The Butterfly Sister Read online

  Dedication

  To my mother, Gail, for believing

  Acknowledgments

  First and foremost, I thank my mother, Gail Angell, for giving me the most valuable gift a parent can bestow on a child: confidence. Mom, you told me I could be anything I wanted to be, and you were right! You read countless drafts, answered a million questions, and listened to me vent and ponder and hope and dream. Most important, you resuscitated this book and restored my enthusiasm for it time and time again. I sincerely could not have done this without you, Mom! There is so much of you in this book; it’s only fitting that your name (my middle name) is on the cover. I share this success with you!

  I also thank my beautiful children, Andrew, Luke, and Amelia, for giving me a reason to be the best person I can be. I followed my dreams because I want you to do the same one day.

  I am forever appreciative of my husband, Neil, for respecting my need to create and for putting up with my flair for drama, both on and off the page. Neil, you’ve been living with these characters our entire marriage! You believed in me, listened to me, and cheered me on every step of the way. I love you!

  This book would not have made it into readers’ hands without the keen eye of my amazing literary agent, Elisabeth Weed of Weed Literary, who made my New Year’s resolution come true. Elisabeth, through our revision process, I felt like you truly absorbed this story and its characters, which surpassed my expectations. You go above and beyond the call of duty, and I am so happy to be working with you. I also thank Stephanie Sun for doing all the little things that made a big difference.

  Another thank-you goes out to my foreign rights agent, Jenny Meyer of the Jenny Meyer Literary Agency, for selling Italian rights to Garzanti Libri in record time. You rock!

  I am so grateful for my esteemed editor, Carrie Feron, at William Morrow/HarperCollins. Carrie, thank you for not letting my vivid imagination get the best of this story! You seem to know just when to let me go and when to rein me in, and your insightful suggestions brought this novel to its utmost potential. I also thank the hardworking team at HarperCollins, especially Nicole Fischer, Julia Meltzer, Mumtaz Mustafa, Shelly Perron, Diahann Sturge, and Tessa Woodward.

  For believing in me with her perpetual you-can-do-it attitude and for reading an early draft, I thank my sister, Lisa Bauer. For her unique reader insights and constant encouragement, I thank my aunt, Jillian Schneider, who also made the act of writing on that basement typewriter look so cool. Thank you to my father, George Bauer, for bringing New Orleans into my life. For being an enthusiastic first publisher of sorts, I thank Mike Angell. I also thank my in-laws, Rick and Shahnaz Hansen, for proudly telling everyone they know.

  For many late nights, literary discussions, and essential inspiration, I thank Heather Temple. Thanks to my forever friends and book club gals, Heather Arnold and Jill Tsuji, for reading this book twice and rooting for my success. For providing truly constructive feedback and heartfelt encouragement, I thank Melissa Citarelli, Lisa Damian Kidder, and Liz Hum.

  For reading excerpts of this book and providing much needed camaraderie, I thank the members of the Algonquin Area Writer’s Group and the Barrington Writers Workshop, especially Claire Beck, Toni Diol, Lisa Guidarini, Bev Ottaviano, and Shaku Rajagopal.

  For helping me build my freelance writing career and for putting me in contact with some truly renowned authors, I thank my editors at Pioneer Press: Dorothy Andries, Michael Bonesteel, Andrea Brown, Robert Loerzel, Mike Martinez, and Jenny Thomas. A huge thank-you also goes out to Nancy Swanson, editorial assistant extraordinaire, for always being there.

  I acknowledge the truly dedicated teachers who honed my writing skills, fostered my passion for literature, or otherwise inspired me: Sue Aavang, Sharon Barger, Tony Casalino, Sam Chell, Michael Craft, Caryl Dierksen, Annette Duncan, Travis DuPriest, Mary Kennelly, Micheline Lessard, Cris Mazza, and Pamela Smiley.

  Thank you to the faculty and staff at Carthage College, for gifting me with four fabulous years of education. I am forever indebted.

  I owe much to the brilliant women writers who paved the way before me and whose lives and works inspired aspects of this book: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Sara Teasdale, and Virginia Woolf. I also note the books I referenced in understanding these women and reimagining them on the page: Anne Sexton: A Biography by Diane Middlebrook; The Bell Jar, Perennial Classics Edition, HarperCollins, foreword by Frances McCullough and biographical note by Lois Ames; Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Woman and Her Work, edited by Sheryl L. Meyering; The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter Fourth Edition, edited by Nina Baym; The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Sixth Edition, Volume 2, edited by M. H. Abrams; Sara Teasdale: Woman & Poet by William Drake; and Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life by Julia Briggs.

  I also thank the following authors I interviewed for inspiring me and genuinely encouraging my writing goals: Elizabeth Berg, Jane Hamilton, Wally Lamb, Elizabeth Strout, and Nancy Woodruff. For sharing his insights on the Hero’s Journey and critiquing my agent query letter, I also thank author Jay Bonansinga.

