Breaking Butterflies

by M. Anjelais

  I sat down woodenly on the sofa in Leigh’s living room, the camera still clutched in my hand. Would Cadence want me to go off my own and get the knife and lock myself in the guest room, instead of sitting here? Was that what I was meant to do? But I didn’t know if he was slipping away in the back of the ambulance, I couldn’t know that. Perhaps it wasn’t time. And what was I thinking anyway? I was going home tomorrow. A plane ticket had been paid for already.

  I turned the television on to distract myself, and Vivienne sat on the sofa with me, watching a British game show without really paying attention to it. I couldn’t sit still; every second, my eyes darted toward the phone, waiting for Leigh to call us and tell us what was going on. I hoped with all my heart that Cadence hadn’t died in the ambulance, or in a white, white room at the hospital. He hadn’t wanted hospitals, he wanted to go at home. They needed to send him home.

  An hour later the phone rang. Vivienne leaped for it, and by the words she spoke when she picked it up, by the way she pressed the receiver to her ear, I knew that it was Leigh. I turned off the television so that Vivienne wouldn’t have trouble hearing her.

  “Oh, he did?” she said, sounding relieved. “I bet he was.” She laughed weakly. “Well, we’re right here waiting for you.” She paused, tapping her fingernails against the kitchen counter. “I know. I’m sorry.” I stopped listening then, some of the worry lifting from my chest. He hadn’t died; they were sending him home after all. I heard the click of Vivienne settling the phone back into its base.

  “Cadence woke up in the ambulance,” she told me. “He was angry,” she added after a moment’s pause. “He wanted them to turn around and bring him back home, but they insisted on at least checking for any problems that might have been caused by his hitting his head on the floor when he passed out.”

  “Well, that’s good,” I said, feeling like there was more to come.

  “Yes,” she said slowly. And then, “They told Leigh we’re very close.”

  “Okay,” I said, nodding my head and staring at the floor for no reason that I could fathom. “Okay, so … okay.” I stopped myself before I could say something stupid. There was nothing I could say to change it. We were almost done.

  And I was going home tomorrow. The feeling in my chest could only have been described as the desire to throw a tantrum on the floor, to be little again and vent what I was feeling, to scream to everyone that I was on the verge of something tremendous and meaningful. I was here to fulfill something. And he was almost gone, and I was going home tomorrow.

  “Hey, Vivienne, can I use the phone?” I asked, my voice quivering.

  “Sure, honey,” she said, in a motherly kind of way.

  I took the phone out of the kitchen and into the room with the piano, and I sat on the piano bench as I dialed my own home phone number. Outside, a cloud had covered the sun, and there was a flock of birds just outside the window, rustling through the trees. As I looked at the piano, listening to the dial tone and waiting for my mother to pick up, I could see a reflection of the window and tree branches outside on the shiny black surface.

  “Hi, Mom,” I said when I heard her voice on the other end at last.

  “Hi, sweetie!” she said, bright and happy. “How are you? Your dad and I are looking forward to seeing you tomorrow! We’ve really missed you.”

  “Mom, I really miss you too, and I love you, but I can’t come home tomorrow.” My voice was wobbling all over the place, cracking and breaking like a crumbly ceramic vase. “Cadence passed out today, Mom, right in front of me, and they took him to the hospital. They’re sending him home, but the doctors said this is it, Mom. I can’t come home. This is it.” I was pleading now, high and almost whiny. The sound of myself would have annoyed me under any other circumstances, but I needed to let myself sound like this. I needed to be a little girl talking to her mother. Maybe this was the last time that I would ever be such a thing.

  “Mom, you have to understand. I have been here for so long, I’ve been through so much, I’ve gotta see it through … I just have to … please …” I was too busy talking to hear anything she had to say, to notice that she was silent on the other end.

  “Sphinx,” she said, and I didn’t really hear her voice. I interpreted it as her trying to gain control of the conversation, to begin explaining to me why I had to leave tomorrow. I started talking again.

