Return of the Butterfly Read online

  After a lost and lonely childhood spent mostly in Father’s voidish Main Line mansion, I swore I’d never live anywhere larger than the Fiskes’ cozy Pasadena bungalow. But I had to admit I did love our new home. It had enough bedrooms and bathrooms—five and four—to accommodate Makeda’s crew and our own coming bunlet. And it had enough Mission style features—exposed rafters, quatrefoil windows, covered walkways—to remind us that our Hispanic friends’ ancestors were the true legitimate residents of SoCal. Unsurprisingly, the house seemed to suit us all. Melesse and Sofiya spent no end of time playing hopscotch in the walkways and running up and down the staircase, their delicate chocolate hands barely touching the scrolled metalwork banister as their deft feet flew. And Buster was particularly fond of sleeping in front of the vibrantly tiled, arched fireplace, snoring like a jungle cat and purring like a house afire. I knew Jillily would have joined him if she could, but she’d been ensconced for more years than I cared to recall in the deepest hole in my heart.

  Of course, one of the best things about our Old Mill Road digs was their proximity to Caltech, my home away from home ever since Stanley H. Fiske had whisked me from Mother’s post-divorce New York penthouse to mentor me in quantum physics, calling me to a life of the mind that no one had ever imagined for the child who’d flapped and whirled and screamed bloody murder out of sheer emptiness and boredom. At Caltech, I’d met Amir Gupta and Gunther Anderten and Katrina Kelly and Tom Haggis and Bob Ballantine and even that impish erstwhile lab chimp cheekily dubbed Lord Hanuman by Amir. It was there, too, that I’d deepened my connection to Adam, whose tutoring when I was just twelve had led to the whole adventure in the first place.

  I hardly ever flapped anymore. It was a last resort of emotional release, to be used only when something exceptionally disastrous occurred, like the loss of someone I loved, Al Shabaab’s recruitment of three-year-old orphans to serve as child warriors, pelicans plastered in crude oil, Miley Cyrus’ aardvarkian tongue driving another nail into the coffin of contemporary childhood, and the possible election of a dangerous dolt who denied human agency in global warming—yet another roadblock in the way of our project to actually do something about it. I’d learned over the years, mostly thanks to Adam, to say what upset me and to ask for my favorite kind of Mack truckish hugs when things got really bad. But that didn’t stop me from worrying whether my bunlet would be as plagued as I’d been by such a pitifully profound set of sensitivities. (I knew I really should stop referring to her as the Bunlet. We had a name for her now. Adam had urged me to pore over passels of baby naming books before he succumbed with more grace than I would have mustered to what I’d wanted to name her all along. Callay Myriadne Manus-Robins she’d be, for surely her incarnating into this world warranted more than a few callooh callays.)

  But as is often the case, I’m afraid I’ve digressed. With a noisy clearing of his throat, Adam wiped his hands with a dishtowel and managed to maneuver me into his arms, whispering so strategically in my ear that my tweeter signaled it hadn’t forgotten what a mini-explosion felt like. “So what is Her Grace going to get up to today while the rest of us slave away at the lab?” I felt a pang of guilt. Speaking of butt thrusts, it was after a particularly vigorous one by Callay that I’d decided it really was time to hand over the reins of our project to Amir, whose early circumambulations around string theory, the space-time continuum, the relative weakness of gravity, and mini-black holes had been particularly helpful in propelling my mind toward the discovery of C-Voids. We’d been banking ever since that those black holes within human cells would eventually enable us to initiate a process that would obviate most fossil fuel-propelled travel. Tom had more recently coined the term “Dreamization” for our project, putting together the dematerialization and rematerialization we were hoping to use to move people from one place to another. With Amir in charge, the work of Dreamization would go forward while I struggled to deliver some semblance of bleary-eyed competency to caring for an infant. And if you don’t think I shuddered at the prospect, you’ve never grown up in a house with a whole wing devoted to small children your father had saved from the devil abortionists.

  I answered Adam with a slight tone of defiance. “Probably see if I can manage one last prenatal yoga class with Siri Sajan before I completely lose the capacity to stretch the toes I can no longer see.”

