Breaking Butterflies

by M. Anjelais

  Leigh didn’t want to leave her chair, didn’t want to let her eyes close. It was a struggle to convince her even to get up and go to the bathroom, and when she did, she raced out of the room and back in, her entire body shaking. She would return to her chair and sit down with relief written all over her features when she saw that she hadn’t missed something, and her hand would stretch out, trying to hold Cadence’s. And he always pulled his hand away, a hint of a smile tugging at the corners of his bright eyes, that smile that came over him when he was gaining amusement from someone else’s pain.

  “Please,” I heard her beg once. “Let me hold your hand, Cay, please.”

  “No,” he said, his emotionless voice sounding like something lost in the wind.

  “Why? Does it hurt?” she asked, her mouth quivering.

  “No,” he said flatly. Then he turned his head to look toward me, his eyes burning.

  I knew instantly that he wanted my hand, not Leigh’s. His eyes were demanding it. When I shakily moved my chair closer to his bedside and extended my hand, he gripped it so tightly that I had to grit my teeth to avoid crying out in pain. It was the same thing he’d done to me out on the swings, looking for that feeling that was out of his reach, that feeling of attachment to another person. Now he was looking twice as hard. My fingers felt like they were being crushed, but I forced myself not to protest, to just let him squeeze. When he finally let me go, my hand was red, imprints of his fingers bruising on my skin.

  Then he turned his head away from me, leaving me hurting and wondering what would have happened if he hadn’t let go, just like I’d wondered what was going to happen all those years ago when he’d cut me. If he’d only held on longer, searched a little longer, would he have felt anything? If he’d kept on squeezing until my bones broke, would the wall inside his head break down with them? I stared down at my hand, the skin still marked red. The lingering pain was haunting me, making it feel as though Cadence were still holding on to me. The nurse came an hour afterward and gave him a shot of something for pain, making him out of touch. Leigh was quivering in her chair next to me.

  I was thankful that she refused to leave the room. It meant he couldn’t get me alone anymore. There were no more moments up in the attic or out on the swings or in any other places where Leigh’s watchful eye couldn’t see what he did to me. The only thing he could do was stare at me, and so that was what he did. Sometimes he looked at me for hours on end. I hid behind books and magazines and pretended to be reading them, but I wasn’t. I couldn’t. I couldn’t think of anything else except that he needed me. But how were we going to do it if Leigh was always in the room? I was aware of my teeth sinking into my lower lip; it was becoming my new nervous habit.

  You aren’t going to do it, that’s how, I thought, and stopped myself before I bit down. But hours later, after talking to my mother on the phone and flipping through a fashion magazine without really seeing anything that was printed in it, I tasted blood. Again, I’d hurt myself without meaning to.

  On Friday, Leigh was asleep in her chair early in the morning when the light began to come through the windows. I crept in from my room to take my place in the seat next to her and found her head lolling down, her chin touching her chest. In her lap, she was holding her own hand; under her eyelids, her eyes were moving back and forth. I wondered if she was dreaming. I was about to pull up the shades over Cadence’s window when she stirred and opened her eyes.

  “Hey,” I said softly.

  Leigh mustered a weak smile. “Did you just wake up?” she asked, putting a hand to her face as though she could wipe away her exhaustion that way.

  “Yeah.” I sat down in the chair next to her. For a moment, we were silent.

  “Sphinxie,” she said hoarsely, “I think I need to lie down in my room. Just for a little while.” Her voice quivered and she added, “But I don’t know if I should. I don’t want to be out of the room if …” She trailed off and put her hands to her face again, then ran her fingers back through her unbrushed hair. I had never seen anyone look so drained before.

  Don’t leave me here, I thought.

  “Go on” was what I said. “I promise I will call you if …” I felt my own voice dissolving into dust in my throat. I had to pause and concentrate before I managed to finish. “If anything happens.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “I’ll just be a little while. A very little while.”

  Her eyes were red-rimmed from lack of proper sleep. As she rose from her seat and started walking toward the door, I found myself repressing an urge to reach out and grab the sleeve of her shirt, like a little kid looking for something to cling to. Instead, I grabbed the edge of my seat. And Leigh drifted out of the door, and disappeared into the hall.

