Page 5 of Butterfly Sisters
After dinner, with her skin still warm and pink from spending all day in the sun, while Meredith was off on her own making the latest in braided string jewelry or doodling in one of her millions of notebooks, Leigh would sit on the screened-in porch that stretched across the back of the house and watch the birds with Nan, looking them up in the picture book of bird species they kept at the cabin. There were so many birds along the lake that she could’ve studied them for hours with the old binoculars that had been in the desk there as long as she could remember.
Leigh brought up Meredith’s contact number and hit call but, once again, she got her sister’s voicemail. “Meredith, I’m going to fill your inbox until you return my call.” She hung up the phone.
She dropped the phone onto the sofa cushion, resolve over returning to the cabin swimming through her. It was time to go back. Living without it was as hard as knowing what Leigh faced returning to it. She didn’t know what it would be like to walk through it and not have Nan shuffle up to her, wiping her hands on her apron, and handing her a fresh glass of lemonade and a tomato sandwich she’d made from the tomatoes in her garden. The house would be void of her smile, her gentle way of making everything seem okay.
Leigh leaned back on the sofa, but she felt restless. Perhaps it was compounded by the coffee or the unease of getting all geared up for work today. As she lay there, waiting for her sister to call her back, old feelings of hurt over how things had gone with Meredith welled up, giving her a headache. She should be able to talk to her sister when she needed to. Leigh had worked so hard her whole life to ensure that everything she did was a success. But, no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t figure out her relationship with her sister.
Leigh closed her eyes to rest them, hoping to ease the pounding in her temples, eventually drifting off. In her semi-consciousness, she was back at the cabin in her nan’s art studio, a small room with wide windows letting in tons of light, on the side of the house with a view of the woods. Easels flanked every wall, holding large canvases with oil-painted scenes of the lake or her grandmother’s favorite European cities.
“Everyone has art inside them,” she said to Leigh, but it still hadn’t made sense to her. For Leigh, painting was some sort of foreign code that she couldn’t crack. It was just the two of them that day. Meredith had run off to find her friends, but Leigh had stayed at the cabin like she always did. “It’s just buried deeper in some than others.”
“I don’t think so,” Leigh countered. “I can’t even draw a stick man well.”
With a knowing chuckle, Nan set down her paintbrush, wiped her hands on the canvas pocket-apron tied around her wide waist, and opened one of the windows, the wisps around her bun blowing in the breeze that was coming off the lake. “Close your eyes,” she said.
Standing in the middle of the room, Leigh complied.
“What do you notice that wasn’t there before I opened the window?”
With her eyes shut, Leigh honed in on the earthy aroma of the woods. “I smell the trees,” she said.
“What else?” her grandmother asked, the delight in her voice clear.
“The cicadas.” Their loud, electric buzzing filled her ears. “And the breeze.” She opened her eyes to find Nan smiling from ear to ear.
“That’s art, darling. It’s simply noticing what’s around you and then expressing it. Your unique way of bringing it to life is your talent, your art…”
Leigh wasn’t sure if it had been ten minutes or an hour when her phone rang. She rolled off the sofa onto the floor of her apartment with a thump, trying to reach it quickly the moment Meredith’s name came into focus.
“Hello?” she said, rubbing her eyes.
“Hey.” Meredith’s voice sailed through the phone calm and unbothered, as if they’d just spoken a week ago, rather than it being two years since they’d uttered a word to each other.
Leigh took in a deep breath to steady herself. “Can you come to the lake house?”
“Why? What’s up?”
When their mother had said she was making the trip from Leigh’s childhood home in Spring Hill to Nan’s cabin and asked Leigh to go, Leigh had immediately put it down in her calendar, telling her she’d be there. Did Meredith really need an explanation to show up?
“Mom has something important to tell us that she needs to say in person.”
The line went silent for a tick, and just when Leigh’s frustration with her sister was beginning to mount, Meredith finally asked, “When does she want us to come?”
“It took some rearranging of my schedule, but I’m planning to leave midday tomorrow if I can finish up my work, and stay for a week or so, depending on what she has to say.”
“You want me to go next week?” Meredith asked, as if the request was completely unreasonable.
Leigh rolled her eyes and sucked in a breath to calm her already frayed nerves. If Leigh could manage to take off work at such short notice, at a company like McGregor, shuffling clients and in-house meetings, squeezing them in during her lunches and coming in early the weeks after, certainly her drifter of a sister could find someone to cover her boardwalk jewelry stand, or whatever it was she was doing these days.
“Yes, next week,” she said, trying to remain composed.
More silence.
Another call beeped in through Leigh’s phone, and she pulled it from her ear to view the caller: Phillip Russo. While she needed to get that, there was no way she was getting off the phone with Meredith until she had an answer.
She pinched the bridge of her nose, the headache surfacing again. “Will you come?”
“I guess.”
