The Butterfly Clues (2 page)

And, today, now, just what I wanted: a sad, strange part of Cleveland, a part of the city I’ve never seen before.

An abandoned playground sits in the center of the block. Two swings dangle from long metal chains; one of them moves back and forth, just slightly, like someone has recently been swinging on it. But it’s got to be nearing eight o’clock on a Thursday night: too late and too cold for playing outside. The gnarled faces of the hobbyhorses, planted jaggedly into the concrete, stare back at me with cold, rusted eyes.

I have a sudden memory: I am on a swing. My brother, Oren, is behind me, pushing me higher, too high. I am laughing—and screaming, too, the full-throat, kid kind of scream, because the sky was getting so close—I’d never been that close to the sky before.

Now, watching the empty swing set, the knotty feeling spreads into my throat.

I stuff my hands back in my pockets and quickly cross the road.

I’m nearing the bus stop—I know it isn’t far, it can’t be. But as I round another corner onto Lourraine Street, I suddenly hear a
whoop-whoop
sound. Sirens, drawing closer. My stomach flips. Someone must have seen me take the marble angel. I duck into the alleyway beside an ugly yellow house, noticing that the concrete front lawn and driveway are covered in painted daisies as I try to flatten myself into the shadows. Across the street, a black sedan hunkers, engine buzzing and whirring.
Is someone inside?

There’s a window set into the wall just above me, and I’m filled with an almost insuppressible urge to look through it.
Tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap:
nine times, twice—right hand on right thigh, then left on left.

The sirens keep wailing, even closer now.

As I’m shifting in the darkness, I think I hear a shout, followed by a heavy
thump
. Almost immediately, I’m not sure whether I’ve only imagined it. My brain is tricky sometimes.

Left hand on right thigh. Nine times before I’m allowed to look.

BANG
.

Loud, deafening chaos: shattering glass, exploding outward like water from a burst pipe. My body curls itself into a ball. I hit the pavement, skinning my knees, pressing my head between my thighs. A heavy
thump thump thump
pulses through my body; a whooshing feeling; skin on fire.

I look up. In the wall right across from me, just a few feet away, something has lodged itself into the brick that wasn’t there before.

I squint.

Bullet.

The word flutters through my head. A bullet. Which means gun. Which means—shit oh shit holy shit—I almost just
died.

I sink back against the side of the house, choking. Panting. My right hand goes instinctively into my vest pocket, gripping the angel. My left hand is bleeding. I hadn’t even noticed. I put it to my mouth, trying to soothe it. A tiny shard of glass comes out and cuts my tongue. I spit the glass onto the pavement. Blood in my mouth, metallic.

I’ve got to get out of here. I have to
move
.

BANG.
A second time. My legs lift me from the glass-covered alleyway and torpedo me through the streets. I run breathless, panicked. The darkness is thickening around me and most of the streetlamps are cracked and lightless. I almost trip on a homeless man with gray, clouded-over eyes, swaying and moaning and muttering something incoherent to me as I pass; I don’t stop or turn or pause. I have to keep running. I can still hear sirens somewhere, behind me now. There are tears streaking my face, and I guess they must be mine.

When I just can’t run any farther, I crouch behind a group of trash cans to catch my breath. Four trash cans. Two more would make them six, a better, cleaner number. Four looks cold; four looks incomplete. Four means no good. The air smells like frost and rotting fish. My cut hand throbs. It suddenly strikes me that whoever fired that shot might have seen me, peering into the window and then bolting madly away… .

And then I hear it: a dragging sound, very close. He’s here. He’s come for me.

I tap the trash can softly nine times with my left foot. Nine times safe. Nine times safe. And then I have to tap six; six times safe. After two nines, there has to be a six. This is the ultimate sequence of protection. I don’t know why; it just is. It has been since I was six and convinced there was a monster in my closet. Nine, nine, six meant the monster went away. I slide my wounded hand into my left vest pocket and cup the objects I’ve been carrying with me—two Micron 005 pens, five bobby pins. Inside my shoe: one slowly disintegrating piece of paper that I never leave home without. And now, in my hand, the angel.

The footsteps stop just beyond the Dumpsters. I can hardly breathe. He’s taking his time, screwing with me. I imagine him: a foot-dragger; a tall, lonely man with a gun.

I draw my legs up to my chest, bite my teeth into my knee to keep from screaming.
If anyone out there exists and can hear me— please don’t let me die like this.

Maybe someone
does
hear me, because there’s no tall, dragging man with a gun—only a small, thin girl in a coat that looks borrowed from a giant. She’s staggering by, hauling a sack of onions. I start blubbering loudly from behind the trash cans.
I’m going to live
. I didn’t even know how badly I’d wanted to.

The girl can’t be more than eleven or twelve years old, with shiny brown eyes and limp hair. She cocks her head when she notices me, then squishes up her eyebrows and says, “You staying here?” She points to the alleyway behind the trash cans. “Don’t worry. I been there. Don’t cry. It gets better.”

She thinks I’m a runaway. “No, I—I’m not sleeping here; I’m trying to get back to Lakewood.” I can barely get out words. I’m still shaking.

The little girl puts the onions down, moves her limp hair to the other shoulder. “Oh, Lakewood.” She sniffs at the air, thinks for a moment. “You get robbed, Miss?” She’s still assessing me with those shining eyes. Her question takes me by surprise.

I just shake my head, trying to dab my face with my sleeve.