  And I sat in the dim room, perched on the edge of my chair with my knees drawn together, and listened to the sound of Cadence’s breathing. It was raspy and hoarse, as though something was caught at the back of his throat.

  His eyes opened slowly, and stared at the painted fish on the ceiling; they moved back and forth as though tracing actual movement. He turned his head to look at me, and I jumped slightly, startled for some inexplicable reason. And he stared.

  “Hey,” I said quietly when he didn’t say anything. “Good morning.”

  He nodded in acknowledgment, a vague twitch of his head. I saw his chest moving up and down shallowly, in and out, rasping. He clenched and unclenched his hand.

  “You want me to call the nurse to come over? Do you need more medicine?” I asked, thinking for a second that he had lost the ability to speak, that he was in pain and trying to tell me with that clench of his hand.

  “No,” he said hoarsely, in a vestige of his old slick-as-oil voice.

  “Oh, okay,” I said. My heart was suddenly pounding in my chest.

  He was silent for a moment, clenching his hand again. Then he licked his lips, and said, “Your mother told you the story, didn’t she?”

  I fidgeted slightly in my chair, feeling like a suspect in an interrogation room, and thought, No, no, no. Not now. I looked toward the door. I imagined myself running out into the hall, calling for Leigh, but I couldn’t. My hands were stuck to the seat of my chair, fingers gripping the edge so hard that my knuckles turned white.

  “You mean about the plan? Yeah,” I said.

  He laughed, a dry croak, and reached a hand up to push his hair out of his eyes. And I thought of the plan, and of what he and I were supposed to do. Boyfriend and girlfriend, engaged, married, children, grandchildren running around the feet of my mother and Leigh on Thanksgiving. And I remembered Cadence and me out on the swings on that first day, and how his hand had felt on my skin, warm and human and all there, touching me.

  “I suppose we won’t be getting married now,” he said, and laughed again.

  “Yeah,” I said, biting my tongue in an effort to keep myself from crying.

  “Imagine,” he said, his eyes wide and haunted. “Imagine what it’d be like.” And he laughed again, for the last time. “You couldn’t raise my children, Sphinxie, I know you couldn’t. That wasn’t what we were supposed to do.” He took a shallow breath and explained, “This is what we’re supposed to do, you and I. We’re meant to end this way. We always have been.”

  I imagined a little blond boy or girl in my arms, one with icy blue eyes, one who was nothing like me, one who was shining and smart and terrible. But maybe we would’ve had one like me, I thought, and immediately stopped myself. I couldn’t think like that, especially not now. I gripped the side of the chair tighter and concentrated on driving all thoughts of the broken plan, of what was supposed to be, out of my head.

  “Sphinxie,” he said, tearing me away from my thoughts.

  “Yeah?” Cadence was looking at me as though I were the only thing he could see, and I was thinking, No, no, no. My hands were freezing.

  “I want to hold the bird,” he stated.

  “The bird,” I repeated. I felt as though someone had removed a gun
that had been pressed against my head. He just wanted the budgie right now. That was all.

  “Yes, that’s what I said,” he told me impatiently. “Go and get the budgie, Sphinx.”

  I rose from my chair and went downstairs, my footsteps sounding louder than usual through the quiet downstairs part of the house. Inside his cage, Wilbur was fluttering around, singing in celebration of the morning. I hesitated after opening the cage door, but then a grown-up part of me insisted that people were more important than budgies, and I took the bird out, holding him with both hands so that he wouldn’t flap away. He chirped and nibbled at my fingers with his blunt little beak, and I carried him back upstairs with me.

  “Here he is,” I said as I came through the door into the bedroom. I brought him over to the bed and put him down near Cadence’s hand, which lay idly on the bed at his side, clenching and unclenching. The budgie swiveled his head around curiously, and climbed up on top of Cadence’s hand, pecking absentmindedly at his thumbnail. “There you go.”

  “Thank you,” said Cadence primly, and fixed his eyes on the bird’s little head. He watched him for a moment, his eyes seeming to grow wider by the moment, and then he said, “Sphinxie, I need some water.”

