Read The Colors of Madeleine 01: Corner of White Online
Authors: Jaclyn Moriarty
The Colors of Madeleine 01: Corner of White (10 page)
The Butterfly Child is so small she can fit into a locket. She likes to ride on butterflies and prefers to reside in a doll’s house. I have never been fortunate enough to meet a Butterfly Child, but this is not surprising: A single Child appears, trapped in a small glass jar, once every
twenty years or so, and only ever in the Farms. Once the jar “manifests,” the lid must be removed immediately, otherwise the Butterfly Child will suffocate. The jar, moreover, is fragile and can manifest anywhere in the province: Tragically, the most recent Butterfly Child appeared on the edge of a mantelpiece. The jar toppled, crashing into the fireplace and killing the Butterfly Child instantly. The family could only watch in helpless horror.
(This happened about twenty years ago. Thus, as this edition of the
Guide
goes to press, there is much talk buzzing around the province of the Farms as to when and where the next Butterfly Child will arrive.)
Butterfly Children are timid, and even the person who releases the Child can have difficulty winning her trust. I have a friend (Barney) who recalls moving to a small town in the Farms when he was young, and discovering, to his immense excitement, that a Butterfly Child was in residence! However, he never got to meet her. She apparently hid behind the tiny chaise longue in her doll’s house whenever a stranger approached.
Any number of magical abilities have been attributed to the Butterfly Child — she has been said to be able to conjure invisibility spells, compose nocturnes, and much more.
None
of these claims has been verified, but it
is
generally accepted that: a Butterfly Child can speak both the language of humans and that of the insects; when a Butterfly Child is happy, the crops in the surrounding area will flourish; and, at any moment, she will vanish, never to be seen again — sometimes after only a matter of hours.
Elliot closed the book again and looked up.
“You plan on finding her?” he said.
“People say it’s time for one. And it’d fix the farming problems, right? I heard that everyone’s selling their grandma’s pearls that they’d hoped to give to their daughter someday ’cause otherwise they’ll starve ’cause nothing’s growing.”
“Corrie-Lynn, people are having a tough time but nobody’s starving, and whoever you overheard complaining about their grandma’s pearls, well, their daughter probably prefers showing pigs at the provincial fair to old necklaces anyway.” Elliot reached across Corrie-Lynn’s head to the wall, and pressed down a stray flap of wallpaper. “As for the Butterfly Child,” he continued, “she could show up anyplace in the entire province of the Farms.”
“Exactly,” said Corrie-Lynn. “So why not right here?”
Elliot laughed again, standing up.
“I plan on finding the Butterfly Child.” Corrie-Lynn leaned forward so her hair fell into her eyes. “And I plan on making friends with that Twickleham girl and teaching her how to talk.”
“Well,” said Elliot, “I like your attitude.”
11.
A
ccording to the paperwork, the broken TV from Abel Baranski’s workbench belonged to Jimmy Hawthorn.
“Hey, Jimmy,” Elliot called.
He’d caught up with his friends in the square for breakfast and now they were heading into school. Across the street, Jimmy was opening the door to the Sheriff’s station.
Jimmy paused, ran back down the stairs to the edge of the street, and shielded his eyes against the sun.
“Got your broken TV in my truck,” Elliot said. The street was empty, so his regular voice carried across easily. “It was in my dad’s shop. He was halfway through fixing it.”
Elliot’s friends shifted closer to him. Jimmy watched them, his hand still at his eyes.
“Thanks, Elliot,” he said. “I’ve got myself a new TV in the meantime, but I’ll take the old one off your hands if you like. Maybe I’ll get it from you at training later on? Unless you can use it yourself?”
“If you don’t need it, I can take it to the dump for you,” said Elliot. “Bunch of other stuff I’ve got to take.”
There was another quiet. Elliot’s friends were looking at the pavement.
“You don’t want to offer it to the Twicklehams?” said Jimmy, even-voiced. “See if they can’t use it for the parts?”
Now the chins of Elliot’s friends lifted abruptly, and Jimmy could have sworn that a camera flash was going off in each one’s eyes.
They spoke one at a time, voices almost overlapping, calm as water:
“Broken televisual machine you don’t want, Jimmy?” said Kala, long dark hair shifting with her words. “School might need it for teaching electronics.”
“Could come in handy for storage of your files and such,” said Gabe, gesturing toward the Sheriff’s station just beyond Jimmy’s shoulder. “Police files, I mean. You just take out the internal workings and you’ve got yourself an empty box.”
“You can make a broken TV into a picture frame, Jimmy,” Nikki suggested, tilting that pretty face of hers. “Cut out the glass and put one of your best photos in there.”
“Might make a good fishbowl,” grinned Shelby, playing with her leather armband. “Take out the wires and stuff, like Gabe said, and then pour in a bunch of water and a fish.”
Then Cody Richter shook the curls from his eyes. “Ah, let me have it, Jimmy,” he said. “Just what I need for the sculpture I’m doing for art class.
Exactly
what I need, actually. I plan on putting it in the schoolyard right over there.” He pointed, and they all turned and looked.
Five different uses for a broken TV in just over five seconds. Jimmy regarded Elliot and his friends, their backpacks slung over their shoulders. They turned back and stared at him, challenge in their eyes.
He would have liked to photograph them.
“You bet, Cody,” he said. “Help yourself.”
Those Twicklehams didn’t stand a chance.
12.
T
wo days later, the sculpture was done.
