The Glass Butterfly (25 page)

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Authors: Louise Marley

Tags: #Romance

BOOK: The Glass Butterfly
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She heard Elvira's heavy step on the staircase. She put the saltcellar aside, and stood with her hands twisted in her apron. Zita was on the point of coming through the doorway into the kitchen, but she fell back to allow her mistress to precede her.
Elvira looked as if she had aged ten years in a single night. The flesh beneath her eyes was baggy and dark. She wore a shirtwaist and a long plaid skirt with a thick woolen shawl around her shoulders. She bulked in the kitchen doorway like a massive ship in a tiny harbor, turning this way and that as she fixed her two servants with a baleful gaze. “I know what you all say about me,” she said hoarsely. “You say I'm crazy. That I throw fits.”
“No, no, signora,” Zita began, but Elvira cut her off with a gesture.
“The
signore
is out?” she said in a colorless tone.
“Sì, signora,”
Doria whispered. “He went to the island. He took his gun.”
“Good. Doria, get your things. I want you gone before he comes back.”
Doria stiffened. “What? Why?”
“I've had enough of your tricks.”
“That's not fair!” Doria cried. “I didn't—”
“Giacomo doesn't see it, but I do! I want you out of my house!”
Doria couldn't think of the right words, the diplomatic ones, the calming ones. She could only blurt, “Signora, if you will just listen to reason!”
“Reason?” Elvira hissed. “How dare you?”
“I didn't mean—I only want to—”
“You think I will keep a servant who speaks to me this way?”
“I only mean—if you would only think—”
Elvira said hoarsely, “You! You, the village slut who can't stay away from my husband.”
Fear and anger mingled in Doria's heart. She protested, “It's not true! I've told you over and over, it's not true!”
“I have my pride! I know who I am and what I deserve!” Elvira pressed her hand, with its long, thick fingers, to her breast. She didn't appear to notice that her corset was twisted askew. The shelf of her bosom was tipped sideways, making her look even more like a ship listing to one side. “I will not have a little viper like you slithering around my feet, Doria Manfredi!”
“You have to let me explain—”
“Oh, yes, yes. You love to talk, don't you, Doria? You love to talk to my husband! You do your ironing late at night, so you can be near Giacomo, though I've ordered you not to do that! I hear you, late at night, talking, talking on and on. You give him no peace.”
“
I
give him no peace?” Doria spread her hands, desperate to find her way through the maze of argument. “It is not
I
who—”
Elvira snapped, “Don't you dare!”
Zita tried again to intervene. “Signora,” she began, but Elvira said, “Quiet! I'm not talking to you!” A peal of thunder rattled the second-floor shutters, and the rain intensified, hammering the roof, spattering the windows. “Go now, Doria. Fetch your things.” When Doria didn't move at first, Elvira took a threatening step toward her. “Do I have to throw you out myself?”
Doria, shocked and defeated, backed away from Elvira toward her bedroom. She fumbled with the doorknob once, twice, before she could turn it and go in. Once inside she stood staring at her few possessions, her brushes, her prayer book, her extra dress, her only coat. She couldn't think how to collect them, what to do with them. She couldn't believe, even now, that Elvira meant it, that after all the times she had lost her temper and railed about this or that imagined offense, her mistress had really turned her out of the house. Doria kept thinking Elvira would call her back, change her mind.
Puccini could not have known what his wife meant to do. Surely, he could not have known. If he had, would he have fled, taken his gun and gone out in his boat? She couldn't believe it. She wouldn't.
Zita came into Doria's room when Elvira's heavy footsteps had clumped out into the studio. Elvira sometimes stood beside the mosaic fireplace, one hand caressing the inlaid mantelpiece as she gazed out over the lake, watching for her husband to return. Doria had always felt sorry, seeing her like that, her big feet splayed on the pretty carpet, her thick shoulders tense with impatience and longing. How terrible it must be to love someone so much that it drove away reason and dignity! How sad to be a woman to be avoided, a woman famed for her bad temper and jealous rages!
But now, sitting on her narrow bed and staring up at Old Zita's wrinkled, sorrowing face, Doria had no room in her heart for pity. Elvira Puccini had thrown her out, after her years of service, dismissed her on a baseless suspicion. “Zita, where will I go? What will I do?”
Zita crouched beside her, taking her hands and squeezing them in her old, dry ones. “You will go home to your mamma, of course,” she said soothingly. “Until the
signora
comes to her senses.”
“Mamma won't have me,” Doria said sadly. “She said so.”
“Of course she will. That was only talk.”
“She will say I should have kept quiet. It's what she always says.”
“I will go with you, and explain. The
signora
is crazy; everyone knows that!”
Doria thought perhaps her heart would break into pieces. She was Butterfly, helpless little Cio-Cio-San. A girl with no power. She hadn't asked much of her life, she thought, only this work, service to the maestro, the music! But Villa Puccini was her Sorrow, to be taken away from her even though she had given her life to it.
She said, “I don't know if Mamma will listen to you, Zita. She's a hard woman.”
“Lo so,”
Zita said grimly. “Emilia's had a hard life.”
“Do you think the
signore
will be angry with his wife for doing this? Will he make her take me back?”
Zita scowled. “Hah. Who knows what rich people will do, Doria?”
Sick at heart, Doria reached under the bed and pulled out the satchel she had carried here on her very first day at Villa Puccini, nearly six years before. She folded in her dress, her nightdress, her few bits of lingerie. She hesitated over her spare apron, then took that, too. She put her hairbrushes on top of it all, and closed it.
She followed Zita out to the kitchen and then to the back door. They put on their coats, and Zita picked up the big umbrella. She also, with a quick glance over her shoulder, took up her shopping basket, and filled it with two jars of tomatoes, a bottle of olive oil, a tin of tea sent from Babington's in Rome, and a loaf of bread. “The
signora
would not want you to go back to your mamma empty handed,” she said. Doria tried to smile at this, but her lips trembled.
Together, the two of them went out the back door and into the rain-sodden garden. Zita put up the umbrella, and, laden with the basket and Doria's satchel, they trudged up the muddy lane toward the Manfredi home. The villagers of Torre came to their doorsteps and windows to watch them, and Doria hung her head. Tongues would wag today. Rumors would fly. Her mother would be furious, and Father Michelucci would be disappointed. Even Zita couldn't know how her heart ached.
Only Cio-Cio-San, poor little Butterfly, could have understood her feelings.
23
La mia mamma, che farà s'io non torno? Quanto piangerà!
 
