Page 7 of Butterfly Sisters
And just like that, her best friend had fired her as well. “Okay,” she said, trying not fall into sobbing tears. “I’ll… see ya.”
“See ya.”
The line went dead.
She waited for the terrified inhale, the gasp of breath as she awoke from this horrific nightmare, but it never came.
THREE
Three hours. That was all it had taken to board a plane this morning and land in Nashville, Tennessee, a whole different world from the one she’d been living in the last four years.
Leigh had left her new suit hanging in the closet back in her apartment, changed her airline departure time online to an earlier one, and now she found herself with the windows down in the Honda she’d rented, the breeze blowing in and the skyline of Music City in her rearview mirror, as she made the drive twenty-five miles upstream, paralleling the Cumberland River toward Old Hickory Lake.
She clicked through the radio stations, the country twang she’d grown up listening to taking her back to the days of her youth. It had been too long since she’d been to this place, and it felt as if her surroundings were peering in on her, wondering where she’d been. Every sight was familiar and with each passing building, she was one step closer to facing the cabin, her broken family, and everything she’d left behind. She kept her eyes on the road, focusing on the traffic instead of her thoughts.
Springtime in Nashville had arrived like a lion, the sun ablaze as if the warmth had trampled winter’s door and burst in. The early-afternoon sunshine was already scorching, coming through the windshield at a slant, heating up Leigh’s bare legs, her shorts unable to protect them. She turned up the air conditioning, but it faded into the balmy, humid wind coming in through the open windows. Although it was really too warm to keep the windows open, she didn’t want to shut them. Her hair tossing around gave her a sense of freedom that she hadn’t felt in a long time. She needed all the peace she could get, considering what she’d just been through and what she was facing.
As a very little girl, Leigh’s idea of happiness had been simple: she’d wanted to be a mom—that was it. She’d carried around her baby dolls, tending to them, telling them stories, and making sure they had their plastic bottles at mealtimes. But as she grew, an invisible force pulled her from this idea of family and wedged something in front of it: ambition. Her ability to make good grades and please the other academics around her perpetuated the idea, and before she knew it, those baby dolls were but a child’s dream. She’d gotten just where she’d wanted to be professionally, but there was always that whisper deep in her belly that she was missing something. She wanted to have that perfect family where she could run to Meredith and her mother and tell them all her secrets. She wanted big Christmases together, with lots of kids, long talks over glasses of wine, girls’ nights in front of the fire. But her little family was different.
Whenever they’d tried to do things as a family, like dinners, Leigh and Meredith would inevitably disagree about something, and they’d sit silent and uncomfortable until they couldn’t stand it anymore, when Meredith would excuse herself and run off to who knew where. Their father would draw into himself, hiding behind his newspaper, baffled as to how to bring his family together. And Leigh and her mother would go off to different places in the house and do their own thing.
It wasn’t easy to communicate with Meredith. Leigh prayed this trip wouldn’t end up with her and her mother on one side and Meredith on the other, which was usually how any discussion between the three of them played out.
As Leigh drove, she steered her mind away from yesterday and the sense of failure that had overtaken her at losing her job to Rebecca. She’d spent most of last night mentally recounting her career and comparing it to what she knew of her new colleague’s, but she just couldn’t figure out why Phillip had seen her as disposable. And she kept thinking that if she couldn’t see why, maybe that in itself was the problem. Even her best friend wasn’t standing up for her. There was only one conclusion: Leigh was clueless about her own faults. She’d built herself up in her head as this uber successful person when really, was she? If she wasn’t a success, she didn’t know who she was.
With Leigh spending all her time at work, Julie had become her confidante, the one person who could understand, but now she wondered if that was even true. At the first instance of someone else coming in, her friend had upped and left her. She suddenly wondered about what she’d missed in all that time she’d spent working.
Nan would’ve been able to tell her who she was. Her eyes would crinkle at the corners, and then she’d drop one line that would make everything seem easy—that was how Nan was.
“Life is about the whole journey,” she’d say. “Not the stops along the way. They’re just designed to get you there.”
Without Nan’s gentle guidance, how would Leigh ever get her life back on track? And, more immediately, how would she manage being without her at the cabin? If only Nan could be there for her right now when she needed her most… But while Leigh felt an incredible trepidation about returning to the lake, there was also something pulling her there, as if getting back to the place she loved could smooth out all the wrinkles in her life. Waking up in the iron-framed double bed under her grandmother’s handmade quilts, the window open, letting in the sounds of the birds and the tinkling of the windchimes on the cabin’s back porch, Leigh had felt as if she were untouchable by the outside world.
