The Iowa Review

Invisibili­a

For a week now we’ve been disappeari­ng. At first we thought it was only our mother, who we found in the kitchen one morning, partially translucen­t, eating a low-calorie muffin after coming back from Pilates class. Vi pointed and we watched silently, from behind, as a blob of muffin worked its way down her esophagus. This was followed by a swallow of black coffee, which went down faster. We couldn’t watch either the muffin or the coffee go all the way down because the view was blocked by our mother’s blue sleeveless workout top, which— like the muffin and the coffee, but unlike our mother—remained solid. Hey, Vi said, you’re see-through.

I’d been trying for a few seconds to come up with something to say, to figure out how to broach the subject. Vi’s the direct one. She says life is too short to broach things, to be a broacher. I tell her it’s not that short, and she’ll remind me of our cousin Ainsley, who died as an infant, when she was three days old. She hadn’t even been given the name Ainsley yet. She was just The Baby. Aunt Liz and Uncle Matt only gave her a name so they’d have something to put on the death certificat­e. Vi will say sometimes: Ainsley never even knew her own name, and I can’t live that way. Something about this doesn’t make sense to me but I can never think of a good answer, one that won’t make me sound like I’m indifferen­t to Ainsley’s plight, so I mumble and change the subject.

Our mother turned. She looked like herself, mostly, except for the fact that parts of the kitchen were now faintly visible through her head, her arms, and her legs. She glanced down at her right hand, splayed the fingers so she could inspect them, rotated her wrist back and forth.

I feel okay, she said, blinking at us. I feel lighter.

Where’s Dad? I asked. Does he know?

In the shed, she said. And yes, probably. He must. Right?

Are you solid? Vi asked.

I am to me, she said. Feel me.

We went to her and each took one of her hands. She never used to let us hold her hands because she said holding hands made her too hot. Aunt Liz told us that our mother refused to hold hands with anyone even as a little girl and once screamed at a crossing guard for trying to take her hand without permission. We jumped at the chance to do it now.

Soft but mostly solid, Vi announced. And sort of cold. Like a jellyfish.

Like holding a balloon filled with cool air, I said. Then I added, But in a nice way. Because I was worried she’d think I didn’t like balloons filled with cool air, and maybe I didn’t, but I didn’t hold it against her. Also, I didn’t want her to let go just yet.

What’s it mean? Vi asked.

Is it because of the not-divorce? I asked, because it’s what I was thinking about at that exact moment, and I was trying to be more direct.

The not-divorce was something we’d just learned about the day before. What happened was that we were having dinner, vegetarian meatloaf with brussels sprouts and french fries (because our father was willing to eat brussels sprouts only when they were accompanie­d by heavily salted french fries, a position I shared), and I had just popped three or twelve french fries into my mouth when my father said that he just wanted us girls to know that there was not going to be a divorce.

Was that, said Vi, on the table?

I didn’t say anything because I was chewing maybe fourteen french fries and trying to swallow another half dozen that were stuck in my throat. But I moved my mouth as if I was also saying something thoughtful.

We kept it from you girls, said our mother. That it was an option, I mean. But the point is that it’s not going to happen, said our father. Why? asked Vi.

Why what?

Why isn’t it going to happen?

Because we’re going to plow ahead, said our father. So there’s nothing to worry about. Family is everything. The important thing is that we’re still intact.

I’m glad, I said. I’d finally swallowed all the french fries. My chest hurt a little because all my saliva had dried up, but at least I could speak and contribute.

But what made you decide to plow ahead? asked Vi.

Because of memories, our mother said, sharing a look with our father that was, I think, supposed to be meaningful and intimate. But they rarely shared looks any longer, and hadn’t for as long as I could remember, and so it appeared as if they were two strangers in a bus station who had just discovered, for example, a shared interest in backgammon, or murder. We’ve had too many good memories, our father said. We don’t want to lose them.

Would we, though? asked Vi.

Probably, he said. He explained that when people get divorced, everything is tainted when you look back on it. Even the loveliest memories, he said, start to curdle when you look back through the prism of unhappines­s and regret. And eventually it would seem as if we’d never been happy, and

everything had only been a terrible waste of time. The happiness in our past will have been stolen from our present and future selves, he said.

I asked what a prism was.

It just seems, Vi said, like maybe we didn’t need to hear this? We thought you should know, our mother said. Just in case things start to seem a little off.

Feels like things are already a little off, said Vi.

The point is that we still have our memories, our father said. He clapped his hands together, which is what he does to signal that everything is resolved to everyone’s satisfacti­on, and then went off to the shed to spend time with his collection of desiccated butterflie­s.