  On the subject of fellow authors, I absolutely must thank Therese Walsh, whose novel The Last Will of Moira Leahy, prompted me to query Elisabeth Weed. Therese, the for writers section of your Web site educated, uplifted, and inspired me countless times while I was writing and revising this book.

  For answering questions related to police work, I thank Detective Jay Tapia of the Waukegan Police Department.

  I thank Liz Zona for borrowing my suitcase and leaving her luggage tag behind.

  And last but never least, I thank my brother, the late Brian Bauer, for teaching me that life is too short not to follow your dreams.

  Epigraph

  What’s past is prologue.

  William Shakespeare, The Tempest

  Contents

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  December Diary One

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  December Diary Two

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  December Diary Three

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  December Diary Four

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  December Diary Five

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Epilogue

  Journal

  P. S.: Insights, Interviews & More . . .

  About the author

  About the book

  Praise for The Butterfly Sister

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  Gwen could not have been more explicit at our first session: I was to cease reading books by or about women who killed themselves.

  An unhealthy obsession, that’s what my therapist called it, and I was inclined to agree with Gwen’s diagnosis. There was, after all, no other logical explanation for the string of events that brought me to her office. Ghosts do not exist. I hadn’t done mushrooms. No brain tumor. I resigned myself to the fact that what I’d seen and done was a consequence of a compromised mental state.

  Like other women writers before me, I had simply gone mad.

  I left Gwen’s office that late December afternoon with a newfound interest in my bedroom bookcase. A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf went first, then The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, followed by Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper
and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. Hemingway took a beating too. In fact, any title remotely relating to mental imbalance found its way into the donation box, even those seemingly innocuous stories like Jane Eyre.

  Could I afford to leave the madwoman in the attic lurking on my bookshelf?

  But it was all in vain—the books, the antidepressants, the therapy sessions with Gwen. Even time’s wound-healing properties proved ineffective. Ten months later, my past was never more than one thought, one breath, one heartbeat away.

  And then, on that particular October evening, it literally arrived at my doorstep.

  Mom found me on the front porch swing that night, swaying with the initiative of a pendulum. Assessing my state of mind in a single glance from the driveway, she soon approached me, teacup in hand.

  “How many today, Ruby?” she asked, handing me the mug.

  I let the steam, the fruity tang of Earl Grey, tingle my nose. Bergamot, of course. A natural antidepressant.

  “Twelve, but nothing tragic,” I said. “Well, except for that sweetheart of a librarian Mrs. Talbot, the one who special ordered my books last summer?”

  “She died? The one you said smelled like marshmallows?” Mom sat beside me. She was still wearing her nurse’s scrubs, navy blue with periwinkle trim. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “She was eighty-nine years old.” I shrugged. “I think it really was her time.”

  We sat silent for a beat, less the squeaking of the swing, while Mom churned her hands like a paddle through butter. I hoped she was just cold—still adjusting to Illinois’s chilly autumn evenings—and not worried.

  “I called in an order to Wu’s,” she finally said.

  “You didn’t have to.”

  “I wanted to.”

  Not cold, I thought. Worried. “But I’m fine. Really.”

  She shrugged. “Maybe I’m too tired to cook.”

  I wasn’t convinced. Annette Rousseau, my New Orleans–born mother, had absorbed the Creole recipes for gumbo and shrimp étouffée in utero; they had crossed the placenta line along with the oxygen. She was proof that you can take the girl out of New Orleans, but you can’t take the New Orleans out of the girl. Moving to the Midwest hadn’t changed the fact that she could make a roux the color of caramel, even at 3:00 A.M., even after a double shift at the hospital. And yet she’d ordered Mongolian beef and crab rangoon from Wu’s on Seventh Street—my comfort food.

  “You know, the hospital gift shop is hiring,” she went on. “A floral assistant. You like flowers.”

  “But I love my job.” It came out too emphatic, too defensive.

  Mom raised an eyebrow, an arc so perfectly curved, so accusatory. We locked eyes, each of us trying to read the other’s thoughts. Looking at my mother was like looking at a computer-generated police sketch, an age-progressed version of myself. Our hair was not red, but auburn—a color reminiscent of autumn, football games, and hayrides. Where my curls held tight, though, hers hung loosely. Over time, her eyes had turned more of a hunter green than emerald.

  “I’m worried about you, Ruby,” she said. “When do you see Gwen again?”

  I smiled at her rhyme, then let the grin fade. There was no joking when it came to my therapy sessions with Gwen.

  “This week,” I told her, trying to look serious but not sad. “On Thursday.”

  “Well, she’s the professional. See what she says.”

  “About?”

  “About whether this obituary job is right for you.” She patted my knee. “All things considered.”

  I nodded, as if to say I would do just that. Truth was, I’d let the opportunity to tell Gwen about my new job pass two times already. Writing for a local newspaper had been Gwen’s brainchild. I needed to put my “skill set” back to use, she’d stressed. So I applied for the obit gig, the port of entry for budding journalists and the only position open at the Cook County Chronicle. My official title, obituary coordinator, meant that while journalists composed witty leads before deadline, I typed information into a template, modified errors in Associated Press style, and occasionally changed the euphemism passed away to died.

