But before that, she had called him out of the weeds at the edge of that other yard, a skinny little boy with arms covered with painful deerfly bites. Mrs. Cottle had taken him by the hand and led him to her truck. They had driven away, forever. Jerome had looked up at her, riding tall behind the wheel, and she had looked down at him and smiled.
“You’re going to be okay,” she had said, with the sure conviction of any mother. “I’ll see to that.”
And she had.
Mrs. Cottle had said the exact same thing to Naomi, too, when she arrived. Jerome wondered if Naomi even remembered it. She acted like she had forgotten what it was like to be found. Jerome, who had found refuge in family, did not understand why Naomi kept running. She had found safety before, and had it now. But still—she ran.
Chapter 15
Celia had been on the street, what now, six, seven months? She counted, dispirited, the butterfly book blurry in front of her.
Nine months. It had been nine months.
She would turn thirteen soon. A birthday on the streets—she had seen those. Street kids trying to pretend that going into the soup kitchen and trying to find a candle to stick in a pile of beans was okay. No. Not for her. It would be better to spend her birthdays in the library, drawing as rain ran down the windows, and the afternoons passed into nights, and the seasons passed into years, and one day soon she would find her feet on the stone stairs outside, years older.
She had no future. She knew that.
“You can become an electrician.” The street kids were playing the game of what-if. “I saw an ad about that once. All you need is your diploma.”
“I’m going to be an airline pilot.”
“Naw! That’s fucking bullshit, man.”
“Really.”
“You need like eight thousand degrees. My mom dated this guy once, he was a pilot—”
“Your mom sucked cock down here with the rest, Stoner.”
The voices faded out. Celia was sitting on the curb with the others. She was aware night was coming. The sunset had lit the sky above them into tatters of orange and blood red, streaks of lavender and a bruised purple like a kiss. The city buildings rose like giant smiles, and in each window Celia saw an eye. The figures moving inside, turning off lights and lowering shades, reassured her.
Rich plopped down next to her. His broad, sweaty face looked at her with concern. “You’ve been quiet lately.” He suddenly sounded much older, and Celia could see him as a boyfriend, a man, to some future woman.
“I’m turning thirteen soon,” she said, reaching forward and capturing her toes. They were starting to poke through her canvas shoes.
“Really? That’s cool.” But Rich knew. His measured glance told her.
“You really think you’re ever getting off the streets, Rich?” she asked.
She saw the crumbs in his eyes, the dirt on his forehead, the curly hair starting under his chin. The beginnings of a mustache. The pink line of his lips, the uncertain eyes, and for the first time she wondered about his past. What had made Rich? He was as gentle as a butterfly.
“Sometimes I think I’ll get off the streets, get a job,” he said. He picked a bottle cap out of the gutter. “But I don’t think they make jobs for people like us. I mean, me. What would I tell them?” His voice was forlorn.
Celia had no answer. She looked at the sky, unfurling like glorious banners. All through the world people shared this sky. They didn’t know she deserved a piece, too.
* * *
Oh, the butterflies. It was like a chant. Once Celia had passed a shop up in a tony highbrow neighborhood called Pearl or something equally stupid. What had her mom once said? “It doesn’t matter what color you paint a turd, it’s still a turd.” The shop had said magic in the window, and spells, and Celia had been intrigued. But when she went inside and tried to smell the incense that cost ten dollars or look at the glass balls that turned out to be plastic, the woman clerk had made an expression that told Celia she was the painted turd and should leave.
Celia had stood outside for a long time, then, thinking about magic and spells, just as she was now, getting ever more lost inside herself, only it wasn’t lost; she was finding herself, someplace deep in this warren of memories. She was tracing her steps back. To the beginning.
It was her most precious memory. She was very young, maybe three. She was with her mother in a sunny meadow. It was the time of sweetness, before Teddy. Her mother had her hands clasped over Celia’s eyes. Counting, each breath like a measured, small bell. One, two.
Three.
“Look, Celia!”
She had opened her eyes, let the bright in. Focus.
Oh.
They were bright as discs of color, circling like the spots of sun. A blue brighter than the sky, a sunshine yellow tipped with gold coming closer.
“Butterflies!”
The butterflies would always be there, Celia thought now, feeling her bottom against the curb, the faint voices of the other street kids, the gassy smell of exhaust growing distant. Walking hand in hand with her mother through the meadow, she saw one land on a purple flower.
“What’s this one, Momma?”
“A great spangled fritillary.”
Her mother had picked a dandelion and rubbed it under Celia’s chin, laughing, but the yellow petals were no match for the yellow of the golden butterflies. The white of an eye could not be whiter than the butterfly whites, and no sky was a match for their iridescent blues. Celia, like her mother, was in a swoon.
Tiny feckless feet on burred limbs. Kind eyes that rotated, seeing all. Even Celia. Celia was not a monster that day.
“Where you going, Momma?”
“Time to go, sweetie.”
Celia had wanted her mother to stay—she had grabbed her hand. Now, sitting on the curb, her face slack with memory, Celia was unaware that her own hand was wide open and reaching out.
Her mother’s eyes had softened. She had smiled.
“Okay. Let me tell you a story, then, about the most magical place of all. It’s called the butterfly museum.”
* * *
The scar-faced man. He had begun to haunt Celia’s life. She saw him on the corners, melting into the crowd. He was in the corner market, picking through the sandwiches as she and her friends reached for the marked-down cartons of milk, the ones they had to sniff carefully before drinking. Once at the river, he was watching the bridge as she and the boys crossed—that really freaked her out. “Did you see him? Did you see him?” she kept asking the others.
Now he was staring at her from down the street. He frowned at her, the scars on his lips wriggling like little worms. Celia pointed him out to the others.
“He’s a perp.” Stoner laughed, and Celia knew then that the boys really weren’t going to keep her safe. They had no idea what it was like to be a girl.
“I think he’s trying to kill me,” Celia said, with fearful simplicity.
“Float you in the river with so many holes you might drown?” said another street girl who came up to Celia, her hair a bright orange flood in the dusk.
“Would you want that?” Celia asked her, a girl she had never seen before. Kids came and went: trains, buses, hitchhiking. Many ended up captives, pure and simple, kept like dogs in dirty hotel rooms.