Return of the Butterfly

by Sharon Heath

  Mortified, I quickly added, “I’m so sorry. Foot in mouth disease.” Which, needless to say, confused her even more. “No, really.” I reached a hand across the table toward Cesar. When he didn’t bridge his own toward me, I hurriedly took a bite of my Chicken Pepián. Gladys had been right. Cesar was on his way to becoming a master chef. I detected a hint of cinnamon, a bit of coriander, cloves, pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds, chilies, of course, and garlic and onion. I would have thought it might have tasted too sweet, but the bitterness of the roasted vegetables conveyed just the right amount of edge.

  “Wow. This is food for the gods.” I paused with another forkful midway to my mouth. “Listen, Cesar, that was downright offensive of me. Especially when you’ve gone to such trouble to cook me such a heavenly meal.” I waited to see if he would accept my apology.

  But Gladys jumped in for him. “No. Cesar should not have said that.”

  Surprised, I saw that he actually looked ashamed. He must really love this young woman if he was letting her tame his habitual resentment.

  I hastened to take my opening. “No. I get it.” I stared into Cesar’s deep, nearly black eyes. “You want to do this your own way. Put your stamp on it. A restaurant is a creative enterprise for anyone who can cook like this.” And I meant it.

  He studied me for a moment, then seemed to relax a bit. “Yeah. That’s a good way to put it. I’m totally psyched.” He added warmly, “And not just for me. This is going to be a real partnership. Gladys will be right with me every step of the way, from designing menus to working out prices to hiring and managing staff. She’s a real people person.” I nodded. He was right on that score. His hand reached down to give Gladys’ bum a possessive squeeze, “It’ll be our baby until we have a real one.”

  Gladys blushed. I think I did, too. I’d heard a lot lately about gender fluidity, but something must have gotten positively sodden in Cesar that he’d transformed from Miss Hot Little Mama to this convincing young paterfamilias. He’d shed his previous incarnation as dramatically as a doughty monarch butterfly, some of whom have been spotted flying past the Empire State Building at a height of a thousand feet. I had a hunch that, with Gladys by his side, Cesar was about to soar.

  As for me, it was more than clear that I knew next to nothing outside of my own little physics bubble and was an absolute dunderhead about human nature. I kept wanting to vanquish the uncertainties of my void by typecasting people, and they simply wouldn’t cooperate.

  Chapter Fifteen

  IT WAS ONE of those rare moments when I actually had a minute to myself. Sister Flatulencia had arrived a little early, traffic from Mar Vista having been particularly light that morning, and I decided to take a walk in the neighborhood before heading out for Caltech. I smiled as I closed the front door, as much at the image of Sister F. sitting on the carpet with Callay, reading her I Can’t, Said the Ant in a high-pitched voice, as at the gorgeous day that awaited me. It was still warm, but not too warm, windy, but not too windy. The breeze fluffed my hair as I noted a glorious gold and black butterfly flitting above the milkweed I’d planted in the front yard to do my part in increasing the dangerously dwindling monarch population. Forcing myself to bypass my inevitable rage at Monsanto for their monarch-murdering herbicide, my eyes strove to follow the butterfly until a crow bisected my sight line. The corvid careened past the sycamore next door and flapped and fluttered there, as if hesitant to land. When it finally did, a few doors down on a lawn far lusher than ours, it walked with a lopsided gait. I approached cautiously, my heart beginning to beat in dread over what I might find as I got closer. Sure enough, it looked bad. One of the crow’s feet was covered by what looked to be a colony of painful-looking bulbous growths.

  “Oh, shit,” I said, startling a neighbor out watering her yarrow-festooned parkway.

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “That crow,” I clarified, pointing.

  She clamped off her hose and approached me. “I know,” she sighed. “It’s getting worse.”

  “I didn’t ... Has this been going on for some time?”

  “It has,” she replied, her eyes moist. “The Heislers across the street tried contacting crow rescue associations, several of us have called our vets, and my husband had a long conversation with a wildlife specialist at UCLA. We’re in a catch twenty-two. Because he’s still able to fly, none of us can get hold of him to take him somewhere to find out what it really is. It could be avian pox; it could be cancer; it could be a fungal condition.” She paused, and we both watched him charily hop around. “The damned thing is, he can do the thing we most envy birds for, which is fly, but he can’t do the thing we tend to be oblivious to: birds also need to land.”

