The Butterfly House. Marcia Preston

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СКАЧАТЬ 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, СКАЧАТЬ