  Adam gave a grunt of appreciation before warning, “Don’t push it, babe. It’s been great that you’ve kept it up, but it’s getting pretty close ....”

  I waved a hand. “Oh, don’t worry. Siri Sajan watches me like a mama bear.” I paused. “Speaking of which, how would you feel about Mother being in the delivery room with us for the birth?”

  Adam raised a brow. “Does she want to?”

  “Oh,” I hedged, “I haven’t officially asked her. We just spoke loosely about the concept. Well, really, she happened to mention that her friend Dory was there when her daughter Lilia gave birth to Jemima, and I said that sounded nice.” I stifled the impulse to pinch.

  Adam crossed his arms. “Tell me what you’re thinking, Fleur.”

  “I don’t know that it’s even a thought. It just occurred to me that she might appreciate ... well, you know. Seeing the baby coming out. The generational thing and all.”

  “I’m surprised.”

  My laugh sounded a bit forced. “By my atavistic reversion to the matriarchy?”

  “Noooo, I wouldn’t exactly put it like that. By you wanting your mother there to comfort you.”

  I felt my face flushing. “No, it’s not that. I just thought it would be sweet for her.”

  “Fleur, I’m good with it. Really, I am. But I just think you should call it what it is.”

  “Which is ...?”

  “You’re scared, and you actually feel close enough to your mother now to look to her for comfort.”

  “Am I?”

  “What? Scared? Aren’t you?”

  “Well, maybe just a bit.”

  “You wouldn’t be human if you weren’t a little. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure it’ll all go fine.”

  “Oh my God,” I marveled, “You’re scared.”

  “Me? Don’t be ridiculous.” He ran a quick hand through his hair and made a face. “Oh, hell, of course I am. Of course we are. Both of us.” He shot me a sheepish grin. “It’s a relief to say it out loud, isn’t it?”

  “I guess so. But I’m not sure it helps.”

  “Maybe we should talk about what we’re afraid of?”

  I eyed him warily. “What are you afraid of?”

  “It’s not what you think. I think the baby will be fine.”

  “Well, there is that, isn’t there?”

  “Yes, but I have a good feeling about her. I think she’s going to be sturdy as all get out. No rational reason, but I do.”

  I attempted folding my hands across my belly, then gave up. “Well, then you must be worried about me. But honestly, I don’t think you have to, because honestly—despite all my moaning, I’m in pretty good shape. Siri Sajan says she’s never seen a pregnant woman more ...” And then it dawned on me. “Your mother.”

  His green eyes moistened, and a little groan escaped him.

  “Oh, sweetheart.” I led him out of the room to the den and motioned to him to sit next to me on what we liked to call “the queen’s settee”—a cat-shredded, lumpy old sofa Mother had commissioned after seeing a photo in Architectural Digest of a similarly Liberty-patterned one in Elizabeth Regina’s private rooms at Buckingham Palace. Three feline lives and hundreds of Krispy Kreme Powdered Blueberry-Filled doughnuts later, it had descended into something more likely to be found in a homeless encampment.

  I nuzzled Adam’s head, detecting a slight whiff of something lime-ish. “I’m not going anywhere,” I said. Dying in the throes of childbirth, Adam’s mother had left him with a slightly crippled left leg and a longing for what he would never have.

  “I don’t think ... and I don’t want to worry you, but you know I w
ould never be able to live if ...”

  “I wouldn’t be able to live without you, either. But I am not going to die on you.” And I realized then that I simply couldn’t. That was that. I felt a surge of strength that I didn’t believe I’d ever felt before, not even when I was convinced I was going to resurrect Grandfather. I’d failed at that, but I could not, would not fail at this.

  “Well, that’s settled then,” I pronounced. “I think Mother will do us both good. Even if she did stop pushing me out of her tweeter long enough to give me this pointy head.”

  “Oh, the head. You really do exaggerate, you know. You’ve got a perfect oval of a head.” He laughed. “A true egghead.”

