Free Butterfly's Shadow by Lee Langley Page B

she recalled how Ben used to talk about the navy, the freedom, the unbroken horizon, the moment when a hint of land blurred the rim, the way the sky blended into the sea at night, the darkness seeming to turn the water to ink. It had stirred her, it was part of why she fell in love with him. Now it seemed he was brushing all that to one side.
    ‘You’re sure about this?’
    ‘Oh, I’m sure!’ Hearty.
    Well. What was it the preacher had said a couple of weeks ago? A problem is just another name for an opportunity.
    Ben said, ‘It’s an opportunity!’
    She was aware that the horizon had shrunk for both of them. It was goodbye to a teaching career: she had a child to care for now. One who was special. He could kick a ball around; at first sight no different from the other youngsters. But difference there was: older than his years, he looked at things mindfully, with a curious intensity, as if searching for something. One day, walking in the park, he stopped beside a flowering shrub. He smiled with delight and touched a pale bloom with his fingertips.
    ‘ Ajisai flowers!’ he exclaimed.
    ‘No, Joey,’ Nancy corrected him. ‘Those are hydrangeas.’
    Then she realised they probably were whatever it was he had called them, but in another place, another language, another life.
    ‘Let’s go!’ she said brightly. ‘We don’t want to be late now.’
    But when she glanced back he was still beside the hydrangea bush, his small hand cupping a bloom. He looked up at her questioningly.
    ‘When can I see my mother?’
    She stared at the child, head suddenly emptied of words, excuses, possibilities.
    ‘Well now, Joey. We’ll talk about that.’
    She took his hand.
    She was a mother, a wife, a homemaker, and she worked at it, keeping the house shiny bright, her hair sleek and bouncy, and welcoming Ben home from work each day with a kiss.
    She was working at it right now, reaching for the cookie jar, setting out plates in the afternoon hush as the gingham curtains blew in a breeze that carried the sound of a creaking swing-seat from a neighbour’s garden: crik-crik . . . criik-crik. Saucers clattered on her new Formica worktop; the kitchen smelled of freshly baked cornmeal cake, and tears ran down her cheeks, dripping on to the golden crust as she took the cake from the oven. Oh, to turn back the clock. But to what hour and what day? And which decision?
    She cleared her throat and called up the stairs to Joey to come down for his tea.
    He heard her calling and stayed where he was, kneeling on the shag rug, rearranging the animals two by two outside his wooden Ark. Some of the animals had been new to him when he first got the Ark as a present for his sixth birthday – long-necked giraffes, stripy tigers, and there were others that Noah didn’t want on board that Joey decided should be included,so he had created a pair of tiny origami cranes, two jumping frogs and a couple of dragonflies and set them down alongside the horses and the monkeys.
    Shifting to reach for another animal he noticed that the strands of the rug had pressed into his knee, forming a pattern of deep lines. He ran his finger over the temporary scar, feeling ridges in his skin, almost like the tightly woven rushes of a tatami mat. He remembered walking along a seashore once long ago; he had stumbled on half-hidden rocks, their surface sharp as knives, but clinging to the rocks were tiny shells, satin-smooth, and seaweed like dark green lace. All those surfaces, those discoveries, were part of another way of life, like sleeping on a futon, not the soft American bed that sagged beneath him, softness he had now grown used to. Thick rugs instead of the tatami mat beneath his feet. What had seemed strange no longer surprised him.
    But sometimes his head rang with words that turned into an endless song, words that added up to minutes, hours, days of a life that was growing fainter as he grew more at home in this huge, flat land planted with crops that people