Breaking Butterflies Page 10

  “Now that reminds me of a Georgia O’Keeffe,” Leigh said. “The flowers definitely do.”

  “I like the swirls,” I said. I wished that I were more art savvy, that I had something to compare my mother’s work to — and I wished that I didn’t sound so stiff, that I wasn’t still on edge from our talk. I swallowed, picked up the water jar, and stirred the brushes around like spoons in a pot of soup, trying to get them clean. The water had turned a grayish shade of brown. “Isn’t it weird that when you mix all those great colors together, you just get this?” I asked, holding the jar up.

  “You would think it’d look prettier, wouldn’t you?” my mother said, looking thoughtful.

  I took the jar over to the sink and dumped it out. The brown water swirled away down the drain and disappeared as I turned on the faucet and began to wash the brushes. I rolled the tips between my fingers as I had seen Cadence do the night I had arrived in England.

  “What do you think, Cay?” I heard Leigh ask from behind me.

  “You used an awful lot of red,” he said. “And Sphinxie’s table is lopsided. Your flowers, though, Sarah, remind me of a Georgia O’Keeffe.”

  “How did you know whose was whose?” I asked, looking curiously over my shoulder. He had had his back to us the entire time, and now even our brushes and paints were cleared away, leaving only the paintings.

  “It’s easy,” he said, without actually explaining why or how.

  “What about your painting?” my mother asked. “Are you just going to fill it with blues?”

  “Perhaps,” he said simply. “I like blue.”

  I looked at my mother’s painting, at those delicate flowers blooming and seeming to move as they filled the paper, leaving no space unfilled; at my own, my spindly little table weak at the knees and imperfect, but with light shining on it from that rectangle of yellow; and at Leigh’s, at her raw red mother’s love, bleeding furiously all over her paper and exploding into those angry purple clouds.

  And then at Cadence’s: his wide, swirling ocean of blue, blue, blue. It was artistic and free-flowing, steady and firm; beautiful, painted with a delicate hand, different shades and nuances, rising up and down … but really nothing at all, when you looked. When you remembered that there was a whole world of other things to paint, a world of flowers and mothers, children, the sun, the earth, people everywhere, it was nothing.

  It was nothing but blue.

  Leigh pinned our paintings to the door of her refrigerator with magnets. Before that, the door had been bare. I supposed that there used to be artwork there, when Cadence was little and didn’t work on canvases, but now there was nothing — until our paintings came along. Leigh smiled and stepped back.

  “I like seeing art on my fridge,” she said, resting her hands on her hips.

  “We used to have tons of Sphinxie’s pictures up on our fridge at home,” my mother said. “She liked to draw the Disney princesses, and horses.”

  I felt a rush of hot embarrassment flood into my face. My childhood attempts at art were so clichéd, and when compared to Cadence’s work, they became downright pathetic. I used to like drawing as a really little kid, when I was still locked blissfully in the stage of believing that every scribble that came out of my pencil was a masterpiece and looked exactly like whatever I was trying to draw. Later, I got frustrated with my lack of talent, and gave up drawing. Then I tried poetry for a while. It was always in a stiff rhyming format, concerning a typical subject: rainbows, for example, or flowers in a garden. I’d given poetry up too. Now the only things on our fridge that had anything to do with me were my soccer practice and game schedules. At least I was good at soccer.

  “I don’t really draw anymore,” I explained to Leigh, hoping that I wasn’t visibly blushing. “Sports are more my thing.”

  “Your mom tells me you’re a great athlete,” Leigh said. “We have pictures of you in your soccer uniform somewhere around here. You look like a pro.” I doubted that I really looked like a professional player, but it still made me feel proud. “Do you want to play for a living someday?”

  “Not really,” I said. “I’m actually not sure what I want to do.”

  “Don’t worry, you’ll figure it out eventually,” she said, and looked at the fridge again. “I really do like your painting, Sphinxie.”

  “Thanks,” I said, for the second time. I wondered if Leigh looked at my painting, with its wobbly, poorly executed table, and wished that she had had an ordinary child. It must be so difficult to be a mother to Cadence.

