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The Butterfly House
Marcia Preston


“I was fifteen when my mother finally told me the truth about my father. She didn’t mean to. She meant to keep it a secret forever. If she’d succeeded, it might have saved us all. ”Roberta and Cynthia are destined to be best friends forever. When both your fathers are missing you have a lot in common. Unable to cope with her alcoholic mother, Roberta finds Cynthia’s house the perfect carefree refuge. Cynthia’s mother keeps beautiful, rare butterflies in her sunporch and she’s everything Roberta wishes her own mother could be. But just like the delicate creatures they nurture, the women are living in a hothouse.Years later, a hauntingly familiar stranger knocks on Roberta Dutreau’s door, forcing her to begin a journey back to childhood. But is she ready to know the truth about what happened to her, her best friend Cynthia and their mothers that tragic night ten years ago?










TheButterfly House

Marcia Preston






www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)


For Paul – husband, lover and best friend.

I love you more.




ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS


My fascination with butterflies and moths began in childhood and never waned. This book was seven years in the making, and along the way I’m sure some of the names that should be included on this page have been lost. I ask forgiveness for any such omission.

I am indebted to author and lepidopterist Robert Michael Pyle of Washington State for his patient advice and expertise, and to Kent Wilson, a fellow Oklahoman. Any scientific inaccuracies in this book are due to my own failings in understanding the intricacies of science, or to intentional licences taken in the name of a better story.

For advice and consultation, my thanks to Stephen J Cribari, Esquire, University of Denver College of Law; Doug Carr of the Spokane County Public Defender’s Office; and novelist Debra Purdy Kong of British Columbia.

Love and gratitude to trusted readers Robyn Conley, Patti Dickinson and Bette Ward Widney, and also to editor Miranda Stecyk, who’s been a dream to work with, and to my intrepid agent, Elaine English.




CHAPTER 1


Alberta, Canada, March 1990

From the window of my husband’s house, I see the stranger stop beside our gate at the bottom of the snow-covered hill. He steps from his black Chevy Blazer, leaving the door open, and peers at the name on our mailbox. His down jacket hangs unzipped despite the cold overcast of the morning, and he’s wearing cowboy boots. Even from this distance I am struck by the contrast of his black hair against the snow.

“You have the wrong house,” I whisper, hoping he’ll turn around and go back the way he came. Instead he gets back in the car and drives slowly up the slope. Damn.

I switch off the single lamp on the sunporch and lay aside the pillowtop I’m embroidering, a gift for someone I love. This one is a yellow-and-black anise swallowtail, scientifically correct. A dozen other pairs of silent wings lie stacked on a closet shelf—my butterfly collection, David calls it. Each time he says the words I feel the wings inside my chest. He has no idea.

From the cool shadows of the house, I watch the stranger park his car and walk up the snow-packed sidewalk to the front door. He is surefooted and somber. I guess him to be about fifty, nearly twice my age, and for some reason this makes me even more uneasy. I stand motionless, holding my breath as he rings the bell and waits.

Go away. It’s the wrong house.

He rings again. He doesn’t look like a robber or rapist, but I’m too tired to open the door and pretend to be amiable while I give him directions to whatever he’s seeking. I need my solitude, especially today. I realize I’m pressing one palm flat against my abdomen and jerk the hand away, clenching my fist. My breathing clots in my chest.

The bell chimes again, and I jump when the doorjamb rattles under his knock.

Go away, for heaven’s sake! Nobody’s home. Whoever you’re looking for isn’t here.

And then the stranger calls my name.

Not Roberta Dutreau, my married name, but my childhood name.

“Roberta Lee? Bobbie?”

His voice sounds deep and somehow muffled. “I saw your light. Please open the door.”

My heart pounds. I don’t know this man; how does he know me? David is at work—I don’t know what to do.

“Please,” he calls out. “It’s about Lenora.”

My breath sucks in. I hurry to the door and jerk it open, sending small tufts of snow onto the hallway floor. No one ever uses this door.

The stranger stands bareheaded, his weight on one leg with both knees bowing outward like a cowboy’s. But he isn’t a cowboy. He’s Indian. His dark eyes meet mine and there’s something familiar there—something I cannot name. He’s stocky and muscular, a full head taller than I am.

I haven’t spoken aloud all morning and my voice sounds hoarse. “Is something wrong with Lenora?”

The stranger keeps one hand in his jacket pocket and the other hooked by the thumb through the belt loop of his jeans. When he finally speaks, his bass voice is flat and expressionless. “You mean besides ten years of prison life?”

I grip the edge of the door with both hands. “Who are you?”

He meets my eyes again. “I’m Harley Jaines.”

The name echoes in my head, bounces through the empty rooms. Harley Jaines Harley Jaines Harley Jaines …

“You bastard.” I grip the door tighter. “Harley Jaines is dead.”

“Sorry to contradict you, but I’m not.” A muscle in his jaw twitches.

I remember a photograph from years ago, a young man in uniform with the same black eyes—my best friend’s missing father. How I envied Cynthia the heroic status of that photo.

And now he stands at my door.

When my knees sag, the stranger reaches a hand toward my elbow, but I shrink away. He drops his hand to his side. “You’d better sit down. May I come in?”

I turn without answering and weave my way back to the sun-porch, my hands touching each chair back and door frame as if I’m walking on a moving train. I hear the door close behind me and his quiet footsteps as he follows.

Sinking into the flowered chair beside the lamp, I pull the afghan over my legs and hug my knees tightly to my chest. He stands in the center of the room, waiting, and finally sits on the sofa without being invited.

His voice is so low-pitched it’s hard to distinguish the words above the buzzing in my ears. “I’m sorry to surprise you like this. I need to talk to you about Lenora.”

“Have you been to see her?” I ask.

He nods. “Regularly, for several months. Ever since I found out where she was.”

“How is she?”

“She says she’s all right, but she isn’t. I can see it in her eyes.”

“We thought … she said you were killed in Vietnam.”

His eyes look away. “It’s a long story.”

He leans back, gazing out the wide windows toward the endless vista of snow-covered pines. “What I came about,” Harley Jaines says finally. “Lenora needs your help.”

He looks at me as if waiting for a reaction. But my mind has flown a dozen years away from here, to a house called Rockhaven that overlooks the Columbia River. I’m seeing Lenora the way she was then.

“I talked to the lawyer who represented her, if you can call it that,” the stranger says. “He’s convinced there was more to what happened than Lenora told him.”

The wings rise to the back of my mouth. I wonder if he can see them beating behind my eyes as I regard him blankly. “And what does Lenora say?”

“She’s told me about most of her life, a little at a time. She talks about you a lot. But she won’t talk about that night.”

He waits. A patient man. But my heart is like the permafrost beneath the northern Canadian soil. Resistant, enduring. I face him with silence.

“The attorney thinks you know the whole story. Says that when you were in the hospital, you told him Lenora was innocent.”

My mouth twists. “Which hospital? Which time?” But I know exactly what he means.

“Lenora has a parole hearing in two weeks. I want you to come and testify. I’ve hired an attorney, a good one this time, and we’re going to ask for more than parole. We’re going to try for a pardon.”

Harley Jaines watches my face. “She shouldn’t have gone to prison,” he says. “You know that, and I know it. I believe you have the power to set her free, if you come to the hearing and tell the truth.”

I shake my head. “You’re wrong. I have no power.”

Outside, it has begun to snow again. I watch the air thicken. From the windows of our sunporch the world is a Christmas card, the pines stacked deep with snow. Despite the warmth of the house, I feel winter in my limbs.

“She’s dying in that prison,” he says. “When the spirit dies, the body follows.”

Wrong again. I’m living proof. How can he be so naive? He’s twice my age, a war veteran, a Cherokee, as I remember. But I don’t bother to contradict him.

“Bobbie,” says this man I’ve never met before, using the nickname he has no right to use, the nickname his daughter gave me. “Do you know where Cynthia is?”

The question catches me unprepared. I stammer. “I hear from her now and then.”

“Why hasn’t she visited her mother?”

My eyes cloud and I tighten my mouth to keep my face blank. “You’d have to ask her that.”

“I’d like to,” he says. “I’d like to see my daughter. She doesn’t even know I’m alive.”

Cynthia Jaines’s husky, anguished voice on the phone six months ago echoes in my head. I picture the thin ghost who came to see me at Green Gables—a euphemism for the mental health facility where I lived for five years before I married David. Would seeing Harley Jaines save Cynthia, or push her, too, over the edge?

“She never gives me an address. I have the impression she moves around a lot. I don’t know where she is.” This is all true, so I meet his eyes when I say it. I’ve never been a good liar.

He nods, his face impassive. I can’t tell if he believes me. Where were you all those years, I wonder. Why did you let Lenora think you were dead?

But I don’t want to know his secrets. I don’t even want to know mine.

My mind flutters to the appointment I’ve made at the women’s clinic tomorrow morning and my stomach contracts. Will I be able to drive myself home afterward? What if I’m ill, or bleeding? What can I tell David that he will believe?

If Cynthia were here, she’d go with me. She’d take care of me, lie for me. Or talk me out of the decision I’ve made. I pull the afghan around my arms and take a deep breath. When Harley Jaines stands up, it startles me.

“I’ll let you know when the hearing is scheduled,” he says. “May I have your phone number?”

Perhaps if he can call me, he won’t come here again. I rise slowly, untangling myself from the afghan, and scribble the number on a pad by the phone. I hand him the paper without meeting his eyes. “Please don’t call in the evenings.”

He accepts it with cigar-shaped fingers that bear no rings. “Lenora doesn’t know I’m here,” he says, and pauses. “You tried to tell the truth once, but no one would listen. I’m asking you to try again.”

Suddenly I’m weary of his childish assumptions. My voice tightens. “Truth doesn’t set people free. Didn’t you learn that in the war? You have no idea what you’re asking.”

This time his dark eyes register some emotion, and I see them take note of the scars that snake down my jawline and flood my throat. He has no right to come here and ask me to rake those scars raw again.

A thought comes to me that his sudden appearance might be some cosmic punishment for the procedure I’ve consented to tomorrow.

But no. That decision is merciful. I’m sane enough, at least, to know that. If I never know another thing for certain, I know I have neither the right nor the skills to mother a child.

I lead Harley Jaines to the door, close and lock it behind him. But with my back pressed against the door, my eyes closed, I see a vision of Lenora as a young woman—Lenora, with the ocean-colored eyes, the person I’ve loved most in all my life.

This isn’t fair.

Then I remember Lenora seven years ago, in a cold room floored in cheap tile. Her face looked ashen against the orange prison garb, her long chestnut hair already dulled and streaked with gray. And I hear the prison guard’s comment behind my back as I stepped into the visiting room: “Ain’t she something? Come to visit her mother’s killer.”

Outside, the black Blazer’s engine bursts into life. I lean against the door until I hear the SUV drive away, then make my way back to the sunporch. Without turning on the lamp, I stand at the window and watch the snow.

Harley Jaines is wrong.

No one knows the truth about Lenora and Cynthia Jaines, Ruth and Bobbie Lee. Least of all me.




CHAPTER 2


Shady River, Oregon, 1971

Cynthia Jaines’s mother kept butterflies in the house. Summer afternoons, from grade school to high school, I pedaled my bike up the steep, winding road to Rockhaven, where my best friend and her mother lived in an enchanted world of color and light.

The house clung like determined lichen to a forested slope above the Columbia River. Sweating my way up the incline, my leg muscles stripped and zinging, I would tilt my face toward the glassed-in porch winking above me and picture the kaleidoscopic flutter of wings inside. A Swedish immigrant named Olsen had built the house half a century before, but in the years I frequented its stuccoed rooms, Rockhaven cocooned a female existence—its single resemblance to the bleak frame cottage my mother and I shared in the village below.

