The Butterfly Girl

by Rene Denfeld

  Angrily, his last foster family shoved his belongings—another black garbage bag, this one full of torn shirts and a broken frame photo of his mom, who had died when he was an infant—out the door. Later, back on the farmhouse porch, Mrs. Cottle carefully took everything out and even folded the garbage bag into a tiny square. “When you have lost everything, everything matters,” she had said, in her gentle voice. “I will keep this for you.”

  But before that, she had called him out of the weeds at the edge of that other yard, a skinny little boy with arms covered with painful deerfly bites. Mrs. Cottle had taken him by the hand and led him to her truck. They had driven away, forever. Jerome had looked up at her, riding tall behind the wheel, and she had looked down at him and smiled.

  “You’re going to be okay,” she had said, with the sure conviction of any mother. “I’ll see to that.”

  And she had.

  Mrs. Cottle had said the exact same thing to Naomi, too, when she arrived. Jerome wondered if Naomi even remembered it. She acted like she had forgotten what it was like to be found. Jerome, who had found refuge in family, did not understand why Naomi kept running. She had found safety before, and had it now. But still—she ran.

  Chapter 15

  Celia had been on the street, what now, six, seven months? She counted, dispirited, the butterfly book blurry in front of her.

  Nine months. It had been nine months.

  She would turn thirteen soon. A birthday on the streets—she had seen those. Street kids trying to pretend that going into the soup kitchen and trying to find a candle to stick in a pile of beans was okay. No. Not for her. It would be better to spend her birthdays in the library, drawing as rain ran down the windows, and the afternoons passed into nights, and the seasons passed into years, and one day soon she would find her feet on the stone stairs outside, years older.

  She had no future. She knew that.

  “You can become an electrician.” The street kids were playing the game of what-if. “I saw an ad about that once. All you need is your diploma.”

  “I’m going to be an airline pilot.”

  “Naw! That’s fucking bullshit, man.”

  “Really.”

  “You need like eight thousand degrees. My mom dated this guy once, he was a pilot—”

  “Your mom sucked cock down here with the rest, Stoner.”

  The voices faded out. Celia was sitting on the curb with the others. She was aware night was coming. The sunset had lit the sky above them into tatters of orange and blood red, streaks of lavender and a bruised purple like a kiss. The city buildings rose like giant smiles, and in each window Celia saw an eye. The figures moving inside, turning off lights and lowering shades, reassured her.

  Rich plopped down next to her. His broad, sweaty face looked at her with concern. “You’ve been quiet lately.” He suddenly sounded much older, and Celia could see him as a boyfriend, a man, to some future woman.

  “I’m turning thirteen soon,” she said, reaching forward and capturing her toes. They were starting to poke through her canvas shoes.

  “Really? That’s cool.” But Rich knew. His measured glance told her.

  “You really think you’re ever getting off the streets, Rich?” she asked.

  She saw the crumbs in his eyes, the dirt on his forehead, the curly hair starting under his chin. The beginnings of a mustache. The pink line of his lips, the uncertain eyes, and for the first time she wondered about his past. What had made Rich? He was as gentle as a butterfly.

  “Sometimes I think I’ll get off the streets, get a job,” he said. He picked a bottle cap out of the gutter. “But I don’t think they make jobs for people like us. I mean, me. What would I tell them?” His voice was forlorn.

  Celia had no answer. She looked at the sky, unfurling like glorious banners. All through the world people shared this sky. They didn’t know she deserved a piece, too.

  * * *

  Oh, the butterflies. It was like a chant. Once Celia had passed a shop up in a tony highbrow neighborhood called Pearl or something equally stupid. What had her mom once said? “It doesn’t matter what color you paint a turd, it’s still a turd.” The shop had said magic in the window, and spells, and Celia had been intrigued. But when she went inside and tried to smell the incense that cost ten dollars or look at the glass balls that turned out to be plastic, the woman clerk had made an expression that told Celia she was the painted turd and should leave.

