The Glass Butterfly

by Louise Marley

  Suddenly, Tory missed Jack with a stab of pain so deep it was as if it were brand-new. It made her heart clench with despair. With an exclamation, as much sob as curse, she seized her coat and knitted cap and fairly threw herself out the front door and through the gate.

  She walked as fast as she could across the damp sand, heading toward Haystack Rock. The rock, big and black and dominating, had become her cathedral, the place she went for respite, the place she could pour out her grief and worry, at least for a time.

  Cold December sunshine broke through the clouds. The tide was out, but the winter breakers still swelled impressively high before they smashed themselves against the ancient boulders. Tory walked right to the tide line, letting her sneakers splash in the brown foam edging the beach. She gazed out over the restless water, and the pain in her heart eased just a bit, to a level that was almost bearable.

  Why did water work that way for her? She had no idea. Except for a couple of beach vacations as a child, before her mother withdrew into illness and depression, she had never lived by the water nor spent much time on it. She remembered the feeling, when she drove the yellow VW right up to the edge of the Pacific Ocean, that her journey was done. In the weeks since, the water had become her solace.

  It’s okay, she told herself. We take comfort where we can. She wondered if it was because of the water in her dreams, that muddy lake lapping at the edge of the road. Her dream life was twining itself with her waking life, so that every event she dreamed of seemed to mean something profound.

  She reached the giant rock, and walked as far around it as the water allowed. She took care not to step in the tide pools or to disturb the miniature beasts that inhabited them, the layered barnacles, the slow-moving sea stars, the curious formations of anemones. She had learned about the aggregating anemones, tiny beings huddled together in communities that shared a single mind and purpose. There was an opposite species, similar, but solitary rather than communal. These little, separate creatures curled in crevices of the parent rock, stubborn and alone.

  Like me, Tory thought. Stubborn and alone.

  She wondered if Jack was lonely. She hoped not, hoped with all her heart that he had friends around him, people to share the burden that had fallen on his young shoulders. She hoped, also, that he would think well of her, in memory. That he would understand that the distance between them had been superficial, something that would have passed in time. She hoped with all her heart that he would know how much she loved him.

  She couldn’t think of her own parents that way. She remembered her mother’s withdrawal into mental illness. She remembered her father’s impotent rages. Had they loved her? Or were they too unhappy, too consumed by the tragedy of their own lives, to make room for her?

  She wrapped her arms around herself against the cold. Nonna Angela must have suffered, too, in that unhappy household, yet she had never spoken of it. She had simply loved her little granddaughter, and shielded her as best she could. It must have been hard to watch the family disintegrate and not be able to do anything to stop it.

  Tory stood for a moment in the lee of the rock, out of the wind, her hat pulled down past her ears and her hands thrust deep into the pockets of her now-shabby coat. She would take the job in the flower shop, if this Betty would hire her. It would give her someplace to go each day, people to talk to, work to take her out of herself.

  She had to move forward. Do something. It was exactly the sort of thing she would have advised her clients to do, but it was surprisingly difficult in the actual event. She comprehended, now, the comfort of being still. Of being stuck. Ice Woman understood. She wondered if she would be able to let the ice break apart.

  Oh, Jack. Be well, sweetheart. Be safe.

  She pulled the collar of her jacket up to her chin, and retraced her steps around the landward side of the great rock, emerging into the wind with her sneakers wet and the hems of her jeans dripping foam. She angled up the beach toward the cottage, thinking she’d better leave her shoes outside, maybe even strip off her jeans just inside the door.

  She had just passed the repaired bench when she stopped, and stood motionless.

  Something was huddled against the gate of her tiny yard. She couldn’t quite make it out at first, just a big, wet mound of brown and white. It took a moment for her to realize it was an animal. Its ears drooped against its matted skull. It was shivering, and when it saw her, the lift of its head seemed to be a gesture of hope. Its eyes, gleaming black from beneath long white eyebrows, pled for understanding. A dog.

