The Butterfly Sister (12 page)

I'll pay extra for a single,
I thought. Without a roommate, Mark could call me anytime.

“Whatever,” I said.

“Whatever,” she repeated, before slamming the door.

T
hat afternoon Mark returned our papers, facedown on each of our desks. And then he abruptly ended class, claiming the English department was hiring a new professor for the coming school year and he had to sit in on interviews. I wondered if that was true, or if he was simply afraid of confrontation, afraid I was going to be angry with him.

He'd given me a D, after all.

I should have been angry, hot-cheeked and fuming, but I wasn't. Instead, I walked back to my room in a daze, disoriented by the bold dismissive consonant Mark had written on the front of my thesis. The grade felt less like an appraisal of my work and more like a punishment, a cold slap on the hand. The fury would come later, once the initial sting wore off. But first, I felt something worse than rage. I felt unworthy of his love.

I prepared to call Mark on his cell phone as soon as I got in. But he'd already left a message on my machine, something he never did, for fear Heidi would hear.

“Ruby, it's me,” Mark said in his message after an initial pause. “We can't see each other. Not anymore.” His voice was higher pitched than usual. “It's the best thing. For you. Right now. You need . . . I'm a distraction, aren't I? You have graduate school ahead of you. And I'm an anchor weighing you down. So it's over. It has to be over. I'm working things out with my wife. She's coming here for Christmas. It's the right thing to do.”

I felt as if a string had been looped around my throat, then tied through the very holes of my nostrils. It stung. I stood there unable to move but unable to cry, and I listened to the message again, hoping I'd heard wrong, hoping I'd misunderstood. But the conclusion was the same: he'd broken up with me.

But why did he do it?
I thought. Not because he didn't love me. And not because he loved Meryl. But because
it was the right thing to do
and he was
an anchor weighing me down
. He was more concerned about my future—my studies, my getting into graduate school—than he was about his own feelings, what he wanted. He wasn't being selfish; he was being selfless.

Or had he fallen out of love with me? I wondered. I noted the growing distance in his eyes, his voice devoid of its once earnest tone. And in his message, how he said, “You need . . .” What did he think I needed? Professional help? Had I somehow driven him further away these past few weeks? Because I was paranoid and anxious from his lack of attention?

I can't let him put me first,
I resolved as I prepared to drive to his cabin. He would be flattered by the gesture, my determination to talk to him in person. At home, off campus, he would not be able to deny his love for me.

I would break him.

I
parked my car down the gravel road, so he wouldn't hear the engine when I pulled in, and went by foot to his cabin, stuffing my hands into the pockets of my coat, bringing them forward to compensate for it being unzipped. My tears had left my skin vulnerable to the arctic blast, and the harsh wind whipped my cheeks like flags. In the dark, cold night, the cabin looked warm and inviting as an ethereal glow from the fireplace shone through the sheer curtains of the front window.

“Ruby, please come in from the cold” I imagined Mark saying, before hugging me until I returned to a normal body temperature. I would say nothing. One look in my eyes. That's all it would take.

I knocked on the front door—Mark had never installed a doorbell—but my cold, gloveless knuckles only skimmed the surface, and the sound drowned into the heavy wood. I hadn't heard it myself. Mark wouldn't hear it, either. I moved to the front window then, and I saw the light grow brighter at the center of the room. I made out the back of Mark's head a few inches above the sofa cushions. I saw his elbow rise, then fall. He was drinking something, drowning his sorrows, I presumed.

But just before my fingertip tapped the icy windowpane, I saw a second figure. It neared the couch and straddled Mark, creating a sort of Rorschach inkblot made blurry by the fire. I could no longer discern Mark or the back of his head. The two bodies became one. And then the figure emerged from the blob like a dolphin from water. It grew taller, towered above him. It blocked the firelight in some spots but not in others, smoothly like curves of an ornate wine glass.

Out then in, out then in.

The epitome of woman.

Meryl.

Ducking under the sill, I lost my footing and fell into a snowdrift, singeing my skin on the cold. My heart shattered with the realization: Mark really had gone back to his wife. And there, tucked in the alcove beside the house, was proof. The body of the car blended into the night. But in the moonlight, I could tell it was black, could make out the
license applied for
plate. Beneath my fingertips, the word Jetta graced the bumper. Obviously Meryl had driven up from Washington, D. C., to spend the holidays with him.

