The Butterfly Girl

by Rene Denfeld

  Celia was puzzled. If Naomi cared so much about children, why did she keep walking by?

  Celia watched Naomi walk away. Naomi didn’t know it, but she was covered with butterflies. They swarmed all over her, attaching to her new clothes, making them as old as time. She would carry them inside the free clinic, and the tall skinny doctor who looked like Stoner, all grown up with a belly, would not see them either. But they would be there, waiting to comfort her when Naomi heard the doctor say he knew nothing, nothing, nothing.

  That was the thing about the butterflies. They could be kind when Celia felt bitter. They could encompass all the beauty of this world even when the skies smarted gray and the old men pulled up at the curb, their dicks already in their hands. Celia closed her mind against the men and went to find the other kids. See ya, Celia, the butterflies said. Celia lifted her small hand and waved good-bye.

  Stoner had found a piece of cardboard and written Homeless please help on it with a black marker pen he borrowed from the woman who ran Aspire. Stoner had wanted to get a red pen and make it look like he had written in blood. “That’ll get them,” he had said, but Rich and Celia told him that was stupid; it would just scare the day people.

  That had started a truth-telling session where all the street kids started talking about chicken hawks and creeps who had invited them home, and all the weird shit they wanted—the girl with the phone talked about a guy who insisted she fuck him up the ass with his electric toothbrush. That got everyone laughing so hard they fell off the sidewalk. Celia laughed until her stomach hurt. Stoner held up one finger and made a buzz-buzz sound, and that cracked them up all over again.

  Then Celia saw Naomi walking back along the other side of the street. She looked sad.

  Celia must have been staring at her because Stoner said something. “Got the hots for her?” Stoner asked, teasing.

  “No.” Celia glowered at him.

  “Celia’s got the hots for the church lady.”

  “She’s not a church lady.”

  “Oh—what is she then?”

  Celia looked at the pavement while the other kids laughed. Rich looked at her, concerned. But Stoner frowned. “Hey, you’re not thinking she’s the one, are you?”

  Celia stared down, blushing furiously. She could feel the blood pouring to her cheeks. Rich looked on the verge of saying something, but then pulled back.

  “Come on, Celia, you know better than that,” Stoner said. “No one down here is going to be your mommy.”

  “I—” Celia didn’t know what to say. She looked helplessly at her feet.

  “Just don’t even think it,” Stoner emphasized.

  “You’re not, are you?” asked the girl with the phone. “I’ve been on the streets a long time, since I was ten. No one is coming to save you. You better get rid of that shitty thinking fast.”

  “That’s enough,” Rich interrupted. “She got the point.”

  “I hope so!” the girl said. She gave Celia a kinder look. “You’re only twelve, right? You got time. Make a plan, like me.”

  “What’s your plan?” Celia’s voice was muted.

  “I’m going to survive until I’m sixteen. Then I’m going to hitch to Alaska and work the canneries there. You can get a work permit at sixteen. I got it all figured out.” She spoke with authority.

  “If you’re so smart, help me with this sign,” Stoner said, and the conversation resumed. Celia snuck a glance up the street. Naomi was gone.

  Chapter 22

  Naomi was driving to the state mental hospital. Jerome was at home, studying for his license test. Naomi liked the idea of each of them doing their own thing. Maybe the last year had brought a little too much togetherness.

  The radio was playing the top news story of the day: the FBI had retrieved the bodies of four girls from the dock area. Special Agent Richardson, the man on public radio said, was being closemouthed about details, but a reporter had heard the girls were all prostitutes. The newscaster said this like it was a relief.

  Naomi reached for the dial, turned it off.

  The old Datsun was without air-conditioning, but she liked the wind rolling in the window, blowing her hair. Once, Jerome had asked why she never wore her hair up. Reflecting, Naomi had realized that she liked her hair being down because it felt like she was moving even when she was standing still.

