The Butterfly Girl

by Rene Denfeld

  Those butterflies had flown away, but Celia knew. They were emissaries of God.

  She climbed the steps of the church, and a man stood at the top, smiling at her. He handed her a pamphlet, though Celia probably stank. Inside most of the pews were empty. At the booths on the side, Celia was told, she could confess. But Celia didn’t want God to forgive her. She wanted life to forgive her, and she didn’t even know why. She walked deeper into the church and smelled the old incense, the warm cloth of people. Their skins, their hopes, their sins. She looked up to the altar and asked the white figure on the cross, Did God bring butterflies to you, too? Did your mother hold her hands over your eyes, and count, and whisper?

  When Celia got back, Naomi was gone. No one talked about her. It was as if she didn’t exist. The day people were like that. If this was hell, they were in heaven, and they peeked around the clouds to look down at the others, then flew away like unconcerned angels.

  She found Stoner and Rich in the dumpster behind the Greek restaurant. The tall girl with the phone told her where to look. The owner of the Greek restaurant refused to spray his dumpster with Raid or pour bleach on the food. The business association was trying to make him, but the old man said no, his people knew what it was to go hungry.

  Unfortunately, everyone else knew about the dumpster, so usually it was picked over. But tonight, Stoner had found a foil tray of crusty moussaka, and this he was eating by the palmful. Rich nuzzled from an empty yogurt container. He had been licking it, and there was now white yogurt under his chin. Celia didn’t say what it looked like. The world was gross, sometimes.

  “Hey, let me,” Celia bossed, and Stoner passed her the tray. Celia scooped a piece out with her dirty fingers, ate. It tasted really good. She bet it would taste even better heated up. Once a month at school lunch, they’d had international day, and the food had tasted this good.

  In the alley entryway a bum appeared, shambling like a scarecrow. The street kids gave him the eye. He gave them the finger in return but left. First come, first served was street law. The street people were hungry for rules, thought Celia, maybe because the rest of their lives were so lawless. Sometimes the older kids formed hard-edged street families with laws of their own. Celia stayed away. She’d had enough law to last her a lifetime.

  The streetlights flickered. It was getting too dark to see. Their shifting feet made crunching sounds in the alley. Stoner and Rich and Celia ate the moussaka until it was all gone and their bellies hurt. It made Celia think of how caterpillars can eat two hundred times their own weight. That was Celia, eating until her thorax expanded.

  Celia had once heard a story of a girl who escaped the streets and gained so much weight she couldn’t move. Celia thought maybe that was one of those made-up stories. But it made sense to her. If she had all the food in the world, she might eat it, too. But unlike that girl she would eventually stop, put her arms over her own face, curl into a ball, and rest until spring, when she could be born anew.

  Chapter 18

  Naomi, having barely made up with Jerome, felt she was sliding on an ice cap that ended at his shoulder. She woke in the same bed with him, but though they lay close together, there was a distance that had never been there before.

  Rising quietly so as to not awaken him, she considered her conviction that her sister was alive. But how could she know that if she couldn’t even remember her name? Her mind skittered uncomfortably away from this thought.

  It was very early. Outside, the birds were quiet. The dark sky lay over the city like a silent blanket. Naomi wondered where Celia and the other street kids slept at night.

  * * *

  Naomi met Sean Richardson from the Feds in a café on the first floor of his building. He had called asking to see her. From their table Naomi watched the businesspeople pass, always in a hurry. She thought of the homeless on skid row, only blocks away and yet in a completely different world.

  “Are you always so quiet?” Richardson asked, sipping his coffee. “I had always heard you were super friendly. Big smile and all.”

  “The past year took it out of me,” Naomi admitted.

  Richardson noted the ring on her finger, didn’t say anything. His own hand was as lonely as his heart. Some people didn’t know how lucky they were. “I got a call from the medical examiner,” he said. “He told me in a few minutes of examination you were able to pick up something neither he nor my team noticed.”

  Naomi took another sip of her coffee.

