The Butterfly Sister

by Amy Gail Hansen

  My mouth hung open. “You stole my notes?”

  “Yes. I knew you would end up telling Mark about your visions—you’d been so open and honest with him in the café when you talked about your father—and I knew he would be reminded of his mother. He would either lose interest in you or love you more, but I gambled on it being the former. He was going to break your heart eventually, I just expedited the process.”

  “But you made me think I was going crazy,” I said. “You were more concerned with removing Mark from my life than you were about my sanity. You thought you were saving me from your sister’s fate, but you helped drive me to it.”

  “I’m sorry, Ruby. I never meant to hurt you. In my mind, I was also haunting Mark, trying to remind him of what he’d done to my sister.”

  I stared back at the professor. Anger throbbed through my veins. But another feeling soon overtook it. Relief. Everything that had happened —Woolf, Gilman, and Plath, those haunting visions of dead women writers—were nothing but this insane woman’s plot to toy with my life.

  I wasn’t crazy after all.

  The professor’s hand went to her heart. “I made up for it, didn’t I? I brought you back to Tarble. I forced you to face your past, to confront Mark. I resurrected you from the dead.” She reached behind her back. “Look, I don’t have much time. Either you’re going to press that button or a real nurse is going to push back this curtain.”

  I stiffened, wondering if she was armed. But she didn’t pull out a weapon.

  “This is for you,” she said, handing me a leather-bound notebook, similar to the one Mark had given me in New Orleans.

  I held the book in my hands but didn’t open it. Instead I ran a finger along the paper edge. “What is it?”

  “Jenny’s diary. I want you and Beth to read it, so you understand.”

  I glared at her.

  “You can pretend to be angry, Ruby,” she said. “But I know how you really feel about me. When it comes to showing our feelings, it is what we do, not what we say, that matters. And you proved everything to me tonight when you tied me to the bed. You left the knot loose.”

  “I didn’t,” I argued. “It was tight.”

  “Was it?”

  I thought back to earlier that night, when I bound Professor Barnard’s wrists to the bed. By the time the police arrived at the cabin, she had gotten herself free. It was impossible, I thought, that I had wanted Virginia Barnard to get away, that I had helped her escape. But then again, maybe I had.

  Because after she left, I waited a good long minute before pushing the call button.

  Epilogue

  One Year Later

  The only thing I miss about the Midwest are the autumnal colors. Come fall, the trees do not change color in New Orleans, but it’s also eighty degrees, and I spend most of my afternoons outside—perusing the French Market, reading in Jackson Square, writing at the café in Pirates Alley. The splendor of the Quarter is literally at my doorstep, since Mom and I started renting an apartment above an antiques shop, just two blocks from St. Louis Cathedral. Mom has her eye on a ranch in the suburbs, though, and when she buys it, the apartment will be all mine.

  It didn’t take us long to adjust to living here again. In fact, it’s as if we never left. The unexpected news from the New Orleans Police Department played a hand in that. Almost three years after my father’s hit-and-run, they finally pinned down who was driving the car that night. It turned out to be a sixteen-year-old girl, driving her parents’ car just one week after she’d gotten her driver’s license. Wracked with the guilt for so long, she turned herself in, and with her to blame, I could no longer fault myself for my father’s death. But the funny thing is, I can’t hate her. I want to, but I can’t. Because if I learned anything from the ordeal a year ago, it’s this: anger cannot bring my father back.

  Now that we are back home, Mom and I have started some new rituals; like every Sunday morning, we walk to Café Du Monde for breakfast. But this morning in mid-October, I am alone. Mom flew back to Chicago for the closing of our house in Oak Park, and though I offered to accompany her, she refused, saying I shouldn’t miss school. And she’s right. I’m taking an overload this semester at the University of New Orleans to complete my degree. I can’t afford to miss a day if I want to start an M.F.A. in creative writing next year.

  The café is bustling as usual this morning, but I snatch a recently emptied table in the back. The waiter has yet to bus it, but I know he’ll be by shortly. In the meantime, I decide to look through the stack of mail I’ve collected since Mom left. I was never good about opening mail in a timely fashion. And that’s too bad, I realize, because it’s brimming with good stuff.

