Island of Grace

Warm breeze and island sunshine brushed her skin. Salt and nectar filled her nostrils, coaxing blood back into her lungs. She moved her eyes beneath her eyelids, scrunched her toes, pressed her fingertips into the hot sand, testing her body’s responses.

She opened her eyes and white nothingness shifted to white sunlight, then opened into foamy blue warm cloudless sky.

Something cool lapped at her ankles. A memory tickled the edge of her brain. Sammy. The word floated across her mind with a warm rush of affection, then dissolved. Who was Sammy? She closed her eyes again, tilting her mind toward the memory, but it bounced away from her attention, frolicking just out of reach. She propped herself up on her elbows to see the cool water just reaching her skin with each wave.

A static charge across her shoulders that had no place in this humid island air pushed Sammy out of her mind. Someone else was here.

“Hi there! Didn’t mean to startle you, I was waiting for you to wake up and get your bearings a bit.”

The voice felt familiar, but off somehow, like seeing your reflection in a distorted mirror. She turned to face her companion and the effect sharpened. She did not recognize this woman, had no idea who she was, and yet something intimate and fundamental in her felt seen in a way she’d never experienced. This woman knew her.

The stranger stood at the edge of the sand, thick green jungle behind her and perhaps eight paces between them. She wore a heavy white sundress with cutouts at the waist and a giant hibiscus flower tucked behind her ear. She stood light and still, with the air of a butterfly sunning itself on a tropical flower, already full of nectar and simply enjoying the warmth on its wings.

She lifted herself out of the wet sand and meant to walk toward the butterfly-stranger, but realized during the laborious process of standing that she was naked.

Naked and….different. Her body stretched and curved and turned with nostalgic ease and elegance, and her skin shone with more than just ocean water. She turned her hands over and flexed her fingers. They moved like a dancers’ should, no creaks, no stops, with calligraphy flourishes and curls. She laughed out loud.

“Isn’t it lovely?” She’d forgotten about butterfly-girl entirely. She began to cover her naked body, but then the impulse left her, dissolving into the sweet-smelling air. She walked toward the stranger with the same swishing movement her fingers had made.

“You’re at your ideal.” Butterfly-girl spoke like she was answering a question, but this cleared up nothing.

“Ideal what?” Her voice, too, sounded different, both huskier and sweeter than she remembered.

“Everything,” Butterfly-girl crooned, her voice husky and musical too, but higher-pitched. “Your ideal sense of yourself, over your whole life –sometimes it’s what you thought was your best time, sometimes it was never quite real, but how you thought of yourself, or wanted to see yourself. Not your insecurities, mind you, not what you wished you were, but how you really were, in your soul. An amalgamation of all your high points. Your best self.”

“So my best self is naked?”

Butterfly-girl laughed. The sound was like a vibraphone roll.

“Your best self is funny! We all arrive naked, and we can choose to get dressed however we please or not at all.” Butterfly-girl winked. “But if you think your best self is naked, she can be.”

* * * * *

They walked along a soft dirt path through the jungle. The vegetation hung thick over the trail but somehow didn’t impede their movement. She watched as butterfly-girl bounced on the balls of her feet and ran her fingers along leaves and petals as she walked, singing wordlessly to herself and twirling periodically without breaking her stride. She felt a strange twinge of something at the sight – not quite an emotion, more the shadow of one – annoyance? But so thin – and then it dissolved, leaving behind a soft tingly joy. She began bouncing, too, and brushing her fingertips along the smooth flesh of jungle leaves. At her first contact with a leaf, butterfly-girl’s head perked up and she posed on the path as if for an invisible travel photographer.

“Oh, yay! I hoped you’d feel it.”

An hour ago, a lifetime ago, she would have been disconcerted by this – what was she talking about? How did she know? – but now she simply laughed her vibraphone laugh and continued drinking in the touch of the plants, following her guide through the jungle.

They arrived at a breathtaking waterfall surrounded by birds of paradise and wild hibiscus. Butterfly-girl took an audible deep breath of appreciation, then motioned for her to go ahead. The path disappeared behind the waterfall. She walked, sure-footed, across wet slippery rocks and through the mist of the churning water, and butterfly-girl joined her with a little chirp of delight. They had entered a cavern with glistening wet walls, three or four times as high as she was tall. Fruits and crackers and salmon and sushi and some kind of drink lay spread over a bright fuscia cloth on the ground.

“My favorite!” she exclaimed, upon seeing slices of pineapple fanned into a flower-shape. But wasn’t she allergic to pineapple?

Butterfly-girl giggled. “Interesting, isn’t it?” she said conspiratorially, folding her legs beneath her at the edge of the cloth. “Both true. We’ll see.”

“What are you…how do you know that?”

“I think you should figure it out yourself. If I tell you, it won’t feel as real. You’re almost there.”

“OK fine…who are you?”

Butterfly-girl wriggled her head. “That’s the same question again.”

“How do you know what I was thinking?”

Silence.

“Ugh, fine. Um…what is this place?”

“Ooh, that I can answer! Kind of. It’s our island. Our home. Do you remember it, or does it feel new?”

She thought for a moment. She hadn’t remembered, but it did feel like home, like hers.

“OK so we do know each other. Or at least, you know me. Why don’t I remember you?”

“You will,” said butterfly-girl, whose nickname was beginning to feel silly.

“What’s your name? Or what can I call you? I’ve just been calling you ‘butterfly-girl’ in my head.”

Butterfly-girl squealed and clapped her hands together. “Oh, that’s wonderful! I love it! My name is Grace, but you can call me Butterfly if you like! I love that!”

She chuckled. “Grace, Butterfly, how long have you been here?” The name on her tongue stirred something in her.

“Hmm. Well time’s a litte funny here. I’ve slept here twice, maybe three times, but I think the measure you’re familiar with’ll be years, right? So that’s probably sixty, sixty-five years?”

“Seventy-two,” she whispered. It was all there now, suddenly, in her mind. Suddenly, but not shockingly, like it had been there all along. Everything–work, baseball, her parents, winter, grocery shopping…That last summer—Claudia’s wedding, the twins’ graduation, a weekend at the lake–she wished then she’d gotten to the lake more, and now….her birthday in July, all that nonsense with the house, and then…nothing.

“Yeah, that’s right, seventy-two! What did I say, sixty-five? That’s pretty good!” Her musical voice kept playing, but the lyrics were lost.

Seventy-two years. Sammy was her dog. Grace. Grace was her middle name. She’d been allergic to pineapple and hadn’t eaten it since she was a little girl, when she was too young to remember its taste, but she knew it was her favorite.

That dress that Grace wore. The white sundress. She remembered it now. She’d worn it on her honeymoon in Maui. They’d eaten fresh pineapple. She’d never gotten married.

“You…I’m…”

Butterfly Grace smiled. “We have a lot to talk about.”

* * * * *