  I supposed at one time she had yelled at him in frustration, tried time and time again to get him to conform, stop breaking rules, stop stabbing people in the back. But somewhere along the line, as he got older and older, she must have gotten weary. Exhausted. Thoroughly tired from trying to bring up this child who shone so brightly into her eyes that it hurt. And then his sickness had come, and although her motherly side still screamed to correct him when he did wrong, she didn’t. He was dying and she’d just had to give up. It was like me and my poetry, amplified a million painful times.

  It was just Leigh and my mother and me down in the kitchen; Cadence had stayed upstairs, locked in place in front of that canvas, his fingernails caked with blue. Vivienne wasn’t in that day. Most days, she would have been moving things around in the kitchen, or organizing something in another room. The house was still without her around; she added a liveliness to the place that Leigh sadly seemed to have lost. There had been a time, I was certain, when Leigh would have been the one who was moving around, smiling, talking animatedly to everyone. She seemed older than my mother now, even though they were the same age. She was leaning on her kitchen counter as we stood there, her palms braced against its edge.

  “Are you okay, Leigh?” my mother asked gently.

  “I can’t say yes,” Leigh answered. “But I can’t say no, either.”

  My mother stepped forward and hugged her tightly, and the two of them rocked slowly back and forth like a toy horse. I stood nearby, feeling as though I was intruding on something terribly private, and averted my eyes, staring at the floor.

  “Sphinxie,” Leigh said, and when I looked up, she was staring over my mother’s shoulder at me, her blue eyes glittering with tears under her kitchen lights.

  “Yeah?” I asked. My mouth was dry, and I licked my lips.

  “You’re a really good kid,” she said, and the tears fell from her eyes, running down her face and dotting the back of my mother’s shirt. “You have a lot of compassion for my son, I can see it …” Her breath rattled in her throat. “You’re just a really good kid.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to say thank you, it somehow felt wrong, but at the same time I didn’t want to stand there, stony, and not say anything. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out, so I closed it again. Tomorrow was Saturday, and after that there would be only a day of our visit left.

  “Don’t worry, Leigh,” I blurted, without meaning to. “I’m staying.”

  “What?” she said, breaking away from my mother.

  “Sphinx,” my mother said, her voice lowered in warning. I hesitated, looking at her, but only for a moment. She had brought me here, I reminded myself. She raised me to this position. And now I was older and I was paving my own way and I knew where I wanted to go. I took a deep breath, willing strength into my chest, and thought firmly, Don’t back down.

  “Mom, I told you, I have to do this,” I said, my voice trembling. Then I looked at Leigh, making perfect eye contact with her, and stated, “I want to stay with Cadence until … until he passes away.”

  Leigh’s hands sought the kitchen counter again and gripped it once more.

  “Honey,” my mother said, “we talked about this. You can’t —”

  “Why not? Because I have school?” I laughed, that short, barking kind of laughter that’s more of a derisive breath out than an actual laugh. “Mom, this is more important than anything I have to do at home. I want to stay with Cadenc
e.”

  “Oh, Sphinxie,” Leigh said, her voice breathy.

  “Honey,” my mother said again.

  I could barely hear either of them. Even though my feet were firmly planted on the floor, I felt the kind of reeling, anti-gravitational panic that comes with slipping and falling backward off a staircase. I had to get a foothold.

  “Let me stay!” I said, feeling like a toddler spiraling into a temper tantrum. “I just have to stay.” My cheeks began to burn; I was embarrassed about what I was doing, I felt like I was making a scene, stirring up trouble … but at the same time, I desperately needed to speak. I had to convince them. I was staying. I needed to stay. I was supposed to stay, it was part of some plan, I was convinced of that.

  “I want to be here for him,” I said, and my voice sounded pitiful in my ears. “And don’t you say that he won’t care whether I’m here or not, because you don’t know that. I’m not taking any chances. If there’s the slightest chance that my being here could make him happy, then I want to take that chance.”