  After weeding out the flyers and advertisements, I see my very first paycheck from the Times-Picayune, seventy-five bucks for a freelance article on last month’s Seafood Festival. It’s a start, I think, and I remind myself to send Craig Hewitt an e-mail to let him know the good news. Although my former boss and I flirted a bit after I returned from my weekend at Tarble, it never amounted to anything serious. Fresh from the whole ordeal, I wasn’t ready to date anyone then. And although I’m still not dating anyone now, I feel ready to meet the right person. I’ll know when it’s the right person this time around. Gwen and I agreed on that at our last session.

  Behind the paycheck, I find a postcard from Tarble College, announcing the school’s first annual Homecoming later this month. Despite protests, the Tarble board of trustees voted unanimously for coeducation, and Homecoming would replace the annual Reunion festivities this year. I smiled when I saw what Heidi wrote on the back of the card: “I know you can’t make it, but see you in NOLA for Thanksgiving!”

  Coeducation was not the only change to occur at Tarble College. Mark was no longer on the faculty. I’d followed through with charges against him, not for sexual misconduct but for plagiarism. Julie and Madeline had done the same. I eventually spoke to Tina Beyers, but Professor Barnard’s assumptions about her had been off base. Yes, she had been in Mark’s class, and yes, she had dropped out of Tarble, but the two factors were unrelated. Regardless, in response to our claims, and the unveiling of his many relationships with his students, President Monroe was prepared to fire him, but he resigned.

  I’m not angry with Mark anymore. I’ve let go, because after some reflection, I realized he was equally haunted by the past. Growing up without a father but with a schizophrenic mother had shaped Mark—his beliefs, his values, his attitudes toward women. Obviously, he loved his mother. He spoke so affectionately about her that day in the café. And he was attracted to women like her—creative, emotional, passionate women. But he also resented her for having those very qualities. He was conflicted, and that juxtaposition of feelings played out in his relationships. That is why he could be so understanding yet so condescending. For as much as he loved his mother, he wanted to punish her. I understand this now. It doesn’t help to be angry anyway. After all, he’s already been punished for his wrongdoings. Thanks to the flames that marred his face and neck, Professor Barnard got her wish. That night in the cabin, she’d wanted to take away Mark’s power. And though he still had his manhood, his disarming good looks were forever gone.

  Of course, Virginia Barnard was no longer teaching at Tarble either. She was charged with abduction and falsifying information, although she didn’t go to jail. Instead she was sent to live in a Louisiana state mental health facility just north of Baton Rouge, only an hour’s drive from me now, which sometimes gives me pause. Fifteen minutes after I pushed that call button to the nurses’ station, the Kenosha police captured Barnard in Mark’s car in front of a Burger King six miles west of the hospital. Found to be unfit for trial, Wisconsin officials eventually relocated her to the facility in Louisiana, where nearby relatives could oversee her care. Despite everything that happened, Beth and I agreed the facility was the best place for her, not prison, and the judge took our perspectives into account when making the decision. In the end, neither of
us could hold her in contempt. Although we could never condone her actions, we understood them.

  We read her sister Jenny’s diary, after all, the one she’d kept over twenty years ago, when she was a freshman at Tulane. It detailed every emotion of her breakup with Mark, from why she fell in love with him in the first place—it was his blue eyes, she said—to her guilt about aborting the baby. Eerily, it had all happened in December, the same month I’d overdosed on the sleeping pills many years later. And in every entry, in every word, I saw a piece of myself.

  I could have written that diary.

  Jenny’s diary was cathartic in another way too. It served as the springboard for the discussion I’d been meaning to have with my mom since I dropped out of school. I ended up telling her everything—about Mark and New Orleans and visiting Dad at the cemetery—all the things I swore I’d never tell her. And even after she heard it all, even after she found out I’d had an affair with my married professor, there was not a speck of brown in the green of her eyes.

