Imago

Ted died a week before the butterflies hatched, so the five chrysalises, suspended like taupe bats to the top of the cup, were neglected. They grew into each other until parts of their wings broke and scattered to the cup’s circular bottom, and when Bridget’s unskilled fingers removed the paper strip – a long flight of flightless butterflies stretched out before her – she thought, Their pain is my pain, too. And as Bridget already knew, pain was a dangerous thing to absorb.

But before the broken wings and the paper strip and the absorption of pain as if it were smeared on her skin, there was Ted who didn’t want the medicine. He had wanted to go on “living” even when wheezing became his breathing and hacking became his talking. And their son, Jackson, toes curling over the cusp of teenagedom, would sit with him in the yard and laugh at his father’s vulgar jokes. Ted had become preoccupied with “titties” and “pussies” and anything else that sounded remotely related to a mewing kitten.

Bridget watched them from above on the roof, pecking at her pimento sandwich as they sat below in rusty lawn chairs, commenting on the early morning joggers and “Curry,” the old woman in the bright red Indian Sari, who walked with white earphones snug in her ears.

The talk was all glaze, Bridget thought. The final coating on a donut that lacked any real substance. The titties of course, the strong scent Curry carried as she shuffled along in tattered leather sandals, Jackson’s loathing for his teacher who was a “prickish bitch,” whatever that meant. She couldn’t stare too long at them, not even the tops of their heads, Ted’s with the quarter-sized bald spot she used to kiss and her son’s that was spiked from the overuse of gel. Her “little men” as she used to call them. Her little men were all grown up and Bridget wanted nothing to do with them.

#

Her thoughts were “woman thoughts” as her father called them. Get married, have a baby, color the breakfast room a calming shade of yellow. Her brain had been poisoned by her mother and her sisters and her friends who made holidays into rainbow-colored spectacles. On one hand, Bridget had willingly sipped the poison, going out with the men her mother deemed acceptable on Saturday evenings and playing bunco at Jill Givers’ house on Sundays after church to discuss these men. It was the natural order of things or at least an order of some kind.

So the day Ted walked into Plugged In to buy his twin brother a mini-television set for his birthday while Bridget was finishing up her shift, the thoughts shuffled like cards, like ducks in a row, like pairs of socks Bridget would place in her future husband’s upper drawers: date Ted, get married, have baby, be happy.

A lot of those things had happen but not everything.

The baby was her favorite part. The baby was swaddled and smelled what warm smelled like, dappled light on her arms in the summer sun. He was perfect except for the purple birthmark beneath his eye, but there were promises of “fading” delivered in cooing baby voices from her mother and in a heavier, less drippy voice from Jackson’s pediatrician.

It didn’t matter, the birth mark, because it was the perfect place to kiss.

He grew up, which Bridget learned was the hardest thing about children. Over the years, her skin had dried with his vomit, mucus, feces, tears – the inner building blocks of all humans. And it was like his very soul had seeped into her pores and twisted with the curves of her DNA. So the day Jackson’s classmate, Tina Ficarro, had told him he had a “monster face,” Bridget had cried so hard that night she worried a vein would burst in her brain.

For the longest time she was her son and he was she. Until Ted had gotten sick. Until Ted started to unravel the weaving.

“What kind of tits do you think Curry has?” Ted’s voice was a raspy fist against the blank wall of morning sky.

“Saggy,” Jackson said and then their laughter started spinning into a single thread of yarn.

Bridget took another lumpy bite of pimento, but she couldn’t taste a thing.

#

Lung cancer was one of those things that happened in the movies until it happened to you. And Bridget felt guilty thinking of it this way because it wasn’t happening to her as much as it was happening to Ted who soiled the Kleenex with bright red bursts of blood.

That was one of the worst things, the trash cans, the waste baskets flowering with red and white tissues. And then the other thing was the grotesquely timeless act of becoming a barnacle because Ted couldn’t move so she didn’t either.

Bridget could feel herself soil as morning became evening and the oils of her skin left a residue on their brown leather couch. It was summer, so her legs would squeak when they moved. She practiced keeping them still as Ted would lull in and out of consciousness and wonder how much later worry would keep her alert. Jackson was out with friends because summer meant riding in cars with the older kids, blasting music, careening into busy intersections, no hands on the wheel. She had been a kid once, all the church in the world couldn’t have changed that. So Bridget knew the secret things you didn’t tell parents and as a parent, she sat rigid as those secret things gnawed at the marrow in her bones.

