Butterfly Tattoo

by Deidre Knight

  “Well, then maybe I’ll buy you an ice cream after.”

  “We’re going to the Dodgers game after. Remember?”

  “Of course I remember,” I snap irritably, even though for a moment I did forget that I have something approximating a date later tonight. “I’ll buy you an ice cream there, okay? At Dodger Stadium.”

  She smiles, the brilliant sun unexpectedly brightening the dark sea of our moment together. “Hey! Maybe Rebecca will take me to get it!”

  And there it is again, when I least expect it. Rebecca O’Neill, the Rosetta Stone to my daughter’s troubled hieroglyphs.

  ***

  “School’s out in a few weeks, right?” Dr. Weinberger asks.

  He looks to Andrea, but she just stares into her lap, toying with the zipper of her Barbie backpack, making it clear that I’d better answer. “Yes, that’s correct. End of the month.”

  “Any great plans this summer, Andrea?” Weinberger rubs his fingers over his salt-and-pepper goatee.

  Andrea answers with more lap staring, then gives an indifferent shrug.

  I answer for her again. “Thinking of a road trip.” I cut my eyes sideways to gauge my daughter’s reaction. “Back East. Maybe.”

  “Excellent,” Weinberger says, nodding. “To see your father?”

  “He’s ministering at a church in Texas,” I say, avoiding eye contact. “Thought I might take Andrea to see him. So he can meet her.”

  “And what does your father say about this plan?” he asks.

  “Haven’t laid it on ole George just yet.” Weinberger smiles in understanding because he knows that my father and I are permanently on the outs.

  Andrea surprises me by speaking up. “He won’t like me ’cause he didn’t like Daddy.”

  “He’ll love you.”

  “But he never liked Daddy,” she argues. “And everybody liked Daddy.”

  “Andie, sweetheart, that’s a different story, okay? A whole other situation. He just didn’t understand Daddy.”

  “Why not?”

  My stomach clenches, my whole body flexing with coiled fury. Because he’s a cold-hearted, judgmental bastard who wouldn’t know goodness if it jumped up and bit him on the ass? Fortunately, I manage to keep quiet and count silently to ten.

  Still, I’m not sure how to answer her question; after all, Andrea knows little of my father, little of how his emotional distance mapped out my youth and defined it. Finally, I settle on this: “Some people in this world don’t understand love, sweetie. Not like we do in our family, okay?”

  “I think what your father is saying, Andrea,” our counselor clarifies, “is that sometimes there are issues for gay couples.”

  “But Michael might not always be gay,” she pipes up, helping. “He told me so. So maybe now his daddy will be okay with me.” Her innocent hopefulness as she glances back and forth between us makes my heart twist inside me.

  “I don’t think it’s quite that simple,” I explain with a cough, ignoring the curious expression on my psychiatrist’s face. “But I know he’ll love you. I do know that.”

  “But how do you know?”

  “Because I do.” Because you’re pure and precious and I won’t let him hurt you, not like he did me.

  “That’s not a real answer,” she counters with all the saucy muster of an eight-year-old.

  “He’ll be meeting his granddaughter,” I explain gently. “And think of how much Grandma Richardson loves you.”

  She presses her stubby fingers into her eyes, closing them, and I wonder what I’ve said to bring out her avoidance maneuver. The Eyeball Gouge is something that we see here frequently at sessions; whenever she gets uncomfortable or upset she blocks us out this way.

  “Andrea, is that hard for you?” Dr. Weinberger asks, tapping his pencil against his notepad. “Talking about your grandparents?”

  She sucks in a quiet breath, dropping her hands so that she stares right at him. “Michael’s father isn’t really my grandfather. That’s all.”

  “Families are defined in lots of ways, Andrea. You come from an unconventional one, but I’m reminded of something that Michael said during one of your very first sessions here. ‘Family,’ he told me, ‘is wherever we find it.’”

  The words are a battle cry, summoning some lost spirit in me, the urge to fight for my family. That’s the only possible explanation for me blurting, “Why don’t you call me Daddy anymore?”

  The minute the words are out, I know I’ve pushed too hard. I’d know it even if our doctor weren’t piercing me with his steely gaze; even if I didn’t see the way my daughter’s face flushes with angry blotches that always betray her emotions.