  “Well, at least you’re right about something.” We kissed for a long time, pulled apart, and then we kissed some more—even longer, with him fondling my gigantic breasts and me pressing my hand against his member and then taking it out of its zippered cave and caressing it more and more vigorously. All the while kissing. His ragged breath became my breath. I sensed his heartbeat in sync with my own. I wondered if Callay Myriadne was in tune with us, too. As Adam cried out, I felt momentarily certain that nothing bad was going to happen to this baby, to me, to us, to generations that would surely spill forth from our love.

  Well, anyway, that was what I felt right then. Once Adam left for the lab, favoring me with a cheeky smirk before closing the door, it dawned on me that Grandfather would never see my little girl. Pushing aside any thought of Siri Sajan’s class, I heaved myself up the stairs to the baby’s room. An animal-themed alphabet frieze by Michael Spink cavorted across one cream-colored wall. Opposite it hung a sepia-toned framed photo of Grandfather pushing a gleeful young me on a swing. His walrus mustache was a strawberry blond in those days, the gleam in his eyes an ad for good health. A heavy gloom descended on the room, and I stood awhile, staring. Eventually, I forced myself forward and lifted the picture off its nail, propping it on my knees as I plopped heavily onto the single bed Adam had positioned catty-corner from the crib.

  The child’s hair was a mass of nearly white ringlets. Would Callay be as fair as this, or would she favor the more robust coloring of Adam’s clan? On that swing now, I swept up toward the clouds, aware of my grandfather’s adoring eyes, my heart in my throat.

  But the sound of a motorcycle spouting noisy smoke farts jarred me back to the present. Below stairs, the grandfather clock in the study sounded eleven chimes. I shifted my position, grateful for the thickness of the plush mattress pad Mother had purchased for an arm and a leg. It occurred to me that I’d be spending a good deal of time on this bed, certainly more than Mother had spent in my pink-painted room when I was young; she’d been too wedded to the bottle—speaking of dematerialization, shrinking into invisibilized form to elude Father’s whip-like words, my stricken grandfather’s helpless ugga umph uggas, and my own frantic screams that only Nana, with her Mack truck grip, could manage to quell.

  I lifted a thick corner of the whimsical quilt sewn by Stanley and Gwennie’s mother that had once graced my bed in their home. I poked it against my cheek. I’d actually coordinated this room’s color scheme of robin’s egg blue, buttercream, apricot, and deep forest green to go with it. “No insipid pink,” I’d proclaimed to Adam, “for our Callay!”

  What I hadn’t said to him, nor to anyone else, was the thought that kept me up after too many nightly pees: would my having aborted Baby X at the age of thirteen be penalized belatedly by one of the more punitive gods and spirits in the vast panoply of religious traditions, like the Norse goddess Vár, who wreaked vengeance on those who broke vows, the Albanian Perit, turning those who wasted food into hunchbacks, or the Shinto Amaterasu, who rewarded an act of rudeness by bringing an age of darkness upon the world? Or even Yahweh, who seemed to have quite a predilection for smiting? Of course, even the most benign of gods could be something of a stickler when crossed: Artemis turning Actaeon into a stag, ripped apart by his own dogs, for staring in awe at her bathing body; Zeus punishing Ixion for flirting with his wife by fastening him eternally to a burning wheel.

  Whatever my crimes over the years, my own worst punishments seemed to consist of huge dollops of melancholy, regret, and dread. But if my daughter’s health were to be compromised by her mother’s sins? I swept my hand across the photo sitting rather heavily on my knees, wishing I could again feel Grandfather’s gnarled hand wrapped comfortingly around mine.

  But now I noticed that my fingers had made tracks on the glass, which was dustier than I’d realized. Looking up, I saw that someone had left the window wide open above the crib. Pushing a fist down into the mattress, I rose gracelessly to return the picture to its perch on the wall, and then shuffled over to pull the window closed, taking care to hear the click of its brass latch.

