Breaking Butterflies

by M. Anjelais

  I tiptoed over and stood in front of the door, my hand raised to knock, wondering if I wanted to talk to him or not. I just felt like telling him that I was going to stay, and making sure that it was okay with him. There was a little voice in my head telling me that maybe I was being selfish by pushing to stay; maybe it would make Cadence happier if I left. After all, I hadn’t stopped to consider that, had I? I knocked softly on the door, three hesitant, shy taps.

  “Yes?” he said.

  “Um, it’s me,” I said, in a low voice. “Can I come in?”

  “No” was the curt answer.

  “Oh, okay,” I said, feeling slightly dejected. Perhaps he wasn’t decent? I stayed outside the door. “Well, I just wanted to tell you that I’m staying another week.”

  “That’s nice,” he said, his voice suddenly softening. “I hoped you would.” From inside the room, the faint sounds of a pencil scratching against paper reached my ears. I wondered what he was writing. Perhaps it was a list of things that he wanted to do in his remaining weeks … or maybe he was writing a story. Did he like to write fiction? He certainly read a lot.

  “Are you going to go to bed anytime soon, Sphinx?” he asked after a few minutes, making me wonder how he knew that I was still there. I could have tiptoed away in that moment of silence. For a brief moment, I was suddenly convinced that he could see through the door, that he had been staring at me the whole time, and I simply hadn’t known.

  “Yeah,” I said softly. “I just wanted to tell you that I was staying,” I repeated after a pause.

  “Thank you” was the smooth, murmured response. There was a soft clack; he had put the pencil down onto a hard surface — a desk, probably. Was it the same desk with the drawer that he had taken the switchblade out of all those years ago?

  “Good night, Sphinx,” he said. I imagined that he was smiling when he said it. He sounded like he might have been.

  “Good night, Cadence,” I said, stepping back from the door.

  I was glad that he sounded pleased with me staying, but a heavy feeling of disappointment dripped into my chest and lingered there. I had envisioned him letting me into his room, had seen us having another talk like the one we had had out on the swings or in the piano room — but it was not to be. The light went out in his room, plunging the hallway into even deeper darkness. I suddenly felt much smaller than I had just a moment before. Things were not always the way that one envisioned them; that was always the problem.

  Instead of going to my room, I went back into my mother’s. Like all mothers, she woke up as soon as I neared her bed. “Are you okay, honey?” she asked, her voice thick with sleep. “What’s the matter?”

  “Can I sleep with you tonight?” I asked. All those years ago, when I had been cut, my mother had offered to sleep with me, to stay with me. And I had been trying to grow up all week, trying to pick apart the threads that bound me to my mother, but now I wanted to cash in on her offer from years ago. Now I didn’t feel like I’d done any growing up at all. I felt like I was ten again, a little girl who was scared of the dark.

  “Sure,” she said groggily, and so I climbed up onto the bed next to her as she shifted over to make room. I curled my knees up to my chest, and she pulled the comforter up over both of us. It covered half of my face, and underneath it the air was warm and smelled like my mother’s lavender bodywash. The rift closed up; I needed her, and she was there.

  The next morning, I sat on the bed next to my mother’s suitcase as she made sure that she had all of her things packed. Her clothes were neatly folded within, a stark contrast to the mass of wrinkles and crumpled fabric that my suitcase had become over the past week. I smoothed a line out of one of her shirts.

  “Don’t worry too much if you forget something,” I said. “I’ll still be here.”

  “I keep forgetting,” she said ruefully. “I wish you were coming home with me.”

  “I know,” I told her. “But —”

  “But I know this is important,” she said, smiling and closing her suitcase. “Don’t worry, Sphinxie, I’ll be fine on that big plane all by myself!” She laughed and zipped up the outer pockets. “And I know you’ll be fine too.” She lugged her suitcase off the bed and put it down on the floor with a gentle thump.

  “Do me a favor,” she said, her smile suddenly growing more serious. “Be there for Leigh, too. She needs someone here for her even more than Cadence does.” She was right, I realized. Leigh was the mother who would be left behind, a piece of her eternally broken off and lost.