  Tory stared at it. She couldn’t open the gate without making it move. She would have to speak to it, possibly touch it. She didn’t like dogs. She had never liked them.

  It wasn’t that she was afraid of them. She had tried to explain that to her son, when he asked if they could have one. She thought at the time it was part of his attempt to be more like the Garveys, and she had talked too long, explaining that dogs required a lot of attention, company, discipline, space . . . He had stopped listening, she was sure. Finally, she admitted her real reason: that dogs made her feel sad.

  “Sad?” he had said, with the disdain only a fourteen-year-old could affect. “That’s stupid, Mom. Why should dogs make you feel sad?”

  She remembered being caught by the question, pinned like a butterfly on a collector’s board by her son’s challenging blue gaze. She still wasn’t used to that look, though she was to become accustomed to it before long. She said, weakly, “I know, Jack. It is a bit stupid, but feelings are—”

  “Yeah, I know, Mom. Feelings are valid. You’ve said.” He rolled his eyes, and shoved his too-long hair away from his face. It was nearly white-blond then, the way her own had been when she was a little girl, when her mother had still liked to brush it and braid it or smooth it into a long, spun-sugar ponytail. His hair had darkened to pale gold as he grew, just as hers had. He said, “So, aside from the counselor talk, why do dogs make you sad?”

  It seemed the right moment to tell him about her mother—his grandmother, whom he barely knew—but it was hard finding the words. She had worked all through it during her training, had achieved a certain peace with the pain of growing up with someone suffering from mental illness. Explaining it to her son was different. It was delicate. She didn’t want him to worry that the same thing might happen to her, or even worse, to him.

  She had begun carefully. “It’s complicated, sweetheart—”

  “Mom, it’s always complicated!”

  “You’re right about that, I guess.” She wanted to take his hand, to make him sit down and listen to her. He stood in front of her, hands in his pockets. He slouched, shoulders forward, his spine curved over his concave chest as if to keep her from touching him. She said, “You know, Jack, I can’t make it not complicated.”

  His gusty sigh should have warned her, she supposed, that he was in no mood for the family story. It had been weighing on her, though. Kate felt that the sooner he understood about his grandmother, the better it would be. Kate also thought she should explain about his father, and she hadn’t done that, either. Kate was great at talking to her kids. Tory didn’t seem to have the knack. Her talents as a therapist seemed to evaporate when it came to her son.

  She began again. “My mother was sick when I was young,” she said. “Mentally ill.”

  “Gramma? Mentally ill?”

  “Yes.”

  “I figured—I just thought it was that thing old people get. Alzheimer’s.”

  “Not in this case.”

  She could see that, for once, she had his full attention. He was silent for a moment, screwing up his face as if that would help him think. After a moment he said, “What does that have to do with how you feel about dogs?”

  “Well—it’s an ugly story. We had a dog, a little one. My mother lost her temper one day and—and she hurt it.”

  “Hurt it?”

  Tory closed her eyes for a painful moment. Even now, all these years later, she could see the lit
tle thing, lying limp and lifeless. Only a dead thing could be that still, and even at ten, she had understood it. She opened her eyes again, and tried to speak in a level tone. “She killed it, I’m afraid. She didn’t mean to, I’m sure, but—maybe she kicked the dog instead of hitting her child. We didn’t know then—none of us understood how sick she really was.”

  “God, Mom. That’s awful.”

  Tory was ashamed at the little spurt of gratitude she felt for his flash of sympathy. She hadn’t, in fact, been particularly fond of the dog. It was snappish and cranky, older than she was. It had been shocking, though, to watch her mother lash out at it, and sickening to see its small body sprawled across the gray and white linoleum squares of the kitchen floor. Her mother, sobbing, had vanished into her bedroom, where Tory could hear her weeping all through the afternoon. The dog’s body lay where it was, sightless eyes staring at nothing, until her father came home.

