The Glass Butterfly

by Louise Marley

  Only one thing mattered, and that was to keep Jack safe. Ice Woman was determined to succeed at that.

  She started down the slope into the valley, skidding on the mat of leaves and moss and needles that softened the forest floor. For now, she told herself, she would be grateful for the impulse that had moved her across the car seat, made her shove open the passenger side door, given her the impetus to throw herself out into the water. She could have been crushed as the Escalade tipped over the rocky bank and fell the thirty feet to the river. Had she had time to think it through, she might have decided she was safer in the car, behind the airbag, but there had been no time. And she had known, when she saw Ellice climb out of her patrol car and stride to the top of the bank to stare coldly down at the wreck, that she had done the right thing at last. The only thing she could have done.

  She kept moving, pressing north and a little bit east. After several periods of walking, resting, and walking again, she broke out of the woods to find herself on the two-lane road that led to the town of Randolph. She walked up it for a time, grateful for the gravel shoulder, which was so much easier to navigate than underbrush and carpets of leaves and dropped branches. Dusk began to obscure the hills, but the darkness was helpful. When headlights flashed ahead or behind her, she stepped down into the drainage ditch, huddling with her head down until the vehicle passed.

  Randolph was just big enough for her purposes. She didn’t know anyone there. She did most of her shopping in Sherburne Center, or even all the way north in Montpelier, but she had driven through Randolph once when Jack was in high school, and she remembered the little lane of used car dealerships with their hungry signs and strings of gaudy lights.

  Her feet hurt in earnest by the time she spotted the lights of the town ahead. She turned off the main road to walk down a gravel-strewn street that led away from the town center. Around her lights shone from modest wooden houses. Children ran and shouted in their yards, and dogs barked as she passed. She thrust her hands into her pockets, and did her best to look like a woman taking her evening exercise in well-worn sneakers and comfortable jeans, a battered red beret on her head. She tucked her hair up under the beret, pulling the front down over her forehead. She might be blonde, brunette, or gray-haired. No one would be able to tell.

  Darkness was complete by the time she found the lane of used car dealers. She eyed them as she passed, hoping a possibility would jump out at her. The strings of lights swinging in the breeze made the hoods of used cars and outdated trucks glimmer with false promise.

  When she spotted a lemon-yellow VW Beetle at the front of one of the seedier lots, she turned in. The salesman who hurried toward her had thin, pimply cheeks and a wisp of mustache that made him look as if he belonged in junior high.

  “Hi!” he said, with an eager smile. “I’m Adam.” He thrust out his hand. The nails were too long, and she found herself reluctant to touch him. She shook his hand anyway. He couldn’t be much older than Jack.

  “Hi,” she said hoarsely, then cleared her throat. She hadn’t spoken for hours. She tried again. “Excuse me. Hi.” She felt as if she were watching herself, observing her performance, assessing the efforts of the woman behind the ice to behave naturally. “This is kind of a cute car,” she said. She couldn’t actually dredge up a smile, but she spoke in as bright a tone as she could manage. “I thought my daughter might like it.”

  “Oh, absolutely!” he said. He withdrew his hand, and she felt the slight scrape of his nails against her palm. That made her shudder. That, of all things, after what had happened? The touch of someone else’s nails? Ridiculous.

  “How old is she? This is a great car for a girl,” he said. He opened the door, and pointed to the bud vase attached to the dash. “They all love those,” he said. “And I’ll bet she loves yellow. Girls love yellow.”

  “Well, yes,” she said. “I think she does. And it’s an automatic, so that’s good.” It was tempting to say more, but Ice Woman stopped herself. The less information she offered, the less he’d remember about her.

  “Special gift?” he asked.

  She said, “Birthday.”

  “Birthday, nice, nice. What a nice mom! How much were you thinking of spending?”

  She bent forward to see what the card on the windshield read, then leaned inside to check the mileage. Okay, it already had 120,000 miles on it. But it was a VW. Surely it could manage a few more. She straightened, and said, “About half what you’re asking, actually. That’s a lot of miles.”

