The Butterfly Sister (2 page)

And then Mom discovered a thin book in the folds of a T-shirt and held it out at arm's length, like she does when she isn't wearing her reading glasses. I read the title then, small black letters on a white binding. Trying to control a visceral reaction, I barely made out the words.

“Virginia Woolf
,
” I said. “
A Room of One's Own
.”

“Isn't that the book? The one you wrote your senior thesis on?”

I nodded and paused to recall Woolf's lengthy essay, based on lectures she'd given at two women's colleges. In the book, the modernist writer asserts “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

Mom handed me the book without sensing consequence, like handing a bottle of Nyquil to a recovering alcoholic. Per Gwen's instructions back in December, I'd donated my own copy. And yet, somehow, temptation had found its way back to me.

Like failing at a game of hot potato, I dropped the book, let it fall to the ceramic floor with a plop. A postcard stuck out from the pages then and I pulled it, instantly recognizing the blue expanse of water, ornate streetlights, mounds of yellow and orange mums, and the name
Tarble
etched in stone. It was a postcard announcing Tarble's Reunion—the women's college equivalent of Homecoming—set to take place the following weekend.

Mom retrieved the book from the floor and opened it. “You're in luck,” she said, attempting to hand it to me once more. “She wrote something inside.”

I looked down then to see Beth's name neatly printed in blue ink at the top of the inside flap, and below that, a phone number with a recognizable area code for southern Wisconsin.

“With all the sickos out there, that's a dangerous thing to do,” Mom said. “It must mean an awful lot to her.”

It means a lot to me,
I thought.

Mom suggested I wait until after dinner to make the call, but I knew the sooner I called, the sooner the suitcase—and the book and the temptation to read it—would leave my hands. So I took the cordless phone to the porch swing. I'd left my empty tea mug there, and I held it as I listened to the rings, running my finger along the inside groove of the handle. Finally, a woman answered; a paper-thin voice prickled my skin.

“This is Ruby Rousseau,” I said. “I'm trying to reach Beth Richards.”

I endured an awkward silence. All I heard was breathing. “Hello?” I tried again.

“I'm Beth's mother,” the woman said.

“Oh. Good. Look, I went to Tarble College with Beth, and I actually have her suitcase. They just delivered it to me by mistake. Is she back from her trip?”

A gasp. “This is a miracle.”

“Yes, very strange. For some reason, she left my name on the tag.”

I heard the woman begin to cry, what sounded like a weeping elation, tears of sadness mixed with joy. “I've been praying for this. For something. Anything. A sign. She's going to come back to me.”

“Back? Back from
where
?”

“Beth has been . . .” The woman started but stopped. She got the rest out in fragments:

“Missing. Since. Friday.”

The mug slipped from my hand then and shattered on the floorboards at my feet, the remaining drops of tea seeping into the porch cracks. “Mrs. Richards, I'm so sorry. I had no idea. I mean, Beth and I weren't close. I mean, we just kind of knew each other,” I rambled. I wanted to pick up the mess, wanted to say something more appropriate but couldn't formulate words.

“The police say they have no leads,” Mrs. Richards continued, as if she hadn't heard me. “They said ‘Hope for the best and prepare for the worst.' ”

Prepare for the worst
. Beth Richards was missing but hopefully not dead, hopefully not like the hundreds of people I'd written about at the
Chronicle.
I told Mrs. Richards I was sorry once more.

“No, Ruby, don't you see? They were wrong. Because this is a lead. This could be how we end up finding her.”

I recalled the mundane items Mom and I sorted in Beth's suitcase. There was nothing there to suggest Beth's whereabouts or foul play. But I wasn't about to trounce on a distraught mother's hopes.

“Tell me where you live,” Mrs. Richards asserted. “I'll come right now to get it.”

I asked Mrs. Richards exactly where she lived, then told her it was a two-hour drive to Oak Park from Milwaukee, but she said she didn't care. She'd drive to Canada if she had to. I fumbled in my pocket then for the business card the delivery woman had given me.

