The Glass Butterfly

by Louise Marley

  Except for Nonna Angela’s Murano glass paperweight.

  In other circumstances, she might have found it all humorous, but Ice Woman had no laughter in her. She didn’t have any feelings at all—except for those she had felt in the dream. The therapist in her found that intriguing.

  5

  Ah! triste madre! Abbandonar mio figlio!

  Ah! sad mother! To abandon my son!

  —Butterfly, Madama Butterfly, Act Three

  Jack stood in the foyer of Our Lady of the Forests, accepting the sympathies of his mother’s colleagues and clients. They shook his hand, murmured regrets, eyed him and each other with curiosity. Father Wilburton stood beside him through it all.

  Jack thought this was particularly kind, since he barely knew the priest. He had stopped coming to Mass when he decided, at the age of fourteen, to become an atheist. The Garveys were atheists, and as a teenager, he had admired everything about the Garveys. The Garveys, though, had been gone a long time. Father Wilburton was here, and his quiet presence at Jack’s shoulder felt good, a little island in the sea of grief and fear that tossed around him.

  The police, in a painful and awkward interview, had taken pains to make it clear they considered Tory’s case a “death investigation,” not a missing persons one. Still, the event today hadn’t been a service, since there was as yet no body and no declaration of death. It had been a gathering, a memorial, really, worried people coming together in the Fellowship Hall beneath the sanctuary. There had been coffee, cookies, lemonade. Tory didn’t have many close friends—in fact, she really only had one—but she had a long list of clients and associates. Father Wilburton encouraged people to step up to the standing mike on the little stage usually reserved for Christmas pageants and spelling bees, and say a few words about Tory. Several did, and Jack listened in stony silence, trying to make sense of it all.

  Nothing about the day seemed real. His heart thudded, and his eyes burned, but even those sensations felt as if they belonged to someone else. It was like watching a scene from one of his mother’s beloved operas. Somber people, dressed in the dark colors of mourning, shook hands, embraced, murmured softly to each other. It all felt stagey. Jack had the bizarre notion that he could turn it off at any time, like turning off the television. If he could just find the right switch, it would all disappear.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t care. When the dean of his college called him into her office to tell him his mother was missing, he had been speechless with shock. He had stumbled out of the administration building, forgetting to say anything to the dean, barely able to see his way on the stairs. She wanted to send someone with him, to stay with him. He had merely shaken his head, trying to process the news. For hours he could hardly breathe for grief and fear. And guilt.

  His hands shook as he packed a few clothes for the trip home. His mouth was so dry it took him three tries to explain to his roommate what had happened. When he was finished packing, he found himself sitting uselessly on his bed, staring at his suitcase. He couldn’t organize himself enough to call a taxi. His roommate finally did it for him, and even offered to come with him. Jack had refused, pulled himself together enough to get into the taxi, go to the station, buy a ticket. He stood on the platform, numb with horror, until the train arrived.

  It was when he was in his seat, staring in misery at his reflection in the night-darkened window, that it struck him. He didn’t know how he knew, but he did.

  Fresh guilt assailed him. He had scoffed at Tory’s premonitions, even mocked her for them. She had stopped telling him about them years ago. Now, here he was, alone on a train, having heard the worst possible news, and he was unable to fight off the conviction that it was all wrong.

  Sitting in the cramped train seat with his legs stretched under the seat in front of him, Jack stared at the lights of houses flashing past, and examined the strange sensation.

  He could only barely remember what Tory had told him about her little fey, as she called it. He couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen, just old enough to act scornful of anything his mother did or said. He remembered her saying it was like something stabbed her in the chest. Jack didn’t feel that at all. He felt it as a sudden knowledge tingling in the middle of his head. It carried an irrational surety words couldn’t explain, and it gave him a slight feeling of vertigo, as if he had just done a somersault.

  Tory wasn’t dead. His mother wasn’t lost. She hadn’t vanished. They were wrong when they said she was. It didn’t matter what they said, what they told him. He knew. Somehow, somewhere, Tory was still in the world.