  “Michael, Andrea may not be ready to answer that question yet.”

  “Can we be done now?” She snaps to her feet so fast that the pink backpack clatters to the floor noisily.

  “Your session isn’t over, Andrea,” Weinberger admonishes as she drops to her knees, scooping up the spilled Barbie detritus. “There are twenty more minutes left today.”

  Over her shoulder, she tosses me an angry blue-eyed look, an accusatory gaze I’ve come to know well over the past year.

  “I miss you, baby doll,” I murmur, searching her face. “I miss being Daddy, that’s all.”

  “But you’re Michael,” she says firmly. “That’s who you have to be.”

  “Have to?” I ask, confused, and her pale eyes widen. I think she’s said more than she intended. “I used to be Daddy.”

  With an eerie calm, she announces, “I can’t call you that anymore, Michael.” Then, without even pausing, she turns to Dr. Weinberger and announces, “We’re going to the Dodgers game tonight.”

  She begins raking Barbie clothing into her bag, focusing all her attention on the task as though nothing has transpired. Clearly our moment has passed, and there will be no further connection. My throat goes tight as she chatters with forced cheeriness about going to the game, about the Dodgers lineup, and whether we have any hope of making the playoffs this season. Like me, she’s a true-blue fan of the Boys of Summer. At least I’ve passed on one crucial trait. Still, that doesn’t make my heart ache any less. In fact, it aches all the more for having come so painfully close to getting some answers out of her, only to fail yet again.

  “And I get to have ice cream with Michael’s new girlfriend,” she adds conclusively, zipping up her backpack.

  I’m betting she tossed that one in just to screw with me. Yeah, one look from our doctor, and I know I’ll hear about that comment during my individual session at the end of the week.

  “She’s not my girlfriend,” I grumble, wishing like hell that this headache would subside. “Rebecca’s a friend.”

  “But you said you like her.” She settles neatly on the sofa again, hands folded in her lap.

  “Right now she’s still just a friend.”

  My psychiatrist scribbles something on his notepad. Maybe his gay patient taking up with a woman might not be memorable enough otherwise, but somehow I doubt that. Judging by the expression on his face, I’m guessing he finds this turn of events pretty damn notable.

  But I don’t even care, because there’s only one burning issue in my mind, something that’s been eating at me for a year now—ever since Andie left the hospital.

  It was just two days after the accident, and we were heading to Santa Cruz to bury Alex. As I wheeled her out to Marti’s car, parked along the curb at patient checkout, she looked up at me and asked for a Coke. I remember noticing that her skin looked translucent, she was still so pale. A single blue vein on her temple stood out, and for a moment, standing there in the blinding late May sun, I thought it was a bruise, and lifted a finger to brush a coppery strand out of the way.

  That’s the first time she ever called me Michael.

  “Can I please have a Coke, Michael?” she asked dully.

  “Of course. I’ll go back in and get you one,” I promised numbly, leaning low to kiss her cheek, but she turned away from me
, so that my lips grazed her braid instead. I knew that she’d turned away on purpose, and I could deal with that. But nothing had prepared me—nothing possibly could have—for my sudden demotion from Daddy to virtual stranger. To a man I’d never known in relation to my child: a man named Michael.

  Standing helplessly beside the car door, a thin rivulet of sweat rolled down beneath my shirt collar, and although I itched to blot it away, I didn’t. Instead, I thought of Katie Hathaway, a girl I loved in high school; the only girl I think I ever truly loved. When she dumped me after Basic Training, she left me standing in a Greyhound bus station in Columbia, South Carolina, my whole body nervous and damp beneath my crisp, impressive uniform that I’d thought she would like so much. Katie took a bus for seven hours just to tell me goodbye, then got on the very next one back to Virginia.

  Andrea never spoke again that whole day, not all the way home from the hospital, not on the drive to Santa Cruz, where we were heading to bury Alex. She just stared out the window beside me, silent. I kept cursing myself for feeling so helpless—and swearing that she’d only made a slip, calling me by my first name that way. If I’d had any idea then that I would spend the next year aching to hear her call me Daddy again, I think it would have broken what little was left of my heart.