She looked over and her husband’s eyes were closed and wet at the lash line. She found peace in this even though he winced in his sleep and the sounds he made were choked with phlegm. She also found peace in the air conditioner’s light buzzing. They had no pets so she imagined it was the steady breathing of a large dog, a chocolate lab following her around with a pant on his breath. It helped with the aloneness. It helped with the way reality had knitted too tightly to her limbs.

She pulled the blankets up around Ted’s chin, because the weight had disappeared and he was more skin than man. But he allowed her the A/C and Bridget reasoned it was his form of an apology. She didn’t think about that, or the guilt that came with watching his wet lash lines dry. She thought about the cordless phone anchored to the kitchen wall. About what would happened when she pressed the strand of seven numbers.

“Hello,” was what the voice said on the other end. It was a woman’s voice, but there had been no names involved last time. All she knew was the number, a wrong number that had dialed their almond brown, 1700 square foot house in Arcanum, Idaho a week ago. A number that had saved her life.

“Allergy shots,” Bridget said. The line was numb with silence and there was a ticking panic beneath her sternum as her bare feet hit hallway carpet.

“Childhood fear?” the voice asked. Relief churned beneath Bridget’s skin and she caught herself nodding. In her bedroom, the air was chemically sweet. She spent her mornings dousing it in air freshener once she brought Ted inside from his outside stints of verbal abuse. Jackson would help her, and she’d catch herself doing a pathetic thing, lightly brushing her fingers against her son’s when they were holding Ted up by his biceps. And once they’d tuck him into the living room couch turned bed, Jackson would walk out the front door and into the world while Bridget would choke on “Summer Breeze.”

“Yes, like you asked last time. I couldn’t think of anything but today, I went outside to get the mail and there was a little girl and her mother on the sidewalk across the street. And this little girl kept screaming, shrill, blood curdling screams all because she didn’t want to walk across the manhole cover. And it flipped like a switch inside my head. The allergy shots I used to get as a kid. I hated them.”

“Tell me.” The “more” was implied so Bridget did.

“They had to ice the skin, and they used surgical gloves filled with frozen water so I’d sit there with a severed hand attached to my arm. My mother wouldn’t stay with me. Said she couldn’t handle the needles.” And the thought inside her head was the one she would often swallow when she saw her mother’s face behind her closed lids or when she saw her mother’s face in her childhood kitchen, holding a baby doll freshly baked from the oven. “But what I really think is that she didn’t like me.”

“Nobody really likes their kid.” The voice stopped and the mechanics of swallowing filled Bridget’s ear. “Was that projecting? Shit, I didn’t mean to project, okay whatever the fuck that means. I guess, my therapist says, Connie – she’s a weirdo, she won’t let me call her Dr. Franks. Anyway, Connie says I do this thing where I project my beliefs onto other people. But nobody likes their kid. They love them, they do the right thing even when most of the time those things end up being wrong. But like is that feeling that comes with choice. And there’s no such thing as choice when you’re raising a kid.”

“I like my kid,” Bridget said. The words spun around in a cloud of engineered summer, and she didn’t breathe so she wouldn’t choke.

“Sure,” the voice said. “Sure you do.”

#

The newest one was named Veronica and she smelled like burning plastic. “The scent of the unliving” as Bridget’s father often put it.

“I’m thinking the yellow, but the violet is speaking to me.” In her mother’s hands were two dresses, one the color of stale meringue trimmed with hand-sewn ducks and the other, purple with no ducks but a string of small flowers around the collar. “Both yours,” her mother said as if Bridget should take pride in this.

“Purple,” she said and took the yellow from her mother, folded it and placed it next to the lace tea doily on the kitchen counter. Veronica sat in the bouncy chair Bridget had bought her mother for her last birthday because of all the things on her mother’s list, it had been highlighted in yellow. The doll had plastic water blue eyes and a plastic skull with tufts of mohair the color of cinnamon. She looked exactly like Bridget’s younger sister.

“Like the tears?” her mother asked as she lifted Veronica out of the bouncy chair and dressed her. Her mother’s name was Rebecca and her hands were mottled with age spots, small details that Bridget didn’t notice until after the divorce and her father went to live with his sister in Jerome county.

“Nice touch,” Bridget said, but she didn’t mean it. She didn’t like the delicate glistening on Veronica’s cheeks or the burning smell or how every time she visited her mother, their conversations were regulated by the discussion of only three topics: the reborns, church, and the next door neighbor who played his “monkey music.” She couldn’t even talk about Jackson anymore.

