Return of the Butterfly

by Sharon Heath

I WAS OUT walking Callay, tracing the synchronized dance of two white butterflies overhead, when my cell phone pinged. It was Adam. His voice was filled with enthusiasm. “Melky’s coming,” he announced excitedly.

  “No way!” I cried.

  We hadn’t seen Melkamu Berhe since he’d served as our informal Ethiopian tour guide six years ago. As Jane Goodall’s mentee, Melky had generously agreed to ferry me to Tikil Dingay from Bole Airport on my fateful trip to meet my rival for Assefa’s affections. Actually, it was when he’d arrived weeks later to take Adam and me back to the airport that Melky had first revealed his interest in Makeda as a woman.

  We’d barely heard from Melky since. Nor had Makeda. There’s nothing like a few acts of terrorism to put paid to the best of plans. But as far as I knew, he was still single. It never failed to amaze me when someone of excellent character struggled to find a partner, though it did occur to me now that perhaps their very excellence mitigated against finding the right match.

  I was thrilled at the prospect of seeing Melky again myself, but my wheels were turning with how I might make sure that he and Makeda got to see each other. Of course, the best way would be to have him stay with us. I hurried downstairs to ask Lukie to prepare the spare bedroom.

  The morning that Melky arrived turned out to be less than auspicious. Monkey was running a bit of a fever with her first cold, and I’d quickly discovered that I was the most overprotective mother on the planet. While waiting for our pediatrician to call me back— his delay quite possibly having something to do with the fact that, despite Adam’s entreaties, I’d phoned his answering service at 6 a.m. on a Sunday morning—I managed to wake virtually everyone I knew to share my distress. The ridiculous thing was, virtually every person I called had never had children. Except for Mother, who wasn’t picking up her phone, possibly because she slept with earplugs now that Cesar was staying with her again; she’d confessed that she didn’t have the heart to ban the trance music blaring from his bedroom every night. Stanley merely mumbled that he was sorry. Katrina, whom I’d surely roused from a deep slumber, had groused, “Everybody gets colds, Fleur.” Amir had pronounced with great authority, “Turmeric and ginger.” Bob made some weird analogy about sea life. Sammie rushed to reassure me that I kept apologizing for my over-the-top anxiety only because I lived in Pasadena and hadn’t had enough exposure to Jewish mothers.

  I didn’t have the heart to call Makeda, who wouldn’t arrive back in town until later that morning from a previously planned visit with the girls to the Disneyland Hotel. Sofiya had been suffering the return of old nightmares of people coming to steal her and her sister away from their adoptive mother, and Makeda, Adam, and I had determined that the situation called for the distracting ministrations of Minnie Mouse and her crew.

  Thankfully, the considerably calmer Adam took charge. After Googling the appropriate fever medicine for six-months-old babies, he administered baby Tylenol and was suctioning the mucus out of her nose with a tiny rubber bulb when the doorbell rang. I flew down the stairs and found a somewhat balder and, if anything, heftier Melky beaming from the porch and wrapping me in a hug that bested Nana’s Mack truck grips by about a hundred pounds.

  “Melky!” I squealed.

  He held me at arm’s length and replied with a giant grin. “Ah, this is what they mean by a sight for sore eyes. Motherhood becomes you, Mrs. Manus.”

  “Oh my God,” I laughed, as he lifted his suitcase as if it were a toothpick and followed me into the hall. “The last time I saw you, Adam and I hadn’t even—.”

  But here was Adam coming down the stairs with Callay against his shoulder. “Adam hadn’t what?”

  “Swept me off my feet.”

  “I think the ocean did that.”

  It came back to me then—that shocking embrace as we were buffeted by the waves of Santa Monica beach, with Adam’s giant hard-on pushing against me as he brazenly confessed that he’d reserved a room for us that night at Shutters.

  I nearly flapped. As Sammie liked to say, it was “TMEI”—too much emotional information. Here was Melky from what felt like another lifetime, juxtaposed against the memory of my first sexual encounter with Adam, and little Callay here with us, too. I moved toward Adam with the intention of getting a feel for how hot her cheeks were, but he—murmuring, “She’s going to be fine, love”—strode past me to shake hands with Melky. Melkanu straightened his wire-rimmed glasses before seamlessly taking the sleeping Callay from my husband and settling her against his own sturdy shoulder as if he held babies everyday. With exquisite tenderness, he stroked the damp wheaten curls on her head, and, giving her an ecstatic sniff, planting a kiss on her crown as if anointing her.