  “Michael, any last questions?” our therapist asks, and I get the idea that this isn’t the first time he’s asked me that. Must’ve drifted so deep into my head that I missed it the first time.

  Just one question, but I won’t voice it out loud, not now. So I shake my head, and he rises from his desk, reminding me of my Friday appointment.

  Yeah, I have a burning issue all right, Dr. Weinberger. I wish someone would tell me why it is, with Allie gone and the father count reduced by one, that I can’t be Daddy to my little girl anymore.

  Chapter Nine: Rebecca

  My radio’s blaring before I’m even off the lot: Elton John, the perfect party music for my Wednesday afternoon. The sunroof’s cranked back, the smoggy late spring air making me feel younger than I have in forever as my hair blows loose and wild and free. I feel free. Speeding a little too fast through the studio gate, the security guard shakes his head at me, grinning disapprovingly at the blurring blonde banshee with “Bennie and the Jets” booming through her open windows.

  Pulling onto Melrose, my cell phone vibrates against my hip. It’s Cat Marino, my good girlfriend and former co-star on About the House. We played spunky fellow soccer moms for thirty minutes every Tuesday night on our predictable sitcom. You know the kind. Big problems, easy thirty-minute solutions, the antithesis of my own life.

  “You’re seeing someone.” I open my mouth to protest, turning down my radio, but Cat cuts me off. “I know it. I know it, because I also know that Jake called you the other night, and if you haven’t called me to dish about that, then there’s only one answer.” She draws a breath. “You’re seeing someone. So no denials, because I know.”

  Laughing in disbelief, not only at what she “knows”, but also at how much she assumes, I ask, “So are you and Jake in league now?”

  “No freaking way,” she exclaims loudly into the phone, forcing it away from my ear. “It’s a protection racket, my friend. Me protecting you from Jake. I’m running interference.”

  “Okay, then tell me why’s he calling?”

  “Well.” Again I hear her suck in a preparatory breath, and know she’s about to unleash a stream of rapid-fire, Spanish-accented sentences. “Apparently Darcy dumped him? So now he’s gone all nostalgic on us, thinking about the good old days and all that, when the only thing he’s really nostalgic about is his pitiful career. Gone, gone, hasta la vista, baby!”

  “Darcy dumped him?” I’ll admit that this gives me a little thrill of triumph, imagining Jake on the receiving end of his own treatment.

  “Well he did that pilot, you know? The one for NBC where he played that future cop?”

  “Yeah.” I remember how depressed I felt, reading about it in Variety last summer. “Slater Cops a Good One,” the campy headline read.

  “Darcy says he took it really harsh when the show didn’t get picked up. That he’s been drifting ever since. No good calls, no auditions, nada.”

  “Wow, I wonder what it’s like to be me?”

  “Forget Jake,” she says, remembering herself and her mission. “I want to know who you’re seeing.”

  “Well,” I begin tentatively. “There is this one guy.”

  “Name? Name? I need a name.”

  “He’s someone I met down at the lot.”

  “What show?” Cat asks.

  “He’s not on a show,” I explain. “He’s over in the electrical construction department. For the whole studio.”

  “Oh,” she answers in a flat tone, not bothering to hide her disappointment that Michael’s not part of the Hollywood glamour train. “But has he been on a show? Or worked on any good features?”

  I name a big sitcom that Michael told me he worked on for a few years as a lighting tech, and also tick off several A-list directors he’s worked under as a gaffer, though that was all before fatherhood took him off the prime-time circuit.

  “Okay, cool, cool.” Cat sounds relieved that Michael’s film pedigree is respectable enough. She wants me with a decent guy, like any best friend, but deep down she still wants me with someone from our artificial universe. That she doesn’t notice any inconsistency in that tells you plenty about my dear friend.

  “I’m seeing him tonight, actually.” I lower my voice for no particular reason. “We’re going to the Dodgers game.”

  “Uh-huh. So he’s one of those guys.”

  “Which guys?”

  “The macho, gotta take you to a sports arena kind of guys.”

