Return of the Butterfly

by Sharon Heath

  It was just as well that the phone rang. It was the ringtone I’d programmed for Mother’s number.

  “It occurred to me that we’re all going to be ridiculously busy soon. Want to come over to the Fiskes for a cuppa? Cesar’s been kind enough to wait here all morning for the delivery of the patient lift I ordered for whenever Gwen gets the green light to come home. It’s going to very important for her state of mind to be able to get out of bed and actually sit in a chair for part of the day. Even after losing all that weight, she’s still pretty heavy. The lift will be a big help to Stanley when no one else is home to help lift her. But the delivery men haven’t arrived yet— surprise, surprise—and Cesar has to go somewhere, so I’ll be cooling my heels here all by my lonesome until they arrive.”

  After shouting to Makeda that I was running out for a bit, I started up the old Prius and drove all of the four and a half minutes it took to reach Stanley and Gwennie’s Rose Villa Street home.

  I actually had to hold the small banister to haul myself up the two steps to the porch. Cesar startled me by flinging open the front door. He sped past me with a barely audible, “Hey, Fleur, how you doin’, dude?”

  Mother caught the door before it slammed shut in front of me. Shaking her head, she pursed her perfectly outlined Chanel Infra-rouge lips for a quick couple of bisous, muttering, “I worry about that boy.”

  Her voice had an edge, and I turned around to see Cesar striding quickly, not to his motorcycle, but to Fidel Marquetti’s house, disappearing inside.

  ‘What the—?”

  “Oh, God. They were right.”

  “Wait. Did I really just see that?”

  Mother fell back against the wall. “I can hardly believe it myself. Gwennie swore she saw him let himself into Fidel’s house a few days before she was hospitalized, but I wrote it off to chemo brain. Then the other day when Dhani was here, she phoned and said she’d seen the same thing. Followed by the loudest and cheesiest disco music you can imagine blaring from Fidel’s backyard.”

  I shuddered. The last time I’d actually seen Fidel, he was covered in blood, having just shot our mutual next-door neighbors’ dog. “Honestly, I guess I’d assumed Fidel moved after what happened with the Kangs. I don’t think I’ve seen him since.”

  “Was Cesar even here when that happened?”

  “No. He was with you. It was Christmas day.”

  Mother frowned, then nodded. “You know, I’d forgotten that we used to split the holidays. What’s really odd is that I guess I’ve heard the story so many times, I actually remember it as if I’d been here myself.”

  I shuddered and stifled the impulse to flap. “I’m glad you weren’t.” It was the most hideous thing I’d ever witnessed. Fidel running in circles, screaming and holding his hand on his butt where Chin Hwa had bit him. The dog not moving, but blood seeping from underneath him like some creepy life force of its own. And Mrs. Kang with her hands pulling at her cheeks, her dress soaked right through with the water from Fidel’s sprinklers so you could see her underwear. She was so skinny and helpless-looking. I didn’t think any of us knew what to do until Gwennie had the decency to go over and hold her.

  We went in and sat together in a grim silence. On my side, I was trying to figure out how Cesar would have even met Fidel. Finally, I ventured the question aloud, but Mother wasn’t looking at me. She strode to the front door and opened it. Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive blasted into the room. Cesar, or whoever he was with over at Fidel’s, must be playing the music at full volume for it to be this loud two doors away.

  I joined Mother on the porch. The hairs stood up on my arms. It occurred to me that, of course, Fidel hadn’t moved. Any buyer of his Spanish bungalow would have gotten rid of that weird, Martian garden of his as soon as they moved in. “Mother, maybe Fidel’s away on vacation and somehow arranged for Cesar to water his yard for him. You know how Fidel feels about his precious plants.” We all knew. It was pride (and prejudice against his Korean-American neighbors) that had led to Fidel murdering Chin Hwa after the unfortunate Jindo had taken a giant dump on his pansies.

  Mother pulled me back inside and leaned back against the door as if barring it.

  “I don’t know. But maybe you and I could ...”

  I tried folding my arms in front of my chest but had to give up. Callay seemed to second that by giving me a sharp jab with what was undoubtedly an elbow.

  “Mother.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t go all How to Get Away with Murder on me. We can’t go spying on Cesar.”

