The Butterfly Sister

by Amy Gail Hansen

  The photo. If I showed it to him, he’d see the proof, that Beth and Mark were in love with each other. Then, he’d confiscate it—just like the book and the postcard—and call it evidence. And he’d probably arrest me for petty theft.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Okay, look, you did the right thing by bringing this to my attention,” he said brusquely, his patience deflated. “But right now, the chance that Beth might have had an affair with her married professor is, as you so eloquently said earlier, moot. Because I know the Pittsburgh PD is about to arrest the man responsible for Beth’s murder. A man who was, verified by airport surveillance, at PIT when Beth’s plane landed.”

  I said nothing. He coughed.

  “Besides, I’ll have you know, I did my job here,” he continued. “I scoured Beth’s credit card statements, her cell phone calls, her med school e-mail, and personal e-mail. We searched her car and her bedroom. And I uncovered nothing to suggest Beth Richards was having an affair with a married man or anyone else for that matter. There were no patterns or frequent phone calls.” He licked his lips. “Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  As I stood to leave, I watched the detective toss the book and postcard to the end of his desk, where an empty potato chip bag also sat, as if it meant nothing to his investigation. As if it meant nothing to Beth Richards.

  As if it meant nothing to me.

  December Diary Two

  December

  If there’s one image of Mark that haunts me, it’s this: he’s walking through campus, amid the chaos of academia, seemingly oblivious to the world around him. He strolls, actually. And that requires confidence, faith, and clarity.

  I envied that.

  His world was his own creation. Mine was too, until I fell in love with him. And then my world became a mere collection of the places we went to together: the coffee shop off campus, Royal Street, the banks of the Mississippi River, Café Du Monde. If he wasn’t with me, I wasn’t alive. I could not drift into foreign lands beyond the pages of our love story.

  Does Mark love me? I think so, at least he did at first, when we were happy, when the future was ours. And if he loved me then, he could love me again.

  They say time heals all wounds, but I beg to differ.

  It seems time only deepens the scars.

  Chapter 6

  One Year Earlier

  By midmorning on Saturday, the fog had long dissolved, but the image of Virginia Woolf did not dissipate from my mind. Her pointy nose and pale skin shadowed me like a restless night’s sleep. She was there, ever present while Mark and I had coffee and eggs, and there still, as we rode the streetcar down St. Charles to Tulane University. I wasn’t able to shirk her until we were walking through the quad near Gibson Hall toward the symposium.

  “I used to play football there,” Mark said, pointing to the large grassy area beside us.

  I imagined a nineteen-year-old Mark tossing the old pigskin in the open space with his college buddies, his hair lighter, sun kissed. At that time, my parents, only three years older than Mark, lived in an apartment above a store on Toulouse Street. That meant Mark and I had lived in proximity for several years. Had we passed each other one afternoon in Audubon Park? I wondered. Me in a stroller and he, a twentysomething college student, out for a jog? I wanted to believe it was possible, that our paths had crossed all those years ago, proof we were destined to be together.

  I also wanted to coil my arm through his but didn’t. Someone might see.

  “Do you miss it?” I asked instead. “Your college days?”

  “I didn’t think so. It’s been decades. But being here . . . yeah, it makes me a little nostalgic.”

  I had visited Tulane a few times in high school at my father’s suggestion—he’d urged me to attend a college close to home—and I remembered the campus was beautiful, a haven for trees. I stared up now at the thick, moss-covered trunks giving birth to litters of twisted branches.

  “Tell me something about you,” I said. “From when you went to school here, something that would surprise me.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know . . . Did you throw wild parties? Or teepee the president’s house? Maybe you streaked through this quad on a dare?”

  “Teepee and streaking? Nope, not me.”

  “Did you ever do anything crazy?” I prodded. “Unexpected?”

  Mark studied the corridor of buildings for a moment. “Okay. You see that bench there? In front of that stone building with circular windows in the eves?”