  The steady clack of the train wheels on the iron tracks seemed to underline his conviction.

  That conviction had not left Jack, and it added to the sense that he was acting, here in Our Lady of the Forests. He was playing the part of the bereaved son, and he wasn’t doing very well at it, but he couldn’t think what else to do. Who would believe him if he tried to explain? The sheriff who had shaken his hand, pursed his lips, and looked as if he might cry? His high school counselor, who hugged him and said, “Call me if you want to talk”? Father Wilburton would no doubt tell him it was natural to feel the way he did. He would say he was in denial, the first stage of grief. Jack knew enough about his mother’s profession to have picked up that bromide, but it didn’t fit.

  Tory’s best friend and closest neighbor came up now, car keys rattling in her hand. “I’ll drive you home when you’re ready, Jack.” Kate was a middle-aged woman, possibly ten years older than Tory. She looked even older than that, especially today.

  But then, Tory had always looked young, even to the critical eye of her son. The clear blonde of her hair never seemed to change. She was lean and muscular from doing her own chores around the place. She didn’t wear a lot of cosmetics, but she didn’t need them. Her skin was clear and smooth, often flushed from walking in the fresh air.

  He was sure he had never told her any of that. Never complimented her, at least not for a very long time.

  He swallowed, and told himself he would think about all of that later. “We can go now,” he told Kate. “I think everyone’s left.”

  They turned toward the front doors of the church, with Father Wilburton beside them. Jack stepped out into the gloomy light of the late October afternoon, pulling up the collar of his wool blazer against the cold. He was waiting for Kate to follow him outside when a big woman, as tall as Jack and with broader shoulders, hurried up the steps from the street, taking them two at a time. She was sandy-haired, with freckled, ruddy cheeks, and she thrust out her hand to Jack with an abrupt movement that made him take a sudden step back.

  “Sorry I’m late, Jack,” the woman blurted. “I was on duty.”

  Jack hadn’t noticed until that moment that the woman wore a police uniform, with a heavy Sam Browne belt and a black handgun strapped into its holster. The thick vest beneath her shirt gave her a barrel-chested look. Her hand was big and strong looking.

  The officer hesitated with her hand outstretched, then let it drop. “You don’t know me.”

  “No. Have we met?”

  The officer shook her head. “I’ve seen your picture in your mother’s office. I feel as if I know you. I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am about Tory.”

  “Thanks.” Jack felt Kate move uneasily beside him, and he managed to say, as he had said to so many that day, “It’s kind of you to come.”

  “I guess I missed everyone else.”

  Kate said, “There’s a guest book. Please go in and sign it.”

  Father Wilburton said, “This way, officer. We brought it up into the foyer.”

  “I’ll come back for that, Father,” Kate said.

  The policewoman nodded to Jack before she followed the priest into the shadows of the church. Kate took Jack’s arm, and guided him down the steps toward the parking lot.

  “Who was that?” Jack said.

  Kate shook her head. “I don’t know. That’s a sheriff’s deputy’s uniform.”r />
  “Mom never told me she had a police officer as a client.”

  “Honey, there are probably a thousand things she never told you. Therapists aren’t supposed to talk about their clients, are they?”

  Jack didn’t answer. It wasn’t just that Tory hadn’t discussed her clients with him. He and his mother had stopped talking a long time ago. That is to say, he had stopped listening to her, and she, bit by bit, had grown silent in his presence. The thought made his throat ache.

  Kate started the engine of her Honda, and backed out of the now-empty parking lot, turning toward the park road. “I’m going to fix you some dinner. I’ve already told Chet I won’t be home.”

  “That’s not necessary.”

  “I thought you might be lonely.”

  Jack gazed out the window as they left the sparse neighborhood of the church and drove up toward the park and the few houses that dotted the familiar hillside just outside its boundary. “I couldn’t wait to get away from here,” he said. “And now I wish—I wish I could put everything back the way it was.”