The sight of Meryl through the window, her car in the driveway, sent a heat through my chest into my throat. My cheeks flared. My hands, however, were frozen by that point, and I reached into my pockets to keep them warm. There I fumbled with my key chain and began to run the tips of my fingers along the jagged edges. And soon, I brought the key with the sharpest ridges to Meryl's driver-side door and dug it deep into the finish until it caught in the groove. I did this more times than I can remember before the key finally slipped in my frozen hand, and I sliced my knuckle.

Sucking on the wound, I drove down the country road, away from Mark's cabin.

It is a devastating taste—the bitterness of blood, the saline of tears.

I
drove around for an hour but didn't know where to go, so I returned to Tarble, parked my car in the lot, and walked back to the dorm. The lake appeared wild with rage that night. Thick, gray waves—topped with a white foam that reminded me of a dog with rabies, a sure sign of an impending winter storm—pummeled the rocky shore. Despite this, I decided to take a detour to the frozen sand beside the unruly waters.

Down on the beach, the wind off the lake, coupled by the spray of waves, seemed to drop the temperature another twenty degrees. After a few minutes, the cold actually felt warm against my exposed skin, as it burned my cheeks and mouth, and somehow, lessened the pain throbbing my gut. I was all out of tears by then, my eyes almost swollen shut from crying. I could barely see where I was going, and I didn't care. If I tripped and fell into the water, so be it. The waves would carry me out to sea. I imagined loading the stones from my windowsill into my coat pockets, just as Virginia Woolf had.

I was halfway down the beach when I sensed I was not alone. And from a distance, I made out a figure walking toward me. Man or woman, I could not say at first, thanks to the veil of night, my swollen eyes, and the spray of water. But as it grew nearer, my pulse quickened at the form I eventually discerned.

It was a woman. Dishwater blond hair curled up on the sides, 1950s style. Even at night, her lips appeared dark with what could only be red lipstick. She was wearing a camel-colored peacoat.

I stopped, stared down at the sand, then looked up again. I shook my head, stomped my feet, even grunted, trying to make her disappear. But she came closer, and unlike Woolf and Gilman, she spoke to me.

“Ruby,” she said.

And that's when I ran. I'm not sure if she chased me, because I never looked back, not until I arrived at the front steps of North Hall. By that time, no one occupied the sidewalk behind me, as far as I could see.

But the image of a young Sylvia Plath remained.

D
on't try to talk just yet,” the nurse whispered, her full lips pursed like a mother ready to kiss the forehead of a baby. “They pumped your stomach. The tube bruised your vocal cords. Your voice is probably hoarse.”

I saw the nurse write something on a clipboard, what I assumed was my chart, then made eye contact again. “You have a visitor,” she added. “But perhaps you should rest a bit more before seeing anyone.”

A visitor. Mark
.
He had heard what happened, had rushed to the hospital to apologize, to tell me he'd made a mistake. He'd almost lost me forever.

“Who is it?” I tried to sit up but lost energy.

“Trisha, your resident assistant. She was the one who found you and called 911.”

“No one else?”

“Your mother will be here shortly, and a few girls, about five of them I think, came right away, but we told them to go back to the college. We didn't know how long it would be. They said they would come back.”

“Any . . . men?”

The nurse's eyes filled with pity. “I'm sorry.”

A few minutes later, I watched the door inch open. My mother's eyes were a bright green but softened around the edges by sadness or fear or maybe anger. When I saw her, I unraveled. I closed my eyes, but the tears continued to break through the barrier.

“It's okay, sweetheart,” she said, getting into bed with me. Soon her arms encircled me fully. She squeezed me, held me in the strength and security of a mother's love. “I'm here.”

We sat like that, me tucked into my mother's body, and drew breaths in synchrony, like we must have done when I was an infant still learning how to breathe, still learning the rhythm of life.

“I'm sorry,” she said into the silence. “I knew something wasn't right with you, but I just assumed you were stressed about writing your thesis. That's why I wanted to take you to Paris. I thought you needed to relax. I didn't realize . . .”

“I'm sorry about Paris,” I said. “Can you get your money back?”

She shook her head, as if to say that money should be the last of my worries. And then she took my hand and held it, securing me to her like the clasp on a mountain climber's rope. “You are alive. By the grace of God, you are still here.” She looked into my eyes once more, tucked a hair behind my ear.

“I didn't mean to do it, not really.” My voice was hoarse like the nurse had told me it would be. But it was also monotone and robotic, lacking an element that made it sound human. “I just wanted to sleep, so I took my pills. And then I took more. And then I couldn't stop myself. I just kept swallowing pills.”

That was true. The sleeping pills were at first a practical idea. I wanted to escape the pain, hoping I'd wake up, and it would all be a nightmare, that Mark would still love me, that he hadn't gotten back together with Meryl. I remembered taking pill after pill from the bottle, placing each on my tongue, counting the pills in my mind. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen.