  The bucket seats were comfy, and the car smelled of long trips. For many years it had been her house on wheels. For almost ten years, in fact. She had kept everything she needed in the trunk, moving from case to case, never staying in one place for long. She had become an expert at finding cheap hotels, eating on the road, and doing her laundry at massive truck stops that always seemed to be playing Steely Dan.

  Ahead of her, a turn off the freeway. What was once a horrendous big pink building was now a sweet calm gray, and the rest of the new mental hospital unfolded across manicured lawns and pleasant open walking areas. It was still a prison, and there were still barbed curls of razor wire on the fences and armed guards inside. But the state mental hospital was vastly improved since the days it had inspired movies like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

  She parked in a lot where families left cars, the newer visitors carrying cards, the more experienced with bags of change for the vending machines.

  The prune-voiced lead psychiatrist was talking to Naomi. “Oregon statute allows the commitment of anyone posing a threat,” he intoned. I know that, Naomi thought with annoyance, trotting after him, but she didn’t say anything. She wanted his cooperation. They passed the visiting room, and Naomi dodged tables to follow his rapid, frenetic pace. The families were entering, saying hellos to the men and women at the tables.

  She followed his back into their main office, thankfully cooled by a fan. The psychiatrist had a receding high hairline, a rind of colorless hair, a humorless mouth. Astonishing in all this were some of the most caring eyes she had ever seen. The eyes changed his face, made it mobile, human. “Most of our patients were convicted of crimes,” he said. “But most of those are minor offenses, like public urination or disturbing the peace. It’s a shame they have to get arrested to get treatment.”

  Naomi sat down heavily in the chair across from his desk. She felt her anxiety run out of her. “I’m looking for my sister,” she began, and went on to explain the little she knew.

  To her deep surprise, in a few minutes he frowned and said, “She might be here.”

  Later it was like a dream in slow motion. Naomi had walked into a dayroom to find a young woman looking bewildered at being abruptly summoned from her room. She wore the blue smock and pants of the patients, her yellowish hair cut to her shoulders. Her clean skin spoke of decent living, but her eyes were dull. They fixated on Naomi with a question in them, and the question was one for a stranger.

  Naomi found the back of a chair with her hand. “We call her Deirdre,” the psychiatrist had said, “because it means ‘the sorrowful one.’”

  She was in her twenties and fit all the descriptors. Deirdre had been found wandering around a lake in the mountains not far from where Naomi had been found. She had twigs in her hair, a fearful expression on her face, and her mouth was stained with blackberries. From the softness of her body, investigators believed she had been fed, and kept. But where she had come from, no one could figure.

  Initially they assumed Deirdre was suffering from selective mutism, the result of severe trauma. It was only after a series of neurological exams that they realized that Deirdre had brain damage. At some point Deirdre had almost died from drowning. Her body worked. Her mind did not. She remembered people and had mastered rudimentary sign language. But she could not say where she had been.

  Interviews of everyone who lived near the lake had found no one willing to take responsibility for the young woman, and eventually the police decided she had been dumped. She could have been driven from anywhere. A civil commitment judge had sent her to the state hospital. Her favorite thing to do was play with the cards
others used for games. Her favorite thing to drink was chocolate milk.

  Naomi held on to the chair as her legs buckled, and looked into the wide face. Are you my sister? she wanted to ask.

  The psychiatrist watched, consumed with a professional interest. Once he had helped twins reunite after being separated their entire lives. The men had known it instantly, crying and hugging. Nothing like this encounter.

  “Deirdre, this woman thinks she might be your sister,” the doctor said, making the sign for sister off his chin.

  Deirdre looked at Naomi and frowned.

  “Is there anything you want to ask her?” the psychiatrist asked Naomi.

  “I want to know if she remembers . . . being underground,” Naomi said, taking a deep breath. Her cheeks pinked. Her eyes teared up, looking at the floor. “I want to know if she remembers me singing about the sweet chariot.”

  A hand touched her. It was soft and impersonal. Deirdre was looking right at her, into her. No, she shook her head.

