Betwixt
Authors: Tara Bray Smith
Copyright © 2007 by Tara Bray Smith
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced,
distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Little, Brown and Company
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First eBook Edition: March 2010
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental
and not intended by the author.
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ISBN: 978-0-316-02255-2
Contents
For anyone who has wandered.
So quick bright things come to confusion.
—William Shakespeare,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
C
HAPTER
1
O
NDINE
M
ASON HATED BUTTERFLIES.
That wasn’t true. She just hated orange butterflies. No, that wasn’t true either. What she really hated were the orange butterflies
painted on her blue ceiling, the ones she was staring at as she tried to wake up.
They seemed to move. One moved. Ondine could swear one moved. One had a woman’s head. It looked at her. Not cruelly, just
coolly.
As if it were studying her. It crawled off the ceiling and flew away.
“Ondine!”
That would be Ralph.
She pressed her fingers to her eyelids. Everything that had been orange turned blue, and all that was blue, orange. The effect
was called the afterimage. She had learned about it in Raphael Inman’s summer art class. The afterimage appeared after you
stared at something for a long time then shut your eyes, proving Ondine’s long-held feeling that what was real was part
in the world and part in her head. A butterfly, after all, had just flown out of a painting.
This didn’t happen in the real world. But part of Ondine knew that it didn’t really matter what happened in the real world.
What mattered was what she saw. There was a real world in the afterimage, too, just a different one, intense but momentary.
She kept her fingers there until the stars came and her eyes began to hurt.
The butterflies looked like orange eggs stacked on each other, split by cigars. They were awkward and childish and they made
Ondine feel embarrassed. She and her mother, Trish, had painted them a long time ago, when she was eight and Trish, an architect,
had just finished renovating the house on Northeast Schuyler. Her father, Ralph, had set up a scaffold and she and her mother
painted lying down on their backs, as Ondine imagined Michelangelo had in the Sistine Chapel. They wore head scarves so they
wouldn’t get paint in their hair, and they transformed the whole ceiling into a jungle set against windless blue. In it they
placed a panther, a bald eagle, a monkey, and a tiny white mouse hidden in the corner — she felt the panther needed company
— all interspersed with bright bursts of orange butterflies set among green leaves.
“Très Rousseau,” her mother had said. Ondine didn’t know what it meant, but it sounded good. She had loved butterflies then.
“Ondine, get your butt out of bed and come down and help your mother!”
She looked at the clock. Ten-twelve. In exactly three minutes, fifteen minutes after Ralph Mason had told his only daughter
he wanted her downstairs to go over last-minute details of the move (the Masons were supposed to be on the road by noon),
he would be pissed. Though
pissed
was a relative term with Ralph. Ondine’s father was a mild-mannered man, more scientist (which is what he was) than domineering
dad. When Ralph got pissed, he set things down in an aggressive way, like his cup of coffee. Ondine could just see him now,
really placing that mug down like he
meant it, young lady.
She was going to miss him.
She was also going to miss Trish. Even Max she’d miss, though she wouldn’t miss taking Max’s mangy terrier, Ivy, to the park
every day while her precious little brother had his cello lessons.
This was because Trish and Ralph and Max were moving to Chicago.
Ondine was not.
And this made her hate butterflies even more.
Ten-fourteen. She yanked on a pair of her father’s old scrubs and headed down the stairs.
“S
O
, E
LLEN AND
M
ARK ARE JUST NEXT DOOR
, and you know you can always call the Harrises, and your first trip to Chicago is in just a month. Honey, are you sure you
want to do this?”
Trish Mason was not looking at her daughter when she spoke. She was looking out the dining room window at the Japanese maple,
whose new leaves were shooting pinky-red arrows toward a mercury-colored midmorning sky.
Her mother, Ondine knew, was crying. Trish always cried. Ondine, never. It wasn’t that she didn’t feel sad. She just couldn’t
seem to get the tear ducts working when they should. Her throat would swell, her cheeks flush, she’d feel awful, but nothing
would come out. When she was younger she’d practice with Visine, just to see what it felt like to have tears cascading down
her cheeks, but since she wasn’t much of a pretender and carrying around Visine made her look like a twelve-year-old pothead,
Ondine became known as the girl who didn’t cry. It made her popular on her soccer team — and scared in private. She told no
one and allowed people to chalk it up to her naturally stoic nature.
Her mother flexed her fingers and put a hand to her eyes.
“We’re going to miss you, you know.”
“I know,” Ondine replied, and reached across the dining room table.
