by Rene Denfeld
But the cops seemed to know. They pushed Stoner into the back of the car, cuffed. In a moment they were driving off, Stoner’s curly hair visible through the window. The kids could hear him yelling from inside the car.
“Where do you think he’s going?” Celia asked Rich after coming down from the clouds. She realized several minutes had passed. Rich had been watching her, curiously.
“Juvie, I bet,” Rich said. “Maybe he’ll get some help now.”
Celia looked at him, sideways. It had never occurred to her that Stoner needed help. Or that any of them might get it.
Celia awoke under the overpass, her mind as smooth as stone. Only the butterflies were there, caressing her awake just as they had carried her to sleep.
She had never told anyone about the butterflies. She knew people would shake their heads, like she was being stupid. Girls like her were damaged, broken, not worthy of the butterflies. Even the victim advocate in court had acted like Celia was slime you could wipe up, but the stain would remain. When the victim advocate had said Celia could move on to a good life, the lie on her mouth never reached her eyes.
But Naomi—she was different. Naomi wasn’t afraid of what had happened to Celia. She acted like Celia wasn’t broken at all. Which was funny, because when Celia was around Naomi, she didn’t feel broken either.
Celia turned over. Rich lay next to her. He opened his eyes, and the two of them just looked at each other, for the longest time.
* * *
In the butterfly museum, Celia knew, nothing dead is allowed. Inside the museum is the soft velvet of plants, the smell of moisture and the lick of leaves. The rooms there hum with spirits, and they are like a movement you can feel but not hear. There is the soft crunching of leaves, the spiraling crawl of the caterpillars, and the soft dusky noises of the instars inside their shells.
In the butterfly museum the butterflies flit from plant to plant, moving their majestic wings in absolute, pure peace. There are no predators there. You can go in, and the butterflies will accept you. You can stand in the middle of the rooms, among all the basking plants, the fruitful air, and you will be one of them. If you hold very still, they will come to you. They will land on your arms, and your head, and, yes, even your cheeks, and they will touch you like you are the most tender piece of fruit or the sweetest pollen of any flower.
You will know then. All their life they have been waiting for you.
Chapter 28
“I might have found something,” Jerome told his friend Ed Ashtree.
Jerome had driven down to see him. It was only a few hours out of the city but a world apart, in the chilly coastal ranges. He had found Ed chopping wood at his house, an unfriendly-looking manufactured home in a gully, damp with stunted trees, festooned with moss. “This is a bad country,” Jerome remembered a chief had said of this inhospitable land over a century before, after his people had been forced to march here. “It is cold and sickly. There is no game on the hills and the people are dying.”
Ed, sixty-two years old with a seamed face, had befriended Jerome on his first trip to the reservation a few years before. Standing in the tiny library, Jerome had looked lost. Ed, recognizing a fellow Kalapuya from his features, offered greetings.
“What?” Ed asked, yanking the axe out of the stump. The wood was so rotten it split at a touch. The damp got in everything here.
Jerome explained the bundle tied in the tree. “It’s in a white oak tree, in what used to be our people’s country.”
Jerome felt comfortable with Ed, in a way he had never felt before with anyone else. That first day, wandering around the reservation, Jerome had realized he was seeing other natives. It was a feeling he didn’t try to explain to Naomi, who was used to looking like she belonged, even if she felt different inside.
“Our people used to burn those fields, to preserve the white oak savannas,” Ed said. “We were among the first to practice wildfire control that way. For the acorns, the huckleberries, the deer.” A thin spire of wood smoke from the house punctuated his words.
Ed, like Jerome, was one of only a few thousand Kalapuya left, from a mighty nation that once ruled the valleys. After being almost eradicated by epidemics, the few survivors of their people had been forced to this sickly land. A civilization that had flourished since the ending of the Ice Age, almost wiped out in less than a few hundred years.
“Do you want to go check it out with me?” Jerome asked.
