The Butterfly Clues (5 page)

“I’m just looking,” I say automatically. I debate leaving the booth entirely but the things—the beautiful things—are calling out to me. I continue picking up the fallen items, lifting, finally, a clot of jewelry from the center of the table, sorting through the dislocated tangle of necklaces, earrings, and pins. Mario eyes me the way salesmen do, sussing out how best to swindle me.

Tangled with the rest of the jewelry is a necklace that seems oddly familiar: rusted silver chain, horse pendant dangling heavy from a wire ring. I turn it back to front, examining its every detail, searching for something that I can’t quite identify—a fact, an image—lodged in an unyielding corner of my brain.

“If you like that one, I’ve got some other stuff you might like, too.” Mario turns to a plastic bag behind him and begins extracting things from it, directs me to a semi-cleared corner of the table, plunks the items down one by one.

“Should have put these out when I first set up,” he says, “but they’re all real new, and I just plain forgot.” He claps his palm to his forehead, exaggerated, smiling: a clown, a con artist.

Everything he lays out is so beautiful it makes me shiver— a crescent moon pin made of dark satiny silver, a bird ring in silhouette, some bangles in sparkly night-sky purples and blues. The thing that I love the most, though, is a jeweled figurine in the shape of a butterfly—it’s luminous and glittery and sad-looking.

But all at once the fact is loosened from some dark corner of my brain. Butterfly figurine. Rusted silver chain, horse pendant. Both were things pilfered from the murdered girl’s house. Sapphire.

My hands and feet go hot. The articles I read online didn’t mention anything about most of the other darkly glittering things Mario shows me, but somehow, without knowing how I know, I’m positive that everything he has just spread before me belonged to her. Objects can tell us a lot, if we’re willing to listen. These are screaming.

It’s him; he’s the one who killed her. He’s the one who fired the shot that nearly grazed my cheek. He must be. And he’s too stupid not to sell her things just days later. My breath is coming in short gasps, but I manage to ask: “Hey, um—” Pause. Inhale. I can’t look him in the eye. “Where’d you get this stuff? It’s really great.”

“Which stuff? Got tons of stuff here. Comes from all over.”

“These things.” I gesture toward Sapphire’s objects.

“Can’t say for sure. Get things all the time, can barely keep track anymore.” He laughs, a little nervous guffaw.

Now I do look at him, his darting eyes and gross cherry-colored hair. “You told me a second ago these things just came in.” I point to the plastic bag; he narrows his eyes. “And, now, you’re telling me you can’t remember where they came from?”

He’s avoiding my gaze. “Where I get my stuff is none of your business.” He shifts a little from foot to foot.

“A girl was murdered,” I say, trying not to choke on my own words. “I recognize some of this stuff from the news. So …” My head is full of fluttering; I can’t believe the words coming out of my mouth.

His eyes narrow. He’s sharper than he looks. He reaches out as if to touch me, and I draw back quickly. Instead, he runs his hands through his greasy hair.

“Okay, listen. Now, listen up.” His voice is low, filled with urgency. “I found all this stuff in a bag in a Dumpster outside of the Westwood Center. That’s where I find lots of things I sell. All right?” He pulls out a pack of Marlboros and lights one, taking a long drag, exhaling loudly. “That’s all I know. Swear to Christ. That’s it.”

Something about the tone of his voice makes me want to believe him—a gentleness, a genuineness. But if he is telling the truth—he did find all of Sapphire’s things tossed in a Dumpster outside of Westwood—then why was Sapphire murdered? Why would some out-of-his-mind junkie risk killing somebody for a few hundred dollars worth of things, only to immediately throw those things away?

It doesn’t make sense.

Mario continues speaking, keen to my hesitation, stubbing out his cigarette. He leans toward me. “Look, you’re not gonna call the cops or nothing, are you? ’Cause I don’t know what you need me to do to prove it to you, but I’ll do it. I don’t know nothing about this shit. It’s just coincidence. Just bad goddamn luck.” His knuckles are sidled against the edge of his display table, growing whiter and whiter. “This is my bread and butter, you know? It’s how come I’m not homeless today, right?”

He lights up a new cigarette, taking quick, greedy puffs this time.

“I’m not going to say anything to the police,” I say, and can see him relax. “It’s none of my business, like you said.” He doesn’t realize that I’d do pretty much anything to avoid a confrontation with the police myself. Not after Officer Clevinger dragged me into his squad car a month after Oren died, when my brain was the static of a TV screen and my limbs did things of their own accord, like swipe the little elephant figurine from the Tibetan store at Tower City. I didn’t even remember taking it, only afterward, curling against the cold glass window of the squad car, trying to disappear as his hot breath fogged my ear and he sneered:
Get it together.
I tried to explain, blubbering,
I didn’t know, I’m so sorry, didn’t realize what I’d done
. He just stared at me, like I was an unbelievable idiot.
One more incident like this, and you’re on your way to juvie. Then you’ll
realize
.

Mario reaches for the butterfly figurine still glittering on the table, mid-afternoon sunlight casting shapes in marigold across everything. He hands it to me. “For you,” he says. “Thank you. Thanks for being cool.”

I nod but say nothing, and that’s that. Our unspoken contract. As he turns around, searching for something in a bag on the ground, the
urge
rips through me, fierce, insatiable. My arm shoots forward to the table, and I pull the horse pendent necklace into my fist and walk quickly, sharply away. Clutching tightly to the butterfly in one hand and the necklace in the other, I move through the market, passing tables of food and tables of fabric and trim and creatures made of wood and glass and metal and baseball memorabilia and faded T-shirts and old headdresses of satin and lace, but all I can really think about is her. Sapphire.