  I laugh. If only she knew what kind of guy Michael really is, she’d let loose a spattering of Spanish expletives guaranteed to permanently damage my hearing. Or even more likely, she’d tell me she finds it a freaking turn-on when a guy swings both ways, then gossip about five other people she’s heard might be bisexual too. Obviously, Cat can be a loose cannon sometimes, and I don’t want anything getting back to Jake, so I keep the rest of Michael’s story to myself for now.

  “So how’d you know Jake phoned me?” I ask, wondering where their paths crossed again after the recent run-in at The Derby.

  “Well, that’s the other thing I’m calling about,” she answers, serious, and my heart palpitates in anticipation of whatever’s coming next. “And I’ll say straight up I don’t like it. But you should know.”

  “Okay.”

  “He e-mailed me last night. Wanted to know why you haven’t been returning his calls.”

  “Call,” I clarify. “He called once.” Everything expands at a geometric rate in Jake’s universe.

  “He wants to see you, but, Rebecca, don’t do it. Stay away from him, okay? He thinks I’ll rep him in the deal or something, but you know he’s always been crazy. That’s the only way he can’t realize what a total loser he is.”

  “Come on, Cat. He’s not that bad,” I say, feeling surprisingly defensive on the snake’s behalf. “I wasn’t totally stupid to be with him.”

  “Stupid is as stupid does, but I love you anyway.” Yep, Cat knows him like a bad brother, after all the seasons they worked together on About the House—including two final ones after I was gone, which makes her a good reality check whenever I start revising our personal history.

  “You’d like Michael,” I announce, picturing the way his rangy frame contrasts boldly with Jake’s smallish, sinewy one. Thinking of how honorable and gentle he is, and that I’m already sure he’d protect me at all costs—not destroy me if given the chance. “He’s the anti-Jake.”

  “That would make him like the anti-asshole.”

  “He is that.”

  “Well, sister, you can’t go wrong with a good guy,” she assesses knowledgably, then adds, “Just don’t call Jake.”

  “Geez, give me some credit, okay? I do have a few ounces o
f self-respect left.”

  “Those aren’t the few ounces I’m worried about when it comes to Jake,” she snickers.

  “My point exactly.”

  ***

  After doing some research—in other words, asking Trevor—I located some good old-fashioned fried chicken at a place on Ventura, and I’ll admit that I’m using soul food like any well-bred southern woman. As a form of flirtation. Call it pure instinct, but I’m betting Michael Warner will respond to a down-home piece of chicken like a grubby-handed child at a church picnic. Then again, maybe I’m putting too much store by that soft twang that periodically colors his dialect. But hey, if the fried chicken fails me, there’s always the foil-wrapped package of buttermilk biscuits. They’ve transformed the interior of my Honda into the front parlor of my nana’s house back in Dorian, Georgia. “Sugar,” Nana always said with a sly smile, “a good supper is the key to all life’s masculine mysteries.”

  I keep thinking that maybe Michael had a southern Nana, one who loved to cook for him like mine did, and these biscuits and chicken might take him back to that.

  Driving up into their cul-de-sac, my stomach knots with nervousness. Like I’m sixteen or something, not a thirty-three-year-old woman who lost her virginity a decade and a half ago. What can I say? My dating muscles are seriously underutilized and flabby after a three-year hiatus. Somebody ought to get me a Pilates dating video, stat.

  I wish I weren’t the last one here; unfortunately the sight of Michael’s circle of friends in the driveway tells me otherwise. He gives an easygoing grin, but my immediate thought is that he seems distant, aloof, standing there with his hands thrust deep in his jeans pockets. His coolness might have something to do with the scowl plastered across his sandy-haired friend’s face. That has to be Casey, with the backwards-turned baseball cap and effortless California tan, since Marti’s got her arm around a lanky man with black hair, and they’re snuggling like a married couple, not mere friends.

  Marti waves at me exuberantly as I shift the car into park. Too exuberantly, like she knows I’m about to swim in with the sharks. Her husband smiles at me, too, and Andrea bounces onto the balls of her feet, rushing my car door. Only Casey stands rooted to his few inches of driveway real estate, watching me circumspectly. And judging by the saturnine expression on his handsome face, I’d say it’s a given that he’s not exactly thrilled that Michael’s gotten so chummy with a woman.