The next day, our mother turned see-through.

Unrelated, our father said, when we had dinner that night. The one thing has nothing to do with the other.

Hmm, said Vi. Why do you look smaller?

It was true. Normally our father was a full, slightly balding head taller than our mother when we were sitting together at the table. Now the top of her partly translucen­t head was about level with his nose, as if he’d slid down a few inches in his chair, the way a child might. And he wasn’t only shorter. There seemed to be just a tiny bit less of him, every part of him, as if we’d snapped a family picture when he was standing a few feet behind everyone else, so he wasn’t quite to scale.

He frowned at the top of our mother’s head, as if perhaps it was to blame. Maybe the rest of you grew, he suggested.

I ran to get the tape measure, and then Vi recorded all our heights on the back of an old Pilates schedule.

Two inches, our father said, as we sat back down. People do get smaller as they age.

Two and a half, I said.

The point is, we shouldn’t worry, he said. We’re intact, I promise. The family abides. We endure.

It really isn’t that bad, our mother said, blinking cheerfully at Vi and at me. She’d been in good spirits all evening even though she found it was harder, now, to lift things and open doors and so forth. She said, You both look lovely tonight, by the way. Really lovely.

I beamed. Vi was in her usual sweats, and I had on a chocolate-stained T-shirt from last year’s band camp, and neither of us had brushed our hair in three days.

We should do something together after dinner, our father said. Like we used to. As a family. Didn’t we used to play games together?

I’m sure we did, our mother said.

Was it Monopoly?

Not Monopoly, I said, quickly.

The money’s all gone, said Vi, and the only piece left is the shoe. And the board is ripped in half.

Only because you guys had too much wine, I said. That one time! Our father appeared, to me, to shrink just the tiniest bit more in his chair. Something else then, he said. A walk. How about a walk around the neighborho­od? Like we used to.

Okay, I said. I didn’t remember us taking walks together, but I remembered other families doing it, and it always looked fun to me. It made me think of families of ducks who walked along together and crossed roads together and protected one another.

We waited until it was growing dark so my mother wouldn’t have to explain to the neighbors why she was becoming invisible, and my father wouldn’t have to explain why he wasn’t to scale anymore. Vi and I walked behind. Our father, now more or less the same size as our mother, reached out to take her very slightly larger hand.

I think they’ve gone mad, Vi whispered.

Quack, I whispered back.

Streetlamp­s hummed to life as we walked past. It was warm and windy and the night trees were lit with fireflies. I’d never seen so many. I took Vi’s hand and squeezed it.

Hey, she said, and she stopped to look down at our two hands. What? I asked.

You feel weird. Do I feel weird?

She’d stopped in front of me, and I realized I could see the pale outline of the sidewalk right through her body. But she was glowing, too. Just here and there at first, these pulses of soft white light along her arms, her legs, her cheeks. But more and more appeared as I watched. I wondered if it might be her soul that I was seeing, if she’d been turned inside out somehow, which made me think of exoskeleto­ns, and butterflie­s. I knew butterflie­s had exoskeleto­ns to keep safe the soft parts inside. Our father had told us about them.

Why are you crying? she said.

Why do I do anything, I said. Because I didn’t know how to tell her about exoskeleto­ns.

Look, she said, pointing down at the sidewalk, where my tears had fallen. They’d formed a puddle on the asphalt, and in the puddle we saw what looked like the twinkling of a thousand stars. They flashed brightly for a few seconds, little supernovas of grief, and then went dark.

The next morning, our father was no more than four feet tall. He looked normal otherwise, though he was dressed now in a pair of Vi’s T-ball pants and one of my old Spongebob T-shirts, which hung on him like a small

nightgown. He was using both hands to hold a mug of coffee while our mother, sitting across from him, slid an entire piece of chocolate cake into her mouth.

You’re eating cake for breakfast, I said.

You’re eating cake, Vi said.

I weighed twelve pounds today, our mother said.

Carpe diem! our father said.

We can’t have much longer, Vi said. She ran a hand gently along her arm, stirring up a cloud of silver-gold stardust.

Let’s not worry, our father said. His voice was fainter now, shrinking along with the rest of him, as if we were hearing him from another room. Let’s not lose this chance, he said, to be together.

I’ve been dreaming that we live somewhere else, Vi said.

Dreams are interestin­g, our father agreed.

We were living with Mom, not with you.

Well, he said.

We were in the city, in an apartment. I knew it was our place because that clock was on the wall, the one with a face that’s half moon and half sun. And we had a dog.

Your mother doesn’t like dogs, he said, frowning now into his mug.

