The Butterfly Girl

by Rene Denfeld

  Flashes of memory, of all the times she had pissed herself. Sometimes she had pissed on purpose to keep Teddy away, but it never worked. She got spanked instead, and the single wet pair of torn sheets were stripped off the naked mattress, and she had to go back and lie on the cold damp circle. Then there were all the times she had pissed without even knowing it, going home with yet another note in her hand. Celia smells like piss, the other kids started saying, which is why Celia never teased Rich for the same. The kids couldn’t find a name that rhymed with both piss and Celia, so they finally settled on calling her “Pee-lia.”

  Now Naomi was standing above her, pride reeking from every shiny pore, sturdy leather shoes on the filthy pavement, beautiful trouser legs, and holding out in her hand was a brand-new book.

  butterflies of the pacific northwest, it said.

  “It’s for you,” Naomi added. She sounded like she was all of twelve herself.

  Fuck you, Celia wanted to say. She was filled with a sudden rage. I’m sure that book will taste good for dinner. Thank you for nothing. She turned away. She didn’t want to speak because the anger might come out, and she didn’t want Naomi to see or hear it. But it was there, settling cold and hard in Celia’s chest, rising to her throat, choking her.

  “You don’t want it?” Naomi’s voice, teasing, still light, but now with an edge of concern. The book stayed held out.

  Celia shook her head, still looking away, her lips pressed together. Rich, down the row, looked at her. A car horn honked—a john picking up a kid was holding up the line. Naomi turned around, saw the cars, and the realization of exactly what Celia did down here struck her like a cold slap. Moving slowly, she set the book down on the sidewalk, near the girl. “I’ll leave it here for you,” she said, softly.

  Then she walked away, head bowed.

  Rich came down the row, sat next to Celia. He took the book. He leaned over quick and kissed Celia on the cheek. That was an excuse to whisper in her ear without others seeing. “What do you need?” he asked.

  “A pair of pants,” she whispered. His nose wrinkling, Rich knew why. But he didn’t say anything. He simply rose, tucked the book into Celia’s backpack, and zipped it up. Then he took off at a trot to the Goodwill trucks, to see if there were any garbage bags of free clothes.

  A half hour later he returned, and Celia was still there, reeking. But night had fallen and in the dark he and the other street kids circled Celia so the men in the cars would not see her change. They covered her with their bodies while she stripped and put on the pants Rich had found. They sang silly songs to her to make her feel better. Celia threw the wet jeans into the gutter, where they lay for the rest of the night.

  * * *

  “I’m going to do something,” Celia said to her sister.

  Alyssa squinted at her suspiciously, and for the first time Celia saw herself. The two were behind the school. This time they were hiding behind the cafeteria dumpster, in case either Teddy or Mom showed up.

  It smelled bad, back here, by the dumpster. Their whole lives smelled bad.

  “Here, I brought this for you,” Celia said, and handed her sister the book Naomi had given her. Alyssa turned it over, looking bored. Butterflies. “Try it,” Celia said, like she was asking her sister to try mashed peas or carrots.

  “Why bother?” Alyssa asked, her voice low.

  She sounded so much like Celia in that moment that Celia was scared. She couldn’t let Alyssa give up hope. Maybe Alyssa blamed her. Just a month ago Alyssa was walking across this blacktop, as pure as the tops of flowers. Now she was hurt, and in some mysterious way this seemed like Celia’s fault.

  “I just wanted to be a good girl,” Celia heard herself say, and Alyssa looked up in shock. “That’s all I ever wanted.”

  “Me, too,” Alyssa whispered.

  Chapter 30

  Jerome met Ed at the pasture with the white oak. The piece of fabric still hung from the farmhouse dormer, blowing lightly in the wind. The front door was open. Jerome took that as an invitation for what the two men were about to do.

  Ed lifted a stepladder from his truck. He and Jerome carried it under the majestic tree. Ed climbed the ladder and cut the frayed rope with a sharp knife, and the blanket bundle loosened from the tree limb. He passed it down to Jerome, who took it carefully with his one hand, bending slightly with awkwardness.