  Adam gave him an approving nod. “I like a man who’s not afraid of little ones.”

  “Oldest brother of nine siblings. They’re all grown now. They’re taking over the world—literally. Four of them spread across Africa. One at Oxford, two in Germany, and one here in the States. Teaching at Yale, at least as long as she can hold onto her visa.” We did a group wince. “The boy in Addis is going to be a father himself any day now.” He grinned. “I guess that means he’s not really a boy.”

  Adam answered cheekily, “Time to make one of your own, bro?”

  As if on cue, we three turned at the sound of a key turning the front door lock. An exuberant Sofiya and Melesse flooded the hallway with sound as they burst inside, their Minnie Mouse ear hats bobbing as they twirled around us.

  “We went on the teacup ride and spinned around and around!”

  From Makeda on the porch behind them, “The word is ‘spun,’ lehb.”

  “I went on the Small World!”

  “I did, too! The children were dancing!”

  Their mother dragged herself inside, pulling a suitcase and wearing her own Mouseketeer hat with a red bow-tied pigtail sticking straight up at the top. Her expression said it all, especially when she saw Melky standing there with a still blessedly sleeping Callay, despite all the noise. Setting the suitcase right down, she swept the silly hat off her hair and tried to tamp down its messiness. “Girls, girls!” she cried. “Zeni beli. Be quiet, please. The baby. And can’t you see we have a visitor?”

  Chastened, Sofiya and Melesse stopped and let their eyes travel up to Melky’s broad smile as if staring at the tallest of trees. Melesse, ever the shy one, was the most affected. She put a hand to her mouth and ran up the stairs. Sofiya couldn’t help but throw out a loud, “We had so much fun!” before capering after her.

  I relieved Melky of my little girl as he leaned down to kiss Makeda once on each cheek and then once more in the Ethiopian way. He murmured, “I am so glad to see you after making such a brief acquaintance at Tikil Dingay. But you are more beautiful than before.” He touched his own graying goatee as if to signify how he’d aged. “How is that possible?”

  I watched a new sort of light come into Makeda’s eyes before turning away to give them some privacy. “Welcome back from Disneyhell,” I said over my shoulder, beckoning to Adam. “We should put Monkey into her crib. She’s got a bit of a cold.”

  By the time we came back down with our girl a few hours later, the kitchen was filled with the sharp tang of Bunna and raucous laughter.

  Her face a bit red and her eyes streaming, Makeda looked up, and—like her daughter earlier—put a hand to her mouth. “The bébé, she is okay?”

  Adam patted Monkey’s back. He said, “She’s fine. It’s just a little cold. Fleur’s anxious because Callay’s never been sick before.”

  “Of course, she is,” Melky said soothingly. He said with obvious sincerity, “She is

  your most precious person. Your world now.”

  I saw Makeda eye him with some surprise. But she said nothing. Until, that is, she asked if we’d mind if she left the girls with us for a while, as Melky had expressed a wish to see some of the city’s highlights.

  “I was thinking,” she said, “the Norton Simon, old Pasadena, and, of course, the Huntington.�
��

  “You are not too tired after what Fleur called ‘Disneyhell?’”

  Makeda laughed. “There is no keeping a good woman down.”

  Go, Makeda!

  “It is not only the gardens—although I have to admit they are quite a bit grander than our Gullele Botanic Garden—but there is an exhibit at their museum you might like, since you, too, are a fan of Octavio Butler.”

  I made a note that they’d gotten to favorite authors already. Always a good sign.

  “They have these wonderful hand-lettered placards she made for herself, almost like messages of self-encouragement for one of her infamous writer’s blocks, that I think you will particularly like. They are childlike in appearance, printed in slanting lines with bold colored pens and paint, as if Sofiya or Melesse had written them.”

  “Ironic,” Melky mused, “for such a hard-headed woman.”

  “Even a hard-headed woman can have a soft heart,” Makeda lobbed back.

  Melky’s eyes gleamed. “Very true, indeed. I stand corrected.”

