Butterfly Sunday (6 page)

It wasn’t the memories that stunned her, but the contrast between life then and now. How had she become habituated to this unfeeling hell where she touched no one or nothing real? When had she become this cunning wretch? Worst of all, what was the source of this driving obsession to carry out Averill’s death? She had to think. Yet she couldn’t. The woods had become a meaningless void, an alien terrain or island where fate had rolled her off its inexplicable tide. What was this murderous impulse that blinded her?

There was a light breeze. It was humid and there was a gathering haze from the woods. It was going to rain. She felt an inexplicable urge to pray—something she hadn’t done since she married the preacher. It wasn’t the desire to bow her head and attempt to communicate with God. It was a deep longing for the faith to attempt it. Aside from the necessity of seeing this careful, homicidal passion through, Leona didn’t believe in anything. Not for herself. Of course, she knew that life still held a great deal of joy and meaning for other people. She didn’t see any point debating whether they were more foolish or wiser than her.

Leona had to live by what was in her heart. She didn’t know any other way. It didn’t matter how much she hated her situation. It didn’t matter what the rest of the world had to say about her actions. She couldn’t be the rest of the world. She could only be herself, looking into the eyes of intolerable circumstances and doing
what she understood to be necessary and moral—even if she was aware no one else shared her view. She didn’t like the consequences of those actions. She just didn’t see any bearable alternative.

What proof did she have? She had none. All she had was her absolute certainty. What good was that? What evidence was there, for that matter? It said “stillbirth” on the death certificate. Arlen, the county coroner, had obviously decided she was a hysteric when she questioned him on it. He was very polite, sympathetic even, but he’d taken slight umbrage when she asked him if he’d actually examined the baby. He obviously considered her a grieving mother who hadn’t accepted the difficult fact of her loss.

The only material evidence lay across the road from the house, six feet under the ground. If her information was right, and she didn’t doubt it, Averill had buried it in a cardboard box. Even if Leona could somehow manage it, what would even be left to find after fifteen months in wet ground? There was only one way. Even if time revealed that she had miscalculated everything, if she lived to see that she had done the wrong thing, she would never suffer the bleeding conscience of willful ignorance. She’d never say she regretted her choice. She could only say that there hadn’t been one. All the winding roads of her life had converged into one narrow path that seemed to dissolve into nothing behind her as it stretched into a similar bleak horizon.

There was no room on the path for second guesses or regrets—except for one heavy uncertainty she still carried in her heart. And while it slowed her progress and burdened her with its constant torment, it hadn’t and wouldn’t stop her. It was part of the price. It had to be sacrificed with the rest of her luxuriant notions of happiness. It was a pain to be endured with the rest, a
throbbing wound that would never heal, only die with her as the narrowing path descended into a sudden spiral that released her into floating oblivion.

His name was Blue. He was the sum of all her regret for this world, which was already beginning to seem like a fable out of the past. She was still here and alive, yet she had separated from this time and place. Blue was the only thing that prevented her from floating off or dissolving into the perfumed air.

Would he ever understand that she hadn’t merely chosen vengeance over him? Would he eventually see that she had spared him a restless existence plagued by the eternal cries of a child’s ghost? Would he take any comfort from knowing that she had kept it from him because he would have succeeded in stopping her? She was exhausted with the ever accruing chagrin she endured as life slapped her across the face with one discomfiting truth after another. Yet here was another one. For Leona suddenly felt herself drowning in the realization that their enormous and miraculous love was completely useless, even ludicrous when she considered its power to create unhappiness.

She breathed the exquisite cool scent of her mother’s iris. It glistened in the sunlight, stirring an ephemeral shadow of her mother. It almost seemed an exquisite present sent to her out of an impossible, living past. Now it bent and fluttered on a sudden rush of wind like a magnificent butterfly separating its moist wings for the first time and summoning them into flight. In that dissolving moment of jeweled and breathing peace, she heard the scrape of her mother’s shoe against the iron shovel as she turned the fragrant earth in her iris beds. It stirred the inimitable comfort of undying nurture. In that moment she understood the power of a mother’s
love to transcend not only time and place, but also all things real or imagined, including death itself.

Now it was all pure and exquisitely simple. Now the intuitive course she had taken became something inevitable. All that had ever been would always be—including her slain infant and her all-consuming will to nurture its eternal essence with detailed public acknowledgment of her avenging deed.

The argument inside the house was still building. Three outraged voices preached three hissing and popping sermons in a simultaneous din. It was one of those watershed wailing contests people stage when their general fury at life overwhelms them. They were lost in their own little riot. Leona had shifted her position toward the back of the yard, such as it was, in order to turn down their volume a few notches.

She felt better than she had in several days now. She didn’t even suffer that gnawing need to have it done. It was already done. Her duties were all but finished. She steadied herself in the knowledge that so little could go wrong now. All those hundreds of frenzied “what ifs” had faded away.

The only part she kept stumbling over was Blue. Why try to fight that? Didn’t the sadness pressing down on her deserve its due? Wasn’t he a real loss? Didn’t this all-consuming ache honor him by its degree? What was the point in pretending it could be any other way? What was the harm now in looking back? It wasn’t going to stop anything. It couldn’t interfere with things that had already been accomplished.

How could she stop remembering it? She would never stop loving him. She even allowed a guilty gratitude for the fact that he still loved her. She was sorry that it gave him so much pain. Yet she knew it wouldn’t
kill him. He was strong and young and overflowing with all kinds of passions. He’d love someone else before too long. She had to believe that. She never would have found the strength to reject him if she hadn’t known it in her heart. It kept her from hating herself. (Though the truth was, it also broke her heart.)