  I nodded eagerly.

  “I once sat on that bench for six hours straight.”

  My mind went first to academics. “Were you conducting some kind of sociology experiment?”

  “Nope. I was stupid and in love.”

  The space between my breasts ached suddenly, as if my lungs had deflated. Had Mark met his wife, Meryl, in college? Here, where we now walked?

  “Her name was Jenny,” he continued.

  The aching subsided. Meryl was, once again, miles away.

  “Jenny?” I repeated.

  “She was a freshman. Brunette. A theater major. I saw her one day in the student union.” He let out a small laugh, as if embarrassed. “And I so admired this girl from afar that I waited outside her class all day, just to strike up a conversation. Unfortunately, she was sick that day of all days. But two days later, she saw me in the union and approached me, saying she’d heard about my heroic feat and was flattered. We dated a few months until . . .” A shadow crossed his face then. “She dumped me for some football player. Henry something or other. All brawn and no brains. Such is life.”

  “Poor baby.”

  “Probably a blessing in disguise. She was . . . a troubled girl. I guess that’s what I would call it now. Emotionally unstable. She was a very talented actress—even got the lead in The Mikado, if I remember correctly—but like a lot of creative people, she had her emotional demons.”

  After my crying spells the night before, what I’d divulged to Mark in the café—about my guilt and nightmares and sleeping pills—not to mention the Woolf sighting that morning, I worried if Mark would describe me as emotionally unstable. Did he think I was the creative type with emotional baggage?

  “Did she marry the football player?” I asked.

  “Doubtful. I heard she dropped out of school to . . . I don’t know, go into the Peace Corps or something.” He shrugged the memory away then stopped suddenly on the path. “The symposium is just down this way. I think we should part ways here. Just in case.”

  “Fine,” I said, trying not to look sad.

  “For the record, I want to kiss you right now. More than anything.”

  I smiled and gave him a firm handshake instead. “Good-bye, Professor Suter.”

  “Good-bye, Miss Rousseau,” he said, holding my hand longer than necessary.

  I walked a mere three steps before he called after me. “Are you going to be okay?”

  “I’ll find my way around.”

  “No, I was talking about . . . what happened this morning. You’re okay, right?”

  “Oh, I was just tired,” I explained. “Like you said, I didn’t get much sleep.”

  He nodded, his lips pursed with worry, and I turned before he could say more. I’m not sure if he watched me walk away, because I never looked back, afraid to see if his concern had traveled from his lips to his eyes, to those creases in his forehead.

  Maybe his concern was valid, after all. Because when I got to the library and pulled my thesis materials from my messenger bag, my notes—all fifteen handwritten pages of quotes and comments and details—were missing. Gone.

  I’m losing my mind, I thought as I scoured every pocket and zippered compartment of my bag, sorted every item, flipped through the pages of every book.

  Again.

  And again.

  And again.

  Later that day, as we rode the streetcar back to the Quarter, I asked Mark if he’d seen my thes
is notes in the hotel room before we left. He couldn’t remember.

  “I’m sure they’ll turn up,” he said. “Speaking of your thesis, I hope you don’t mind, but I shared some of your ideas at the symposium today.”

  My cheeks flushed with flattery. “You did? What?”

  “Your contemplations on the word room. What you said last night in the café was brilliant. I had to share it. I gave you credit, of course. Not by name. I just called you my star pupil.”

  I punched his arm. “You did not.”

  “Okay, I didn’t. I referred to you as a colleague.”

  “Colleague.” I smiled. “I like the sound of that.”

  “Well, you have a real gift—a complex and intricate mind.”

  He thinks I’m brilliant, I thought. Not emotionally unstable, but complex. Intricate.

  When I turned to say more I found Mark’s eyes closed, lulled by the white noise and rhythmic motion of the streetcar, his head resting on the back of the bench seat. It had been a long day. So I took the opportunity to check the contents of my bag a final time, convinced the passage of hours would merit different results. They didn’t, and I passed the time instead by rereading Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper.