  Celia had stood outside for a long time, then, thinking about magic and spells, just as she was now, getting ever more lost inside herself, only it wasn’t lost; she was finding herself, someplace deep in this warren of memories. She was tracing her steps back. To the beginning.

  It was her most precious memory. She was very young, maybe three. She was with her mother in a sunny meadow. It was the time of sweetness, before Teddy. Her mother had her hands clasped over Celia’s eyes. Counting, each breath like a measured, small bell. One, two.

  Three.

  “Look, Celia!”

  She had opened her eyes, let the bright in. Focus.

  Oh.

  They were bright as discs of color, circling like the spots of sun. A blue brighter than the sky, a sunshine yellow tipped with gold coming closer.

  “Butterflies!”

  The butterflies would always be there, Celia thought now, feeling her bottom against the curb, the faint voices of the other street kids, the gassy smell of exhaust growing distant. Walking hand in hand with her mother through the meadow, she saw one land on a purple flower.

  “What’s this one, Momma?”

  “A great spangled fritillary.”

  Her mother had picked a dandelion and rubbed it under Celia’s chin, laughing, but the yellow petals were no match for the yellow of the golden butterflies. The white of an eye could not be whiter than the butterfly whites, and no sky was a match for their iridescent blues. Celia, like her mother, was in a swoon.

  Tiny feckless feet on burred limbs. Kind eyes that rotated, seeing all. Even Celia. Celia was not a monster that day.

  “Where you going, Momma?”

  “Time to go, sweetie.”

  Celia had wanted her mother to stay—she had grabbed her hand. Now, sitting on the curb, her face slack with memory, Celia was unaware that her own hand was wide open and reaching out.

  Her mother’s eyes had softened. She had smiled.

  “Okay. Let me tell you a story, then, about the most magical place of all. It’s called the butterfly museum.”

  * * *

  The scar-faced man. He had begun to haunt Celia’s life. She saw him on the corners, melting into the crowd. He was in the corner market, picking through the sandwiches as she and her friends reached for the marked-down cartons of milk, the ones they had to sniff carefully before drinking. Once at the river, he was watching the bridge as she and the boys crossed—that really freaked her out. “Did you see him? Did you see him?” she kept asking the others.

  Now he was staring at her from down the street. He frowned at her, the scars on his lips wriggling like little worms. Celia pointed him out to the others.

  “He’s a perp.” Stoner laughed, and Celia knew then that the boys really weren’t going to keep her safe. They had no idea what it was like to be a girl.

  “I think he’s trying to kill me,” Celia said, with fearful simplicity.

  “Float you in the river with so many holes you might drown?” said another street girl who came up to Celia, her hair a bright orange flood in the dusk.

  “Would you want that?” Celia asked her, a girl she had never seen before. Kids came and went: trains, buses, hitchhiking. Many ended up captives, pure and simple, kept like dogs in dirty hotel rooms.

  The girl shrugged. She had pimples on her chin, small fleshy eyes, earlobes like globes of fat. She smiled at Celia, showing a line of mercury teeth. “Anything is better than this,” the girl said, sashaying away, her hips pounding a beat only Celia could hear.

  And then there
was the woman. The one with the glossy tail of hair. Galloping up and down the street, sticking her flyers on telephone poles. Celia saw her and sighed. The woman took whatever fun there was out of the night.

  Chapter 16

  The women’s shelter was called Aspire. The sign was bolted on the side of a building that had seen better days. Pigeons, roosting, had left the brick sides a smeary Jackson Pollock painting of bird droppings. Inside was a familiar sad smell: sweat, sorrow, grief. Naomi passed a large dorm room, empty and waiting for nightfall, the cots tucked hard with green army blankets. A sign-up clipboard for available bunks hung to the side of the door. The last bunk for the night had been claimed by a woman named Laverne.

