The Colors of Madeleine 01: Corner of White (26 page)

She was sleeping again, the Butterfly Child.

The weather had turned wintry, and Elliot watched her in the doll’s house a moment, wondering if she might be cold. The fire was quiet, so he added another log, pushed it around a bit, sparks and smoke flaring, until the flames grew tall and busy. A pair of his gray woolen socks was hanging on the grate. He closed his hands around them. They felt crusty-warm, maybe a little damp around the toes still, but dry enough. He folded one in half and gently draped it over the Butterfly Child. She stirred in her sleep and turned over twice, so the sock slipped off.

He replaced it, straightening it so her little face and shoulders were free, and there it was again, a kind of catch in his throat. She was so tiny!

He thought of flakes of coconut, grated chocolate, granules of sugar, dustings of cinnamon or cloves.

He thought suddenly of how his father used to cut his hair. Elliot would sit at the kitchen table and his father would start off flamboyantly with the scissors, but then he’d slow, and slow, and it seemed he would never finish. “
Almost
done,” he’d murmur, “not quite yet,” concentrating, leaning forward, feathering the edges, snipping so finely it was almost not snipping, the touch of the scissor blades faint moments of cold against Elliot’s neck, the touch of those fine, fine hairs falling past his cheeks to the floor.

In Elliot’s backpack was a book he’d borrowed from the library that morning. It was a Saturday, and he’d finished the farmwork. So he moved away from the doll’s house and sat on the couch by the fire, the book in his hands.

The cover was dusty pink. Its title, in elegant mauve, was:
The Butterfly Child: A Cellian Treasure.

Beneath the title was a deep purple lithograph of a Butterfly Child clasping a rose. Quite possibly, she was waltzing with the rose. Across the bottom of the cover was the author’s name,
Daffodil A. Hazel
, in a shiny foil font.

Elliot regarded this cover for a while.

Ah, what have I got to lose?
He shrugged. There’d only been this one book in the library on the topic.

He opened it and scanned the contents. These, also, made him pause.

• Whence comes this fragile angel? Musings on Her Origins …
  
• Exquisite Friendship: Tales of the bonds between the Child and her Finder …
  
• Her sweetest tastes: Her eating habits and her hobbies …
  
• All this from one so small? Myths surrounding Her magical skills …
  

And so on.

Elliot had been thinking more along the lines of “Dealing with a Dud.”

He found the index, and there were about twenty references to “the Crop Effect,” but every single one told wide-eyed-wonder anecdotes of branches breaking beneath the weight of apples, wheat fields growing to the height of buildings, and honey darn near flowing down the streets.

The Crop Effect begins within days of the Butterfly Child’s arrival
, said the author confidently,
although it may take up to four weeks
.

Well, that deadline had passed.

Elliot turned to the index again, but there was no entry for
Sleep
or
Rest
. None for
Excess
of either sleep or rest or lying around either.

There
was
an entry for
Illness
, which excited him a moment, but it only took him to the chapter on
Myths surrounding Her magical skills
and the legend of how, centuries ago, Butterfly Children had spun healing beads that supposedly cured human sickness.

He flicked through the pages at random, and occasional phrases jumped out:
Some think that the fable of the genie in the bottle arose from early Butterfly Children
, and
In a way, she does grant wishes — just not necessarily the ones that you want
.

In the eating habits chapter, there was a claim that the bark of the sycamore tree was a delicacy for the Butterfly Child.

She likes to read about current affairs
, asserted a section on
Hobbies
.
A thoughtful Finder will leave newspapers casually strewn about in the vicinity of Her doll’s house. How the heart swells to catch sight of the dear little thing struggling to turn those enormous pages with her tiny hands! (A thimbleful of honeydew is excellent for washing off the print stains.)

The book was a waste of time.

He snapped it shut, and there was the faintest sound from the doll’s house. Then quiet again.

He stared at the tiny shape and as he did, the words of the Girl-in-the-World came to him:

Okay, then
, he thought, and he kept watching.

He sat and stared at the Butterfly Child for half an hour, and just as his neck was aching and his legs getting agitated — just at that point, it came to him.

Like a curtain shifting.
Little and little, into a full and clear light.

A dreaminess stole across him.

It was words he’d read about the Butterfly Child in the Cellian guidebook — the time Corrie-Lynn had shown him — they pinned themselves up before his eyes, slow and graceful.