  Leigh was looking at me with her mouth open, the tears rolling in waves down her face. I couldn’t tell if she was pleased with me or horrified, if they were happy tears or not. I shut my mouth, sealing my lips tightly. I didn’t want to offend her. That was the last thing I wanted to do. I clasped my hands together behind my back, feeling supremely nervous all of a sudden. Had I just upset her, or had I affected her in a way that was deep and good? What was I doing? The kitchen was silent.

  “I’m … I’m really sorry,” I stammered out. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  “No, no,” Leigh said. “You’re okay, Sphinxie, you’re okay.”

  My mother closed her eyes briefly, and put her arm around me, but said nothing. My face was still burning. The more childish part of me wanted to leave so that I wouldn’t have to look at Leigh and wonder if I had hurt her, if she was just saying that it was okay. The rest of me, though, was almost proud of myself. I had spoken out. I didn’t often speak out for myself like that: It was a rare occurrence. It was a step forward. I thought I felt some of the hot embarrassment begin to drain out of my face. I wasn’t almost proud of myself — I was proud of myself.

  No one seemed to know what to say. My mother’s arm felt like a line of bricks on my shoulders, and Leigh’s eyes were filling up her face. She reached over onto the counter and took a napkin out of the holder and wiped her face. She crumpled the napkin into a ball in her hand and pressed her lips together, trying to get a hold of herself. And I looked at the fridge, at our paintings, and thought of the mass of empty blue upstairs. It was like the wide blue of the ocean, deep and cold and dangerous. Beautiful, but so dangerous. And here I was, and I had spoken up, and suddenly I was feeling like I could swim no matter how deep the water was.

  And then the ocean came into the kitchen. Cadence stepped out from around the corner, his head held high, his hands folded behind his back, reminding me somehow of Napoleon. He came forward and stood in front of us, his eyes alight with something that was, as usual, unreadable.

  “She’s a good girl, isn’t she?” he said, nodding his head in my direction.

  “You’re good, too, Cay,” Leigh said weakly.

  “Don’t say that,” he said, scornful. “No one is good.” He turned to me and asked fiercely, “Why do you want to stay? So you can have a nice vacation in England, is that it?”

  “No,” I said softly, shaking my head. “I just want to be here for you.”

  His eyes flashed, and it was almost as though I had said something completely foreign to him.

  “I just want to be here for you,” I repeated, and my eyes were pulled into a lock with his. They were such strange eyes. It was as if they were made of three layers: the first, a layer of ice; the second, the normal blue that was so like Leigh’s; and then the third, a flickering flame, dancing out of reach inside his head. And I wanted to reach that flame, to understand it.

  He was looking at me like a person looks at a famous painting in a museum. He was studying me, all of the lines that made up my being, fascinated. I just wanted to be there for him. Perhaps, for a genius like Cadence, seeing that in me was like going up to a wide, detailed canvas and realizing suddenly that the whole thing was a mass of multicolored dots, far more complicated than one would originally assume. It seemed like Cadence was leaning into me, peering closer and closer, although I wasn’t sure if that was real or just my imagination. Had I really been a painting, one of the museum guards would have stuck out their hand and told Cadence to take a step back. I saw the beginnings of a smile tugging at the edges of his mouth, drawing them upward. His eyes were alight. And I still couldn’t look away.

  Then he seemed to draw back into himself. His eyes closed up again, the ice thickening over the dancing flame, and he pulled himself up to his full height, ramrod straight.

  “Sphinx,” he said gravely. “There is no reason for you to want to stay with me.” He stated it like a scientific fact, like something undeniable. As though once he said it, I would immediately realize the error of my ways.

  “But that’s the whole point,” I told him, feeling a terrible lump rise in my throat. “That’s why it matters so much, that’s why I want to be here so badly.”

  He looked at me, his expression detached, like a cat staring at a mouse underneath its paw. Then he turned slowly to face Leigh, and smiled. Such a dazzling, breathtaking smile.