  “Thank you,” Naomi whispered, her voice strangled. The psychiatrist smiled at Deirdre. He looked at Naomi with sympathy. “I’m sorry for all you went through,” he said. “The both of you—wherever she is, too.”

  Naomi left, running for her car. She saved the tears for the drive home.

  * * *

  Once, when Naomi was in community college, studying criminal law, a woman who had survived a terrible flood came to talk. She talked about the waters coming over their lands when she was a child, and how she climbed to the roof of their barn, hoping to survive. Days later, rescue workers found her blistered with sun. The waters had receded, revealing the tops of the trees in their yard, and tangled in the branches of those trees were large pillows.

  Only they weren’t pillows. She realized years later those were her parents.

  The other students had questioned the woman, the fear obvious on their own faces. What if we are all capable of lying to ourselves? But the story didn’t bother Naomi. Instead it reassured her, confirming that the stories we tell ourselves have more meaning than the facts. That doesn’t make them lies. Seeded with every myth was the emotional truth.

  Chapter 23

  “Can you come home?”

  It was Alyssa whispering over a nighttime phone. Celia stood straight, felt the fear rush right up her back to the sky.

  She was on the row with the others, watching the cars circle like so many metal vultures. The girl with the phone had brought it to her. Celia, breathless with anxiety, thought it was her mom, calling the last number back. “Yeah?”

  But it was Alyssa, of the soft little voice. She was sobbing, quietly, that swallowed kind of crying that Celia knew too well, that broken-voiced whisper that reminded her of bed slats and the cry of the wind late at night.

  “Please come.”

  Teddy was in the background, yelling for her to give over the fucking phone. Celia could remember the sounds of Teddy’s rage carrying out the open windows. She remembered the slammed windows of other houses, the waiting for the dialing for help, the police cars and the heavy knock on the door. Her mother, wiping her cheeks with her hands, giving fearful glances to Teddy, and Teddy opening the door to the police with a regretful smile on his face. All was well here, sir. Never mind the girl hiding in the corner, and the woman sitting on the couch, scratching her arms to ragged sores with desperation and fear.

  “Did he hurt you?” Celia asked, and this was the thousand-dollar question.

  “Yes—I,” her sister answered, and Celia closed her eyes. She saw herself bounding there on huge dragon feet, smashing the house with her claw hand and reaching in to rescue her sister.

  “I have to take the bus,” she promised Alyssa. “I’ll be there.”

  It was midnight when the last bus finally crawled down their street, and Celia got off, knowing she was stuck out here for the night. She ran up the street, seeing how dark the house was now, the hulking shape of Teddy’s truck parked outside, the teamster sticker in the back window. The wind moved through the long grass of the yard, and from inside she heard . . . nothing. A tick of silence. Far away an owl called.

  Creeping through the long grass, Celia slid up alongside her sister’s bedroom window. It was the bedroom that once belonged to Celia. The same bed, even, filled with sickness. Sometimes Celia thought the mattress was forever wet with the pollution he left. Teddy.

  She scratched at the window. Nothing. Pulling her hands along the aluminum seams, Celia felt for the metal runners. She was an expert now at popping cheap windows out of their metal frames.

  Her sister unlatched the window, slid it open a bare inch. “Celia?” It was a whisper, and relieved, Celia collapsed against the side of the house.

  “Alyssa? You okay?” she breathed.

  “I’m okay.” The whisper was calmer now. “You should leave.”

  “I came all this way.”

  “I know.” Both of them breathed in the night. Celia could smell the inside of the room through the open window, and her nose prickled at the aroma. No.

  “He’s doing it to you,” she said, her heart breaking inside.

  A sniffle, and a wipe of the nose. “You should go. He’s going to hear you.”

  “Where’s Mom?”

  “You know.” The image of a couch hung between them.

  “You don’t have to stay.”

  “Where would I go?” Her sister’s voice was so young. “The teachers say I’m smart. I don’t want to live on the streets. Like you.”

