The Butterfly Clues (35 page)

And, suddenly, my whole body aches to reverse the awful cycle that was Oren’s disappearance, his death—not for me, even, but for Dad. So he’ll be happy again. So he’ll stop working sixteen-hour days to resurrect a dead city, to bring back someone whose gone-ness is final and resolute. So Mom will come alive again, and the pills will vanish from her nightstand, and we’ll dye Easter eggs together and build fires at Christmas.

But I know it’s not that easy. Nothing’s that easy.

We pull into the driveway and then walk inside together, and the house feels warmer than it usually does, lighter somehow, crisper, more real. I realize once we’ve gone inside that I didn’t
tap tap tap, banana
, and that it didn’t matter. I didn’t freak out. I’m
not
freaking out.

“I’m going to make some tea, Lo,” Dad says. “Would you like some?”

“Yes, please,” I say, only once this time. “I’ll be right back.” I walk quietly upstairs, press my ear against Mom’s door. It’s quiet—no TV, no sobbing. I keep going. Up to my attic room, to my porthole window and four-poster bed and everything I’ve rescued, no longer scattered across the floor where I left them: the cracked things thrown away, the unbroken things pushed to the sides, arranged in neat little piles. Dad must have come in while I was gone—tried to organize, separate, reorder. My chest swells.

I kneel beside my bed, extracting the rectangular old cigar box, pulling from within it two letters. Two letters from Oren. Letters I’ve kept hidden away, secrets. Short and to the point, they both say nearly the same thing:

Dear Little Sis,

I wanted to tell you that I miss you. I’ve known you since the day you were born, and it’s weird feeling like I don’t know you right now. I don’t know how long I’ll be gone, only that I had to go. I was ruining everyone’s lives, and I hated that. I don’t want that. Make sure no one messes with my stuff, OK? I love you, Lo.

Your Big Bro,

Oren

And they end the same way, too:
P.S. Hug Mom and Dad for me.

Back in the kitchen, Dad pours steaming water into two mugs, sets them on the kitchen table, folding his hands lightly around the big, flowery one that Mom, exclusively, used to drink from.

“Chamomile okay, Lo?” he asks. “It’s all we have. And that’s my fault, I know—I’ve been … so
distracted
. I guess things have been falling through the cracks.” He laughs a little, sadly.

I hand him the letters, clutched tightly in my hand. “Chamomile’s perfect.”

“What are these?” he asks, voice quiet, edged with fear.

“Just read them.”

I sit at the table and hold my mug in my hands as he reads, and when I look up again he’s smiling, fat tears coursing down his cheeks. And without thinking twice about it—an instinct, a phenomenon powerful as birth, as death—we stand and wrap our arms around each other, and I breathe in his dad smell. It’s been so long since I’ve really been close enough to him to smell it—his leather and peppermint and sap and warmth. It’s the safest smell in the world. It’s the smell of being carried to your room and sung to sleep in a big, warm bed.

And the house seems to glow around us, to fill and grow lighter than it’s been in a very long time and our tired, hopeful hearts thump against our chests and I know that things are going to change. I hug Dad tighter.

Things are already changing.

CHAPTER 33

Being back in school after a near-death experience is impossibly weird. But, weird in a different way than it was, returning after Oren died, when everything seemed coated in this fine, dark ash, shrouded and shadowy. Now everything seems slightly lighter, sharper. Every sound, too—louder, more defined.

Rumor has it that, finally, last week, Jeremy Thoroux asked Keri Ram to prom.

I see Keri just after fourth period. She and Jeremy are standing together. She is in a blissful lean against her locker but straightens up as soon as she spots me.

“Hey, Lo!” she calls out, waving. The words arch toward me, a warm beam—her eyes glow, her cheeks are pink.

Jeremy turns, too. He blushes, gives me a shy wave and a smile, as his hand tightens around Keri’s.

I smile back at both of them. They’re right; they
fit
. I knew they would fit, just as I know exactly why my remaining stone wolves and stone bears belong beside each other in my room, or how the Chinese gold-fringed peacock rug looks best three inches from the cherrywood printer’s drawers. She smiles even bigger, then, and turns back to Jeremy, weaving her arm into his as they walk, doubly redheaded, to last period.

My heart beams in my chest. Maybe I’m not so hopeless after all. Maybe—maybe we’ll actually be friends. I picture it: Keri and Jeremy, Flynt and me. Hanging out. Grabbing some pizza. Trash can bowling.

Suddenly—I have an idea.

The bus ride to Neverland, just like school, feels new—my body a tangled mass of nerves and excitement and residual fear, the light, pouring broadly through the windows.

It’s getting warm out—finally—new smells rising from defrosted plains of grass, from fresh mud and re-budding plants. When I get off the bus I shed my winter jacket, hold it balled up between my arms like a serving dish I’m presenting to this whole cracked, “eternally wasteful nation-home of Neverland.” That’s what Flynt called it the first time I met him. I still remember that, how he’d spread his arms like a magician offering me a private view into heaven. But that’s Flynt—he can go anywhere and make it home, turn garbage into art.