  “Oh? Sure,” I said, hopping up from my chair again. When I left the room, a part of me knew perfectly well what was going to happen, even though I didn’t fully realize it. And as I went downstairs, as I got a glass out of Leigh’s kitchen cabinet and filled it with water from a pitcher in the fridge, as I carried the glass back upstairs, I was preparing myself, thinking about what I would do when I went back into the room.

  And when I did go back, with that glass in my hand, I saw exactly what I knew I was going to see. The budgie was lying next to Cadence’s hand, the little feathery neck at an odd angle, one wing splayed out limply.

  A last-ditch effort to feel something.

  I set the water down on his bedside table. He hadn’t really wanted a drink, I knew. He had just wanted me to get out of the room while he was with the bird, while he was breaking it between his hands. While he was trying, so hard and in the most broken way, to feel alive for just a second, to feel something other than a stony mask.

  I sat back down in my chair, feeling so terribly small. Cadence withdrew his fingertips from the bird’s body and closed his eyes briefly before opening them again. He looked tired, awfully tired. And who wouldn’t be, after sixteen years of trying so hard?

  Then he hissed, “Go to my desk and open the top drawer.”

  Suddenly, the gun was pressed against my head again. I shook my head wordlessly, and felt hot tears burning against my cheeks. I was still shaking my head as I went to the desk and did as he said, reaching out, sliding the top drawer open with a soft scraping sound of wood against wood.

  Lying on the top of a mess of papers and old notebooks was a run-of-the-mill kitchen knife, probably stolen away late at night when there was no Leigh or Vivienne bustling around cooking something or making tea. I reached out a shaking hand and picked it up, gripping it. For a split second, I could see my reflection in the blade: my wide eyes, my twisted mouth, my mouse-brown hair tangled around my face.

  I turned back to face Cadence and he gave me an unreadable look, his eyes fixed on me as though I were the only person left on the face of the earth.

  “Sphinx, you shouldn’t be crying,” he said. I hadn’t realized that I was until he said it. “Not when you’re about to do something meaningful.”

  The knife quivered in my hand. I willed my fingers not to betray me, to hold on to the hilt. He stared at me, his eyes hardening, and leaned forward, raising himself up from the bed as far as his weakened body would allow him to go. And I stood in front of him, shaking, thinking about his fist in my hair when we were little, holding me as he drew the blade across my cheek. About Wilbur, and how he had been alive just a minute ago, only a minute ago. About all the times I had ever looked in the mirror and wondered what I was supposed to do with myself, what I was meant to do.

  All of it was swirling in my head, faster and faster. Slowly, my hand trembling, I lifted the knife, holding it poised over one of my wrists, right over the place where one of those terrible blue lines of paint had once been. And for a split second, my sobs quieted, as though my chest had been frozen, a premonition of last breaths to come.

  “There,” Cadence whispered. “Go on, Sphinx.”

  But I don’t want to die, I thought, and a fresh sob ripped from my throat, rough and painful.

  “Why are you crying again?” Cadence said, spitting out the words like a schoolyard bully calling someone a name. His voice was laced with sudden scorn, his burning eyes narrowed. I couldn’t answer him, I couldn’t speak. I stared back at him and tried to convey what I was thinking through my eyes: I care about you, I care about you, I don’t want you to die, I don’t want either of us to die …

  “Why the hell are you crying?” he demanded. “Do it, Sphinx!” His voice was higher now; it was still scornful, but underneath there was something raw and soft, like an insect that has just shed its skin, not yet hardened. “You’re supposed to do it!” he said, his voice breaking. “Stop crying and do it!” And I stared at him, and felt the hot tears running down my cheeks. I care about you, really, you were part of my plan, I don’t want you to die, I don’t want either of us to die …

  It took strength to die, yes, that was something I was certain of. And Cadence was strong enough to die, strong enough to live as an illusion for sixteen years, strong enough to leave a world filled with unanswered questions and things he could never have behind.

