Butterfly Tattoo (10 page)

Ellen holds fast to my arm, teetering beside me in her high heels. Even at seventy-six years old, when we’re trudging out here, in the damp grass, she refuses to give them up.

“My precious boy,” Ellen murmurs under her breath, as if she were cradling Alex in her arms. “We miss you so.” Tears immediately burn my eyes, and I blink them back, not moving. Not even when she whispers, “And we love you so. Always.”

“Grandma? Why do you talk to Daddy whenever we come here?” Andrea doesn’t look up, just continues to stare at the monolith atop his burial place, reaching with her fingertips to touch that, too. Maybe she needs to know that where he stays is solid, corporeal, even if he is not.

Ellen gazes up at me, the quiet blue eyes filled with emotion. I speak for her. “Sweetheart, don’t you?” I ask. “Talk to him whenever we’re here? Maybe not out loud, but in your head?”

I can tell she’s thinking about the question pretty seriously when she finally whispers, “I talk to him in my dreams. ’Cause that’s when he talks to me.”

Beside me Ellen shivers, and I do too, despite the heat of the afternoon. I know Andie’s speaking metaphorically, but it still spooks me. “What’s he say?” I ask, barely suppressing the trembling that tries to invade my voice.

“That he misses us. But that he’s happy, too. He’s in a really good place,” she explains reverently, then looks over her shoulder at both of us. “He’s not here, you know.”

“No, darling, of course not,” Ellen agrees.

“That’s why I asked, Grandma,” she continues. “Just ’cause I know he’s not down there.” She pats the quiet earth beneath her hand by way of explanation.

“Then where is he?” I squint into the sun. Is he high up in some cloudlike heaven? Staring down at all of us today? “Is he there when you dream at night?”

Andrea laughs like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “Don’t you know?” She hasn’t laughed this honestly with me in a year, nor smiled so transparently. I even glimpse love in her expression. Ellen releases my arm, as slowly I crouch low beside my daughter.

“No, Andie, tell me. Where’d he go?”

Blue eyes fix me, clear and bright, and I behold the mysteries of my whole universe. “Silly, he’s at the beach,” she says with a dimpled grin. “Surfing. And the waves are always good!”

The beach. Well, of course. Where else would Alexander Barrett Richardson be? Laughter bubbles up from deep within me, unstoppable, despite the incongruity of being here at my lover’s grave.

That’s when the miracle happens.

For once, just once, Andrea lets me pull her tight into my arms, and rock her like she’s still my baby girl.

***

After the cemetery visit, Andrea and I retire to the adjoining upstairs guest rooms for a nap. She doesn’t even complain about that fact, which I’m pretty certain has a lot to do with the cache of Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books she discovered in Laurel’s old bedroom trunk. Typical Ellen, though—neither room has ever been fully converted to dedicated guest quarters. Both retain some of their childhood charm and character. Laurel’s room has an antebellum dollhouse that has fascinated Andrea for years, and Alex’s boasts a bunch of surfing and football trophies, as well as tall shelves lined with his favorite books.

But right now, it’s the cigar box on his old bed that’s holding my attention. Ellen told me she’d pulled together some photographs for me to cart home, but I can’t believe she’s really willing to part with all these family pictures. She wants Andrea to have them, she explained. And me. “Darling, I have more in this house than I can possibly keep up with,” she told me. “You must have them.”

Dropping onto the edge of the bed, I thumb through a disheveled heap of photographs and mementos. There’s a wrinkled camp award for “good citizenship,” a handmade potholder, an old journal. That gives me pause, as I crack it open and realize that Al kept it when he was fourteen years old. From what he told me, I wonder if his first confessions about realizing he was gay might be in those pages. I shove the cloth-bound diary to the bottom of the stack to guard his secrets, and then notice a large picture just beneath.

Gingerly, I pull the framed photo out, and at first I hardly recognize him: he can’t be more than twelve years old, riding high atop Casey’s shoulders. Overhead he holds some flag like it’s an exultant trophy, grinning from ear to ear. He’s so small and young and vulnerable that I want to reach into the picture and save him. Save him from anything that might possibly hurt him, and hold him close like I did Andrea earlier.

