Butterfly (23 page)

The mirror shows that Plum’s hair is longer than she’s realized, and of a bluer shade of black. Her eyes are curved across the top, giving them a friendly look. Her cheeks are spotted, but that’s her age; she has no eternal moles. Her nose and mouth are still blurred by childhood, but promise to be acceptable. She pushes up the windcheater, frowns critically at her breasts. They look like two
crèmes brûlées
turned out from dessert bowls. She wonders if it’s time to ask Mums to buy a bra. She’s lived in dread of making this request, but suddenly she feels ready.

The knock on her door makes her spring back from the mirror, patting down her windcheater as if it were on fire. Flustered, she opens the door to see Cydar, the least expected of visitors, slouched against the balustrade. In his arms is a big brown box around which he’s wrapped a pink ribbon but no paper, despite the fact that the box’s contents are emblazoned in black letters on its side. “Can I come in?” he asks, and because her hands are clapped to her mouth, he steps in uninvited. He puts the box on her bed, and as she undoes the silky ribbon and lifts the television from its scaffolding Styrofoam, all she can say is, “Oh! Oh!” Cydar stands back among the posters while
she pulls at plastic bags and electric coil, saying nothing until she looks at him with sparkling eyes and laughs, “Cydar, you remembered!”

“Happy birthday,” he says.

“Cydar!” she shrieks; and is overcome by a physical frenzy, leaping up and down on the bed, thrashing her arms in the air. It is exactly the set she has hankered for — the three stubby legs are there, and the alien’s antenna, and the helmet-like sphere of shiny chrome within which the black-and-white screen sits — and been forced to forget, because of the crushing cost. Suddenly suspicious, she rolls upright. “Where did you get so much money?”

“I sold the fish.”

Plum’s smile fades: “Not — all of them?”

“Most of them.”

“The golden tang?”

“Yeah, the tang.”

“The neon goby?”

“Most of them, Plum.”

Plum sees row after row of phantasmal tanks reaching to the ceiling, each one white and still as a headstone. She sees Cydar lying in the dark, his searching eyes seeing nothing. Anguish rears in her: “But you loved your fish.”

Her brother shrugs. He would never say there are other things to love. “It doesn’t matter. I wanted you to have this.”

“What about — my jewel fish?”

“Even your jewel fish,” he confirms.

Plum looks down at the television, runs her fingers over its rounded crown. Its cost has reached into the clouds. She thinks of Cydar’s quiet, watchful ways; and knows why he’s done this sacrificial thing, and hates everything about the reason. “I’m sorry,” she says.

From the security of the wall he considers her flushed face, her downcast eyes, her limp but stolid limbs. “It’s all right. It’ll be good. Life is change, Plum.”

“I know,” she says. “I’m glad. I’m glad I’m not a shovel-nosed catfish who ate the dinosaurs.”

He smiles, and almost laughs, which is the greatest of the rare honors he bestows. He doesn’t kiss her cheek, or ask if she likes the television, or give her instructions on its use or describe how he plans to fill his fishless days — but as he leaves the room on soundless feet, Plum hears the things he
could
say. And she feels the wrongness of loving Justin too much, and of never loving Cydar enough. She swallows hard, cradles the television to her, squeezes her face to the set’s own. The world is such a sad kind place that she is forced to groan.

David is fractious. Maureen has bathed him and dressed him in fresh pajamas, and put him into bed surrounded by a frieze of trapeze artists and dancing poodles and pixies driving snub-nosed cars, but he will not close his eyes. His bedroom is lit by a nightlight, a teddy bear crowds his pillow, his truck is parked in its corner where he can see it,
and yet he will not sleep. His eyes fly open the instant they close, his fingers twist the hem of the sheet. A frown has cut into the pale skin between his brows. His gaze leaps around like a frantic bird, touching the toys he didn’t choose for himself, the clothes he is told to wear. The rain hits the window in rhythmless gusts, stony against the pane. Maureen puts a hand to her child’s forehead. “Go to sleep,” she urges. He turns his head: “Daddy, Daddy,” he sighs. All afternoon he has whimpered for his father, until the sound has become like the rub of a shoe against a stripped heel. Maureen knows she should leave him — close the door, play a record, put distance between herself and the boy — yet she makes no move to rise from the mattress. It’s not that she doesn’t want to be alone: aloneness presents itself like a rocking raft, something on which she can lie down in the knowledge that he is safe, and she is safe, and they will both sleep untroubled through the night. Maureen often thinks about this raft, which is sometimes a cradle, sometimes a desert, sometimes the moon or the sea, not in order to escape herself, but so she might be escaped from. There is something in Maureen that’s too worrying to put into words, something formless like the unseen presence that brushes past in the ocean. Something unsettling, but also pleasant. It is this that’s keeping her here in the room, this underlying wrath. It does not want quenching, peace is its enemy. It wants to rake and rake over the hot coals of the day, growing larger and angrier and more uncontainable. Maureen strokes her son’s forehead and tries to catch
his hand, saying, “Shush, shush, David,” while, inside, the furious thing gnaws on the events of this day, on recollections of that atrocious girl.