My mother, what will she do if I don't return?
How she will weep!
 
—Jake Wallace,
La Fanciulla del West,
Act One
J
ack took care making his way out of Vermont, across New York, and south to Pennsylvania. He kept a close eye on his rearview mirror. He bought a map at a service station to supplement the GPS, since he wasn't certain what destination to program it for. He used the cash he'd brought, and for two nights he slept in the car, rolled in his sleeping bag, finding deserted state parks and campgrounds to park in, and watching to be certain no one observed him. By the time he skirted the south end of Lake Michigan and headed north into Wisconsin, he was sure no one was following him.
She
wasn't following him.
He kept his cell phone in the car charger. Once or twice a friend called, but he didn't speak long. He promised himself he would call Chet and Kate in a day or so to reassure them. He pressed on toward the west, using the map to choose the fastest route. He had to change the radio channel often as stations faded in and out. Once he came upon a classical station that lasted long enough for him to hear Octavia Voss sing “The Song to the Moon” from
Rusalka
. Tory loved that aria. He yearned to see her, headphones fixed over her head, tears on her cheeks as she gave herself up to the music, and he swore to himself he would see that again.
There was plenty of snow, but the roads in Wisconsin and Minnesota were well plowed, and he only had to slow his pace a few times. Christmas lights shone along main streets of towns and from remote farmhouses. They blinked garishly in convenience store windows. He ate fast food mostly, but once or twice, when he couldn't face another greasy hamburger, he stopped in a grocery store and bought oranges and bananas. He cleaned up in rest stops and gas station bathrooms, and promised himself a motel room when he reached Montana.
The long, long hours of driving forced him to be alone with his thoughts. His mind spun with images and regrets and tumbled memories of things he wished he'd done differently, until at last he blew out a breath and said aloud, “No way, man. You'll end up as crazy as Gramma. Take it from the beginning.”
It was a good way to pass the hours, it turned out. Tory the therapist, he reflected wryly, would have approved. He disciplined himself to look at his twenty years in order, to try to figure out what had gone wrong between himself and his mother, what he had done and, in fairness, what she had done—or not done—to let this rift grow between them. He had a good memory. He thought back to when it had all started, when he was thirteen or fourteen, and worked his way forward through the years.
He remembered jumping on the trampoline in the Garveys' backyard, he and Colton bouncing together, falling, laughing even when they bounced right off onto the grass. He had banged his head on the steel support where the canvas was suspended. His forehead swelled, and his eye turned black and blue in a quarter of an hour. Mrs. Garvey had glanced at him, saying offhandedly, “There's ice in the freezer if you want it,” then turning back to whatever she was doing. He had been amazed at that. His mother would have insisted he hold an ice pack on the bruise, would have lectured both him and Colton about the dangers of getting wild on the trampoline and, if it had been Colton with the black eye, called his mother to tell her. When Tory came to pick him up that day, Mrs. Garvey was nowhere to be found. Colton had looked a little shamefaced about that, facing Tory's worried frown with a shrug and reddening cheeks. Tory had refused to let Jack go back to the Garveys' again until she learned the trampoline was gone.
He remembered a baseball game one spring evening. Colton's dad had practiced all the sports with him, football, soccer, basketball, and baseball, and Colton was a great hitter. Jack remembered the shame of his own strikeouts, the agony of a dropped ball in center field. They'd won the game anyway, when Colton smacked one completely out of the park, and he had stood by watching Colton and Mr. Garvey high-fiving each other. When Tory came up, she said something or other, he'd made a good effort, at least he'd tried, something like that. He remembered how his throat had burned with humiliation at the other guys hearing these lame excuses for his failure. He had snapped at her that she didn't know what she was talking about, and he remembered with painful clarity how the smile had frozen on her face, how her slender shoulders had stiffened, and how high and tight her voice was when she turned to greet one of the other parents.