With a sigh, I roll onto my back and smell his childhood bed. Plaid pillowcase, handmade quilt, it’s all a little musty. Like he really has left this world, same as he once left this room. Quiet—impenetrable quiet—blankets me as I prop my head on my elbow, and watch dust motes waft listlessly in a beam of light. Squinting, I look at Al in the picture again. He had no idea what the world held for him then, but he was just wide open, ready for it all, fearless.

Strange, but I almost feel like it’s me somehow in that crackled photograph, riding high atop the world. For a minute, I close my eyes, and I’m almost certain that it is.

***

Not sure how long it is before I wake up, and for a displaced moment, I think it’s morning. Blinking back the sleep, I even think it’s a year ago, as I scrub a drowsy hand across my face. Then I remember the anniversary and just how much we’ve all lost.

I slept in this room for days after the funeral. Every now and then, I’d rouse from heavy slumber and gaze through the mottled windowpane into the backyard. I’d spy Andrea with her grandmother, sitting in the garden, or see Laurel coming into the back door, arms filled with brown-paper grocery bags. Whenever I tried to awaken during those days, it felt impossible. Like moving under water in a thick dream; like being drugged. Occasionally I’d stumble downstairs, and Ellen would always kiss me, pointing me straight back to bed. “Sleep, darling. You need rest,” she’d chide me.

I had to sleep because I couldn’t live. Not with him gone.

But then, after three days of barely eating the sandwiches and fruit they kept delivering to the bedroom on that food tray, I did finally get up. I had to wake because Andrea was still alive—even if I wasn’t.

The gratitude I’ll feel for their protection during those first days after we buried Alex is something I’ll never forget, no matter how much some of the later events with Laurel nearly destroyed me. I try and remember that as I blink back the naptime sleep from my eyes and amble downstairs in search of Ellen. Funny how much today feels like a year ago; the same heat, the same shrouding coolness inside this steamship of a house, the same rhythmic ticking of the antique grandfather clock.

“You’re up already?” Ellen asks. She is sitting at the dining-room table sipping tea, a hardback open in front of her.

“What are you reading?”

She examines the novel’s spine. “C.S. Lewis.” Ugh. God stuff. Not what I need today. Settling across from her, I slide my newly discovered picture of Alex across the table toward her. “You see this one?”

She lifts it eye-level, smiling as she studies it. “That’s the summer he grew like a bean stalk,” she laughs gently. “At least six inches, I think.”

“You know what I noticed about it?” I ask as she hands it back to me, shaking her head. “That he was triumphant. On top of the world. Guess he always was.”

“Not always,” she answers wistfully. “But most of the time.”

Staring down at the image, at the way he’s riding high and confident on Casey’s shoulders, I say, “Bold as a mountain.”

“Bold as life,” she agrees. “Some people are born that way, Michael. They come to us for a brief, special purpose. We must accept that it was Alex’s way.”

I know she’s right. Alex, the speedy comet that trailed across my life, then burned out fast. He lived to the fullest, that’s for sure. No apologies, no hesitation, he reached for life with both hands and took it. Gusto should have been his middle name.

“It was the same way when he came out to me,” she continues. “He was gay, that’s how it was, and he hoped I’d still be proud of him.”

“And you said?”

“How could I not be proud?”

“You’re a great mother.”

“I had a great son.”

“Well, you won’t get any arguments from me about that.” I laugh, and our eyes meet. We shared a true love between us; the approach just came from different directions.

She gets a distant look on her face, staring past me at some unseen place. “He went at everything so intently, it was almost as if he knew he’d die young.”

“Yeah, maybe some people have a short lifespan coded into their DNA.”

I thought about that after he was gone. How fitting it was that he’d made a career of staving off death, of battling it, hand to hand; then, ever the victor in others’ lives, he succumbed finally in his own.

“I’m angry when I think of all the people he might have healed,” I say. “All the kids he could have saved. That really burns me up.”

“I receive letters from the parents, you know,” she says. “I had one just last week, from the mother of a thirteen-year-old boy he treated for leukemia. Her son has been in remission for five years now. Totally well. She wanted me to know how thankful she was for Alex.”

