Читать книгу The Butterfly House - Marcia Preston, Marcia Preston - Страница 8

Alberta, Canada, 1990

On Wednesday morning, the day of my appointment at the clinic in Calgary, I awake at 7:00 a.m. feeling nauseated. David’s side of the bed is rumpled and already cold. My limbs feel like pine logs and a dull ache pulses behind my eyes. I remember watching the clock’s red numerals flick to 2:00 a.m., then three, and four.

From beneath the warmth of my down comforter, I sense a coldness in the house and know that it’s snowing outside. Winter here is heartless and beautiful, and it lasts most of the year. David grew up in Canada and he inherited this house, his father’s summer place, in recompense for years of neglect. But David loves the house and these mountains; his few happy memories from childhood are here. After college he wanted to move back to the mountains, and I didn’t object. I had nowhere else to go.

I pull on my robe and fleece-lined slippers and squeeze behind David’s weight machine to look out the tall, narrow window of our upstairs bedroom.

A world of white assails my eyes. There’s no horizon, no sky or land or trees. Nothing but a blur of blinding whiteness.

The icy knot in my stomach expands. Calgary is a forty-minute drive in good weather, the first part over two-lane mountain roads. David will take his four-wheel-drive to work, thinking I’ll stay home as usual. I have a vision of my silver Honda sliding over a steep edge, nosing down into free fall with me gripping the wheel in stony horror.

At least I wouldn’t be pregnant anymore.

Downstairs, in our warm, country-style kitchen, I realize that once again I’ve calculated wrong. David is humming about in his navy sweat suit, obviously not ready for work. Even the baggy suit doesn’t camouflage his lean fitness. Surely he won’t run this morning, in all this snow.

Coffee gurgles into its glass carafe and I smell bagels in the toaster. The radio plays softly from a cluttered shelf opposite the white square of window. David looks up, brown hair askew and a shadow of stubble on his cheeks. He grins. “The pass is closed!”

The shine in his brown eyes makes me think of the first time I met them across a worktable at school. He was smiling then, too, and I felt something like an electrical shock, a buzzing in my fingertips. His major was history and mine biology. We might never have met if we hadn’t been assigned to the same practicum at the Museum of Natural History in Tacoma, where we were students at Puget Sound University. The first time I saw him he asked me on a coffee date. I said yes without even thinking. I was nineteen and had never been on an actual date before.

I smile back at him now. “Lucky you.” I look away quickly to hide the glaze of panic that stiffens my face.

I’ll have to cancel my appointment. How can I phone without his knowing?

David is a curator of exhibits at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary and he loves his work. Still, he’s as happy with his snow day as a kid out of school. He hums around the kitchen, pouring orange juice into a glass, which he sets at my place on the wooden table.

“What would you like with your bagel, ma’am, besides creamed cheese? An omelet? Fruit?”

I slide into the wooden chair, feel the coldness of its carved spindles against my back. “Just coffee, thanks.”

David looks disappointed. The toaster ejects two sliced bagel halves and he stacks them on a small plate and inserts two more. He sets the plate before me along with two cartons of creamed cheese from the refrigerator—strawberry and maple pecan.

I look at the food with a mixture of hunger and nausea, thinking only a pregnant person could have both sensations at once. I take a moment to wonder at this phenomenon and a niggling regret etches through my chest. Some primordial part of me wants to experience pregnancy, some part that’s genetically programmed to preserve the species. I picture a small, warm body in my arms. I imagine telling David he’s going to be a father, and seeing the innocent joy on his face.

It can’t happen. I’d mess up the child for life, leave it an emotional cripple like its mother.

My fingernails rake the scars on my forearms. After all these years, they still itch every morning. Tears have welled at the corners of my eyes and to hide this from David I rise and pour coffee into two oversize mugs. Coffee slops over the edges.

“Be right back,” I say, and head for the bathroom.

During breakfast, with no newspaper today, David wants to talk. “This omelet tastes great.”

I glance over at his eggs, speckled with bell pepper and mushrooms, and my stomach rolls.

“Want to share?” he says.

“Um. I’m not that hungry.”

He wolfs down another forkful. “So what are you up to today?”

A bite of bagel clogs my throat. I cough, take a sip of scalding coffee to wash it down. “Nothing really. Just my needlework, I guess.”

“Want to put on snowshoes and go for a walk? The mountain will be spectacular in all this snow.” He lifts his eyebrows hopefully.

“Um. Maybe later, if it lets up. Right now we could get lost, it’s so heavy.”

“Nonsense,” he says heartily. “I’ll drop bread crumbs.”

When I don’t respond, he leans his arms on the table. “You ought to get out of the house more,” he says, his levity gone.

I don’t want to have this conversation again this morning. Finally he shrugs and turns the radio up a notch. The news is mostly about the weather. They expect the snow to keep up until early afternoon. The snowplows won’t bother trying to clear the pass until it stops.

David will be home all day. What if I don’t call, and simply don’t show up for me appointment? They must be used to that—young women having second thoughts, changing their minds. I don’t know this doctor and will never see him again afterward. His name and the number of the Calgary clinic were given to me by a women’s hotline. They promised me anonymity. If his nurse won’t let me reschedule, I can always get another name. But I can’t wait too long.

Another thought freezes me: if I don’t show up, will someone from the clinic call here? I try to remember if I gave them my number. I think I did. Yes, the woman who scheduled me insisted, in case the doctor had an emergency on the day of my appointment. What if they phone here and David answers? I can’t take the chance. Later, when David’s in the shower or outdoors, I’ll have to call.

I glance across the table at my husband, a good man, an honest man. He deserves more than he’s getting from this marriage. I wonder why he stays.