  In the dayroom Naomi found a table of women playing cards. Whist, from the look of it. One was the skinny bald woman she had seen before, digging through the gutter. She seemed to be in a much better place today, sitting upright, dealing a card. A heavyset woman was at the head of the game, wearing an Aspire shirt. “Game’s full, honey.”

  Naomi showed her license, explaining her cause.

  “I seen your flyers around,” the woman said, dealing another card. “Would have called you if I knew, but there’s not much there. Twenty-five, white? It could be anyone.”

  The other women nodded, sagely. All looked to be in their forties or older and hard-bitten. Naomi told them her story, emphasizing how she was checking to see if her sister had ended up in the city.

  “I don’t know anyone who talked a story like that,” the woman said, taking a drag on a cigarette and putting it down in an overflowing ashtray. “You say you were held in some bunker out in the woods?”

  “I’ve heard shit like that, even worse,” the older bald woman said, serenely.

  “Really?” Naomi turned to her. “Like what?”

  “Yeah, what?” another woman asked.

  “Right here, in this town. Shit you wouldn’t believe. Maybe you would, stay on the streets long enough.”

  “Amen right there, sure enough,” one of the women said, reaching for a card.

  The bald woman looked at her hand. “I heard some creep is taking those girls. Keeps them in some house, cuts them to pieces.”

  Naomi felt her heart pound. “How do you know that?”

  “Men talk. Maybe they smell it on each other. Dogs.”

  “Yeah, uh-huh,” another woman agreed, picking up the communal cigarette and adding her own lipstick stain.

  “Do you know where this house is?”

  “Hell no. You think I want to get my ass anywhere near such craziness? I got enough troubles as it is. Besides, I’m too old for him to take. Thank the Lord.”

  None of the women seemed fazed. One shook her head, passing a card.

  “Who might know more?” Naomi asked.

  “Maybe those little kids he’s taking.” Another drag on the smoke. “Poor babies.”

  Naomi pulled up a chair. “Help me,” she said, smiling.

  The women exchanged looks, laughed. They talked with Naomi until the shelter manager stubbed out her final smoke and said the fun was over, it was time to turn down the beds. Turning down the beds, Naomi found out, meant checking in the long line of women who had appeared outside. No weapons, no pets, no drugs. There was a line of battered lockers for locking up the knives, sharpened screwdrivers, and other self-defense tools the women carried.

  Naomi followed, helping as best she could. “I’m curious about a man I’ve seen around,” she said, describing the scar-faced man.

  “Oh, I’ve seen him,” the manager said, pulling a stack of the olive green army blankets out of a locker and handing it to a short woman behind her, beaten by time.

  “You have?” Naomi asked.

  “Sure. Major creep if you ask me. Seen him loitering around. There’s not much we can do about the pimps and rapists hanging outside. Scratch that. There’s nothing we can do.”

  In the dorm room women were milling around and sitting on the edges of their beds. One of the volunteers who had been playing cards circulated with tiny paper cups of juice and packets of donated cookies. Baskets of high-demand items—sanitary napkins and face wipes—sat on tables at the edges of the room. One per day, handwritten signs said. The women seemed relaxed, as if the stress of the streets was rising off their shoulders.

  “You come back, in the morning,” the manager said, shutting the locker. “We unlock the doors then and the women leave. Ten dollars you’ll see some pimp in a car, thinking he can grab the woman he was beating and get her back in the fold. Or you go outside right now, when the women line up. It’s like open season out there.” There was bitterness and hurt in her voice. “That’s why we lock the doors every night. To keep us safe. Lord help me, though, sometimes I want to go out there and give them payback. But then I’d be the one in jail. I got a friend doing life for killing her pimp.”

  Naomi thought of the river, wide and deep. She thought of the girl she had seen pulled out by the bridge. “If there was a place close by where someone wanted to throw a body in the river and not be seen, where would it be?” she asked.

  “The industrial area, at the old docks,” the woman answered immediately. She smiled at Naomi. “I grew up here. I was an honor student, back in my day.” The smile vanished. “Then one of those pimps caught me. Made me feel loved for the first time, and it was all a lie.”

