The Butterfly Girl

by Rene Denfeld

  She had felt the roof of her mouth with her tongue. Looked over the people in the pews, all looking back at her. The judge was a black vulture at her back. In the midst of all this was her mother. She sat with her head bowed. She wore a pretty new dress, long sleeves over the marks. Her eyes looked up, full of guilt that ran to the bones.

  Six butterflies. As old as the sister you will lose.

  “They call me Celia the liar,” she had said, and was surprised at how clear it came out.

  Chapter 12

  Naomi had put up flyers, visited her detective friend, paid her call to the Feds. Seen some street kids, asked around about shelters.

  It was nothing, she told Diane in her mind, driving to her house in the puttering Datsun. By the time she got in the door the echoes of her mind were no longer soft and listening, but hard and frustrated.

  “I’m not doing anything on this case!” she barked to Jerome and Diane, both in the kitchen, looking up from the homemade pizza they were taking out of the oven. Jerome’s eyebrows rose, and Diane’s merely arched. Her entire being said, Don’t even.

  “You mean your sister or the street girls?” Diane said, wiping her floury hands on a towel. Jerome glanced from where he was testing the pizza.

  “Both.” Naomi pulled out a chair hard.

  “Mind your manners.”

  “I’m not five.”

  “You’re acting like it.” That was Jerome.

  Naomi whipped on him. “Maybe you should get a job.”

  Dead silence followed that. The whole kitchen took on a polar chill. Naomi felt the tick of shame in her belly, the rising fear. She wanted to apologize, but Jerome turned and left to go upstairs. She had never seen the look he had on his face before. It wasn’t even anger.

  It was distance.

  “Naomi. Honey.” Diane was coming to her, moving her hands toward her head. Naomi leaned in, unwilling. “I’m sorry,” she murmured, against Diane’s hair, once so silky, now brittle. Naomi could feel something, deep in her friend, something that felt like sadness, but in her own distress she let it slip away.

  “It can only take a minute to ruin a lifetime, my dear.” Diane’s voice was firm against her. Her arms held Naomi tight. “Just like your cases. It only takes a minute to ruin a life.”

  Naomi collapsed. The anger ran out of her. She fell into the chair, crying helplessly into her hands. “I keep trying,” she kept saying.

  Diane lowered herself carefully and held Naomi’s knees. “Trying to do what, my dear?”

  “To remember.”

  “And you think you need to?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You think you failed because you haven’t found the one you think matters the most. But Naomi. My dear. Your sister isn’t the one who matters the most.”

  Naomi lowered her hands. Her face was wet with tears and hard with fear. “Who does, then?”

  “He’s upstairs right now. The future.”

  Naomi stood up so hard the chair knocked over. She left the house.

  They didn’t talk for two days. Them—once foster siblings, running in meadows, fashioning whistles out of split grass, teaching each other how to skip stones play leapfrog jump rope double dutch fly-fish do algebra drive a tractor look in my eyes now Naomi. Two children who once couldn’t go ten minutes without a serious smile or giggle, who fell asleep telling each other stories—now silent.

  At one time, not long after their marriage, when as adults they had realized the truth of their love, Naomi had woken up thinking she had swallowed Jerome’s missing arm and was going to make it for him, like a paper wasp spits a nest, and when she told him this, he had merely smiled, and looked at the empty space his arm would take, and said, “I can see it already.”

  I wanted to be your future, she thought.

  You are making me the past, he thought.

  Diane’s thoughts whirled in her room, trying to figure out a way to make things right between Naomi and Jerome. But she knew better. The silence in the house was two young people stuck in a sea of stubbornness. Like so many of their era, and maybe like people of all times, they had no role models.

  Naomi’s entire body was filled with self-loathing when she and Jerome were not talking. Naomi, too, remembered the hunts for artifacts that she now suspected were more about love than arrowheads or bundles in trees. In Jerome’s own child face she had seen the hunger for a place to call home. He didn’t know how deep her own longing ran, or the terror. For Naomi, home could be a prison.