How far had I gotten? I couldn't remember. I only remember seeing Sylvia Plath on the beach. Had she inspired me to do it, to kill myself just as she had?

I knew from my research that the notably bipolar Plath committed suicide at age thirty by sticking her head in an oven full of gas. Many blamed her suicide on the infidelity of her husband, the English poet Ted Hughes. But Plath had tried to kill herself before. While a student at the all-girl Smith College she had swallowed sleeping pills—forty-eight of them—in a failed suicide attempt. She later based her only published novel,
The Bell Jar,
on that experience.

Mom tightened her grip. “Why, Ruby?”

If I revealed who I really was, a woman without morals and values, a woman who sleeps with married men, my professor no less, I feared my mom might never look at me the same way. There would be a small speck of black in her green eyes, a shadow, a deep pocket of disappointment. So I told her everything then, just not about Mark. I told her how Heidi moved out; how I'd been feeling anxious and sad and depressed the past few weeks; how I'd left my dorm room door wide open and collected random objects like the rocks; and how I'd received a D on my thesis, a paper I'd given up a whole semester of my life to write.

“Maybe you can rewrite it,” she offered. “Resubmit it next semester?”

I bit my lip. Mark had to have heard the news by then, and he hadn't come. I realized then that things would never be the same. Could I go back to simply being his student? Could I go back to Tarble, now that everyone knew I tried to kill myself?

I looked into my mother's soft, forgiving eyes.

“No,” I told her. “I'm dropping out.”

December Diary Three

December

I remember a girl in high school did it. A cheerleader, the prom queen type. She took some pills—her mother's Valium—and ended up in the ER. And the hallways buzzed the following school day with a burning question: Did she really want to die, or did she feel like she didn't want to live? There's a difference, apparently. The former is indicative of a much deeper problem; the latter understandably associated with a response to a traumatic event.

If I can't be with Mark, if he doesn't love me anymore, I don't see the point to living. Over the course of our romance, perhaps every day we were together, I imagine I cut a piece of myself off like a strip of fabric, and worked that section of myself into and over and under him, so now, there is no way I can break away.

We are woven together.

It hurts. It hurts to get pulled apart by the seams, every thread exposed, every fiber raw. The only way I can end the pain, the only way to medicate myself, is to stop my heart from beating, stop my lungs from breathing, stop my brain from thinking.

I want to die. And I feel like I don't want to live.

I don't understand the difference.

Chapter 9

I
could not see Lake Michigan from the road, could not distinguish where the murky sky met the steely waters, but as I neared Tarble College on Friday afternoon, I sensed its presence like someone standing behind me; my arm hairs danced, and a cold tingled the canyon between my shoulder blades. Low temperatures and a mistlike rain—as characteristic of a midwestern autumn as amber leaves—had fogged the window of my Corolla by then, and I had to roll it down to view the school from the road.

The Tarble campus was no more than a half mile long, but it stood proud upon its cliff, overlooking the lake to the east and the road to the west. Removed from the main road and a good mile from town, it long reminded me of a miniature village within a snow globe—a utopian world protected by a bubble of glass.

With white knuckles bracing the steering wheel, I approached the school's main entrance. It boasted no fence or gate, just a large stone insignia surrounded by mounds of manicured mums, eye-popping paint splatters of yellow, orange, and red. On instinct, I brought my foot to the brake pedal but didn't press, my boot suspended in air, my leg muscles taut. I watched the windshield wipers whip before me, squeaking each time they doubled back.

You don't have to do this,
I thought.

Go home
.

Go home.

Go home.

I turned anyway, at the last possible second, a swervy skid onto campus drive. Because it was the onset of Reunion weekend, and classes were still in session, I had to park at the far edge of campus. It was a heart-pumping uphill walk to the academic buildings from there, but I embraced every step, every breath of sand and silt and seagull air before inevitably losing my anonymity. Ahead I saw a herd of students nearing Langley Hall—I recognized their backpack-weighted saunters—and my stomach cartwheeled up my throat. Because some girl will spot me, I thought. Some girl will stop me. Some girl will say “What are you doing here?” And then, before I even answer, her memory will kick in, and her head will flop to the side with pity, and a hush will ensue as she pictures me in a straitjacket. And I will stand there, still and silent in the midst of those buzzing, whirring students, and regret ever coming back.