Ed gave Jerome a puzzled look. Jerome was so clearly hungry to know his people, and yet he acted as if he didn’t matter. Maybe it was growing up in foster care. Jerome had bought into the lie that some histories matter more than others, and this angered and grieved Ed.
Ed thought Jerome played second fiddle to Naomi, even though he was a decorated soldier, a war hero. “Of course I want to check it out,” he replied testily, and then softened. “Stay the night here. We’ll go back in the morning.”
“Naomi will miss me. I’ll meet you there.”
“Naomi can take care of herself,” Ed said, picking up the rotting split wood and adding it to the stack.
Jerome thought of all the times Naomi woke shaking from nightmares and he held her. Since they had started looking for her sister, he often awoke to find Naomi pacing the floor, restlessly, fast asleep but ready to search. “I’ll meet you there,” he said.
Jerome realized he had the better part of a day—a few hours to sunset—before he needed to head back to the city. The ocean beckoned, over the rest of the scrubby mountains. Manzanita and bent pines, hills that rode back from the winds and trees that remained, stubby reminders of faith and perseverance.
He drove into a tiny, ramshackle fishing town. On a sand dune covered with bladelike sea grass, he stood watching the fishing boats ride the waves directly onto the shore, sparkling with the last of the sun. The cold sand was empty except for one lone woman walking with a tea cozy hat on her ample gray hair and a long coat.
Jerome wondered what he had wanted to find out here besides memories of the long years between Naomi leaving their foster home and them getting married. They were lost years, and not even the scurry into war had helped him feel like he had a cause in this world besides loving her. He kept this hidden from her because he was terrified of how helpless it made him feel. He knew some would say he loved too much, too deeply, but he asked himself what else on the earth were we here for.
He got into his truck and drove back to the only home he knew, which was her.
Naomi was standing outside the Aspire shelter. The smeary brick, the narrow streets, the shapes huddled in the doorways—all felt familiar to her now. She had crossed the threshold. The world of the missing had become her own world. She knew the regulars, the bruised-cherry alcoholics, the families on nodding acquaintance, the street kids like Celia.
And the scar-faced man.
He was at the corner. He turned to see her and their eyes met. Naomi moved towards him, quickly, at a trot, dodging through the street people.
But when she got to the corner, he was gone. She blew her breath out in exasperation.
A small, fussy-looking man in round glasses was standing nearby. He had been studying one of her flyers, taped to a telephone pole. His face was as round as his glasses, with a narrow, upturned nose. He wore a suit, even in the warmth of the day. His neat little bow tie reminded her instantly of Sean Richardson, and she remembered his talk of an undercover agent. This man’s shorn silver hair was a dead giveaway he was a cop.
“Do you know who that man is?” Naomi asked him.
“I have been wondering that myself,” the man replied in a soft, cultured voice. The sun flashed off his glasses. She noted his shiny black dress shoes. Not even trying to fit in, she thought. She lost even more respect for the Feds.
“Have we met before?” Naomi asked, politely. “Maybe at a training?” She was thinking of all the law enforcement classes she had taken where the FBI showed up, acting dark and aloof in the back rows. He tilted
his barbered head at her.
“I’m sure we have,” he said.
Naomi was moving up the library stairs, feeling the dense air. The air of a thousand books, hanging serenely over the heads at the tables.
She was on her way to the third floor to look at old microfiche for the town of Elk Crossing. She had a lot to learn. Exactly what she wasn’t yet sure. Libraries had been the saving grace of many of her cases. Old phone directories, ancient city maps, blueprints, self-published biographies—you never knew what you might find. She cracked one missing child case because a corner store grocer had written a diatribe against the Piggly Wiggly chain and, unbeknownst to himself, given away the location of his disappeared son.
She was passing the fiction room, and there, perched like an urchin in one of the wood chairs, reading as if all alone in a magical universe, was Celia.
