As Alice scaled El Mirador alone, it was as clogged with tourists as ever. Eighty-five feet below, couples milled about the lush grounds. Paul and Bobby had planned to renew their vows in that very garden on their fortieth wedding anniversary. The first time around, they’d eloped. Millie, Bobby’s mother, hadn’t approved of their union, and Paul’s parents hadn’t approved of Millie’s disapproval. The whole thing had drama and unpleasantness written all over it, so Alice’s parents decided to dispense with the wedding part of marriage. They went to a courthouse—not this one—got a license, and that was that. When Alice had asked why they planned to wait until their fortieth anniversary, her father said that they would be sixty-five—the age Bobby was now—older but not so old that life could not begin again. They’d still have the time and energy to do all the things they’d never gotten around to earlier in life.
Alice’s vision blurred as she felt the physical impact of an image consuming her mind. In fact, it was not one image but two: a very long aisle and a butterfly. She leaned against the wall of the tower and breathed to steady herself. The dizziness and the brilliance of the colors along the butterfly’s wings intensified. Her epidermis electrified, calling her to sit down and write even as she tried to fight the impulse. Alice did not want to draft the story for her mother. Glorious as it was, she did not want to see the intricate pattern of the butterfly’s wings that had invaded her mind. But the only way to clear it was to write.
“Are you okay?” she heard someone ask her.
“I’m fine,” she asserted as she breathed deeply. Her vision was narrowing, and she feared she might faint. The story needed to come out of her. There was no fighting its force.
Alice raced down the winding stairwell, bumping into several tourists huffing and puffing their way up. When she reached the ground floor, she sprinted outside and plopped down on an empty step leading to the sunken garden. At the bottom of her bag, she found a crumpled menu for an event the previous week. She smoothed it out and started writing.
The story began with a detailed description of her mother in a white dress she’d never worn, walking down a very long aisle. Bobby might fall in love, but she would never marry again. That part of her life, a vow, betrothal, was over. This was not the wedding Alice was giving her.
This was a wedding for one. No relatives, no rabbi, no friend ordained by an internet church, not even Alice. Her mother needed to be alone. Bobby couldn’t feel like she was being unfaithful to Paul if the only person she was promised to was herself.
At the end of the very long aisle, a butterfly landed on Bobby’s right ring finger. It was the largest, most resplendent butterfly she’d ever seen, with gold-tinged wings. Bobby watched as it tiptoed from her ring finger up her arm, across her shoulders and down her left arm to her other ring finger where it reached the tip and flew away.
This was Alice’s shortest story yet, fitting on the back of one piece of paper. Like the others before it, Bobby’s story came to her in a mad rush. The moment Alice placed the last period on the page, she knew she had reached the end. Once it was done, it was done. No editing. No amending. It simply was what it was. Misspellings, homonyms, and all. The butterfly might be too prosaic or too much like Gabby’s hummingbird. She was going to have to start coming up with imagery that did not involve flying animals. For now this simple and perhaps hackneyed story was just what her mother needed. Alice had told Bobby what she already knew. It was time to let go. Time to vow to herself that she would tend to her own needs. Time to let someone else care for her if not take care of her. As soon as Alice folded the menu and returned it to her bag, she understood that she’d been wanting to tell her mother this for a long time. In the end, Bobby was just like the others. Someone Alice could help.
During the wedding reception she worked, Alice continued to feel that buzzing through her body, even though she’d finished writing her mother’s story. When she returned home, unusually high on the adrenaline of rushing around on her feet for the last five hours, the tingling sensation persisted. It would not go away until she unleashed the story. She settled before her computer and typed it. Revisiting it, she found the symbolism less trite, more true. When she was finished transcribing the page, she printed it, sealed it in an envelope, and drove down the coast to her childhood home. It was late enough that her mother had turned off the porch light. Alice looked up at the dark window of her mother’s bedroom.
“I hope this is really what you want,” she said before tiptoeing up to the door and slipping the envelope through the mail slot. When the slot clanged closed, Alice began to panic. It was too late to reverse whatever she’d just set in motion.
By the time Alice returned to her apartment, her limbs were so tired she could barely move to unlock her door. Inside, a few glasses and empty plates decorated her desk and living room, but they would have to wait until morning. She flopped face-first onto the couch, her cat, Agatha, gently nudging her, concerned.
“I’m okay, Aggie,” she managed to mutter before falling into a deep sleep that lasted fourteen hours.