  But that was just what we did.

  The last strains of I Will Survive were blaring from the backyard as we crept up Fidel’s ivy-lined driveway. I was sure I felt something bite me on the arm. I tried not to pay any attention to it, I really did, but gruesome scenarios involving Valley fever and Lyme disease started multiplying in my mind. Would Callay survive at this point if I died of West Nile virus? What if a pack of rats was preparing to attack us from the ivy?

  It wasn’t until Donna Summer launched into Hot Stuff that Mother found a slightly larger gap between two wooden fence posts. I let her lean in to take a look, convinced that my belly would just bounce me back, but the particular shade of pig pink that Mother’s face had taken on convinced me to try.

  I had to hand it to Fidel. With the same attention to detail with which he’d created a front yard mosaic of thick grasses, beehive ginger, urn plants and monkey paws, he’d constructed his own outdoor disco hall in back, with colored lights mounted on a pair of graceful birch trees and crisscrossing a raised, wooden dance floor bordered by life-sized cardboard cutouts of John Travolta, Michael Jackson, and Donna Summer herself, all of them applauding the dancers, who seemed to be—could they be?—Fidel himself and our Cesar. At least, the former had the same red-faced coloring as our neighborhood dog killer and the latter had on the same black boots Cesar had been wearing when he’d sailed past me a half hour before.

  Beyond that, the two were nearly unrecognizable. Fidel was dancing surprisingly well, given the height of his spiky silver heels. He was no longer a spring chicken, so the shiny, black waves that flowed over the shoulders of his white, décolleté gown must surely be a wig. But nothing but nature—or, as I realized later, surgery or hormone treatments—could have fabricated the twin milk-chocolate mounds that seemed about to burst from his heaving chest.

  If Fidel was, in his own fashion, a model of glamorous taste, the way Cesar had gotten himself up was another story. Pancake make-up had been applied to his face sufficiently thickly to cover the signature birthmark that sat above the inside corner of his left eyebrow like an off-center bindi. Above his calf-hugging boots was as much of an expanse of bare skin as a rather short Guatemalan male could muster, climaxing in a wisp of black lace that exposed an undulating ass whose perfect contours most of female America would have died to have been born with. A mix of metaphors, to be sure, but I was hardly in a state of grammatical sagacity.

  I fell away from the fence—Cesar’s spiky, platinum blond wig and elaborately painted face fixed in my mind’s eye—to land right in Mother’s arms. Her body was vibrating.

  I stepped back, and we stared at each other like a couple of gapeseeds. Mother squeaked, “What the hell?”

  And then, before I could object, Mother had loosened me from her grip and was climbing—climbing!—over the fence, somehow managing to use its thick hinges as purchase for her feet. As she went over, I couldn’t help but note the imprint of the pricey Arche brand logo on her rippled black soles.

  It is no small torture to be standing on one side of a fence with a debilitatingly large belly when your mother has just landed with a great howl of pain on the other side. About the only good news was that the music had stopped and sounds of sympathy soon superseded cries of Cesar and Fidel’s own understandable shock.

  I screamed, “Let me in!” and the gate began to open out, revealing Mother sitting on the ground, rubbing the top of her head, a redder
-than-ever-faced Fidel stooping down with his arms around her shoulders amidst a large, glossy-leafed bush that I would later learn, with some gratitude, was aptly named Soft Touch Holly.

  But little was soft about the scene before me. Mother looked dazed, and I saw with some fear that Cesar did, too, particularly as he’d turned back from opening the gate to stand directly above Mother, his jaw slack, his legs curled inward as if to protect his poorly-packaged privates. His garishly made-up eyes looked decidedly wander-y.

  I unceremoniously shoved him away, issuing a terse, “Get a grip! Call an ambulance!”

  I didn’t know whether to be appalled or relieved to hear Mother cry out, “For God’s sake, change your clothes before they come!”

