Butterfly Sunday by David Hill Read Free Book Online

heart. She didn’t know any other way. It didn’t matter how much she hated her situation. It didn’t matter what the rest of the world had to say about her actions. She couldn’t be the rest of the world. She could only be herself, looking into the eyes of intolerable circumstances and doingwhat she understood to be necessary and moral—even if she was aware no one else shared her view. She didn’t like the consequences of those actions. She just didn’t see any bearable alternative.

    What proof did she have? She had none. All she had was her absolute certainty. What good was that? What evidence was there, for that matter? It said “stillbirth” on the death certificate. Arlen, the county coroner, had obviously decided she was a hysteric when she questioned him on it. He was very polite, sympathetic even, but he’d taken slight umbrage when she asked him if he’d actually examined the baby. He obviously considered her a grieving mother who hadn’t accepted the difficult fact of her loss.

    The only material evidence lay across the road from the house, six feet under the ground. If her information was right, and she didn’t doubt it, Averill had buried it in a cardboard box. Even if Leona could somehow manage it, what would even be left to find after fifteen months in wet ground? There was only one way. Even if time revealed that she had miscalculated everything, if she lived to see that she had done the wrong thing, she would never suffer the bleeding conscience of willful ignorance. She’d never say she regretted her choice. She could only say that there hadn’t been one. All the winding roads of her life had converged into one narrow path that seemed to dissolve into nothing behind her as it stretched into a similar bleak horizon.

    There was no room on the path for second guesses or regrets—except for one heavy uncertainty she still carried in her heart. And while it slowed her progress and burdened her with its constant torment, it hadn’t and wouldn’t stop her. It was part of the price. It had to be sacrificed with the rest of her luxuriant notions of happiness. It was a pain to be endured with the rest, athrobbing wound that would never heal, only die with her as the narrowing path descended into a sudden spiral that released her into floating oblivion.

    His name was Blue. He was the sum of all her regret for this world, which was already beginning to seem like a fable out of the past. She was still here and alive, yet she had separated from this time and place. Blue was the only thing that prevented her from floating off or dissolving into the perfumed air.

    Would he ever understand that she hadn’t merely chosen vengeance over him? Would he eventually see that she had spared him a restless existence plagued by the eternal cries of a child’s ghost? Would he take any comfort from knowing that she had kept it from him because he would have succeeded in stopping her? She was exhausted with the ever accruing chagrin she endured as life slapped her across the face with one discomfiting truth after another. Yet here was another one. For Leona suddenly felt herself drowning in the realization that their enormous and miraculous love was completely useless, even ludicrous when she considered its power to create unhappiness.

    She breathed the exquisite cool scent of her mother’s iris. It glistened in the sunlight, stirring an ephemeral shadow of her mother. It almost seemed an exquisite present sent to her out of an impossible, living past. Now it bent and fluttered on a sudden rush of wind like a magnificent butterfly separating its moist wings for the first time and summoning them into flight. In that dissolving moment of jeweled and breathing peace, she heard the scrape of her mother’s shoe against the iron shovel as she turned the fragrant earth in her iris beds. It stirred the inimitable comfort of undying nurture. In that moment she understood the power of a mother’slove to transcend not