The Butterfly Sister Page 6

  Mark and I created an alternate New Orleans that night—a city once again built on hope, on dreams, on the promise of tomorrow.

  We ate dinner at a courtyard table for two, under antique lamps and strings of white lights swirled through a canopy of branches and vines. Our mouths were romanced by a roux done just right, by the perfect balance of garlic and onion and celery, and later, the buttery warmth of Bananas Foster. And then, with bellies full and senses heightened, we strolled down Pirates Alley, pausing to pay William Faulkner homage outside his 1920s apartment, before stepping into a hauntingly darkened Jackson Square, lit by streetlamps and the glimmering candlewicks of fortune-tellers. We watched the fog settle on the Mississippi River and listened to the moans of cargo ships—late-night calls that echoed the bliss beating in our chests—before hitching a ride on a horse-drawn carriage.

  “But that’s for tourists,” I argued, when Mark pulled out a wad of cash for the driver.

  He sported an irresistible smile. “Isn’t that what we are?”

  And then, as if we hadn’t been up and down almost every street in the Quarter, we walked them all again, sometimes in silence and other times, in unadulterated conversation. With every sight and sound, Mark’s memories from his college days seemed to sharpen—they were mostly related to being drunk on Bourbon Street— and it was almost midnight when we found ourselves back where we’d started the evening, in front of our hotel.

  I slipped off my heels and stood barefoot on the cool sidewalk, my shoes dangling by their backs from my index finger. Mark embraced me, his mouth going to the tender spot behind my ear. His warm breath sent a chill down my spine. And then he slid a dress strap off my shoulder so he could kiss the skin above my collarbone.

  “Are you going to invite me up to your room?” he whispered.

  You know what I could go for?” Mark asked an hour later, his body pressed against mine under the sheets like a spoon. “One of those powdered sugar doughnuts.”

  I loved his phrasing I could go for; it sounded familiar, like we had always been like this, had always been together.

  “You mean beignets.” I placed a reprimanding finger to his lips. “Never call them doughnuts. Cardinal sin.”

  “Sorry. Beignets.” He eyed the nightstand clock. “Do you think that café is still open?”

  “Café Du Monde? It’s always open.”

  “Let’s go.”

  “Now?”

  “Why not now?”

  And so we threw on the clothes we’d strewn across the hotel room floor and headed to Café Du Monde. This time, though, I wore flip-flops and Mark opted out of his suit jacket for the plain white shirt, unbuttoned at the collar. We grabbed a table on the periphery of the café overlooking the sidewalk, where a saxophonist had left his instrument case open to collect spare change for playing “Dream a Little Dream of Me.” Mark kept an eye out for the waiter while I took in the sights and sounds of the café.

  Two tables over, I saw a group of college students who looked like they’d just stepped off Bourbon Street. Beads adorned the girls’ necks. Red kiss marks covered the guys’ cheeks. One girl still carried a tall souvenir glass, a few sips of pink daiquiri remaining. Her bright eyes and pink cheeks revealed she had finished most of it. I studied each student in the group, and not one looked familiar. I breathed a sigh of relief. There would be no awkward “Didn’t I sit next to you in Mr. Harrison’s biology class?” conversations.

  Next to the students sat a woman, perhaps midthirties with brown, wiry hair and dark-rimmed glasses, more New York than New Orleans. She seemed to be writing in a notebook. Something about the tilt of her head and her smooth, relaxed jaw made me believe she truly had nowhere else to go and nothing else to do.

  And then there was the man folding napkins into origami, the transvestite, and the amorous couple, who French kissed between slurps of coffee. I smiled, happy to see the café as I often had in the past—filled with artists, eccentrics, and lovers. The waiter, a young Vietnamese man wearing the uniform white paper cap, approached us then with a stone face. Mark asked for two café au laits and an order of beignets.

  “So tomorrow,” he said once the waiter left. “We’ll ride the trolley out to Tulane?”

  “Streetcar,” I corrected.

  “Streetcar. Beignets.” He rolled his eyes. “For people who chant Who Dat, you sure are particular about semantics.”

