Tinfoil Butterfly

by Rachel Eve Moulton

  Then the world is warm and dark and soft and quiet and I go.

  * * *

  Darkness is replaced by a raw tenderness that prevents me from moving. My eyes are open. My joints ache, my toes burn a steady throb.

  This could be dead, I think, but I move slowly, letting each appendage bend and stretch before sitting up. I’m covered in blankets I don’t recognize. I’m lying next to the open oven and the kitchen is wonderfully warm. I wiggle my toes. I can feel all of them. My boots are off. My socks too. Dazed, I reach out of the blankets to touch my face and then I peek under the blankets. I’m naked except for my sports bra and underwear, and I see now that my clothes are draped over the counters. Spread out to dry. There is sick in my hair, and the smell makes me feel sick again but my stomach has nothing left to give. I wrap my hair into a tight bun at the back of my head and hold it still with an elastic.

  Next to me is a lump of a little body. Hair sticking up wild from the top of the blankets. The familiar silver butterfly mask crookedly covering but not centered. It’s Earl. And I realize a few things at once. First, this is my chance to see Earl’s real face. Second, Earl has the body of a little girl. I think of George. I don’t have a son.

  I wrap a loose blanket around my shoulders. I lean in and try to move the mask, but Earl snorts and swats at me before rolling over on her back, the mask moving to cover more face than before. I reach for the blankets and lift them slowly, peer under. A pale body, naked except for panties. A soft waist giving in to a too-thin rib cage.

  I drop the blankets back down.

  I feel a sharp sadness in my chest. Was he, I mean she, so scared of me that being a boy seemed safer? Of course, it is always safer to be a boy. Everyone knows that. Fucking men always waiting to take something that isn’t theirs, to reach up into your insides and tear you up.

  I tiptoe around the small diner kitchen. I need time to gather my thoughts. Figure out what to do. I push open the door and step into the seating area, which is much cooler than the kitchen.

  Outside the windows, the world is settling. The early morning sky is clear and bright. The snow has stopped falling. It lies thick and untouched. I hear a throat-clearing growl and a bear walks out of the trees and onto the parking lot. A big, lumbering, belly-sloppy bear sidles up to Veronica, pushing at her gently with his nose. She rocks under his weight and snow falls off her roof onto the bear’s back. He shakes it off, annoyed. The snowfall has taken him by surprise as well. October, even late October, must be early for this kind of weather. He thought he had a little time before he had to hibernate. He’s huge, fattened up for the winter but not yet asleep. He’s crossing the snow-covered parking lot alone and leaving pothole-size footsteps behind. It’s the largest animal I’ve ever seen. He stops and looks through the diner window to consider me the same way I am considering him. His big brown eyes are on mine. We watch each other for a moment before he moves on.

  Back in the kitchen, I stand over the kid.

  Our parents sent Ray on Outward Bound the year after they got married. He’d been acting out. Sneaking out of the house, cutting himself. While I managed to keep my drinking secret, Ray was not so skilled. At the wedding, my soon-to-be stepfather pulled me aside and asked me to watch out for him. He made me Ray’s babysitter.

  “He needs your sense of balance, Emma,” his father said. “Stay close to him.” Easy enough, I was already in love with Ray. Our stupid parents were so worried that they let us fall asleep, curled together in his hot room watching B movies until we slept. They saw nothing sexual between us. No warning signs at all, and perhaps they were right. Ray loved me, but not in the way I wanted him to.

  My Ray was gone for three months on Outward Bound. He didn’t want to go. He hated them for making him. I wrote him notes every night. Observations from the day that I would have shared with him had he been there alongside of me:

  Slept through breakfast lunch and dinner. Thinking of a pizza snack. Wishing for a monkey butler.

  In July, when the corn is knee high, let’s fold in half and disappear.

  Mrs. Hurie stopped wearing bras. Her boobs hang like pendulums when she gardens. I dare you to look away.

  I had nowhere to send them, but I piled them up on loose scraps of paper and tucked them into his pillowcase.