  “Their feet were soft,” she explained. “Even children show wear on their feet from daily use. Corns, calluses, broken nails. None of those girls had walked for weeks.”

  His brown eyes looked pained. “Anything else?”

  Naomi paused for only a moment. She decided to take a risk. “I heard about a house where the girls might be kept before they are killed. I don’t know where it is—yet.”

  Outside the crowds were dwindling. Everyone had scurried inside the buildings where they worked, which Naomi now imagined as giant hives, the workers nesting bees.

  “And you?” Naomi asked. “Has your man on the ground found anything?”

  He shook his head. “I’m thinking of hiring one of those profilers.”

  “You guys really don’t learn, do you?”

  He flushed. His brown eyes were on her. “Do you think this has something to do with your sister? All this time?”

  Naomi was staring at him, as if he were a grim reaper.

  “Breakfast?” Naomi stuck her head in Winfield’s door.

  They went to his favorite deli at the top of downtown. The food was crap, but the waitresses comped Winfield’s meals. Naomi noticed a group of street kids in one booth—Celia was not among them—and wondered how long such kids had been in plain sight and she had not noticed them. Winfield ordered a Denver omelet while Naomi asked for a tofu scramble.

  His eyebrows went up at that. “Didn’t know you for a tofu gal.”

  “I’m trying something new, spark my appetite.”

  Winfield added three sugars to his coffee, looked over his cup. The Naomi he had known had the appetite of a truck driver.

  “This city is a hell of a mess,” Naomi said after the food arrived and she took a small, curious bite. They were in Winfield’s favorite booth, the window shielded, easy access to both the front and back doors. Winfield was safety conscious like that. When he walked with her down the street, he ambled at her side like a bear. She thought it was silly. What could he protect her from?

  Winfield shook hot sauce over his omelet. “You must be hanging out on skid row.”

  “It isn’t a row anymore, it’s a mile,” Naomi said. She explained what the woman at Aspire had said about the lack of shelters for children. Her eyes kept glancing at the street kids as she spoke.

  “That what you want to talk about?” Winfield said, scooping food into his mouth and quickly wiping. The Naomi he knew also didn’t waste time on what she couldn’t fix. She kept her eye on the prize. Naomi reminded Winfield of the parable of the starfish: A man, out on the beach one day, stopped to find a boy throwing starfish back into the sea. There were hundreds of starfish washed up on the beach, and the man explained to the boy he couldn’t save them all. “I can save one,” the boy replied.

  “I want to know if my sister is in the state mental hospital,” Naomi said. “It would explain why I can’t find her.”

  Winfield wanted to point out that maybe Naomi couldn’t find her sister because she didn’t even know her name. But Winfield knew this was how investigations were solved, one small step at a time. “I can call down there for you, ask,” he said.

  “I’d rather visit in person. Can you get me clearance? It takes longer if I try.”

  “Sure.” Like a lot of cops, Winfield ate like there was a timer in the room. Naomi once used to beat him to the bell, but not anymore. She pushed her plate aside.

  “Not good?”

  “Just not very hungry lately.”

  Yes, something
was wrong with Naomi. The waitress came to take their plates. She smiled. Winfield put down some dollar bills for a tip.

  “Something else bothering you, child finder?” he asked, rising heavily.

  “Just the usual,” Naomi replied sardonically. Her sister was missing. Wasn’t that enough?

  “The world is full of heartache,” the detective said. Naomi could see the sadness he bore, too. “You got to carve out some happiness for yourself. Otherwise it will take you down.”

  Naomi nodded, looking away.

  “Saw your husband the other day,” Winfield added as they headed out. He held the heavy door open for her, eyes scanning the street.

  “Where?”

  “Down at the licensing agency. He was asking after being an investigator, like you.”

  He saw her face. She hadn’t known.

  Naomi found a note from Jerome on the kitchen counter. Raised in the country without cell service, they had the habit of leaving notes for each other instead of sending text messages.

