The Patron Saint of Butterflies(7)
I cringe at her offhand comment. Suicide is a mortal sin. “Okay,” I call after her. “I’ll see you later, then.”
Honey lifts her arm in response but doesn’t turn around. Benny tugs at my arm, leading me in the opposite direction, but I find it hard to take my eyes off Honey as she moves farther away from us. Her head is held high, her back straight and proud.
It’s so strange. Every once in a while, even though I know it’s wrong, I find myself wishing that I could be more like her.
HONEY
It’s the middle of May, which means that the field behind the horse barn is full of new butterflies. On any other day, I’d be running around like a nut, numbering the different species, examining their wing patterns, and writing everything down in the little notebook Winky gave me. Not today, though. Today those tiny buggers could have wings of pure gold and I wouldn’t give them a second glance. After tearing off that damn blue robe, I lie down in the grass instead, turning on my side when it hurts too much, and stare at the sky for a while. I’m supposed to be down in the East House with Agnes and all the rest of the kids, saying afternoon prayers, but that’s just not gonna happen. If I was in that room right now, I would probably punch someone. And if Christine wants to give me a hard time about it later (which she won’t), she can go jump off a cliff.
When the noise in my head gets too loud, I pull the tiny ceramic cat out of my front pocket and hold him up over my face, directly in line with the sun. George is a Siamese, about the size of a large pecan, and so small that most days I forget he’s even there. He’s the only thing I have left of my mother, Naomi, who left him behind just before she took off. Sometimes I wonder just how demented she really was, thinking that a four-inch ceramic cat could actually take her place. I don’t know whether to cry or laugh when I think about it.
“Hey, Georgie,” I say, studying the soft brown markings along his nose and ears. “How are you? You get squished at all from everything that went on in there?” His blue almond-shaped eyes stare back at me. I turn him around, checking every angle. The tiny chip in his tail is still there, but everything else looks intact. “You’re a tough cat, you know that?” I lower my arm so that I can see him up close. He is trembling.
“Hey,” I whisper. “Why’re you still shaking? It’s okay. We’re out of there now. Those psychos are history. They’re not thinking about us at all anymore.” I wrap my cold fingers around the figurine and bring him down against my chest. My heart feels like a tiny, untethered ball knocking around under my rib cage. “It’s okay, little guy. It’s okay. Deep breaths, remember? In and out. In and out.” The sun, a bright lemon disk, warms the cold skin on my face and legs. “In and out, George. That’s it. In. And. Out.” My arm, heavy as a log suddenly, sinks down across my eyes.
I try not to think about it, but the whole Regulation Room scene unreels itself like a movie in my head. Emmanuel’s thin lips loom in front of me, followed by Veronica’s ice-blue eyes. I can’t stand Emmanuel, but I hate Veronica with an intensity that frightens even me. I hate that she is beautiful, not because I’m jealous, but because her beauty has been wasted. No one as mean as Veronica deserves to carry around a face like that. She has milky white skin, a high forehead, and large, perfectly round blue eyes. Agnes says they are the color of sapphires. I think they are the color of death. I also hate that she is the only person in this place—aside from Emmanuel—who doesn’t have to play by the rules. As the queen of Mount Blessing, she calls her own shots—no questions asked. She doesn’t want to wear her robe one day? Fine. She wants to buy a television for Emmanuel’s room, even though all electronics are forbidden at Mount Blessing? No problem! In fact, why not buy a gigantic color television that will hang on the wall of Emmanuel’s room like a fish tank?
I hate that she is cruel. Not cruel like Emmanuel. Emmanuel’s cruelty is freakish, something almost inhuman. Part of me wonders if he was just born that way, that maybe he doesn’t even have a choice. Veronica, on the other hand, is a whole other deal. She’s learned how to be cruel over the years, and the more powerful she’s become, the meaner she’s gotten. She used to leave Emmanuel’s room whenever one of us kids was brought in to be interrogated. Eventually she got to the point where she could stay, but with her eyes riveted on the floor and her fists clenched in her lap. Pretty soon, though, she was participating in the question-and-answer drills, even interrupting Emmanuel at times to ask us to “clarify” something further. Now she even takes over occasionally in the Regulation Room, the way she did this morning. Despite all this, everyone still considers her to be on the same level with the Blessed Virgin Mary. It makes me want to puke when I think about it.
But most of all, I hate that the Believers here refer to her as the mother of this place. As far as I’m concerned, the words “Veronica” and “mother” should never be in the same sentence. Yeah, I know my own mother ran off and left me, so what do I know about mothers, right? I guess I should be grateful that I have some kind of pseudomother stand-in at all. Well, I’m not. I might not know anything about what having a mother feels like, but I’ll tell you what: I do know what having a bad mother feels like. And I’d bet my life that having a bad mother is worse than not having any mother at all.