  “I have to stay! All this time I’ve been here, I’ve been thinking about lots of things, like life and God and feelings and being alive, and being lucky and thankful and just being, and death and how” — I faltered, tears springing to my eyes and spilling down over my cheeks — “how not to be afraid of death, because it’s a terrible thing but it’s beautiful too, Mom, it can be an art just like life can, like everything can … and, Mom, you have to let me stay, because this is the plan. I don’t know why it didn’t turn out like you and Leigh planned, I don’t know why it is how it is, but this is it. Our plans don’t mean anything, Mom, because there’s a bigger one, and we’re all a part of it. This is the plan, I have to do this, I’m supposed to do this.” I gasped for breath; I’d forgotten to breathe in between my words.

  “Do you understand?” I finished, still panting. “Do you —”

  “Yes,” she said, in such a soft voice. “I know, Sphinxie.”

  For a minute, neither of us said anything. It gave me the sensation of hugging through the phone, that we were simply being together without actually touching one another. I heard her breathing. I wished I were really in her arms. I wished I could breathe in and smell her — her bodywash, her shampoo, the scent of our house.

  “Dad and I will fly up there to get you, when it’s over,” she said finally. “We want to be there for Leigh, at the funeral.” I nodded my head, and then realized she couldn’t see me. And she wanted to come get me, when it was over, but I wasn’t sure that I would be here to get. I stared down at the reflection of the window and the trees on the piano and watched it blur through my tears, swirling into nothing.

  “Okay,” I said, still nodding as I tried to blink the tears from my eyes, as I tried to convince myself about everything and nothing at once. “Okay, you’ll … you’ll get me then.”

  For a minute longer, there was more silence. I wondered if she was consciously listening to me breathe, as I was listening to her. I imagined her standing in the kitchen back home and was immediately hit with a wave of homesickness and a longing to be safe with my family, but I forced it back out of my head. I was staying, and that was all there was to it.

  “I’m going to call you again, okay?” I blurted out, breaking the silence. “I’m probably … I’m probably going to try to call every night, from now on, okay?” I hadn’t been talking to my parents on a regular basis since my mother had left to go home, but now I felt the need to start. I couldn’t let this fragile, shaky conversation be the last one I might ever have. If there was going to be a last time, I wanted to sound strong and happy for her.

  “We’ll be here to answer,” my mother said softly. “We’re always here for you, Sphinxie.”

  “Thanks, Mom,” I whispered, gripping the phone as though it were her hand.

  Deep down inside, I felt like I had known what was going to happen. From the moment that Cadence had asked to see me, everything had been set into motion. He had wanted me here for a reason, had wanted to take me with him for a reason. I was the first playmate, the one he had first told what to do. I was the one whom he had learned to cry from, when the butterfly died, when things went wrong and people were supposed to feel bad. It was me.

  His intelligence, his talent, his artistry? That was all his. But the semblance of normalcy, the fake smiles, the laughs, the tears that he forced out of his eyes, the emotions that he had learned to fabricate even though he would never understand them? He had copied them from me when we were very small, carried them with him all of his life, used them as a sturdy base for the rest of his illusion. I put a hand over my mouth, feeling a ragged sob
rising in my throat. I was Cadence’s mask. That was why he wanted me to die with him.

  Leigh and Cadence came home not very long after I got off the phone with my mother. Vivienne and I went out and met them in the garage. There were dark circles showing under Leigh’s eyes, making her look as though it were late at night even though it was only midday. And Cadence was weak and strange; he was shaky on his feet, but he didn’t want any of us to touch him or support him. Vivienne tried to put an arm around him to steady him, and he bit her on her forearm, like a dog. No one even said anything; there was nothing to say. When we finally got him inside the house, he lay down on the sofa and stared at the ceiling, trying to fight the obvious urge to fall asleep. His eyes kept almost closing, but he always forced them back open, returning to glaring upward.

