Most of the girls were swept off to school, and Kat cherished the relative quiet brought by the days. She sat in the family room, watching Ms Wilder through the kitchen doorway, shifting to keep her in sight as she moved to the stove or the little letter desk to pay her bills. Finally Ms Wilder looked over at her and said, ‘Honey, you’d better find something to do afore your eyeballs fall out,’ and Kat had skulked over to the bay window, plopped herself down, and stared at the road, reparsing her father’s last words to her, searching out hidden meanings and nuance.
You’ll think I won’t know how great you turned out.
There were so many gaps and spaces, and it was too late to ask him to fill them in.
You need to be tough. Your life is at stake. No one can know anything about you.
She was Katherine Smith from San Diego – they’d been there a few times for SeaWorld and Legoland, and she could describe the smell of the mist coming off the ocean. But so far no one had asked, not even Ms Wilder.
I will come back for you.
Nothing uncertain about that. Was there?
Staring at the occasional passing car, she strained her mind but couldn’t remember if her father had said anything about when he’d come back. Two weeks? Two years? When she was a teenager?
Kerry Ann, the three-year-old, was tattooing Kat’s knee with a drumstick. Kat brought the drumstick over to a broken xylophone and tried to play her the Orphan Annie song she’d practiced a lifetime ago with her piano teacher, but she couldn’t get it right, and besides, Kerry Ann was distracted chasing the cat.
When everyone got home from school, Kat tried to disappear into the walls. She sat at the bay window as the girls stormed around with their backpacks and hair bunchies and rambling stories. Her scalp itched from the chemical treatment; she had been pleasantly surprised that no one had made fun of her when Ms Wilder had combed the gunk through her hair on the first night. They’d all been there before.
Janine took note of Kat staring at the street and halted. She was pretty in a bug-eyed sort of way.
‘Don’t waste your time,’ she said.
‘He’s coming,’ Kat said. ‘He swore it to me.’
Janine pushed out her bottom lip with her tongue and applied a bright swath of lipstick. ‘You’ll learn,’ she said, and pranced over to join the cluster of girls at the pickle jar.
Their conversation washed over her, but she barely heard.
‘Maybe it’s a monarch.’
‘Ms Wilder says it’s the wrong season.’
‘Oh, ’cuz Ms Wilder knows everything?’
‘She knows more than you.’
‘There are lots of kinds of butterflies. Besides, monarchs are too Halloweeny. I hope it’s yellow instead of orange and black.’
‘Just as long as it’s not a ugly moth.’
It was as if Kat were underwater, the voices warped and distant. She pressed her nose to the glass. There was just her and the street and a caught-in-her-throat prayer that her father would show up with a stolen car and a smile.
During dinner Kat did everything not to cry. She chewed and swallowed, forcing food through the stricture of her throat. She tried not to meet anyone’s gaze, because she knew if she did, she’d break and start crying and then that’s who she’d be forever after: Katherine Smith, the Girl Who Cried at Dinner. So she directed her gaze at the twig and the cocoon. As the girls rose to clear – her job was silverware – she saw it pulse once.
That secret got her through after-dinner chores and teeth brushing. When she prepared for bed, she saw that one of the girls had stepped on her pillow with dirty feet. A dark smudge right in the middle. She padded down the hall. Ms Wilder was in the family room with the older girls, watching a Hannah Montana rerun – Jackson pouring cereal from the box into his mouth, half of it making it in.
‘Sorry to be trouble,’ Kat said, ‘but can I have…? My pillowcase is dirty. Can I have another one?’
A few of the girls tittered, and Kat’s face grew hot.
Ms Wilder said, ‘Honey, what we got is what we got.’
They turned their focus back to the TV. Kat stood there feeling stupid.
Ms Wilder said, ‘Something else?’
‘I… Do I get to go to school?’
Ms Wilder said, ‘We’re working on that.’
‘I wouldn’t complain if I was you,’ Janine offered. ‘Not about school.’
As Kat passed the kitchen, she peered in at the cocoon and saw a seam where it had cracked. She went back to bed with her heart pounding and flipped the pillow over so it was clean side up.
Lying there, she stared up at the bunks towering on either side of her. The younger girls were all asleep – Emilia even snored some – but Kat couldn’t so much as close her eyes. Sometime later she heard the TV zap off with a crackle, and there were footsteps and creaks and doors closing, and then there was nothing but the hum of the radiator.
Kat lay as long as she could and then slipped out and tiptoed into the kitchen. The cocoon was laid open, curled on the twig like a dead leaf, but she couldn’t see the butterfly anywhere. Slowly, it dawned on her that it wasn’t a butterfly at all, that what she’d mistaken for a fat bulge on the twig was really a newborn moth.
It was brown and fuzzy and very ordinary.
She thought about the pet lizard she’d wanted to keep and forgotten in the truck and how her dad had brought it in at night and how it had slid stiffly around in the jar. Before she’d really considered it, she had the pickle jar under her arm and was creeping out into the backyard, the night snaking up her sleeves and pajama legs and raising goose bumps. Pulled tight to the fence was a parked cop car, which made her feel safer even though there was no one inside. At the back of the lot, beyond the play structures, rose a line of thinning trees, and Kat couldn’t help but think about how much lusher the ones were that lined her own backyard.
She remembered her father’s words – I will come back for you - but she couldn’t remember his expression when he’d said it, and she realized that soon she might not remember his face at all. And then the words might blur, too – what he’d said and what she thought she remembered – and it hit her with horror that one day, one day she’d really become Katherine Smith of San Diego.
He’s coming, she told herself. He swore it.
She looked down at the pickle jar, her little secret that no one else had seen, the girls’ sneers returning: Just as long as it’s not a ugly moth.
It had spread its wings against the glass, and even here across the road from the streetlights she could see the tiny patterns, beige against chestnut, like a masterfully inlaid floor.
She thought about the disappointment and cackling that would ensue once the girls discovered that their butterfly was a common moth, and she ran her thumb across the sharp spots on the lid where breathing holes had been gouged with a screwdriver or a knife.
You’ll learn.
With a savage twist, she removed the lid and held the jar aloft. The moth hesitated there on the side of the glass, and then it flicked once and cleared the mouth of the jar. She watched it jerk its way around the nearest tree trunk, rising, rising, and finally losing itself against the pitchblack sky.
No more than twenty feet away, among the trunks of the trees, an orange dot flared to life.
She froze, zeroing in on the point of light, suddenly aware of the silence, her isolation, the charcoal air that had blanketed the shadows at the edge of the yard. The faintest crackle of burning paper rose above the evening hum.
A cigarette.