  In the end, he portaged through Minnesota in February and came back with a host of gruesome stories and a renewed love for bathroom humor and a best friend named Charlie, who I resented. Ray looked good when he came back. He’d put on weight. His cuts had healed. He loved to tell me how brave he’d been.

  They jumped into icy waters on purpose so that someone else could drag them out and save them from freezing to death. You get the victim and yourself undressed, then wrap up next to them.

  Earl did the same thing for me. Kept me safe. A wave of feeling passes through me right then. Protectiveness? Love? The kind of too-late feelings I should have had for Ray at the end.

  My jeans are stiff, potato-bag harsh against my bruised legs. My socks are still wet, but I haven’t been this well cared for since I was very little and I hadn’t yet taught my mom to be afraid to love me.

  Earl’s clothes are in a pile on the floor. A big wet heap that hasn’t been sorted out. I pull it apart and lay it out in the same careful way my clothes were laid out for me. I kneel down next to her. The butterfly mask has slipped almost entirely off, and I put my hand between Earl’s shoulder blades.

  “Hey, Earl,” I say. “Can you wake up?”

  And just like that she shoots up, blankets and mask falling away so that she can back up against the wall. Both hands to her face to cover what I briefly see are the scars she promised me.

  “Whoa, I’m not going to hurt you.”

  I loved Ray’s scars—my love never distinguished between the accidental and the self-inflicted. I wanted to trace them, mark them. They were a way of claiming ownership over him, and because of me, he kept making them. Cut here and here and here. I would trace them when they were still bloody. Lie lazily next to him in our spot by the river and count the marks where he’d opened himself up. Ask for one more.

  I want to tell Earl that I know she is a girl and that being a girl is okay. That being a girl is great, even if that’s a lie.

  She’s just a little kid. A body that needs a bath. Small hands. Tiny feet. She has the fat belly of a little kid not grown to her full height and yet her body is already changing, subtly shifting. I got my period when I was nine. A terrifying surprise to me and a devastation to my mom.

  “Oh, Emma,” my mom said when she caught me pulling the stained sheets out of the dryer. I’d panicked and tried to clean them as I would have for my father’s accidents, forgetting to throw in my own pajama pants. Blood and urine leave different histories.

  Earl has a birthmark on her chest that looks like the state of Ohio. And then I do what I know I shouldn’t and I lie. “It’s okay. I’ve already seen your scar.”

  The kid doesn’t say anything and continues to secure the mask either out of habit or because I’m a liar.

  “You’re a girl,” I say gently.

  “Am not.”

  “I see you. You’re a girl and that’s okay. I’m a girl too. I’m not going to hurt you.”

  “I’m not a girl.” I hear the anger. It’s an old rage. Something said before. Shouted. Whimpered. “I’m a boy, just got the wrong parts.”

  “Okay, Earl, what do you mean ‘wrong parts’?” I ask.

  “I don’t have a penis. I have a gina.” He whispers the word “gina” as if it is our secret code phrase. “My mama said God got mixed up and switched my parts with some other kid.”

  “So, some girl is wearing your penis around?” I ask.

  Earl laughs in spite of himself. “I think it’s just stuck up in, you know, there. It’ll come out when it’s ready.”

  “I’m pretty sure that’s not how it works, and what’s wrong with being a girl?” I ask.

  “Nothing’s wrong with it.
I’m just not!” He’s had this conversation a hundred times before and he starts to get dressed.

  “Fine. You’re a boy.”

  “You believe me?”

  “Makes no difference to me what you are. I’m used to you being a boy. It’s old news.”

  He smiles. Grateful. My chest expands with warmth.

  “Did you move him?”

  “Move who?” I know exactly whom he means.

  “George.”

  “No.”

  He looks surprised, and I think his surprise is like my own—he isn’t accustomed to people being honest—but then he says, “He’ll come for us.”

  I think of the empty lawn chair.

  “He’s dead now, I’m sure of it.” The snow falls steadily. The temperature is too low for someone outside to survive the night.

  “Was he dead when you left him?” Earl asks.

  “No,” I admit. “But he was dying and I tied him to the chair and he was just lying there on the ground.”

  “Lying there?”