I said nothing. But I knew that the dog’s name was Daisy, and Vi’s room was pale blue and mine was pale purple with dark purple stenciled clouds up near the ceiling.

I’m going to the shed, our father said.

Wait, I said. Stay. We won’t talk about it.

He waved this away with his little hand. I just need to check on something, he said. In the shed.

Your butterflie­s, I said. They’re still there.

Let him go, our mother said.

Our father slid down off the chair and stomped to the sliding door that led to the backyard. With great effort he was able to open the door and slip out into the yard.

We can sit together and talk, our mother said, drifting, almost floating, to the couch. Just the three of us girls. Like we used to. Remember?

I wanted to remember. I wanted to sit with her and with Vi even if there was nothing to remember. But I was watching my father from the window. He’d made it at last to the shed, and he must’ve shrunk a little more on the way from the house because he couldn’t quite reach the door handle. So I went to help him.

The shed was in the back corner of the yard, shaded by hickory trees. Our father built it himself when we first moved into the house. Outside, it looked just like our real house: it was painted white with flower boxes

beneath the windows and a gabled roof and a bright yellow door. It even had its own mailbox on a post outside the front door, an exact replica of our real mailbox except three-quarter size. Every day when I was younger, our mother would remove all of our father’s mail from the main mailbox, carry it out to the backyard, place it inside his special mailbox, and lift the little red mailbox flag to let him know he had mail. He’d come home from work and look out the window into the yard and see the red flag, and he’d smile his slow quiet smile, and then he’d laugh, and she’d laugh, and then he’d go and pick up his mail and read it in his shed before dinner. Then one day I noticed that she left his mail on the island with the rest of the mail, and the little red flag never went up again.

I can’t do it, he said now, and his tiny shoulders sagged. He was no taller than my knee.

I put my hand on the door handle. I hadn’t been inside in years. He never said we couldn’t come in, but he was careful not to ever really invite us either. Sometimes our mother sent one of us out to fetch him or to ask him a question. We’d stay for a minute or two, bouncing on our heels and sneaking glances at his books, at the old illustrate­d diagrams that hung from the walls (Insects Harmful and Useful, Conspicuou­s Beetles of New England, Visual Taxonomy of Cicindela puritana), and especially at the butterfly case that hung on the back wall, away from the sunlight that filtered through the hickory branches in through the two small windows. When it was time for us to leave, he’d say jokingly, You’ll have to come for a longer visit next time! But we knew he was relieved when we left.

Go on, he said, seeing me hesitate. It’s okay.

It was cool inside and there wasn’t much furniture: a simple desk, a chair, and an old green love seat that he’d found on the side of the road and wanted because, at the time, we had a regular-sized green sofa in our living room.

The butterfly case hung on the wall behind the desk, but he was too short now to be able to see it clearly.

Maybe you could take it down for me, he said.

So I removed it from the wall and set it down on the rug. The case was about four feet wide and almost as tall, and there were, I guessed, close to a hundred butterflie­s pinned behind the glass. Some big ones were scattered here and there—pretty blacks with pearly-white dots along the wing bottoms, iridescent blues tinged with orange specks, one big orange monarch in the bottom right corner that looked like a setting sun about to disappear around the corner of the frame. But most were smaller. And most looked, to me, like the same butterfly, of palest blue outlined in white, with flecks of black and brown along the wing tips.

What’s this one? I asked.

Spring Azure, he said. Celastrina ladon.

Is it rare?

Common, he said. They were everywhere when I was growing up.

I asked why he’d kept so many, then.

Because they were his favorite, he said.

Whose favorite?

He put his hand, which was now about the size of a cat’s paw, on the glass. Well, he said. You had an uncle, I guess.

You guess?

He cleared his throat and said, He wasn’t an uncle then. He would’ve been an uncle. He died long ago. An accident. I was there, too.

Why don’t we know about him?

We never spoke of him. They never did, I mean, so I never did either. Too sad. Nobody wanted to be sad.

You were there?

He was so little, he said. Even for his age. And he couldn’t see anything. Thick glasses, nearsighte­d. But he loved bugs, and microscope­s. So he could see things no one else could see.

What was his name? I asked.

Adam, he said.

I’m sorry.

Well. You know. It was so long ago.

My skin was mostly transparen­t, now, dark and pulsating with its new weird light. I laid my hand on the glass beside his. I always wanted to touch their wings, I said. When we came to visit here.

I didn’t know, he said.

It hurt me sometimes, I said. Not to touch them.

He turned to look up at me, at the giant face of his daughter. Go on, he said.

Won’t it fall apart if I touch it?

Try, he said...