  I was smart, too, Celia thought. But not smart enough. The familiar smell coming from inside the room was stronger now, and Celia’s heart dissolved in pain. The smell of sadness and fear and what a man did because of all that. The juice of hate.

  “You can tell someone,” she whispered, closing her eyes, knowing that was crazy; no one would believe Alyssa, especially now. They would say Celia had talked her into it. She reached out, stroked the rough siding like it was her sister, there on the other side of the—

  A sound in the grass behind her and suddenly he was there, taller than the night and angrier than the sky, his head above her, and he was swinging at her as she howled in pain. “Caught you, you bitch!” Teddy yelled, and Celia burst into tears as Alyssa did, too, in sympathy. Celia was being shaken by her stepdad, smelling his angry fish breath, seeing how much he wanted to bite her—it was one of her biggest fears, being bitten, and she remembered afresh how he would play those ugly teeth against her childhood nipples and threaten to do just that. “You’d like that, you’d like that,” he would say—

  He swung her hard against the side of the house. The air escaped her lungs when her head cracked against the wood. She fell to her knees into the grass, dimly aware that the spider bite on her leg was bleeding.

  A neighbor’s back porch light flashed on. “Don’t make me call the cops on you, fucking creep!” someone yelled, and Teddy’s arm stopped above her, raised like a sword.

  Instead he flipped her over, falling down on his knees, too, and Celia felt him, hard against her like a dog. No, not right here, she thought, and felt that long arm reach around and pin her stomach against her spine so she couldn’t breathe. His voice was coarse in her ear. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you, ugly little bitch.”

  Celia tried to breathe. He wouldn’t. He would. His other hand came around, to grab her throat, and all of the horror of the world stole over her. The sky was turning black. He was whispering, talking to her, telling her all sorts of secrets. On the other side of the wall Alyssa was sobbing, and Celia was making her promise in her mind to not listen. Go someplace else, Alyssa, she thought. Think of the butterflies.

  He stopped. Other lights were turning on. Celia came to, slowly, hearing the tap of his breath, becoming aware of her own limbs. She wasn’t dead after all. She wormed out of his hold and stood up, feeling his grossness all over her body, imprinted through her clothes. He stood, too, looking strangely shamed in the night. On the other side of the wall Celia could
hear Alyssa sobbing. She was pleading, under her breath, saying, “Don’t hurt my sister, I will do anything.”

  Celia breathed into the night. Her throat burned. She felt herself coming back, heard the murmur of voices, the secrets he had told. Suddenly she knew. Bending over, swept with nausea, she spoke:

  “I wasn’t the first,” she said. “You hurt other girls. You made my mom an addict, just so you could have me. It wasn’t the first time either, you fucking disease.”

  “You don’t know shit, Celia.” He wiped his mouth.

  “I do know! You raped me! Now you’re raping my sister! You are a fucking rapist.” The last came as a shout, and around the neighborhood a silence fell. All the murderous rage of Celia’s life was coming out now, she was boiling and she didn’t care, she was going to run, run, from this horrible man and this terrible life.

  “I am not a liar,” Celia screamed into the night.

  Two

  Chrysalis

  Chapter 24

  It was early Monday morning, and that meant Naomi arrived at the boxing gym before it opened. She snuck up to the broad glass to make sure it was empty, and then retreated to her car to watch for the mysterious Ray. If he was the same scar-faced man she had seen downtown, she wanted to keep her distance. To start.

  She drank the coffee resting in her console, ate a granola bar without tasting it.

  Ten minutes before the place was due to open, a group of teenagers showed up and sat politely outside on a piece of concrete barrier. One rose, looked in the dark window, gestured down the street at a Jack in the Box. The others rose to follow him.

  A hulking figure walked across the street, towards the gym. From the angle Naomi couldn’t see his face. He wore a baseball cap, pulled tight over his temples, and had his collar turned up. His walk was sloping, almost jerking. Nerve damage, Naomi thought. She put down the granola bar, reached for the door handle.