The Butterfly Sister (6 page)

“Do you want to go home?” he asked.

More than anything,
I thought.
I want to go home, to a New Orleans that no longer exists, the one where Dad is alive.

“Don't be silly,” I said. “We flew all the way here. We checked into the hotel already. And we have the symposium tomorrow.”

“None of that matters if you're not happy, if you're not comfortable. Say the word, and I'll book us on the next flight back.”

“You'd do that?”

“Of course.” His expression was solemn, determined, earnest—the countenance of a knight in shining armor the moment before he rescues the princess.

I wrapped my arms around the meaty part of his waist and rested my head on his chest as I weighed the decision. “Let's stay,” I finally said.

He took my hand then and led me past my father's shop, our palms bonded by a love as strong, as adhesive as orange juice.

M
ark and I created an alternate New Orleans that night—a city once again built on hope, on dreams, on the promise of tomorrow.

We ate dinner at a courtyard table for two, under antique lamps and strings of white lights swirled through a canopy of branches and vines. Our mouths were romanced by a roux done just right, by the perfect balance of garlic and onion and celery, and later, the buttery warmth of Bananas Foster. And then, with bellies full and senses heightened, we strolled down Pirates Alley, pausing to pay William Faulkner homage outside his 1920s apartment, before stepping into a hauntingly darkened Jackson Square, lit by streetlamps and the glimmering candlewicks of fortune-tellers. We watched the fog settle on the Mississippi River and listened to the moans of cargo ships—late-night calls that echoed the bliss beating in our chests—before hitching a ride on a horse-drawn carriage.

“But that's for tourists,” I argued, when Mark pulled out a wad of cash for the driver.

He sported an irresistible smile. “Isn't that what we are?”

And then, as if we hadn't been up and down almost every street in the Quarter, we walked them all again, sometimes in silence and other times, in unadulterated conversation. With every sight and sound, Mark's memories from his college days seemed to sharpen—they were mostly related to being drunk on Bourbon Street— and it was almost midnight when we found ourselves back where we'd started the evening, in front of our hotel.

I slipped off my heels and stood barefoot on the cool sidewalk, my shoes dangling by their backs from my index finger. Mark embraced me, his mouth going to the tender spot behind my ear. His warm breath sent a chill down my spine. And then he slid a dress strap off my shoulder so he could kiss the skin above my collarbone.

“Are you going to invite me up to your room?” he whispered.

Y
ou know what I could go for?” Mark asked an hour later, his body pressed against mine under the sheets like a spoon. “One of those powdered sugar doughnuts.”

I loved his phrasing
I could go for
; it sounded familiar, like we had always been like this, had always been together.

“You mean beignets.” I placed a reprimanding finger to his lips. “Never call them doughnuts. Cardinal sin.”

“Sorry. Beignets.” He eyed the nightstand clock. “Do you think that café is still open?”

“Café Du Monde? It's always open.”

“Let's go.”

“Now?”

“Why not now?”

And so we threw on the clothes we'd strewn across the hotel room floor and headed to Café Du Monde. This time, though, I wore flip-flops and Mark opted out of his suit jacket for the plain white shirt, unbuttoned at the collar. We grabbed a table on the periphery of the café overlooking the sidewalk, where a saxophonist had left his instrument case open to collect spare change for playing “Dream a Little Dream of Me.” Mark kept an eye out for the waiter while I took in the sights and sounds of the café.

Two tables over, I saw a group of college students who looked like they'd just stepped off Bourbon Street. Beads adorned the girls' necks. Red kiss marks covered the guys' cheeks. One girl still carried a tall souvenir glass, a few sips of pink daiquiri remaining. Her bright eyes and pink cheeks revealed she had finished most of it. I studied each student in the group, and not one looked familiar. I breathed a sigh of relief. There would be no awkward “Didn't I sit next to you in Mr. Harrison's biology class?” conversations.