Elliot’s friend Cody believed in speed. It was part of his personal theory of art — once you got an idea, you executed it. Right away. Without even stopping to sharpen your pencil, let’s say the art in question was a pencil drawing.
The art teacher sometimes talked to him about planting ideas in the soil at the back of his mind, nurturing them, seeing how they grew, but Cody said he spent enough of his life farming without having to harvest his
art
as well.
Faint rain was falling — not falling so much as trembling — and Elliot was crossing the schoolyard, heading back to his truck after deftball training.
In the corner of the yard was Cody’s sculpture. It was a pile of cement rising up out of the asphalt, the broken TV jammed on top. It was a mess, that was Elliot’s first thought. But he’d been friends with Cody long enough to set that thought aside. Cody always had a point.
TV as trash
, Elliot thought, but that was too obvious.
The cement was pale in the moonlight and he thought maybe it resembled a snowman, the TV as its head. In Cello, snowmen lasted
as long as the winter, and winters could be anywhere from an hour to a couple of weeks. (Once, there’d been winter for just over a year, but they’d torn down all the snowmen eventually, in protest.) So the sculpture was a comment on the fickleness of seasons — the TV representing what? The weather news?
Elliot moved closer. He circled the sculpture. The back panel of the TV was still missing, he saw now, but in the darkness it looked like a patch of blacker black.
It felt good, the TV being here. The last appliance his dad had worked on — the final, unfinished repair job — and now it was an artwork. Not one of Cody’s prettiest, but still. It was not in the dump yard, not under the magnifying glass of those Twicklehams, not even in a shed at the back of Jimmy’s house.
It was here. Set in concrete. In the schoolyard.
Ready for his dad to come back for it.
That was the moment when he saw the corner of white. As the thought ran across his mind —
ready for his dad to come back
— he caught sight of it. The corner of a folded paper. Somewhere deep inside the back of the televisual machine.
At first he thought it must be part of Cody’s sculpture and tried to adjust his theories to include semi-concealed paper, but then he wondered if it might have fallen in. Maybe it was supposed to be fixed to the outside of the TV? Cody sometimes wrote notes of explanation.
Or maybe — and this thought had been there from the moment he first glimpsed it, playing deep in the darkest darkness of his mind — maybe it was something of his father’s.
He reached his hand into the darkness and drew it out.
His head was chanting:
Peripheral connectors are: Pin 1: +12, Pin 72 and 13: Gnd.
To remind himself that even if the paper really was his dad’s, most likely it was more of that same thing. Dry electronics. Not something personal or sweet. Not something that would somehow speak to Elliot, or explain where his dad was right now.
He walked away from the sculpture, to the streetlight above the school gate, and unfolded the paper.
It was not his father’s handwriting. Nor was it Cody’s.
It was a rushed, flat scrawl and it said this:
Dear Parking Meter,
Me too.
I mean, metaphysically speaking I am. I can’t figure out how to get away, or get back, and I really freakin’ want to, so in that metaphysical sense, well, I am also being held against my will.
If you see what I mean.
And if I’m using “metaphysical” correctly. Not sure.
The thing is, my mother’s got us sort of trapped here. In a tower. Or anyway in a flat that’s high off the ground. No chance of rescue cause neither of us has hair long enough to let down, let’s say our names even WERE Rapunzel, which they’re not.
You want to know what I used to eat? Jasmine gelato, lavender cupcakes, frangipane tart, and fine-spun toffee infused with rosewater. That was on an ordinary day.
Here, we eat tinned beans. Specifically: fava beans, white beans, and, on special occasions, baked beans. (They make my mother throw up sometimes cause she’s used to the finer things in life.)
Do you know what I USED to hear? Laughter like chime bells, my father playing his double bass, my mother singing, water features gurgling (that used to annoy me, actually, but I see now that it was beautiful), the teeny-tiny ding of the hotel elevator opening at the penthouse floor.
Here, there are tourists saying the same thing over and over, in exactly the same tone, and students ringing their bike bells like scalpels, and the buzz of the sewing machine.
In my life before, I never stayed still. I’d fall asleep in Paris and wake up in Prague. It was like I had wings, I was always flying or cartwheeling or floating. I was a girl who rode in carriages and
sleighs, on ships and skateboards and skis, and everywhere I stepped there were white-gloved hands opening the doors to let me through.
Here in Cambridge I only ride a rusty bike, and everywhere I turn I have to Keep Off the Grass. We can’t afford the bus fare to London, but my mother buys tickets anyway so she can take useless journeys to see about a quiz show.
So that’s my story. What’s yours? Life as a broken parking meter. Kinda sucks, I guess.
Yours sincerely,
M.T.
P.S. But if the note was actually left by a PERSON and you’re being held against your will? Well, I guess, ignore the above, cause it must sound mad selfish to you. Also, sort of irrelevant, considering your situation.
P.P.S. And listen, you should maybe contact the police rather than leaving messages in parking meters. Just a thought.
Elliot studied the note awhile. He leaned against the school gate. At first the words were like spark plugs, because they were not his father’s. Even dry electronics facts would have been a gift, and he’d been hoping for a gift, so this ignited something fierce inside him that scorched his eyes.
But then the words settled into themselves and he began to disentangle a little of their meaning. He raised his eyebrows.
He folded the note, put it in his pocket, drew out the deftball instead, tossed it high and straight into the night, caught it, and headed to his truck.