  “A few more weeks, the leaves coming in, you never would have seen it,” Ed said, climbing down the ladder.

  “I was lucky,” Jerome said.

  The two men carried the bundle to a soft place under the tree. The rope was tightly embedded in the fabric, so Ed carefully cut it open. “Might as well find out now,” he said.

  They pulled open the blanket.

  There, coiled in years of dark, spotted with the passing rains and dried by the sun, was a collection of artifacts. Jerome knew no other way to describe it. Several nightgowns, tightly coiled. A faded dress. A pair of worn brogans. A rusted brooch. A favorite teacup. Set on top of all this was a photograph of a woman.

  Jerome gently lifted the bordered photo. It was a Kalapuya woman standing outside the farmhouse above them. She was wearing a simple farm dress, tight at the waist. Her hair was swept off her neck, and her face was beautiful, with serious eyes and wide cheeks. There was resolve in the full mouth.

  Jerome turned the photo over. A note was written on the back, in spidery pen: Tasmin, remember I kept you safe.

  “That sounds ominous,” Ed said.

  Jerome looked back at the empty farmhouse. “This whole area is bad. It almost makes me believe in evil spirits.”

  “People don’t need spirits to make them evil,” Ed said, surprising Jerome.

  “Can I keep ahold of all this?” Jerome asked. “Just for the time being.”

  “Sure,” Ed said, after a moment’s hesitation. He wrapped it back up, loosely. “If you don’t find her family, I’d like it all. There is so little of us left.”

  Jerome stretched. He wondered what kind of life the woman had led, living in this farmhouse outside of Elk Crossing. Had her people come from afar, to help her walk on in the traditional way, once her time had come? Maybe more importantly, what had she known about the graveyard, with its row of child graves?

  Naomi had been thinking about graves, too. Those bodies hadn’t just tumbled themselves into their coffins, she thought, morbidly.

  After dropping Jerome at the pasture, she had headed to the Elk Crossing funeral home, named the Crossing Home. It was still open, no doubt until the final population of the town was put to rest. Naomi let herself in the pink building, hearing the chimes ring. She stood in the waiting room, taking in the way the Oregon light poured in the windows. She rang the bell on the counter, sharply. After a time, the funeral director hobbled out, tucking in his shirt with one hand, balancing on his cane with the other.

  He was a short, round man who looked to be in his eighties, with a large head and wobbly blue eyes. He had the unkempt look of sin, his cheeks peppered with old beard. His large eyes looked at her, accusingly. His face said nap.

  Naomi gave her best country smile and extended her hand. He ignored it, shuffling out with his cane and lowering his wide bottom into a waiting room chair.

  “I heard about you,” he sniffed after she introduced herself. He was of the generation that looked to the side of young women, as if they were contemptible. “Missus Horn at the courthouse said a lady and a soldier come, inquiring after records. You asked after the graveyard.” He gave another self-important sniff.

  Outside the windows the white cottonwood blooms drifted, catching on the bushes. “I lived down in Opal,” Naomi said. “Used to be cattle country, but nothing left now. There’s no place like home, is there?” She added the last with a touch of menace.

  His blue eyes caught her. They were cold, filmed inside like a dead baby bird in its shell. Naomi dropped the pretense.

  “Have you been the director here for long?” she asked, knowing the answ
er.

  “Fifty years,” he croaked, his neck wobbling.

  “That’s a lot of dead to bury,” she said.

  He grunted.

  “What do you do when you get unidentified bodies?”

  The hands on the cane changed somehow. “You mean the Does in the graveyard.”

  So much for sneaking up to it. “Yes,” Naomi said, leaning forward to let him know she was serious.

  He didn’t answer straightaway. Most people didn’t. “I take care of the cemetery. Well, me and Missus Horn. No one left to mow or trim, and that’s gotten beyond us. I really shouldn’t be taking care of the dead either, to tell the truth.” He held up a weak hand. “It’s hard work. Physical.” He sounded petulant, like a child.

  Naomi waited.

  “The judge used to call us on those.” He took a sudden interest in the floor, rubbing at the old tiles with the bottom of his cane.

