“Yeah,” Michael answered. “There’s a few. What do you need?”
I smiled softly. “I’d like to get some puzzles.”
Michael and I went together to the store after coffee, while Rob and Adam stayed behind to keep an eye on David. I imagined that they probably sat there staring at him the entire time we were gone. But when we returned the two men were sitting there around a newly-stoked fire and David was nowhere to be seen. I got nervous for a second that they had killed him and buried him in the garden.
“Where’s David?” I asked as we walked in.
“Taking a shower,” Adam answered.
Whew.
We had been able to pick up a few other things at the store while we were there, so now I had my own comfy pair of joggers to wear; the kind that had the little elastic bands which hugged around your ankles.
I went outside to the backyard with a blanket and a couple boxes of puzzles in my arms and spread the blanket out on the grassy mountainside. Then I laid the puzzles out and waited. After a bit, David came out to join me.
“Look what I got,” I said. I almost felt a bit like I was treating him like a child, as if we needed to go that far back in time to fix the broken pieces in order to rebuild them and make them able to work again now.
“Puzzles,” he said as he smiled and came to sit down on the blanket with me.
“Which one do you want to do?” I asked.
He picked both of the boxes up and studied them each carefully. One was a picture of a giant winged dragon in some sort of fantasy-scape. It was really cool looking and had a sort of metallic sheen to the pieces which the box said made the puzzle picture appear to be almost holographic. The other was about three times the number of pieces and was a landscape of the mountains covered in wildflowers. It had repetitive mountains that looked nearly the same and hundreds of flowers of similar color. The entire puzzle was mostly comprised of three colors; the blue of the sky, the green of the grassy mountains, and the pink faces of the flowers that covered them. The selection at the store wasn’t the best, but they still had at least a dozen puzzles to choose from. And I had chosen these two on purpose.
I wanted to see which one David would pick.
“This one,” he said as he held out the mountain landscape and put the dragon box back on the ground.
He chose the hardest and longest one. He wanted to spend time building the puzzle. I smiled and opened the box and laid down flat on my stomach as we dumped the pieces out and flipped them all right-side up to see the side with the picture. We started to sort them by color and pick out all the corners and edges. This part David had always been better at than me. I was too impatient to do the sorting, anyway.
I always just wanted to start building.
That afternoon we sat for hours upon hours in the sunshine building a picture similar to the very ground we were sitting on. By dinnertime it had only just started to come together enough to begin resembling something. The other three guys had stared at us off and on through the window and the open door throughout the day. One of them had eyes-on at all times. I think they were pretty perplexed for the most part and didn’t really know what to make of it. Rob had brought us out some snacks in the afternoon, and as it approached evening, Michael brought us both glasses of wine. He bent down and kissed me on the side of my mouth as he handed me my glass and glanced at the progress of the puzzle.
“Looks good,” was all that he said before he went back inside.
Out of all of them, he was trying the hardest to hope this worked out for me. He knew how hard it was for me to trade revenge for forgiveness and how important it made it for me to have David’s transformation succeed.
“Do you remember when we used to chase butterflies?” David asked as he continued to meticulously place each piece of the image together.
Uh oh.
This was not one of the things from our childhood that I thought was a good idea to bring up. In truth, it was something that had haunted the corners of my thoughts ever since David had come back into my life.
“Yes,” I answered cautiously. “I remember.”
“You got really mad at me the last time we played that game,” he said without looking up from the puzzle he continued to work on.
“I was upset about what had happened,” I said.
There was no point in not being honest with him. That’s what all of this process was about now, getting to the truth of things in order to fix it all.
“I know,” he replied as he nodded his head.
Then, after a moment of consideration, he continued down a path I didn’t expect from him.
An open and truthful path.
“I didn’t know it was just pretend, you know,” David said. “I thought that I needed to catch them all in order to be the butterfly king.”
I studied his face as he chiseled away at the puzzle. “I know you did.”
“But it didn’t work out the way that I had expected. I caught them all and put them in my pockets for safekeeping until we were finished. I was waiting until we could count them to see who had won. I thought that when we were all done, I would open my pockets to count them and they would all fly out in some sort of splendid and colorful cloud of flapping wings and that it would be so beautiful to see that you would love it and I would get to be king because I had made you so happy.”
Holy shit, I never knew that part.
I furrowed my brow. “You didn’t know that they would die if you stuffed them all into your pockets?” I asked in surprise.
He shook his head and continued with the puzzle. “No.”
All this time I had thought David’s monstrous intent had started as a small child. I envisioned him as this seething timebomb in a child’s body that was intent on cruelty and destruction simply because he had been the product of two wicked people that had infused his genetic material with no other option than for him to be just like them. I had based my entire notion of who David was on that one incident of butterfly genocide which had haunted my mind for years. I had thought he had intended to murder, when in fact he had just been trying to give me a fanciful surprise.
David snickered. “I didn’t even care if I had the most or not, I just thought that you would make me the butterfly king simply because you’d be so pleased with the spectacle. I wanted to be king, but I hadn’t wanted to do it in the way it ended up turning out.”
I was no longer paying attention to the puzzle. “But you didn’t look at all upset as you pulled them all out of your pockets and piled them between us on the blanket that day,” I said.
I wanted to understand him, but I also wanted to know that he was being honest with me. And just like the rest of the guys, I wasn’t as quick to trust him as I was to try and forgive him.
His eyes met mine and he shrugged. “What was I supposed to do at that point? If I had freaked out, you would have freaked out even more than you already did. I couldn’t cry, my father had always told me that crying was for sissies and not men. It was too late for me to do anything except count them and win the game. It just wasn’t exactly the way that I had wanted to win,” he said. “You were so upset that you screamed, and your mother came running.”