Slowly, she moves toward the credenza, easing a drawer open. There must be family silver and serving pieces in that thing, because it gives an uneasy groan, but she steadies it, pulling out a thin envelope. Everything Ellen Richardson does is deliberate, purposeful, elegant. Her movements are choreographed poetry. Like the way she runs her palm over the creased paper as she removes it from the envelope, ironing the thin paper with her fingertips as she lifts her reading glasses upward to the bridge of her long nose.

She settles into the chair again and studies the page, her eyes skimming over the words. “Your son gave me back my own son,” she begins. “For that I will always be grateful. But we are not alone. I know there are countless others like my family. Your son touched us all.”

Family. With that one word, tears fill my eyes. Ellen must sense my reaction, because she pauses, glancing upward at me. “Oh, Michael,” she soothes, covering my hand with her own weathered one. “I’m sorry.”

She blurs, becomes misty as I blink at the tears. I don’t want this woman, the only mother figure in my life, to see me cry. Her bony hand closes around mine, squeezing tight, and the tears won’t stop. Searching for my voice is a useless task; there’s only a tight raspy wheeze as I bow my head, dropping it into my palm.

Ellen rises from her chair and stands beside me, her familiar hand circling my tired shoulders. “You loved him so much, I know.”

“It’s not just that,” I manage thickly, glancing up at her. “We were a family.”

“You still are, Michael. You and Andrea.”

“But he was the glue. He’s what held us together.”

She strokes my hair, brushing her long fingers through my unruly locks. “It only feels that way right now, dear.”

Family. What I hadn’t really known before Al, and what it feels like I’ll never know again. The one thing I still have here, at Ocean Crescent Drive. “I can’t reach her, Ellen. I’ve tried.”

“I think she’s better.”

“Maybe on the surface.”

“She told me Inez is going to keep her this summer.” There’s no accusation in her words, but I feel heavy guilt descend in the space of a heartbeat. That I have to work, that I can’t stay with her myself. That I’m not loaded like the Richardson family used to be, once upon a time, before only the trappings of their fortune remained.

“While I work,” I offer lamely, wiping at my eyes with the back of my hand.

Ellen leans down, embracing me, and I catch the faint aroma of hand cream and perfume, tinged with earthy smells from her garden. These scents have been a constant during my thirteen years in her family. “Michael, of course you’re working.” She laughs, giving my shoulder a squeeze of reassurance. “The world works because it must, but perhaps you could take some time off. A vacation for the two of you might help Andrea to open up.” She settles herself regally in the chair beside me again, studying me with her aged blue eyes. Eyes so eerily like my dead lover’s that for a careless moment, I’m startled.

“I’ve been thinking of taking her back east. To meet my father.”

Ellen nods, but her mouth turns downward in concern. “Have you spoken to him?”
Lately.
She doesn’t say it, but I know that’s what she’s thinking.

“Nope.” The grandfather clock in the foyer sounds the quarter-hour, and the chimes echo through the whole house. The quiet here has always been peaceful, never lonely like at my home when I was growing up, where it was empty and cavernous. The kind of silence that would swallow you whole if you weren’t careful.

Ellen draws in a breath. “Does your father know that Alex passed?” Staring down into my tea glass, tinkling the cubes of ice in it, offers me a temporary reprieve until Ellen covers my hand with her own again. “He doesn’t know?”

“He doesn’t even know that we have a daughter, Ellen,” I confess, glancing up at her. Damned if fresh tears aren’t a serious threat, but I manage to urge them away.

“You should tell him,” she states with a resolute nod of her head. “He’s your father and he’d want to know.”

“He doesn’t want any part of what I had with Alex. He made that painfully clear years ago.”

Again, only the sound of the grandfather clock, measuring the silence between us like a metronome. She knows my family history. Knows that my old man had expected me to become a doctor, not hook up with one—one of the male variety at that. Knows that the Reverend Warner had some very choice words to say about my life partner.

Keen blue eyes fix me hard. “You are a father, Michael. You understand what this breach between the two of you must be doing to him.”

“Ellen, no. Seriously. He doesn’t give a crap, okay?”

“Has he phoned you in the past year?”

“A few times.” I shrug. “That’s it.”

“And you didn’t tell him that Alex died?”

I lean back in my chair, expelling a tight breath. “What do you hear from Laurel lately? You told me she’d be here this weekend.” I’m turning the tables intentionally, reminding her that both our families have their torn places.