The Butterfly Plague by Timothy Findley Read Free Book Online

that, or anything like it. She had come home to live. That was to be the only reason for everything she did. She was going to lie in the sun, swim in the ocean, walk on the sand. No one would touch her. No one: no circumstances.
    I should pretend to be deaf and dumb and just stare at people, smiling, she thought. Everyone would say, “Poor Ruth—she can’t hear us, she can’t tell us what it’s all about,” and I could sit there and smile and very soon, perhaps, not having to tell, not having to listen, I could forget.
    All the way home…She rose.
    Across the room the curtains beckoned and she padded over and drew them apart.
    There was the ocean.
    A dog barked out on the sand.
    Ruth retreated, rummaged in one of her still packed suitcases and found a bathing suit. She put it on. Custom tailored. Her size precluded anything else. Everything she wore, even her brassieres, had to be made somewhere by hand.
    She looked in the mirror. White and going to pot. Oh well, a few sunny weeks would clear that up.
    She left the room and went out into the hall, praying Miss Bonkers was not an early riser.
    Her prayer was answered by a stillness pervading the entire house. No one, it seemed, was awake anywhere.
    She made her way along the hallway and onto the balcony, which winged out, second-story high, all around three sides of the house. There were stairs, and she went down onto the sand. It was already warm, although the sun had been up for barely half an hour.
    The beach was entirely vacant except for the dog who stood barking at the water’s edge. Ruth walked down toward it.
    It seemed a friendly dog and soon stopped barking when Ruth appeared. Then it wagged its tail—a yellow dog, some kind of retriever.
    “Pretty dog,” she said. “Pretty dog.”
    She gave it a scratch behind the ears and then began to stroll, walking in the water, toward the far end of the beach.
    She did not remember that house being there. When she went away there had only been the bluff. Curious, she strolled on.
    It might be nice to meet a stranger, she thought. But then it’s probably just some picture star, or a hideaway for someone’s lover, or something inane and private like that. I won’t even think about it.
    She stopped. The tide was still out. There was hardly any motion to the water. The dog lay down at her feet with its paws in the sea. It looked up at her and began to pant. Ruth looked back at the sun behind her. She felt its early, pleasant warmth on her shoulders. She remembered being sunburnt, being California brown, being salt all over and dry and tight and muscled for winning. She wanted to go back. Not to have married Bruno. Not to have cared about Olympic medals and championships. Just to swim and love it as she had back then, not really so long ago, only seven, eight years ago—ten (was it?), ten, eleven, twelve years ago—an incredibly long-boned girl standing on the beach. “I’m going to be a swimmer, Mama”—1922. Sixteen years ago. Theirs was then the only house on the beach. Go back. Come back. Stay.
    The dog stood up and waded further into the water. On the rocks the seals cavorted and mewed. Ruth sighed again. She started walking.
    Keeping track of your past is pointless, she thought. All you ever do is forget it or get it mixed up or wish it had been different. Dogs were lucky. Dogs didn’t even know where they came from, who or what they were—or where they were going. She slid, beside the dog, into the water.

    9:30 a.m.

    A parade of bathers had begun below them on the beach.
    Ruth, covered now with olive oil and wearing a bandanna over her hair and dark-green glasses over her eyes, was stretched out partly in a deck chair and partly (her legs and feet) along the railings of the porch.
    Naomi, in a bright-red wrapper and a huge coolie’s hat, with socks pulled up to her knees, was seated in the shade of her parasol on the far side of a table which was laden with coffee cups, orange-juice tumblers, and