  She was right, of course. That was one of the many things trees were for. I thrust out a hand. “Fleur Robins. I can’t imagine why we haven’t met—and why I didn’t even know of this neighborhood tragedy—except that I have a toddler and I also work.”

  Her sea-blue eyes crinkled in a warm smile. “I’m Halley Smith-Robinson. Fleur Robins? I know about you. My husband’s at Caltech. Maxfield Robinson. You’ve probably never met.” She made a wry face. “He teaches English. As he likes to say, he rounds the geniuses out.”

  I laughed. “Well, I don’t know about geniuses, but most of us scientists could definitely use some rounding. Good to meet you, Halley. And no, I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting your husband.” I refrained from asking whether she worked, too. So many San Marino matrons lived a more conventional lifestyle: supported by their husbands, keeping themselves attractive and fit, volunteering for worthy, if mainstream, charities. The sort of life Mother could have lived but had avoided like the plague.

  But Halley momentarily put paid to my wretched bent for stereotyping. “Max and I met at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. He went in the academic direction, and I found my calling in children’s books. I’m sure psychologists would have a field day with a childless woman specializing in kiddie lit. I write under the pseudonym Sarah Stevens. How old is your toddler?”

  “Oh my God! Sarah Stevens? Callay—she’s twenty-three months—is crazy about Who’s Got My Tail? And One Cat, Two Cat. And we’ve just checked out Cody’s Kittens and Then Some from the library.” I paused. “How many do you have?”

  Only later did it occur to me that my question might have been misconstrued, but Halley was right there with me. She laughed. “It’s pretty transparent, isn’t it? Right now, we’ve got four.” She ticked them off on her fingers, “Catastrophe, Courageous, Clementine—we usually call them by their nicknames, Cat, Corie, and Clemmie, (otherwise known as ‘the girls’)—and Gerald, named after our favorite Durrell. But don’t tell anyone we’ve got so many, please. Max is embarrassed enough to be married to the Cat Lady of Children’s Literature.”

  “Oh, I’m sure he’s not,” I said, quite certain of that. If Halley was as clever as her books were and as kind as her concern for the crow suggested, any man would feel lucky to be with her.

  Just then, a flutter above us stole our attention. The crow had taken off and soared beyond the sycamore as exquisitely as any of his healthy brethren. “He’ll die, won’t he,” I commented gravely, “unless he has a spontaneous recovery?”

  “Yes. That’s pretty much what all the experts have said. They even insisted we desist from feeding him if he collapses. If it’s avian pox, it’s contagious, and he could infect all the other birds in the neighborhood.”

  I sighed heavily. “Well, I should probably think about getting to work.”

  Halley put a hand on my shoulder. “Oh, I’m so sorry. I’ve spoilt your walk.”

  “No. You didn’t. Mr. Crow didn’t either. This is nature’s balance. These days I tend to think of us humans as the only source of misery in the world, but the dark clouds of death and disaster have been around long before we came along. Besides,” I threw her a genuinely grateful smile, “this time there really is a silver lining. I got to meet you.”

  I realized on my way back
to the house that I hadn’t asked her why she’d chosen a pseudonym. It would be a good reason to pay her a call, which I knew—for Callay’s sake, as well as my own—I was going to want to do. My daughter needed to learn that actual people write books, that they weren’t churned out by some sort of invisible magic or computer algorithm, that people could make amazing things by working at them.

  I thought about the neighbors who’d come together to try to save Mr. Crow. They might not achieve that worthy goal, but they’d created community. I realized with a pang that—up until today—I knew none of them. My street was filled with undoubtedly interesting people, each of them a whole universe unto themselves, and I’d been entirely oblivious, as if my house were an island. I felt ashamed.

  But I had to laugh when I went inside. There was a track of books leading from the front hallway to the living room. Recently, Callay had discovered something else to do with her favorite books: making trains that, to her great consternation, Buster loved to sit on, changing his “train car” each time my daughter cried out, “No, no! Buthter-do! You go! Not for you!” But when I followed this particular winding path, I found my little Monkey sprawled across the track, petting the white belly of a loudly-purring Buster, who lay on his back atop—what else?—Cody’s Kittens and Then Some. Carl Jung and Wolfgang Pauli would have loved it.