“It's better, don't you think, if you just stayed home?” My words came out like hers had, in bits and pieces, interrupted by thoughts and breaths. I felt guilty for not offering to bring the suitcase myself, for allowing Beth's mother to drive at night in her condition. “Let the delivery service bring it to you. That's their job.”

“But I have to
do something,
Ruby
.
I can't just sit around waiting for a phone call, waiting for the police. Waiting for Beth to walk through the door. I have to get my daughter back.”

“I know. I know,” I said, though I didn't know at all. I could only imagine, and the guilt tripled. “But what if the police call while you're gone? What if Beth does come walking through the door? You need to be there.”

“But the suitcase . . .”

“—I'll bring it to you.” The promise slipped from my mouth. I couldn't take it back. “Tomorrow. After work.”

This appeased Mrs. Richards enough to give me her address, and I went inside for scratch paper on which to jot it down before we said our good-byes.

When I returned to the porch, I noticed that
A Room of One's Own
still lay open on the swing, and despite the promise I'd made Gwen back in December, I started reading it. I read only a sentence before I felt the stitches in my heart—the ones I'd sewn up daily since I left Tarble—unravel.

I came undone at a handful of words.

Chapter 2

One year earlier

B
efore knocking, I studied the nameplate on the half open door, the words
MARK SUTER, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH
. Then, with fingers curled around the frame, I peeked inside.

From the first day of senior seminar, I had thought my teacher attractive, counting it a blessing that Professor Margaret Preston, who usually taught the course, had taken a sabbatical that semester to research Victorian literature in London. Mark Suter, though untenured, having taught at the college only three years, was a welcome replacement. All of my classmates thought the same. Perhaps it was his hair, the color of wet sand, just long enough to curl behind his ears. Or maybe his eyes, a true baby blue, playful but sedative. Or was it his smile, a grin exposing not only flawless, pearl white teeth but less perfect—and thus, irresistibly endearing—creases around his eyes? Whatever it was—I don't think there was a single way to quantify it—Mark Suter was that disarming, paradoxical blend of rugged and refined. A cowboy in a blazer. A bad boy with a Ph.D. During class, I often had to glance out the window to allow my eyes a rest, to drain the red from my cheeks, to settle the flutter in my stomach.

Though I'd long been a straight-A student, no other teacher had treated me with as much esteemed regard as Professor Suter. In fact, on the second day of class, he'd referred to my analysis of a John Donne poem as a “sheer stroke of brilliance,” much to my classmates' chagrin. And ever since, I'd found myself milking opportunities to be in his presence. I was the first student to enter his classroom and the last to leave. And he always seemed to notice.

“Professor, do you have a minute?” I asked that October afternoon, rapping the door with my knuckle. It was only then, with the door fully open, that I saw a student slouched in the chair opposite his desk, a backpack in her lap. Her short, black hair—chopped at odd, pointy angles—reminded me of a raven, and subsequently, of Edgar Allan Poe.

Professor Suter stood from his chair then, and his six-foot-three frame commanded the attention of the entire room, even the inanimate objects—the corner ficus tree, the framed Modigliani print above his head, the second hand on the college-issued wall clock. Each seemed to accommodate his stature with a subtle shift, a minute modification. His eyes darted to mine with respectful anticipation, as if I were one of his colleagues at the door, not a student. It was the reaction I expected, but the gesture still made me blush. As usual, I took respite by looking away.

“Sorry,” I blurted. “I'll come back.”

“Nonsense. We're done here,” he said, without allowing his student time to disagree. “Just add a few more transitions, a few more examples from the text,” he told the girl, escorting her by the elbow to the door, “and I'll take another look.”

The girl fixed her eyes on the toes of her tattered Converse high-tops, on which she had drawn a checkerboard pattern with what looked like black Sharpie.

“Madeline,” he said, quick and sharp, like a doctor trying to snap a woozy patient back to consciousness.

“Can I bring it back in an hour?” she asked.

“I'll be here.”

Passing me in the doorway, the girl finally made eye contact. Although she flashed me a smile, her red-rimmed eyes defied her. She'd been crying.