  Gone to the firing range, the note said. Jerome’s truck—adapted for driving with one arm—was gone from outside, and the house was empty. Walking heavily up the narrow stairs to their guest room, she saw his holster was no longer over the chair.

  Carrying a gun never worked for Naomi. Whenever she wore one, her leads dried up, and witnesses refused to talk. She could swear people could smell it on her. For her a gun was a small object that fired wildly, threatened fewer than it should, silenced the good witnesses and emboldened the bad. She preferred to use her hands. She had extensive self-defense training and stayed in good shape. She had had some close calls, but so far it had worked.

  Sitting at the end of the bed, Naomi looked around the room. She remembered the times over the years she had shown up here, exhausted from travel, and Diane had taken her in, let her spend a night or two, and hugged her wordlessly when she left. Here was where Naomi had left her heart. The walls were covered with cards sent by the families of children she had saved. Thank-you notes and How are you doing, child finder? Concern in their voices for her. The kids could always tell. She remembered the soft touch of one girl, looking up at her and knowing.

  “I hope you don’t get lost,” the girl had said.

  Lost. You can be lost even when you’ve been found. You can make the wrong turn in life even if you’re surrounded by people who love you. That was what suicide was, Naomi figured. It was choosing the final exit instead of another path. Not because you wanted to hurt anyone, but because you feel too hopeless to find your way home. There was more than one kind of suicide, too, more than one kind of leaving. How many people spend their entire lives not even knowing that they have already left?

  She leaned over, sighing. Diane and Jerome were right. The past year she had stopped even thinking about anyone else. All she had cared about was finding her sister. When Jerome came back, they would talk about their future. She would tell him she thought it was a good idea for him to get his investigator license. He could help her, and still make some money on his own cases.

  And they would talk about her stopping running, at least for the time.

  * * *

  Diane spent her days saying good-bye to the past. She figured this was what lonely people did, and since she had done everything in her life with gusto—from being a short-order cook to put herself through college to running a treatment center for emotionally disturbed teenagers—she had decided to do lonely well, too.

  She went to the train station with the clock tower and ordered a cosmopolitan in the adjoining jazz lounge, which looked unchanged since the ’40s. That was in memory of her dear mother, who had once nurtured a dream of being a jazz singer but instead became a pediatrician. She went to the Chinese gardens where she had met her first and only love, a woman named Marsha. Then she drove into the west hills to visit the Japanese gardens, where they had watched the koi on the day when Marsha told her that she was going to die. That had been over twenty years before, she reflected now. On the way down she stopped at the high concrete aqueduct known as the suicide bridge, the site of one of her greatest regrets. There a teenage patient named Daniel had swan-dived to his death.

  But getting back in her car Diane realized she was being silly. This wasn’t how she wanted to spend her final years—being alone. There would be enough loneliness after death, she figured. She would go home and tell Naomi that she wanted her, and Jerome, to stay. They could make a family. It wouldn’t be the most ordinary family, but it was something.

  Diane turned her key in the door. Jerome and Naomi sat close together on the couch, waiting for her. Naomi was trembling, ever so slightly. Diane could see it in the hand holding the teapot.

  A cup was waiting for her.

  “That wasn’t what I expected,” Diane told her evening mirror, later. She could see the fine crepe under her eyes. She picked up the hairbrush on the vanity. She seldom used it: it had been her mother’s. She inspected a strand of silver hair in it, wondering if it was hers.

  She remembered the last days of Marsha’s death from liver cancer, when she had become delirious, breaking vases, trying to attack Diane. The hospice nurses had to wrap her hands in thick mittens to keep her from clawing out her own eyes. Marsha had died right here, in this house, in a hospital cot set up in the living room. Diane had never regretted it. It was a precious thing, to say an intimate good-bye.

  “We want to stay here, with you, if you will have us,” Naomi had said, and Diane had seen the flutter in her throat, and how Jerome had turned to look at his wife as if a miracle had happened.