Nestled against the water, down a slew of winding dirt lanes, the lake house was hidden from the public and secluded among the trees. It was the perfect place to get away from it all. And that’s what Leigh was hoping it would do for her this week. No matter what her mother had to tell her, she prayed the cabin and Nan’s memory could get her through it. She needed to feel close to her grandmother right now, and there was no better place to do that than the cabin.
The city landscape gave way to smaller roads, meandering through the hilly countryside toward the lake. The winding paths were shaded by the trees, the sun offering a sparkle through the leaves as they rustled in the breeze. Leigh slowed way down to the twenty-mile-per-hour limit and passed the old farmhouse, where she used to stop to get fresh peaches on the way to Nan’s. Its owner, Bob Hynes, was sitting on a rocking chair on the front porch behind the wooden produce stand, wearing his usual faded bibbed overalls. The man recognized her in the car, raised a weathered hand, and waved as if he’d been waiting for her to drive by. She waved back, allowing the joy of seeing him to settle upon her.
As she followed alongside the cotton fields, a lone, free-standing weather vane on the edge of the meadow turned in the wind and an old tire swing swayed on the branch of an oak tree nearby. These snapshots of southern life outside the city were the fabric of her childhood. And what she hadn’t let herself think about until now was that holding all the threads of her memories together was Colton Harris. Was he still there?
She slowed to a stop at an intersection to allow a tractor to cross. As she sat in the idling rental car, she clicked through the channels on the radio, stopping at a country song she hadn’t heard before and letting it play. The scent of earth and wild grape blossoms filled the air around her. Suddenly, a Monarch butterfly with a gorgeous array of white-and-black texture overlapping its bright-orange wings flew in through her window and landed on her steering wheel.
“Oh! Hello,” she said to it. Its enormous wings fluttered back and forth, as it perched there like it was showing off. “You’re beautiful,” she whispered, wishing she could show it to Nan.
Her grandmother had a leather-bound sketchbook full of the different butterflies she’d seen. Every time she saw a new one, she drew it and then researched the type, jotting down its name and her feelings about it underneath in pencil. She’d drawn all the different types: Swallowtails, a Mourning Cloak, Red-spotted Purples, and Hackberry Emperors… This could’ve been her Monarch.
The butterfly in front of Leigh was so mesmerizing that she hadn’t even noticed the tractor had gone and she was still sitting at the stop. The insect flapped its thin wings. Then, as quickly as it came, it flew away. She watched it until it disappeared into the woods.
A car came up behind Leigh and tapped its horn, startling her and forcing her to move on from the moment, but as she drove, she couldn’t help thinking about the creature. The rolling hills sliding past her window, the silence all around her, the static of the wind, and the warm glow of sunlight all worked together to calm her. It was as if she’d just figured out how to breathe.
As she carried on along the winding roads, she looked down at the map on her phone, only to realize the screen had turned black. She picked it up, tapping it.Great.The phone was dead.
She tossed it onto the passenger seat.
She searched the dash of the rental car for a way to plug in but, of course, that model didn’t have a port. The last leg of the trip was always tricky, all the roads looking exactly the same and none of them having street signs, but they’d also changed in the eight years since she’d last made the drive. There were fields where there used to be trees, the old maple that sat on the side of the road as a marker now gone. But to her relief, she was nearing Leon’s service station, which she remembered was one of the last stops before the lake. She could get directions there.
Leigh pulled into the vintage station, parking next to an old red Ford, complete withFor Farm Uselicense plates and a Bluetick hound dog sitting in the passenger seat. The dog watched her through the open truck window as she made her way to the clapboard structure, hobbling across the uneven gravel in her new summer wedge heels. She passed under a covered porch flanked by a pair of weathered rocking chairs, and went inside, the bells on the door jingling when she opened it.
The place hadn’t changed a bit since she’d been gone. The pickle jar still sat on the counter with a sign alerting customers that they, too, could have one on their way out, for twenty-five cents. The aisle by the door was stocked with homemade treats from the local baker, just like it had always been. And free firewood was still piled by the door. The unspoken rule was that you could take two logs a day as long as you bought something in the store. Leigh never understood why Leon gave it away, but she didn’t argue. It was completely normal to hear Nan call, “Hey, Leigh. I’ve got a dollar in my purse. Why don’t you get yourself a pack of gum and grab two logs at Leon’s?”