  He smiled, and nodded. “Absolutely, absolutely. You know how it is. That’s a starting point.” He looked up at the office, little more than a lighted cubicle in the darkness, and she realized he was alone on the lot. The light showed the office was empty.

  She glanced pointedly at her wrist. She had been wearing her wristwatch when she left, just a Timex. Now it was the only jewelry she had left to her. “Look, Adam,” she said. “Can we get to the end point? This was sort of an impulse, and I need to—”

  “Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Make me an offer, and I’ll call my manager.”

  It didn’t take long after that. She offered him eight hundred, and could tell by the way his face lit up that it was going to be enough. There was a bit of awkwardness when she slipped into the office restroom and came out with eight hundred in cash in her hand, but they got through it. He gave her a curious glance as she counted out eight hundred-dollar bills and one fifty to cover the sales tax, but he didn’t say anything. When he asked her to step into the office and sign papers, she folded an extra fifty and slipped it into his hand. She said, “My daughter will come and do that tomorrow, okay?”

  “Well—I guess that would work. I’ll just say you’re driving the car on approval.” He pocketed the bill, his cheeks flushing guiltily.

  Ice Woman persuaded the salesman to fill the gas tank. Within half an hour she was climbing into the car, inserting the key into the ignition, praying the thing would start. The salesman stood by, watching, no doubt joining her in her prayer. When the engine obediently came to life, a look of relief passed over his pimply features. She put the car in gear, and Adam stepped back, waving and smiling. Ice Woman waved back, then gunned the engine, zipping out into the street with a little rush that made the bud vase wobble in its holder. She glanced into the rearview mirror as she drove away, but Adam had gone back into his office, and was grinning as he spoke into a telephone. Someone, at least, was happy tonight.

  Tory turned her eyes back to the road, searching for street signs as she tried to get used to the little car, adjusting the mirrors, locating the windshield wipers. She turned south toward Hartford, where she could catch Interstate 91. She wished she could go north, but crossing the border without identification was out of the question. She could find a map at a service station, but she thought for now she would just let her sense of direction guide her. She didn’t know where she was going, in any case. Just away. As far away as she could possibly go, and as quickly as she could accomplish it.

  She drove off into the night, pushing the little Beetle as fast as she dared. After half an hour, she pulled off the beret and tossed it into the passenger seat. She didn’t look back. She didn’t think, and she didn’t feel. Ice Woman.

  The Beetle was no Escalade, but despite its rattles and coughs, it carried her steadily south and then west, on roads with numbers and names she didn’t recognize. She bought coffee and a hamburger in a drive-through at about midnight, but not before pulling on the beret again to hide her hair. She was careful to keep her head down, handing over her money without looking up at the clerk’s face. She had slipped the bill out without noticing it was a fifty, but there was no demur. She pulled out again into the road, and ate the burger as she drove. She bought gas in a self-service station with one of the twenties she’d gotten from the fast-food place. The restroom was locked, but there was no one around, so she went around to the back and squatted in a square of weeds and gravel. In moments she was on the road again. />
  The radio in the VW worked fairly well, but she couldn’t find a classical music station within range. She drove on through the night in the hard silence of solitude.

  She wondered, vaguely, how Jack would take the news of her disappearance. Of her apparent death. She hoped he wouldn’t be too unhappy. Despite the distance between them—call it what it was, an estrangement—she was certain he cared about her. She had known many clients who resented their parents, but that didn’t mean they didn’t love them. She had often taken comfort in that knowledge.

  Jack was safe now. As long as she was gone, he was safe. It was the only thing that made her feel anything, though it was more an absence of anxiety than a concrete feeling of relief. Better to lose a parent than to face the mindless fury of Ellice Gordon.

  “It takes time,” she had said to traumatized clients. “Give yourself time.”

