by E. L. Carter
“Maybe thinking about what you might get helps you grieve.”
Oh. That was simple. A touch uncomfortable. “Where did you get this tea? It’s so pungent.”
“Losing someone is like going crazy. I know, it’s hard to talk about. But sometimes it helps.” Again, no judgment.
I look around me. The sun comes in wan through the window, the one that faces that brilliant field of crocuses. If I craned my neck around I would see Mrs. Bird’s desk behind the couch, scattered with papers and lined with frames. The other side of the room holds shelves of old books, the kind where you just read the spines, but also some pulp fiction, a row of thin paperbacks that could only be poetry, and a group of psychology texts. Above the books runs a gallery of fantastic paintings. They must be of flowers, but they could be something else—they beg the imagination. The sun brightens them so that the flecks of gold in the paint shine.
I want the crocuses to stay just as they are, the same ones curled up, the same ones wide open. I don’t want any dust to gather on the frames above the paintings, and if there is any, I don’t want to brush it off. I don’t want to drink strong tea, and I don’t want it to get cold. I don’t want to go back to Mom and Dad’s when this is done. I want to run. I don’t want to know what Mrs. Bird knows. I want to feel pain and misunderstand it. I want Mrs. Bird to be waiting for me.
Here we sit, two women on either side of a tea service, looking intently at each other. One of the women appears calm. The other one is me. The steam rises from the spout of the teapot, betraying the movement of time, the changing of molecules.
“Dad’s on auto pilot, just sitting back while the scenery flashes by. He’s got his medicine, so it’s kind of like no big deal, the dead son and all. Mom is—she goes on, like everything is the same. But her face—it’s like someone watching a TV show. Have you ever looked inside a house, when you couldn’t see the TV, just the blue glow on the faces? Her face is like that—flat and dull and passive. I don’t even know how I feel. I just want to go somewhere warm. Maybe Hawaii. The problem is, even in Hawaii Kris is still dead.”
I stop with that. Take a breath. Look at my hands, captured in a frame umpteen years ago by someone I don’t know. I turn them over and look at the backs. Then I speak again, still looking down. “I think Kris left his inheritance to me. But I don’t know if it’s in Iraq or his apartment. I don’t know if it’s animal, vegetable, or mineral. Bigger or smaller than a bread box. I don’t know anything. But maybe it will make it all better if I find out.”
“Maybe it will.”
I didn’t expect Mrs. Bird to answer like that. “So what do you know, then?” I blurt out.
She cocks her head. “You mean—”
“I mean what you said at the funeral.”
“Forgive me. Now that I’m old, I forget what I’ve said by the time it’s out of my mouth.”
“You said something about helping. About how I matter to you.”
“I’ve known you and your family forever. Since—oh, I don’t know. Even before your grandmother came to this country. That was what I meant.”
“You knew Mom’s mom?” I feel a tremble go through me.
“It was a bit of a shock, your grandfather bringing her home and all.”
“I don’t know anything.”
“Your family still won’t talk, will they?”
“Mom only says enough to rip her apart.”
“Well, when people get hurt, sometimes they make up stories. Stories can be like medicine.”
“That’s what I need. Medicine.”
When she doesn’t answer, I try again. “Why did you tell me that you could help?”
“Because I care about your family. And I try to respect the wishes of people about whom I care. But sometimes I open my big mouth anyway.”
“Do you know what it is?”
“Oh, Maddy.” She closes her eyes and rubs them. “I wish I could make things easy for you.”
“But?”
“But I don’t have those answers. I think all that my stories would give you is a lot of confusion. A lot of questions.”
“That’s more than I have now.”
“Yes and no. Some things are better left sleeping.”
I sigh. I want her to be wrong. “Okay,” I say finally. Why don’t I just run again? We finish our tea in near silence.
Mrs. Bird puts her empty cup on the table and spins it around once. Then she says, “I can—I can help you, Maddy. Just not how you want.”
I look at her straight. I don’t want to be tamed, civilized, modernized, westernized. “I’m not looking for tea party kinds of answers.”