David and I were drawn together by mutual loneliness camouflaged as sexual attraction. I never hid from him the fact that I was living at the sanatorium, voluntarily. I had a private cottage by then and could come and go as I pleased. Staying on the grounds was an anchor for me, someplace I could pretend was home. And I still met twice a week with Dr. Bannar.

David seemed unfazed by this, even when he came to visit me there. Later I learned that his mother had spent time in psychiatrists’ offices; maybe he thought all women did. He was interested in my past, but not morbidly so. He had some shadows of his own, he said. I never asked, but after we’d dated for a while, he told me.

He’d had a brother, only a year older. Michael was athletic and tall; David slight from bouts of childhood asthma. David had worshiped Michael and followed him everywhere. The day Michael drowned in the ocean, sucked away by the undertow, David was playing twenty feet away in the shallow waves.

They were ten and eleven. “If I’d been stronger, like Michael was, I might have saved him,” David told me, lying on his back in bed in his apartment, after we’d made love. It was a single bed and his arm was hooked underneath me to keep me from rolling off.

“Probably not,” I said, picturing his thin, boy’s body knee-deep in the water, in the horror. “It’s hard to save anybody in the ocean. Especially if they’re bigger than you are.”

“I was scrawny then,” he said, “but I never cared until Michael died.”

I ran my hand over his muscled chest and understood why he lifted weights and ran every morning in the dark, what he was running from. I rolled on top of him and we made love again.

Our lovemaking was always urgent, but gentle, too. Neither of us could get enough. He would trace the scars on my neck with light kisses. Dr. Bannar told me sex could be a healing experience. David and I joked about that. “How about a little physical therapy this afternoon?”

When he asked me to marry him the spring he got his degree, I still had three semesters to go. But I agreed, knowing he was worthy of love, knowing I didn’t quite love him because I was afraid to. Hoping I might grow into it.

On this snowy morning, as David gets up to refill our coffee cups, I ask myself if that has happened. We’ve been married almost five years.

The news over, the radio has switched to music and David turns it down. He picks up his empty plate and gestures for mine. I shake my head; three-quarters of my bagel still sits on my plate. He takes his coffee and leaves the room.

I feel great affection for David. I respect him and would miss him terribly if he were gone. Is that what loving a man is supposed to feel like? I’ve loved only women—Lenora and Cynthia, and maybe my mother when I was small. Love mixed up with pain.

I think of Lenora—and remember, like an electric shock, the visit yesterday from Harley Jaines. I’ve been so fixated on my appointment in Calgary that I’d blocked him out.

“I believe you have the power to set her free. You tried to tell the truth once … I’m asking you to try again.” Heat rolls through my stomach like lava. I don’t even know if this stranger is who he claims to be.

But that’s rationalizing. Those eyes, that chin … yes, he is the man in the picture, Cincy’s father. He’s back from the dead and he obviously cares about Lenora. It can’t be for money, because she has nothing. If she is paroled—or pardoned—would the two of them live together, happily ever after?

The idea seems so childish I can’t even hold it in my mind. I decide to ignore the resurrected Harley Jaines. Maybe he’ll disappear like a wisp of my imagination. So many things will go away if you ignore them long enough. Like that line from a poem, “The face of the mother with children/ignores and ignores….”

But unlike old memories, a pregnancy can’t be ignored. This I must deal with immediately. Dr. Bannar would be proud of my ability to make a firm decision and take action, whether she agreed with the action or not. “Take responsibility for your life,” she kept saying. “Take control.”

Would she agree with abortion? I wouldn’t know even if I could ask her. She always turned the hard questions back to me.

After breakfast, David stands in the closed-in back porch and dresses in thermal coveralls, ski mask and snowshoes. “Come with me,” he urges.

“Maybe later.”

I am glad his ski mask hides his disappointment. I tell myself I will go out after I make the phone call. As soon as David steps out into the snow, I go upstairs to the telephone in our bedroom.

As so often happens, all my worrying has been over nothing. The doctor’s assistant is understanding when I tell her the pass is closed and I have to cancel. Why wouldn’t she be? The blizzard isn’t my doing, after all; it’s an act of God. She cheerfully reschedules me for two weeks later. I hang up the phone with a buzzing in my ears as loud as the dial tone. My heartbeat jolts my chest.

Downstairs, I pull on my own thermal coveralls, boots and hood. I lash snowshoes onto my boots and step awkwardly out the back door into the white wilderness.

The cold makes me gasp. Tears form in my eyes and immediately turn into frost on my eyelashes. I scan the yard for David, but he’s out of sight.

The mountainside is eerie as a moonscape and incredibly beautiful. I start off toward the hiking trail David maintains, which winds through our acreage and up the steep slope behind our house to a meadow that overlooks the valley for miles. I hope this is the direction he’s gone; why didn’t I ask?

On the trail, the trees become trees again instead of white mounds. Their trunks are packed with snow on the north side and branches droop like the oily wings of cormorants I once saw along a northern coast after an oil spill. I slog along the trail, listening to the whirring silence of snow sifting through fir and pine, and my own labored breath.

After a few minutes, I stop. Trees surround me, and I can no longer see David’s tracks or where the trail has gone. I search for landmarks, but any familiar deadfall or boulder is buried in snow. Everything is changed, as if I’ve never been here before.

Perhaps I haven’t. I turn a circle but can’t see the house. I don’t even know which direction it is. This slope catches the wind, and my tracks, too, are fast disappearing. I begin retracing them but come to a halt when the space ahead of me seems to fall away steeply. I don’t remember this drop-off….

I look straight up through the trees. “The woods are lovely, dark and deep/But I have promises to keep/ And miles to go before I sleep/And miles to go before I sleep.”

“David!”

My scream sounds muffled in the snowy silence. I draw a deep breath and try again.

“David, I’m lost! David!”