And therein lies the difference between words and actions. It had all seemed so easy—agreeing to Heidi when she insisted I stay in her guest bedroom instead of a room at the Lakeview Motel, asking Craig for the weekend off, telling my therapist yesterday and mother how excited I was about reconnecting with old friends at Tarble's Reunion. But it was all talk. Only words. Easy for me to say but not actually do. Now that I stood on campus, in close proximity to Mark's Jeep in the faculty parking lot and the red bridge where we used to meet and the beach where I saw Sylvia Plath and the dorm room where I overdosed on sleeping pills, I wanted to turtle my head inside my body. Thankfully, my oversize umbrella—Mom had checked the weather report and reminded me to take one—veiled me from possible stares and finger-pointing as I reached the main sidewalk and fell into rhythm with the other women's steps.

But the voices came after only a few strides.

“They found her on the floor,” one female voice whispered.

“Did she slit her wrists?” another asked.

“Overdose,” the first said. “She took the whole bottle.”

“Why did she do it?”

“Why does anyone do it?”

The voices, muffled by the white noise of rain, became trapped under the canopy of black umbrella fabric and swirled around my head like twittering birds in a cartoon. I continued walking on autopilot, though, my legs grounded and focused but my mind distant and floating. I tightened my grip on the umbrella handle.

They're talking about me,
I thought.
They're already talking about me.

“Are you talking about Julie?” A third voice asked.

I turned then to see four students walking behind me in an iceberglike mass, their shoulders slumped and heads drooped in a recognizable act of gossip. Thanks to the spray of rain and lakeside breeze, none of them saw me peeking from beneath my umbrella. Their eyes were glued instead to the sidewalk as they braced the forces of nature with the tops of their sweatshirt-hooded heads.

“You heard?” the first girl replied.

“Everyone's heard,” a fourth chimed in.

Tipping my umbrella back, I studied the students lining the sidewalk ahead of me. They were all in clumps too, all consorting, all seemingly whispering on the way to class. The rain was only half of the white noise I'd heard; the other half, their murmurs as they swapped grapevines about Julie.

Julie, Julie, Julie.

Obviously, it was the day after.

As I shook off my umbrella inside the lobby of Langley Hall, the murmurs died to a low humming buzz. The space was alive with people—students, alumnae, and faculty members with red cheeks, taut from over smiling. Scanning the lobby, I saw Heidi standing behind a red table-clothed table, under a
WELCOME TARBLE ALUMNAE
banner. She looked exactly as I remembered, which was expected after only ten months. Still, the time had passed so slowly for me—it had felt more like ten years—and somehow, I'd expected her to look different, older, changed. But she still styled her chestnut hair into a sleek bob, and her face was still round, her skin naturally pink and dewy, her eyes still a captivating brown.

Only her gregarious smile and blithe spirit were missing. Even from a distance, she looked unusually stern, a wrinkle bridged her eyebrows. And the wrinkle seemed to deepen when she saw me approaching the table.

“Ruby.” She handed her clipboard to the bored, name-tagged coworker beside her. “You're here. Already.”

“I said one o'clock, didn't I?”

“Of course, you did. Of course.” Gripping my shoulders, she moved me several paces from the table. The wet soles of my brown boots screeched on the recently polished floor. “It's just so good to see you.”

She hugged me then, holding me longer than necessary, as if saying good-bye rather than hello. She pressed me so hard, my nose smushed into the red fluff of her cashmere sweater, and I smelled grapefruit. She'd eaten one at lunch.

“How was your drive?” she asked after our embrace.

“Fine.”

She eyed my umbrella. “It's raining, isn't it? Is it still raining? I was really hoping it wouldn't rain.”

I put my hand on her shoulder to quiet her nervous rambling. “Heidi, I know.”

She cocked her head at first, as if about to lie, then exhaled a weighty breath, as if resigning to tell the truth. Her voice raised an octave. “You do?”

“Julie,” was all I said.

She sighed. “I was going to tell you. Just later, once you were settled.”

“What happened?”

Heidi scooted our conversation another foot from the table before saying more.

“Julie Farris,” she said under her breath. “She's a freshman. Smart girl. Sweet girl. Her RA found her unconscious late last night. There was an empty bottle of Tylenol on the floor beside her. She's okay. Alive, at least. She's at Kenosha General. Word is, they're admitting her to the psych ward later today.”

I winced. It was the same ward into which I would have been admitted back in December, had my mom not requested I be relocated to the hospital in Oak Park where she worked.

Heidi seized my elbow like a handle then, as if afraid I'd run away. “How did you hear?”

“Word travels fast at Tarble, remember?”

“I'm so sorry, Ruby,” Heidi gushed. “If I had known this was going to happen, I never would have . . .”

“Asked me to come?”

