“You will remember Mrs. Butterfield as the teacher who impressed Shakespeare and Hemingway upon you. You will remember that she drove to school every morning in her pristine Volkswagen Beetle. You will remember her kindness and her solitude. As she passes, we celebrate all of this, but it also gives us an opportunity to celebrate what we didn’t know.
“There are people we are familiar with only in certain contexts—ministers, therapists, doctors. Teachers are our most intimate acquaintances for a period of our lives, but the relationship is tilted toward us; they mute themselves in order to act as a conduit for our growth. No one played this role more seriously than Mrs. Butterfield. There are the things we knew about her—you will remember, no doubt, the fondness with which she spoke of her dog, Harold—but the rest of her remains an enigma. Death gives us the opportunity not to complete the picture, necessarily, but to contemplate the unknowability, the strangeness, of others, even our most intimate friends. And what better way to do that than through fiction, the human endeavor that cleaves itself most closely to the mysteries of our lived experience?”
Cyrus gestured, inviting us all onto the stage. The lights changed; he faced each of us in turn and moved us around into a circle. When he reached me and looked into my eyes and whispered, “Asha Ray,” all of the blood pooled in my legs.
“Hello,” I breathed.
Finally, we were assembled. Cyrus asked the person on his left to begin.
“?‘Do not go gentle into that good night,’?” they said. Cyrus nodded to the next person in the circle.
“?‘Good night, good night, parting is such sweet sorrow.’?”
Then: “?‘I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.’?”
And: “?‘People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you’re dead? Nobody.’?”
There was laughter. Cyrus gave it a moment. The next person read: “?‘When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed, and the great star early drooped in the western sky in the night, I mourned, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.’?”
“?‘And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand.’?”
I was last. “?‘Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul, and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all.’?”
The lights went down, and in the darkness Cyrus whispered, “Jana—Mrs. Butterfield to most of us—and I spent a lot of time talking about death. Her final words to me were ‘The Prince of Darkness is a gentleman!’ and I knew, when she said it, that her pain was coming to an end.”
I couldn’t believe he was right there, being a real person. And while I had no reason to hope this was true, I felt like maybe he was thinking the same thing about me. He looked so different than when I saw him last—the basic facts of him were still the same, the lanky, long torso, the angle of his jaw, his wavy, calligraphic blond hair—but everything had slowed down. He was beautiful and older and completely perfect.
Afterward, he found me in the cafeteria nibbling through a sandwich. “We kept in touch,” he said. “After I dropped out. She would call me and check that I was reading enough Shakespeare. She told me everything else was optional.”
I wasn’t thinking about Mrs. Butterfield. “How did you do that?”
“You mean the service?”
“Getting all those people to have a moment.”
“That’s kind of my thing,” he said. “I create rituals.”
“But do you do that to all the grieving people?” I asked.
“What?”
“Look into their eyes and cause mayhem? Internal organ damage?”
He smiled. “I hear you live in Cambridge.”
“How did you know?”
“Mrs. Butterfield gave me a list of people to invite. Turns out we’re neighbors.”
“No.”
“Streets away.”
“All this time?”
“All this time. Do you want to take the bus back up with me?”
“My sister is driving me. She has a meeting with the Boston chapter of Planned Parenthood.”
“Mira, right? Is she…?”
“Exactly as she always was. How about dinner tomorrow night?”
“Great. I’ll pick you up at your lab.”
“You know my building?”
“I’ve been paying attention,” he said. And then he leaned over and kissed me on the cheek and burned a hole right through my face.
* * *
The next day, the first thing Cyrus said to me was “What did you do today?” as if the gap between what he knew and what he didn’t know about my life was only twenty-four hours long. This put me at ease, even though when he folded himself into the seat across from me I caught a glimpse of his pale pink nipple and almost fainted.
I told him I’d been to a lecture on lifespan.
“I’m down with extending lifespan.”
“You want to live forever?”
“Maybe not forever,” he said, “but I may not be done by the time I’m a hundred.”
This was typical, I came to understand, from Cyrus. That he never wanted things to end. “You’re not afraid of being old?”
“Under the right circumstances, no.”
“How old are your parents?” I asked. “Lifespan is mostly genetic.”
“I never knew my father,” he replied. “And my mother died after eleventh grade.”
All those years ago, I’d been obsessed with him and never known anything about him, not even the very basic facts. “That’s why you did those crazy projects?”
“We did them together—she gave me ideas from her hospital bed. Right down to the last days.”
We talked about the intervening years. After his mother died, he had gone to live with an aunt. He didn’t finish high school. He backpacked around Mexico, and then he helped to organize a copper miners’ union in Chile, and after that he had taught English in Ecuador before returning to America. He met Julian, his best friend, while hiking the Presidential mountain range in New Hampshire (they had met on Madison and started talking on Jefferson, and by the time they had done the Washington traverse, they were inseparable). Days before I’d moved to Cambridge, Jules had convinced Cyrus to move into his house, just streets away from my dorm. By now I was over being shy; I decided it would be best to just tell him.
“This is a strange and wonderful coincidence,” I said, smiling. “That the you I was so smitten with all those years ago is the same you who moved around the corner from me at the very moment when I am about to complete my metamorphosis.”
“You were smitten with me?”
“Oh, don’t act like you didn’t know. I could’ve written it on my forehead with a Sharpie and it would’ve been less obvious.”
He laughed. Then he said, “Into what have you metamorphosed?”
“That’s for you to figure out,” I said.
“Well then, that is a wonderful coincidence.”
“You’re really Cyrus Jones,” I said, shaking my head.
“You’re really Asha Ray,” he replied.
The metamorphosis was this: I was no longer the awkward new kid at school with the smelly lunchbox. I had taken the heaviness of my childhood—the story of my parents and their exile and those years above the pharmacy and all the striving I had to swallow—and I had turned it into fire-breathing. I was clever and awesome and, despite my less than stellar performance in Dr. Stein’s lab, beginning to understand my powers. This is the me that Cyrus met for the second time. In his mind, the person sitting in front of him and the person who gazed adoringly at the back of his head for nine months were one and the same, and for me, the boy with the long wavy hair who made magic out of homework and the man sitting in front of me who made magic out of a funeral were also one and the same person, and suddenly every novel Mrs. Butterfield had me read made perfect sense, because all the great love stories are about two people bringing the story of their yesterdays and the story of their todays into one epic sewn-together poem, and that is what they mean when they say lightning strikes. It’s not when it strikes the first time, it’s when it strikes twice, which hardly ever happens, except, I think, when you fall in love.
* * *