The Patron Saint of Butterflies (3 page)

I stare at the sky. Emmanuel has a no-crying rule in the Regulation Room. No matter how bad it gets, if you cry out, it will only get worse. I’ve learned to hold my breath, taking tiny gulps here and there so that nothing but air emerges from my mouth, but Honey always carries on like she’s being tortured or something, just to make him mad.

“ ’Course, I paid extra for that,” she says bitterly.

“What do you mean?”

She rolls back over so she is lying on her stomach. “Lift my shirt up.”

“What?”

“Lift my shirt up. Take a look at my back.”

I sit up on my knees, tucking my robe beneath my legs. Honey’s never asked me to do anything like this before. Sticking out my arm, I let my fingers hover tentatively at the edge of her shirt before dropping them again. “I don’t want to.”

“Oh, just
do
it.” Honey sighs, letting her forehead drop against the ground.
“God.”

I lift her shirt gingerly, as if it might hurt, and hold my breath. Nothing prepares me for what I stare down at. Underneath the slashes of violet belt stripes there are letters scrawled in red marker, large and sloppy, across the tender skin:

H-A-R-L-O-T

My nose starts to wiggle, a habit of mine that started when I was three years old.
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle.
Somehow it prevents the tears from coming.

“Nice, right?” Honey asks, craning her neck to see over her shoulder. “That was Veronica’s idea.”

“Veronica?” I repeat, letting go of her shirt.

Honey nods. “Yup, Veronica. Sweet, pure, chaste Veronica who can do no wrong.”

I stare disbelievingly at a blade of grass, feeling the blood pound behind my eyes. If Emmanuel is Mount Blessing’s spiritual father, Veronica is our spiritual mother. She’s second in command here, just one rung below Emmanuel, and is just as holy and virtuous as Emmanuel himself. The story of Emmanuel finding her twenty years ago while teaching one of his advanced divinity classes at a college in Iowa is legendary at Mount Blessing. Dad has told it to Benny and me numerous times over the years. My favorite part is when Emmanuel finally approached Veronica, who, as a college sophomore, had answered yet another one of his theological questions with a wisdom well beyond her years.

“You have an almost otherworldly knowledge of divinity,” he had said to her. “Have you ever studied it before?”

Veronica was really shy back then, so shy that she could not even look Emmanuel in the eyes as he addressed her. She was also very self-conscious of a skin rash that covered her
arms and hands. It was so severe that it made her skin bleed, forcing her to keep her hands hidden inside her shirtsleeves at all times. “No,” she answered. “Never.”

“Then how do you know so much?” Emmanuel pressed.

According to the story, Veronica ducked under his steady gaze. “It’s not really me,” she answered. “It’s something bigger, something inside of me that knows. I can’t explain it.”

But it was explanation enough for Emmanuel. Back then, Mount Blessing was just starting to form, with nine Believers—all of whom had left their homes and come to live with Emmanuel in his little house next to the college. Soon after her conversation with Emmanuel, Veronica became the tenth Believer. Two weeks later, after leaving Iowa and moving to Connecticut where he would begin Mount Blessing, Emmanuel introduced Veronica in a formal ceremony to the other members. She was dressed in the very first blue Believer robe, and her hair, which smelled of lemons and rosewater, shone in the light. The red rash on her hands was completely gone. “Look carefully,” Emmanuel said to the tiny congregation. “She is the closest any of you will ever come to being in the presence of the Blessed Virgin.”

Every female at Mount Blessing—except Honey—strives to be like Veronica, beginning with how she wears her hair, swept off her face and knotted at the nape of her neck, to the way she holds her arms out straight during an entire prayer service, just like Jesus on the cross. I’ve spent prayer services—two, three hours at a time—just watching the way she moves her lips or the fervent way she closes her eyes when she utters certain phrases. She is the epitome of perfection, the example of what we are all striving to become. And she is brilliant. Sometimes
even Emmanuel will defer to her while he is preaching and let her explain things in her own words. That is why I don’t want to hear Honey’s reason—if there is one—about Veronica’s participation in this. It just wouldn’t make any sense.