She took my hand and squeezed it. “I just wanted things to be perfect.”

“It's okay,” I lied. “How are you holding up?”

Heidi rubbed the corner of her eye. “I'm exhausted. I've been up since four this morning putting out fires. This couldn't have happened at a worse time. On top of all the Reunion events that have to go on without a hitch in spite of the rain—not to mention the vigil we're planning for Beth—President Monroe has me on damage control. Apparently, someone leaked information to some jerky reporter from the
Kenosha Sentinel,
and he called asking implicating questions, and now it's my job to assure financial backers and alumnae that Tarble isn't some breeding ground for . . .”

“Lunatics?”

She shook her head. “That this isn't an everyday occurrence. It's happened only twice.”

Twice, and I was the first.

“Maybe I should go,” I said.

“No. Why?”

“It's strange, isn't it? That some student tries to kill herself the night before I come back to campus for the first time? I don't want to make anyone feel weird.”

“No one will feel weird. And if they do, then they're weird,” Heidi shot back. “Actually, it's a good thing you're here. I mean, look at you. You're proof that life goes on. People heal. People get better. You're not tainted for life. You're totally fine now.”

I only look fine.

“Please stay,” Heidi begged. “Please? I was so looking forward to this weekend. We were going to order pepperoni and green pepper pizza and watch
Breakfast at Tiffany's
and eat thin mints from the freezer. I had to hunt down a Girl Scout for those, and it wasn't easy. It isn't the cookie-selling season, you know.”

I smiled at Heidi's list of our favorite things, her diligent preparation for my arrival. She had tried so hard, put forth a grand effort to welcome me back to campus, back to her life. How could I leave? And why should I?
It's a coincidence,
I thought. What happened to smart, sweet Julie Farris had nothing to do with me.

“Pizza and thin mints, huh?” I pretended to mull things over. “Okay, I'll stay.”

Heidi hugged me again. “Let me get your name tag.”

She headed to the table, and I followed. I watched her snatch a white peel-back name tag from a sea of identical stickers, and place it on my shirt.

Looking down, I saw my name in italicized Garamond and my class year, even though I hadn't technically graduated. “Why do we have to wear name tags?” I asked.

“President Monroe says it makes you feel important and welcome.” She smoothed the curled-up corners of my tag. “And if you feel important and welcome, you'll have a great time. And if you have a great time, then you're more likely to give. It's all about donations.”

I pressed the tag again after Heidi did, thinking it was pointless. Everybody already knew who I was: that girl who tried to kill herself. And now,
the one who did it last year
.

I noticed my font color was different than the others. “Why is mine green?”

“They're color coded depending on your major. Just another way to make you feel extra special.” She winked. “It's also how we gauge the number of people sitting in on any given class this afternoon. The professors like to know what to expect as far as handouts and such.”

“Sit in?”

“Don't you remember? How the alums used to sit in on a class Reunion weekend for old times' sake? It hasn't been so long for you, but the people who graduated twenty years ago get a real kick out of it.” She took the clipboard back from her coworker and scanned it. “Looks like your options are English Lit with Suter or American Lit with Barnard.”

My stomach flipped.
Mark's here
.
In the building. Mere feet away.

I opened my mouth to say I wanted to skip the whole sitting-in-on-a-class experience when someone interrupted us:

“Did I just hear my name? Is that why my ears are ringing?”

I turned to see a woman wearing an A-line royal blue housedress, a belt cinching her thin waist. A messy knot kept her blond hair—an inch of brown at the roots—from her face.

“Professor Barnard,” Heidi said. “Ruby, this is Virginia Barnard. She's new this year to Tarble. She teaches American Literature, Feminist Theory, and Women's Gender Studies.”

“Good memory.” The professor extended her hand but suddenly drew it back, wiping what looked like chalk dust onto her skirt. She held her hand out a second time. “Virginia Barnard,” she repeated. “Assistant Professor of English. And you're . . .” She read my name tag. “Ruby Rousseau. Great alliteration.”

We locked eyes, and I found the woman sophisticated and charming and warm. And immediately familiar, like a cousin I hadn't seen in a while but could never forget. She seemed to be in her midthirties, younger than most Tarble professors. She had taut cheekbones and a defined chin. Her eyebrows were thicker, a shade darker than the roots of her hair. To me, the overall effect was dramatic. Striking. Her lips were the color of raspberry juice not Max Factor. Her outfit—she'd paired the housedress with boots and clunky earrings carved of mahogany—seemed to suggest she was a bohemian, the kind of woman who dishes out fortunes and guidance from her hut at the edge of the village.