The Butterfly House. Marcia Preston

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