  Jack leaned forward, and patted her shoulder with just his fingers. “I’m sorry, Mom,” he said. “That really stinks.”

  She wanted to catch his hand and press it between hers, but she was already learning such displays weren’t welcome. She had to content herself with the brief, voluntary contact. There was more she would have liked to tell him, but she was terrified of becoming one of those single mothers who turn their sons into the man of the house, load their young shoulders with adult burdens. She had counseled too many people who had grown up as a parent’s confidante. It was never a good thing, and she didn’t want to do that to Jack.

  She never spoke to him again about her girlhood. She didn’t describe the pain of ruined playdates, the embarrassment of strange calls when she was at school, summoning her home for nonexistent emergencies. She never told him how her father reacted to her mother’s illness, the towering rages that left her cowering in her bedroom while he stormed around the house. She understood, eventually, that fear was at the heart of her father’s fury, the fear of losing control, of losing his wife, of their entire life as a family coming apart. There had been no question of therapy, or counseling, only the awful day when her mother—who had ceased speaking, stopped eating, refused even to get out of bed—was taken away in an ambulance. Tory had been terrified of being alone with her father, but with her mother gone, his rages disappeared, too. He no longer shouted or broke things. He didn’t do much of anything, in fact, but go to work, then come home to sit, silent and broken, at the kitchen table. Tory, by the time she was twelve, was keeping house, cooking, shopping, cleaning, washing clothes. Jack never knew any of this.

  It was a great relief for Tory to go off to college, and it was there she discovered music. She went to New York with some friends to hear Madama Butterfly at the Metropolitan Opera, and the perfect beauty of the melodies and the harmonies was almost more than she could bear. The inevitability of Cio-Cio-San’s tragedy overwhelmed her. Tory, the most reserved girl of all her circle, wept through the entire performance. When she went to bed that night, the arias whirled around and around in her head, perfectly memorized. She had the strangest feeling of recognition, as if she had always known this music. She began to search out CDs, go to every concert she could find, immerse herself in this unexpected pleasure.

  Whenever she went home, it was like being in a prison of silence. She and her father crept around their hushed house, avoiding each other. The two of them made ritual visits to the mental institution to visit her mother, and on the way back they might assure each other she looked a bit better, she had said a word or two, perhaps she was on the mend, but neither of them believed it.

  Jack never knew any of that. She poured it all out to Kate one day, talking and talking, a spate of words as if someone had opened a dam that was on the verge of cracking. But she never told her son.

  Now, far from her son and her closest friend, she looked down at the shivering dog in front of her, and the intensity of her sadness was almost more than she could bear.

  She tried to edge around the dog to open the gate, but when she did, it fell to its side, as if the only thing holding it up had been the support of the wooden slats. Its ribs stood up like those of a wrecked ship, each bone visible through wet fur. It shook visibly, wasted muscles rippling from head to tail. She stared down at it in an agony of indecision. She could leave the gate open, go inside, hope the dog could fend for itself. Perhaps it would get up and wander off. Or perhaps it would die, right there where it lay.

  “You pitiful thing,” she muttered. “You’re like me—wet, alone, and miserable.”

  The dog’s ears twitched, and it gave one small whine, as if in agreement.

  Tory sighed. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t go in and close her door, hoping the dog would disappear and solve the problem for her. She trotted up the walk and into the house. She grabbed a towel, and hurried back through the yard to where the dog trembled on the bare ground, the open gate looming over it like a coffin lid. She bent to wrap the towel around the thin body. At her touch the dog’s tail, a bedraggled flag of brown and white fur, beat three times against the ground. Tory felt her heart beat in time with it, each strike of the wet tail a thud in her own chest. “Okay,” she said softly. “Let’s get you up. You don’t want to lie out here in the cold.”

