Butterfly Tattoo Read Online Free PDF Page B

to do a thing to chase my little girl away. I regulate my breathing, remembering what our counselor has said: it has to be on her terms, her timetable.
    Andrea shifts her weight from foot to foot, looking up at me through her dusty auburn lashes. She’s waiting for something.
    Very tentatively, I begin to speak. “Tell me about it,” I urge with a nod. “About her scar.” I know it’s a risk to press her, but I need to be closer emotionally.
    She takes one step toward me, chewing on her bottom lip. “It’s on her face.” She touches her cheek with a fingertip and draws a line that reaches the edge of her mouth. “Right here. Didn’t you see it?” She scrunches her face into a strange, twisted imitation.
    Only now do I realize how little I glimpsed of Rebecca O’Neill. I know she seemed attractive, that something about her got to me. In fact, I spent the rest of the workday trying to shake off that reaction, the way she’d drawn me in. Now I can’t believe I missed so much of her story.
    “No, it was dark, sweetheart. Tell me.”
    Andrea stops then, wrapping her small, pale arms around herself in a bear hug. “Her scars still hurt sometimes, too. That’s what she said.”
    I fight the urge to reach for her, to try and hold her. Like some hostage negotiator, I’m forced to play observer in my own family, as she edges nearer by the moment. “Like mine does.”
    My lips part and what I want to say is that I’m sorry. Sorry that my sweet little girl has to hurt at all, that she worries about a scar nobody else can even see. Sorry that her daddy’s nearly a year dead and all she has left in this frightening world is me.
    But I don’t, and before I can figure out what I should say next, she’s already gone, vanished in a blur of white nightgown and coppery red hair. Then there’s the sound of her bedroom door slamming shut, and the whole house gasps in shuddered reaction.
    All I can do is bury my face in my hands and wish like hell that Alex were still here with me. Because I don’t have a clue how I’ll ever keep doing this on my own.
     
     
    I wake the next morning with a jackhammer pounding straight through the core of my skull. Apparently some crack team of demons is on an expedition to my medulla oblongata, and are causing hell along the way. Bravely, I open one eye in my own version of a recon mission, but the sunny spring morning sends me diving back for my pillow with a muffled groan of agony. God, somebody stop me the next time I decide to drink a twelve-pack of Heineken by myself.
    Why is it that the denials and oaths of abstinence always make so much sense in the morning, but nighttime brings the same bottomless swell of loneliness all over again?
    I bury my face in the quilt, and fight a tide of nausea that rises high. I hear muted sounds from the living room, and know that Andrea must already be up watching television or playing Wii. But that doesn’t explain the homey smells drifting my way, something like eggs and bacon and maybe even fresh-ground coffee.
    With another deep groan I roll onto my back, sniffing the air as I rub my eyes. It’s got to be my imagination; there can’t actually be breakfast cooking in the next room. Then I remember. With all the clarity of a boom lowering, I know that I’ve screwed up big-time. Marti’s here to help with my taxes, exactly like she’s supposed to be, and I’m the one who’s fallen way off schedule.
    I force myself to sit up in bed, the whole room gyrating and pulsating angrily. Staring in the mirror over the dresser, I hardly recognize the guy staring back at me: wiry curls askew, hollow circles under his eyes, pasty complexion shadowed by an outbreak of beard.
    I’m pathetic, and I know what dear Marti’s going to say the minute she lays eyes on me. “Lord, Warner, you look like hell!”
    That’s why she’s my best friend—and a great ex-girlfriend, at that. Sometimes in the past year I’ve almost wondered if Alex didn’t will her