  The waiter interrupts my thoughts to clear the table and take my order, and I ask him for a café au lait and an order of beignets before I go on to the next piece of mail in my stack, a thank-you note from Beth Richards for the baby gift I recently sent. She didn’t miscarry after all, and in May, she gave birth to a darling girl—Renee, which means “reborn” —with fine blond hair, a button nose, and petal-like lips the color of a rose. I know Janice Richards was beside Beth as she gave birth, holding her hand with every push, unspeakably gracious for the miracle of outcomes: her daughter alive and a granddaughter too. So far, and much to Beth’s satisfaction, the baby looks nothing like Mark. He will, however, be a part of his daughter’s life. Beth is allowing him visitation rights because she realized that having a father—even an imperfect one—was better than not having one at all. And Mark will have plenty of time to see his daughter on weekends, since he and Meryl divorced in the spring.

  I look at the photo of baby Renee that Beth included in her card—the baby is now five months old and cutting a tooth—and marvel at the fragility of human life. Had Virginia Barnard not kidnapped Beth, she would have boarded that plane to Pittsburgh, and under the cover of attending the photography workshop, aborted the baby now smiling back at me.

  Little girl, you owe your life to a crazy woman, I think.

  Then again, so do I.

  True, what Professor Barnard did—pretending to be the ghosts of dead women writers—played a key role in my suicide attempt. But she wasn’t entirely to blame. Mark played his part too, and ultimately, so did I. In the end, I chose to swallow the pills. It was my insecurity, my desperate need to be loved, to fill the void my father left when he died, that brought me to that point, not the visions of Woolf and Gilman and Plath.

  But when it came to picking up the pieces of my life, I have to credit Professor Barnard. Had she not brought the luggage to my house, had she not put the book and Reunion postcard inside, I never would have returned to Tarble. Because of her, I confronted Mark, confronted the pain, confronted my past, and in doing so, finally embraced my future. I often reflect on the story the professor told us in the cabin about her sister. Not of Jenny’s suicide, but of their deep bond of sisterhood. I never had a sister, but I imagine if I had, she would have gone to the ends of the earth to protect me. There would be no bounds to her love. And so I’ve come to see Professor Barnard in another light. Because truth is, she came into my life softly and unexpectedly and briefly, but inspired a metamorphosis. She changed me, altered the course of my life.

  She was, as her sister Jenny so whimsically put it, my butterfly sister.

  The waiter brings me my coffee and beignets then, and I set the mail down to savor them.

  I finish my café au lait but take the other two beignets with me in a paper sack. For Dad, I think, deciding it’s the perfect day to ride out to the cemetery. I leave the café and cut through Jackson Square on my way to the streetcar stop on Canal. The resident artists are already set up for the day on the slate walkway, their easels easily visible, their work propped against the wrought-iron fence.

  “Excuse me,” a man says, interrupting my thoughts. “Are you setting up here?”

  I turn to see a man—late twenties, I guess—holding an easel. His fingers and shirt are stained with paint, but he’s clean-shaven and sports a boyish haircut. His eyes, a patina green, mesmerize me to the point that I lose my voice.

  “I’m not an artist,” I finally say.

  “Everyone’s an artist,” he replies.

  “That’s true. But I’m not setting up here,” I add, gesturing to his easel. “Please.”

  I step back as he sets the easel down and begins pulling his paintings for sale from a large portfolio sleeve. They’re the most beautiful I’ve ever seen and genuinely New Orleans. One is a courtyard, eerily foggy. Another is Royal Street, the pink and greens so vibrant, so true to life.

  “They’re stunning,” I tell him.

  “Thanks.” He bows his head, as if suddenly shy. “But it’s just a hobby. Extra income. I’m in my last year of law school at Loyola.”

  I continue to look at his paintings as he sets them out. And the last one stuns me. It’s of a man under a green umbrella tent, holding his small daughter’s hand. In her other hand is an orange—partially unpeeled. It’s titled Sunday Morning at the French Market.

  “I want this one,” I say. “I have to have it. How much?”

  He studies me and smiles. “It’s yours. Take it.”

  “I can’t, not without paying you something for it.”

  “Well, what’s that in your hand?” he asks.