  Sister F., undoubtedly alerted by the sound of the front door blown noisily shut by the wind, came in wearing a Physicists are Spacier apron, with its “a” crossed out and replaced by an “i,” wiping one of Callay’s Curious George cups with a checkered dishcloth. “How was your walk?” she asked brightly.

  “Une salade mixte,” I replied, describing my introduction to Halley Smith-Robinson and the sad circumstances of the ailing crow.

  “What’s going to happen to him?” she asked.

  “What do you think?”

  “You never know, my dear. All we can see is the past and the present. Miracles do occur.”

  Once a nun, always a nun. I wished I had more trust myself in miracles. But then I heard my miracle of a daughter burst into her own mangled version of a song that Adam had recently taught her. I prayed that the synchronicity of Callay singing “High Hopes” would prove to be prophetic for Mr. Crow.

  As for prophecy, who would have predicted that Gwennie would recover from her own health crisis with such hardihood? I took Callay to see her right after our arranged visit a few days later to Halley Smith-Robinson, the interior of whose home pretty much seemed like what you’d expect from a couple that keeps four cats. Aside from the lack of the telltale smell. The Robinson home was happily devoid of Eau de Chat and redolent, instead, of what I learned from Halley was called Aromatique Summer Sorbet. The scent was so similar to what they used at Shutters, where Adam and I had first made love, that I nearly swooned in the front hall.

  Bending down to shake Callay’s hand and tell her how happy she was to meet her, my new favorite author led the two of us into a living room with a pair of facing sofas with loose burgundy and sage slipcovers thrown over them. Placed seemingly haphazardly on the surrounding rustic gray wood floor was an array of Persian-carpet-covered floor cushions. Upon four of these perched a quartet of lazily blinking cats, like feline potentates calmly surveying their shared realm. But as soon as Halley bade Callay to plop down onto her own cushion, Gerald and “the girls” leapt in near unison to come and sniff the new specimen in their midst. My muscles tensed in preparation for quick movement as it dawned on me that these four might think my daughter a potential usurper and get a bit hissy and bitey, but no—they were like kittens with their mama, vying to get in closest to lick the milk-white limbs of this small, giggling creature, who had to be admonished not to lick them back. The cats’ shared motoring made quite a racket. And Callay? Well, of course, Callay was in heaven.

  It was a heaven that deepened in pleasure once Halley Smith-Robinson excused herself to dance down the stairs several minutes later to bestow on my child her full library of cat-themed books, each inscribed personally to my daughter in a rather unique handwriting with the kinds of inked-in tail curls and flourishes that set Callay whirling in delighted circles at the foot of the stairs. I had one moment of panic—my own whirling at her age had been accompanied by screaming and banging and pinching and, in general, personally causing myself pain—but no Adam would be needed to help socialize this little girl. Callay ran to her new friend and wrapped her pudgy little arms around her knees, exclaiming, “I wuv you, Haowie!” Given the meltiness of Halley’s expression, the feeling was clearly mutual.

  It took awhile to actually get Callay and myself and the two Gelson’s cloth grocery bags bearing Halley Smith-Robinson’s entire oeuvre out the door and into the Prius in front of our own home. In the end, I only managed to budge Monkey by telling her that if we didn’t hurry we were going to be late for our lunch with Granny Gwennie. (Somehow Gwennie had metamorphosed into a Granny from an Auntie in Callay’s clever mind after Mother died, and not one of us sought to stop it.)

  When we arrived at the Fiskes’, Gwennie was just saying goodbye to her physical therapist. He was young, of course, and unusually handsome: his skin like alabaster; his black hair slicked back to frame his perfectly proportioned features; his body, as Sammie liked to say, “ridiculously ripped.” As usual, Gwen was flirting with him, telling him that he made her want to lose ten pounds and thirty years, and it looked like he was enjoying it. He flashed me a heart-stopping grin as he passed me. I managed to turn my eyes away from his particularly beguiling butt to say to my friend. “Gwen you’re shameless. And p.s., you’d better not lose any more weight.”