When a Butterfly Child is happy, the crops in the surrounding area will flourish.

He opened his eyes wide.

“You’re not
happy
?” he said into the stillness of the room. “
That’s
the problem?”

The Butterfly Child lay still.

What’s not to be happy about?
he thought, suddenly annoyed.

What did you do about a depressed Butterfly Child? Get a therapist like the Girl-in-the-World used to have?

He sat back on the couch and raised his eyebrows.

Leaned forward to stoke the fire, and sat back again.

Now this was strange.

The warmth of that fire was running down his spine, and more than that, it was
inside
him. Like hands around a mug of something hot, only the hands were in his chest, at his heart, warming his heart.

Somehow he wanted to weep with it, that warmth. Wasn’t it just a moment ago he’d been so annoyed with that sugar-sweet book and that dozing, miserable Butterfly Child? Now his fingertips brushed against the cover of the book and he smiled tenderly at the author’s name,
Daffodil
. There was a sighing sound, sighing in, sighing out — the room was breathing, the world was breathing — then he realized, no, it was him that was breathing. He
was
the world.

Ah, that Butterfly Child
, he thought, and he felt the tears touching at his eyes. He looked across at the doll’s house and realized his mistake was trying to compare her to physical objects: No object could ever be small enough to describe her sleeping lashes! She was as small as that sound — was it a sound he could hear? That Butterfly Child, she was as small as the sound of a page turning, in a distant room in a house.

Elliot shifted ever so slightly but only so that this soothing warmth could find another part of his heart. His thoughts seemed to sigh their way together, and then a single word emerged. Kala! Ah, Kala. Now the warmth seemed an actual physical force, pressing at him so his eyes burned, and tears fell, and the warmth of those tears on his cheeks was an echo of the wonder in his heart.

To have Kala in his life, to be allowed to kiss her, hold her, touch her, listen to her voice, and catch her eyes with his. That was all there was. That was the essence.

He watched the fireplace, and he thought of sitting side by side with Kala on the roof of the barn, holding her hand. He thought of the essence of Kala herself, and he got the crazy idea that she was one of those fold-up postcards, the kind where you get ten picture postcards all joined together, but folded into one. He could fold her up, unravel her, fold her up again, their legs swinging side by side on the old tin roof.

He let the butterfly book fall to the floor and took a notepad and pen from his backpack instead.

Then he drew a little sketch of Kala’s hands, and underneath:
I love you — Elliot.

He looked at the paper and knew he had to take it to Kala immediately.

Outside, there it was: the fifth-level Red, and the faint sound of warning bells. He nodded, not surprised. This Red was rich and warm, a lighter red, almost orange, and it misted at the height of tall trees, drifting in broad boatlike shapes.

It was the Red that was making his heart fill up, he knew that now, but still, he did not hesitate.

It might be the Red
, he thought,
but it’s also the truth. The Red is just illuminating truth.

He took his bike and rode slowly into town — the truck would be too noisy for this mood — and he put the note into Kala’s letter box.

Meanwhile, all around town, the fifth-level Red washed through the air, and people caught their breath and placed hands palm-down on their chests. Women climbed into attics to find old hats, old paintings, old love letters. Men wept quietly and tenderly. Children stared through windows at fields or ran outside to stroke their pet rabbits. Little Corrie-Lynn set to work on a new wooden puppet for her best friend, Derrin Twickleham.

Jimmy Hawthorn walked out of his front door, down the path, through the gate, and knocked once, twice, three times, on his neighbor’s door. When Isabella Tamborlaine answered, he said, “I think you ought to know — well,” and they fell into each other’s arms.

In the Sheriff’s station, Hector Samuels was sitting on the floor behind the counter. His face was a wreck of scars, lines, and tears. He was holding a gold ring so tightly that it was aching a mark into his palm. “Ah, Simon,” he rasped, meaning his lost love, his first love, who died of an illness twenty years before. He’d hardly thought about Simon this last decade or more, but here he was again, snared on Hector’s heart.

Back at Elliot’s home, Petra Baranski was curled on her bed, turning the pages of the family photo album, touching the photos of her lost husband.
Your face, your mind, your heart, your beautiful hands.
Over and over, she mouthed the words, her own face streaked and stained with sobbing.