Rockhaven loomed large and beautiful to me then, although now I realize it was neither of those things. Tunneled partway into the hillside, it had two windowless bedrooms that stayed cool in summer, warm throughout the winter blows. Dining and living rooms faced off in the center of the house, unremarkable except for their respective views of sunrise and sunset. The cockpit kitchen pooched out on the sunrise side in a bay of miniature windows. But the ordinariness of those rooms escaped notice, overshadowed by two distinctive features: a native-stone fireplace whose chimney rose like a lighthouse above the river, and the stilted, glass sunporch jutting from the hillside into green air. Below its windows, the teal-blue Columbia looked placid and motionless, except when flood season churned it to cappuccino.

After the fire, only the stone chimney of the house remained. Blackened and naked, it towered above the leafy riverbank, a monument to Rockhaven’s history.

Cynthia and I were fatherless. During the long, pajamaed nights of prepubescence, we lay wide-eyed in the darkness inventing romantic histories around the shadowy figures who’d shaped us and then disappeared. But when we first met, at age seven, neither of us had any idea of such commonality. I was the new kid in school, a lost puppy, and Cynthia was the matriarch of second grade.

During my first week at Shady River Elementary, Petey Small and his band of apostles approached me at the lunch table. I was sitting alone, considering whether it was safe to eat the taupe-colored pig in my pig-in-a-blanket without any mustard to sterilize it. Petey plopped onto the seat across the table from me, rattling the plastic “spork” on my tray. The others hovered close, watching. This couldn’t be good, I decided, and chomped a semicircle from my peanut butter cookie to discourage theft.

Petey twirled a black-and-white checkered ball in his hands. “Did you play soccer in Oklahoma?” he demanded.

Undoubtedly a trick question. I wasn’t falling for anything that sounded like “sock-her.” I shook my head vigorously.

That morning Mrs. Hanson had asked me to tell the class about my background, a ploy I recognized even then as an attempt to integrate the new girl into the fixed social structure of hometown kids. They’d all hushed to hear my voice, the first time I’d spoken aloud inside the classroom. I confessed, my face steaming, that I had lived in four different states: Atlanta, Oklahoma, New Mexico and now Shady River. Mrs. Hanson was tactful enough not to correct my geography.

Thus Petey’s interest in me. “We need one more player for the other team,” he said.

Still suspecting a prank, I shook my head again. Was sock-her the Shady River version of dodgeball? I’d played that before, and wanted no part of a rerun.

Petey and the boys didn’t leave, and I realized he expected more of an answer.

“They play football in Oklahoma,” I whispered. Then added, “But not the girls.” Actually, in Oklahoma, I’d played running back during a touch football game organized by one of my first-grade teachers. I was small but evasive, swiveling through a gauntlet of classmates to the goal line, my frizzy braids flying free. The moment illuminated my memory with a freeze-frame of rare joy.

But I wasn’t inclined to share that recollection with Petey Small.

He twirled the ball and watched me with blank eyes, his mouth hanging open. Petey’s mouth always hung open.

At that moment, salvation appeared. A crescent of dark hair swung into the corner of my vision, followed by Cynthia Jaines’s oval face.

“Wanna jump rope with us?” She eyed my plate. “After you eat?”

I hadn’t had so much attention in my entire life. My cheeks burned, and I could feel my freckles standing out like Cheerios in a bowl of milk.

“Yeah!” I popped from my chair, grabbing the cookie and a celery stick. “I’m finished.”

Cynthia turned to Petey Small with a smile that showed two missing front teeth, one dimpled cheek, and mischief sparking in dark-chocolate eyes. Already she knew how to wield her charm like a weapon. I watched her, wide-eyed.

“Petey’s such a mensch, he’ll take your tray,” she said. “Won’t you, Petey?”

Neither Petey, nor I, nor his merry men had any idea whether he’d been flattered or insulted, but the strength of Cynthia’s superior knowledge struck the boys silent.

“Thanks,” I said to Petey, and shrugged.

As I hurried away from the table with Cynthia, aware of the stares that followed us, our eyes met in a moment of feminine collusion. We burst into giggles.

Cynthia’s patronage saved me from a miserable school year. At Shady River Elementary, every child among the eighteen in my class had spent not only first grade but kindergarten together. I hadn’t attended kindergarten. And after switching schools twice during first grade, I struggled to catch up. Because of Cynthia, the other children accepted me with tolerant indifference, in my view the perfect response. Left alone, I navigated safely within my three-cornered universe: the fantasy land of books, the reality of the shabby rented house I shared with my often-absent mother, and the exotic world of Cynthia Jaines.

The first time Cynthia took me home with her after school and we approached the strange rock house on the hill, I thought it looked like something from the Aesop’s Fables our teacher sometimes read aloud. I’d never heard of a real house that had a name.

The door to Rockhaven stood open to an October breeze, and Cynthia bounded in. Before my eyes could adjust from bright sunshine to the interior darkness, something huge and fluttery brushed past my head, chilling me to stone. I strangled a scream, and Cynthia’s laughter bubbled.

“That’s Zoroaster,” she said, holding up a finger as if the wild-winged thing might alight on her hand. “Isn’t he beautiful?”

He was indeed. My mouth stretched open as I watched an iridescent-blue butterfly waft toward the light of the sunporch. Wide as a dinner plate, its wings beat as if in slow motion. “Wow,” I said, while goose bumps tickled my skin.

“It’s actually a blue Morpho from South America,” she said, “but Mom gives pet names to her special ones. We have lots more. Come on, I’ll show you.”

I followed her toward the light.

The green aroma enveloped us even before I stepped onto the tiled floor and gaped at the ceiling of vines, backlit by diffused sunlight. Plants tangled at our feet and sprouted like fountains from massive pots. Along the glass walls, table planters of dark soil nourished a jungle of spiky fronds and lacy ferns. Occasional bright flowers glowed like Christmas lights among the greenery. And weaving through the maze, multicolored butterflies flapped and floated, random and slow as the river beyond the glass.

Cynthia’s mother separated from the forest and spoke to her, startling me.

“Hello, sweetie. Oh, good! You’ve brought a friend.”

Her voice was the forerunner of Cynthia’s, low-pitched and slightly sandy. Lenora Jaines smiled at me, her temples crinkling around sea-green eyes. I’d never seen eyes quite that color before.

“This is Bobbie,” Cynthia said, shortening Roberta into the nickname we’d agreed on after much consideration. I’d never had a nickname before, and to me it represented acceptance in my new world. For her, we’d picked Cincy, Cindy being far too common.

Lenora Jaines’s dark hair was swept back into a low ponytail, and loamy soil clung to her hands. Her skin was moon-colored against the backdrop of leaves. She said, “Hello, Bobbie,” and I knew then that Bobbie was my real name.

“Her mom works at the River Inn and isn’t home yet,” Cincy said. “What can we eat? Can we make rock cookies?”

Lenora appeared to think that over. “I’ll wash up and we’ll see what we can find in the kitchen.” She brushed off her hands and followed Cincy into the main house, but I lingered a moment on the sunporch, unwilling to leave the mysteries of that indoor Eden.

Once alone, I stood stock-still, my head thrown back in wonder, and inhaled the chaos around me. A zebra-striped butterfly flitted from bloom to bloom. In all four states, I’d never seen anyplace so beautiful. I wanted to take it all inside me—to sip nectar and float above the world on psychedelic wings.

“Bobbie? Come on!” Cincy called. “We’re going to bake rocks!”

I hesitated a moment longer, then turned and skipped toward the kitchen.

Lenora Jaines occupied her house with the same airy freedom as the butterflies. Mundane things like grocery shopping rarely occurred to her. In the midst of putting together supper for the three of us, she’d discover with genuine surprise an absence of milk, or cooking oil, or bread. This delighted Cincy and me, because then we’d be sent on a mission to the market.

Rockhaven sat on the Washington side of the Columbia, but the village of Shady River spread along the Oregon bank. Riding double on Cincy’s silver bike, we flew down the winding road at terrifying speeds and crossed the wide river bridge, arriving at the grocery store breathless and giddy. After making our purchase and storing our booty in the bike’s wicker basket, we walked the bike back up the incline, chewing licorice whips or sucking on sour mints—whatever dime treasure we’d chosen as our reward. In winter we rode Cincy’s homemade sled down the hill.

One balmy spring evening, we arrived back at Rockhaven bearing a dozen eggs and found a car in the driveway.

“Company!” Cincy shouted. Her mom seldom had visitors.

My neck prickled. “That’s my mom’s car,” I whispered.

Cincy clutched my arm, the aroma of jawbreaker warm on her breath. Her black eyes were caverns in the twilight. “Are you in trouble?”

“Who knows?”

She stowed the bike and we hurried inside.

Mom and Lenora sat at the scrubbed pine table in the dining room. Lenora cradled a coffee mug in her hands, and her smile looked slightly too cheerful. A wineglass stood before my mother, a remnant of dark red seeking its stem.

Would you like some coffee, Mrs. Lee?

Thanks, but do you have something stronger? Long day at work, you know?

“Hi, Mom. What are you doing here?”

Both mothers laughed, in that kids-what-are-you-going-to-do-with-them way parents have when they get together. I glanced at the clock. Mom had gotten off work only twenty minutes ago, but she’d taken time to change out of her pink hotel uniform into a pair of jeans before coming up the hill. She hated that housekeeper’s uniform.

“It was getting dark, so I came to pick you up,” she said. “Besides, I thought it was time I met Cynthia’s mother.”

She was using her kind voice. My muscles relaxed, but only a degree. I looked from her face to Lenora’s, then back again. “I’m spending the night, remember? You said it was okay.”

Cincy stood beside me still holding the eggs in their paper bag, a half smile on her face, her eyes curious as she watched my mother.

Mom shrugged and another mat of cinnamon hair escaped from its plastic clamp. “You must have asked me when I was half asleep.” She turned to Lenora. “Which I often am, after these ten-hour shifts. I’m supposed to get three days off that way, but they’re shorthanded at the hotel and I wind up working five or six days anyway.”

Lenora shook her head. “That’s grueling.”

“Yeah, but anything over forty hours is time and a half.” She straightened in the chair and pressed both hands to the small of her back. “Thank God I’m off tomorrow.”

“Bobbie’s welcome to stay tonight,” Lenora said. “You could sleep late.”

Mom looked at me. “Bobbie?”

I hadn’t told her my nickname and the stamp of her disapproval was clear.

“Please, can she stay?” Cincy said. “Two of our cecropia moths are supposed to hatch tomorrow.”

I knew the verdict before she answered. Begging would only bring trouble later.

“Maybe next weekend,” my mother said. “I haven’t had a Saturday off in a long time. Roberta and I need to do some shopping.”

“Of course.” Lenora’s voice was open and friendly. “But please know that Bobbie’s always welcome. Any weekend you have to work, send her up. I’m always home.”

The slightest stiffening of my mother’s neck sent me into action. “I’ll get my bag.”

I ran to Cincy’s room, snatched my pillowcase satchel from the debris on her bed and flew back to the kitchen, afraid to let something happen in my absence. Cincy stood where I’d left her, still watching my mom with intense interest. I wondered what she saw. They had met once before, at my house, but only for a few minutes when Cincy and I had gone by after school to leave Mom a note and found her home unexpectedly. That day, she’d taken off work with one of her headaches and was glad enough for us to leave her alone.

“I’ll call you tomorrow to see if they hatched,” I said to Cincy.

“Okay. If they have, maybe you can come up and see them after you get back.”

“Get back?”

Cincy looked at me. “From shopping.” Her voice sounded envious.

“Oh. Okay.”

With sudden understanding, I realized Cincy was picturing a mother-daughter day out, perhaps trying on clothes as she loved to do. I wondered if Lenora thought that, too. She gave me a smile but I couldn’t read her eyes.

On the short drive down the hill, my mother and I didn’t talk. A pale amber moon had risen in the southeast, glittering the wide surface of the Columbia as our tires rumbled onto the bridge. This bridge was the last wooden structure on the entire river, my teacher had said. I rolled down the window, but I couldn’t feel the magical pull of the river the way I did when I crossed the bridge alone. Tonight the river was only a deep-slumbering giant, distant from the lives of little girls.

