The Red Butterfly

For John

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The house was yellow, as it had always been in dreams, blurred as if behind thick glass, and in stories both written and never written, half-remembered, caught in glimpses on sleeping neighborhood streets, through floats of pale fog that wafted above the street lamps like ghosts.

When she arrived at the foot of the wide wooden steps, rotting in patches and overgrown with moss and creeping periwinkle, she wasn’t surprised. It was yellow not because she had wished it that way, or because she had sought it out unconsciously, but because that was always the color of the house. She had remembered her future the same way that she remembered her very early childhood: one sense indistinct from another, smells taking on colors, touch and sound thrumming together with the rhythm of her breath, and moments that were only a few seconds long taking on the historical depth of years.

It was in the same way that he, who had the looser relationship to time, was happy to see his acquaintances before even running into them, anticipated cancellations and altered schedules, and knew that he loved her, for many years and with the intimacy of routine and steady growth, when they had only just met. The material of the future wasn’t clear to him, but its sorrows and joys wounded and healed him with a weight equal to those of the past. Unlike most of us, he was aware that he was not walking the path from beginning to end, but from a single point viewing the labyrinth all at once, in flashes of light and trembles of shadow.

He marveled at the house, but wasn’t surprised.

The porch was sunken but sturdy. The front door was hung with a dirty, brass carving of a lion’s face, a ring clutched between his teeth. These things could be cleaned up, repaired, nails hammered in crooked then removed, attempted again. The bones of the house were solid. Its life was long, it hauntings deep and slow as the seasons.

They arrived early in spring, when the windowpanes still sparkled with frost in the mornings, and the fire spat from dusk until midnight. They got as much use out of the fireplace as they could, to make up for the years spent huddled in front of the old apartment’s gas furnace, and sat around it, stared into it, discussed it, cautioned the children with stories of disfiguring burns and frightened themselves most of all. They roasted marshmallows, which charred black or melted sticky over the bricks, terrible to pry off, and collected big piles of ash in paper grocery bags, scraping it out with a flat iron tool that they felt lucky to own.

The house was piled with boxes, which he unpacked quickly, methodically, taking to the drudgery with the expertise of experience, while she worked slowly, with great distraction, seeking out only what she needed at that very moment, then getting sidetracked by discovering something better which she didn’t need at all. The children weren’t helpful, but they were happy. Their voices carried through the halls, up and down the stairs and out into the yard.

The cat got lost within the first week, which led to many tears and accusations, apologies, forgiveness, helpless grief and efforts towards acceptance, and then turned up again in the garden a few days later, thin and flea-bitten, happy to be home but refusing to let on, and slept for almost a full day in front of the fireplace.

In the backyard, the raised beds were long overgrown, crowded with wild mint and sweet clover, knotted in the browning fibers of dead vines and shriveled squash flowers. The chicken coop was in ruins, its roof caved in, wire mesh torn and contorted as if by the jaws of foxes. The crabapple tree sprouted small white buds, flushed pink at their edges. Sparrows swarmed and tittered through it even on gray mornings. In the flush of tepid March rain, weed flowers sprang up across the lawn, their yellow mouths opening towards the brief glimpses of sun. The weather changed every fifteen minutes, from mist to shine to hail, drizzle spiking into downpour, refracting pale rainbows through the window above the kitchen sink, where they had hung amber colored glass. After the yellow flowers passed, leaving only patches of waxy leaves in the shape of tiny lily pads, wild bluebells came, drooping violet across the yard in thick clusters from which the cat would pounce, suddenly, towards a robin or jay who would flutter off too quickly to be caught.

She had fantasized about tending a garden, but had done nothing to prepare herself for the work that chapped her hands and lodged black dirt beneath her fingernails. The earthworms wriggled away into their holes, fearing sunlight. Spiders spun wide webs that glittered in the rain. She planted vegetables in the patches and flowers around the rest of the yard, tended them, kept out the weeds, foiled the plans of the slugs. Much of gardening, as with much of life, turned out to involve only waiting, anticipating what was to come.

She dreamed of ivy coiling over everything, of root rot and pestilence, and, more than once, of a red butterfly emerging, sticky and quivering, from its chrysalis. The dream came with the physical symptoms of a nightmare, but it didn’t exactly frighten her. The memory of the transformation was engrossing, disgusting. She returned to it at odd times, when there was nothing else occupying her mind.

They slept in the attic room, which was steepled and hot, with wood paneled walls and two broad skylights. A window in the shape of a half-circle faced the east, bringing the sun’s dewy warmth in earlier and earlier each day. On clear mornings they could see the white peak of the mountain, and when there was mist it haloed the hills and the houses in a pale pink light, slowing the passage of time and shrouding the city in sleep. Crows made nests in the eaves, and they could be heard scratching and digging around the edges of the roof at every hour. The cat would watch riveted from the sill, never minding the glass separating her from her prey.

Beneath the slanted roof, the walls were too short for bookshelves, so books were stacked sideways in piles along them, all of a size. To chase away the smell of neglect, they burned sticks of incense and thick pillar candles, which gave the room, with its deep shadows and long slats of light, the atmosphere of a church. The floorboards, which were stained the color of honey, creaked eerily under their feet. This charmed them in the daylight, but made them uneasy when they woke in the night to hear that very same sound. Everyone agreed that the attic was the most haunted room in the house without knowing what exactly that meant.