  But it had happened anyway. One day—whether looking into trees for treasures tied in the branches or picking up agates on the ridges—she had fallen in love with him, and it had taken her most of her life to admit it.

  Not knowing what else to do, she made a list:

  Jane Doe bodies, morgue

  Psychiatric hospital? Maybe she was committed.

  Stop in/visit every homeless shelter

  And last but not least:

  Who is that man? The one with the scars.

  Chapter 13

  Riding the bus made Celia sleepy. She closed her eyes, putting her cheek against the soothing chill of the window glass. She folded her hands inside her thighs and dozed off. She was aware of the warm bus, the smell of other poor people around her, someone playing loud music through their ear pods.

  She was on her way to visit her mother.

  At stops she heard the accordion hiss, felt the bus lower. She was counting the stops as she dozed, feeling back in time as the distance between stops got longer and glimpses of yards furred with weeds and grass, gnarled apple trees, and gutters rusted with moss ran through her mind. In her dreams she was running beside the bus, feeling the wind in her lungs. Then she was tired and rode back inside her body. The butterflies, floating against the window, were tapping. Celia, they said. You are no liar. You never were. Remember that.

  “Mom?” She stood on the dime-sized concrete porch, peeking in the broken screen door. Inside was a haze of stale cigarette smoke and the din of the television. “Mom?” This time louder, a little squeak in her voice.

  “That you, Celia?”

  Her mother’s voice was hoarse with sleep and sickness. Celia could tell in that moment her mother was on the same afghan-covered sofa. It felt like Celia’s heart broke and fell to the ground in pieces, so much she had to crouch to scoop them up and shove them back in her chest.

  “Yeah. It’s me.” She saw her hand reach out, slowly. She heard the creak of the screen door, paused. “Teddy isn’t here, is he?”

  Silence. A quiet no.

  An hour later, Celia stood at the sink, washing dishes. She had picked up the floor, swept cigarette butts, cleaned the foul mess of the litter box. One of the cats was nowhere to be seen, and her mother, slipping in and out of her nod, couldn’t seem to remember when it went missing. Celia hoped it hadn’t been hit by a car. Maybe a nice neighbor had taken it.

  Her mother lay on the couch, a dried-out washcloth over her face. Celia took it, wringing it out with fresh cold water and putting it back. Her mother sighed. Celia picked up ashtrays and the dirty clamshell takeout containers with petrified fried rice.

  “That you, Celia?” her mother asked again.

  Celia stood and looked at her. She didn’t know why she kept coming back. Nothing changed. She remembered a junkie on the street telling her that his brain felt like a fuse, burned out and dry. Maybe her mom had lost her memory, too.

  “It’s me, Mom, remember?”

  “Oh.” Her mother turned her head. “Can’t you come home, Celia?”

  “We’ve talked about that, Mom. You know I can’t.”

  “Teddy would forgive you.”

  “I didn’t lie.” It took all of Celia to say it. Her mother’s disbelief was like a stone in her throat. Her whole stomach felt filled with the sickness of it. Her mother’s mouth moved, but no words came. After a moment, they did.

  “That’s not what the jury said,” her mom whispered.

&n
bsp; Celia went into the tiny, messy bathroom. Using her mother’s scissors, she hacked at her hair until it was short again. She liked looking more like a boy—it was safer on the streets. She went back to cleaning the kitchen and left when she was done.

  The pavement behind the school was broken with time, sprouting grass from the cracks like whiskers on an old man’s chin. The metal bars of the jungle gym, glossed by decades of dirty hands, cast long shadows.

  Celia was hungry. She should have tried to find something to eat at her mom’s house. She thought of the always dirty, crowded fridge, the bags of old meat leaking brown juices. The last thing she was able to teach Alyssa was to make sure and ask the lunch lady if she could help for extra food.

  She saw her sister coming out in a group of other girls. Celia was always too dirty, too ashamed, for friends. And once she had reported, everyone knew. Fuck bag, some of the boys called her, and tried to stick their fingers up her shorts. You already did it, so what’s the big deal? Celia hadn’t worn shorts since.

  Her sister saw her. An uncertain smile. Celia, filthy in her street clothes, aware now that she smelled. Maybe she was her mother after all. Just dirty in another way.