  I noted to myself that they’d already developed a flirty repartee I’d never observed in either of them, except—I suddenly recalled—when Makeda and Adam had nearly driven me out of my mind with jealousy in our few days together in Tikil Dingay. It occurred to me that my Green-eyed Monster may have given my dormant desire for Adam a little push back then, which might in turn have given him the encouragement he needed to make his bold move at Shutters. Perhaps I should give Makeda some credit for that. Looking at her now from that vantage point—her insouciantly-cut, gauzy modern Habesha top, with its beautiful border of turquoise, yellow, red, and pink complementing her glowing sienna skin—I wondered that I hadn’t felt any of my familiar pangs since Makeda had come to live with us. But looking over at Adam, who threw me a frankly adoring look back, I concluded with some surprise that the Green-eyed Monster may have actually been put to some ghostly green bed once and for all.

  A lusty cry erupting from the vicinity of Adam’s shoulder interrupted my reverie. I rushed to take our little girl from him, and her rooting lips reassured me that she was healthy enough to be hungry. I unbuttoned my blouse and let her begin to suckle as Melky and Makeda prepared to go out.

  Chapter Eleven

  I WAS SO glad that Mother and I had arrived at our truce over the worrying-about-daughter issue. The following few months were filled with delicious days of communing by three generations of what poet Naomi Ruth Lowinski liked to call “the motherline.” This particular day started off especially joyously. For once the stifling humidity of this horrid, yearlong LA heat wave had abated, allowing a brisk wind to riffle our hair and freeing our limbs from their torpor. We’d decided to take advantage of the clemency with a field trip to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where an exhibit was being curated of Marc Chagall’s “Fantasies for the Stage,” comprised of set designs and costumes for, among other things, Ravel’s ballet Daphnis and Chloé, one of my favorites—with love ultimately prevailing over the Green-eyed Monster.

  But there was nothing monstrous about the exhibit, save for a scary bat costume or two. Chagall’s affinity for music and his predilection for peopling his paintings with chickens and goats had bequeathed an odd piquancy to his set designs and costumes. Callay had pointed delightedly at some of the more fanciful mannequins, and Mother and I had actually danced around a bit to the operatic accompaniment to this spacious show. Luckily for us, none of the other visitors seemed much bothered that one young woman pushing a baby stroller and one middle-aged matron attired in tasteful pearls and stylish heels were cavorting amid the creatively-clad figures.

  It was in that spirit that we exited the museum with Monkey in tow and made for the traffic light that would allow us across the street to the parking lot. As we waited for the light to turn, Mother continued to prance around, her long silver hair with its striking blue stripe—yes, she’d done it—flaring like a rock star’s in the wind tunnel of Wilshire Boulevard.

  “How can you still look this beautiful?” I cried against the racket.

  “Oh, pish. Beautiful,” Mother shouted dismissively. “I’m so sick of having to be beautiful, I could spit.” She shocked me by doing just that. I gave a silent prayer of thanks that the wind hadn’t been aiming in my direction.

  “But it’s a gift. Beauty makes everything easier,” I objected.

  Mother leaned in toward me and put her face surprisingly close to mine. “Haven’t you learned yet that the obligation to look beautiful shreds a woman’s heart? I could never bloody well relax with a man. Always so damned conscious of keeping an appealing expression on my face, carrying my body with poise. It’s actually one of the main reasons I took to drinking. Give me enough glasses of wine, and I didn’t give a fuck. I could be a slob, or—God forbid—angry-looking, or goofy, or just ordinary and prosaic and boring.” She shook her head emphatically. “Beauty? It’s vastly overrated. Give a girl a book, a sport, something outside of herself that she can be passionate about. Now that’s a gift.”

  It felt like a bizarre conversation to be having at the noisy intersection of Wilshire and Ogden. For some reason, I felt vastly disappointed. I’d always looked up to Mother for her elegance. Yes, her beauty had also felt like a shield that somehow kept me out. But I’d rationalized it like this: who cared about being left out in the cold if your mother was a goddess?

  Making a mental note to discuss this with Sammie when she returned from her trip to London, I quickly changed the subject, pointing out to Mother how many of the cars whizzing past us were Priuses, Volts, and (this being LA) Teslas. “It’s such a good sign,” I emphasized. “Even if we get Dreamization active in the next five years, every bit of reducing humanity’s carbon footprint right now helps.”

