My train to Los Angeles was scheduled to leave at two in the afternoon, and I woke up in the loft again on that Sunday in the very early hours, this time with no alarm. The babysitter was still asleep; I could hear her steady breathing, and the occasional licking sounds of Hattie grooming himself. For a long time I watched the windows change with the light, watched the room turn back into itself again, imagining there was no travel ahead, and instead a long and cozy Sunday of activities with her and me and the city together, all dappled by the scent of lemon verbena.
The order of the morning was, at first, the same as the day before: Hattie descending, then babysitter, coffee burbling, the slow stirring of oatmeal, a call to Uncle Stan, baby update, mother update, Aunt Minn recovering well, information about the steward.
By then, the light was growing fair and warm, and the babysitter had opened her curtains and shades so sun rays could move into the room to place glints into the objects and reflecting surfaces. The monster, whatever the monster feeling was, the feeling that had been growing and swelling and tugging over the last two days, had passed. It had laid its turd and moved on. I felt the freshness in the room, and despite the circumstances, and the upcoming train departure, I ate my oatmeal with brown sugar and butter happily, two bowls-full. The sunlight shared the room with us, greeting us, reaching to us, so it was just natural and participatory to let my eye locate and enjoy the various glints, the babysitter’s coral-colored speckled glass vase up high on the bookshelf, the corner mirror by the door with a star of light in its top corner, and something reddish and gold glinting on the surface of the water glass by my couch bed. I finished the second bowl of oatmeal and brought it to the sink. The babysitter smiled at me as I washed the bowl and spoon and placed them on the drying rack, tucking the bowl against a wire hill, resting the spoon, pretending it was my drying rack, my daily chore, and as I did it the red-gold sparkle on the water glass occurred to me again like a pleasant thought I needed to revisit, what pretty light, what a pretty room it was on a morning touched by the gleam of a new spring sun. The babysitter rose to go use the bathroom. For a second, I thought to call out to her before she passed through that door and out of the moment, to show her the special brightness this morning had offered to us in her apartment, but for whatever reason, the impulse passed.
She entered the bathroom, and the door lock clicked. Soon, we would fold the blankets on my couch bed together into tidy squares that would return to the shelves of her closet. She would place the dry bowl and spoon back in her cabinets, and on Monday she might pass by my classroom and see my own teacher peeling my name sticker off my cubby, explaining to the other kids that I had moved away to another town. Perhaps the class would send me a letter or two. In a couple hours, the babysitter and I would take the bus together to the train station, where we would arrive early to get everything in order before I would board the train and take it a day and a half south to Los Angeles, California, the place I would soon be calling my new home. I had a sleeper car for the night portion, a “roomette.” I would meet the steward, my second cousin, a kind and thoughtful chaperone.
I turned from the sink and tucked in my chair at the kitchenette table. On some level I must have known something important was happening, had happened, because I can remember filling with what I would now call a formality of movement, like adulthood was brushing through my body, a gust of adulthood moving both through me and out of me and formalizing me in its wake. I carefully sidestepped the edge of the couch and moved closer to the small table and the water glass. I smoothed back my hair and brushed my cheeks clear of sugar. Hattie lapped at the water in his bowl.
Up close, it became clear that the glint of light was more than a reflection of sunrays in the water glass but had itself shape, solidity. What had appeared to be a pool of gold revealed the body of the butterfly, with red-golden wings and splattered red dots and thin black antennae, drifting on the top of the glass of water. It was a dead real butterfly, floating on the top of the water. There were no windows open in any part of the loft. It was spring, and still too cold to leave a window open at night. The door had been locked. Butterfly migration had passed.
So, I saw it, and at first it was just itself, just the glass of water with a dead butterfly in it, an image suspended and unconnected to anything else, until my mind remembered where it had seen such a butterfly before, found the link, and linked it.
Until the most predictable and unthinkable thing in the world was to tilt my head, and look at the shade.