Naomi slid into the chair across from Celia, making sure to cough first. She didn’t want to startle the girl. Celia looked up, her expression cold—probably expecting a pervert—and then her face changed with surprise. She looked possibly even happy to see Naomi.
Naomi smiled at the stack of books around the girl, along with scraps of paper. Butterflies and more butterflies and, perhaps to mix things up, a few novels. About butterflies. flight behavior, read the thick spine of one. Barbara Kingsolver. That’s a serious book, Naomi was on the verge of saying, but stopped herself. It might sound insulting to the bright girl.
Celia looked over Naomi’s head as if she saw something there. Naomi looked around, saw nothing but the ornate ceiling. The girl had been drawing something, but she hid it with one hand, pulling the paper closer to her.
“I’m doing research about my sister,” Naomi said. Her hands were relaxed on the table.
Celia looked interested. “What kind of research?”
“Oh, you’d be surprised at what you can find in the library.” Naomi paused and then said, directly, “It’s hard to keep secrets. Sooner or later they come out.”
Celia looked slightly sick. Her soft hand hid the drawing. “Sometimes people don’t believe you even when you do tell,” she said.
Naomi could feel the silence around them. She had suspected it, but now knew it to be true. People act as if reporting childhood sexual abuse solved the problem, but Naomi knew that most cases don’t end in conviction. What no one talked about was what life was like for the victims after acquittal.
“I did everything right,” Celia said.
“I’m sure you did,” Naomi answered.
Celia glanced again above Naomi, as if she were seeing something there. Her green eyes were clear and bright. “No one cares,” she said. “It’s all bullshit.”
Naomi felt a twisting. “I care. Same with Jerome, my husband, and lots of others you don’t know. There’s even an FBI undercover man trying to find out what is happening to the missing girls. People do care, Celia.”
“Try to talk yourself into that—huh.” Celia picked her book back up. She held it in front of her so Naomi couldn’t see the tears in her eyes. After a while, she heard the chair squeak. She felt rather than saw Naomi leave the room.
Celia looked down at the sketch she had been working on.
Up the steps into the periodicals room. Naomi knew she was wronging Celia but was not sure how. Oh yes, you do, her mind said.
She unspooled ancient periodicals into the reader. The long-defunct Elk Crossing Gazette. Ads for tomato soup and a short-lived beer garden. She combed the obituaries carefully. Warm eulogy for Mrs. Blankenship, who made a mean mince pie. No one liked to cook strawberries in strawberry country, Naomi knew. They were sick as fermented jam of them.
She came to the week she and her sister had been stolen. The most exciting event reported was a log-rolling contest. You’d think nothing bad had ever happened in the town of Elk Crossing. There were no articles about missing children, or the dead and unidentified Child Does buried in the local graveyard. She read until her eyes grew blurry.
She stopped, like her hand was on a Ouija board. Locals spruce up state orphanage, read the caption under the photo. Naomi enlarged it. There were no names, no identities. Just a group of men in the orphanage yard decades before, pitching brush into a trailer. One man had turned towards the camera, a hat shading his eyes. Naomi put her face close to the reader, trying to discern features. They were too far away to make out their faces.
Stopping, rubbing her mouth, Naomi was unaware that her eyes had gathered into a dead-set stare. She got up and found the Census of Agriculture. Most people knew that the census counted humans. They didn’t know the government also counted every sheep and cow. Returning to her reader, Naomi was again immersed. Thickets of lines and numbers. Dewberries and goats, cows right down to the weight.
Naomi got to the page showing the number of migrant farm workers hired, which got her thinking. She remembered the migrants wrapping her in an old serape the night she escaped, keeping her by their fire. In the morning they had driven her away from Elk Crossing. They had saved her life.
Her fingers following the numbers, she noticed a dwindling workforce. Fewer migrant workers had been willing to work the Elk Crossing strawberry fields as the years passed. It wasn’t wages, Naomi could tell. Other towns reported increasing numbers of laborers. She remembered the children buried in the graveyard. If their parents were undocumented migrants, it would explain why others would be unwilling to work the fields. They had known something was very wrong in the town of Elk Crossing.