  “Hi, Alyssa,” Celia said. The other little girls tittered nervously. Alyssa stared up at her sister, and her friends left to find their parents. Celia and Alyssa were alone on the blacktop.

  “You look nice,” Celia said.

  Alyssa was wearing a decent shirt and cleanish pants. Celia could imagine her, closed into their bathroom, trying to stay clean. She had been brushing her hair, but had missed a big spot in the back, and there was a knot. Celia reached for it, but Alyssa jerked away.

  Why not you? Celia wanted to cry out. She had done everything to save her sister, yet her sister hadn’t needed to be saved. Was there something wrong with Celia? Had it all been for nothing?

  Acquitted, the victim advocate had told Celia after the verdict. She had to explain what the word meant. “You mean he is coming home?” Celia had asked, terror grabbing her throat.

  The very next day he did, and Celia couldn’t go to school for a week for the beating that followed his return. Celia didn’t wait for the next beating. Or rape. That was the only good thing she got out of the entire trial—she learned the right words for what Teddy had done. That night she had taken her backpack, some clothes that were soon stolen, and ridden the bus downtown. She had been lucky enough to meet Rich while she was wandering the streets, trying to look tough when really she was so scared.

  All for nothing. Because now, as her sister stood before her, Celia didn’t think Teddy had ever touched her. Not in that way, at least. Alyssa was looking up at Celia with something like suspicion. No doubt she was thinking what everyone else said: that Celia had made it up. The jury had said so.

  But it was true, Celia wanted to say. I told to save you.

  All the way back downtown—walk, buses, walk—Celia engaged in her favorite pastime, which was to daydream. “Dream by day,” her teacher Mrs. Wilkerson once told her. “Dream by night. Your imagination can save you, Celia.” Reality is whatever you chose to see: the face of a gnome in the grass, a construction team of elves on an anthill, the way tree leaves lace together to make messages only you can read.

  And yes, the butterflies. They cascaded around her now, tickled her tired feet, lifted her shoes all the way back to the bus stop. They rode next to her through the bus window. As she got off downtown, one grabbed hold of a strand of her hair. Celia laughed. She could remember being a little girl in a sun-splashed meadow with her mother. She could feel her wings open.

  What are you doing, Celia?

  Flying, she told the imaginary person in her mind.

  Arms out now, running through the downtown streets, seeing the shocked faces of the day people as she passed. Celia the butterfly, brilliant green, blue, red like a star. Celia the truth.

  Rich looked up to see his friend running down the middle of skid row, her arms stretched out, a glorious look on her face. It was funny—he could almost see the shine of her wings. People stood back, watching her fly.

  Celia. Just Celia.

  Chapter 14

  The city morgue had, at one time, been set near a community center, and across from a bookstore selling used library books. Naomi had visited the facility on other missing child cases that brought her to the city. She had found it a friendly place, with attendants bustling in their greasy plastic aprons, a pot of coffee stewed to sharp bitterness on the counter, and a plate of cookies no one wanted to eat. The old place had been associated with all sorts of scandals, including an attendant caught taking dried blood home to fertilize his roses.

  The new building had been built out in the suburbs, possibly to clean that stain. It sprawled, all pale stone, and yet the refrigerator chill was more obvious. There were no more strange cookies in the waiting area. There was only a fan circulating the muddy air.

  The medical examiner was a quiet man named Mike Morton whose hobby was making model airplanes. One for every case that haunted him, he had once told Naomi—now he sat behind a desk so crowded with flying machines it might take off with him. Maybe that’s what he wanted, Naomi thought.

  “Child finder,” Mike said, rising quickly to shake a hand.

  Naomi smiled at her nickname and sat down. Mike Morton was a small man, made smaller by his work. His skin was the same gray color of the bodies he worked on.

  “I’m looking for my sister,” Naomi said, and explained.

  “If you’ve entered your DNA into the system, I don’t have anything new for you,” Mike said. Naomi felt some relief, but not much. In her heart she was convinced her sister was alive.

  “I had assumed you were here about the murdered street girls,” Mike said.

