Butterfly Tattoo (3 page)

Once we’re settled at the cafeteria table, I learn that her full name is Andrea Lauren Richardson. Michael is her stepfather, she says, but then reveals nothing else. So I guess Trevor was at least partially right—he’s clearly off the market. She doesn’t mention her mother; I want to ask about that, but something stops me, something in the vague way she answers my question about Michael. “I live with him,” is all she says, gazing down at her doughnut.

“You going to eat?” I ask after watching her poke at the Krispy Kreme’s icing for a while.

“Are
you
?” She points to my own untouched bagel and I feel like my old semi-anorexic tendencies have just been shoved under a microscope.

“Probably.”

“Yeah, probably me, too.”

After a moment I ask, “So how old are you, anyway?”

“Eight.”

“Third grade?” I probe, determined to learn more, and she nods in agreement.

I flash momentarily on my own experiences at that age: Girl Scouts, dance classes, and horseback riding. I spent that summer on my parents’ farm with nary a concern in my mind. “Second grade’s really cool, isn’t it?”

She shrugs, frowning slightly. “I guess so.”

We fall silent, Andrea’s eyes constantly searching the busy commissary. This is the place to come if you want to see weird aliens, vampires, or even plain old character actors here for a meal. It’s also a good spot to land spoilers for upcoming television shows if you eavesdrop successfully on the right producers’ conversations, but Andrea seems oblivious to all of that. Her auburn eyebrows arch upward, and she cranes her neck, scanning the whole of the room repeatedly.

“Looking for anybody in particular?” I finally ask, but she doesn’t answer. She only stares down at the table again, picking at the doughnut some more. “Nobody at all?”

For a moment she opens her mouth to answer, but then snaps it shut again. Instead, a melancholy expression darkens her face as she stares out the tall windows into the spring sunlight. Something’s going on inside her mind. I just can’t tell what it is.

When she looks back at me, she whispers under her breath, “I have one, too.”

I think hard, certain I should understand this cryptic statement, but since I don’t, I lean close and ask what she means.

“A scar. Only you can’t see mine.” She gazes up into my eyes with an intense expression, and for a moment I fear she might cry. Then just as quickly she stares back down at her doughnut, silent.

Her remark makes me feel self-conscious, but it’s not the usual deep shame that such comments elicit. Maybe that’s why I brush back my hair so she can really see the marks along my face and jaw line. She responds to the invitation, peering upward for a closer look, then asks in a small voice, “Do they still hurt?”

“Sometimes. Especially the ones you can’t see.”

Her clear blue eyes widen in surprise. “How many do you have?”

“A few.” I leave out the brutal details about my chest and abdomen because she doesn’t need the violent truth about my past. “You?”

“Only one. On my leg.” I know she must be burning with as many questions as I am. Dozens instantly speed through my head—like why there’s such a sorrowful expression in her eyes. Or what happened to her that left this hidden scar.

We fall silent then, the revelations apparently finished for the moment. I spread cream cheese on my bagel; she gives me a tentative grin and says, “So you
are
eating, huh?”

“Yeah, think I am.” Gesturing with my knife I ask, “What about you?”

She reaches for her doughnut and licks some of the warmed chocolate off the top. “Yeah, me, too.”

Subtext, I think with a smile. That’s what my little red-haired friend and I are speaking. Volumes upon volumes of it, without any need for translation at all.

If only grownups felt so safe—and so easy to understand.

Chapter Two: Michael

“So did you have fun on the lot today?” I try to sound bright, but Andrea just stares out the passenger window of our truck, remote as always. “Well, did you?” My voice tightens over the words despite my best intentions.

“You were supposed to call Ms. Inez to watch me today. You knew it was a teacher work day.” The disdain in her voice is palpable, thick as the smog hanging over our city like a threat. Even if I didn’t know that summer’s almost here, I’d see it in the hazy evening sky tonight. It’s turned all purplish blue, like a bruise.

“I forgot, sweetheart. You know that.”