  “Do you think she’ll be okay?” I asked my mother. “When Cadence is gone, I mean.”

  “I think she’ll make it,” my mother answered, squeezing my shoulders. “It’ll be so hard, of course, but people are resilient. She won’t forget, but she’ll be able to go on, I think. She’s strong, she always has been.”

  “That’s good,” I said quietly. “I feel so bad for her, Mom. She’s going to feel it, forever.”

  After breakfast, we all got in Leigh’s car to drive my mother to the airport. Cadence sat next to me in the backseat, wearing a floppy red jacket and clutching a travel mug of tea so fiercely that his knuckles had turned white. His hair was falling into his eyes, a mass of golden tangles. His iPod earbuds were in his ears, and he wasn’t responding to anything that any of us were saying. I leaned over slightly so that I could see what he was listening to: Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

  Outside the car, the sky was gray but clear. As we drove away from Leigh’s house, I noticed a man jogging with his dog on the side of the road. It was a shaggy golden retriever, pink tongue lolling, tail wagging happily as it followed its owner.

  “Look at the dog,” my mother said from the front passenger seat. “That’s a really pretty dog. I always wanted a golden retriever when I was a little girl.”

  “I remember that!” Leigh said. “I was going to help you sell lemonade on your street so that you could get enough money to buy a puppy!” They laughed together, enjoying the memory.

  “Did you ever get the dog?” I asked my mother curiously.

  “No,” she said. “Grandma is allergic to them, remember?”

  “Plus your lemonade was too watery,” Leigh remarked. “We had one customer, this little girl from the block over, and she took one sip and spat it out. Then she told all the other kids not to buy Sarah’s disgusting lemonade. I thought she was the rudest child in all the world.”

  “I never liked that kid,” my mother said. “She was in my class at school that year. She used to make fun of the bad haircut I had.”

  “What was her name again?” Leigh asked.

  “Polly? Lucy? I don’t know,” my mother said, and giggled for no apparent reason. That was when I realized how nervous she was about leaving me behind.

  We were nearing the outskirts of Leigh’s rural town, coming closer every moment to the tall city of London and its airport. Soon my mother would be on a plane, rising higher and higher, while my feet remained firmly on the ground. Just as I had wanted. Still, a pang of nervousness suddenly stung the inside of my stomach, making me shudder. I was the one Cadence had hurt the most; I knew his dark side better than anyone. And I was still determined to stay. But no matter how old you get, there’s always a part of you that wishes your mom could always be there to protect you, even if you are trying to be an adult, even if it was all your idea to make her go home without you in the first place. My stomach was in knots, conflicted. In that moment, I hated that I had the capacity to hold such a twisted assembly of emotion inside me.

  When we arrived, I carried my mother’s suitcase for her into the building and stood with her as she checked it in, wrapping the tag that the man behind the counter gave her around her suitcase handle. As we walked through the airport toward the line for the baggage check, Cadence aligned himself so that he was walking next to me, close enough for his hand to accidentally brush against mine every now and again. I looked up at him and he gave me a smooth smile, his eyes sparkling. I f
elt a chill run through my body.

  “Sphinx,” he said casually, in a low voice. “Look at this.”

  When I turned to see what he was talking about, he put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a Swiss Army knife. When I saw it, I felt a terrible chill run through my entire body, as though someone had dumped a bucket of ice water over my head. And I remembered, with a sick feeling in my stomach, that he’d introduced me to the blade that he used on my face with almost identical words. Look at this.

  “What are you doing with that?” I whispered, trying not to look at the little blade. “Cadence, we’re at an airport, you can’t have that out! They take things like that very seriously!”

  “So sorry,” Cadence said, in a smooth voice, as he slipped it back into his pocket. “I forgot I had it. I was just showing you, Sphinx.” That was a lie. He’d brought it along in his pocket on purpose, I knew that. But what had he meant to do with it? Was it a threat? For a moment, I wondered frantically if it was too late to change my mind and fly home with my mother. Maybe I was crazy to be letting her leave me alone in a foreign country with a boy who’d used a knife on me before. But there was nothing I could do now. The knife was out of sight. No one had seen it but me. And Cadence was probably just trying to see if he could get a reaction from me, if he could cause trouble in the airport. Just a little fun, a little game. He was always playing some kind of game.