  Time was all she had left. Time, and a gutsy old yellow Beetle. And a bit less than ten thousand dollars in twenties, fifties, and hundreds. She would count it, eventually. Work out how long it would last. Decide what to do next. For now, she drove, and watched the highway signs spin by.

  By midmorning, with the cool autumn sun at her back, she knew she had to stop and rest. She left the freeway when she saw a sign for a town called Meadville. It seemed big enough to hide in, but not so big she couldn’t find her way back to the freeway. It would have been better, she supposed, to stop when darkness fell again, but her eyes were burning and her hands aching from holding the steering wheel. She could yearn for the easy steering of the Escalade if she allowed herself to do it, but she resisted. Instead, as she pulled into the back parking lot of the simplest motel she could find, she patted the dashboard of the VW. It was doing its job to the best of its ability. It wasn’t the little car’s fault it wasn’t a Cadillac.

  She pulled on the beret again and went to register in the motel office. The clerk was elderly, peering at her through thick glasses with black plastic frames. When he asked for a credit card, she said she had forgotten it. “You’ll take cash, though, right?” She gave him her most feminine shrug, spreading her hands helplessly, and he nodded.

  “Just fill this out.” He pushed the form across a cracked counter that looked as if it had been lined with a leftover sheet of linoleum.

  She wrote down an address in New York, not knowing if such an address existed or not. She made up a license plate number for her car, hoping the clerk wouldn’t walk all the way around back to check. She took the key, thanked him, refused the city map he offered, and made her way up a set of splintered stairs to the room he had given her. It didn’t look like there were any other guests, but she didn’t mind that. That meant there were no maids with carts of sheets and towels to encounter, no people to notice or remember her. She let herself into the room, locked the door, drew the blinds, and tossed the beret onto a chair. She used the bathroom, then folded back the thin coverlet of the bed and kicked off her sneakers. She kept her jacket on, falling onto the dingy sheets and tucking the inadequate pillow under her cheek, and fell asleep at once.

  When she woke, the room was dark, with only a dim band of light making its way through the blinds from the hallway. She groaned at the ache in her back and neck, and rolled gingerly off the bed. She went into the bathroom and flicked on the light, avoiding the mirror. She showered, trying to keep the bandage on her arm dry by holding it out of the stream of water. She would have to buy more bandages. The cut might take a while to heal. It didn’t feel hot or swollen, but she didn’t want to remove the bandage to have a look.

  She soaped herself twice, and washed her hair with the tiny bottle of shampoo provided for her. There was a bottle of lotion, too, and she used it all, rubbing it into her arms and legs and over her heels and her face. The last of her makeup was gone now, and when she finally faced the mirror, her face looked bare and somehow purified without lipstick or foundation or mascara. Different.

  When she had toweled her hair until it was reasonably dry, and tucked it up into the beret, she put on her clothes again. She wished she had taken time to wash out her panties before falling asleep, but it was too late now. It was time to be on the road again.

  The hour, she learned from the car radio, was after midnight. That was good. No one would see her leave, and with any luck, no one had noticed her arrival, either. She followed the road back toward Interstate 91, stopping first for another hamburger and a large paper cup of coffee. She took the paperweight out of her jacket pocket and placed it on the seat beside her. “You’re all the company I have, Nonna Angela,” she said. The green glass sparkled dully, and the gold butterfly appeared and disappeared in the intermittent freeway lights.

  As she passed the “Welcome to Ohio” sign, Tory gave it a victory salute. She could do this. It was hard, and it was lonely, but she could do it.

  That was a good thing, because she had no other choice.

  3

  Tu che di gel sei cinta, da

  tanta fiamma vinta, l’amerai anche tu!

  You who are girded with ice, conquered

  by such burning passion, you will love him, too!