Next to the students sat a woman, perhaps midthirties with brown, wiry hair and dark-rimmed glasses, more New York than New Orleans. She seemed to be writing in a notebook. Something about the tilt of her head and her smooth, relaxed jaw made me believe she truly had nowhere else to go and nothing else to do.

And then there was the man folding napkins into origami, the transvestite, and the amorous couple, who French kissed between slurps of coffee. I smiled, happy to see the café as I often had in the past—filled with artists, eccentrics, and lovers. The waiter, a young Vietnamese man wearing the uniform white paper cap, approached us then with a stone face. Mark asked for two café au laits and an order of beignets.

“So tomorrow,” he said once the waiter left. “We'll ride the trolley out to Tulane?”

“Streetcar,” I corrected.

“Streetcar. Beignets.” He rolled his eyes. “For people who chant
Who Dat,
you sure are particular about semantics.”

I laughed. “What time do we need to be at the symposium?”

He grimaced. “I wish you could tag along, Ruby. Truly. But I think it's too risky. I still know quite a few people at Tulane—my former professors, colleagues in the field. If anyone would see us, put two and two together . . . Besides, I don't think I could concentrate with your pretty face in the crowd.” He stroked my cheek. “You can keep yourself busy, right? Nose around campus and the bookstore until I'm done?”

My heart sank. I'd simply assumed I was going to the symposium with him, since he'd asked me to attend that afternoon in his office, even before our relationship began. I hid my disappointment with an exaggerated head nod. “I'll go to the library. I need to work anyway.”

“I knew you'd understand.” He squeezed my hand. “And how is your thesis shaping up?”

“Really well. Right now, I'm working on the connotations of the word
room
. When Woolf said a woman should have a room of her own, did she mean only a physical space? I think
room
could be something more abstract, a corner of the mind perhaps, a place free of judgment and guilt and expectation.”

He said nothing but looked back at me with warm eyes and a soft smile.

“What?”

He shook his head. “Nothing. I just love the way your mind works.”

Love
.
He loves me
.
Does he love me?

“Anyway, I'm still in the note-taking stage,” I went on. “I have fifteen pages so far, but there's still so much information to sift through. So actually, it's a good thing I'm not going to the symposium. I can hole myself up in one of those study cubicles.”

“Well, don't work
too
hard,” he cautioned. “I wanted this weekend to be about pleasure not business.”

I placed my hand on his upper thigh. “Well, I'm certainly enjoying myself.”

“Me too. But . . .” He studied me like a crossword puzzle clue, as if both confused and challenged by me. “I think we should talk about what happened earlier. On Royal Street. I'm beginning to think you haven't told me the whole story.”

“Story?”

“About your father. What happened when he died.”

Mark must have seen my eyes water then, because he tucked one of my errant auburn curls behind my ear, then cupped my cheek with his hand. And the warmth of his hand caused the first tear to fall, and the rest followed suit. I pushed my fingers into the corners of my eyes to stop the weeping, but like a Band-Aid on a gushing cut, it didn't work. In a matter of seconds, I was blubbering—a sudden, snotty-nosed, ugly cry. I covered my face with my hands.

“I'm so sorry,” I blurted.

“There's nothing to be sorry about.” Mark made a shushing noise. “Ruby, I want to know the whole you, not just the parts you want to show me. I like it when you're happy, but that doesn't mean I don't want to know when you're sad. So don't leave me in the dark, okay?”

I blew my nose first into a napkin plucked from the metal holder on the table.

“It was my fault,” I said.

“You said it was a car accident. Were you driving?”

I shook my head no. “It was a hit-and-run. He was just crossing the street.”

“How could that be your fault?”

“It wouldn't have happened if I had come home like I was supposed to.”

I continued to tell Mark the details, how every year, on the night before Christmas Eve, my father and I went to the Celebration in the Oaks, the annual holiday light display in City Park. It was traditionally just the two of us, ever since I was a toddler, because my mother always took extra shifts at the hospital to assure she'd be off Christmas Day. And with each passing year, the holiday outing became as sacrosanct as Mardi Gras.