There were good times, too. They had made a trip to New York when he was fourteen, and wandered the streets together staring at the buildings they recognized from films and television, going to a Broadway show of his choosing, attending only one classical concert. He had enjoyed that, actually, and had liked the way the patrons of that theater glanced at his pretty mother, how smart she had sounded chatting with their seatmates about the music.
His eyes began to burn as the sun set ahead of him, beyond the flat fields and low silhouettes of the little Minnesota towns he drove through. He had better stop. He'd be no good to his mother if he fell asleep and crashed the damn car.
And he remembered, as he started looking for a safe place to park, how cautious she had been about his driving, how he had chafed under her constant reminders, how he had badgered her to let him take the car to school—an old Volvo station wagon, embarrassing, but at least having four wheels—and how rarely she had allowed it.
By the time he was driving, of course, the Garvey family he so admired had broken up. Mrs. Garvey's negligence, Mr. Garvey's infidelity, had all led to disaster for Colton and his little brothers. Jack had seen it for what it was, even as a teenager. He understood he had been wrong about them, that their family was no more ideal than his own single-parent household. Why had he never told his mother that? She had never spoken of it except for offering to take him to say good-bye to his friend on the day the Garveys left town.
Jack found a city park with a gravel lot in a tiny town on the western edge of Minnesota, but the moment he turned off the engine, he knew it would be too cold to sleep in the car. Snow blanketed the grassy area around him, and bent the boughs of pine trees with its weight. Frigid air crept in through the doors of the car the moment the heater went off. He'd have to splurge on a room. He wouldn't be any good to Tory if he turned into a Popsicle, either.
He pulled out his wallet and counted what he had left. He was pretty sure he could do it. He would be out of money by the time he reached Oregon, but that didn't matter. The important thing was to get there, undetected, and search for Tory.
There was a motel in the little town, a dilapidated-looking place with cabins arrayed around a snowy parking lot. There was no one in the office when he stopped, but a sign said to ring for service, so he did. A sleepy woman with old-fashioned plastic curlers in her hair came out to the desk, had him sign the register, and gave him a key. She looked curiously at the cash he gave her, but she didn't say anything other than to direct him to a room. He took the key, said a polite good night, and went out to take his duffel bag from the Escalade.
The room was the most depressing place he'd ever been. The sheets were threadbare, there was no television, and the shower emitted only a weak stream of water. Still, it was good to be off the road. Jack stood under the shower for ten minutes, scrubbing his hair with hand soap and rubbing himself down, glad to be clean after three days of roughing it. He put all the blankets the room provided on the bed, and he inspected the sheets before he climbed in between them. He laid his head on the pillow, and listened to his stomach gurgle. He had only had a banana since lunch. He closed his eyes, longing for eggs and sausage and pancakes. That made him think of the kitchen at home, always stocked, something ready in the fridge for quick meals. Another good memory, and one a guy only appreciated too late.
In fact, he thought, yawning, turning on his side, Tory's house had been the most efficient he'd ever seen. As different from the Garveys' house as it could be, of course, and that had been part of his problem.... As he grew warm under the blankets, his thoughts drifted sleepily. Images from his days of driving jumbled with thoughts of school, of his friends, of the classes he hadn't finished. His stomach gurgled emptily, and he thought of the savory smell of Tory's lasagna winding up the stairs and into his bedroom while he sat at the computer—
His eyes opened abruptly. Sleep slid away from him, and he lay staring up at the flyspecked ceiling of his lonely motel room.
The computer. The note with that cell phone number on it.
Why was he thinking about that now? What had happened to it?
Or, he wondered with a chill that matched the icy Minnesota air, who had taken it?

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