Mom began to sing, her voice silvery and clear as the light off the river. “I see the moon, the moon sees me, down through the leaves of the old oak tree. Please let the light that shines on me, shine on the one I love.”

The tires rumbled off the bridge and onto the blacktop beyond. “So I guess now you’re mad at me,” she said.

I didn’t answer. I stared ahead toward the sparse lights of Shady River.

“I was lonesome for you, honey.” Her voice was soft now, conciliatory. “Seems like we’re never home at the same time. At least, not awake.”

The knot in my chest softened, but I still had nothing to say. I took in a deep breath that smelled of the river.

My mother sighed and changed tactics. “What in the world is a see-crap-ya moth?”

I burst into giggles, knowing I’d been tricked but grateful to give up the painful anger. “Not crap-ya! Cecropia. It’s a huge moth that doesn’t have a mouth. It can’t eat so it doesn’t live very long.”

I linked my thumbs and pressed the fingers of each hand together, like wings. Moonlight animated my hands with shadows. “The caterpillar spins a silk cocoon that’s brown and hairy, like a coconut. But smaller, of course. Lenora counts the days and knows when it’s supposed to hatch.”

Caught up in the mystery of metamorphosis, I watched my hands act out the drama. “When it’s ready, it gives off some kind of juice that makes a hole in the cocoon, and it crawls out. Its wings are all wet and crinkled up on its back. As they dry out they expand, like a bud opening into a flower.”

“Lenora told you all this?”

“Uh-huh. She’s seen it happen.”

“Yuk,” Mom said, and shuddered. “Sounds disgusting.”

She began to sing again. “Through thick and through thin, all out or all in, but we’ll muddle through….”

She paused, waiting for me to join in, but I wasn’t in the mood.

“To-geth-er,” she finished.

It was her traveling song. She’d sung it as we drove the miles from Atlanta to Oklahoma City, from Oklahoma City to Albuquerque, from there to Shady River. Bored on the long drives, I added my unmusical voice to her firm, resonant one, a kazoo accompanying a violin. Somewhere along the miles, listening to my mother’s voice, I came to believe that everyone in the world has at least one gift. I wondered what mine might be. Maybe I’d be a scientist, like Lenora. Once I’d caught up with my classmates, I turned out to be smart at school. Maybe I’d win the no-bell prize for science that my teacher had mentioned, though I couldn’t figure out what bells had to do with it.

Mom parked the old Ford Fairlane in the beat-out track beneath the carport. She’d stopped singing now, her mind on other diversions. I recognized that quietness.

Inside the house, I queried the darkness for Rathbone, the stray cat who’d adopted us part-time. “Kitty, kitty?”

No answer. Somehow Rathbone managed to come and go from the house as he pleased. Mom probably forgot to close one of the windows.

She switched on the small light over the kitchen stove and made bologna sandwiches, pouring milk for me, wine for her. I ate my sandwich and left the milk. She left half her sandwich but drank the wine and refilled her glass.

“Get ready for bed, honey. It’s getting late,” she said.

In my tiny bedroom, hardly larger than Cincy’s walk-in closet, I donned the oversize T-shirt I used for a nightgown, then went into the bathroom and brushed my teeth over the stained sink. When I came back to say good-night, Mom was sitting on one end of the sofa in the darkened living room, her feet curled beneath her. She offered a one-armed, halfhearted hug.

The faint disinfectant scent she always carried from her job mingled with the stronger odor of wine. I knew that, in the darkness, the wine bottle sat on the end table next to her.

“You ought to go to bed now, too,” I said, resting my head against her soft breast. “You’re always tired.”

“I will, honey. Pretty quick. Sleep tight, now.” She kissed my hair, dismissing me.

In my dream I was a cecropia larva, trapped inside my cocoon. I chewed and clawed but I couldn’t rend the tough silk fiber I’d spun around myself. I awoke in a panic, the sheet twisted around my legs. Kicking free, I lay in the darkness with my eyes open, waiting for my thudding heart to return to normal.

A dim light still glowed through the open bedroom door. I gathered up the chenille spread from the foot of my bed and carried it into the living room.

My mother was asleep on the couch, snoring lightly, the empty wine bottle on the floor beneath her outstretched arm. A shaft of moonlight whitened the hourglass-shaped scar on the inside of her arm, a mark she would never explain. Her breathing didn’t change as I covered her legs and pulled the spread up to her chin.

My feet were cold when I crawled back in bed, and the knot behind my breastbone had returned. But this time I was angry at myself. For a moment that evening, driving home with my mother and the moonlight on my hands, I’d actually believed we might go shopping tomorrow.




CHAPTER 3


Shady River, 1974

Three, six, nine, the moose drank wine,

The monkey chewed tobacco on the streetcar line.

Line broke. Monkey got choked.

All went to heaven in a little blue boat.

I was pretty good at jumping rope, Cincy was better, but Samantha never missed. Never. We had to make a new rule for her, or else it would have been her turn the entire recess. Lean and tall, with long red curls that thrashed about her head in rhythm to her pounding feet, Sam called out her own cadence without even panting. She said that after high school she was going to play ice hockey for a pro team in Canada.

Sam’s best friend was Patty Johnson. Patty had no coordination, but she had a wide, freckled face that laughed at everything, and besides, she brought the rope. The four of us met on the playground every recess of fifth grade. We’d chant the cadence, then count each rope-skip until the jumper missed—or Samantha reached a hundred. We knew half a dozen rhymes, but the moose one sounded so sophisticated and subversive it was our favorite. Years later, in college, I heard a jazz musician sing the same words and felt a thrill of kinship.

Occasionally, other girls joined us. When six or more of us stood in the circle, sounding off in unison like an army cadre, our blended voices drew a crowd of watchers. Those times were exciting, like having company. But I loved it best when it was just the four of us, carefree and comfortable together.

On the rare days I couldn’t go home with Cincy after school, my stomach began a queasy rolling as soon as the dismissal bell rang, as I wondered if my mother would be home yet, and in what condition. Usually she drank wine, which made her mellow and affectionate. If I targeted my requests for the third glass, I could do pretty much whatever I wanted. Waiting past the third was successful but risky; the next day she’d deny giving permission. But on the rare occasions she drank whiskey, she got mean. Later on, as a budding high school scientist, I deduced that the different effects of wine and whiskey must be psychosomatic; alcohol was alcohol once it entered the bloodstream. Probably she drank wine when she was feeling gentle and whiskey when she felt mean. But in grade school, all I knew was that the only times Mom struck me were accompanied by the yeasty aroma of bourbon.

In the seventies, nobody thought a parental palm across the mouth of a sassy child constituted child abuse. Not even the child. Nevertheless, by age ten I’d learned to search the house when she wasn’t home and pour any hard liquor down the drain. I washed away the odor with plenty of water and replaced the empty bottle where I found it, so she’d think she drank it all the night before.

I left the wine alone. She was rather cheerless when she was sober, and she worried too much.

Even the wine didn’t help during the holidays. Mom began to get irritable around Thanksgiving and by Christmas she’d progress to morose. I had one hazy memory of a merry Christmas—Mom, Dad and me beside a sparkling tree; their laughter as I careened back and forth on a spring-mounted rocking horse necklaced with a red bow. The last Christmas we spent together, I was three. Every year, when the first tinsel and fake snow appeared in department store windows, I called up that memory and turned it over and over in my mind to keep it alive.

Mom always feigned good cheer as we opened our gifts, but there was no light in her eyes and they sagged at the corners like the cushions on our secondhand sofa. The only sparkle came when she opened my handmade gift.

Since I never had money to shop, I’d continued the tradition initiated by my first grade teacher, who helped us make a felt-wrapped, glitter-spangled pencil holder from an orange juice can. Mom had made a fuss over it—after I explained what it was—and her fate was sealed. In second grade, the homeroom mother provided red-and-green strips of polyester which I dutifully wove into a pot holder, perhaps the single ugliest handicraft ever committed. In third, we framed our school photos in plaster of paris, painted gold, and in fourth grade Mr. Burns helped us tie-dye T-shirts and print them with autumn leaves. Our fifth-grade teacher, an unartistic sort, abandoned us to our own devices. I panicked.

Cincy, as usual, provided the answer. From a high shelf in her cluttered closet, she produced a sand bucket full of tiny seashells. “I picked them up at the beach one summer when Mom and I went to the ocean,” Cincy told me. She dumped them onto the bedspread, sand and all.

In her mother’s sewing box, Cincy found a gold metallic string left over from the sixties when Lenora strung love beads. Cincy often wore them to school. Digging deeper in the box, I claimed a piece of thin black cord, soft and shiny like satin. It was the perfect contrast to the delicate chalkiness of the shells.

Every day that autumn, as the afternoons shortened and the evenings chilled, we sat cross-legged on Cincy’s bed and strung the scrolled, pastel treasures into necklaces for our moms. The project went slowly. Most shells required tiny holes bored with the tip of a screw before we could string them. Lenora accepted her banishment from the room with good humor, and I saw her only when we arrived after school or when she called us out for supper. It was that December, when we were almost eleven, that Cincy told me about her father.

Accustomed to an all-female world, I hadn’t thought to wonder about the missing male in her family. At my house, fathers were a taboo subject. But one evening as we prepared to work on the shell necklaces, Cincy moved a pile of rumpled clothes on her dresser and knocked over a picture of a man in camouflage clothes.

The picture bore an inscription at the lower right: “To Lenora, with love. PFC Harley Jaines.” I picked it up. “Who’s that?”

“That’s my dad,” Cincy said matter-of-factly. “He was killed in the Vietnam war.”

The young man in the photo was dark-complexioned, and even with his military haircut, I could tell his hair was ink-black. He stood against a backdrop of foliage as dense as the wilderness on Lenora’s sunporch.

“He kind of looks like you,” I said.

“He was half Cherokee. Which makes me one-quarter.”

“How did he get killed? I mean, was he shot?”

“Nobody knows,” she said. “He was reported missing in action. His body was never found.”

She laid the picture on the bed beside us while we bored and strung the tiny shells. PFC Harley Jaines smiled up at me, proud and straight, and I wished my father had been killed in a war, instead of deserting us. I had no photo of him.

“They went to college together, in California,” Cincy told me. “Mom’s parents divorced when she was in high school, and she got a job and lived by herself. She had a scholarship for college but she had to work, too. She was a waitress in the Student Union.”

I’d never heard of a Student Union, but I could hear the echo of Lenora’s words in the story Cincy told, so I kept quiet, craving this glimpse into her past.

“My dad worked there, too,” Cincy said, “only he wasn’t my dad then. He worked in a big room where they had pool tables. He’d come over to the café and talk to Mom and drink Cokes, and they fell in love.”

In my mind, the image rose up in black and white, like an old movie. “Then what happened?”

Cincy slipped a shell on her string and reached for another. “Harley didn’t like school, so he dropped out and got a job building houses. Then he got drafted.”

“What’s drafted?”

“Called into the Army, to fight in the war. Mom didn’t believe in it—the war, I mean—and she tried to get him to run away to Canada. But he wouldn’t. He went away to get trained, then came back for three days. Then he got on a ship and went to Vietnam.” Her voice turned confidential. “She never saw him again.”

“Oooh. That’s so sad. But if she never saw him again, how—”

“Pretty soon she found out she was pregnant.” Cincy’s eyes flashed up at me, mischievously. “So guess what they’d been doing those three days!”

My face turned hot and Cincy giggled, bouncing the bed. “She wrote to him and they were going to get married when he came home. But Harley was reported missing in 1963, the year I was born.”

My mouth fell open. She seemed pleased that I was properly impressed.

She leaned forward, whispering. “I’m illegitimate. A love child. Mom says not to tell anyone because some people wouldn’t understand.”

“I’ll never tell anybody,” I promised.

“The same year I was born,” Cincy said, “Mom’s father—my grandfather—committed suicide. Shot himself right in the ear! He left her some money, so she loaded me and all her stuff in the old Volkswagen—the same one we have now—and started driving.”