  Though she’d widened in the early days of her recovery, Gwennie had ultimately settled into a much thinner body than she’d begun with. Her hair had grown back a brilliant, shimmering silver, and a teasing new dimple had appeared in her smile, as if she’d been to hell and back and had retrieved from that scorched landscape a life-giving balm. She beamed at Callay and bent down as to lift her up before she caught herself. “Jarod would kill me,” she apologized to my oblivious daughter. “’He’s not the smartest tack in the drawer, but he’s pretty wise about the body. ‘One step at a time, Gwen,’ he likes to say.” Instead, she grabbed Callay’s chubby little hand and said, “Come and see what Granny Gwennie’s made for you, pet.”

  I followed the two of them into the kitchen, where a round, blue and green cake was cooling on a rack on the white tile counter. Gwen slid over a short stepladder for Callay, who dutifully climbed up to see it with a little help from Gwen to keep her from falling backward, and I came closer myself to get a better look.

  My Monkey clapped her hands. “It’s Earth! You made Earth!”

  And indeed, Gwennie had swirled icing to create a gorgeous representation of our oceans, separated by glistening green continents. She turned toward me and shrugged haplessly. “I’ve broken all my rules about sugar and white flour and food coloring spray and gel, but when I saw its prototype on the internet, I just couldn’t resist.” Gwennie admired her own handiwork, adding as an aside, “The woman who came up with the recipe calls herself OC Mom. She describes how she lost her mother at nineteen to cancer. I felt like I was supporting her somehow. I even sent a picture of this version to her blog.”

  “And so you should,” I said, reaching out a finger to taste one of the shiny green swirls, but Gwennie was fast, playfully slapping my hand. “Oh no, you don’t, missy.” Callay looked up at me, a little worried, and Gwennie hastened to reassure her. “Granny Gwennie’s just playing with Moomah, but we do have to eat our lunch first. I’m going to grill us some lovely cheese sandwiches, and we’ll toast our planet.” She slid me an ironic shrug. “No pun intended.” And to Callay: “Did you know it’s Earth Day?”

  “’Wha’ Earth Day?” asked my daughter.

  “It’s the day we celebrate our Mother Earth!”

  Callay chimed in, “Earth Day, Mother Earth birthday!” And then she threw us both a sly smile. “Caycay
made a rhyme.” (Except it came out wyme.)

  “Oh, you clever girl,” Gwennie cried, ignoring Jarod’s admonition and scooping my daughter up into her arms, attempting a twirl before remembering herself and setting her down. “And yes, it’s just like that. Let’s make a little party for our Earth.” She fetched a package of paper-wrapped Cheddar from the fridge and unwrapped it, then turned her attention to melting a giant daub of butter on her stovetop grill. I suggested to Callay that we change her diaper before our party. She might be a budding genius, but my little girl still regularly peed in her pants when we were out and about. Mother had burned it into my brain not to push her in that department, and I was hanging onto any bits of wisdom she’d imparted before she’d died.

  Having deposited a sodden diaper in the black bin in back, the two of us returned to the tantalizing aroma of melting butter and cheese in the kitchen. Gwennie had set up Callay’s booster seat at the table and had programmed her iPad to play the latest episode of Peppa Pig. It was just about the only cartoon series we allowed her. I think we all fantasized she’d learn a British accent from it and become one of those adorable children with impeccable manners, one of whom I once overheard in a London tube asking with a pleasing soprano lilt, “Mummy, won’t you please buy me a teddy?” But all I got today was, “Moomah, Caycay want blueberries after sammich,” with “please” added as an afterthought once both Gwennie and I favored her with a stern eye.

  My daughter’s own eyes were riveted to the screen now, and Gwen and I knew that there would be no way to regain her attain without shutting the bloody thing off. I very much wanted to talk with Gwen, but I knew we each felt a bit guilty distracting Callay with screen time.

  “I’m feeling better than I ever would have imagined,” Gwen insisted. “Actually, pretty full of p. and v.” She rose up to fetch a printed flyer from the kitchen counter that bore a bold, black headline: Families Belong Together. “Wanna come? You could bring Callay.”