Something about her is burning little holes into my heart. I wonder if what draws me to the butterfly is what drew her to it, too: not just its dark, pooling glow but the way its wings are folded back like it has just landed—and not a grand, proud landing but a solemn, lonely one, a head-bowed one, a middle-of-the-night leaving-of-somewhere-or-someone landing.

I wonder whether someone, somewhere, misses her. There’s got to be someone, even if no one was there to claim her as a loved one, even if there were only strippers at Tens to speak not of her, but of her things. Now my brain is doing a gushing kind of thing, in tandem with my heart, and I can’t stop the thoughts, landing like the heavy kind of snow that sticks and forms thick cold walls around everything.

I wonder if Oren thought he was missed, as he eased down the gradual slope of his slipping away from us, from everything, into nothing.

I clasp the necklace on to my neck, the small, cold horse resting against my sternum, and squeeze the butterfly in my palm. Nine, nine, six. Again. Nine, nine, six. Once more. Nine, nine, six.

What happens to people when no one mourns for them? When no one cares what they were feeling when they died—whether it felt like a million points of light or endless mouths singing arias or whether it felt like nothing, like a wave raising itself to the stars and pulling the world back with it, into the vastness of everything that goes on and on and on.

I have pieces of Sapphire now, pieces she left behind. And somehow, they make me feel I have a responsibility to her, too: to her life, to her death.

We’re born alone, and all die alone, too. I read that somewhere, in some book. After Oren died I used to lie awake and think about that: think about the universe sucking up hope for us, soul by soul, until we’re so dry we all starve, all at once, and the sky takes our bones and crushes them into mulch and starts over again. So goes the cycle. So go the millions and billions of things we can’t ever begin to control. But it can’t be that way. It just can’t.

Even though I’ve only stopped at four stalls instead of nine— the pain of four pulling at every one of my cells—I leave the flea market, stumbling out onto the sidewalk in a kind of daze, feeling caught between worlds, dizzy.
Hey, Sapphire—can you hear me? Wherever you are, I hope you’re okay.

I grip the butterfly hard, three times more.
Are you okay?

I look up at the sky. There is no answer from above—no answer from anywhere—other than a light drizzle that begins to fall.

Or maybe that is the answer.

CHAPTER 4

That night I dream that blue-black snowflakes are falling from the sky, settling like ash. I’m with Oren. I’m always with Oren in my dreams now; we’re walking beside a wide, cold lake. The trees are missing their leaves. Then, just as I reach some kind of conclusion in a point I’m trying to make, I turn, and he’s gone, and I understand that the lake has swallowed him.

And in the dream I’m not perplexed at this having happened, only angry with myself for not having held on to his hand just a little tighter.

The ash falls on my head and my hands are covered in it. The dream-lake that swallows my dream-brother is full of it, and he is full of it now, too. His dream eyes. His dream tongue. His dream throat.

Sapphire’s butterfly figurine sits perched on my night table. I carry it with me as I dress for the day, attempting to cover the awkward lines and angles of my body: dark jeans with the cuffs rolled up, the horse necklace, tucked against my chest beneath a gigantic blue felted pullover that was my mother’s once, a navy blue knit hat shoved low over my ears. I push my bangs up underneath it. But then the scar peeks out at me, white as chalk. I release the bangs from the fortress of my hat. My hair is dark and split-ended and long-suffering for a cut that I’m never quite prepared to give it. I’m just not good at parting with things, I guess.

I should be doing homework right now for Intro to Economics— the elective my father decided would be in my best interest to take. I should be researching and performing basic statistical analyses of inflation and unemployment, but I just haven’t got any room for that: the only thing in my head right now is Sapphire; the moment she died. I don’t think what happened was random—don’t think it was just
bad goddamn luck
, as Mario would say.

I’m going back to Neverland, back to the puke-yellow house with the daisies. I don’t exactly know what I plan to do once I arrive, but I’ve got to be there. I’ve got to reclaim her, whatever it is she was.

It takes me a while to retrace my steps and find the place. The painted daisies are even more glaring in full daylight. No one’s here—no police officers, no one sniffing around attempting to right any wrongs.

I walk cautiously to the front door, crossed with police tape. I
tap tap tap, banana
and bite the tip of my tongue lightly nine times before I try the knob: locked. I don’t know what else I expected. My heart’s hammering splinters in my chest as I creep down the alley, toward the door in back. I pass the shattered window, also crossed with police tape, and notice that the bullet has been dislodged from the wall. A new, sick fear flashes through me, making me want to turn around. But I don’t.

I reach the back door. It looks pretty flimsy, like it might be easy to slip through. There’s a broken bit of wood by the knob; I start to work it with my fingers. It splinters quickly apart.

Suddenly, a pair of strong hands grip my shoulders from behind.

I let out a shout without meaning to and whip around, prepared to hit, prepared to run. I’m so scared that for a second what I’m seeing doesn’t make sense—it’s all fragment and fracture and
bear
and
teeth
and
boy
.

Then I realize the hands gripping my shoulders belong to a guy in a bear-eared hat. It’s the boy from the flea market, the boy whose high-speed jaunt sent me crashing into Mario’s table. His eyes narrow for a second and then widen. He must see a flicker of recognition pass through my eyes.