I pictured the two of them, alone on the road—just like my mom and me. Only Cincy had been just a baby.

“When she came to Shady River, she bought this house with the money my grandfather left. People thought she was a war widow and they were real nice to us, so she used Harley’s last name and pretended they’d been married.”

My chest ached with a sweet, sad longing. Haltingly, I explained that my mother and I, too, had come to Shady River alone, looking for a place to settle.

Cincy grasped the parallel at once and embraced it with characteristic vocabulary. “Fate brought us both here!” she said, her dark eyes shining. “We were destined to be best friends forever.”

The power of my emotions embarrassed me, and I averted my eyes.

“Yeah,” I said. “Forever.” And concentrated on boring a hole into the peach-colored shell in my trembling hands.

On the Thursday before Christmas we had snow. Cincy left school early to visit her grandmother in Seattle. She wouldn’t be back until Sunday, the day before Christmas Eve.

My mom had to work Saturday and Sunday, so I spent the long, gray days home alone, wrapped up in a blanket with my Laura Ingalls Wilder books. The evenings were even lonelier, with Mom at the lowest ebb of her holiday funk.

On Sunday evening Cincy phoned. “I’m back!” Her voice was bubbly, full of adventure and holiday spirit.

Mine was envious. “Did you have fun?”

“The airplane ride was cool. Grandma’s kind of a pain—she’s always nagging at Mom. But she gave me lots of stuff. Some of it’s weird, but there’s this hood with a long muffler attached, and it’s lined with fur. Wait’ll you see it.”

She paused, as if noticing my silence. “So what’ve you been doing?”

“Absolutely nothing.”

“Is your mom home?”

I had no secrets from Cincy. “Three, six, nine …”

“Your mom drank wine,” she finished, giggling. “Good! Then she’ll let you come up! Ask her and call me back. I’ll meet you at the bridge.”

The night was crystalline, with diamond-nugget stars and a crescent moon bright enough to illuminate the snow. Bursting from the oppressive bungalow into the sharp beauty of the night,

I felt like a prisoner set free in a fantasy land. I couldn’t keep from running.

I had stuffed my pajamas in one pocket of my blue car coat and my toothbrush and hairbrush in the other. With the hood buttoned under my chin and Mom’s black boots over my ten-nies, I felt snug and insulated from the cold. The air bit my lungs as I whooped and howled huge puffs of steam toward the moon.

After a block I slowed to a walk, tired out by the extra baggage of boots and padding. On a rise I turned and looked back at the lights of the village. Red and green dotted the edges of scattered roof lines; a church steeple ascended in tiny white sparkles. All was silent. As I stood panting warm air onto tingling fingers, a carillon began its wistful chime: “O come, all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant …”

Somewhere far off a dog barked, and my vision shimmered as I turned toward the river again, my boots crunching through the snow.

The steel arches above the bridge framed it in a latticework of white. From my end, I could see Cincy entering the other, a dark red blotch against the snowy rise beyond. On the darkened hillside, Rockhaven’s sunporch glittered with holiday lights like a jewel nestled in black velvet.

“Merry Christmas! Ho, ho, ho!” Cincy shouted. Her husky voice echoed from one riverbank to the other.

I laughed aloud, delight welling up until I thought I’d explode in a shower of stars.

Neither of us ran to the center of the bridge. Instead, we paced off the distance like graduates, or soldiers bearing the casket of a fallen friend. At the center of the bridge Cincy opened her padded arms and mitten-clad hands and we bear-hugged, two snowmen giggling with the secret of life. She was wearing the fur-lined hood her grandmother had given her and she looked like a snow princess.

We turned and looked out across the slow-moving water. It was too beautiful to talk about, and too cold, so we leaned on the railing in silence.

Finally, Cincy clapped me on the back with her red wool paw. “Let’s go home before we freeze, Gwendolyn. Your teeth are chattering.”

She was always making up dramatic names to call me. “Quite so, Alexandra,” I said.

“Follow me, Rapunzel.”

“Lead on, Sarsaparilla!”

Holding our sides, we laughed and stumbled all the way up the hill to Rockhaven.

When my mother opened the tissue-wrapped box and saw the pale swirls of salmon and ivory nestled on their bed of cotton, her mouth dropped open. After so many crude and childish gifts, this one was a shock. She glanced at me quickly.

“I made it. Cincy gave me the seashells.”

Her fingers lifted the necklace slowly, touching each unique link. “It’s beautiful, Roberta! Like something from an expensive jewelry store.”

I beamed, my ego bursting. This must be what people meant when they said it was better to give than to receive.

Mom slipped the necklace over her head, lifting her frizzy hair so the shells wreathed her neck and hung down over the sweatshirt she wore for pajamas.

It was Christmas Eve, our traditional time for exchanging gifts. We had eaten supper, put on our pajamas and made hot chocolate, then come to the tree. We never did play the Santa game. After the rocking horse year, Mom always put my gifts under the tree early. Maybe our ritual let her avoid memories of Christmas mornings with my father. Whatever the reason, I liked opening gifts after dark much better than in the cold light of morning, when the tree lights looked pale and hungover.

As usual, three gifts waited under the tree for me, only one for Mom. Before we moved to Shady River, she used to get something in the mail from her sister Olivia, the only relative she ever admitted to having. But we hadn’t heard from Aunt Olivia in years.

The Christmas of the shell necklace was special for another reason, too. After I’d opened my two boxes of clothes and one containing a new mystery book, Mom told me to put on my shoes and coat.

“What for?”

She smiled and leaned toward me, her eyes wide. “You have one more present, and it was too big to get in the house.” She seemed excited while we scrambled into our wraps.

Cold wind sneaked under the tail of my nightgown, molesting my bare legs as my mother led me out through the carport to the backyard. It was a small area, unfenced, that bordered an alley used by garbage trucks. I never went out there in wintertime. In the snow-lit night I saw next to the house a large shape covered with a sheet of plastic and an old quilt. I gasped, hoping beyond hope that it was what I thought it was.

Mom helped me pull away the covering. There in the moonlight stood a bicycle. Even in the darkness I could tell it was metallic red.

“I can’t believe it! This is so cool!”

“It’s not new, but it doesn’t have a scratch on it,” she said. “Look.” She reached over and squeezed the rubber bulb on an old-fashioned horn attached to the handlebars. It made a sound like a lost Canada goose.

The horn would have to go, but I didn’t say so then. Stamping my feet in the snow, my teeth chattering, I ran my hands over the silver handlebars, the red fenders. I still couldn’t believe it was real.

I never asked for specific Christmas presents because we were always short on money, but I wasn’t above hinting. For three years I’d dropped hints about a bike and finally given up. This year I’d started on contact lenses, though the eye doctor said there was no sense getting them until I was fifteen. I figured a four-year head start was none too soon. The bike proved my theory.

“Are you sure we can’t get it in the house?” I said.

Mom shrugged. “Maybe the two of us can.”

She brought the quilt while I rolled my new bike through the carport. We hefted it up the two steps and into the kitchen, where it left wet marks on the linoleum. The kickstand was missing, so I leaned the handlebar against the kitchen cabinet and inspected every gleaming inch of my incredible gift. Mom watched me, smiling.

I didn’t know how she’d managed the money, and I didn’t care. I didn’t want to know anything that might diminish my joy.

“Thanks, Mom. I love it.”

I hugged her, still looking at the red bike and thinking I could hardly wait to show Cincy. I’d learned how to ride on her bike.

But I couldn’t do that tonight, so we popped corn and Mom opened a bottle of wine while I wiped the bike tracks from the floor. We curled up in blankets on the sofa and watched television together until we fell asleep.

When I awoke it was light and a church program was on TV. Mom’s blanket lay empty at the other end of the sofa. I smelled bacon and waffles, and then I remembered the bike.

I wrapped my blanket around me and shuffled into the kitchen. “Merry Christmas,” she said. “Breakfast’s ready.” She ate her waffle dry, like toast, and had wine instead of apple juice.

By midmorning, Mom was beyond caring when I put on my coat and rode my new bike through quiet streets toward the river. Leftover snow lay in brownish-gray heaps along the roadside. Not a car was stirring, the children still inside playing with their Christmas toys.

O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie, the church bells played. The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.

On my new bike, in the crystalline morning with my friends’ house in view, I couldn’t have said why I was crying.




CHAPTER 4


Alberta, Canada, 1990

On Wednesday morning, the day of my appointment at the clinic in Calgary, I awake at 7:00 a.m. feeling nauseated. David’s side of the bed is rumpled and already cold. My limbs feel like pine logs and a dull ache pulses behind my eyes. I remember watching the clock’s red numerals flick to 2:00 a.m., then three, and four.

From beneath the warmth of my down comforter, I sense a coldness in the house and know that it’s snowing outside. Winter here is heartless and beautiful, and it lasts most of the year. David grew up in Canada and he inherited this house, his father’s summer place, in recompense for years of neglect. But David loves the house and these mountains; his few happy memories from childhood are here. After college he wanted to move back to the mountains, and I didn’t object. I had nowhere else to go.

I pull on my robe and fleece-lined slippers and squeeze behind David’s weight machine to look out the tall, narrow window of our upstairs bedroom.

A world of white assails my eyes. There’s no horizon, no sky or land or trees. Nothing but a blur of blinding whiteness.

The icy knot in my stomach expands. Calgary is a forty-minute drive in good weather, the first part over two-lane mountain roads. David will take his four-wheel-drive to work, thinking I’ll stay home as usual. I have a vision of my silver Honda sliding over a steep edge, nosing down into free fall with me gripping the wheel in stony horror.

At least I wouldn’t be pregnant anymore.

Downstairs, in our warm, country-style kitchen, I realize that once again I’ve calculated wrong. David is humming about in his navy sweat suit, obviously not ready for work. Even the baggy suit doesn’t camouflage his lean fitness. Surely he won’t run this morning, in all this snow.

Coffee gurgles into its glass carafe and I smell bagels in the toaster. The radio plays softly from a cluttered shelf opposite the white square of window. David looks up, brown hair askew and a shadow of stubble on his cheeks. He grins. “The pass is closed!”

The shine in his brown eyes makes me think of the first time I met them across a worktable at school. He was smiling then, too, and I felt something like an electrical shock, a buzzing in my fingertips. His major was history and mine biology. We might never have met if we hadn’t been assigned to the same practicum at the Museum of Natural History in Tacoma, where we were students at Puget Sound University. The first time I saw him he asked me on a coffee date. I said yes without even thinking. I was nineteen and had never been on an actual date before.

I smile back at him now. “Lucky you.” I look away quickly to hide the glaze of panic that stiffens my face.

I’ll have to cancel my appointment. How can I phone without his knowing?

David is a curator of exhibits at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary and he loves his work. Still, he’s as happy with his snow day as a kid out of school. He hums around the kitchen, pouring orange juice into a glass, which he sets at my place on the wooden table.

“What would you like with your bagel, ma’am, besides creamed cheese? An omelet? Fruit?”

I slide into the wooden chair, feel the coldness of its carved spindles against my back. “Just coffee, thanks.”

David looks disappointed. The toaster ejects two sliced bagel halves and he stacks them on a small plate and inserts two more. He sets the plate before me along with two cartons of creamed cheese from the refrigerator—strawberry and maple pecan.

I look at the food with a mixture of hunger and nausea, thinking only a pregnant person could have both sensations at once. I take a moment to wonder at this phenomenon and a niggling regret etches through my chest. Some primordial part of me wants to experience pregnancy, some part that’s genetically programmed to preserve the species. I picture a small, warm body in my arms. I imagine telling David he’s going to be a father, and seeing the innocent joy on his face.

It can’t happen. I’d mess up the child for life, leave it an emotional cripple like its mother.

My fingernails rake the scars on my forearms. After all these years, they still itch every morning. Tears have welled at the corners of my eyes and to hide this from David I rise and pour coffee into two oversize mugs. Coffee slops over the edges.