  “Yes, Jesus. He fell over in the chair. He woke up, so I tied him to the chair and then he vomited and fell over. He passed out.”

  Earl stares at me for a while.

  “What were you doing that whole time?”

  The cellar. Body brown. Skull bones visible through skin. Like a sheet of tissue paper wrapped around a birthday present.

  “You saw her,” he says.

  “I was with your dying father. That’s plenty.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  “Earl,” I say, and reach out to grab his arm. It is a touch meant to reassure him, to hold him still so I can talk some sense into him, but he swipes at my hand and breaks free without even giving me a minute of contact. This is the same kid who let me wrap around him last night? “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  He says nothing.

  “You don’t know him. He makes me dress up like a girl. He calls me Earlene,” Earl says, and then takes off his butterfly mask, and I see what else George is capable of. A face thick with scars but also fresh spots. Little red scabs over cigarette burns. A split lip.

  “George did this?” I ask. “Because you are a boy?”

  “I’m what he’s got left. He doesn’t like that.”

  Rage grows in me, a welcome déjà vu of a tamped-down feeling. Warm and thick and burning at the edges. I let George go, and now he’s free to find Earl again.

  “It’s not so bad,” Earl says, and the rage loses its heat, goes rigid with its sudden cooling.

  I stare at his eyes now, and in that look from Earl to Emma and Emma to Earl, I feel it. The fear. George is coming; he is here in these hills.

  “He didn’t always want me dead. We moved here so we could start again. He said this would fix everything. Mama said he wouldn’t hurt us anymore if he was happy.”

  “But he did hurt you. He does. He killed your mother, didn’t he.”

  Earl flinches a little but recovers quickly. “We moved, but he was never happy. This place wasn’t what he said it would be. Maybe if it had been more like what he’d planned he would have gotten better instead of worse.”

  “A place doesn’t just turn you, Earl.”

  “I don’t think he meant to kill her. He just wanted to make her stop crying. He said it was all he could ever hear out here, her hollering and weeping, so he held on to her neck too long. I couldn’t stop him. I should have stopped him. I tried. This place made him sick. He says we’re running out of money.”

  “Earl,” I say, his name coming out of me with such sorrow that saying anything else seems arbitrary. But then I think again and add, “Why do you want to stay here in this sad place?”

  “What do you mean?” he asks. “You think it’s gonna make me sick too? Make me kill someone?” His eyes are wide with fear of the possibility.

  “Haven’t you already killed someone? Or tried anyway?” I ask. “George. You’ve tried to kill your father,” I say when I see he isn’t getting it. How has this not occurred to him before.

  “George doesn’t count,” he says, but I can tell he is unsure. He isn’t sure what he’s capable of. I know that feeling. I’ve worried my whole life that I’m crazy.

  “My mama’s here and it isn’t bad for me like it is for him. It makes me feel strong like I can make my own world, like I won’t ever have to fit into anyone else’s again.”

  “My father taught me that no one is evil by accident. You have to invite it in. Don’t invite it, Earl. Leave here with me.”

  I reach across the distance again for Earl’s small hand and he lets me take it. I lean down and keep my eyes locked on to his pupils.

  “We have to hurry, Earl. We have to run.”

  EIGHT

  When my mom walks into my hospital room her clothes flow about her in fall colors—safari tans and prairie greens and creamy stripes that make me wish I had a yogurt. A Chico’s moved into the Town and Country mall near our house about a year ago and my mom started shopping there like it framed a new identity for her: “It makes me feel like I have a beach house somewhere.”

  Today she wears a tight tank top and an ankle-length skirt that sits too high on her waist. Her sunglasses are huge, looking to revive the ’70s, and she does not take them off even when the doctor comes in to give her an update on how I’ve been. We do not speak to each other. No greeting. No touching. But I can tell she wants to hug me, as if throwing her arms around me would fix anything.

  During all the blocking of bleeding they had to do to save me from myself, they also found yet another something on my fallopian tube. Malignant. Another abnormal growth, but this time on my ovary and separate from the one nestled in my uterus that Ray and I had mistaken for a baby. Maybe benign. They couldn’t be sure. The size of the tumor on my fallopian tube required immediate action. If they caught it now, scooped everything out, radiation might still be avoided.