  “One more question—”

  “Time for me to lock the doors, honey.” Behind them in the dorm the women were laughing. One had put a pillowcase on her shoulders as some sort of cape and was telling a story.

  “There are children out there. Aren’t there any shelters for them?” Naomi’s voice was pleading.

  The manager stopped. She shook her head.

  “Why not?” Naomi asked.

  “I think it’s a legal thing,” the woman answered. “The city would be responsible. There’s some shelters for older youth. But not for the younger ones. Little kids, why, they leave the shelter and get killed or raped, the city’s got a lawsuit on their hands. Easier to just pretend they don’t exist.” She paused. “Maybe we’re afraid to admit they’re there. What that says about us.”

  “I appreciate what you do,” Naomi said, somberly.

  The woman looked surprised. “I appreciate you, too, honey.”

  Naomi stepped outside, hearing the door close for the night behind her. In the distance she heard a bird. Finch, she thought automatically. Even here. It made her long for the clean crispness of a farm field at dawn, or the trail through the woods you know will loop and return to safety. But she could smell the river, and was struck for the first time that the city, too, had its own beauty.

  Down the street, a group of street kids had gathered in the dusk. The little girl Naomi had run to save by the library was sitting among them, the big boy next to her.

  Chapter 17

  “Here she comes,” Rich said, and one of the other kids picked it up into song: “Miss America . . .”

  “Her tits ain’t big enough,” Stoner said.

  “Ha! Caught you looking,” Rich answered.

  “She’s better-looking than that creepy guy Celia keeps seeing, the one with the scars.”

  The kids fell silent as the woman approached. To Celia, sitting at the curb, Naomi looked tall enough to touch the stars. Her shiny head was Orion, sparkling in the sky. At least she had made the scar-faced man disappear. He had vanished from the corner.

  “Well, hello!” She smiled at everyone.

  Celia looked at her nice shoes. They were leather and laced up the front, with low walking soles. Thick. Comfortable-looking. Celia spit on the sidewalk, close enough to those shoes to make a point.

  “Fuck, Celia, that’s harsh,” Rich said. He stood up, smiling at the pretty woman. “That’s no way to treat someone.” Celia turned away. “I’m sorry for my friend here,” Rich said.

  Celia made a small noise of contempt. Her face felt hot with embarrassment. All the other kids were looking at her like she was
an asshole.

  “I’m looking for my sister,” Naomi was telling the others.

  “We saw the flyers,” Stoner offered.

  Celia’s eyes secretly traveled up the trousers, past the sturdy middle, saw the underside of her soft chin, the planes of her face. So this was the woman who had written the flyer in the annex of Sisters of Mercy. Tell her I am sorry, the flyer had said. I miss her.

  The street kids looked at one another, shrugged. No one knew anything.

  “Don’t know a thing. I’d tell you if I did,” Rich offered, gallantly. “No one should lose their sister.”

  Celia got up, walked away.

  Celia walked until she found herself at the church at the top of downtown. The evening bells were ringing. The streets looked clean, swept by the rain brooms of God. Celia had been to no kind of church, ever, except for the one that mattered, and that was the church of the butterflies.

  They flew around her, even now. Butterflies are emissaries of God, her mother had said, that fateful day before the flood of darkness came over them both. Every country has butterflies, she had said. There is no place you can go without butterflies.

  “Not even the deserts, Momma?”

  “Not even. The sagebrush checkerspot lives there.”

  “You know a lot about butterflies, Momma.”

  “I wanted to be a lepidopterist, when I was young.”

  “What happened, Momma?”

  No answer, the words taken by time. But Celia could swear that she had learned about butterflies deep within her mother’s womb. Her mother had fed them to Celia with her own blood, and when she was born, the sack was pulsating with them, so the doctor stood back, astounded as she erupted, covered with wings.