The Butterfly Still Affects

Thou art weighed in the balances, 

and art found wanting.

-Book of Daniel 5:27

The Butterfly Still Affects

Purgatory: the place some faiths believe will be entered to purify the soul on the path to Heaven.  A final cleansing. But some people can never be cleansed, and others can never be forgiven.  

Fall, 2020.  They sat in a row at the table.  Fittingly, a total of eight eyes filled with blame judged him, not undeserved.  He imagined that purgatory felt a little like this. The brain being gutted for its most personal information, stripped and naked for all the world to see.  Would the judges there wear robes, or something similar to the jeans and athletic bottoms that clothed the four bodies sitting opposite him? He would almost welcome the purification by pain or fire; anything would be better than the hatred that radiated from his grown children.

Spring, 2016.  He could still smell her perfume mixed with his sweat.  She burned with a desire for him that Elena hadn’t shown for years.  It wasn’t that he didn’t love her anymore. She just fulfilled a different need.  She was the mother of his children. She took care of him and kept the house clean.  She was a born nurturer. When it came to wife material, she checked every box on the list.  But Rayne. He had known from the second she’d entered his favorite dive, if given the chance, he would stomp their wedding vows and watch them burn.  And he did.  

One time turned to two.  Days turned into weeks, months, and eventually approached a year.  Elena busied herself, because that’s what mothers do. She had noticed that he had been working longer and a chasm was spreading between them, but raising four kids was hard work, so she barely had time to breathe let alone mend it.  Besides, a vow was a vow. Every marriage was “for better or worse” and this stage was just the worse. She could dimly see the light at the end of the tunnel. At some point, once the kids were through high school, (which they were almost), they’d have all the time in the world to nurture their own relationship.  She hummed their wedding song as she threw his work shirt in the washer.  

For him, the lying became easy and the cheating was like a drug.   Elena rarely questioned his whereabouts; she was too wrapped up with sporting events, dance recitals, and keeping the house in shape.  She barely had time to look at him, let alone notice the scent of another woman on his breath. The more detached he became from her and the children, the easier it had all become.  To be honest, he had never expected his preoccupied wife to find out, and she wouldn’t have, had he not forgotten to empty the note from his pocket before she did the wash, which she always did.  

Elena reached into his pants pocket as she had done a million times before.  She scrunched up her nose; of course one of his favorite bars still had smoking as though it was the ice age.  She felt the paper and thought nothing of it. Until she pulled it out and saw the script.  

Ryan,

I didn’t know alive until I met you.  You have awakened my everything. I count the hours until the minutes I can spend with you.

-Rayne

The rage of all she deserved but would never have filled her. She felt the blood rush to her head, setting her cheeks ablaze.  The tears were immediate; a flood that had been dammed. She felt the bile rise and ran to the bathroom, where she emptied her insides out.  She shut the bathroom door so the children could not hear. All of the perfection she had created, crushed by a letter that reeked of cheap perfume and smoke.  

With her back against the door, she sat in a fetal position playing the DVD of her life.  For years she had given and given while everyone else did their taking. What was even left of her?  She’d quit her job to rear her children. She’d moved away from friends and family to support his dreams.  She had cleaned and mended and cooked and planned to the point of exhaustion, and the one thing that was hers, not him but her family her greatest treasure, had been torn from her grasp.  She again glanced at the note: after all of this she had been brought down by a paper shoved into the back pocket of a pair of jeans like a piece of trash, not to be confused with the piece of trash who’d written it.  Slowly, she peeled herself off the bathroom floor. She was destroyed, and he didn’t deserve to be a part of her rebuilding. Remembering the woman she was, she straightened her shirt, dabbed at her bloodshot eyes, and lifted her chin.  She would go home for awhile and pull herself together. Then, she would fight for her children. She passed him as she walked down the stairs without a backward glance. 

When he got the phone call, they said it was ice.  She had already crossed the state-line when her tires met the freezing rain and it sent her flying.  She was dead when the ambulance arrived. His secret was safe; no one would ever guess he, not the ice, had killed her.  

The kids of course, were devastated.  She had been their everything. She had bandaged every cut, cheered at every game, attended every conference.  What had he ever done? He was a stranger living under the same roof. He did try. Day by day, he tried. He had built the best relationship with them he had known how.  The children, now adults, had never learned of his indiscretions. Until now. All because of that damned box.

 Lilly, the youngest, had received a large portion of her mother’s jewelry, being the only girl.  Over the last few years, she had slowly gone through it; most of it too painful to even wear. It just sat on her dresser, serving as a memory of what was but would never be again.  

Now four years later, Lilly sat in the middle of her bed and stared at the final box.  Her mother’s favorite. Knowing she would be overtaken by the flood of memories, she hesitated; little did she know she'd be opening Pandora's box.  She knew her mother had kept all of her most treasured possessions from the kids’ childhood in it. Steadily, she drew a deep breath, but when she opened the wooden square and unfolded the letter, she needed more than a breath to face what stared back at her.  The gut punch knocked every once of air from her lungs, and for the second time in her life, the world as she knew it shattered around her.    

So, here she and her brothers sat.  Motherless. And now fatherless. In a sort of purgatory of their own.  Maybe the not knowing had trumped the knowing. Either way, there was no going back.  

Forgiveness is a strange thing, often elusive. When not given, it is a wraith that haunts both the ones unable to forgive and the one unforgivable.  Not all stories have a happy ending, and for Ryan, this one was no different. He watched as the only parts of his life that now mattered, in single file, turned their backs and exited the door.   He sat alone, with only his memories. He had been weighed. He traded purgatory for hell. Their judgement was swift and final.  

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