  “That’s natural. It’s a terrible loss for you—for all of us—but I know Tory wouldn’t want you to grieve too much.”

  It burst out of him, before he realized he was going to say it. “I’m a lousy son.”

  For a terrible moment, Kate didn’t say anything. He took her silence as an acknowledgment of the truth of what he’d said. When she finally spoke, she said only, “You’re young, Jack.”

  “Twenty,” he said bitterly.

  “Well. Twenty is young, though you might not think so. You’re still finding yourself.”

  He made a small, involuntary noise that might have sounded rude. He hoped not. It was really a sound of pain and regret. He didn’t know how to explain that to her.

  She glanced at him, and he saw tears in her eyes, tears she had managed to resist during the memorial. “I hope you can have good memories of her,” she said, her voice a little too high. “She was—remarkable.” Her voice cracked on the word, and she turned her head away.

  He didn’t dare answer for fear his own voice would break.

  They drove for a while in unhappy silence. Jack watched the stands of trees grow thicker as they climbed the hill. The maples were like flames of red and gold against the dark green backdrop of the eastern cedars. The beauty of it hurt somehow, as if it were a reproach.

  When they were getting close, Kate said, “I wish you’d reconsider staying at our place. You’d be so welcome, Jack. All the kids are gone, and—”

  He shook his head. “Thanks, Kate, but I’ll be fine.”

  “Not nervous?”

  “Nervous? No.”

  “Well, I would be,” Kate said frankly. “Since no one really knows what happened.”

  Jack turned his head to look at Kate’s plain, familiar profile. “You’re the only person willing to talk about it,” he said.

  Kate kept her eyes on the road. “The police talk about it, surely.”

  “Well, yes. The sheriff’s people. They always say the same thing. ‘We’re doing all we can.’ ” He shrugged. “I think it’s shorthand for ‘We don’t have a clue.’ ”

  “Honey, if Tory drowned—” Kate winced as she spoke the word.

  “I know that’s what they think. They said there was no reason to think she’s alive.” They had dragged the river, they told him. Searched the banks, below and even above the site of the accident, and found nothing.

  Kate nodded, pressing her trembling lips with her finger. After a moment, she said in a choked voice, “It could be months before they find her.”

  “Yeah. If ever.”

  Kate touched his shoulder with her soft hand. “It hasn’t hit you yet, I’m afraid.”

  “It doesn’t seem real.” He watched the familiar flicker of a porch light here and there. He knew every house, every family that lived up here in the foothills. They passed Kate and Chet’s driveway, with its funny mailbox in the shape of a doghouse, before they turned into his own. Tory’s mailbox was a tasteful gray-and-white rectangle, matching the paint of her house. The driveway was long and twisting, a narrow lane with a neat and fairly new layer of gravel. It looked as if she had raked it recently. It led nearly to the top of the hill, where the house had a view of the valley to the east and the park to the west. They had lived in it, Tory and Jack, as long as he could remember.

  Jack had decided, at the age of fourteen, to blame his mother for everything—for having no father, no siblings, no other family. He understood, later, that it made no sense, but he hadn’t gotten around to telling her that. Or maybe he just hadn’t wanted to say it, and receive a therapist sort of answer about adolescents and their feelings. Sometimes he thought, when he was still a teenager, that she must not really care, or she would be angry, scold him, shout at him the way other mothers did. The way Mary Garvey shouted at her kids and her husband.

  But Tory wasn’t like that. She was . . . contained. Controlled. He rarely saw her show emotion except when she was listening to music.

  The silence of the house, as they got out of the car and approached the front door, added to the strangeness of the day. When Tory had been here—and Tory had always been here when Jack came home, something that used to irritate him and now filled him with desperate sadness—music had met him, pouring out through the front door, or through an open window in summer. If it was early in the day, it was baroque. Bach, Vivaldi, Handel. If it was afternoon, Tory would have progressed to classical—Haydn, perhaps, or Mozart. Jack would always know the workday was over if the music that greeted him was opera. He had resented it, felt as if she was imposing her own tastes on him and anyone else that came into her sphere. He had often plunged up the stairs to his room to play opposing music, punk or metal or even country, cranking it up as loud as he dared.