  I laughed. “What time do we need to be at the symposium?”

  He grimaced. “I wish you could tag along, Ruby. Truly. But I think it’s too risky. I still know quite a few people at Tulane—my former professors, colleagues in the field. If anyone would see us, put two and two together . . . Besides, I don’t think I could concentrate with your pretty face in the crowd.” He stroked my cheek. “You can keep yourself busy, right? Nose around campus and the bookstore until I’m done?”

  My heart sank. I’d simply assumed I was going to the symposium with him, since he’d asked me to attend that afternoon in his office, even before our relationship began. I hid my disappointment with an exaggerated head nod. “I’ll go to the library. I need to work anyway.”

  “I knew you’d understand.” He squeezed my hand. “And how is your thesis shaping up?”

  “Really well. Right now, I’m working on the connotations of the word room. When Woolf said a woman should have a room of her own, did she mean only a physical space? I think room could be something more abstract, a corner of the mind perhaps, a place free of judgment and guilt and expectation.”

  He said nothing but looked back at me with warm eyes and a soft smile.

  “What?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing. I just love the way your mind works.”

  Love. He loves me. Does he love me?

  “Anyway, I’m still in the note-taking stage,” I went on. “I have fifteen pages so far, but there’s still so much information to sift through. So actually, it’s a good thing I’m not going to the symposium. I can hole myself up in one of those study cubicles.”

  “Well, don’t work too hard,” he cautioned. “I wanted this weekend to be about pleasure not business.”

  I placed my hand on his upper thigh. “Well, I’m certainly enjoying myself.”

  “Me too. But . . .” He studied me like a crossword puzzle clue, as if both confused and challenged by me. “I think we should talk about what happened earlier. On Royal Street. I’m beginning to think you haven’t told me the whole story.”

  “Story?”

  “About your father. What happened when he died.”

  Mark must have seen my eyes water then, because he tucked one of my errant auburn curls behind my ear, then cupped my cheek with his hand. And the warmth of his hand caused the first tear to fall, and the rest followed suit. I pushed my fingers into the corners of my eyes to stop the weeping, but like a Band-Aid on a gushing cut, it didn’t work. In a matter of seconds, I was blubbering—a sudden, snotty-nosed, ugly cry. I covered my face with my hands.

  “I’m so sorry,” I blurted.

  “There’s nothing to be sorry about.” Mark made a shushing noise. “Ruby, I want to know the whole you, not just the parts you want to show me. I like it when you’re happy, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to know when you’re sad. So don’t leave me in the dark, okay?”

  I blew my nose first into a napkin plucked from the metal holder on the table.

  “It was my fault,” I said.

  “You said it was a car accident. Were you driving?”

  I shook my head no. “It was a hit-and-run. He was just crossing the street.”

  “How could that be your fault?”

  “It wouldn’t have happened if I had come home like I was supposed to.”

  I continued to tell Mark the details, how every year, on the night before Christmas Eve, my father and I went to the Celebration in the Oaks, the annual holiday light display in City Park. It was traditionally just the two of us, ever since I was a toddler, because my mother always to
ok extra shifts at the hospital to assure she’d be off Christmas Day. And with each passing year, the holiday outing became as sacrosanct as Mardi Gras.

  “But last year, Heidi invited me to go home with her to Minnesota. And I said yes,” I explained. “I wanted to experience a real ‘White Christmas.’ But more than that, I think I was testing my autonomy. Maybe I wouldn’t move back home after graduation; maybe I would stay in the Midwest. And I needed to prove to myself that I could do it, that I could cut that tie—to New Orleans, to my family, to my father. Of course, I had no idea what would happen. He would still be here if I hadn’t been so selfish.”

  “If you had been here, you would have been hit too,” Mark rationalized.

  “No, because the timing would have been off. Dad and I always went out for cheeseburgers and fries first. It was our little indulgence, our little secret. We’d load up on fat and carbs and then walk the food off in the park, walk the stench of it off our clothes, so Mom wouldn’t smell it on us when she got home. But I didn’t come home for holiday break, and my father went alone. Not for the cheeseburgers, just the light show. And so if I had been here, we would have been crossing the street at least an hour later. It wouldn’t have happened.”