  I wondered if he was afraid of falling asleep and never waking up again. He was certainly aware of the possibility, even if there was no fear attached to the concept. And he was looking so hard at the ceiling, almost as if he was seeing something other than what was there. Did he look up and see his life, his memories? Did he see his canvas of blues, stretching out and out? Or perhaps it was just the ceiling, and nothing more. Nothing beautiful, nothing profound. Just the ceiling and a stubborn child below it, clinging to any string he could find that looked like it was attached to life. He was such a fighter. He would go down throwing knives at his unbeatable opponent.

  And me? I couldn’t tell if I was fighting or surrendering. It was as though I were in a pool of deep water, deep enough that the light was blocked out, that I couldn’t tell which way was up toward the surface. Deep enough that my fingers would not reach past the water and into the air if I lifted my arms up and searched for it. Searching, searching.

  I sat on the sofa opposite from him and asked him how he was feeling.

  “Fantastic,” he said, giving me a wry smile. Then he touched his chest and said, in a more detached voice, “My rib hurts. Go get me some Tylenol.”

  Leigh got him the pills and a glass of water. He swallowed them and poured the rest of the water on the floor — just let his wrist fall limp and the glass turn over, as though he hadn’t a care in the world. I stared at the puddle on the floor as Vivienne came over with a hand towel and began mopping it up, stepping on it to draw the moisture out of Leigh’s living-room rug.

  “Why’d you do that?” I asked.

  “I can,” he answered. “I can do it, and so I did. It was an experiment.”

  I didn’t know what the point of the experiment was, but if it had been me, I supposed it would have been to see if anything would happen to me. If somehow the universe would shift if I just did something different like pouring my water all over the floor. Maybe doing something would stave off the inevitable, shock time into stopping for a minute to see what was happening here, to stare at the boy who was slipping away right in front of me. Beautiful and terrible and still stunning me, even now.

  I used Leigh’s laptop again that night, taking it up to my room with hands that felt colder than the rest of my body. I set it down on the bed in my room and climbed up in front of it, opening it and pressing the start button. The screen illuminated and came to life, icons popping up on the left-hand side, that picture of Cadence at the piano dominating the desktop. I shivered.

  My cold hands trembling, I took the little blue plastic memory card out of the digital camera and plugged it into the USB port at the back of the laptop. A window came up on the computer screen, asking me if I wanted to upload the contents to an existing folder or create a new one instead. I created a new one.

  The movies that I’d taken of Cadence, all the candid moments and short clips, little bits and pieces of an extraordinary life that was slipping away — they all came up on the computer screen, filling the empty folder that I’d labeled with his name. Each one was a little box, with a still frame in it: him at the piano, him painting, him, him, him. When I clicked on the first one, it grew and filled the screen, playing out for me. I adjusted the volume so that it wasn’t too loud, and watched. I watched them all, there in my guest room. And when I was finished, the first thing I thought was of the blue canvas, finally filled, and the black box on the camera, beeping. Memory card full.

  It struck me that I was never seen in any of the videos. In all of them, I was merely an offscreen presence, a silent camera operator. Now I wished that I had filmed them differently, so that I was visible in them too. So that if I did take my life, my mother would have films of me to look at, just like Leigh would.

  I took a deep breath and saved the folder, once, twice, three times, making absolutely sure that it was stored in Leigh’s computer. And then I closed the window, and turned off the laptop, and brought it back downstairs, my mission almost accomplished.

  On the sofa, Cadence’s hand moved slightly, the fingers stretching out, reaching and reaching for a split second before becoming still again.

  They had a children’s hospice nurse come to Leigh’s house. I was the one who answered the door when she knocked for the first time. She was a short woman with red, frizzy hair pulled back into a bun, and a gold heart-shaped locket hanging from a chain around her neck. It looked like the kind of necklace every eight-year-old girl wanted, out of place on a grown woman’s neck. She looked like a kind woman, but in my eyes, she was not a welcome presence: She was a harbinger, an omen of death to come, and when I saw her standing there on Leigh’s doorstep, I felt nauseous. I couldn’t bring myself to greet her politely because I was afraid of what might happen if I opened my mouth, and so I looked down at my feet and stepped silently aside from the doorway to let her in.