  I look down at the paper bag from Café Du Monde, the two beignets I had planned to take to my father’s tomb. “Leftovers,” I say. “From breakfast.”

  He rubs his belly. “It just so happens I didn’t eat breakfast. Even swap?”

  “I kind of promised them to someone else,” I tell him.

  He winces. “Your boyfriend?”

  “I don’t have a boyfriend.”

  He pretends to wipe a bead of sweat from his forehead in mock relief. “Well, if that’s the case, then, hi, I’m Julian,” he says, his voice buoyant as he holds out his hand.

  I grin when I hear my father’s uncommon first name and accept his handshake, telling him I’m Ruby. He smiles back, earnestly. And we look into each other’s eyes longer, deeper than most people do when they first meet.

  “Julian,” I finally say, still holding his hand. “Well, if that’s the case, then these are for you after all.” I hand him the bag.

  “Are you sure?” he asks.

  I study him and his painting of the father and daughter and the orange.

  “I guess there’s no way to be sure,” I say. “But I’ve got a good feeling about it.”

  Journal

  Dear Jenny,

  My dear sister, I can’t write fast enough, afraid one of the nurses will discover this pen and yank the lifeline from my hand. The pen belongs to Claudia, the only decent person working here, and I wouldn’t want her to lose her job for being so careless with her belongings. It’s not like I could harm myself or others with a pen, or MacGyver my escape using one. Or maybe I could . . .

  Right now, it doesn’t matter. I am writing again. In addition to the pen, I also stole two sheets of paper from Claudia’s yellow steno pad, and have folded them in such a way to resemble a journal, securing the binding with a piece of string I pulled from the rug in the group therapy room. It will have to do.

  If Claudia ever finds out what I did, I will just tell her why. I did it for her. The only way for me to think well—thanks to the medications they give me—is to write. And I have to think this out clearly and carefully, have to plan how and when and where all of this will happen. Because Dr. Berger must be stopped. In addition to Claudia, I am certain he is sleeping with two other nurses at this facility. I can tell, just by the way they try so hard not to look at him, the way he strokes their fingers when
they hand him a file. He’s going to hurt them, all of them, especially Claudia. I can tell by the way she follows him with her eyes, even long after he’s left the room, that she’s in over her head. I sense she’s never been in love before. He is her first. And the first, well, we know all too well it can be devastating beyond repair. That is why I can no longer sit idly by. I cannot let her relinquish her life to him. I cannot let her become yet another foolish statistic.

  I’ve decided to help her.

  P. S.

  Insights, Interviews & More . . .

  About the author

  Meet Amy Gail Hansen

  Born in the Chicago suburbs, Amy Gail Hansen spent her early childhood near New Orleans. She holds a BA in English from Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin. A former English teacher, she works as a freelance writer and journalist in suburban Chicago, where she lives with her husband and three children. The Butterfly Sister is her debut novel.

  About the book

  FOR ME, STORY IDEAS have always come unexpectedly and organically from real life experiences, and the origin of The Butterfly Sister is no exception.

  In 2004 my husband and I went on our honeymoon to Italy. Moments before I checked my luggage, I realized the tag on my suitcase bore someone else’s name and address. That’s because I’d lent it five years prior to a college acquaintance and hadn’t used it since. Removing her leather tag at the last minute and replacing it with one of those flimsy paper ones the airlines give out, I thought, What if my bag had gotten lost? Would it have gone to her instead of me? And isn’t that a good idea for a story?

  Once home from my trip, I hung the tag off the ironwork base of my bedside lamp as a reminder of my great story idea. It sat there two years collecting dust before another layer of the story revealed itself to me at a local writers’ group meeting. I went only once to this particular group—it wasn’t a good fit— but the single experience provided me with my story’s setting. That night a woman read a heartfelt poem about her alma mater, Wells College, a women’s college that had recently adopted coeducation. It had been a decade or more since the woman graduated, but she was obviously devastated by the change. She cried when she read the poem. Her passion on the subject enchanted me and later, on my drive home, I decided to set my “suitcase story” at a women’s college on the brink of going co-ed. And suddenly, but slowly, the story unfolded like petals of a flower.