“But last year, Heidi invited me to go home with her to Minnesota. And I said yes,” I explained. “I wanted to experience a real ‘White Christmas.' But more than that, I think I was testing my autonomy. Maybe I wouldn't move back home after graduation; maybe I would stay in the Midwest. And I needed to prove to myself that I could do it, that I could cut that tie—to New Orleans, to my family, to my father. Of course, I had no idea what would happen. He would still be here if I hadn't been so selfish.”

“If you had been here, you would have been hit too,” Mark rationalized.

“No, because the timing would have been off. Dad and I always went out for cheeseburgers and fries first. It was our little indulgence, our little secret. We'd load up on fat and carbs and then walk the food off in the park, walk the stench of it off our clothes, so Mom wouldn't smell it on us when she got home. But I didn't come home for holiday break, and my father went alone. Not for the cheeseburgers, just the light show. And so if I had been here, we would have been crossing the street at least an hour later. It wouldn't have happened.”

“You can't blame yourself, Ruby. You can't play the ‘what if' game.”

“But I play it all the time, ever since it happened. Even in my sleep. Right after, I started having these recurring nightmares, where my father is walking alone in the park, and people—moms with snot-nosed kids wearing reindeer antler headbands—are glaring at him as he passes because, what forty-five-year-old man goes all by himself to a holiday light show? A pedophile?”

“You're being too hard on yourself,” he said.

“Do you know it snowed here last year?” I went on. “The first time in a very long time. It snowed that night, just a few inches, but people here don't know how to drive in snow, not like people up north. They close school here for a dusting of snow. They close roads. And that night, it snowed. And whoever was driving the car that hit him—the police never caught the person—probably didn't know how to handle driving in that kind of weather.”

“This is an awful amount of guilt for you to bear, Ruby.” Mark sighed. “Have you seen someone?”

“When it first happened, yes, especially when the nightmares kept me up all night. I was an insomniac. I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and prescribed sleeping pills. But I've been fine lately. I've been sleeping well. I haven't been feeling guilty. Until now and . . .”

“—Come here,” Mark said, wrapping his arms around me so tightly, his hands clasped at the small of my back. We sat like that—my face buried in his chest, my tears dotting our laps below us—until I gained control of my breathing.

It was then, after we pulled back from the embrace, that I noticed the woman with the notebook—the one who'd looked like she had nowhere to go and nothing to do—watching us. She stared at me as if she knew me, as if trying to place me in her memory, and my mind raced through faces: women my mother used to work with at the hospital, the mothers of my grammar school friends, our old neighbors. Do I know her? I wondered. Does she know me? Had she known my mother and saw a resemblance? No, her expression did not suggest recognition but rather disgust. It seemed she'd seen our exchange. Or had she overheard our conversation? Either way, it was clear she didn't approve.

The waiter provided me a respite from her damnation when he appeared with two mugs filled with a liquid the color of a good summer tan, and a small plate of fried dough coated in powdered sugar. Mark paid while I gave the woman one more glance, and sighed relief when I saw her reabsorbed in her notebook. Maybe she hadn't been looking at me after all, but someone or something past me. I turned to look behind me but saw only an empty table.

I sipped my coffee then—the rising steam a comfort to my red eyes—and delighted in that unmistakably earthy taste of chicory. Meanwhile, Mark's mouth was already full of dough. White powder coated his lips and fingertips after only one bite. He looked adorable.

“Have one,” he said, pushing the plate toward me. “Nothing has the power to cheer you up like a big dose of fat and sugar.”

Unfortunately, there is no ladylike way to eat a beignet, so I held the mass of warm dough and watched the powdered sugar dangle at the edge, preparing to sprinkle my black dress with Café Du Monde fairy dust. The napkins were so small, I would have had to use twenty of them to protect my lap. With my head positioned above the plate, I brought the beignet to my lips, and I ate the whole thing that way, shoulders curved, chin up. But the powder, miraculously, still sprinkled the front of my dress. I dabbed the spots with water, but the sugar seemed imbedded in the black silk. My rubbing had turned the smudges into splotches.