With Madeline gone, I stepped fully into the office, a corner room with a corner window, one pane facing Lake Michigan and the other, a forest rich with autumn. It seemed larger, longer than my other teachers' offices, perhaps due to two oversize bookcases stocked with what looked like a game of Tetris, hundreds of geometric book spines at perpendicular angles. The room also boasted an eggplant purple love seat, the cushions housing more books, plus piles of magazines—back issues of
The New Yorker
and
Ploughshares
—that seemed permanent, as if the couch were a storage unit all its own. I smiled at my professor's disorganized organization, his obvious obsession with print media, his zealous promise to read everything, cover to cover, in due time.

When I heard the door click shut, I turned to find Professor Suter watching me, his feet planted squarely on the floor, his arms crossed. Under the wrinkled, rolled-up sleeves of his otherwise starched button-up shirt, I admired his biceps, just large enough to indicate masculinity without appearing forced, the kind of muscles you get from chopping wood not pumping iron. His jeans, dark but faded at the meaty part of his thigh, also hinted at his athletic physique.

My professor stepped closer; the subtle scent of musk—his cologne, shower gel, or deodorant, I couldn't say—was reminiscent of my father's aftershave and tickled my nose with familiarity.

“The first year's the hardest,” he said, his voice as steady as his stance. “When they discover this isn't high school English.”

I nodded understanding. “You're really good. I mean, you were really good with her just now.” I gestured at the hallway beyond the now closed door, into which Madeline had vanished, my movement exaggerated and overdone. “I mean, the way you handled that. You could have said tough luck.”

“True, but tough luck won't teach her how to craft a cohesive essay.”

“And speaking of cohesive essay,” I started, “I want to talk about my thesis.” I eyed the slew of papers on his desk, a half-eaten peanut butter and jelly on rustic whole wheat. “You're sure you have a minute?”

He seemed to size me up then, down to my boots and up to my breasts, but not in the way that earns most men a slap. “For you, Ms. Rousseau, I have all afternoon.”

He waited for me to slip into the chair opposite his desk, where Madeline had sat only minutes earlier—the cracked, faux leather cushion still so warm, I wondered how long she'd cried in his office about her essay—before seating himself.

“Your thesis.” He rubbed his hands together fanatically, as if preparing to throw down a triple-word score in Scrabble. “You've had me wondering for weeks. I have a knack for guessing which texts my students will choose. But you . . .”

“—Me?”

His eyes narrowed, like a detective spotting an overlooked clue. “You're my wild card.”

My cheeks tinted scarlet. I wasn't sure which word I relished more,
wild
or
my
.

“I'm happy to hear I'm unpredictable,” I said. “But wouldn't that make guessing correctly more rewarding?”

I hardly believed my own ears; the playful, casual tone I took with my teacher, how easy it was to banter with him, alone in his office with the door closed, despite the professional nature of our relationship.

He smiled, and those characteristic eye wrinkles curled in unison with his lips; it was a grin that made my heart stop and start again. “It would.”

“So guess.”

“Kate Chopin.”

“Virginia Woolf,” I corrected.

His sapphire eyes gleamed with thought. “Woolf, huh? I knew you'd go with a feminist. I take it you like stream of consciousness?”

I nodded. “When I read
Mrs. Dalloway
in sixth grade—”

“Sixth grade?”

“I was precocious,” I explained. “But even at eleven, I didn't know it was called stream of consciousness. I just remember thinking Woolf wrote how I thought, lots of tangents and asides, weaving in and out of the past and present.”

He studied me for a moment, as if conjuring me as a pubescent, nose in book on a quiet playground bench while my classmates played kickball in the distance.

“Precocious, indeed,” he finally said. “So it's
Mrs. Dalloway
then? You'll critique Woolf's use of flashback as a literary device to define her characters' pasts? Or maybe explore the themes of homosexuality through Clarissa Dalloway's affection for Sally Seton?”

I admired his ability to spout off character names so effortlessly. I shook my head no. “Those are excellent topics, if I was going to write about
Mrs. Dalloway
. But I'm not.”

He cocked his head with intrigue.

“
A Room of One's Own
,” I said.

