Читать книгу Butterfly Soup - Nancy Pinard - Страница 13

V alley stops playing scales on her flute and listens. The house is so quiet her mother must be out weeding. She puts the flute down on her bed, crawls across it to the puzzle portrait and lifts it off the wall. Her father hates this picture. They had it made at Sears when they were all dressed up for Mother’s Day one year, but he had refused to do it again. He couldn’t stand the photographer tapping his chin to adjust the angle of his head and telling him to smile. And he didn’t like the way Valley’s hair stuck up from the duck barrette. “You just don’t know what’s cute,” her mother told him one night when they were both in her room, kissing her goodnight.

“Hair doesn’t grow up,” he said. “She’s cute the way she is.”

Maybe the picture is why he never comes in her room anymore. She doesn’t blame him. She can’t think why she’s left it up. She turns the picture over and removes the clips and the cardboard to get to the puzzle itself. Once it’s free of the frame, she props it on her pillow for a last look, makes a fist and punches through her baby face. A puzzle bracelet circles her wrist.

When Valley withdraws her hand, her pillowcase shows through. Her mother’s lap now holds a white balloon. Tears well up in her eyes, and through their watery blur, it is young Mrs. Harper sitting there with a hole in her lap. And Joey’s body without a head. She screams, but no sound comes from her mouth. It stays trapped in her head.

She sweeps the picture off her pillow and puts her Sebastian bear there instead. Frantically she searches for a place to hide it. The closet and bureau are no good; her mother will find it when she puts the laundry away. The mattress. She puts the ruined picture under it and drops the mattress. It will do until she can find a better place. She straightens the quilt. Pieces of her face still lay on the quilt top as if somehow part of its bear-paw pattern. She tries to fit them back together, but where her fist struck, the cardboard tongues are bent backward. She puts them in her top drawer under the balls of matched socks.

If only she could go back to a time when she didn’t know about today. One day would do. She’d been a better person the day before. A strange pressure in her chest, like a giant spring winding ever tighter, threatens to uncoil and wang her all over the room. She reaches for her flute, as if it might anchor her, prevent her from hitting the walls.

A Bach bourrée is on her music stand, but the endless eighth notes are more than she can face. She turns instead to a sinfonia, a slow, dreamy piece she can almost play by heart.

As her breath funnels through the cylinder, Joey is seated before her, propped on the pillow in place of Sebastian. At first he is huge, a burden she must drag behind her through humid air and acres of boggy farmland. She slogs through the complications and resolutions of the melody until her tone becomes full and the music takes over. She allows its power to lift her to the peak of each phrase before falling freely down the backside. Joey is now light, full of helium. He floats up from the bog and is borne aloft on the sound of her voice. Eyes closed and body swaying, she woos him, leaning into the phrases, rocking him gently on the melody.

The vision of Joey fades and she is playing for Mr. Moore, but his chest is expanding, his face reddening from inhaling for her without exhaling into a flute. She plays on, weaving through the andante. Mr. Moore’s face is purple now, but still she plays on, bewitched by the sound she’s making—until he turns blue and keels over. She drops her flute and runs downstairs. In the refrigerator are two bottles of her father’s beer. She uncaps them both and downs the first, not thinking how she’ll replace them. The taste is nasty, but she doesn’t care. She’s after the drowsy, calm effect she’s seen on her dad, the way he cares less with each beer as a Reds game wears on. She holds her nose to down the second bottle. She takes the bottles out to the garbage can, not quite able to be as quiet as she’d like to be, though nothing like calm has come over her yet. She buries them deep in a green plastic bag. Her mother is nowhere in sight. The backyard is empty.

Their two-story Victorian rises behind her like an empty tomb. She wonders where her mother is, why her father is gone on a Saturday. The company of a caterpillar isn’t enough. The spring inside her chest begins to tighten. Her breath comes in spurts. She can’t go inside. It’s better to fly apart in the wide world, where she’ll bounce off the soft blue of the sky’s dome. She heads down the driveway, one step, then the next. She’ll keep walking, forever if she has to. It’s the one thing she’s certain she can do.

Walking helps. She focuses on her breathing. Inhale one, two, three, four; exhale one, two, three, four, walking and breathing in 4/4 time. She changes to 3/4, bending her knee on the accented first beat and then taking the next two counts of the measure on her tiptoes. She sings a polonaise and is surprised at the end to find herself in town. In front of the movie theater, a long-haired boy leans up against the brick, a boy she can’t remember seeing before. He’s watching her with a blurry, bemused expression, one thumb hooked in the waist of his beltless jeans. His mouth curves up in a lazy grin.