She stood up, stretched, was surprised to see the sun was setting. Hours had passed. The main room was empty. Celia could have been sitting outside the door in the hall, back against the wall, her special book in hand, waiting, and Naomi would not have known.
Naomi opened the online card catalog, cross-checking names. Elk Crossing newspapers, check. Elk Crossing courthouse, done. Elk Crossing and strawberries. Now look at this. An old listing for the Thurman Family Strawberry Farm.
Owned by none other than the judge himself, Ralph Thurman.
The lights flickered above her. It was time to go.
Floors below her, Celia had decided to leave, but her warmth was still in the rooms, haunting Naomi with her longing.
Chapter 29
“Look.” Rich spoke with fear as ripe as the bruises on his face.
He and Celia were at the edge of an industrial area, looking for cans. It was just the two of them now. Word had filtered back, as it sometimes did on the streets, that Stoner was in lockdown treatment. He liked it there, they had heard. They had food.
Celia had thought about telling Rich about the scary house she had seen some weeks before, with the eyes behind the basement window. But Rich might want to go look, and Celia wanted to stay the hell away from it.
The street was cold and empty. The sky was the color of smoke, with a magenta sun, and Celia marveled at how the dumpsters filled up despite how desolate the streets were. She had just pulled out what looked like a completely uneaten and unfucked-with McDonald’s burger when Rich spoke. She opened the bun, checking for broken glass. People did mean shit in life.
She froze. Down the street a group of jocks had gathered, climbing on a dumpster. Larking, their faces said. All the old-fashioned words for the hunt, Celia thought, when it stops being play and starts turning wild.
But this wasn’t play, unless Rich and Celia were the prey.
“Are they the same ones?” she asked, putting the burger back in the trash.
Run, the butterflies warned, suddenly. They masked the falling sun with their fury.
Rich slowly backed away. “Let’s go,” he said.
The jocks turned. The leader had yellow hair.
“Fuck,” Rich said.
For real, the butterflies added. Run, Celia!
Celia ran. She felt as unreal as the coming night sky. Her thin-soled shoes, hitting the rough road. Her legs, lifting the sun-dried jeans. Her mouth, breathing the dusky, red-tinged air. None of this was real, a voice in he
r said, and that was why she might end up a junkie strung to the last hope of life, or a phantasm that went in and out of the cars, nothing but a hollow shell that performed as the men wanted. A doll. A toy. Never was here.
The last fury, the butterflies told her, flying in great clouds now, up by the falling sun, was if Celia was to believe her cells had hope. If she was to claim her body was as real as the blood that might jet from her veins, as real as the cars and the roads and everything else that mattered down here, everywhere. If Celia could only think she was alive.
That would be the most radical act, the butterflies said, coating the sun. If only Celia could think she deserved to live.
“They’re getting closer.” Rich’s mouth was a choo-choo train, collecting breath, his cheeks florid. The two darted around corners, running faster, faster. Through a narrow street, closing in towards downtown, the last stretch of vacant road, littered with the empty warehouses that posted security guards so the homeless could not camp. for sale for development, read the graffitied signs as the two street kids ran, the pack of jocks chasing them, their own faces blurring.
Part of Celia wanted to dart off to the side and run straight at the river, to her own doom. Or to turn around and walk slowly towards them, her arms out, her eyes closed. A sacrifice.
But her body was saying live, and the butterflies were, too, and she and Rich ran.
* * *
“I brought you a book,” Naomi said, smiling wide.
Celia was sitting on the curb on skid row, arms wrapped around her legs, deeply ashamed of herself, because in running, she had pissed her pants, and now she didn’t know what to do. She could feel the scalding piss on her inner thighs, feel the damp circle in her jeans. If she stood up, the whole world would know.
The butterflies, flitting around, consoled her. They traced her tender skin with their antennae, delighting at her beauty.