  She was surprised, when the dog struggled to its feet, at how tall it was. Its head reached her mid-thigh. It wavered on its long legs as she helped it up the walk. She kept the towel around it, worried it might have bugs or mange or some other doggy pestilence. Its shoulder bumped her knee as they made a slow, awkward progress up over the single step and into the cottage. Tory shut the door with her foot, then turned to start scrubbing the dog dry as best she could. It lay flat again, and she knelt beside it, rubbing its flanks and chest. When she gingerly lifted its head to dry its ears, its long pink tongue flicked out and scraped her cheek.

  She chuckled in spite of herself. “We’re a pair, you and I, dog. Lost and lonely, and more than a bit damaged.” She rubbed it from head to tail, then picked up each big paw and dried those, too. It submitted with patience to her ministrations. She didn’t know if dogs liked being rubbed, or if this one was just so tired—or ill—it didn’t care. As the sand and water came out of its coat, she found no signs of injury or noticeable sickness. It—he—was just bone-thin and cold.

  Tory coaxed him to get up, to move onto the rug in front of the easy chair. She had chopped wood the day before, and now she laid a fire with kindling and crushed newspapers and a nice dry log. In moments the fire crackled pleasantly, and warmth swept out into the chilly room. Tory, kneeling on the hearth, surveyed her unexpected company.

  He was on his belly now, lying with his head on his paws, his eyes shining with firelight. His ears twitched as she came to her feet, adjusted the fire screen, sat on the edge of the little couch. “Listen,” she said. “I don’t know anything about dogs. I don’t know what you eat, or what you need. I can probably afford to pay for one vet visit, but if there’s anything seriously wrong with you—” The dog’s long eyelashes swept down, then up. “I don’t even know if Iris will let you stay here.”

  The dog sighed, a huge, gusting puff of air that came from his lean flanks and made his nostrils flutter. With a groan that sounded very like one of relief, he rolled onto his side again and lay flat, his head toward the warmth of the fire, his tail extended beneath the easy chair. His eyelids drooped.

  Tory watched the dog breathe. He looked like some sort of spaniel, she thought, but she had no idea what kind. She bit her lip, trying to think of what she should do next. Water first, she supposed. He would need water. She had some hamburger in the refrigerator. She was pretty sure all dogs liked meat.

  She filled a bowl from the tap, and put it near the dog’s nose before she pulled her phone out of her pocket. She had to call Iris before she did anything else.

  “Paulette. Did you change your mind?”

  Tory caught a breath. “How did you know it was me?”

  “Caller ID. I put your number into my
phone. Don’t you have it?”

  Tory nearly took the phone away from her ear to look at it, then blinked at the foolishness. “No. No, this phone isn’t much.”

  “I left a message at the flower shop. They’re expecting you in the morning. Is that why you called?”

  “It’s not that, Iris, but thank you. I haven’t changed my mind. I’ll be there. What I called about, though—the thing is—” Tory glanced back at the brown-and-white dog, lying in front of the fire. She said helplessly, “Iris, it’s this—this dog.”

  A long pause made her wonder if their call had been cut off. She was about to say something more when Iris said, “A dog?” in a wondering tone. It was as if Tory had told her it was a spaceship.

  “This dog was—it was collapsed in front of the gate. Wet, shivering. Skinny. I didn’t know what to do, but I couldn’t just leave it there.”

  “What kind of dog?”

  “I don’t know. Big. Brown and white, long hair. He’s kind of sweet.” She rolled her eyes, embarrassed at what she had said. She didn’t know, really, if the dog was sweet. He might turn into some sort of monster when he wasn’t so tired.

  There was another pause, but Tory could think of no way to fill it. She waited. It was as if she could hear the process of Iris thinking, all the way from her pretty house across town.

  “Well,” Iris said finally. “Actually, the rental agreement says no pets. But you—” She expelled a sharp breath, as if through her teeth, and it was somehow a sound of decision. “Paulette, you’ve done so much work on the place. It’s never looked better. I would imagine when you leave, I’ll never know there was a dog there.”

  “You know, Iris, I hadn’t really decided to keep him,” Tory confessed. “He just—he’s lying there in front of the fire, and he looks—”