  Moments later, I was sitting down in the living room, just feet away from her, still looking at my shoes, feeling embarrassed for not mustering a hello. She was perched on the edge of Leigh’s sofa as she talked to us, her legs crossed primly at the ankles. On the sofa opposite, Leigh was leaning forward to listen, looking over every so often at Cadence, who was sunk into the sofa cushions beside her.

  The nurse asked if we wanted to have a hospital bed installed in the house; it would make things easier, she told us. Cadence refused. He did not want to die in a hospital bed, he said, and forcing him to do so would leave him completely without dignity. The nurse shrank slightly under his burning eyes, lacing her fingers together in her lap. She looked stiff, sitting there on the sofa like a little stuffed bird.

  “All right,” she said. “We won’t do that, then.” Her voice was high, like a little girl’s. I thought they should have sent a different nurse, one who was stronger and more fit for dealing with someone like Cadence. Then I thought that perhaps they had sent a doormat on purpose, to avoid any power struggles between nurse and patient. Perhaps she was the best choice after all.

  She brought up IVs, fluids, and nutrients, moving her hands around in little gestures as she explained different choices and processes to us. Cadence watched her like a hawk, as though he were looking down from above at a smaller animal. In his head, he was standing on a pedestal, on his sacred ground; the nurse, of course, was removed from that, just like everyone else.

  “No,” he told her. “You can give me something for pain. You can give me something when I tell you I can’t sleep. I don’t want anything else. The only other thing I need is Sphinx.” His eyes were glaring out from dark hollows in his head, shining, angry, icy, blue. “I am not prolonging this,” he said, baring his teeth slightly. And the nurse shrank again.

  Whether she was intimidated or frightened or simply saddened, I couldn’t tell; she had seen a teenager — a child — who was dying, and who was accepting of it, urging it to come forward and take him on. No hospital bed, no fluids. Take him on. I wondered if she was just put off by the morbidity of the situation, or if she was thinking that he was something stunning, something shining. Such a fighter. She didn’t know about the paintings, I realized. I thought she needed to go up to the attic and see the paintings.

  Before she rose from the sofa and left, she reached o
ver and gave me a comforting squeeze on the knee. I stared at her. She was smiling at me, and there was a dimple in her right cheek, and she thought that there was only one dying person in the house.

  You don’t have to die, I thought to myself reflexively.

  “Make sure you take care of yourself,” she said. Her little hand, a wedding ring glimmering on the ring finger, lifted away and she stood up.

  “I will,” I mumbled. I didn’t know what my answer meant. The nurse’s kitten heels were clicking away on the hardwood floors as Leigh showed her to the door, and then suddenly the coppery taste of blood was blossoming over my tongue, sharp and bitter. For a moment, I thought I was imagining it. I put a hand to my mouth.

  “Did you hurt yourself, Sphinxie?” said Cadence softly. “You were chewing your lip the whole time that idiot was here.” He raised an eyebrow. “See how easy it is to bleed? You don’t even notice it.”

  Abruptly, I got up from the sofa and went to the bathroom to wash out my mouth with cold water.

  Within the next few days, a morning came when Cadence didn’t get up at all, and from then on he stayed there, in the bed that had nothing to do with a hospital, surrounded by the paintings on the walls, the fish swimming above his head. Leigh and I sat in his room in chairs pressed up against the wall, feeling like people in a waiting room. And he paid us no mind, he just read, and read, and read. Every classic he could think of, he read it, even if he had already done so. The books piled up on his desk in little leaning towers, the titles facing us, and I checked them off in my head. The Metamorphosis, the same copy that I had picked up off the floor of Leigh’s car, was in the middle of one of the piles. I took it out one day and tried to read it, to gain new meaning from it, but I couldn’t. I got through the first three pages and closed the book, placing it down on the floor underneath my chair.