“It’s not the tea that’s the problem, Maddy. Things are good and bad all over the place, not just in our neighborhood.”
I stand up. “Thank you.”
She cocks her head. “You’re braver than you think, Madeline.”
“I don’t know about that.”
And I don’t. I walk to the door.
I skirt the edge of the narrow road behind my parents’ house, at the place where the tar meets new grass starting to push through. Above me the trees still sleep, but not for long. Over one stone bridge, then another, past quaint little houses with fresh paint and picket fences. Eventually the road widens enough to merit a stripe down the middle, although none has been painted.
As the road eases into town, I see the antique store and the boutique to my right, the general store to the left. Kris, my crazy brother, chose the apartment over the general store and under the ancient walnut tree as his strategic missile-launching pad and butterfly terminal. He kept it during his tour, and he went back to it as soon as he could walk again.
I don’t get it.
He used to live in a tree, crouched between the branches with his hunting knife in one hand and a can of corned beef in the other. That was when he was a pioneer. He hiked anywhere you can reach in a day or two, creating temporary shelters as needed and claiming not arable land but small spaces in the canopy where the bugs didn’t mind company and the view was as spacious as New Jersey can offer.
Then he lived in his car, always somewhere between New England and Michoacán, chasing monarch butterflies and his next scholarship. I can still see him stepping out of the driver’s door, his brown hair tousled and unwashed, a shadow of beard on his chin. The word handsome never fit. I called him beautiful, with his high cheekbones, big brown eyes, and Mom’s pouty lip. He wore rumpled Capilene clothes that smelled like a sock. His car, an older sedan with a dent on one side, looked like the inside of a tent, with sleeping bags and snacks tangled together along with a makeshift pillowcase and a damp rain jacket.
The tree and the car were where he lived. This narrow staircase leading to the roof of the general store holds no life. Only his dying. I wish I could see him looking down at me—not the wasted bit of him they sent home on the plane, but the beautiful scientist, the one who would even classify love into its four Greek types. He would climb down these stairs and back into his true home, which is a tree that has butterflies asleep in the branches. I wouldn’t have to take a step right now.
The stairs are made from treated wood, recently replaced. At the top I find an uninviting door, solid and made of metal, the kind you see on warehouses. I push the key into the deadbolt and it thunks out of its place. Then I try the door handle, jiggle it a few times, and the door pops open.
He was all packed and ready to go somewhere. Grad school? A research trip? Anywhere but here? The centerpiece of the studio is a collection of milk crates piled with shirts, underwear, and trinkets. Each is labeled with a marker on masking tape: “Crap.” “More Crap.” “Old Crap.” “Important Crap.” The carpet, the kind of beige shag you only find in apartments, has a little bit of dried rice on it. I see an open sliding door on one side of the room, leading into an empty closet. Next to that is the bathroom door. On the other side, tucked against the one large window, is his bed, the sheets crumpled at the foot like Kris has just rolled o
ut and is making waffles in the kitchen. The back of the apartment houses the kitchen area, behind a pony wall. I walk back there onto the squeaky linoleum and stare at the single fork and upturned bowl still sitting in the strainer. The bowl, a white one from either a restaurant or thrift store, says DISHWASHER AND MICROWAVE SAFE on the bottom. Kris has neither, but he does have a kitchen table made of laminated particle board. A kitchen table without any chairs. If I had to guess, he once used to eat standing up with his food on the edge of the pony wall, or pacing the floor, bowl in hand, dreaming of another trip to the Transverse Neovolcanic Belt, or the contents of a butterfly’s cerebral ganglion. The bathroom has a fiberglass shower stall, empty, no towels of any kind, and one bar of hotel soap at the edge of the sink. The walls of his apartment have not a single decorative thing hung on them. Not a poster or a photo, not even a coat hook. The refrigerator clicks suddenly and I jump. Then, as if to comfort me, it begins to hum in monotone.
I need to sit down, but the table has no chairs. The bed is a museum piece. The milk crates can’t be trusted. So I stand hugging myself in the middle of the floor, floating on rice particles and brown fake fibers, somewhere between the rejected options, a survivor stranded on a little dingy.