  In the story, a woman suffering from postpartum depression is forced by her doctor husband to spend a summer on “rest cure” therapy in a room with a “repellent, almost revolting” yellow wallpaper. Diagnosed with “a slight hysterical tendency” and denied the opportunity to write, the woman becomes obsessed with the wallpaper’s pattern and what she sees beyond it: a creeping woman. The main character begins to believe the creeping woman is being held captive by the wallpaper’s maddening twists and turns and is disturbed to the point of ripping the paper off the wall, peeling it back piece by piece.

  I had just gotten to the description of the infamous yellow wallpaper when Mark stirred.

  “Sorry,” he said, shaking off sleep. “I don’t know what came over me.”

  “It’s okay,” I said, slipping the story back into my purse. And then, the words crawled up my throat without permission. “I want to go to the cemetery.”

  His eyes shot wide open. “Did you say what I think you said?”

  I nodded. “I want to go to my dad’s grave.”

  He rolled his neck from side to side and sighed. “Okay, confession time: cemeteries freak me out. Especially the ones here. Dead bodies should not be aboveground. ”

  “Don’t you ever visit your mom?” I asked.

  “Only in my mind.”

  I looked outside the streetcar window and saw the sun was already dipping below the horizon. It would be dark soon. “Can you make an exception?” I kissed his neck. “For me?”

  He let out a low growl, as if I’d targeted some sort of G-spot on his neck. “Of course. I can’t in good conscience let you wander around a cemetery at night by yourself. Where is it?”

  “He’s in Lafayette,” I said, already pulling the cord above my head to alert the driver of our stop. “We can get off on Washington Ave.”

  While we walked a block to the cemetery, I told Mark I wanted him to wait for me at the front gate. “This is just something I have to do alone,” I explained.

  “I’m not letting you out of my sight,” he argued.

  So we struck a compromise: he would walk me to the row of graves and wait while I made the rest of the journey alone. He would be able to see me, but not hear me. That would suffice.

  Unlike Mark, I had never been afraid of cemeteries, thanks to my father. When Mom started working second shift at the hospital, he used to bring me to Lafayette Cemetery as a girl to see his family’s tomb. We’d picnic there—fried chicken and biscuits with butter and honey—on the two steps leading up to the vault door. I grew to appreciate the tombs’ ornate architecture and features as we strolled the aisles of graves. I likened the cemetery to a small village, outfitted with houses all the perfect size for a six-year-old girl.

  “I want to live here someday,” I had told my father on one occasion.

  “Someday, you might,” he’d said. “But a long, long, long time from now.” He had brushed the curls from my forehead, pushing my bangs in the direction of my cowlick. “A long time,” he repeated.

  “Why a long time? I want to live here now. I could live in the little house with Grandma and Grandpa.”

  “But they don’t live here.”

  “But this is where we visit them.”

  “Their bodies are here, but their spirits aren’t. Grandma and Grandpa only come when we’re here.”

  “But if I lived there, they would be here all the time.”

  “You can’t live here, Ruby. You need a special ticket; you know, like the ones we get at the movie theater? You need one to get in, and you don’t have one.”

  “How do I get one?”

  He’d paused, as if considering his choice of words. “You get one when you die.”

  “Then I’d like to die.”

  “Don’t say that,” he’d scolded.

  “I’m sorry. Did I say something bad?”

  “No, sweetie.” Again, he’d pressed my bangs to my forehead. “Dying isn’t bad. It’s just that you have a long, beautiful life to live.”

  “But can I die later? After my beautiful life?”

  “Yes,” he’d said. “You may.”

  “Will you die with me?”

  “I suppose. You, me, and Mommy, we can all die together. As a family.”

  “And Fat Tuesday?”

  My father had considered our obese housecat. “Sure. He can come too.”

  I’d thought it over and agreed. “And then we can all live with Grandma and Grandpa in the little white house?”