  We waited with my mother as she procrastinated going through security, as she hesitated over and over again and filled the air with empty conversation in order to avoid the inevitable. When we finally hugged and said good-bye and I love you a thousand times, she paused yet again before walking off to remind me of all the things I was supposed to do, to call her and be careful and be a good houseguest. And I promised that I would. Then she disappeared through baggage check and was gone, leaving an imprint of herself on the air behind her, still trying to watch over me.

  “Well, Sphinxie, it’s just you and us now,” said Cadence casually.

  “Yep,” I said, taking a deep breath and trying not to think about the knife.

  “Do you want to eat lunch out on our way home?” Leigh asked.

  “Sure, if that’s okay with you and Cadence,” I said.

  Leigh smiled and put an arm around my shoulders, giving me a quick squeeze. Behind us, Cadence had wandered over to a magazine stand and was peering at the headlines: gossip and scandals and who cheated on whom.

  “Of course it’s okay,” said Leigh, still smiling. “You know, I can’t tell you enough how much it means to us that you’re staying, Sphinx.”

  “It means a lot to me, too,” I said, still looking out the window at the sky, at the place where my mother had disappeared. There was no turning back now.

  We went to a restaurant near Leigh’s house, a casual little place. It didn’t feel like we had really left my mother at the airport, and I kept having to remind myself that she was in the air, flying home. The waitress was grandmotherly, with gray hair pulled back from her face and wrinkles around her mouth from a lifetime of smiling. When we gave her our orders, she didn’t write anything down.

  “I keep it all safe up here,” she said, and tapped the side of her head when she saw us looking quizzically at her. She had little earrings shaped like carrots dangling from her earlobes. When she brought our orders out, everything was exactly correct; she really had kept it all safe in her head. I admired her for that, seeing as she was an older lady. You would think she’d have problems with her memory.

  Leigh and I were sharing a large basket of fries, but Cadence had a bare salad in front of him. He was rearranging the leaves of lettuce, moving them around and around in circles, and staring through my head to the window behind it. It had begun to rain again. I wondered if he was feeling sad or just tracing the path of a certain raindrop, watching it to see if it would beat the other drops to the bottom of the window. I twisted around in my seat and picked out a drop. If he was upset, I wanted to distract him.

  “Let’s play raindrop racers,” I said, pointing. “This one’s definitely going to win.”

  He only stared at me, seeming unimpressed. I knew he probably thought I was behaving like a little kid. I waited for him to roll his eyes and return his attention to his salad. Instead, he watched me for a moment, his head inclined slightly to one side, and then pointed at the window too. I felt myself let out an involuntary breath of relief.

  “I think that one is going to win,” he said, showing me his choice.

  And for a minute, we stared intensely at those drops, cheering our chosen racers on.

  They both reached the bottom at the same time. I looked back at Cadence, and he turned to look at me almost at the same time. His eyes were cold as they quickly swiveled around to meet mine. For a moment, I wondered if he was angry that he hadn’t “won,” even though a raindrop hitting the bottom of a window was a random event and not a skill to be mastered. I felt one corner of my mouth quirking into a quivering involuntary smile, like a frightened dog pulling back its lips.

  And then he smiled too, the corners of his own mouth stretching almost in sync with mine.

  “Did you see that, Sphinxie?” he said.

  “See what?” For a split second, I thought he was referring to his own smile. I’d made that happen. I’d pointed out the raindrops for us. And managing to do these little things for him meant that my choice to stay was not going to waste. I had my purpose here.

  “The raindrops, Sphinx. They ended the race together.”

  “Yeah,” I said, feeling suddenly uncertain. His tone sounded as though he was trying to make a point, but I didn’t know what it was.

  He nodded and looked back to the window, still holding my smile on his face. I wondered what he was trying to tell me. And then Leigh said something in her forced cheery voice that I was only half listening to, and the pattering of the rain on the roof slowly came to a halt.