“Be right back,” I say, and head for the bathroom.

During breakfast, with no newspaper today, David wants to talk. “This omelet tastes great.”

I glance over at his eggs, speckled with bell pepper and mushrooms, and my stomach rolls.

“Want to share?” he says.

“Um. I’m not that hungry.”

He wolfs down another forkful. “So what are you up to today?”

A bite of bagel clogs my throat. I cough, take a sip of scalding coffee to wash it down. “Nothing really. Just my needlework, I guess.”

“Want to put on snowshoes and go for a walk? The mountain will be spectacular in all this snow.” He lifts his eyebrows hopefully.

“Um. Maybe later, if it lets up. Right now we could get lost, it’s so heavy.”

“Nonsense,” he says heartily. “I’ll drop bread crumbs.”

When I don’t respond, he leans his arms on the table. “You ought to get out of the house more,” he says, his levity gone.

I don’t want to have this conversation again this morning. Finally he shrugs and turns the radio up a notch. The news is mostly about the weather. They expect the snow to keep up until early afternoon. The snowplows won’t bother trying to clear the pass until it stops.

David will be home all day. What if I don’t call, and simply don’t show up for me appointment? They must be used to that—young women having second thoughts, changing their minds. I don’t know this doctor and will never see him again afterward. His name and the number of the Calgary clinic were given to me by a women’s hotline. They promised me anonymity. If his nurse won’t let me reschedule, I can always get another name. But I can’t wait too long.

Another thought freezes me: if I don’t show up, will someone from the clinic call here? I try to remember if I gave them my number. I think I did. Yes, the woman who scheduled me insisted, in case the doctor had an emergency on the day of my appointment. What if they phone here and David answers? I can’t take the chance. Later, when David’s in the shower or outdoors, I’ll have to call.

I glance across the table at my husband, a good man, an honest man. He deserves more than he’s getting from this marriage. I wonder why he stays.

David and I were drawn together by mutual loneliness camouflaged as sexual attraction. I never hid from him the fact that I was living at the sanatorium, voluntarily. I had a private cottage by then and could come and go as I pleased. Staying on the grounds was an anchor for me, someplace I could pretend was home. And I still met twice a week with Dr. Bannar.

David seemed unfazed by this, even when he came to visit me there. Later I learned that his mother had spent time in psychiatrists’ offices; maybe he thought all women did. He was interested in my past, but not morbidly so. He had some shadows of his own, he said. I never asked, but after we’d dated for a while, he told me.

He’d had a brother, only a year older. Michael was athletic and tall; David slight from bouts of childhood asthma. David had worshiped Michael and followed him everywhere. The day Michael drowned in the ocean, sucked away by the undertow, David was playing twenty feet away in the shallow waves.

They were ten and eleven. “If I’d been stronger, like Michael was, I might have saved him,” David told me, lying on his back in bed in his apartment, after we’d made love. It was a single bed and his arm was hooked underneath me to keep me from rolling off.

“Probably not,” I said, picturing his thin, boy’s body knee-deep in the water, in the horror. “It’s hard to save anybody in the ocean. Especially if they’re bigger than you are.”

“I was scrawny then,” he said, “but I never cared until Michael died.”

I ran my hand over his muscled chest and understood why he lifted weights and ran every morning in the dark, what he was running from. I rolled on top of him and we made love again.

Our lovemaking was always urgent, but gentle, too. Neither of us could get enough. He would trace the scars on my neck with light kisses. Dr. Bannar told me sex could be a healing experience. David and I joked about that. “How about a little physical therapy this afternoon?”

When he asked me to marry him the spring he got his degree, I still had three semesters to go. But I agreed, knowing he was worthy of love, knowing I didn’t quite love him because I was afraid to. Hoping I might grow into it.

On this snowy morning, as David gets up to refill our coffee cups, I ask myself if that has happened. We’ve been married almost five years.

The news over, the radio has switched to music and David turns it down. He picks up his empty plate and gestures for mine. I shake my head; three-quarters of my bagel still sits on my plate. He takes his coffee and leaves the room.

I feel great affection for David. I respect him and would miss him terribly if he were gone. Is that what loving a man is supposed to feel like? I’ve loved only women—Lenora and Cynthia, and maybe my mother when I was small. Love mixed up with pain.

I think of Lenora—and remember, like an electric shock, the visit yesterday from Harley Jaines. I’ve been so fixated on my appointment in Calgary that I’d blocked him out.

“I believe you have the power to set her free. You tried to tell the truth once … I’m asking you to try again.” Heat rolls through my stomach like lava. I don’t even know if this stranger is who he claims to be.

But that’s rationalizing. Those eyes, that chin … yes, he is the man in the picture, Cincy’s father. He’s back from the dead and he obviously cares about Lenora. It can’t be for money, because she has nothing. If she is paroled—or pardoned—would the two of them live together, happily ever after?

The idea seems so childish I can’t even hold it in my mind. I decide to ignore the resurrected Harley Jaines. Maybe he’ll disappear like a wisp of my imagination. So many things will go away if you ignore them long enough. Like that line from a poem, “The face of the mother with children/ignores and ignores….”

But unlike old memories, a pregnancy can’t be ignored. This I must deal with immediately. Dr. Bannar would be proud of my ability to make a firm decision and take action, whether she agreed with the action or not. “Take responsibility for your life,” she kept saying. “Take control.”

Would she agree with abortion? I wouldn’t know even if I could ask her. She always turned the hard questions back to me.

After breakfast, David stands in the closed-in back porch and dresses in thermal coveralls, ski mask and snowshoes. “Come with me,” he urges.

“Maybe later.”

I am glad his ski mask hides his disappointment. I tell myself I will go out after I make the phone call. As soon as David steps out into the snow, I go upstairs to the telephone in our bedroom.

As so often happens, all my worrying has been over nothing. The doctor’s assistant is understanding when I tell her the pass is closed and I have to cancel. Why wouldn’t she be? The blizzard isn’t my doing, after all; it’s an act of God. She cheerfully reschedules me for two weeks later. I hang up the phone with a buzzing in my ears as loud as the dial tone. My heartbeat jolts my chest.

Downstairs, I pull on my own thermal coveralls, boots and hood. I lash snowshoes onto my boots and step awkwardly out the back door into the white wilderness.

The cold makes me gasp. Tears form in my eyes and immediately turn into frost on my eyelashes. I scan the yard for David, but he’s out of sight.

The mountainside is eerie as a moonscape and incredibly beautiful. I start off toward the hiking trail David maintains, which winds through our acreage and up the steep slope behind our house to a meadow that overlooks the valley for miles. I hope this is the direction he’s gone; why didn’t I ask?

On the trail, the trees become trees again instead of white mounds. Their trunks are packed with snow on the north side and branches droop like the oily wings of cormorants I once saw along a northern coast after an oil spill. I slog along the trail, listening to the whirring silence of snow sifting through fir and pine, and my own labored breath.

After a few minutes, I stop. Trees surround me, and I can no longer see David’s tracks or where the trail has gone. I search for landmarks, but any familiar deadfall or boulder is buried in snow. Everything is changed, as if I’ve never been here before.

Perhaps I haven’t. I turn a circle but can’t see the house. I don’t even know which direction it is. This slope catches the wind, and my tracks, too, are fast disappearing. I begin retracing them but come to a halt when the space ahead of me seems to fall away steeply. I don’t remember this drop-off….

I look straight up through the trees. “The woods are lovely, dark and deep/But I have promises to keep/ And miles to go before I sleep/And miles to go before I sleep.”

“David!”

My scream sounds muffled in the snowy silence. I draw a deep breath and try again.

“David, I’m lost! David!”




CHAPTER 5


I stand rooted to the snowy slope like the fir trees around me, screaming David’s name. My snowshoes sink inch by inch into foot-deep powder.

I listen hard into the rushing silence but hear only the sigh of the wind through the trees. My eyes strain to see past the flurry of whiteness until even the distinction of vertical pine trunks disappears, and I am snowblind.

Vertigo gathers momentum like an avalanche in my brain. I take deep breaths, fighting it, but lose the battle. The sky spins. I summon all my strength behind my hoarse voice.

“David! Can you hear me?”

Then I am falling.

Not through snow, but into a wall of leaping flames. The hillside, the sky, the world is engulfed in fire. Bright wings beat wildly inside my head, fighting to escape. I am running through flames … glass walls explode … my foot connects with something soft, something human that shouldn’t be there. And I am falling through fire….

When my eyes jerk open, I’m lying in the snow. An unbearable nausea, like seasickness, washes over me. Cold burns my face.

I hear a muffled sound. David’s voice?

My elbows tremble when I push myself up and struggle to my feet, clinging to a tree while the world swims around me. I hold my breath and listen.

“Roberta! Keep yelling so I can find you!”

Heat floods through my stiff limbs. His voice sounds far away, but I fix on its location and the vertigo disappears.

Keep yelling, he said. I can do that.

“I’m here! Over here!”

Breathless but weirdly elated, I suck in air and call out again. I struggle to move but am stuck in the snow.

A dark shape materializes from the whirl of falling flakes—Sasquatch in a red ski cap. An overgrown redheaded blackbird. I start to laugh.

By the time David wraps me in his insulated arms, I’m giggling wildly. I feel his warm breath against my cheek, but he isn’t laughing. He holds me tightly until I quiet down. Then he turns me away from the drop-off and guides me through the trees with a gloved hand.

His breath comes through the red mask in steamy puffs. “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming out? I’d have waited for you.”

I don’t answer. I don’t remember the answer. It doesn’t matter anyway. What matters is that he knows how to find the trail. My knees tremble lifting the clumsy snowshoes.

“Maybe we ought to mark the path with yellow flags or something,” I suggest, trying to sound normal. But my voice shakes so that when I hear it, I start to laugh again, but only a little.

“Good idea. If I’d realized how low the visibility is, I wouldn’t have come out until later. I nearly got lost myself.”

This isn’t true, of course. He’s trying to make me feel better about my helplessness. David grew up in these woods; he came here with his parents every summer of his first eleven years. In the winter they used to cross-country ski here. After his parents divorced, he even came back once with his dad, before they gave up trying to talk to each other.

When I see the outline of the house ahead of us, my heart makes a painful leap that catches in my chest. If it were possible in snowshoes, I would run.

My confidence returns as we get closer to home, though I don’t let go of David’s arm. At the back porch I turn to look out across the white wonderland. The snowfall has lessened for the moment, the sky lifted. Mountain peaks shrouded in clouds angle downward in frosted slopes that sink away toward the valley.

Severely beautiful. We stand a moment in silence.

“How about some hot chocolate?” I say, as cold seeps beneath my layers of clothes.

“Sounds good. After I feed the birds, I’ll come in.”

Not many species of birds winter here, but David feeds the hardy ones every day. From our sunporch windows I can watch them gobble seeds and suet, insulating their tiny bird bones from the cold. Sometimes I spend entire mornings watching them scratch and peck atop our picnic table and beneath it. I wonder where they sleep in the subzero Canadian nights, and how they manage not to get lost.

That evening the TV weatherman says the blizzard is over and the pass has been cleared. I digest this news with mixed feelings.

The next morning David gets ready for work. “Why don’t you get dressed and go with me?” he says. “You could poke around the museum this morning.” He knows I love spending time there alone, especially in the Rungius gallery. The artist’s wildlife and landscape paintings are breathtaking; I never tire of seeing them.

“At lunch I could drop you off at the shopping mall,” David says. “Or the library.”

“I’ll be fine here. Really. I don’t feel like going to town today.”

He gives me a quick goodbye kiss before he goes out the door. I hear his Jeep start up and plow down the unshoveled driveway.

When I’ve cleaned up the breakfast dishes, I settle on the sun-porch with my needlework. The butterfly on the pillowtop blooms yellow and black, its stripes vibrant in the warm cone of lamplight. The colors are satin beneath my fingertips. Secure in this familiar way, I let myself think about my postponed doctor’s appointment, and about what happened yesterday morning in the snow.