So I lifted free the glass case and set it aside. Then I knelt on the floor with my knees touching the wood frame, and leaned forward to touch one of the smallest of the pale blue Azures.

It’s still soft, I marveled.

Then its wings fluttered.

We both sat back on our heels. The pins which kept the butterfly in place slipped free, and the Azure rose from the case, wings beating ponderousl­y for a few seconds. But it steadied itself and flapped harder, rising and falling and darting madly, left and right, as if caught up in a current. Learning to fly, to be alive again. Then it made its way to the open doorway and flew off. We looked at each other.

The rest, he said. Quickly.

You’re sure?

I’m sure, he said.

So I touched each butterfly in turn, and each broke free and took flight. In less than a minute the room was a cloud of resurrecte­d butterflie­s, and we lay on our backs to watch them, his small hand in mine.

Once they’d all flown at last through the open door, he climbed into the case and lay on his back. He was about the size now of a large dragonfly. He stretched his arms wide.

I’m not going to pin you, I said.

It’s not so bad, he said. I could get used to it.

The days passed.

Some days I awoke in a purple room with purple clouds near the ceiling, and outside the window was a quiet, leafy city street. I watched the leaves blow about as I walked to school with Vi, a new denim backpack slung over my shoulder, and I thought of the way the leaves sounded underfoot, crunch whisper whisper crunch, and I thought of Susie, the girl who sat next to me in social studies, who I wanted as a friend because she’d drawn dancing skeletons on all her book covers. Some days I awoke, and I was made of stars, and Vi was made of stars. Our mother was so light that we had to tie a string to her to keep her from floating up and out the window. Our father was small enough that we worried we’d squash him if he were left free to roam, so we brought the Christmas village down from the attic and set it up in front of the bay window, and we moved him into the Alpine Lodge. We tried to be together.

But I think it won’t be long, now.

Some days I can’t quite remember what I think I’m supposed to remember. It’s all a little mixed up in my head, me and not-me. The one who sleeps in a different place now.

I feel like I’m forgetting things, I tell Vi. We’re almost to school. The weather is getting cooler now, even in the city. I’m still wearing only a zip up hoodie, the one that’s not mine. Our father gave it to me the last time we stayed with him because I’d packed only T-shirts for the weekend. I’ll buy you one to keep here, he said. No, this one is good, I said. I like the way it smells.

Which things, says Vi. Checking her phone, which is in a black case printed with the words Gothic Babe, in silver gothic letters.

(A moving truck has appeared outside our house. It’s late afternoon on a fall day. I know it’s fall because the hickory trees in the backyard have started dropping their yellow leaves, and no one has swept them away. I wonder where the summer went.)

I don’t know, I tell Vi. From when we were together. What it was like.

Watch this, she says, and hands me her phone, and I watch a video of a baby panda sliding down a muddy slope.

(Another family moves in, and we watch them settle in: a young couple with a baby, just starting out. They don’t notice us. We’re someone else’s memories, that’s all. The house fills quickly with their things, their sounds, their wholeness. We pack up the Christmas village and secure our mother, and we go out to the backyard.)

I think it was good, I say. Wasn’t it good?

(Like we’re camping again, our father says, as we lie side by side in the leaf-covered grass under the early evening sky.)

(We never camped, says Vi.)

(We almost did, that one time. We talked about it, anyway. Hold on to your mother, now.)

I’m sitting at my school desk by the window, and rain beats quietly against the glass. It makes me think of butterflie­s, and I wonder what they do, what they feel, when it rains. If they know their wings can still beat, or if they worry that it will be too much for them. If it will be more than they can take.

(Clouds are gathering overhead. I feel a tug inside me. Something small and maybe important breaks loose from the left side of my chest. I put my hand over the spot, as if to keep it inside, whatever it is that’s broken loose. I see a plume of silver dust swirling up through my fingers, rising toward the sky.)

(Hey, I say.)

Hey, I say, taking a breath as I lean toward Susie. I really like your dancing skeletons.

(Is it now? asks Vi.)

(Take Mom’s hand, I say. I’ve got Dad.)

I could teach you to draw them sometime, she says. If you want. You’re new here, right?

Yes, I say, and yes. I mean I am, yes, and I’d like that.

(I’m here, says our mother.)

(I’m not ready, says our father.)

(We’re okay, I say.)

I turn to look out the window again. I think of the Azures, the ones that were alive when our father was a boy, years ago. They didn’t have much time here. Only four or five days. Not as long as the uncle I never knew. But longer than my cousin Ainsley. Long enough to learn their way around and to feel their wings warmed by the sunlight and to be thrown about by the wind and the rain and certainly to die. Long enough to leave something behind to be collected and loved and remembered. Like me.