  Chapter Three

  WHY IN THE world were medical facilities inevitably kept at a temperature just barely above freezing when the ailing body cried out for every kind of warmth? After a shivery wait of nearly three hours at the Huntington Hospital ER, Mother had been pronounced “good to go home” by a harried resident with an ominously protruding mole on his chin that brought to mind the proverb from Luke 4:23 that I’d first read at the age of three, “Physician, heal thyself.” I nearly ran after the man to make him promise he’d have the worrying knob looked into, but Mother was already grabbing her clothes from the little cubby at the corner of the room and pulling on her lacy, black La Perla panties. Her balance was more than a little wobbly. I quickly stepped forward to support her lest we have another injury to contend with.

  Emerging from that dolorous prison, we exchanged grateful glances at the feel of the balmy afternoon air. I held Mother’s arm with one hand, while in the other I clutched copies of paperwork confirming that her insurance would pick up the undoubtedly pricey tab for her use of a cot fit for a largish doll and with instructions ending with the caveat that Mother should visit a neurologist if her mild headache turned into something more.

  Within the hour, she and I huddled together on the smaller of two smoke-colored, Jean-Michel Frank Bauhaus sofas in her capacious living room, while perched at the edge of its companion was a sullen-faced Cesar Jesus de Maria Santo Domingo Marisco, clad— thank God—in jeans and a T-shirt, with only the faintest hint of glittery blue mascara to remind us of his get-up earlier that day.

  I kept an ice pack clapped on Mother’s head as she spoke with exquisite tact, her face nonetheless wreathed in worry and pain, for which I’d never forgive Cesar, though it had admittedly been she and not he who’d decided to climb that fence. As if she were a teenager and not a woman about to become grandmother to my own increasingly restive bun. I prayed not to go into labor until Mother recovered from her wallop.

  “Cesar, dear,” Mother murmured, “You could have told me, you know. We alcoholics have been around a block or two ourselves.”

  Cesar’s face screwed into a mask of contempt as he flung out a defiant, “Don’t even go there. Alcoholism is a disease. Cross-dressing isn’t.”

  Mother drew back as if she’d been slapped. Her ice pack landed in my lap and I re-applied it as she adjusted her strategy.

  “Of course, you’re right. I didn’t mean to imply that it is, only that—”

  Cesar wasn’t having any of it. He stood and leaned in toward us, fists clenched at his sides with visible self-restraint. “Don’t you dare patronize me. You know nothing about me. You and Miss Hand-Flapping Queen of the Universe over there. It’s been Fleur this and Fleur that ever since I was kidnapped from my family and brought to this damned country.”

  Mother squeaked out a hapless, “Kidnapped? But no, really—Cesar, you were adopted. Nana and I took you to visit your mother. And, since then ... you know I’ve done everything I could to support your contact with her.”

  “Yeah, but now she’s stopped calling, hasn’t she, and I don’t even know how to find her. The only people who ever bothered to ask how I feel about things have been Nana and Fidel, and now one of them’s dead and the other won’t want anything to do with me. Did you ever think of that when you decided to come spying on me? Before ruining my life for the millionth time? I’ve had your number from the very beginning. You’re all a bunch of hypocrites, thinking you’re doing good when you’re so fucking selfish except when it comes to rearranging your lives to accommodate the genius freak. Move to Pasadena? Sure. Never mind that Cesar, who’s had a hard enough time with his ADHD, has to change schools when he’s finally begun to make a few friends. Nobody needed to drive a car when we lived in Manhattan. Did it ever occur to you that Nana never would have died if we’d just stayed put? But, oh no, we have to go where the freak goes.” His upper lip trembled as he fought back tears. Mother grabbed her ice pack from me and fumbled with it before flinging it onto the coffee table.

  The irony was that at that moment it was all I could do not to flap. It wasn’t the venom in Cesar’s voice, or the name-calling. Over the years, I’d been called all sorts of things (admittedly, mostly by Father), from Autistic Weirdo to Odd Duck to Sneaky Little Monster. I was used to it. No, what got to me was the implication that Cesar had been languishing in my shadow. That the boy who’d been abandoned by a crack-addicted mother had also been—not exactly kidnapped, but evidently being adopted had felt the same—subjected to another series of losses, most of them thanks to me. I was mortified. If only I could peel off my own skin.

  But before I could begin to summon an apology, he’d fled the house, whose windows quaked with the force of the slamming front door.