The dreams of Rockhaven come less frequently now, just as Dr. Bannar predicted. Except for the nights when I don’t take the sleeping pills she prescribed. Sometimes those sleepless nights are a refuge, a time zone separate and unconnected to my repetitious, panic-filled days. In the quiet dark, I take out the past like an old locket and turn it over and over in my hands. I try to believe that when I’ve done this a specific but indeterminate number of times, I will be able to put it away forever.

It isn’t working. How long can I live this way before I step over the edge again?

At midmorning David phones, ostensibly to ask if I want anything from the store. I know he’s checking on me; he’s such a worrier. I list bagels and milk and whatever fresh vegetables at the market look edible today.

By lunchtime I have finished embroidering the orange-and-blue spots on the butterfly’s hindwings. I am rethreading with black, looking forward to outlining the teardrop-shaped swallowtails, when the telephone rings again. Impatient, I pick up the receiver intending to tell David I’m not a child and he doesn’t need to keep calling.

My stomach lurches at the sound of the bass voice that reverberates across the line. It needs no identification, but he gives one anyway.

“It’s Harley Jaines.”

The embroidery needle pierces my fist and a red droplet rises instantly on the knuckle.

“I’ve just come from the prison,” he says. “Lenora wants to see you.”

I watch the red drop swell on my hand. “I’d like to see her, but I don’t think I can.” I sound helpless as a child and hate it.

“I could drive you. I’ll come this afternoon. Or tomorrow, if that’s better.”

“No! No. I can drive myself.” But it’s a long way to Spokane, more than four hundred miles. “Maybe next week, if it doesn’t snow again.”

In the long pause that follows, I bring my knuckle to my lips and suck away the blood.

“You’ve got to help her, Bobbie. You have to come to the hearing.” His rumbling voice is gentle now; I am only imagining the menace behind his words.

“Maybe it would help you, too,” he says.

The house ticks its irregular heartbeat in the silence. I think of Lenora’s pale face in the sterile prison, then see her tanned and animated among the tangled vines of my childhood. I force deep breaths to stop the spinning in my head. “I’ll talk to Lenora about it.”

“When?”

“I don’t know!”

He waits a beat. “If you don’t come down by Monday, I’ll come to get you.”

“Don’t threaten me! And don’t come back here.”

I jab the button on the portable phone so hard it flies from my hands and clatters to the floor. My hands are shaking.

This won’t do—too much silence. I go to the living room and switch on the stereo. An old Elton John song floats through the house, a song Lenora used to love. I can hear it playing from her dusty radio on the sunporch, nestled among the leaves and loam on the potting table.

And suddenly I’m desperately homesick to see Lenora. I want to ask her if Harley Jaines has told me the truth. I’m slipping back toward that dark place where I’ve been before. Lenora is my anchor, but I abandoned her. I let her stay in prison all these years.

Could I really have changed that? Why didn’t I try?

I know I must drive to Spokane.

David will want to go with me. That’s okay. I could let him drive while I zone out, maybe sleep. Perhaps Lenora won’t look so pale and lonely this time. I could talk to her about finding my self pregnant, how wretched it is to know what I must do….

No. I mustn’t use her that way. I wipe my face on my sleeve and go back to the porch, wrap up in the afghan and stare out at the snow.

Lenora will ask questions that I can’t answer. Emotions could swamp me. I know the dangers, but the thought of seeing her is soothing and a longing grows in my chest.

So I rationalize: If I go, Harley Jaines won’t come here again. If I talk to her, Lenora will understand that I can’t testify at her hearing. That I cannot save her because it’s all I can do to save myself.




CHAPTER 6


In my earliest memory, I am lying in a bed with bars on the sides, a crib, and watching tiny speckles of light dance on the ceiling. I’m supposed to be sleeping. Instead, I listen to the music that seeps through the wall from the next room. I hear my mother’s voice, and my father’s and another man’s. I don’t know who he is but my mother does. I can tell by her voice, though I don’t understand the words.

The music feels happy. I hear my mother laugh and then the front door closes and her voice is gone. Only the low, rumbly sounds of Daddy and the stranger drift through the wall as I doze off.

Later something wakes me—a dream. A noise, maybe. I’m frightened but not enough to cry. The light has receded into a thin stripe around the door. The music is still playing in the next room but I don’t hear any voices. I throw one leg over the crib railing and hoist myself up—then I’m tumbling to the floor. I land on my big stuffed bear and roll off unhurt. I pick him up and get the door open and go out into the hall.

Daddy and the other man are sitting on the sofa in the living room with their backs toward me. Their heads are shadows in the lamplight.

“Daddy,” I say, and both faces turn toward me, surprised. More than surprised. Frightened?

Then they both smile and my father comes around the sofa, fast, and sweeps me up.

“Well, look at you! How did you get out of bed all by yourself?” He laughs and the other man, whose face I cannot remember except for a frame of reddish curly hair, laughs, too.

Carrying me back to bed, my father kisses the top of my head. “What a big girl you ‘re getting to be,” he says. “Daddy’s smart, big girl.” His voice sounds sad.

I was fifteen when my mother finally told me the truth about my father. She didn’t mean to. She meant to keep it secret forever. If she’d succeeded, it might have saved us all.

On Friday evening after dinner, I finally tell David about Harley Jaines. We argue about whether I should go to Spokane.

“You don’t know who this guy is. He could be some kook,” David insists. “We should have him checked out. I’ll call the prison, find out if Lenora’s had a regular visitor, if there’s really a hearing coming up.”

“David, I know who he is.”

“Maybe, maybe not. Don’t let him scare you into going down there if you’re not ready to see her. I don’t want you—” he pauses, choosing his words”—to make yourself sick again.”

Crazy again.

Pinpoints of light float through my vision and blackness gathers around the edges. I curse my inability to handle a normal household argument, or any stress at all. I take a deep breath and blow it out the way a sprinter does, the way Dr. Bannar showed me. Breathe and blow. Keep the oxygen flowing.

David paces between the kitchen table and the sink, numbering the reasons I should not make the trip, while I sit huddled on my chair staring at the half-eaten food congealing on my plate, hugging my knees. Suddenly I wonder whether it is I who have shut myself in this house like a recluse, or whether he’s keeping me here. Like a specimen in a jar. Homo sapiens insanitus.

I interrupt him. The confidence in my voice surprises us both.

“David. Regardless of Harley Jaines, I need to see Lenora. I want to see her. I don’t think I’ll ever be normal again—” was I ever normal? “—until I’ve done this.”

He looks at me as if I’ve already lost it. Worry and fear show in his eyes.

I spread my hands and state the obvious. “Hiding hasn’t worked.”

He shakes his head, defeated, then he comes to stand behind my chair. Without speaking, he places his hands on my shoulders and lays his cheek on the top of my head. I know he means it as a gesture of love, and it makes me feel like an unresponsive mother.

“I’ll drive you down on Sunday,” he says. “I’ll go in tomorrow and finish setting up the new exhibit so we can stay overnight in Spokane and drive back Monday.”

My muscles stiffen but he doesn’t seem to notice.

“It’ll be all right,” he says. “I’ll take care of you.”

I picture the two of us in the car those long hours, tension hovering over us like a back-seat driver.

On Saturday afternoon, when David goes to the museum, I pack my small suitcase and load it into the Honda. I put out extra food for the birds, and leave a note on the kitchen table.

David—I’m sorry, but I need to do this alone. Please don’t worry. I’ll call tonight. Love, Roberta.

When he reads it, he’ll be horrified.

I lock the house and stand for a moment on the shoveled driveway, my breath coming out in white puffs of worry. Breathe and blow.

What will I need that I didn’t pack? I haven’t taken even a weekend trip for so long I feel disoriented about sleeping somewhere else. I worry about toothpaste and contact lens solution. This is simpler than worrying about what will happen when I reach my destination, or the recurring images of my car drawn magnetically toward a snowy precipice like a jumper to the edge of abridge.

I climb in the car and start the engine. Should have warmed it up. I pull on gloves and fasten my seat belt, breathe and blow. At the bottom of the hill beside our mailbox, I turn left toward the main road.

The snow mounds high along the roadsides, but the sky is a bright, blinding blue. I fumble for my sunglasses. Ten hours to Spokane, maybe more, but I’ve made a plan: drive until dusk, get a cheap, safe room somewhere and sleep like a glacier. I’ve brought medication to make sure of it. Then I’ll finish the trip Sunday morning, find a room in Spokane and locate the prison. It’s been so many years since I visited Lenora there, I can’t remember where it is.

I should have called ahead. I think regular visiting hours at the prison are on Sunday afternoon—at least, that’s how it used to be. I may not get there in time for that, and I seem to remember every visitor’s name had to be on an approved list. It’s possible they won’t let me in.

Hope rises at this thought; I wouldn’t have to face her, and it wouldn’t be my fault. But if I don’t see her tomorrow, I’ll have to try again. Because what I told David was true. Though I’d never admitted it before even to myself, I must see Lenora again.

I keep driving, my fists stiff as stone on the wheel.

At the main road, instead of turning east toward Calgary to catch the superhighway south to the U.S. border, I turn right, toward the resort areas of Canmore and Banff, the scenic route. The trip will take a bit longer this way, which I recognize as avoidance behavior. But the route is beautiful, and I know the roads will be cleared of snow, for the ski traffic. Tourists uber alles.

David and I drove this road together when we moved to his inherited house, but I haven’t traveled it since. The scenery is even more spectacular than I remembered. Perhaps that’s because I’m seeing it alone, in captured glimpses like photographs, while I concentrate on the two-lane road. After an hour my hands cramp from gripping the wheel so hard. I slump back in the seat and will myself to relax, shaking out one hand and then the other.

Another two hours slip easily beneath my wheels; I’m beginning to enjoy the drive. Being on my own like this is scary, but heady, too.

David made waffles and eggs for our late Saturday breakfast, but by five o’clock I’m hungry again and desperately need to pee. Up ahead I see a roadside hotel where tables and chairs sit outdoors on a wooden deck with a view of snowy peaks. Today the tables are covered with snow and the deck deserted, but I like the looks of the place and pull into the parking lot.

The small dining room is cozy, with rose-colored tablecloths and a smoke-stained fireplace where yellow flames leap and crackle. I use the rest room first, then choose a table where it’s warm but not too close to the fire, and order a sandwich.

Only a few other diners come and go. I listen to their conversations while pretending to concentrate on my food. An old woman tells her younger companion whose face I cannot see, “You’re still looking for what you can get, honey. It isn’t what you get, it’s what you give.”

The sandwich is plain with store-bought potato chips on the side, but the bread is good and the chicken tastes fresh. I consider staying here for the night, but the food has restored my energy and I want more miles behind me. By five forty-five I’m back on the road, switching on my headlights in the early darkness of mountain shadows.

The route winds south through Kootenay National Park and finally joins a thin, Canadian version of the Columbia River just below its source in the Columbia Reach. I catch glimpses of it in the headlights.

I’m following the river that leads back to my childhood, the same waters where I once tried to drown. That history seems like a hundred years ago. And it seems like yesterday.

By the time I reach the outskirts of Cranbrook, my chest feels heavy and my contacts grate like sand in my eyes. I stop at the first motel that looks well lit. The room is spare and clean, uncomplicated, and suits me perfectly. I take my sleeping medicine first thing, a nice big dose, then a hot shower. I rush through the other bedtime rituals and fall into bed, asleep almost as soon as my head hits the pillow.

At daybreak, in the peculiar blue light that filters through the motel curtains, I awake and think of David.

I forgot to call. Damn.

I roll over and switch on the bedside lamp, find my glasses and read the instructions for dialing long distance. David answers on the third ring, his voice husky from sleep though he sounds alert. “Roberta?” is the first thing he says.

“Yes, it’s me. Sorry I forgot to call last night. I was so tired….”

“Where are you?”