  —Liù, Turandot, Act Three

  The ocean was gray and cold looking, with rolling waves that splashed and broke on the sandy beach and left irregular lines of brackish foam. A great rock, nearly black in the muted light, rose against the backdrop of the sea and the cool gray sky. Tory pulled on her coat, and stepped out of the Beetle into the gravel parking lot of the viewpoint. Seagulls swooped and cried above her head, and some sort of little long-beaked bird—a sandpiper, maybe—trotted here and there on the sand. There was no one else around, though rows of beach houses stretched to the north and south. She turned up her collar against the chill wind as she stepped over a weathered log that marked the end of the road.

  The end of her road. She had traveled as far west as she could. Unless she were to turn south into California, her trip was over.

  She had driven straight across the country, stopping only when she was too tired to drive any farther, subsisting on fast food and the occasional apple from a convenience store. She was wearing drugstore lingerie under the jeans and sweater she had started with. At the same drugstore she had bought a box of hair dye and a pair of scissors, a fake leather purse, a toothbrush and toothpaste, and a tube of hand cream.

  At a diner in Wyoming she had picked up a USA Today someone had left behind. When she turned past the front page, she found a photo of her Escalade, nose jammed into the rocks of the Winooski River, open doors crumpled by its headlong rush to the bottom of the bank. The headline of the article read, “Missing Vermont Therapist,” and there was a blurry reproduction of her license photo. Swiftly, she closed the paper and thrust it under the seat. She didn’t want to read it, and she didn’t want to risk someone seeing a picture of her. That day she cut her hair and dyed it, and tossed the beret into a Dumpster.

  “It was so odd,” she mused aloud, when she was on the road again. She had laid the paperweight carefully in a layer of plastic shopping bags, worried it might roll off the seat and crack. Through the long days of driving, she had taken to talking to it, speaking her random thoughts aloud as if Nonna Angela could hear her. “Missing Vermont Therapist, I mean. It didn’t seem to apply to me at all.” She had read once that for an actor, stepping onto the stage in a role meant thinking and moving and feeling as her character would. Putting aside everything else, anything that didn’t belong in the world of the play. She was doing that. She was on her own stage, in her new role.

  And now, her character would stop traveling.

  When she had seen the sign, just off Highway 101, she had felt that familiar pain, like a dull arrow piercing her breast. This time she understood what her fey was telling her, and she obeyed it. The moment she turned off the highway, the pain eased, and as she followed the signs it lessened swiftly, until she could hardly feel it. As she drove over a concrete bridge into the rather rustic-looking town, the pain subsided. To her ri
ght, the ocean tossed in the misty light. Ahead, simple two-lane streets ran past businesses and restaurants and the sorts of shops tourist towns featured. Most of these were closed, and there were almost no cars on the streets. The season was over. October in this northwest coastal state must be at least as cold as October in Vermont, and no doubt considerably damper.

  Tory stood in the viewpoint facing the beach for half an hour, watching the waves dash themselves against the big rock and listening to her intuition. The movement of the water held her gaze, called to her in some way she couldn’t have described. For so many days there had been nothing, and no one, that seemed significant. Now, on this rocky beach, the breakers seemed to catch the rhythm of her heartbeat, to draw out the tempo of her breathing. Ice Woman still admitted no feelings, but she didn’t want to leave the sea’s edge.

  Her face was chilled and her fingers were stiff with cold by the time she turned back to the Beetle, but she had decided. Her journey was over.

  She climbed back into the Beetle, saying, “We’re here. We’re done driving.” The paperweight, from its plastic nest, glowed green and gold in the gray light.

  Tory glanced to her left and right, deciding which side of the town would be best to explore. To the north were hotels, inns, restaurants, all oriented toward the view of the ocean and the great rock anchoring the beach. It seemed to her that the residential streets stretched in the other direction. She cranked up the heat in the Beetle, backed out of the parking lot, and turned south.

  With no map and no directions, she began driving through neighborhoods, more or less at random. Some streets were little more than packed dirt, while some were paved, but without sidewalks. The houses ranged from tiny cottages to the sorts of mansions rich people built as their weekend homes. She eyed them all, watching for rental signs, turning this way and that, always keeping the beach and the water in sight.