The Butterfly House. Marcia Preston
room where they had pool tables. He’d come over to the café and talk to Mom and drink Cokes, and they fell in love.”
In my mind, the image rose up in black and white, like an old movie. “Then what happened?”
Cincy slipped a shell on her string and reached for another. “Harley didn’t like school, so he dropped out and got a job building houses. Then he got drafted.”
“What’s drafted?”
“Called into the Army, to fight in the war. Mom didn’t believe in it—the war, I mean—and she tried to get him to run away to Canada. But he wouldn’t. He went away to get trained, then came back for three days. Then he got on a ship and went to Vietnam.” Her voice turned confidential. “She never saw him again.”
“Oooh. That’s so sad. But if she never saw him again, how—”
“Pretty soon she found out she was pregnant.” Cincy’s eyes flashed up at me, mischievously. “So guess what they’d been doing those three days!”
My face turned hot and Cincy giggled, bouncing the bed. “She wrote to him and they were going to get married when he came home. But Harley was reported missing in 1963, the year I was born.”
My mouth fell open. She seemed pleased that I was properly impressed.
She leaned forward, whispering. “I’m illegitimate. A love child. Mom says not to tell anyone because some people wouldn’t understand.”
“I’ll never tell anybody,” I promised.
“The same year I was born,” Cincy said, “Mom’s father—my grandfather—committed suicide. Shot himself right in the ear! He left her some money, so she loaded me and all her stuff in the old Volkswagen—the same one we have now—and started driving.”
I pictured the two of them, alone on the road—just like my mom and me. Only Cincy had been just a baby.
“When she came to Shady River, she bought this house with the money my grandfather left. People thought she was a war widow and they were real nice to us, so she used Harley’s last name and pretended they’d been married.”
My chest ached with a sweet, sad longing. Haltingly, I explained that my mother and I, too, had come to Shady River alone, looking for a place to settle.
Cincy grasped the parallel at once and embraced it with characteristic vocabulary. “Fate brought us both here!” she said, her dark eyes shining. “We were destined to be best friends forever.”
The power of my emotions embarrassed me, and I averted my eyes.
“Yeah,” I said. “Forever.” And concentrated on boring a hole into the peach-colored shell in my trembling hands.
On the Thursday before Christmas we had snow. Cincy left school early to visit her grandmother in Seattle. She wouldn’t be back until Sunday, the day before Christmas Eve.
My mom had to work Saturday and Sunday, so I spent the long, gray days home alone, wrapped up in a blanket with my Laura Ingalls Wilder books. The evenings were even lonelier, with Mom at the lowest ebb of her holiday funk.
On Sunday evening Cincy phoned. “I’m back!” Her voice was bubbly, full of adventure and holiday spirit.
Mine was envious. “Did you have fun?”
“The airplane ride was cool. Grandma’s kind of a pain—she’s always nagging at Mom. But she gave me lots of stuff. Some of it’s weird, but there’s this hood with a long muffler attached, and it’s lined with fur. Wait’ll you see it.”
She paused, as if noticing my silence. “So what’ve you been doing?”
“Absolutely nothing.”
“Is your mom home?”
I had no secrets from Cincy. “Three, six, nine …”
“Your mom drank wine,” she finished, giggling. “Good! Then she’ll let you come up! Ask her and call me back. I’ll meet you at the bridge.”
The night was crystalline, with diamond-nugget stars and a crescent moon bright enough to illuminate the snow. Bursting from the oppressive bungalow into the sharp beauty of the night,
I felt like a prisoner set free in a fantasy land. I couldn’t keep from running.
I had stuffed my pajamas in one pocket of my blue car coat and my toothbrush and hairbrush in the other. With the hood buttoned under my chin and Mom’s black boots over my ten-nies, I felt snug and insulated from the cold. The air bit my lungs as I whooped and howled huge puffs of steam toward the moon.
After a block I slowed to a walk, tired out by the extra baggage of boots and padding. On a rise I turned and looked back at the lights of the village. Red and green dotted the edges of scattered roof lines; a church steeple ascended in tiny white sparkles. All was silent. As I stood panting warm air onto tingling fingers, a carillon began its wistful chime: “O come, all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant …”
Somewhere far off a dog barked, and my vision shimmered as I turned toward the river again, my boots crunching through the snow.
The steel arches above the bridge framed it in a latticework of white. From my end, I could see Cincy entering the other, a dark red blotch against the snowy rise beyond. On the darkened hillside, Rockhaven’s sunporch glittered with holiday lights like a jewel nestled in black velvet.
“Merry Christmas! Ho, ho, ho!” Cincy shouted. Her husky voice echoed from one riverbank to the other.
I laughed aloud, delight welling up until I thought I’d explode in a shower of stars.
Neither of us ran to the center of the bridge. Instead, we paced off the distance like graduates, or soldiers bearing the casket of a fallen friend. At the center of the bridge Cincy opened her padded arms and mitten-clad hands and we bear-hugged, two snowmen giggling with the secret of life. She was wearing the fur-lined hood her grandmother had given her and she looked like a snow princess.
We turned and looked out across the slow-moving water. It was too beautiful to talk about, and too cold, so we leaned on the railing in silence.
Finally, Cincy clapped me on the back with her red wool paw. “Let’s go home before we freeze, Gwendolyn. Your teeth are chattering.”
She was always making up dramatic names to call me. “Quite so, Alexandra,” I said.
“Follow me, Rapunzel.”
“Lead on, Sarsaparilla!”
Holding our sides, we laughed and stumbled all the way up the hill to Rockhaven.
When my mother opened the tissue-wrapped box and saw the pale swirls of salmon and ivory nestled on their bed of cotton, her mouth dropped open. After so many crude and childish gifts, this one was a shock. She glanced at me quickly.
“I made it. Cincy gave me the seashells.”
Her fingers lifted the necklace slowly, touching each unique link. “It’s beautiful, Roberta! Like something from an expensive jewelry store.”
I beamed, my ego bursting. This must be what people meant when they said it was better to give than to receive.
Mom slipped the necklace over her head, lifting her frizzy hair so the shells wreathed her neck and hung down over the sweatshirt she wore for pajamas.
It was Christmas Eve, our traditional time for exchanging gifts. We had eaten supper, put on our pajamas and made hot chocolate, then come to the tree. We never did play the Santa game. After the rocking horse year, Mom always put my gifts under the tree early. Maybe our ritual let her avoid memories of Christmas mornings with my father. Whatever the reason, I liked opening gifts after dark much better than in the cold light of morning, when the tree lights looked pale and hungover.
As usual, three gifts waited under the tree