  “Judge Thurman?”

  No answer.

  “Judge Thurman is dead and gone,” Naomi said. “There is nothing to be afraid of.”

  His opaque eyes told her otherwise. “There’s no statute of limitations for murder, is there?” His voice was as soft as the gossamer strings of white blossoms outside, blowing across the empty parking lot.

  “Was it you, or were you an accessory?”

  His eyes closed, and Naomi saw sweat appear high on his nose. It might have been the first sweat of years for him, glossing his cheeks now, too. Maybe those were tears. He put his face against his white hands on the cane. “I stay away from those graves. Sometimes I think they are haunting me. Haunting all of us. Those of us left, anyhow.

  “Maybe I should get an attorney,” he added.

  “I’m not a cop. Invoking counsel won’t make me go away.”

  He glanced at her, terrified.

  Naomi suddenly changed tack. “I saw an article about locals who volunteered at the orphanage.”

  His eyes widened.

  “I bet you remember hearing about two little sisters that went missing from that orphanage. Maybe you thought the judge would be calling you about them, too.”

  There was a deadly silence. He looked dead already, and Naomi had a vision of him on one of his rubber tables. She leaned close enough to feel her cheek warm his unwilling face. She spoke directly to the ghosts in front of him. “One of those girls was me.”

  “Oh my.” His chest began moving, and his hand scrabbled over his cane. His mouth blubbered open, a wet hinge.

  “Look at me.”

  He shook his head. He had hearing aids in his ears, she noticed. Just another human.

  “Look at me.” Naomi’s voice was soft and gentle, and yet so hard. “You can’t hide anymore. I’m going to stand on your grave and shout it to the world.”

  “Please.”

  “You’re old,” Naomi said, and the monster was now in her voice. “You’re going to die soon. You will rest with them. The children.” She saw him give a shudder.

  “There is no absolution,” he croaked.

  “I know.”

  He shook his head, rapidly, as if denying that after all this time a truth teller had finally arrived.

  “It was the judge,” he said. “The judge and . . . his son.”

  Naomi closed her eyes then. A feeling like the darkest relief swept her. “What was his son’s name?” she asked.

  Fever. Naomi had the name. Like the malaria and measles, Jerome thought, that once swept the villages of his people, shaking them like acorns from the trees. Like the fire that burns the heart with true love, Ed thought, watching both of them at the table.

  They met in the Country Kitten Diner in nearby Murky Grove before heading their separate ways home. The tablecloths were greasy red-and-white-checkered and the special on the blackboard said Sad Susie. Jerome ordered it around without knowing what it was, wanting Naomi to stay in the reverie, knowing that was what she needed right now. If you take a burrowing animal and deny it anything but a glass cage, it will break its own claws in the madness to escape. Naomi, who once had no escape, had created one with her mind.

  Wesley. Her lips, soundless, formed the word, tried it on, cautiously. It felt okay. Wesley, she tried again, her face contorting. Jerome watched, his eyes kind. Ed watched, thinking he was seeing a transmogrification.

  Naomi looked up as the waitress was putting down plates. Sad Susie, Sad Susie, same. It was just stewed vegetables, cooked until limp. “Wesley Thurman,” Naomi said clearly, looking brightly around the restaurant as if the world had just awoken and given her a gift. “The man who stole me and my sister is named Wesley Thurman. He kept us in that bunker. He’s still alive. He left town after I escaped. But I’m going to find him because he has my sister.”

  Then, neatly, she began eating, only it was as if she couldn’t stop. Jerome wanted to reach, to still her hand, but knew better. They finished their plates and went out to another Oregon spring day. It was the same one that had opened the sky that morning, Jerome knew, only it would always be different. It would get better now, for Naomi.

  * * *

  Sometimes Naomi thought she had a mother. It was a mother she had never met, maybe the one she had always known in her heart had died giving birth to her sister, as the orphanage director had told her. This mother was like an angel. She was out there, floating around, watching Naomi. She was watching Naomi tell Jerome how the funeral director said her sister was not buried in one of the pauper graves. Those were all migrant children. So that meant, Naomi said, that her sister could still be alive.