  During the initial diagnosis at Planned Parenthood, when I thought we were confirming a baby, they told me what I had was not a baby at all. They told me I needed to see a specialist. “It might be cancer,” the young doctor whispered. In my shocked and too-young brain, I formed a question: “So we made a tumor?”

  The doc looked at me quizzically and then offered ever so kindly: “It might not be malignant.”

  I looked “malignant” up just to see the cool, ink-to-paper definition. Malignant: evil in nature, influence, or effect; passionately and relentlessly malevolent: aggressively malicious; tending to produce death or deterioration; tending to infiltrate, metastasize, and terminate fatally.

  Emma, accurate.

  An unusual case, they assured my mom. Odd to find so big a tumor in someone so young. Both ovaries looked like possible breeding grounds for cancer, something already developing on one, the other suspiciously swollen. My mother’s mother died of ovarian cancer. The doctor said an oophorectomy should cover all the dangerous possibilities in my case, a fairly simple abdominal procedure to remove both ovaries and the fallopian tube. An oophorectomy. It sounds so clumsy, so male. Ooph. The doctor told us, “We’re lucky to have found it all.”

  Lucky.

  I watched the doctor make baseball-size gestures. Big as an orange. Too risky to wait. I signed the paperwork with my mom’s help. Signed away my insides. Bye-bye, Pea Baby. Good riddance to future babies. I had to sign six times to make them feel better. To ensure that a semi-healthy, eighteen-year-old woman wouldn’t later decide to sue their asses. Even as my mom signed once, then twice, then three times she was crying. Big, silent tears that made her look even prettier than she already was.

  Coming out of it later, I dreamed the tumor into pulpy, fruit-slice sections. The solid skin of it split open on a surgical knife blade. The blood-fruit color and texture. The taste of it on my tongue, sour. Bitter gagging. I scraped the skin clean, swallowed my insides for safekeeping. When I woke up fully, my mom was long gone. Dr. Patel was there to describe the complications they’d encountered. They’d found a
nother cancerous lump cuddled into the lining of my uterus. They’d had to remove more than they’d originally hoped. Hysterectomy. Just a few more organs, tissues really, here and there.

  Alone and dizzy and sore. The nurses wouldn’t look at me or I wouldn’t look at them. I had three little sessions with a hospital-hired psychologist, psychiatrist, psychopath in which I said nothing. How was I feeling? It’s normal to have a sense of extreme loss. It’s normal to feel some anger. Some women experience a decrease in sexual pleasure. Good, I thought. I don’t want it anymore. You can have it along with my ovaries and uterus. You can keep my future orgasms in a jar.

  One of the nurses or doctors saying, “Poor thing. She’ll never get over this. Honey, what do you need?”

  “Drugs,” I answer, and she obliges. It isn’t as good as cocaine, but she gets me more than I need and then, instead of blackness or sleep, there is a constant white glare. Like staring out the window at high noon after a snowstorm, like headlights bouncing off eyeballs in the middle of the night.

  Today Dr. Patel is recommending radiation after all. They already spoke to me about it, but I’ve been playing catatonic. Besides some shameful crying when I realized how much I’d lost—gagging and boogers and crunched-up red face—I’ve not said a word. The nurses hate me. The doctors talk around me. It’s amazing how quickly people make you into wallpaper.

  I just bathed, wanting to feel clean and to examine my scar privately, but I heard my mother arrive while I was still undressed. I wish she’d stop visiting. She comes every day. Twice a day. We don’t even talk to each other. She just comes and sits as if something is going to get better or change. As if Ray is going to turn out to be alive and I’m going to stop wanting to be dead. Every time I look at her I want to cry, and if I start crying, I won’t stop. I hate her for this.

  I rushed to put the hospital gown back on too quickly and now I feel steam trapped between my skin and the fabric. Hearing them discuss radiation treatments as if I cannot hear them, as if I am not eighteen and ready to make my own decisions, turns all that steam to liquid and it slides down toward my shoes in the form of sweat.