They found him partway between the apartment and my parents’ house, past a gate and a No Trespassing sign, on a trail that runs along the edge of a hayfield and into the woods. I know exactly where it goes, which house to avoid (the owner of the sign), and the glacial erratics left like sleeping giants along the slope of the hill, with roots running along them.
I know it exactly because we went out there all the time when we were kids—to our mobile castle built from sticks or up in the crook of a tree—and we dug up a stone back there, smooth and speckled as a chicken egg, that gave us the gift of seeing inside solid objects. Out there we performed our groundbreaking work as paleontologists, and had our brief but illustrious careers in outer space.
We found it when Kris was seven and I was nine, the same year we learned how to smuggle chapter books into our bedroom. We lay under the stifling blanket with the flashlight casting a yellow dome all around us, filling the space where people travel back in time, where other planets become home for a while, where lions can talk and heroes live in the bellies of animals.
We were in voluntary exile from our home castle. Mom stenciled ivy around the baseboards while her crock pot steamed with the effort of another meal. Dad stumbled around saying weird and creepy things under his breath while his job at his father’s stockbrokerage dissolved in the weekend haze. There was clutter on the counter, laundry to do, broken toys and crumpled homework in our book bags. We ran like refugees into the woods.
But the exile was bigger than home. Wherever else we went but the woods, there was rejection, ejection, shame—like when Kris got kicked out of fourth grade for breaking the window of the science room, or when he failed three elementary grades purely out of boredom and rage, or the time he flipped his buddy’s Saab over in the parking lot of their high school, which would occur a month after getting kicked off the basketball team for smoking a bowl in the janitor closet. His refugee role as magician-appointed hero would clash horribly with his persona as a jock during the years his teachers, for sheer lack of imagination, convinced him he was stupid. And I, demigoddess, was kept on the run by my ongoing weight-control programs, and tripping on the stairs on my way to get my eighth-grade diploma.
The woods was the closest thing to home, wasn’t it, Kris? Do you remember the way the trail straddled the woods and the field—two directions to choose: shadow or the bright edges of cultivated land? At the height of summer, the heat was enough to make us dizzy and the cicadas trilled relentlessly in the trees. We ducked into the edge of the field, feeling our way among the sticky, prickly milkweed stalks that brushed our faces and arms. In the fall you would break the silky pods open, tangle the silk in your fingers, and let it disperse. And then the day came—the day to change all days. Deep undercover, under a wide, rubbery leaf, you found a black, yellow, and white prince.
I know, you had already identified thirty species of butterflies from your field guide that very summer, breaking all previous records, and do you remember the golden saltmarsh mosquitoes you bred in that dirty Mason jar with a screen for a lid? You already knew a house cricket from a field cricket without even needing to see them, and if you found larvae under a rotten log you whooped like you’d won the lottery. We had a terrarium at home, the former home of an unfortunate anole (later found fossilized under the dining room rug) and now—although I didn’t understand until much later—you had a vision.
“Careful!” you barked as I leaned in toward the caterpillar I now held in my hands, trying to grasp what it smelled like. “Look where you’re going, Maddy.”
“Relax,” I shot back, my nose so close the delicate velvet of its body brushed against me, delicious, squishable but precious. “I have the gift of X-ray vision, remember?” I raised my eyebrows at you, pulling back from this exquisite moment, unable to resist the fight.
“You mean like the way you run into the harp stool every time you go to play?”
“I do not.”
“I hear it, Maddy. Every time.”
You were right too. That was my flaw: so eager to reach the strings I forgot about the thing in between, only reminded by the familiar sharpness of the wood against my knee, the giddy shot of pain that sent me stumbling onto the seat, still eager but chastised by the solidity of the world, its stubborn unwillingness to relent to my passion.
“Whatever.” I sulked now, the caterpillar cupped between my hands. I wouldn’t relinquish my turn, even though I was the big sister.
The lucky prince left his skin behind in no time, disappearing one day into a chrysalis the shape of a very tall, ornate turban, of the purest green outside of emeralds. I should have known when I caught you there at the terrarium, your face pressed to the glass for so long it was covered with steam, the cocoon shrouded in mist.