When she woke up the following afternoon, she expected to find a message from her mother. Certainly by dinnertime there would be a text indicating that she’d received the story. When one day became two, Alice started to worry that something had happened to Bobby. She left voicemails and text messages, getting no response. Quickly, the panic shifted to anger, for surely after forty-eight hours, if something had happened to her mother, someone would have alerted her. Had Bobby read Alice’s story and hated it? Or been confused by it? Maybe it really was trite. Maybe Bobby had simply felt nothing, which seemed the worst possibility of all.
All week, Alice was distracted by the suspicion that her mother had hated her story and was too afraid to tell her the truth. At a fortieth birthday party hosted by the birthday boy’s older wife, she dropped not one but two trays of mini crab cakes. At a launch party for a lipstick brand, she spilled a glass of wine down the front of the CEO’s dress. Fortunately, it was white wine, not red. That did little to quell the anger of the sticky, sodden woman, even though her cherry red lips looked perfect.
“What’s with you this week?” Alice’s boss, Caroline, asked. “You better get your head on straight before you drop scalding soup into someone’s lap and we end up embroiled in a lawsuit.”
Alice was mindful to take trays of salad rather than soup for the first course, careful to place the plates of oil-dredged lettuce evenly on the table. Caroline was right; Alice’s head was askew, twisted and contorted with worry that her mother was avoiding her. Of all the reasons Bobby had not contacted her, the possibility that her story had worked did not occur to her.
She was biking home when at last she received a call from her mother.
“You’re alive,” Alice said as she picked up.
“Sorry, dear. I didn’t mean to worry you. I’ve just been...well, I’ve been wanting to tell you... I wanted to know what it was first and I guess I’ve always known but I’ve been scared. Now I’m finally starting to realize—” As Bobby continued to ramble, hedging her words, Alice realized her mother was in love. “Your story was beautiful. Even if you weren’t my daughter I would have loved it.”
“Really?” Alice said.
“Of course. The way you described the lace on the dress, the way you evoked the motion of walking down the aisle, its uncanny quality—it was all very effective. I read it the morning after you dropped it off, while I was eating a croissant. I’d bought one at the bakery the day before when I picked up bread for the week. I don’t know why I even got a croissant. I never eat croissants. All that saturated fat.” Bobby had become obsessed with fat content since Paul’s heart attack. “So I’m eating this croissant and reading your story and a memory hits me of this time I was eating a croissant and a butterfly landed on it. I hadn’t thought about that moment in so long. Or the person who shared it with me.”
As Bobby read Alice’s story, her chest seized and her heart began to beat too fast. Although she worked with children, she was still a doctor and knew what was happening to her body was not a heart attack. When she managed to slow her heart rate enough that she could think again, her mind drifted to the memory of that croissant and the butterfly, and the man who had sat across from her witnessing that simple but beautiful moment.
“Your story,” Bobby continued, “it made me realize how much I miss Mark.” Since they broke up fifteen years ago, Bobby had never mentioned Mark to Alice again. Alice assumed that her mother had tried to forget about her one attempt at romance after Paul.
“Really?” Alice intended to write her mother a story to let go of the past, and instead had unlocked a repressed memory that might live again.
This wasn’t a case of the unconscious shaping the work of the conscious mind. Alice had never heard her mother’s story about a butterfly landing on a croissant. The coincidence was nothing short of magic.
“I didn’t overthink it. I just picked up my phone and called him. I hadn’t spoken to him in fifteen years, but I remembered his telephone number. Oh, Alice—”
Oh, Alice.It was what they all said when they told her what had happened to them after reading her story.Oh, Alice.So much emotion in those simple words.
“He could have remarried. He could have been in a relationship. He just plain could have not wanted to talk to me. I wouldn’t have blamed him.”
Of course Mark would talk to Bobby. When Alice moved back to Santa Barbara after dropping out of med school, she’d run into Mark at the farmers market on State. He was the kind of man who gave his ex-girlfriend’s daughter a hug. The kind of man who could ask Alice what she was up to and make her comfortable telling him the truth about being adrift. The kind of man who offered to set her up with a job at his niece’s catering company to tide her over until she figured out what she wanted to do. The kind of man who followed through and actually called the niece, the kind of man who would not judge Alice, eight years later, for still working that temporary job. If he was the kind of man who would do all this for his ex-girlfriend’s daughter, he was certainly the kind of man who would give his ex a second chance.