She heaves a weary sigh. “You always forget,” she says. “But Daddy wouldn’t. He would’ve remembered.”

“You’re right. He would have.” She turns to me, her ocean-blue eyes widening in shock at my new strategy. But why
not
admit the truth? I have no illusions. Her daddy would have done a better job at this single parenting drill than I’ll ever manage on my own. No wonder Andrea’s so bitter. She landed second unit with me, not first, and I’ll never be able to close that gap.

“You didn’t get me on the
Evermore
set, like you said.”

“I said I’d
try
.”

“But you didn’t.”

“It was a closed set!” I cry, blowing my cool, and a thin smile of satisfaction forms on her lips. It’s like she lives for this now, to see me lose control. It’s what she’s always after. Maybe because she needs some kind of reaction from me, anything other than this numbness that has such a stranglehold around my heart.

She says nothing else, just stares out the window of the truck again, outlining an invisible pattern on the dusty pane with her fingertip, something that only she can see. I clutch the steering wheel tensely, the familiar silence smothering us as we edge along the 101 toward home. Long damn way there, too, at least in this kind of traffic. Really need to sell the house and move somewhere closer to the studio, but I can’t bring myself to do it. Can’t bring myself to let go of Alex that way, not when all of our memories are tied up in that place. Well, maybe not all of them, but certainly most of the significant ones.

Just the thought of leaving our old bungalow on Mariposa Way makes my throat clench painfully. Nothing feels more like home than those eucalyptus trees that shade our tiled rooftop, or the thick jasmine vines knotted around our front steps. I can picture Andrea like it’s yesterday, maybe four or five years old, collecting handfuls of those white flowers as a gift for me.
Here, Daddy! I picked them ’cause they’re beautiful, just like you!

We have family history that practically hums all around that house. It’s in the crevices of the wooden floorboards, on the craggy paths that lead up the canyon hillside away from the garden, and in the sun-drenched windows of the morning room. Every direction I turn, our life resonates there, and maybe that’s because memories have a spiritual life all their own. Where there’s been suffering, the dark atmosphere hangs over a place forever, becomes a kind of energy that’s imprinted in the air. Like at Auschwitz or Gettysburg, or even Fredericksburg, where I grew up, where the bodies of men once fell by the moment. Ghosts before their bodies had even hit the ground.

But when something’s been perfect and beautiful, as our family once was then the emotions linger like the perfume of angels. No wonder all my memories of that house are touched by sweet-scented jasmine.

We moved to Studio City because Alex practiced pediatric oncology at UCLA, so it made sense to live in that neighborhood, an affordable family one closer to the hospital. That was more important than buying a house near the studio, like West Hollywood where I wanted to be. Allie hated my insane hours on the set, wanted me home more, so we fought over that decision. In fact, I remember mouthing off that some of us weren’t doctors pulling down a couple hundred grand a year, that some of us really
worked
for a living.

God, the scorching, blue-eyed look I earned for that one. Alex was one of the warmest people I’ve ever known, but he could pack a feisty temper on occasion. The old stereotypes about redheads were true, I guess, because that day I got a pretty pointed lecture on the rewards of higher education versus those of pissing off my father by joining the army at age eighteen. That was okay, ’cause I also got a damned passionate kiss at the end. Making up was always the sweetest part of Allie’s firestorms.

I swear those arguments over buying our first home together were some of the worst we ever
had. Looking back, it’s easy to see that there were other tensions at play, deeper stresses about commitment and starting a family. About even being a couple in the first place. My fears over
that
issue alone
were threatening to separate us like the San Andreas Fault. Besides, having kids and settling down is already pretty big stuff when you’re only in your twenties, even if you’re a traditional couple.

Being with Allie scared the crap out of me, all right, because I’d never gone that way before. I’d always been straight as an arrow before him. But I realized even then that love doesn’t bother with those kinds of distinctions. It just falls over you like a mystery, and once it does, you’re gone for life.