“Ah, yes. What is it Woolf said?” He cleared his throat. “ ‘A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.' Something to that effect?”

“Word for word,” I said, before launching into the monologue I'd practiced an hour earlier in the bathroom mirror. “I plan to use Woolf's essay as a springboard for a larger umbrella question, which is: Why did so many women writers, Woolf included, succumb to depression and ultimately, suicide?”

He cocked his head again, and this time, in the acute angle of the tilt, I saw he was preparing to play devil's advocate. “But suicide knows no gender boundaries,” he argued. “What about Hemingway?”

“What about him?” I countered. “He shot himself. Easy. Quick. Decisive. But Woolf? She drowned herself by loading the pockets of her overcoat with stones and wading out into the depths of the River Ouse. Sylvia Plath stuck her head in an oven full of gas. Charlotte Perkins Gilman overdosed on chloroform. And Anne Sexton? Carbon monoxide poisoning. She donned her mother's fur coat and swigged a glass of vodka before heading to the garage to sit inside her car while it was running.” I paused only to breathe. “These women were complicated and conflicted, right down to the intricate, muddled, haunting ways they chose to leave the world. And yes, they were artists—mad artists, plagued by mental illness and creativity complexes—but they were also female, women trying to infiltrate a historically patriarchal tradition. And so they crafted literary female characters not unlike themselves—mothers, sisters, wives—who were equally distressed by their own creativity and intelligence. And why? I think the explanation lies with Woolf's essay. Without the opportunity to fully express herself and her creativity—without money and a room of one's own—a woman can simply go mad.”

I let out an exhaustive breath, both exhilarated and frightened to hear my professor's response. And while I waited, I studied his forehead wrinkles. Tarble girls often speculated about his age. The consensus was forty-two.

“It's fresh,” he finally said. “It crosses curriculum with psychology and history. I'd expect that from a grad student or faculty member, not an undergrad. Tell me, other than an appreciation for Woolf's writing, what was your inspiration?” His fingers curled and waved, as if he was literally, physically trying to pull information from me. “Did you read about this somewhere? Say, in a literary journal?”

The idea had come to me over the summer, when I found myself rereading most of Woolf's books before gravitating toward the works of Plath and Gilman. I was well into a book of Anne Sexton's poetry when I realized the common thread of suicide. Were my summer reading choices indicative of something macabre? I'd wondered. An obsession with death since my father's passing? An attraction to melancholy?

“My inspiration was originality,” I said instead. “I didn't want to choose something domestic like Austen or something pretentious like
The Wasteland
. I didn't want to be like the other girls in your class.”

His eyes shot to mine. “You could never be like the other girls.”

I looked down at my feet, where my toes curled inside my boots. I sensed him studying me long and hard, like a fire he wanted to contain.

“You're not from the Midwest, are you?” he asked.

I looked up. “What makes you say that?”

“There's something ‘otherworldly' about you. Your attitude, the way you think. It's refreshing. And your accent . . . I noticed you don't always pronounce the
r
at the end of certain words. And with a last name like Rousseau, well, I'm thinking French Canadian?”

I smiled. It wasn't the first time someone up north had tried to pinpoint my accent and failed. Because that singsong twang—how folks from Mississippi or Alabama talk—was absent from my dialect, people never guessed I was from the South.

“I'm from Louisiana,” I said. “New Orleans to be exact.”

“That's it.” He tapped the desktop in defeat. “Of course, it's New Orleans. I should have known. I got my bachelor's at Tulane, you know. Best four years of my life.”

“Really? My parents went to UNO.”

He nodded, then looked past me, as if recalling his own coed memories. “New Orleans,” he mused. “What a sultry, sinful city.”

“Have you been back? Since you graduated?”

“No, but I'm actually flying down there in a few weeks for a symposium at Tulane. That's the kind of thing you have to do to get tenure around here,” he added as an aside. “Attend symposiums, serve on panels, publish papers. And interestingly, this symposium pertains to your thesis. Gender and Creativity is the topic. Any chance you're visiting Mom and Dad at that time? You could be my guest.”