There’s no truth in what the girl had said; but there is.

It seems to Maureen that she’d only looked away for a minute, but when she looked back it was to find that her life had congealed. She had not realized it happened this way — that one only gets to make a handful of decisions before everything is decided, that every choice fuses a different choice into impossibility. Routes close, options shrivel, and it all happens without fanfare, simply day following day — until, suddenly, life is no longer pliable, and becomes like a frieze on a nursery wall, the same thing over and over. Maureen had not realized, and now she’s paying for her ignorance. Her fault is that she’d thought life was fairer, more generous, less rigid, that’s all.

“Where’s Daddy?” asks the boy; “Shush,” says Maureen. She’s made of glass tonight — a very thin glass forced to contain a substance as repugnant as tar. “Shush,” she murmurs, drawing her mouth into a smile, but his eyes are on her untrustingly. He is old enough to recognize the fury in her, but not old enough to stifle in himself the fear that fury feeds on. Usually he can hide under a table, in the garden, behind a door. Tonight he is trapped on the bed, which is barren despite the puffy pillows and the carnival-patterned sheets. “Daddy!” he pleads, and the word infuses his mother’s face with a blackness that is terrifying, yet must also be a good thing: for although she hates him for
his fretfulness, she loves him for it too, because she loves how angry his distress makes her feel. “Daddy,” he says, and can’t stop saying. “I want Daddy,” pawing helplessly at the linen.

“I know. But Daddy isn’t here. Only me.”

The rain hits the window harder, making the boy catch his breath. Despite the bulk of his bedding, he is shivering with cold. Tears have dampened his eyes, and his gaze shines around the room, over books and shoes and building-blocks, past superheroes and their plastic cars. His breathing jerks and flutters, his toes wrestle beneath the sheets. “I want someone,” he says, and Maureen has to smile.
I want someone.
The wretched cry of the species, born into it like a faulty gene.

She closes her eyes and lets her head sink until her chin touches her chest. She boards the raft and glides through a place that is uncluttered and plain as sand. She recalls Justin in glimpses, as if he’s bound up in web. She doesn’t doubt that the words sneered by the girl were exactly what Justin had said.
I don’t love her, no. Why would I?
It’s likely he’d been trying to protect Maureen, choosing words that would convince through their sheer brutality. He knows, after all, that she loves him with a deathless love, a love that
has not the option to die.
He knows how rare such love is, he wouldn’t vandalize such a thing without cause. Nevertheless, there’s truth in what he’d told the girl. There are
circumstances.
There are all her wrong decisions. If life were changeable, she would change these calcified choices
into ones that make her not only desirable, but claimable. Pitiable, too. If Justin pitied her more, he would be here. If he could see that he, too, might make decisions he one day regrets, then he would have sympathy. If he could see past his confusion to realize that, without him, she has nothing, that he’s abandoning her to
nothing
. . . then he would have compassion. That’s all he needs to feel for her: a greater amount of pity.

“Daddy . . .”

“Daddy’s not here, David.”

“But I want Daddy! I want Daddy!”

She rocks on his bed, fingers pressing in her thighs. She is nursing an injury like the bloody-edged gouge torn from flesh by a bullet. She understands Justin’s reasoning: he was trying to protect her. But in doing so he’s injured her profoundly.

“I want Daddy,” says David; “I know,” sighs Maureen. One elegant hand reaches out to him, slides smoothly down his cheek. “I know what you want,” she comforts him; but doesn’t say that life rarely grants more than a taste of what’s wanted, and never deigns to give everything needed. “Poor boy,” she mutters, because it is impossible not to feel sorry for a child who has so much to learn about the niggardly nature of life. If she had the means to make things different for him, for herself, for her husband, for Justin, and even for that girl, then nothing would remain as it is. It strikes Maureen as a noble thing to wish for, the power to make everything endurable.

Her hand is weighing like a white sea-creature across the boy’s face. “Shh,” she says, needing to quiet him because in this moment she craves silence: a light which is almost celestial has begun to burn in her mind. Inside it she sees how few things are truly worth wanting. A bird asks for nothing but wings. Deafened by light, she hardly notices that her son is still; in this cold room of dancing dogs and cartwheeling clowns it’s as if nothing has ever happened, and the rain has brought the unheard-of opportunity of beginning again.