  “You can’t blame yourself, Ruby. You can’t play the ‘what if’ game.”

  “But I play it all the time, ever since it happened. Even in my sleep. Right after, I started having these recurring nightmares, where my father is walking alone in the park, and people—moms with snot-nosed kids wearing reindeer antler headbands—are glaring at him as he passes because, what forty-five-year-old man goes all by himself to a holiday light show? A pedophile?”

  “You’re being too hard on yourself,” he said.

  “Do you know it snowed here last year?” I went on. “The first time in a very long time. It snowed that night, just a few inches, but people here don’t know how to drive in snow, not like people up north. They close school here for a dusting of snow. They close roads. And that night, it snowed. And whoever was driving the car that hit him—the police never caught the person—probably didn’t know how to handle driving in that kind of weather.”

  “This is an awful amount of guilt for you to bear, Ruby.” Mark sighed. “Have you seen someone?”

  “When it first happened, yes, especially when the nightmares kept me up all night. I was an insomniac. I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and prescribed sleeping pills. But I’ve been fine lately. I’ve been sleeping well. I haven’t been feeling guilty. Until now and . . .”

  “—Come here,” Mark said, wrapping his arms around me so tightly, his hands clasped at the small of my back. We sat like that—my face buried in his chest, my tears dotting our laps below us—until I gained control of my breathing.

  It was then, after we pulled back from the embrace, that I noticed the woman with the notebook—the one who’d looked like she had nowhere to go and nothing to do—watching us. She stared at me as if she knew me, as if trying to place me in her memory, and my mind raced through faces: women my mother used to work with at the hospital, the mothers of my grammar school friends, our old neighbors. Do I know her? I wondered. Does she know me? Had she known my mother and saw a resemblance? No, her expression did not suggest recognition but rather disgust. It seemed she’d seen our exchange. Or had she overheard our conversation? Either way, it was clear she didn’t approve.

  The waiter provided me a respite from her damnation when he appeared with two mugs filled with a liquid the color of a good summer tan, and a small plate of fried dough coated in powdered sugar. Mark paid while I gave the woman one more glance, and sighed relief when I saw her reabsorbed in her notebook. Maybe she hadn’t been looking at me after all, but someone or something past me. I turned to look behind me but saw only an empty table.

  I sipped my coffee then—the rising steam a comfort to my red eyes—and delighted in that unmistakably earthy taste of chicory. Meanwhile, Mark’s mouth was already full of dough. White powder coated his lips and fingertips after only one bite. He looked adorable.

  “Have one,” he said, pushing the plate toward me. “Nothing has the power to cheer you up like a big dose of fat and sugar.”

  Unfortunately, there is no ladylike way to eat a beignet, so I held the mass of warm dough and watched the powdered sugar dangle at the edge, preparing to sprinkle my black dress with Café Du Monde fairy dust. The napkins were so small, I would have had to use twenty of them to protect my lap. With my head positioned above the plate, I brought the beignet to my lips, and I ate the whole thing that way, shoulders curved, chin up. But the powder, miraculously, still sprinkled the front of my dress. I dabbed the spots with water, but the sugar seemed imbedded in the black silk. My rubbing had turned the smudges into splotches.

  “I think my dress is ruined,” I said after exhausting all efforts.

  Mark tossed me a playful wink. “So you’ll take it off.”

  We didn’t say more about my father. I think Mark sensed I was emotionally drained from the conversation. Instead, we ate and we drank, listened to the saxophonist, enjoyed the ambiance of the café, the high ceiling and twirling fans, the cup and saucer clinks, the noisy chatter of people out in the wee hours of the morning.

  When we finally left the café, we had to pass the college students and the transvestite and the origami artist but first, the woman and her notebook. She lifted her eyes as we went by, but I could not look into them. I feared they’d remind me too much of my mother’s, of the guilt I’d somehow escaped in my affection for Mark. I saw only the corners of her mouth turn down, her head shaking.

  “Tsk, tsk,” I thought I heard her say under the café murmurs and clanking dishes.

