The Butterfly House. Marcia Preston

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