  It still amazed me how quickly things got messy. “Hell in a handbasket,” our old housekeeper Fayga—she of the serious aversion to dirt—used to say. She’d frantically ply her powerful, industrial grade vacuum at dust balls and cracker crumbs, sending me fleeing in terror lest I be suctioned in myself. That fear didn’t get any better over the years. Once I started studying physics, I learned that the universe was rife with black holes, sucking in vast clouds of gas and whole solar systems like our own. Great debates raged in my field around John von Neumann’s theory of entropy and his description of wave-function collapse as an irreversible process. In the course of my work on Dematerialization, I was one of those who’d posed the possibility that physical information might permanently disappear into black holes, effectively dissolving many disparate physical states into the same dead one.

  You can see what the presence of a little dirt did to me. Lacking a mother sober enough to see to me or a father who’d cared to, I’d clearly osmosed the household staff into my psyche more than I cared to admit. Rubbing my thumb against my blackened fingers, I felt a distinct sensation of impatience with our current housekeeper, Lukie. She might be a sweetheart of a human, but she could use a bit of Fayga’s fanatical compulsiveness. I made a mental note to make sure she dusted this room thoroughly before the baby came. I wanted everything pure and clean for my child.

  But who was I kidding? How could anything be clean and pure for our little girl when everything was going haywire on the planet? I ducked my head as if I could block out the impossible dilemma. We had to live our lives as if we had forever, didn’t we? Otherwise, we’d climb under the covers and go paralytic with despair. And that simply wasn’t going to be an option. Not for me, anyway. And certainly not now. I headed for my own room and yanked a loose-fitting T-shirt from a cupboard. I’d decided to go to yoga after all.

  Sanctus

  The Soul of the World was troubled. It wasn’t enough that in many places the earth had become fire, that grain crops were declining, that coral reefs were dying, that sea levels were rising and glaciers retreating. The birds she’d counted on to sing her awake each morning were in dangerous decline. She’d already been mourning the losses of the Lord Howe thrush, the Santa Barbara Song Sparrow, the Arabian Ostrich, the Grand Cayman Oriole, the Seychelles Parakeet, the southern starfish; the growing roster of the missing was relentless. It felt as if birdsong itself would soon be gone.

  The starlings whose murmurations soared wavelike through the sky were succumbing to the theft of permanent pasture by livestock farming. As the earth heated up, signs of spring were moving forward, and migratory birds were arriving early at their breeding grounds. Those harbingers of new life, the rousingly bill-clattering White Storks, were wintering in Europe, rather than Africa, foraging at rubbish dumps, rather than breezily canopied savannahs; ironically, as humans reduced the number of open landfills to prevent birds from choking to death on plastic and rubber bands, those selfsame storks would be taxed to come up with new solutions or starve.

  The World Soul settled uneasily onto her mossy haunches and let the Fates do their reweaving around her. She shot an encouraging glance at Clotho, put a steadying hand on the shoulder of Lachesis, an
d directed a stern eye at Atropos, lest she go wild with those shears of hers. A soul could absorb only so much grief at a time.

  Chapter Two

  I LOVED SIRI SAJAN, but within weeks yogic aspirations devolved into the lesser goals of getting out of the bathtub on my own, scratching the bottom of my foot, and picking up anything from the floor. My acid reflux kept insisting that the baby was late, late, late for her very important date. Never mind that it was only day 281 of my pregnancy. On day twelve of my admittedly compulsive marathon of prepping for her, I heaved myself down the hall to repeat the ritual, telling myself that keeping busy would also distract me from the fact that Gwennie’s release from the hospital had been delayed, yet again, by a resurgence of her blood infection.

  Here are some of the items I’d already washed—some by hand—and folded and refolded and which I now tackled anew, as if practicing for what was soon to become a far more necessary constant drill:

  1. The hand-dyed, dusty rose gown in which Mother had transported me from Bryn Mawr Hospital to Father’s Main Line estate. Despite my overall eschewal of pink for my child and this particular gown’s utter impracticality, with its satin lace ruffle at the neck embellished with a floppy chiffon flower affixed with a polished pearl broach, I couldn’t possibly bear the pain in Mother’s blue eyes if the daughter of her daughter didn’t wear it home. Besides, I was madly in love with its similarly adorned matching headband, which had proclaimed that the decidedly pointy-headed, bald child in the earliest photo of me was, in fact, neither a boy nor the po-faced alien she appeared to be.