By then I understood, too, that I was with Alex Richardson because I couldn’t be anywhere else.

“You missed the exit.”

“What?” I blink, staring ahead of me at the car-clogged freeway in disbelief.

“That was our exit back there.” Our daughter explains the facts to me with the patient condescension of an eight-year-old.

“Damn.”

“Daddy didn’t like you cussing in front of me.”

“No, you’re right, sweetie. He didn’t.”

Your daddy didn’t like a whole lot of my wicked ways
, I think, maneuvering into another lane of traffic. Now, thanks to my error, it will be another thirty minutes before we make it home.

Yeah, Memory Lane can be a painful detour, all right. Can take you places you really don’t want to go, and then send you scrambling for hours to recover.

Sometimes you never do.

When someone dies, you’re left with mountains of memories. At first, you rush headlong at all of them, fists opening greedily, desperate to hold onto your loved one, no matter the cost, but over time, particular snapshots come into focus. They’re the ones that surface continually in your dreams and mental drifting, popping up on radar when you least expect them.

For me, I’m haunted by Alex’s last trip to New York City. A random memory, really, but I think about him calling me from there last March. It was lunchtime back east, and I was starting my workday at the studio when my cell phone rang. I flipped it open, and Al greeted me with his warm, booming voice. “Can you hear them?”

“Hear what, baby?” I asked softly, turning away so the other guys wouldn’t eavesdrop.

“Listen, okay?” He laughed, and there was the sound of blaring horns and traffic through the receiver. I could practically smell the exhaust fumes and late winter snow he’d described in an e-mail earlier that morning. But irritation rankled through my system, too, because he’d plowed right into my workday, not even bothering with a decent greeting.

Then I heard them. Chiming bells that rang out in a lovely, melancholy voice. Despite myself, I smiled for a moment. It was such an Alex thing to do, to call me for something like that. Everywhere he went in life he discovered an adventure, found something beautiful to appreciate in the midst of stress and chaos.

But the thing was, I didn’t hear those church bells. Not really. I was too self-conscious that the guys might be listening in, and frustrated with Alex for not asking if I was busy, if I could even talk in the first place. When he came back on the line, a little breathless, he said, “They’re the bells of St. Patrick’s. I’m sitting here on the steps, and I wanted you to hear them, too.”

“Cool,” I mumbled, cautiously watching my boss, a craggy old-school union guy, walk closer. I’d never come out to him about Alex, and I wasn’t about to start right then.

“Tomorrow’s Ash Wednesday,” Alex said. “I think I’m going to try to make a service.”

For a moment, I pictured his freckled forehead, a sooty cross marking the center of it like a bull’s eye. Something about that somber image made me shiver despite the morning heat.

“You sure you want to do that?” I asked, feeling spooked for reasons I couldn’t possibly verbalize, but he only laughed at me, so I rushed to add, “I mean, aren’t they already lining up today like it’s a Stones concert or something?”

“Now, Michael, don’t forget I’m a good Catholic boy,” he teased, knowing that I never darkened a church door. Well, except for our commitment service, which was the one time he ever got me to attend an ecclesiastical ceremony. No wonder we could never agree on getting Andrea baptized.

“Yeah, Father Roberto would be proud of you,” I mumbled, rubbing my palm over my heart. I couldn’t shake the eerie shadow that had fallen over me, the vague sense of dread. “You out of the conference?” I asked, trying to turn the subject in a sunnier direction.

“I’m taking a walk during the lunch break,” he said. Suddenly a passing siren blared loudly through the phone, drowning out his words, until I caught the end of some amputated sentence: “…and that I wish you and Andie were here with me.”

“Yeah, me, too,” I half-whispered into the phone, eyeing my boss, but he was busy at his desk now.

“I bought you a present yesterday.” I could practically hear the smile in his voice; nobody loved a surprise like my Alex. A terrible pang of guilt nagged at my heart for having been irritable, even if he hadn’t known it. He’d been gone for days and I’d begun to miss him a whole damn lot.