  Other times he would come upon her, curled up in the wide stuffed chair beside the Bose system, headphones on, tears streaming down her cheeks as she listened to some music she particularly loved. He hated finding her like that. It was embarrassing, as if he had caught her without her clothes on.

  He had been, he thought now, the cliché of a teenager. He hadn’t improved much as a young adult, either.

  Now, opening the front door into the quiet house, the full impact of his mother’s absence struck him like a gust of winter wind rolling out from the empty hallway. He froze on the doorstep, with Kate behind him.

  “Are you okay, honey?” Kate murmured. She put one hand on his back, not insistently, but gently. Her hand wasn’t slender, with firm, muscular fingers, like his mother’s. It was plump, the palm soft and warm. “Do you want me to go in first?”

  Jack shook his head. “No, I’m good,” he said, but he couldn’t get his legs to move.

  Kate said, “Right,” and stepped past him into the hallway. She turned on the porch light and the hall light and then stood, holding the door wide, giving him time.

  The lights helped. Music would help. Kate left Jack to carry his suitcase up to his room, and she went to the kitchen to start putting a meal together. Jack trudged up the stairs, and stood uncertainly outside Tory’s bedroom. The door was open. The bed was made, everything looking neat and tidy as always. A book lay facedown on the bedside table, open at the place Tory had stopped reading. Without going in, Jack could see that a bathrobe hung on the hook of the open bathroom door. A towel had been used and then spread to dry over the rack.

  He turned away to his own room. He tossed his suitcase on the bed, and looked around at his things, carefully kept just the way he had left them. His Little League trophies lined the shelf above his desk, where his college thesaurus and dictionary still rested. His bookshelves were orderly, dusted, his old favorites waiting in neat rows. The same old band posters, curling now at the edges, studded the walls. His bathroom had towels on the rack and soap in the dish.

  “Goddammit,” he muttered. It was all just as he had left it, although a good bit tidier. She had kept it ready, as if she expec
ted him to return at any moment. Or hoped that he would.

  A single, painful sob forced itself through his constricted throat. “Goddammit,” he said again. “Mom—I’m sorry. I’m going to find you, somehow, so I can tell you that.”

  6

  Vedete? Io son fedele alla parola mia.

  You see? I am faithful to my word.

  —Manon, Manon Lescaut, Act One

  “I don’t know what else I can do,” Doria said. She cast her mother an exasperated look. “Veramente, Mamma, I work from before the signora is awake until she goes to bed at night. I’ve been there five years, and no one knows the house as well as I do! I clean, and I scrub laundry, and I iron the sheets and the curtains. I help Zita with the cooking, and I serve at table. I always wear my apron, and I never complain.”

  “You must have done something to make her angry.” Emilia Manfredi dusted her floury hands over the sink, and gathered up the scraps of dough to roll another sheet for the ravioli.

  “No one has to do anything to make her angry!” Doria pressed harder on the stone pestle, grinding the basil and garlic together. The pungent scent of pesto filled the room. “You can ask Old Zita, and she’ll tell you, Mamma! The signora’s angry all the time. That’s why no one else will work there!”

  “Lucky for you!” Emilia snapped.

  Doria clacked the pestle angrily against the rim of the mortar. “You don’t know what it’s like! She’s so mean the signore calls her his policeman, did you know that?”

  Emilia clicked her tongue. “That’s not a nice thing.”

  “But she is like a policeman, Mamma, giving orders, shouting, always trying to catch someone in a mistake. The maestro stays away all day with his dogs and his friends, and Zita hides in the kitchen, but I have to go upstairs, downstairs, in and out all day, and be silent all the time besides.”