  He’d tapped my button nose with his index finger. “All of us.”

  All of this came back to me as I traversed the stretch of grass leading to the rear section of the cemetery. I knew the way to my father’s grave, even in the dark, as if my brain had been programmed like a GPS to find it.

  It was smaller than I remembered as a girl. The tomb, which had once seemed big enough to house my entire family, was only the size of a large pantry or bathroom. And I walked the perimeter to ascertain that fact. One side was sunken a half foot and the white plaster exterior had been weathered by the elements. It had seemed more pristine to me as a child.

  “Hi, Daddy,” I said, sitting on the stoop. “I should have brought you some chicken.”

  And then a sudden pain stabbed my eyes, and tears fell through my closed lids.

  “Oh, Daddy,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

  I sat beside the tomb then and sobbed, and I knew I wasn’t only apologizing for the sequence of events, the guilt I bore, that led to my father’s death. I knew I was saying sorry for something else. Something I hoped I didn’t have to say out loud, something I hoped he could understand from his side. Something I had tried to rationalize since I first kissed Mark in his Jeep. Something I realized the night before, after the woman in the café and the stain on my dress.

  I was a bad girl.

  The wind picked up just then and brought a chill past the tomb. I heard a thump and looked up through blurry eyes, wondering if Mark had decided to follow me after all. And that’s when I saw the shoes—girlish, black lace-up boots with a sharp toe—sticking out from behind a nearby mausoleum. I shot up from the stoop to see a woman wearing a long black skirt and a matching black jacket that came to a ruffled V at the top, exposing a high-neck lacy collar. I blinked, rubbed my eyes, even repeated the word no in my mind, willing her to disappear from my view. But she didn’t. In the dark of night, I squinted to discern her black hair, parted down the middle then braided on each side of her head and pinned up in the back.

  I knew who she was, and she was not Virginia Woolf.

  I squeezed my eyes shut, my fists also clenched at my sides, and counted five long seconds. When I opened them again, she was no longer there. But I caught a flash of something—black, flowy, the corner
of her skirt perhaps?—from behind the edge of the nearby tomb. Had I made the woman disappear, or had she simply walked away?

  I ran in the direction I’d seen her, behind the tomb and others, zigzagging between them so forcibly I tripped on one and slammed against the white cement, scraping my hand. Even though my palm burned—a thin layer of skin lost during the fall—I kept running until I came to the exit. When I felt a hand on my shoulder, I jerked away, screaming into the night.

  But it was only Mark.

  “It’s me. It’s me,” he cried. “Jesus, Ruby. What happened?”

  Catching my breath, I looked left and right for her, as if expecting the woman to reappear and prove my sanity to Mark.

  “She was right here,” I panted.

  “Who?” And then I saw it, the worry of wrinkles around his eyes. “Virginia Woolf?”

  I shook my head no and looked again for her.

  But Charlotte Perkins Gilman—who had looked real enough to touch only a moment ago—had, like Virginia Woolf that morning, vanished.

  I caught my breath once we were on the streetcar again, but my heart still pounded in my chest. Crazy, Crazy, Crazy, I heard with every beat.

  “There’s a logical explanation for this,” Mark said.

  “There is?”

  “Stress. It wreaks havoc on the psyche, Ruby. Trust me, I’ve written enough term papers and crammed for enough tests in my life to know. You overworked yourself today, that’s all, and you saw something that wasn’t there.”

  “Are you saying I hallucinated?”

  He shook his head. “I’m sure there was someone walking in the cemetery tonight. A woman in a long skirt. And you imagined it was Gilman. Because you still haven’t had a good night’s sleep. You were upset, being at your father’s grave.” He overannunciated his words, I thought, as if talking to someone still learning English. “I think we should head back to the hotel. We can order room service.”

  “I thought we were going out.”

  “We were but . . . this is the second time you . . . I just think we should relax. We can order a bottle of wine. We can take it easy.”