“What’s a harlot?” I find myself whispering instead.

“It’s a whore,” Honey says. Her voice is matter-of-fact, but when she starts talking again, it trembles around the edges. “Veronica said that’s what I am, running around trying to kiss boys like I do. Like I make a habit of it or something. It was one time, for God’s sake.
Once
!” The silence between us is deafening, interrupted only by a soft
neigh
from one of the horses in the barn. I take her hand in mine and stroke it tenderly, my fingertips caressing the rough patches along her knuckles.

“You’re not a harlot, Honey.”

“Yeah,” she says, pushing her hair off her face. “I know.” Her gaze is fixed on something I can’t see in the blue canopy above us. She points with her index finger. “Hey, look! It’s a Spangled Fritillary!”

I squint at a small orange butterfly swooping down toward some Queen Anne’s Lace. Only a butterfly could distract Honey from the conversation at hand.

She stands up slowly, watching as the small insect floats from one flower to the next. “Look how gorgeous. And so many markings on the wings.” She turns to look at me. “Did I tell you Winky and I started aerating the garden this morning?” I nod. “Winky found some wild fennel and turtlehead in the field, too. We’re going to transplant them tonight after dinner. The garden’s going to be so beautiful this year. I bet we’ll have over a thousand butterflies.” The butterfly
soars past us suddenly and, after grazing the tip of more Queen Anne’s Lace, disappears from sight. Honey watches, shading her eyes with her hand.

A small, sudden shout interrupts the moment. “Agnes! Are you up here?”

Instinctively, Honey drops back down in the grass. “Who’s that?”

The voice floats over us, louder this time. “Honey! Agnes! Where are you?”

“That sounds like Benny,” I say, peering in the direction of the voice. Standing up straight, I wave my arm through the air. “Benny! Over here! We’re over here!”

“How’d
he
know where to find us?” Honey asks.

I lean up on my tiptoes. “Probably from when he followed us the last time. Remember?” My little brother is so small that I can see only the top of his white-blond hair as he turns and then swerves through the tall grass like a marshmallow on a stick. He’s a nervous little kid to begin with, but he gets even more nervous when he doesn’t know where I am. At all times. I love him to pieces, but sometimes it feels like he is suffocating me.

“Nana Pete’s here!” Benny says, bursting out all at once from inside the field. His blue robe flaps around him like a tent and his enormous black glasses slide down the bridge of his nose. A constellation of freckles stand out like tiny ants across his face.

“Nana
Pete
?” I say. “What are you talking about? Are you sure?”

Benny is holding his knees with his hands, breathing hard. He lifts his head at my barrage of questions. “I’m
telling you, she’s here! Mom just came down and got me out of prayers so I could go get you! She’s waiting for us in the Great House!”

Honey looks at me accusingly. “You didn’t tell me Nana Pete was coming.”

I stare wide-eyed at her. “She wasn’t. At least, she’s not supposed to be. Dad said she wasn’t coming until August, just like always.”

Nana Pete is Dad’s mother. Despite living all the way down in Texas, she comes up to visit us at Mount Blessing every summer without fail. Sometimes she takes a plane, but more often than not, she drives her big green Cadillac, which she calls the Queen Mary. There’s nothing she likes more, she always says, than a “good ol’ road trip.” And while she is Benny’s and my paternal grandmother, she has made a point to include Honey in every single thing we’ve ever done with her, starting when we were just little kids living in the nursery. In fact, I can’t ever remember a single time with Nana Pete that didn’t include Honey.

Benny slaps his knees. “Can we go? Please?”

Honey laughs out loud and tosses her robe carelessly over one shoulder. “See you guys later.”

“Oh, come with us,” I say. “You know she’ll ask for you as soon as she sees us.”

“No more Great House for me today,” Honey says, walking on ahead. She looks over her shoulder. “But tell her I’ll see her later. Maybe after dinner.”

“Where are you going?” I ask uncertainly.

Honey spits out a blade of grass and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. “Back to the East House, I guess.
Christine probably thinks I’ve committed suicide by now or something.”

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.