  Now that I was its sole guest, Leigh’s house seemed larger and more imposing. I walked through her front door and into her entrance hall feeling as though I had never really noticed how big the place was. In a daze, I left my shoes on the communal pile in the mudroom and followed Leigh into the kitchen while Cadence disappeared out onto the back patio, letting the door slam behind him.

  Vivienne was at the stove, a large pot simmering gently in front of her. She had a wooden spoon tucked behind her ear like a pencil, and the silver bangles around her wrists jingled happily when she moved. Her shirt had a humongous purple peace sign spreading across the front of it. She turned and smiled at me when I came into the kitchen.

  “I heard you’ll be with us a little longer, huh?” she said, taking the spoon from behind her ear and sticking it into the pot. “I’m glad you like it here so much.” She stirred the soup, back and forth. “It’s so nice that you want to be here for Cadence.”

  I bristled without meaning to. This particular thing had been quietly grating on me ever since it first came up: the way that it was “so nice,” “so good” of me, to stay with Cadence. Some girls I knew from school at home might have thought of me as a goody two-shoes; I didn’t sneak out at night or party, nor had I ever experimented with drinking or drugs. Even so, I was not a saint. And I thought there was something sad about it, that everyone thought of me as so good when I wasn’t, and of Cadence as so terribly bad. Nothing was ever said aloud, but it was still sad. We were both just teenagers; I was just as prone to getting in trouble for a stupid mistake as he was. And it was very possible that my continued presence in the house was a stupid mistake in itself.

  “You could move into the room your mom was using, if you want to,” Leigh said, tearing me away from my thoughts. “It’s bigger, and it has its own little bathroom attached too.”

  “Oh, thanks,” I said, still feeling slightly uncomfortable. The fact that my mother was no longer there was making me feel insecure; I didn’t want to take her room and be constantly reminded that I was really on my own now. Not to mention being
constantly reminded of her, and our discussions, and the plan, and the rift. It was a paradox. I wanted her back and I didn’t. “Maybe I will, but I don’t know. I really like the room I’m in now, it’s so pretty.”

  “Oh, good, I’m happy you like it,” Leigh said. “I wasn’t so sure about it when I decorated it.”

  “I think it’s great,” I told her. Not only did her house seem to have grown, but her conversations with me had grown suddenly awkward. “Do you know where Cadence went?”

  “Probably up to the attic,” she said, moving to the stove to help Vivienne add ingredients to her soup. “You can go up if you want, Sphinxie.” She said it sheepishly, recalling — just as I did — the incident when he had shoved me for accidentally going up there alone.

  “I’ll go up,” I declared, trying to exude confidence. I left the kitchen and slowly traveled up the stairs. When I reached the second floor, I turned toward the direction of the attic stairs, but the sound of movement from inside Cadence’s bedroom caught my attention. He wasn’t in the attic after all. Just as it had been the night before my mother left, the door to his bedroom was not closed all the way, but hung open a crack. And just like I had that night, I went over to the door and knocked quietly.

  “Yes?” he said.

  “Can I come in this time?” I asked bravely.

  There was a pause.

  “Yes,” he said finally, and his voice was higher and softer, enticing. I was pleased he wanted me with him, but his tone put me on my guard. I didn’t know what to expect, but I swung the door firmly open anyway.

  He was sitting in a chair in front of a writing desk, shirtless. His stained painting shirt was laid out on his bed, making me think that he had simply been changing his shirt when I knocked on the door, and then decided to invite me in just to shock me. And it worked. I had never been alone with a half-naked boy before.

  His shoulders were fairly broad and his waist narrow, but his collarbone jutted sharply out from his chest, as did his ribs, and across his chest there was a gigantic bruise, deep purple and blue and black, yellowed around the edges. It covered almost the entire left side of his chest. I recoiled; it looked horribly painful. And this wasn’t just any bruise on just any body. This was Cadence. Beautiful Cadence, fading away before my eyes, disintegrating into a painful and stark frailty.