I can tell he’s both angry and worried. “Umm.” I try to remember the name on the map. “Cranbrook, I think. Yes, that’s it.”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. I enjoyed the drive, actually. The mountains—”

“Stay right there. I’ll come to you. I can be there before noon.”

“No, sweetheart. Don’t do that. I’m fine, really. I’m going to get some breakfast and get on the road so I’ll be in Spokane early.”

“Roberta—”

“I’ll try to see Lenora today, and get a room in Spokane for the night. I’ll call again this evening. Be sure the answering machine is turned on if you go out.” I pause for courage. “How is the exhibit coming along?”

I hear his sigh and the rustle of bedding and picture him sinking back onto his pillow. “What if you can’t see her today?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they’ll let me come back on Monday. Meanwhile I’ll find a mall and window shop.”

“You hate shopping.”

“Not through windows.”

“What if you run into that Harley character?”

“What if I do? He’s not going to hurt me, David,” I say, feeling the irrational flutter in my stomach that betrays my confidence. “After all, I’m doing what he asked. So far, at least.”

“You’re scaring me, Roberta.”

“I know and I’m sorry. But right now, it can’t be helped.”

“I love you,” he says.

Why is it easier for him to say this over the phone than when I’m right in front of him? This small weakness endears him to me; my own flaws hang unfurled like tattered flags.

“I love you, too.” And when I say it from this distance, I realize it’s true.

Back on the road, I turn on the radio for company, find only static and switch it off. The snow along the roadsides thins and grays with decreasing latitude as I near the checkpoint at the U.S. border. It reminds me of Christmas morning when I was eleven, the Christmas of the shell necklace.

Shady River, Oregon, 1974

On my almost-new bike, I gasped and teetered up the slope to Rockhaven in the winter morning stillness. Whatever remorse I might have felt for abandoning my mother to her bottle on Christmas Day dried up with my tears in the freezing air. I left the bike in the driveway and rang the bell.

They greeted me at the door as cheerfully as if I’d remembered to call before I came.

“Merry Christmas, Sarsaparilla!” Cincy chirped.

“Merry Christmas,” Lenora said. “Come into this house!” Her smile made me feel like a real person instead of just a kid.

I stood red-nosed on the flat space of concrete that served as their porch, my lips thick and numb with the cold. “Come look at my new bike!”

“You got a bike?” Cincy shrieked. “Outta sight!”

She bounded out of the house, wearing flannel pajamas and rabbit-eared house shoes.

Lenora came, too, carrying her coffee mug and lifting her terry-cloth robe off the ground. Her hair hung loose down her back and glistened like mink in the morning sunshine. I pictured my mom’s short, kinky hair and felt guilty for making the comparison.

Pulling my red Stingray erect, I held it for my friends’ inspection. They circled and exclaimed until my face hurt from grinning.

“Come in and eat breakfast with us,” Cincy said, dancing in the cold. “We can go riding after it warms up out here.”

I laid the bike gently on its side and we all three sprinted for the warmth of the house.

Christmas carols played from a radio somewhere in the living room, and the house smelled like cinnamon and candles. The whole sunporch was their Christmas tree, except the one end Lenora kept sealed off for controlled research. I’d recently learned she was a real scientist, a lepidopterist.

Strings of tiny colored lights looped around the tallest plants and wound across the ivy-covered ceiling. Glass ornaments and silver icicles draped the other greenery, shimmering with every breath of movement. A few nights before, Cincy and I had sat on the porch with all the other lights off, whispering about the mysteries of Christmas and our approaching teenage years. In the dark, the place looked enchanted.

This morning, though, it was sunny and bright. Cincy and Lenora were having breakfast there. Lenora had set up a card table in a narrow space among the plants and covered it with a red cloth. She crowded in another chair for me and insisted on sharing her omelet.

Cincy went to get me a glass of orange juice and returned with two small packages tied in curly bows. She laid them in front of me one at a time.

“This one’s from me, and this one’s from Mom.”

My smile fell. “But I didn’t get you anything.” I searched Cincy’s face, appealing.

She made a brushing motion with one hand. “You weren’t supposed to, Gwendolyn. These are no big deal, believe me.”

She flipped her long hair behind her shoulder with a toss of her head, a motion that had become characteristic lately. “Go on. Open them.”

I tore into hers first, finding a pair of knitted gloves. They were white, with red-and-blue reindeer marching around the backs and palms between borders of holly. “Ooh, they’re pretty,” I said. I pulled them on and flexed my fingers.

“I told you it was no big deal,” Cincy said. “Grandma got me an extra pair and I knew you’d lost yours.”

“Thanks,” I said, adopting her lightheartedness. “My hands were frozen to the handlebars on the way up here.” But I wished desperately that I had presents for them.

As soon as I picked up Lenora’s gift, I could tell it was a book. I tore off the paper. “Wow.”

I ran a gloved hand over the picture of a tiger swallowtail on the cover and read aloud, “The Golden Nature Guide to Butterflies and Moths, 423 illustrations in color.” I glanced up at Lenora, feeling she’d entrusted me with something special. “Thanks. I love it.”

Lenora winked at Cincy. “See, I told you.”

“I know,” Cincy said, faking disgust. “Science. Gross.” She flipped her hair. “Come look at my Christmas loot!”

I tucked the book in my arm but hesitated. “Want us to help with the dishes first?” I asked Lenora.

She smiled. “Thanks, Bobbie, but since it’s Christmas, I’ll let you off the hook.” We streaked to Cincy’s room.

Later in the day the temperature rose into the forties and we rode our bikes across the bridge and into town.

“I ought to stop by and check on Mom,” I told her.

We parked in the driveway and entered through the kitchen. Cincy needed to use the bathroom, so I steered her down the hall and went into the living room alone.

The room smelled sour. Mom was asleep on the sofa, still in her sweat suit, the TV playing. She hadn’t even roused when we came in. Asleep, her face looked much older than thirty-five.

“She’s okay,” I told Cincy when she came out. “Anyway, she’s still breathing.” I had begun to develop a caustic edge about my mother’s drinking when I talked to Cincy. I never mentioned it to anyone else.

On the way back to her house, we traded and rode each other’s bikes.

Late that afternoon Cincy and I were watching It’s a Wonderful Life on TV when I heard the phone in the kitchen ring and Lenora answer.

She called into the living room. “Bobbie, your mom wants you to start home now, before it gets dark.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll sack up some Snickerdoodles for you to take to your mom,” Cincy said.

I went to Cincy’s room and put on my coat and new gloves. Luckily, the butterfly book fit into the oversize pocket of my car coat. My new bike didn’t have a basket yet.

As I came back through the dining room, I heard Cincy’s subdued voice in the kitchen. “Isn’t there something you can do to help her? Maybe she just needs a friend.”

I froze, my throat squeezing shut.

What was she talking about? She was my friend! And I didn’t need any help.

“I don’t think so,” Lenora answered. “Every woman has her own demons to fight. I don’t think Ruth wants to stop drinking yet.”

Heat flashed to my cheeks. They had no right to talk about my mother.

Despite my indignation, a realization spread over me, slow and thick as syrup. Alone in the dusky dining room with my hands clenched into fists at my sides, I understood for the first time that my mother was an alcoholic. Neither Cincy nor Lenora had said the word. It simply burbled up from within me like a belch, embarrassing and unwanted.

My mother is an alcoholic. And I knew beyond a doubt that this was how other people saw her.

If this was how people saw Ruth, how did they see me? The child of the alcoholic, an object of pity? Was that how Lenora and Cincy saw me? Did they include me in their family out of pity instead of love?

The edges of my world crumbled beneath my feet; my head reeled.

I waited two beats until I could control my voice, then yelled toward the kitchen. “I’m going now! Thanks for the presents!” And fled out the front door.

Cincy caught up with me as I climbed on my bike. “Wait! Here’s your cookies.”

“Thanks.” I tucked them in my other pocket, avoiding her eyes, and pushed off down the driveway.

The tires wobbled until I caught my balance, then began to pedal recklessly, gaining speed. I could hear the blood zinging through my veins, alcoholic, alcoholic, while I careened down the hill on the red bike my mother gave me, far too fast for my beginner skills.

The sun hung on the horizon in a lonely strip of sky between the river and a bank of gray clouds. By the time I reached the bottom of the hill where the drive turned left, my nose was running and I was flying.

My tires hit a patch of loose gravel and skidded sideways. The bike waffled and the steep edge of the road loomed close. Beyond, a rocky slope descended into a gulch that led toward the river.

I gritted my teeth, my heart pounding. Part of me wanted to give in, go sailing into the chasm. But some other, stubborn girl rose up on the pedals, gripped the handlebars, and fought for balance.

I would not go down! Damn it, I would not!

In the still, cold air, I controlled the skid inches from the precipice and sailed onward toward the bridge. Cincy’s voice echoed down to me like a benediction.

“Ride ‘em, Sarsaparilla!”

Canadian/U.S. border, 1990

As I wait at the checkpoint before crossing into Idaho, the benediction echoes in my mind. What happened to that determined little girl I used to be? Would the baby I’m carrying resemble her, or the flimsy sister I’ve become in the eons since then?

The thought scares me. It’s the first time I’ve imagined this brief embryo as an actual person.

In the insulated time warp of the warm car, I remember a resilient little girl playing out the mystery of metamorphosis with the moon on her hands. And I allow myself to picture my accidentally fertilized ovum as a real baby, then a child, and eventually a young woman totally separate from me. I imagine curly hair like my own and sturdy legs, poor girl. But when I try to fix an image of her face, the features become the thin, aging visage of Lenora the last time I saw her, in prison.

It’s not what you get, the old woman at the restaurant said, but what you give. I should have asked her, is it what you give that makes you happy, or that kills you?




CHAPTER 7


Shady River, 1978

In our teens, Cincy and I invented a game that began, “If your father were here …” The scenarios started realistically, but quickly progressed into wild fictions full of money and adventure.

“If your father were here,” I told her, “he wouldn’t let you date Stan Stenson even if he asked, because of that motorcycle.”

“Well, if your father were here,” she countered, “he wouldn’t let you stay after school supposedly working on your science project with Petey Small. He’d ride up to the school on his white horse and throw you across the saddle and carry you away….”

Each new layer outdid the last, until finally our fathers metamorphosed into fantasy lovers. “But he isn’t your father at all, see,

he’s this warrior from the next village who’s loved you from afar….”And we were swept away into nonsense and laughter.

It was a surefire method for cheering ourselves up.

Cincy’s favorite fantasy was one about a fellow I’d named Lionel, who was involved in international espionage but returned to her, his one true love, for fixes of wild lovemaking before disappearing again into the mist along the river. Cincy made me tell this one over and over, adding her own creative twists. Whenever we saw a handsome stranger, she’d dig her elbow into my ribs and choke out, “It’s Lionel, come to take me away!”

“Take me, too!” I’d whisper.

But nobody ever did. Instead we went to school, and to her house afterward. Cincy grouched about her homework; I whined about the contact lenses I couldn’t afford. I’d convinced myself that my life would blossom if only I could get rid of my glasses.

“If your father were here,” Cincy scolded, “he’d tell you that you’re beautiful just as you are.” Then she shrugged, grinning. “But he’d buy you the contacts anyway.”

Sometimes, when I was alone, fragments of my missing father rose in my consciousness like a chronic toothache. The memory hurt only when I returned to it, touching my tongue to the aching spot to probe the pain. By the time I reached puberty, I was accomplished at this. Whenever I wanted to pity or punish myself, whenever I longed for the drama and sweet suffering that defines adolescence, I called up the mystery of my father’s desertion.

Sometimes, to punish both of us, perhaps, I asked my mother about him.

How had they met? Did I look like him? What was their life like before I was born? She gave short, offhand answers with a nonchalance I knew she didn’t feel.

I saw fine lines etch the pouches beneath my mother’s eyes, and watched her jawline melt into middle age. In rare teenage moments when I felt giddy and invincible, the sudden contrast to my mother’s life impaled me with guilt. I tried to imagine cleaning other people’s hotel rooms day after day, coming home to a daughter and nothing else.