  Naomi hesitated. No one had hired her officially on the case, but no one was stopping her either. Now that she had met some of the street kids—Celia especially—she felt responsible. She told herself it wasn’t hurting to work that case while searching for her sister.

  “I thought you might have some ideas how to identify them,” Mike said.

  Naomi remembered her foster mother, Mrs. Cottle, and how hard she had fought to get Naomi a legal identity. Like so many children who ended up in foster care, Naomi didn’t have a birth certificate. If she had run away or been kidnapped before Mrs. Cottle managed to get her a social security number, there would have been no way of tracking her, just like there was no way of tracking her sister.

  “I’d check with child welfare,” she told him. “Maybe those girls were in foster care before they became homeless. That could be why you’re coming up empty.”

  His eyes widened. “What a good idea. Thank you. Would you be willing to look at them, tell me what you think?”

  Naomi hated looking at corpses. They left a lingering shadow on her, a mark. And now she couldn’t go back to Jerome and decompress. But she knew it would be impossible for her to say no, not if it helped a child find her way home, dead or alive. She followed Mike back into the chilly morgue. Soon he was pulling open body drawers, citing the Tanner stages—the ages of sexual development—of the girls as he went. Most were Tanner stage four: about thirteen or fourteen. One was barely pubescent. Her narrow, undeveloped body reminded Naomi of the street girl she had confronted outside the library. Celia, she remembered.

  Part of her licensing as an investigator was in examining remains, but Naomi’s greatest knowledge came from her past. She put the last foot back down on the table. For a long moment she stood motionless. She was remembering how after running in escape, her feet had hurt for weeks. The ground had been too tender to touch, so Naomi had wrapped her feet in Mrs. Cottle’s flowered dishcloths and hobbled around until her soles toughened.

  Once free, Naomi couldn’t stop moving. Mrs. Cottle had understood. It was a puzzle because Naomi had never asked Mrs. Cottle how she knew, and now it was too late. Naomi had run away, as usual. She had an excuse—she was working a missing child case at the ti
me—but she had missed saying good-bye to the only mother she had ever known.

  “They weren’t in the river very long, but I bet you knew that. A day or two at most,” Naomi said. “What needs to be investigated is what happened before the murders.”

  Mike stepped closer. “What do you mean, what happened before?”

  Naomi lifted the white foot. “Look at these feet. No calluses. None of them have any signs of wear or activity on their feet. It’s one of the first signs you see in cases of captivity.”

  “Jerome?”

  He was sitting in Diane’s living room, ensconced in her velvet sofa. The room had the scent of incense and the leftover pizza he had heated for lunch.

  He looked up, his face cautious.

  “I’m sorry.” She went to him, sat down, held on. She felt his hair against her cheek. She had always loved his hair. Naomi knew that might not be the right way to see it—Jerome was Kalapuya, an Oregon native—but those childhood memories, of magic, held on. For her, at least.

  “I’m tired of moving, Naomi.” She saw his firm mouth, the tender chin. “I’m tired of being second best.”

  “You’re not—”

  “Yes, I am. Either we make this a partnership or it doesn’t work.”

  Naomi felt fear. It was a fear as vast as an empty tomorrow. “What does that mean?” she asked.

  “We need to put down roots. Make a home, someplace. It doesn’t have to be forever, but it needs to be now.”

  “I need to find my sister.”

  “I know.” His voice was gentle.

  That broke her. She wept against him, just as she had cried against Diane, and he put his arm around her. It wasn’t just fear of not finding her sister, Naomi realized. It was fear she would not be strong enough to stay once she did.

  * * *

  When Jerome was little, a woman came for him. She came picking her way over a yard littered with dog turds, swollen black garbage bags, a knocked-over hibachi with a vacant grill. The woman had the look of a farmhouse wife, the kind of grandma you see in books. She wore a checkered or flowered dress—now he wasn’t sure—stout shoes, the kind of thick pantyhose you wear for varicose veins. Her hair was silver and piled on her head, and her eyes were a kind, bright, merry blue that said Christmas and cookies rolled into one.