If she had to sum up Blue Hudson in a word, that word was “kindness.” Not that he’d agree or consider that a compliment. He’d much rather be regarded as strong and maybe honest. He was those things too. He took enormous pride in his physical stamina and he worked almost obsessively to maintain it. He walked and talked like a hard-shell redneck—unless you actually listened to him, which most people didn’t. And maybe he didn’t want them to. He carried himself in an almost menacing manner. There was a tension about him that seemed eternally about to explode.

It was all left over from some kid he had long since determined he didn’t want to be. No, the one-word description was “kindness,” whether he liked it or not. What made Leona melt into his arms for the first time wasn’t his powerful good looks. Experience had long since taught her the folly in that. It was the fact that Blue seemed to know his own strength. He also knew in some essential way that its purpose wasn’t self-protection or physical supremacy. Strength was given to some so that they could use it on behalf of those who were weaker than they were.

He’d never said that. He would have made fun of Leona if she had. Yet it was second nature to him. When she was with Blue she was safe. Funny, she had no idea he was any of those things the first time she found herself alone with him. In fact, at first, she smiled to recall, she had actually wished Averill would come home.

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 17, 1999

4:19 P.M.

Saint Patrick’s Day always fell in that mystical week of March when a sudden blur of little red and purple leaves floated on the wet black limbs rising out of the mist. Overnight the dry yellow stubble in the yard was neon green and the jagged forsythia bushes beside the driveway atoned for five months of gnarled ugliness with a gossamer burst of sunshine yellow.

She had dragged herself out to sit on the porch swing in the early afternoon sun. It was chilly now. The blanket was too thin to do much good and the mist was slowly turning into a rain that the weatherman said would fall hard and steady through the night. The air was like a cold stew.

It had been nine weeks since the thirteenth of January, the night she had lost the baby. Across the road
through a blur of shriveled bramble she could see her gray tombstone near the edge of the cemetery. Earlier she had heard a car and voices from the far end near the church. It was kids, know-it-all teenagers getting themselves stuck up for life.

Several times now Averill had run across their refuse—beer bottles and what the holy hypocrite referred to in a subsequent sermon as “life-preventing apparatus”—designed for adulterers. It might stun his flock to know that Brother Saintly had an old boot in the bottom of his closet where he kept a secret trove of those very same evil implements. Furthermore, their sanctified shepherd had never employed a single one of them in any intimate activity involving his wife. So when Averill pronounced the condom an implement of adulterous facilitation, he had it on good authority.

Not that she felt one way or the other about it—or anything else at the time. Losing her baby had subverted all her feelings under a heavy pall of empty despair inside of her that seemed to reflect the heavy gray winter skies and bare trees outside her window. She had a vague sense that spring might stir her to some plan or forward action. In fact, moving from the living room to the porch swing earlier had been a near monumental triumph over lack of will.

By then Leona was well into her “awareness,” as she called it. By then she knew her marriage was an irreparable disaster. She was not only accustomed to Averill’s absences, but she preferred them to his company. She knew he had women—or a woman—whichever. That was fine. It spared her any obligation to avail herself to him as a wife.

In the first few weeks of their life as man and wife, Leona had gone to some lengths to arouse and satisfy
him. At first Averill’s eager facility for pleasing her gave her a fragile hope for their future together. However, it didn’t last long. Willingness and effort had ephemeral power at best in the bedroom. He had an intensity she didn’t know how to return, and it grew increasingly difficult to substitute gratitude for desire.

Maybe it was because she was almost six months pregnant by then and her swollen shape reminded him that she was carrying another man’s child. Whatever the reason, Averill hadn’t touched her since their fourth week of marriage. Though she knew she didn’t really want him and she doubted that he wanted her. As the weeks passed, they made less and less formal pretense. Averill drifted into his solitary routine, using the house as a place to sleep and change clothes while using her in Sunday public as a prop—his beloved wife and soon-to-be mother of his longed-for child.

She had a head filled with questions about her own future as well as that of her unborn child. If it came as predicted by mid-January, then it would be six months old by midsummer. Sooner than that, it would be too fragile, and soon after that time, it would grow too difficult to carry while she made the two of them a life. Strange, she had never discussed it with Averill, but she knew he wouldn’t mind her going. She was so blinded by her desire to leave, she never noticed how little sense the entire situation made.

Even now, Leona still couldn’t pretend she understood why Averill had married her. If she had looked more closely from the beginning, if she had examined the incongruous signals from the start, she might have seen what was coming and gotten herself out in time.
Leaving out all the hell of it, giving his philandering some legitimate impulse of certain otherwise well-intended men, she couldn’t find the logic anywhere. Why would a man marry an almost penniless eighteen-year-old girl who was not only pregnant but desperately in love with her baby’s father?

Love? Did a man love his bride one week and then abandon her the next? Why had he rescued her and lured her here to this lonely place with false assurances and phony admiration? What had he hoped to gain? Was it really as simple as a cloak of respectability behind which he could hide his secret life? Yet if that was true, why had he murdered Tess? Was it the way Soames had said? Was it really possible that Averill truly, deeply, obsessively loved her to the point that her faded passion for Tyler, her baby’s father, had fermented in his mind? Were his sudden indifference and silent contempt his means of communicating his misplaced jealousy? Did the sight of her carrying Tyler’s child day after day have the cumulative effect that Soames had theorized?