“So, then,” she says, shifting her weight, a little sassy now, “why
are
you crying?”

“I’m not,” I say. I try to swallow back my sniffling. “Do you … do you know how I can get home from here?”

The girl looks me over. I count eight buttons on her coat; eight makes me feel weird, makes my skin prickle. Two fours. Two less than ten. Off-kilter. Dirty. The year I turned eight I wouldn’t let Mom put eight candles on the birthday cake. Eight candles would have made it inedible.

“There’s a bus a few blocks down, on East 117th,” she finally says. “You can walk with me. I’m going that way anyway.”

We walk together the few blocks to the bus. I keep looking over my shoulder, expecting someone to leap out at us. Expecting more bullets, more shattering glass.

The little girl tells me she helps out in her mom’s diner, that’s why she has the onions, except the mom isn’t her real mom because she ran away from home when she was nine. I tell her I’m adopted and have never met my real family but have been searching for them for years, everywhere and anywhere I can, in dark alleyways and behind trash cans. I tell her I’ll search for them forever if I have to.

I don’t know why I lie; my words rush out, uncontrollable. And after all, who knows? Maybe it’s true. Maybe there’s an entirely new, healthy family waiting for me somewhere, waiting to fold me up in their arms and make things all right again. Maybe my other-brother version of Oren’s there, too—waiting.

The little girl tells me good luck, and I say thank you too many times. I wait for the 96 Line alone, watching her struggle away, hauling her onions one-handed through the dark.

The bus arrives after a few long, shaky minutes. I tap my hand against my thigh three times before entering, utter, “Banana,” under my breath so that I can enter, so that it’s all right.

In third grade, during the six-month period we lived in Kankakee, Illinois—our house a concrete box between rows of neck-high cornstalks—Shelby-Michelle Packer noticed me tapping patterns into each leg when I was called on to give an answer to a math question. I couldn’t answer until I’d tapped the right number of times (that day it was six, on each side, but the answer still wouldn’t come to me.) I felt everyone’s eyes on me as Shelby announced, to the whole class, “Lo, you’re
bananas
.” As soon as she said the word, out of nowhere, the answer arrived; it was
fourteen ducks
. I don’t remember the question, but
banana
was a sign; it made things right.

The bus is almost empty. I finally exhale. My face hovers in the bus window: puffy eyes, ghost-pale skin. I look away. I suck some more on the dark gash in my palm and newly dried blood flakes onto my lips. There’s a woman with stringy blondish hair in back holding a howling baby. She’s staring out the window, not trying to soothe the kid at all. The baby howls as I watch the streets change outside my window, the world of small dark houses and cracked streets becoming the world of planned, tree-lined cul-de-sacs and stone houses and lots of glowing streetlamps. I pull the cord and exit the bus; the baby continues to howl in my head.

At home, everything’s dark. A low TV murmur comes from my parents’ room upstairs. Dad’s still at work, I’m sure. Mom doesn’t greet me, but I don’t expect her to. I pass Oren’s bedroom door, closed now forever, and creep upstairs to my attic room undisturbed, surveying everything, sprawled like a wide, warm, glittering lake before me. I think this is the first time I’ve really breathed all day. I remove the smooth angel figurine from my vest pocket and press her to my cheek.

Stepping across my room, I place her into a small hollow beside a nest of other perfect, smooth, glassy figures—between other marble men and women, and at a safe distance from the stone horses and wolves and bears. I hum a little—I’m not sure what the song is—finally starting to feel better. The bullet never happened. I pretend that I dreamed it: the sound, the shattering glass. But my hand, still caked in blood, throbs.

I yank my dark hair on top of my head, enter the bathroom to brush my teeth and stare at myself in the mirror for a few seconds, at the smears of dirt and blood on my cheeks and chin. Then I wash my face three times. Finally, I rub cream that smells like oranges into my skin, pushing back my grungy bangs and running my finger along the tiny scar over my left eye. Can’t tell which is worse—the scar or the bangs. I push them to the left, and then to the right, and then back again before letting them fall to rest over my forehead. I look like a badly groomed poodle.

Back in my room, I step out of my clothes, throw on a warm, soft T-shirt that reaches halfway to my knees. Oren’s old shirt. Then I sigh and fall into bed, finally. Relieved. Clean. Whole. My angel hums with me as we fall together, tumbling into sleep.

But my dreams are full of holes dug deep into the earth, patchy grass, a grave. Oren’s grave. Oren’s funeral. People in a row, blank faces, everyone silent except for Mom, who is sobbing, while Dad tries to hold her up. The sun disappears. The earth goes sodden beneath our feet. Rain. Rain. Rain. I glance at the top of his casket: the marble angel sits on top. Except now the angel is gone and it’s Oren. Oren’s green eyes, staring back at me. His tall, lean body. That mole, right at the center of his forehead. He’s sitting on top of his own grave, whistling. Suddenly, he says,
I lost my Tigers hat, Lo. Help me find it.
I start backing away, the rain blurring Oren’s face.
Lope, I need you,
he says, more urgently now. But now the rain is choking me and I can’t see Oren anymore, I can only hear his voice, desperate, fading:
I lost my hat. You’ve gotta help me, Lo.

Even after I can no longer see him, his voice echoes, screams through my head:
Lo, I need you. Lo, don’t leave me.

Why did you leave me?

CHAPTER 2

“Rachel Stern and Mikey K.
totally
did it at Sarah’s party.”

“No
way
. Zach made that up. Are you seriously going to believe Zach?”