  Or had she said mistress?

  Once on Decatur Street, I tried to concentrate on the night sky, on the spires of St. Louis Cathedral aiming for the stars. But I lost the image. The woman’s disgust was all I could see. I rubbed the front of my dress once more.

  “There’s no use.” Mark reached around my waist. “What’s done is done.”

  I knew it would wash out. I knew no one would see it that time of night. But until we reached the hotel room, I kept my hands before me, hiding the powdered sugar stains on the front of my dress: the letter A the woman from the café had placed there with one hard look.

  I opened my eyes to a dark hotel room. The heavy curtains worked so well, I didn’t know if it was morning or the afternoon of the following day. But soon, I saw a thin stream of hazy early light where the curtain met the wall.

  Mark was still asleep on his stomach, his arm curled over the pillow. The position revealed his muscular arms and toned obliques. I wanted to slide my arm around his waist and kiss him softly on the shoulder, not only for how handsome he looked in slumber, but also for breaking the ice about my father. How could I repay him for his kindness at the café? He’d been so sweet, so strong. He’d seen through my facade. He’d asked the hard questions. He’d listened. How could I wonder if he loved me? Was that not evident in his actions?

  I decided not to wake him and instead, slipped out of bed. I’d fallen asleep reading Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. The book, my alternative to sleeping pills, was still in bed with me, and I placed it on the nightstand. And that’s when I thought of Leonard Woolf.

  From my research, I knew Virginia Woolf’s husband had been equally as kind, caring for her during the bouts of depression and nervous breakdowns that inevitably followed her completion of a novel. Leonard had given his wife so much time, so much understanding, that she’d come to feel like a burden, that she was ruining his life. In addition to hearing voices and the sensation she was going mad, it was one of the reasons Woolf took her own life in 1941.

  “You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good,” Virginia had written to Leonard in the suicide note she penned just before she drowned herself in the River Ouse. “I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer. I don’t think two people could have been happier t
han we have been.”

  I didn’t want Mark to see me as a burden. I didn’t want to take advantage of his compassion. And I vowed then not to cry about my father the rest of the weekend, not to appear weak, injured, needy, or emotional. I would prove to him that I was strong. Stoic. I would be fun and easy and carefree, the kind of woman he deserved.

  I approached the window then to witness the dawn of a new day. Pushing the curtains aside, I saw the foggy courtyard below. Fog, especially first thing in the morning, is as characteristic to New Orleans as jazz or seafood, and I watched the hazy cloud of white as it revealed tables, chairs, and a chaise lounge, all enjoying the tranquil aftermath of a light morning rain. I reached for Mark’s watch—he had set it on the writing table near the window—and found it was quarter to six. I had slept a mere three hours. We’d made love again after the café au lait and beignets and powdered sugar spill. But somehow I felt refreshed enough to venture out for a coffee from the hotel lobby and a courtyard stroll. I would bring Mark back a fresh cup, fixed just the way he liked it. We would start the day off right.

  Sunlight slowly penetrated the veil of fog and continued to lift it as I walked through the courtyard that morning. After only a few minutes, the humidity cooled my coffee and it became chalky, but it was a nostalgic taste, actually, like chicken soup. It reminded me of the many Saturday mornings I’d sat with my mom at the kitchen table talking about everything and nothing. I longed to call her, to burden her instead of Mark, but she had no idea I was in New Orleans with him, with my professor, a married man. She would certainly disapprove of my relationship with him, but somehow that seemed a secondary issue to a more unpardonable sin: I went back to New Orleans without her.

  I decided to return to the hotel room then, and I was on my way to the lobby to fix Mark’s coffee, when I stopped abruptly at the sight of a woman standing just below our hotel room window. Even in the haze of fog, her profile struck me immediately. I recognized her, but in a vague way, like seeing a childhood friend all grown up. Her hair, the color of muddy water, was pinned at the nape of her neck and appeared unkempt and yet refined. Perhaps it was her blouse, white with a frilly lace neck, which suggested reservation. Or her brown ankle-length skirt. Or the narrow, pointy nose of a nun.