“Perfect,” her mother said, kissing Veronica on the head and placing her in Bridget’s arms. Her mother rifled through her cabinets and pantry and went about making the biscuits for the church fundraiser that would raise money for a new altar cross.

“He’s getting worse,” Bridget said. Her mother’s mottled hands were deep in the mix of milk and flour and shortening.

“Cancer kills,” Rebecca sang and went back to kneading. Bridget looked down at the dead baby in her arms.

“It does. It did,” she said, no longer thinking about Ted, but her younger sister, Becky, named after her mother and who had nineteen unliving dolls made in her honor because she had died of leukemia at twelve.

“The cross will be beautiful,” Rebecca said, dolloping out the wet biscuits onto the greased baking sheet. She shook the spoon too hard and dough arced into her graying hair.

“Ted is coughing up blood now, and there’s a woman on the phone I talk to about it. It’s nice talking about it.”

Rebecca responded by hefting the biscuits into the oven. She excused herself for a stretch of time as she often did during her daughter’s visits, so Bridget drifted into the living room where she and Becky used to build forts and later where she’d sit in her father’s recliner and watch Becky’s pallid face reflect the colors from Saturday morning cartoons.

As Bridget cradled an unliving Veronica in her arms, fresh baked dough replacing the taste of burning plastic, she remembered her mother once telling her how lucky she was to still be alive.

“This has been nice,” Rebecca said to Veronica’s tearful face when it was time for Bridget to leave. Her mother took Bridget’s skull in her mottled hands, kissed her daughter on both cheeks and then did the same to Veronica who was still in Bridget’s arms.

Later at home, while Ted wheezed through a conversation on the phone with his brother in Toledo, Bridget sat in the bath tub and cried, removing doughy bits of her mother from her hair.

#

“How’s Jackson?” the voice on the phone asked. It had been two days since their last conversation and Ted’s coughing was getting worse, so Bridget had stepped outside to dial the numbers and remember what quiet felt like.

“He’s good. They’re doing a behavioral project on butterflies in his psych class. It’s about how they respond to color. So I’ve been trying to raise a few myself to understand the project better.” She had found out about the butterflies by snooping through Jackson’s homework binder. He had yelled at her. He had never yelled at her before. And now she felt stupid whenever she passed by the cup of chrysalises because it meant she was a fraud who couldn’t even get her son to love her.

“You’re a good mom. But you know he won’t appreciate it.”

“I know, but that’s not really the point for me.”

“What’s the point then?”

Night was heavy, a quick switch from the stretched out summer sun. It was clean, clear air, but it choked her harder than summer engineered in a can.

’What’s the point, Bridget?” the voice asked.

“I never told you my name.”

“What’s the fucking point?

“The point? The point? I don’t know. To make me feel like a mom? To make me feel like I give a shit about my kid? About my husband? About my mother who makes goddamn baked babies in her oven but never once asks me about my heart?” She swallowed “heart” and it burned. “I don’t even know your name. Elizabeth, Lucy, Jean? What’s your name? Who are you? How do you know me? And why does it feel so fucking lonely every second, every second I open my lungs…”

“Who are you talking to?” Bridget looked up and her son was at the side of their home, the door wide open. The bugs will get in, she thought.

“Oh just a friend,” she said and went to shake the cordless phone in her hand, but nothing was in her hand, just a vacant orb of night air. “I mean, I-“

“He fucking died and you’re out here talking to yourself like a crazy person.”

“What? No, I’m-“

“He’s not breathing, he wasn’t breathing when I came in. I called the ambulance. Oh God-” Jackson slid down the side of the house and the screen door slammed shut. “How long has he been, been like this? Why, Mom?” He sucked a breath in hard and the exhale was brutal: “You’re such a cunt.”

Bridget dipped her toes into the porch light’s halo. Her son was talking, grunting. She made no mind of his eyes, his mouth, but she did keep tabs on the birth mark.

There was still a spark in her chest, two ribs rubbing together. She wanted the fire to light her entire body, but it didn’t.

She no longer had it in her to kiss her son’s face.

#

After the funeral, Jackson went to live with his Uncle Rodney in Toledo. He left her in an empty house that hummed forced air and smelled chemically stale and gave birth to half-dead butterflies.

By the time Bridget studied the mass of death inside the cup – the act even more brutal than the “cunt” seared inside her ear canal – she felt she was witnessing the demise of a nameless friend.

Bridget’s fingers gripped and pulled the strip and death became a long line of sticky paper, multiplied from the cup at her chest to Ted’s cluttered desk. With wet pupils, Bridget noticed a small wave of a single wing.

Not everything but enough.