The children slept below, in separate rooms that were each so full of toys, games, knick-knacks and lop-sided, black-eyed stuffed animals that it was hard to believe that they had before fit all of their things, combined, in a single bedroom. The older boy got the best of the afternoon light, so they crowded his windowsill with succulents, which began to emerge from their winter dormancy with slow, elemental movements towards the sun. Across the hall, the large bathroom held the plants that thrived in humidity, lacy ferns and dark-leaved begonias, bromeliads with lingering flowers, tiger-striped prayer plants dangling from high shelves and hanging baskets, their leaves coiling closed at night and unfurling with the morning. An enormous peace lily was beginning to grow slim white flowers in the room’s shadiest corner.

He would take long baths most evenings, fogging the large mirror, unveiling the scribbles that she and the children had traced across it with their fingers. Sometimes there emerged notes that nobody had written, images nobody had drawn. The bath was deep, free-standing, with the feet of a gryphon: the front two were talons, the back two were paws. They had tried, without success, to figure out at what date those strange fixtures had been added, and by whom. The house had a long history, but it wasn’t long enough to be registered as historic by the city, and the oldest photographs they could turn up were only of the exterior, which had changed little over the decades. The tile in the bathroom was pale blue. The faucets had all been replaced, updated, made functional but sapped of character. The ceiling was high and the single window was tall enough to flood most of the room with light in the mornings, though it never quite reached the peace lily.

The days grew longer, the nights receded. Pale green leaves, so thin that light shone through them, budded on the tree branches. The garden bloomed, exciting his allergies. She had planted fuschia for the hummingbirds, snapdragons for the children, foxglove and purple columbine, tiny forget-me-nots and yards of sun roses, all of different colors. Patches of gold yarrow, and later, tall stalks of Japanese anemone emerged on their own, the lone stragglers from whenever the garden had last been tended, aside from the mint whose roots she was always digging up. Her favorite flowers were the wide red poppies with deep purple stamens that came after the smaller orange poppies, and, of course, the sunflowers, which rose in closely clustered forests around the yard. In the vegetable beds, food grew, thickening, ripening, turning colors. The children liked snapping the peas from the vines that coiled over metal supports. She liked the cherry tomatoes, how they glowed, their red flesh hot, smelling of earth and sun. The summer rose around them, humming.

They only turned the A/C on when it was unbearably hot. Otherwise, they kept the windows open at all hours, letting in the wind and, with it, bird song and the musk of browning flowers. Something in the yard was always dying, and something else shooting up in its place. In the summer, the house felt bigger than it had, as if mirrors had been added to all the rooms. On quiet days, when the kids were away, a haze lay over everything. The lavender bush in the front yard swarmed with bees, and juncos trilled in the dogwood tree, their song like an old-fashioned telephone ring.

He played guitar on the living room floor, stoned and frowning. She, in the room they called the library—which was only a spare bedroom walled with books on every side and up to the ceiling—hunched with her chin in her palm, word processor open in front of her, thinking about the red butterfly. Whenever she began a sentence, a finch would appear at the bird feeder on the other side of the window, or the spider whose web was against the pane would catch a fly. She had been watching that spider for weeks, and every day it grew bigger, so big that she had become afraid of it, awed by it. Like everything about the house, it was an omen, and like every omen, she couldn’t discern its meaning.

Among the other omens were: the crumbling stone bird bath in the backyard, overgrown with blackberry vines that caught thorny in their shirtsleeves; the symbol nailed above the back door, a crescent moon crossing a sun; the blackened wood beneath the wallpaper that they peeled away in the basement, solid but stained as if by smoke; the bird skeleton beneath the porch, the bones of its ribcage fine as needles; the sweet smell of rotting flowers that hung in the attic staircase; the silence of the rooms in the night, as if the daily rumblings of the house had been hushed, a finger that didn’t exist against a pair of lips that didn’t exist. She noted them down in her journal and then forgot to ever consult them, or try to put them together.

In the yellow house, they could still hear sirens through the open windows. The world outside still moved, they still worked, still fought, cried, slept until noon or didn’t sleep at all. They had the same problems they had always had, but now they had more rooms to have them in, a backyard to have them in, a little path to the woods to stomp down, and a creek that dried up in summer to cast stones into. Sometimes the youngest boy said that he saw an animal crawling through the house. The cat? Not the cat. Sometimes when she woke at night, she could feel a weight on the end of the mattress, beside her feet. The cat? Sometimes it was. Other times, he woke and heard a soft voice singing a familiar lullaby which he couldn’t quite place. A hint: it was not the cat.

They called the ghost “she,” sometimes they set a place for her at dinner, sometimes they ran as fast as they could to the bathroom at night and as fast as they could back to bed. Sometimes the omens lined up, an answer was in sight, and then, of course, it blurred and receded, and the noise and light of life took over: math homework, homemade pizza, canned television laughter. The house stopped being an object of fascination and became only part of the scenery. They read books and made grocery lists and got drunk, overslept their alarms, talked over each other, sat in silence, had sex, made plans and had their plans dashed, overturned. Something would fall off a shelf, or a word would appear written in a winter morning’s condensation across the windowpane, in nobody’s handwriting, and the ghost talk would start up all over again, fading only in time.

The day that the red butterfly appeared at the house, clinging to the screen door at the back of the kitchen, its wings twitching softly, almost the size of her palm and only mildly red, really much closer to a rusty brown, she interrupted him in the middle of a shower, made him get out and pulled him after her, naked but for a towel and leaving a trail of damp footprints through the rooms, to the see it before it flew off.

He kissed her softly on the temple and said that it was, in fact, a moth.