  I wasn’t sure Mother could hear me. Callay, who’d watched her grandmother twirl with wide and wondering eyes, began fussing a bit, not yet in baby warrior mode, but issuing those fretful sounds young humans make when they’re beginning to realize they’re uncomfortable. Mother leaned toward the stroller, beginning to sing the Hokey Pokey with full physical demonstration. When she reached the point of turning herself about, she did so with such enthusiasm that she lost her balance and began to fall, arms flailing, over the curb.

  They say timing is everything. And as I’d learned, everything and nothing are the closest of kin. Mother struggled to right herself, but just as she seemed about to regain her balance, a bright red Metro Rapid bus hurtled impatiently into the right lane. It clipped her shoulder, making an ominous thwack, and I screamed a panicked “No!” as I saw her fly through the air just slightly ahead of me, close enough that I instinctively yanked away Callay’s stroller to avoid impact. Time slowed down. Molecules moved visibly within the shapes of cars, shops, signs, and concerned-looking people in my vista, whose mouths uniformly became ovoid. Across the street, the vertically aspiring SBE building and the squat LA Fitness structure beside it traded places, and the trees that had been planted to soften their concrete insult outstretched anxious branches toward us.

  Not again, I thought. Not another concussion! As if to assess the potential damage, the scientist in me sought to estimate the speed of Mother’s trajectory before she landed with a heavy thump back onto the sidewalk. The bus that had batted her like an airless ball came to a full stop, its rotund driver descending from its opened door and running toward her. Mother’s body was arrayed at an odd angle, and her eyes were wide open with surprise. But not blinking.

  Not blinking, not blinking, not blinking. I tried to take it in, but I could not.

  Sudden death is indigestible; it simply doesn’t want to go down. That’s why we frequently greet the sight of it with a resounding “No!” Sometimes, as with Assefa’s grandfather Medr, whose wife was raped and murdered before his eyes, we cease to make any sound at all. I sensed movement around me, my baby crying, mouths opening and shutting a few inches from my face, a uniformed stranger grasping my elbow, settling me—my fingers locked desperate
ly around Callay’s stroller handle—onto a bus stop bench.

  Something inside me stayed locked. I dared not let in what had just happened. How could a life, a vital life, be extinguished in one unfathomable nanosecond?

  I cannot begin to describe what happened immediately after that. I recalled—and still recall—nothing of it. Captive to a torpid state, I was walked through the next few days by Adam, Makeda, Melkanu, Stanley, Aadita, Sister Flatulencia, Dhani and her crew, and the whole physics team. I heard their voices as if from underwater. I vaguely recall a familiar hand—it must have been Adam’s—at my back, propelling me into a limousine, then later coaxing me out of it toward the place where my mother’s body was to be lowered into the ground. In a box. My mother in a box? How would she ever breathe? I heard the word “God.” It meant nothing to me. Perhaps it never had.

  I knew I couldn’t manage my life without a mother. Gwen had become a bit more motherly once I started calling her Auntie, and Sammie was the best belly sister ever. But, blood-wise, I had only my little girl and a host of half-sisters Father had saved from the devil abortionists, and we hadn’t spoken in years.

  You were about to say, “But you have the most amazing husband ever.” And I was well aware that I did. But it wasn’t quite the same as having a mother. My own. Mother.

  After many years of fighting it, I fell fully into the Void of Everlasting Emptiness. I knew it so well. I knew the smell of it from my days in Father’s house, when everyone but Grandfather was Otherwise Occupied by their own ways of evading the void. Mother herself was preoccupied in those days with her wine glass with its medicinal smell and her need to keep in close proximity to her bed. Fayga dallied with dirt, Cook kept busy coming up with fresh purees for all the Saved Babies, Sister Flatulencia forged ahead with caring for Mother and coping with her own crazy digestive system, Father crammed his hours with campaigning against the devil abortionists, the Saved Babies were saddled with their hunger and their poops and pees and head lice. I had Jillily, of course, with her question mark tail and her motor. And Grandfather. But then he got so sick he couldn’t even say his ugga umph uggas. I had the Austins and my diaries of various lists, my books and my favorite weed and my pinching and banging and the tree that Father cut down after Grandfather died. But the void was always there, whistling in my ears and digging out the pit in my stomach, whispering that dust I was and dust I would forever be. Alone.