  Chapter 19

  The librarian kept stacks of scrap paper—soft pink, yellow, plain white—in a small wood box on her desk next to a cup of stubby pencils. Celia took a handful of the paper, looking at the librarian to see if it was too much, but the woman only smiled. Celia carried the paper and pencil and her favorite book to her favorite chair, upstairs in the big room, where the light came in the windows no matter how hard it rained.

  Most of the time she drew butterflies—long, magical butterflies, with trailing wings and otherwordly eyes. But other times she drew her sister, tracing her face as if to remember it always. When Celia drew her sister, or anyone she loved, she added butterflies: all over their shoulders, sprouting from their eyebrows. Even the tiny dot inside the eye became a single, precious beast. In this way the butterflies were the people she loved and the people she loved were free.

  When she was done with the drawings, Celia slid them into her favorite book. It was the only safe place she knew to keep them. They would get wet under the overpass and lost on the streets.

  Celia knew it was hard to find safe places. The most unsafe places were the cars and the beds of any man. Alleys and dark tunnels. Any place where she could be trapped. The secret to survival was a map inside her mind, where Celia was always trying, like a butterfly, to find the right place to land. But there seemed to be no such place.

  It was cold under the overpass when Celia awoke the next morning, and she felt a stinging sensation on her leg. She lifted her jeans to see a large, raised red spider bite. She knew it was a spider because the insect had gotten squished against the cloth. Probably she had rolled on it when it bit her.

  “Is this a black widow?” Celia asked, pulling the jean cloth inside out.

  “Looks like a black smear to me,” Stoner said. Rich peered closer. All of them had seen street kids with bad wounds from infected rat and insect bites. Celia vividly remembered one girl who got a cockroach stuck in her ear while sleeping in an abandoned house. Her screaming carried for blocks.

  “I hear you can bathe in bleach and it kills germs,” Stoner said.

  “You say that all the time,” Celia said.

  “Well, it’s true. You just have to dilute it.”

  “I don’t have a bathtub.”

  “I guess you could do it in the river.”

  Celia and Rich looked at Stoner like he was insane. He blushed. He bit his thick li
ps, looked away, hoped they would drop it. They did. Celia limped to standing. Maybe if she walked it off the pain would go away.

  “I’ll go with you to the free clinic,” Rich offered.

  The free clinic was at the top of skid row, along the park blocks where the city police were always tearing down the tents the homeless families put up. Celia and Rich sat on the slashed seats for hours, waiting to be seen. The doctors there were nice, but did it matter?

  Her stomach felt like a cave, and she was dizzy from hunger when she finally got called back to the exam room. For some reason she kept thinking of peanuts, and the salty taste flooded her mouth at the thought of one. If she had a peanut, she would suck on it for like an hour.

  Celia had been in the free clinic before. That had been for an STD check. Celia didn’t want to get pregnant or get STDs. She was worried about her period starting because then it would mean she could have a baby, and she already had one—her sister. She had told the doctor all this while filling her pockets with the free condoms, not understanding why his face looked so sad.

  Day people.

  The doctor was a tall, skinny man with black curly hair, like Stoner grown up, only with a small round potbelly under his white jacket, which already had smears and stains from other patients. He smelled like Juicy Fruit gum. He looked at Celia’s leg, at the red raised circle around the spider bite and the hole in the middle. She showed him the dead squished spider. “I left it there so you could see it,” she said proudly.

  She read his name tag as he leaned over. dr. alex lopez, it said, and she thought of the scar-faced man and his nameless blue jacket.

  “Well, I don’t think it’s a recluse or widow,” he said doubtfully, looking at the squished bug. He cleaned the bite and wrapped it with a clean bandage that would be filthy or lost within a day. He shook his head as she left, knowing he would make the mandated report call, and the recording about yet another homeless child on the streets would enter whatever endless system stored them, for a caseworker to find next week or next month. Even when they picked the kids up, they had nowhere to take them. The doctor had heard about kids sleeping in child welfare offices, on the floor.