Then the morning came. It came early, while the sun was still drying the tips of the grass on the lawn, the time of day when the cacophonous night callers rested and the birds were barely beginning to sing, when I lay snug in my bed, a talking goose on one side of me, its stuffed neck flopped against my chest, and a flying horse on the other, the wings folded now, invisible to the naked eye. On that deep summer morning, you came to the edge of my bed, knelt down, and slapped me.
“Hey!” I opened my eyes, fists ready.
“Sorry, sorry, it’s just, Maddy, the butterfly …” you trailed off. Your head turned the other way again, toward the terrarium.
“It’s what?” I leapt out of bed and sprinted across the room to the glass. The cocoon was split on the bottom like a package ripped open at a birthday party and the head, the new head with antennae instead of feelers, with wise butterfly eyes, was coming out.
The king labored. He appeared to be stuck. I suggested scissors and you gave me the Look of Death. I lay on my back and played air piano.
The room was totally quiet except for the song blossoming in my mind as I played, a light song with wings on it, all staccato and arpeggios. I willed the creature out with the silent vibration of notes. The sound of a wingbeat. The sound of a stamen full of nectar. Behind my song, like a metronome on adagio, I could hear you breathing.
When you moved again, the joints in your foot popping, I knew it must be done. I rolled over and looked.
It was shriveled at first, but its wings unfurled before us, and after only some lingering observations, a few corn muffins, and one short game of basketball, you consulted your watch and gave me the thumbs-up. You flipped open the plastic lid of the terrarium and pulled out the dried-up milkweed stalk, the monarch pumping its wings as you traveled toward the window. You set it on the sill where the breeze pushed back on the wings, and the butterfly stepped away from the empty chrysalis, which was nothing more than a transparent shell, shattered glass.
When you pushed the scr
een back on its hinge, the monarch seemed to sense the opening. It edged to the lip of the sill and hesitated, brought its wings up to a point, then down, and then the butterfly was gone.
I looked at you. You were gone too. Flown away.
I think that moment is why you became a butterfly scientist. You belonged to them. Not on the run but flying. It’s like living inside magic, all of it, from the tiny eggs to the fairy beast to the impossible migration, thousands of miles, and even in the midst of counting and tracking and sorting butterflies, in the midst of the banality of science, there is no end to beauty, room enough for the imagination to soar.
Tentatively I step toward one of the crates. Reach down and touch a shirt. I pull it out of the crate and hold it up to my nose. It doesn’t smell like Kris did: like a bakery, thick and a little bit sweet. Instead it smells musty, like old detergent and dust. I refold it and lay it back on the pile. I don’t know if that butterfly saved him or killed him. I just want to find his gift. It could be anywhere, even in this crate at my feet.
I sit in the middle of the floor, the crates to one side of me, the chairless kitchen table to the other, the rumpled bed before me, and the door to the bathroom behind me. I sit in the middle of a cross, a cross of unfinished crap and aborted possibility, of dirty linens and guilt.
I stay that way for a long time, until the ringing in my ears is so loud I have to run out, take a breath of outside air. The porch looks down on the same quiet street; you could almost say nothing has changed.
When I come back, the dusty milk crates refocus. In sudden acuity I see their shape, not haphazard like I thought but arranged exactly so: the thorax down the middle and the wings on either side. You have put your box of stuff from the army right on top in the center, like a pin.
Oh, crap, Kris, where will my own wings come from?
BAGHDAD—AUGUST 2005
I think of what Kris’s staff sergeant said before I left: You’re completely fucking nuts. I know he was trying to scare me alive, but what he said helps me hurtle down the airport road past dusty, shrubby land, too fast for the trigger point but still fast enough to die. His diagnosis gives me a good solid reason for my actions. Raed should be getting on with a master’s degree or a career at the university, but instead he’s risking his life to transport citizens of the country occupying his. I should be getting on with something else—I can’t think of what right now but I’m sure it’s not this, I’m sure it involves shorts and a T-shirt, maybe some flirtation and definitely no guns. This abaya is going to smother me.