Here is what Trish was crying about: The Masons had decided to go to Chicago for a year. Dr. Mason, an obstetrician turned
in vitro pioneer turned geneticist, had gotten a yearlong
research grant at the Chicago office of Xelix Labs, the genetics think tank based in Portland. The family — Trish and Max,
that is — had decided to go with him. Trish, originally from the Midwest, wanted a change of scenery and had clients in Chicago.
Max, a cellist, wanted to study at Spenser Conservatory. Ondine had asked to stay, to the surprise of her parents, though
they were used to their only daughter being headstrong. She wanted to finish high school with her friends, she said. She also
wanted to study with Raphael Inman, the legendary Portland art star who had returned from New York and was now teaching at
Reed. That was usually how it went, Ondine going in the opposite direction from her family. She didn’t know why; it just did.
She squeezed her mother’s left hand, and Trish’s wedding ring of twenty years — three years older than Ondine — glowed in
the sun.
“Are you sure
you
want to do this?”
Trish sighed. “No. But it would really help if you wouldn’t be so pigheaded and come.”
Ondine twisted in her wooden chair. “I told you. I’m not going to some whack-ass suburban school in — what’s it called? Glencoe?
— for my senior year.” She could hear her own childishness. She was normally calmer, but now … now she had to act like a brat.
It would help them leave. “I’m not the one who decided to take the sabbatical in Chicago — Dad did. And you
and Max wanted to go with him. But my life is here, Mom.” She looked at her mother. “You decided to go. Remember? We all sat
around this table” — she tapped the dark wood and it sounded in the open room — “and we voted, and Dad wanted to get the grant,
and Max said he wanted to be in a city with a better symphony, and you wanted to be closer to Nana, and Vita is in Chicago,
and you liked that stuffy Glencoe with all of its antique shops —”
Trish, used to her daughter’s bossiness, laughed and covered her long, narrowish face with her hands. Tall and slender, her
mother could pass for thirty-five, Ondine thought, though she was almost fifty. Only recently had she begun to go gray, and
the white strands traced her mother’s black hair like snow on dark branches.
“Evanston, Ondine. We’re in Evanston. Not the same thing.”
“Ooh, I know what’s gonna happen,” Ondine went on. “When I come you’re gonna be wearing a fur coat, and we’re gonna have a
butler in our mansion in Glenkillyoursoul —”
Trish stood and kissed her daughter on the crown of her head and then pinched the back of her neck.
“I’m getting another cup of coffee, and that one’s from Max. You’re going to miss him, Miss I-Don’t-Need-No-One.”
“Huh.” Ondine blinked.
“You want one?”
“You know I don’t drink Starbucks.”
“No, you just eat the ice cream.”
“Not fair!”
Trish called back from the kitchen. “No, baby, that’s your problem.”
Ondine looked out the dining room window at the maple in the backyard. Her parents had planted it a few days after they brought
Ondine home from the hospital. They called it their baby tree. Now it was full grown.
It had started to sprinkle — early summer was often rainy in Portland — and the branches were black and slick. The tree’s
leaves were sprouting; the spears that emerged from the crooked branches hinted at the fullness of the summer tree. There
was an awkwardness about the tree, though. Dwarf Japanese maples were small and packed, as if there were too much activity
for the spindly limbs to handle. Like Ondine herself: petite and delicate — peaked caramel-colored face, bright mouth, pointy
limbs — in a family of stately pines.
And her eyes, violet, like the sky before a storm. Ralph and Trish had brown eyes. Max’s were hazel. But Ondine. No, Ondine’s
eyes had to be
purple,
wide set, and heavily lashed. Beyoncé and Yoda’s love child. Dr. Mason couldn’t even try to explain that one.
“Sweetheart.” Ralph kissed his daughter on the top of her head and placed a mug of coffee in front of her. His face was
paler from winter and she loved the way the freckles splashed across it like mud on a Portland sidewalk. “Everything’s pretty
much packed, doll.”
“Thanks, Dad.”
Though her father knew she didn’t drink Starbucks, he was absentminded and anyway, it smelled so good this morning. Ondine
thought of all the mornings ahead when Ralph wouldn’t be making coffee, and though she had told herself she wouldn’t, her
throat swelled. She took a sip to quell it and looked up. A key ring looped around his bony fingers.
“Here are the keys — car, house, garage. Jesus. I just can’t believe you’re not coming. What’s your mother going to do?”
He took his daughter’s hand. “Are you sure about this?”
Her sadness just made her more certain.
“The class at Reed this summer is the most important thing I can do for my art. Raphael Inman is teaching. He
never
teaches. I told you there was no way I could miss it. And next year’s senior year. I can’t switch schools for my senior year.”
She stopped, swallowing the rush of words that she knew probably sounded more like justification than anything else. Still,
Ralph and Trish bought it. Most people did. Ondine could convince almost anyone to do almost anything.