Park where she worked.

  Heidi seized my elbow like a handle then, as if afraid I’d run away. “How did you hear?”

  “Word travels fast at Tarble, remember?”

  “I’m so sorry, Ruby,” Heidi gushed. “If I had known this was going to happen, I never would have . . .”

  “Asked me to come?”

  She took my hand and squeezed it. “I just wanted things to be perfect.”

  “It’s okay,” I lied. “How are you holding up?”

  Heidi rubbed the corner of her eye. “I’m exhausted. I’ve been up since four this morning putting out fires. This couldn’t have happened at a worse time. On top of all the Reunion events that have to go on without a hitch in spite of the rain—not to mention the vigil we’re planning for Beth—President Monroe has me on damage control. Apparently, someone leaked information to some jerky reporter from the Kenosha Sentinel, and he called asking implicating questions, and now it’s my job to assure financial backers and alumnae that Tarble isn’t some breeding ground for . . .”

  “Lunatics?”

  She shook her head. “That this isn’t an everyday occurrence. It’s happened only twice.”

  Twice, and I was the first.

  “Maybe I should go,” I said.

  “No. Why?”

  “It’s strange, isn’t it? That some student tries to kill herself the night before I come back to campus for the first time? I don’t want to make anyone feel weird.”

  “No one will feel weird. And if they do, then they’re weird,” Heidi shot back. “Actually, it’s a good thing you’re here. I mean, look at you. You’re proof that life goes on. People heal. People get better. You’re not tainted for life. You’re totally fine now.”