  The ghost of Naomi’s mom—maybe—watched as Jerome and Naomi sat in his truck and made a flurry of phone calls, looking for addresses, utility records, credit histories, but it was all smoke and mirrors because Wesley had gone underground. Naomi knew how easy it was to disappear yourself, because this is a big country, full of dark and light. Both she and Jerome had cases where people had created new identities. Naomi had one where a child kidnapper had made a new identity from a Costco card he found on the ground. He had stayed hidden for years that way—until she found him.

  There was a part of her that wished she could be one of those people who could read books or watch movies about murder and not even know it was real. But the ghost of her mother knew better.

  Naomi knew Wesley was probably good at hiding. But she was better at finding.

  Chapter 31

  It was field trip day. Celia hated field trip day. All of downtown was clogged with yellow buses and kids streaming off them, laughing like they owned the fucking world.

  Even down in skid row, where she and the other street kids now clustered, the students walked through in groups, their teacher tour guides pointing out the architecture. Celia sat with Rich at the curb, watching. Both of them had the same curdled look on their faces. It was envy and desire at the same time.

  “That could be us, Rich,” Celia said.

  “Well, it’s not.” His face looked like a bruised pumpkin.

  “How old were you when you left school?” she asked.

  He turned towards her. “I didn’t leave school. I was kicked out.”

  “Why?”

  He scratched a leg. “There were some kids. Picking on me.” He hesitated, as if he wanted to say more. “I put a firecracker in one of their lockers. You’d have thought I tried to burn down the White House. I got expelled.”

  “I thought there was some sort of law where they have to educate you. Or something like that.”

  “Yeah, well, what good have laws done you?”

  Celia thought of the jury, their eyes on her.

  “So here I am.”

  Celia decided she had missed part of the story. She watched a group of kids across the street. They looked her age. But they were different. It wasn’t just their clothes. It was the way they carried themselves, the way the girls laughed with each other and preened. Everything she questioned they took for granted.

  “Did your parents kick you out?” she asked, cautiously.
>
  “You don’t understand me. I left.”

  She made a face at him, appalled. The idea anyone would be on the streets without being forced out made no sense to her.

  “I didn’t live with my mom,” Rich explained. “I was in foster care. My mom lost her parental rights to me. But there aren’t enough foster homes, so I had to go to a group home. It was more like a prison. I ran away, and here I am.”

  “Oh.” Across the street, as the kids milled around, their teacher pointed to the turrets above, touching the sky. Celia gazed upwards, too. She was listening to the teacher, following along, pretending to be one of them.

  * * *

  Once, in fifth grade, Celia had done her class project on butterflies. She had stapled together paper and colored in her own drawings with pencils. She had taken her time and followed the details from the books perfectly. Red admiral, painted lady, peacock. Viceroy. She had even stolen nail polish from the drugstore to get the metallic sheen just right.

  “These are all red butterflies, Celia,” said her teacher at the time, Mr. Calhoun. Celia was scared of male teachers. To cover her fear she acted bold.

  “Yeah,” she told him, and then added sarcastically, “I like the color red. It’s bloody.”

  He had glanced up at her. “Is that a joke?”

  “No.” Muted now, but the specialness of her book was soiled, touched by his gross fingers. He turned the pages. “You have talent,” he had said, with surprise. The next day in class he called on Jessica first—Jessica of the blond hair, the clean neck with a gold necklace around it. Twenty-four carat, Jessica was always boasting. Celia hated her. Then Jessica stood in her white pants and everyone had seen: Celia was not the only red one.

  The others had laughed as Jessica bolted from the class, but Celia felt sorry for her. She had followed Jessica to the girls’ bathroom, where she was crying. Celia had taken brown paper towels and folded them into long rectangles. “This is what I do,” Celia told her. She showed Jessica how to put the homemade liners in her panties.

  “Can’t you afford pads?” Jessica had asked, and Celia had shaken her head, confused. “That’s for when you get your period,” Celia had replied. Celia could hear the water dripping in the bathroom sink before Jessica answered: “If you don’t have your period yet, why are you bleeding?”