I weave my way through the streets, patchy and raw, passing Flynt’s barbershop squat along the way, passing the Prophet at his post, swaying as usual. I fumble in my pocket for change. “Thank you,” I tell him, dropping coins into his hat. He doesn’t say anything this time, just smiles, keeps singing.

I skirt between the dirty buildings, searching for the graffiti-skulled alleyway, the drippy red
M
, the boy in the bear-eared hat
.
And, finally, in the distance, I see it—the entranceway to Malatesta’s, marked in red
X
s, covered in paint. My heart flips as I approach and walk through to the lean-to, its door wide open to the breeze.

Flynt is squatting on the floor, elbow deep in paint and papiermâché. Gretchen and the tall musician guy from the Narniaesque party are here, too, playing twin ukuleles in the back of the space, singing something dissonant, jangly.

He hears my footsteps, raises his head. “Lo!” He scrambles to his feet, wiping his hands on his pants and propelling me back outside and through the streets before I can get a look at his newest work. “Rough draft,” he explains. “You’ll have to forgive my brutish appearance—wasn’t expecting a royal visit today, though … I did hope for it.” He smiles. “So, how are you, Lady Lo?”

“I’m alive,” I answer. “I think that means something.”

He grabs my hand and squeezes it in his. Warm. The lines of our palms press. I don’t pull away.

“So,” I say, “what are you doing tonight?”

“Hmm—well, aside from organizing my army of rats to storm Washington … nothing.” He turns to me. “Who wants to know?”

“I do,” I answer, firmly, “I want—I want to have our date tonight.”

He wiggles his eyebrows, laughs. “Couldn’t wait any longer, eh?”

“Well, actually, tonight is … prom.” I squeeze his hand— quickly—three times. “And I want to take you. As my date.” I bite my lip and look up at him. “You know, to repay you for saving my life and everything.”

He looks surprised, releases my hand and reaches up to grab a spotty green leaf, twirls it between his fingers. “You’re sure?”

I’m not sure. Not at all. In fact, the idea sets my stomach curling, but I nod anyway. “Yes, definitely, one hundred percent.”

“You’re very convincing, Lo,” he says, laughing. Then his voice gets serious. “You do realize you’re asking me to leave Neverland again, and aside from the occasional life-saving mission, I make a point
never
to do that.”

My heart sinks.

“Then again,” he continues, turning to me as we approach the busted old birdbath—the point at which Neverland ends and the rest of the world begins—“never say never.”

Slowly—timidly, almost—meeting my eyes, taking my hand again in his, he takes one tiny step forward. And then, one more. One more step into the great beyond.

“One small step for man …,” he says, lips spreading into a grin.

“One giant leap for mankind,” I finish, as we both crack up and he pulls me into his chest and we hug, swaying there for a minute and I feel the muscles of his back beneath his flannel.

“Look at us,” Flynt says, his voice growing theatrical, dramatic— releasing the hug to clasp both of my hands—“stuck in the middle, hovering on the line between two worlds.”

“I think this is where we belong,” I say, as the number 96 bus comes into sight, rumbling from down the block. Quickly, I tear a piece of paper from a notebook in my bag, scribbling down my address. “Pick me up at eight?”

“It’s a date,” he says as the bus arrives, pulling noisily beside the curb. He squeezes my hand in his, a long, warm second. Everything is fireworking inside of me as I board the bus and find a seat near the back. I stare out at him through the window, still standing there, saluting to me as the bus pulls away.

With less than an hour before Flynt comes to meet me, I pull Sapphire’s bustier from the hanger, run my fingers along its sparkling black bust, cinched waist, and hold it against me in the mirror. Something winging through my head says, simply, yes. One time. And once is enough. I wriggle it over my head and feel her around me, and again—it’s the two of us, crazy-nervous, dressing for our first prom.

Digging into my closet, I pull out a few hand-me-downs my mom gave me back when Oren was well, when she was happy. I’ve seen old pictures of her wearing them, from high school in the seventies, when her hair came all the way down her back in smooth black waves, when she wore giant sunglasses and flowers tucked behind her ears, when the camera caught her, mid-spinblurry, dancing at the edge of the Chesapeake Bay. They’re things I never would have worn before: a soft black linen bell skirt that ties at the waist, teal teardrop-shaped beads edged along the hem; red suede heels; a scarf patterned in multicolored daisies that I wrap, loose, around my shoulders.

I wonder what my father thought when he picked her up for their prom in his fancy rented tuxedo: if his whole body shook, in a good way, when he saw her; if he could have imagined that she would become a dead woman trapped in a breathing, living body; if he would have still fallen in love with her.

I shiver, slide my feet into my new-old shoes, twist my yellow-daisy costume ring onto my pointer finger, assess myself in the mirror. A tingle runs up my spine; for once, I look … like me. A collage of pieces and places and time periods.

I push my bangs back, off my forehead, my scar a deep diamond gash above my eye—assurance that I’ll never forget the day at Butt Creek when Oren saved my life. Not that I ever could. Every single moment I ever had with him, I have them all—folded into a million messy drawers in my brain; they belong to me; my dowry, my heritage.

It sparkles from the corner of my eye—Sapphire’s broken butterfly. I reach for it, grip it in my palm as I stare at myself in the mirror—no one else’s image flitting through—just me this time. Almost seventeen years old; scarred, but whole.