“Let’s bring Andrea here for her birthday in the fall,” he continued. “Wouldn’t that be great? To really do the city together, all three of us?”

“Definitely.”

“We could take her ice skating at Rockefeller Center.” I had a momentary vision of holding Andie’s small hand in mine, leading her in an awkward circle around the rink while Alex videoed us together. But then my boss stood from his desk, clipboard in hand, making a beeline right for me.

“Let’s talk about it when you get back.” I wanted to hurry Al off the phone before my boss realized I was on a personal call. After we said goodbye, I wondered what I’d missed when the siren had silenced his words. It seemed like something critical, something I needed to know. In fact, I almost called him back to ask, but then with the day’s usual hectic tension, I forgot about it completely. Never even thought about it again—or about him sitting there on those cold steps, phoning me just to hear the bells. Not until he was dead, and by then I could hardly think of anything else.

God, Alex loved me.

He truly did. I just hadn’t learned yet that time is elastic: it stretches and gives, far more graciously than it probably should, and then one day, when you least expect it, something simply ruptures, and your sheltered life is done.

No, I couldn’t have imagined then that Alex would be stone dead nearly three months from that very day. Long before the fall or Andrea’s birthday arrived, or even before we could accomplish a fraction of our dreams.

Hard to believe that only those cathedral bells would remain, haunting me like the refrain of some long-forgotten hymn from my childhood.

***

Not sure how long I’ve been on this sofa, but I must’ve drifted off because the living room is completely dark except for the glow of the television. My head feels like someone’s been pounding a dagger into the center of the thing. A big, gauzy swollen melon of a head, thanks to the five beers I’ve already tossed back. Thank God it’s Friday night.

I feel around on the floor beside the sofa, and find a sixth bottle still open. The ceiling spins a little; the blue, artificial light from the television flickers above me in melancholy shades, like some eerie heavenly host watching to make sure I’m still alive.

My eyes drift closed as the warm beer slides down my throat, cloying, but at least I find some release.

Used to be I’d sit outside on nights like this one. Go out on the deck and inhale the spring night air. Maybe smoke a cigar, read the paper. Wait for Alex to come home from the hospital so we could unwind together over a glass of wine. Used to be I treasured putting Andrea to bed; it was something precious, and if Alex got home in time, we did it together. It always felt like the three of us had really formed a family then. Now I only want to close up shop at night. I can barely focus on her bedtime story anymore, much less enjoy reading it to her.

She knows it, too. She knows it, but I don’t think she even cares at this point. In fact, I’m pretty sure she’d rather live with anyone else but me.

My eyes drift shut and I imagine that I can hear the garage door opening, Alex home for the night. My heart beats faster in expectation, because through the hazy beer scrim, I half-believe it’s a possibility. There’d be the familiar jangle of his keys dropping on the kitchen counter, then maybe Andrea’s feet slapping exuberantly across the hardwoods. “Daddy!” she’d cry, flinging herself into his arms. The love of both our lives, come home once again.

Tears sting my eyes; I blink them back and take a long swig of the beer again. Anything to numb the pain. I maneuver the bottle onto the floor carefully, rubbing at my temples, when I’m jolted back to reality by Andrea’s whispery voice. “Rebecca has a scar like mine,” she says, and my eyes snap wide open.

I’ve spent a year trying to get to this place with her, to get her to talk about the accident. All my efforts to this point have met with nothing but stony silence.

When I jerk upright on the sofa, planting both feet squarely on the floor, the near-empty bottle of beer clatters over, a sticky puddle forming beneath my socked foot. But I don’t even notice, not really. My attention’s trained only on her.

She stares at the floor, tugging on the sleeve of her long cotton nightgown self-consciously. She wants to say more; I sense it. God, I want to help her do this, too, but I just don’t want to spook her. I don’t want to do a thing to chase my little girl away. I regulate my breathing, remembering what our counselor has said: it has to be on her terms, her timetable.