“Why don’t you and Ying Su take off to Portland for the weekend?” I urged her. “Go shopping, go to the movies.” Ying Su worked with her at the inn.

“Maybe sometime I’ll do that,” Mom said, but she never went. I even suggested she flirt with the hotel manager, invite him to Portland.

“Now you’re being ridiculous,” she said. “He’s younger than I am.”

“So what?”

She gave me one of those mother looks and changed the subject.

When my questions about my father got too pointed, Mom claimed ignorance. She didn’t know where he lived now. She didn’t know where he worked. No, he never sent money; she didn’t want him to.

Once, though, she found an old snapshot of the three of us. “I’d forgotten about this,” she said, her voice sounding far away. “Keep it, if you like.”

The blurry images of a young couple and their shapeless, androgynous baby fascinated me. I resented that she’d kept the picture from me all these years.

In the photo, my father’s hair looked dark, much darker than mine. He wore glasses like me and behind their rims I could see bushy eyebrows that explained why mine required continual tweezing. The faces in the photo were small and partly shaded. Even when Cincy and I examined it with a magnifying glass, lying in her bed on a summer night in our baggy T-shirts, I couldn’t be sure of the color of my father’s eyes or the shape of his nose.

“He’s handsome,” Cincy pronounced.

I couldn’t see it. “You’re just being polite.”

She punched my arm. “Don’t you dare accuse me of such a thing.”

I laid the photo on the nightstand and switched off the light. Cincy’s room, built partly into the mountain, had no windows, so when the light went off it was like a cave. If we left the door open, a faint rectangle of moonlight from the living room windows relieved the blackness, but that night the door was closed so our talking wouldn’t keep Lenora awake.

It was well after midnight. We’d gone swimming at the new municipal pool all afternoon, and I’d cleaned Mom’s house in town before going. My muscles felt tired and my skin pleasantly sunburned.

“I’m going to be sore tomorrow,” I said, stretching my legs out on the cool sheets.

“Whereabouts? I’ll give you a rub down.”

She sat beside me in the darkness, massaging my shoulders and back while I groaned my appreciation, or giggled when she hit a ticklish spot. Then she rubbed my feet and calves.

“You should be a professional masseuse,” I told her sleepily. “You could work at one of those ritzy spas giving massages to rich people and getting hundred-dollar tips.”

“No way,” she said, her voice deep and laughing in the humid darkness. “I wouldn’t do this for anybody but you.”

“Not even Stan Stenson?”

“Well …”

Our freshman year, Cincy blossomed into a long-legged beauty. She had the black satin hair and dark eyes of her Cherokee ancestry, with high cheekbones and Lenora’s small mouth and slender nose.

Despite her looks, she wasn’t the least conceited. She talked to everybody, even the nerds and thugs most kids shunned as if they had VD. Social distinctions didn’t exist for Cincy. I considered it one of her best qualities, recognizing in myself a reticence toward people who were outwardly as uneasy in the world as I felt but kept hidden. I’d look at one of those kids and think there, but for the grace of Cincy, go I.

As it was, I merged with the great gray middle class of students, accepted because I was decently groomed and a friend of Cincy’s, respected and suspected because I was smart. Boys talked to me, but they didn’t flirt. Girls talked to me, but they didn’t confide.

Most of the time I was satisfied with that. I had Cincy, after all. My only other friend—besides Petey Small, my science buddy—was the athletic, red-haired Samantha. Like me, Sam existed mostly in her own world, where sports filled her brain space the way science did mine.

Samantha talked Cincy into running track. If our small school was weak on academics, it was huge when it came to sports. Sam said Cincy was a natural athlete. Her long legs pumping around the cinder oval that ringed the football field reminded me of waves on the ocean, rhythmic and tireless, though I’d seen the ocean only on TV. My own legs were far too short for speed. At five-two, I refused desserts, fighting the natural resemblance to a pear that defined my mother’s figure.

Cincy ran, but she didn’t care about running. Coach Hastings said she could have won any of the long-distance events if only she would concentrate. He put her in sprints, which he said were better matched to her short attention span, and when she won without half trying, he just shook his head. “She’s amazing,” he said to me once. “I love to watch her run.”

She didn’t care about her studies, either. In fact, aside from hanging out with me, only one thing interested Cincy. While I was preoccupied with books and butterflies and the gray dread of going home at night, Cincy’s curiosity turned to boys. How could it not? Whenever she walked down the hall at school, their adolescent lust followed her like a cloud of gnats.

Sometimes she seemed oblivious to their attention, and other times she’d flirt outrageously. Usually she just got that knowing smile—the one I’d first seen in the lunchroom during second grade—and gave me a wink.

I grinned back. “There’s a mean streak in you, Cynthia Jaines. I like that.”

One guy after another began to walk or bike up the hill to Rockhaven, and Cincy would go off with him to a football game or a movie at the Mount Hood Theater. The movie house was the only entertainment in town during cold weather. Cincy and I spent a lot of Sunday afternoons at the Mount Hood, with our feet sticking to the floor and the aroma of stale butter prickling our noses.

If a boy had asked me out, which none did, I knew Ruth would say fourteen was too young to date. But Cincy never asked Lenora’s permission, she just floated away with a jaunty wave. The first time Cincy left on a car date with a guy who was sixteen, Lenora frowned in silence, and I foresaw trouble in paradise.

I’d always envied Cincy and Lenora’s easy relationship. Lenora believed in letting Cincy make her own decisions. They were on the same team, she said, partners. Whereas Ruth and I were perpetual adversaries. My mom criticized everything I did, it seemed to me. But in truth, our arguments traced directly or indirectly to two sources: her drinking, or her resentment of my friendship with Lenora and Cincy.

I suppose the friction that developed between the Jaines women was inevitable. But I knew nothing then about adolescent psychology; what I saw was the crumbling of an ideal. And with so few ideals to believe in, the loss made my stomach hurt. Without being asked, I tried to mediate by voicing the worries I read on Lenora’s silent face.

“Cincy, Danny Soames is too old for you,” I told her as she stood in front of the warped, full-length mirror on her closet door drawing dark red on her lips. “And too fast.”

Cincy cocked her head and undid one more button on the front of her blouse—a sort of barometer of how much she liked each boy she dated. Her hair shone like glass.

The red lines widened into a smile. “You think he’ll take me into the woods and have his way with me?”

“If he did, what would you do about it?”

“Well, Grandma, I’d poke out his eyes and kick him in the balls, just like you taught me.”

“Get real. He’s on the football team. If he decides to rape you, you’re dead meat.”

“I think the expression is hot, red meat.”

“Yuck! Cincy!”

She laughed. “Stop worrying, Rapunzel. I can handle Danny Soames.”

“Oh, yeah. He’d love for you to handle him.”

In the mirror, Cincy’s eyebrows wiggled up and down.

“Aren’t you going to brush your teeth?” I reminded.

“Naw. Kisses don’t taste right when your mouth’s too clean.”

We laughed it off, but secretly I wondered if it were true. I had no way of knowing.

“If your father were here,” I said, “he’d meet Danny on the front porch with a shotgun.”

She dropped her lipstick into a tiny shoulder bag and snapped it shut. “Well, he isn’t here. But I’ll tell Danny that if he lays an unwanted hand on me, you’ll hunt him down and see that he makes an honest woman of me.”

“Making you honest is too big a job for anyone, let alone a jockhead.”

Cincy smiled and shot me the bird.

I watched them drive away in Danny’s dad’s new Chevrolet, feeling that I’d failed as a parent.

That semester my science teacher, Mr. Jenkins, directed us to choose a research project. For me there was no question about a subject. I consulted Lenora, and she handed me an issue of Nature magazine with an article about Old World swallowtail butterflies. One of them was Pharmacophagus antenor, found only on the island of Madagascar off the southeast coast of Africa. It was the only African swallowtail known to feed on pipevine, and its evolution was speculated to reveal links to the age when the earth’s plates shifted and separated to create the continents.

In the photos, the antenor’s black wings appeared delicate and narrow. The forewings were marked with white spherical spots that melded along the bottom of the hindwings into rounded crescent-shapes of pale yellow to red-orange. The antenor had a wingspan of five to six inches and a life cycle virtually undocumented by science.

“This is neat,” I said, returning the magazine, “but I don’t see how I could make a science project out of it.”

Lenora sat on a tall stool on the sunporch, methodically examining the leaves of a willow branch for eggs. The porch was warm with rare November sunlight, and butterflies fluttered overhead. Most species couldn’t fly unless the temperature was near eighty.

“Remember Zoroaster, the Morpho rhetenor?” she asked.

I recalled the iridescent blue beauty Cincy had introduced to me on my first visit.

“It was from French Guiana in South America,” she said. “That red-and-black one up there,” she pointed, “is from Asia.”

I looked up, nodding, but I still didn’t get it.

“How would you like to be the first American ever to raise a generation of Pharmacophagus antenor and document its complete life cycle?”

The light came on. “You could get one of those?”

Her eyes sparkled. “The university research facility obtains lepidoptera specimens from approved foreign sources under a special permit for scientific study. That’s what the quarantine area is for,” she said, nodding toward the one end of the porch sealed off by a glass door. “I have an acquaintance in Florida that I met at a conference who’s offered to fund research to investigate the relationship of that species to other members of the swallowtail family.”

I loved it when she talked like a scientist to me. Ever since I’d learned she did actual scientific research on her sunporch, I’d spent more and more time there. And made straight A’s in science class. I knew her income depended on grant money from various sources.

“You could be my research assistant,” she said. “I want to put the immatures—caterpillars and pupae—under the dissection microscope and compare them to some specimens we could get on loan from Sarasota or maybe Yale.”

“Far out,” I whispered. And it was—far out of my limited range of understanding about her work. But I understood quite clearly that she was offering to include me, to share with me the mysteries of the butterflies. My chest inflated to the point of exploding. “How long would it take to get them? I’m supposed to do the project this semester.”

“It might take a while,” she admitted. “Only eggs or pupae can be transported successfully, and we’ll need to import the Madagascar variety of pipevine, too. I’ll see if the university has a contact in Madagascar, and tell them it’s a rush so that our research will be ahead of Britain’s. That always pulls their chain. But the U.S. Department of Agriculture might give them trouble about importing the plants.”

“Couldn’t the caterpillars eat American pipevine?” “Maybe, but not the first generation. Later on, if we get a second generation going, we could see if the larvae will adapt to the pipevine that grows farther south in the States. Or maybe try the ginger plant we have locally that’s related to pipevine.” “So if the government vetoes the plants, the project is off?” Her eyes took on a devilish light. “Not necessarily. There are other ways. In France you can buy lepidoptera eggs, pupae, even food plants—cash and carry. Smuggle them through Customs in your handbag, if you’ve got the nerve.”

My eyes widened. “Have you ever done that?” She pursed her lips like a kiss. “I’m not at liberty to say.” My grin stretched so wide Lenora laughed at me. I was practically hopping. “This is so cool! Can you call the university now?” “Shouldn’t you talk it over with your teacher first? Better find out if he’s willing to be patient, in case your project doesn’t get moving until the semester’s nearly over. And there’s always a risk that the specimens will die without reproducing.”

I waved it off. “I can talk Mr. Jenkins into it. No problem. I’m his star pupil.”

She smiled, approving my rash confidence. “If we can nurse a few through the pupal stage and get the adults to lay eggs on domestic pipevine or ginger, though, it’s possible we could keep the generations going indefinitely.”

Her voice held genuine excitement, and I let myself believe that part of it was because we’d be working together. I ran to bring her the phone, nearly tripping over its twenty-foot cord, so she could call her friends at UO.

On a Saturday morning, the two of us drove to a forested valley in the Cascades in search of wild ginger. Lenora wanted to begin cultivating it on the sunporch so we’d have a supply at hand. She thought we could buy pipevine at a nursery in Portland.




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