  Mother and I sat wordlessly together until I rose and wandered blindly out the French doors leading to the side garden. Broad beams of sunlight filtered in through the leaves of the young sycamore Mother had planted when she’d moved here. It had been her way of honoring the robust, mature version that Grandfather and I used to watch together for hours at a time, the one we’d called, “our tree.” The one Father had cut down from spite.

  The air was quite still. Quiet enough to hear the whirr of a turquoise damselfly as she shot across the lily pond. Quiet enough to hear Mother whisper from behind me, “It’s not your fault. It’s mine.”

  I turned around and studied her face. Telltale smoker’s vertical lines scored her upper lip more deeply than ever. I saw the weariness in her. The heaviness. She, who’d been so filled with optimism ever since winning sobriety.

  “Dear God,” she muttered, “I really have my work cut out with that boy, don’t I?”

  The baby moved, and I took Mother’s hand and placed it on my belly. Callay shifted position again, a small temblor inside me, and what must have been a foot poked out visibly. One lone tear ran down Mother’s face. I brushed it away with my fingertip and pulled her toward me in a long, clumsy attempt at a hug.

  I stared vaguely over her shoulder until the delicate purple and white flowers of a particularly abundant milkweed plant caught my eye. They trembled at a slight gust of wind.

  “Oh, look!” I cried out, pointing.

  Mother skewed around to see.

  Scores of tiny, translucent golden eggs sketched out a diamond design across a long milkweed leaf that gestured gracefully toward us. They sparkled like miniature Christmas lights in the late afternoon sun.

  Taking Mother’s hand, I tiptoed us closer. Mother squinted. “What—?”

  I spoke softly, as if even the vibration of my voice might disturb them. “They’re monarch eggs. First stage of a caterpillar’s life. A butterfly’s life.” A little cry of joy escaped me. “As soon as they hatch, they eat the leaf they’re born on. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.”

  “Oh, I wish I had my glasses.” Mother leaned in closer to get a better look.

  “The little caterpillars can’t move very far, so the mother butterfly needs to lay her eggs on exactly the kind of leaf that will nourish them. Any other plant simply won’t do. And once they start feeding, they grow like crazy, but their skin doesn’t stretch like ours, so they have to keep shedding their exoskeletons while they grow.”

  “Like snakes!”
>
  “Sort of. If you like, we can be on the lookout for when they reach the pupa stage. The chrysalis. They’ll be hanging from a branch like little pea pods.”

  Mother snorted. “My scientist daughter is getting carried away now. With any luck, you’ll be feeding your own little pea pod by then.”

  “Oh, my god. You’re right. I’d better!” I felt a wave of regret at the thought of missing the evolution of those delicate little droplets, but then a pang of distress overtook me.

  “Mother!” I cried.

  “Hmm?”

  “Do you think Cesar landed on the wrong sort of leaf?”

  Frowning, she nearly spat at me, “Don’t.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t say that. It makes it all sound so final. As if something terrible has happened that can’t be undone.”

  Ah. There it was again.

  As a child, I’d had the delusion that watering my dead grandfather’s shrunken member would accomplish the feat of resurrection. I’d reasoned that if the part of his anatomy that served conception were revived, he would be, too. I’d come a long way since then, but was our team’s end goal all that different? In this case, we sought to stave off our species’ extinction by lessening our reliance on fossil-fueled travel. Would we be able to make a difference in time, before the verdict of climate change became final? I felt torn between my impatience to get this baby girl of mine born and a sense of urgency to make the Dreamization project a living reality so that she might actually have a future.

  Hurry, intoned that insistent voice, hurry, hurry!

  Chapter Four

  OUR LIVES WERE fast turning into a medical drama. An OB-GYN visit for me—according to my doctor, everything still “on track,” with no need to think about inducing yet. Then, just to make sure, a neurology workup for Mother with unenlightening results. Within the same week, heartening news came via group text from Stanley H. Fiske. Gwennie would finally be sprung from the grand and sanitized complex of City of Hope to be delivered the following day via private ambulance to the Fiskes’ much humbler digs on Rose Villa Street. I gave a little prayer of thanks that Stanley had gotten home in time on the day that Mother had bonked her head to take delivery of the patient lift.