  My eyes had been released at last from his gaze when he turned to Leigh, but I wanted him to look back again. Had I pleased him? Had I actually made him happy?

  “She’s a good girl,” he said again, and the smile pulled wider. We were frozen again in the kitchen. Leigh was leaning forward slightly, looking as though she might simply pitch forward to the floor at any moment. It was like a scene from a movie; the soundtrack would have been high and soft, suspenseful in the background. It seemed unreal. My newfound pride was still with me, but it was taking a backseat now: I felt like it was my fault for beginning it, for starting this strange heaviness on the air when I had started talking about wanting to stay. It was just like the tenseness after my talks with my mother, except now that it involved more people, it had bigger consequences.

  “I would love if —” Leigh began after a moment, and then halted, taking a shaky breath. She swallowed. “I would love if you would stay, Sphinxie.” Then she looked toward my mother, and I watched their eyes meet. “But of course, that’s really up to you, Sarah,” said Leigh, in a lower voice.

  Leigh looked like a frightened child asking for permission, her eyes moist. My mother opened her mouth and closed it again.

  Cadence looked at the clock over the stove. “It’s close to dinnertime,” he said, suddenly conversational. “What are we having?”

  “I thought we could order in,” Leigh said, her voice wispy and thin. Everyone was shaken but Cadence, who breezed away from the group, floating over to the table and slouching in one of the chairs like a prince waiting to be served. People always said they wished they could get over things, not be so affected, so hurt. Cadence was a master at that. He wouldn’t remember the awkward sadness and stiffness in his own kitchen, the words he had overheard, the way Leigh had called me a good kid. He moved on so easily. And here I was with pain in my throat, sourness in my chest. Inside me there were colors, swirling about and bruising and growing and changing every moment.

  Not a single one of them was blue.

  My mother let me stay.

  She protested until the very end of the designated week, even though I gathered up my courage and went into her room every night and talked to her about it, trying to drill it into her head that I was not going to give up. I wanted to stay. I had to stay. I had to open up the rift and unclench her fingers from around me and let her know that this was okay, that this was the plan now. That I needed Cadence just as much as she needed Leigh, that I knew she’d want to do the same thing for Leigh if she were dying, even though Leigh wasn’t nearly as extraordina
ry as Cadence. There was something important that needed to be done here, and it was my job to do it.

  On Saturday night, she shook her head and closed her eyes. But on Sunday night, she gave in — at least partially.

  “I don’t want you to stay here for long,” she said, “but I’ve talked to Leigh, and we decided to let you extend your visit another week.” She ruffled my hair as though I were littler than I was. “I have to go back to work, there’s a meeting I can’t afford to miss,” she said. “Are you sure you’ll be okay without me? And are you okay with flying home alone?”

  “Yeah, I’ll be okay,” I said, and hugged her, really hugged her, for the first time since we’d been having our nightly talks. “Thank you so much.” I looked over her shoulder. There was a mirror hanging on the wall above the dresser in her room. I saw my own reflection in that mirror, and although I was smiling, thankful for the one more week, my eyes were hardened. Another week was too little; I needed to stay until the very end. But I bit my tongue to avoid saying anything. Once my mother was gone, I supposed it would be easy to keep pushing the end of my visit further and further back. Without her there, the only one who could get me to the airport was Leigh, and I knew she wanted me to stay.

  And if Leigh wanted me to stay, then so did my mother, even if she wasn’t fully aware of it. For my mother, when it came to helping Leigh, the answer was always yes; it always had been.

  “Call me every day,” my mother said. “More than once a day, if you can.”

  “Don’t freak out if I miss a day,” I told her wryly.

  “I’ll try not to,” she said, and touched my hair again. “I love you, Sphinxie.”

  “I love you too,” I whispered. She kissed me on the top of my head, and then I walked through the dark hall of Leigh’s second floor, heading for my room. It was dark in Leigh’s bedroom, but when I looked in the direction of Cadence’s, a thin strip of light was glowing, pushing out from the cracks around his slightly open door.