  Perhaps Gwen would have applauded the fact that I got hired, but I feared she would psychoanalyze my choice. Was I punishing myself? Was writing about dead people some sort of self-imposed penance for my past sins, like one of the rings of Hell in Dante’s Inferno?

  I didn’t want to answer that question.

  Fortunately, Mom dropped the subject. And while I finished my tea we chatted about less pressing matters—like the new Toulouse-Lautrec exhibit opening at Chicago’s Art Institute—until a white van rounded the street corner not fifteen minutes later.

  “That’s got to be a new record,” Mom said, rushing inside to get cash.

  I approached the van, expecting to see Mr. Wu’s son—a seventeen-year-old with a toothy grin and the work ethic of someone who’d survived the Depression. I expected an olfactory delight, the unmistakable smell of grease and soy sauce when he opened the door. Instead, a woman in a khaki uniform stepped out; her ponytail, the color of a cardboard box, slipped through the back hole of an equally brown cap that shadowed her eyes. In lieu of slacks, she had feminized her look with culottes.

  “You Ruby Rousseau?” Her accent—Boston or Brooklyn—made my name sound foreign to my own ears.

  Before I could answer, she slid open the van door and lifted a suitcase from inside. “Betcha glad to see me. Or rather, this,” she said, before setting the luggage before me with a thump, like a cat bringing its owner a dead mouse.

  I rested my eyes on paisley print, swirls of red and gold and blue. I choked on the crisp fall air, my own saliva. “That’s not mine.”

  “Your name’s awnit.”

  I crouched beside the suitcase then and stroked the fabric, rigid like a heavily starched shirt. As if reading Braille, I ran a fingertip over the American Tourister emblem. And then I reached for the luggage tag and stared at my name and address in curvy script.

  I soon felt my mother’s breath on my cheek. She was crouched beside me, thirty bucks in hand. Our eyes locked once more.

  “But it’s your handwriting,” she whispered.

  I let the tag fall and stood, even stepped back, as if to disown the suitcase through mere distance. “This is a mistake. I borrowed this suitcase from a friend in college last year. She must have forgotten to take my tag off.”

  “What’s ya friend’s name?”

  “Beth. Elizabeth, rather. Elizabeth Richards.”

  “She lives round here? In the Chicago suburbs?”

  “Wisconsin,” I corrected. “At least, she did.”

  The woman told us to wait while she made a call from her van.

  My mother made a tsk sound then, as if she’d been trying to solve a puzzle only to discover the answer blatantly simple. “This is the suitcase you were supposed to take on our trip to Paris,” she said. “The one I returned to that girl in your dorm.”

  I nodded but kept my eyes on the van.

  “Okay, here’s the deal,” the delivery woman finally said. “Ya friend—this Elizabeth Richards—it seems she hasn’t filed a lost luggage claim yet. Now, I can take the bag back, but it’s gonna sit in storage ’til she claims it.” She lowered her voice. “Look, between you and me, it’s gonna get back to her a heck of a lot faster and without a whole lotta red tape if you’d just, you know, contact her directly.”

  “Me? But isn’t she tied to the bag somehow?” I tried to remember how it all worked. Mom and I never flew to Paris after all, but I was certain the sticky tag, the one the attendant puts through the bag handle, displayed the owner’s name and flight information.

  “If all goes right, yeah. But that tag’s destroyed.” The woman lifted the mangled piece of black-and-white paper hanging from the suitcase. “The bar code’s unreadable. Probably got caught in one of the machines and missed the flight. Seen it happen a dozen times. Airline figured it was their fault, so they sent it to the person o
n the personal tag. And that’s you.” She cleared her throat. “Didn’t the airline call?”

  I looked to my mother. She said no.

  “Your dad probably took the message and forgot to tell you,” the woman prompted. “My hubby does it all the time.”

  I shook my head no. My father died almost two years prior.

  “Look, it’s not my bag,” I argued, avoiding my mother’s gaze, evading any pain that might have flashed through them at the mention of Dad. “So it’s not my problem.”

  Mom curled her fingers over my shoulder then. “Call the girl, Ruby,” she said. “You’d want someone to do the same for you.”

  It was a valid point, but I knew Mom was picking up where Gwen had left off. If I called Beth Richards, I’d be forced to reconnect with someone from Tarble, a private women’s college in Kenosha just over the Illinois-Wisconsin state border. I’d dropped out of Tarble my senior year, one semester short of graduation.

  “But I don’t have her phone number,” I spat back. “We didn’t stay in touch.”

  “You could call the college,” Mom suggested. “The alumnae office, perhaps.”

  “I didn’t graduate.”

  “Who cares?” She waved her hand through the air, as if batting a fly. “If you ever went to a school, you’re an alumnus.”

  The delivery woman impatiently tapped her clipboard with a pen, as if keeping time.

  “People sometimes keep important information inside their suitcase,” she said. “Maybe there’s anotha tag somewhere. You can look. I can’t. I just deliver. And speakin’ of deliveries, I gotta get goin.’ What do ya want me to do?”