  But me? I was not an illusion, I was not a mask. There were people I loved here, and loved fiercely; I always had. The questions that I wanted to answer, questions of life and growing up and how to be a person — the answers were in my reach, my hands were open and ready to receive. And I realized, standing there in his room, the hilt of the knife like ice in my palm, that I wasn’t strong enough to follow the plan, I wasn’t strong enough to belong to someone like Cadence. I wasn’t strong enough to die.

  I was strong enough to live.

  “I can’t die with you,” I whispered. “But I love you. I love you.”

  His eyes widened. Everything about him seemed to be searching, computing, trying, trying, but coming up with nothing. His fingers were moving as though preparing to grasp something physical, but they came up short, and he dug his nails into the bedspread.

  “I love you,” I choked out again.

  “Why?” he asked. For an instant, some of the ice softened, his eyes opening themselves at the iris, trying desperately to let something in, past the wall. He reached for the budgie, long, pale fingers lengthening, his heartbeat pressing in his eyes. And he was a genius in front of his canvas, and in the school, and a living statue everywhere else.

  And then he was gone, lying there in that bed underneath the ceiling fish, with the dim morning light filling up the corners and his blond hair tangled. And his eyes, his blue, searching, beautiful eyes, no light behind them anymore, finally human.

  The knife dropped out of my hand, and just like that, we were both free.

  Click.

  Leigh came back in a moment later, as though some part of her could sense that her child had left the room. She froze in the doorway and looked at me first, me standing there with my shaking hands at my sides, my eyes like miniature waterfalls. And then she ran forward.

  Almost without thinking, I kicked the knife and it spun, flying underneath Cadence’s bed and out of sight. Leigh was a blur in front of me, checking his breathing, but it had stopped. And then she was up on the bed, touching his hands, his face. Holding him. Crying silently, with her lips just barely parted. And I simply stood there, numbly thinking. Cadence, this boy whom I had once known, who had once cut me, who had once marked me. He was gone, and I was alive. Didn’t I know that I had been touched by an angel?

  I couldn’t stop looking at his eyes, open and staring and bare now, the ice melted, go
ne with his life. They were just blue eyes now; there was no fire burning, not anymore. Ordinary blue eyes — you might have seen them in anyone’s head. Somewhere, was Cadence awakening, feeling peaceful and normal at last? Somewhere, was he standing on ground that was truly sacred? Would I know someday?

  I stumbled backward and sat down in my chair. I wrapped my arms around my legs, hugging my knees to my chest, and closed my eyes. Floating behind the blackness of my eyelids, I could still see him looking at me.

  I took a deep breath in through my nose and let it out through my mouth, shuddering. Alive.

  Alive out of my own choice. Not because of my mother’s plan, not because of Leigh, not because of anything except for me, and what had happened to me. This was what was really meant to be; this was my strength, my purpose. Alive.

  My mother flew in the next day, and Vivienne met her at the airport. She came through the front door of Leigh’s house and entered into a world of chaos: Leigh was trying to make arrangements, but she was scatterbrained and grieving, unable to do anything properly; the entire house was a mess, no one knew where anything was, and there was no food in the fridge. I kept expecting the doorbell to ring, neighbors to come over with food. Wasn’t that what was supposed to happen? There were no neighbors, though, what with Leigh living in a field in the middle of nowhere. And I was slowly realizing that she had withdrawn herself and her son from the outside world, secluded both of them in a safe haven where no one could get hurt but themselves.

  When my mother arrived, I was out in the backyard, burying the budgie. I had walked all the way out to the edge of the forest, at the very back of Leigh’s yard, and dug a little grave underneath a tall tree. Carefully I laid the little body in the bottom of the hole, wrapped in a tissue, and covered it up with dirt, patting the pile with the trowel I’d brought to make it flat. There was a small stone on the ground, nestled between some of the tree’s roots, and I placed it on top of the grave, a marker. I had really liked that little bird, I realized. I’d always imagined, in the back of my head, that I would take the bird with me when I went back home if I was still around to do so. That wasn’t going to happen now. I could feel a sob wedged in between my lungs, putting pressure on my insides, but I didn’t cry. I was dried out from the day before.