Butterfly's Child Read Online Free PDF

decades ago that he forgot to look for rocks, and Benji stopped picking them up, walking slowly beside him.
    â€œPapa-san?” Benji said.
    Frank knelt beside him. “Benji-san.” It was the first time the boy had addressed him directly since that miserable day, when Frank had rocked him to sleep in the hotel room. Benji said something in Japanese he couldn’t understand, then stared at him, his face unreadable. Frank gave him a quick embrace. “You’re going to be fine. You’ll come to like it here. I promise.” When they returned to the house, he would look up some words of comfort in his dictionary.
    The stone boat was pulling away from them. “Pinkerton?” the Swede called.
    As they hurried to catch up, Benji stubbed his toe on a rock and fell; the string ball rolled out of his pocket. Frank watched as he scooped it up and carefully brushed it off. It was like a rainbow, every color of string imaginable. She must have spent hours making it. Benji scrubbed at it with his hand, frantic; there was a stain he couldn’t remove. Frank soaked his bandanna in water from the canteen and dabbed at the ball. “See, it’s better now.
Daijobu
,” he said, though he couldn’t tell for sure. “We’ll wash it some more when we get home. Water—
mizu
—and soap.”
    Benji was sniffling, and his hair was plastered to his forehead with sweat. Frank wiped the boy’s forehead and neck with the wet bandanna, gave him a drink. “Time to unload,” he yelled to the Swede. He hoisted Benji to the seat beside the Swede, and gave him the canteen. The boat dragged around in a wide circle, and they drove back across the field to dump the rocks on the pile already there, then they headed back toward the house.
    Frank stared at the ground, still scanning for rocks, but his mind had come untethered. He thought of Butterfly’s delicate fingers wrapping the strings around the ball, then laying it out by Benji’s futon as a morning surprise—in such a way, she had given him a fan that he now kept in a drawer of his desk. He could see her quiet smile as she anticipated Benji’s reaction, then his delight, throwing the ball up and down, the two of them chattering in Japanese. Now he had no one to talk to. If she could have known how her boy would suffer without her, would she have taken her life?
    Sharpless seemed to think it was his fault, that she had cared for him more than he knew, was in such despair that she drove the sword into her breast. He shuddered, pushed away the image, went back to a time beforethat, when they lay on the futon one morning at daybreak, listening to birds in the garden. If he had been true to her, perhaps they would be a family now.
    But then he wouldn’t have Kate. He wouldn’t even have known Kate, but he wouldn’t have known that he didn’t know her. He concentrated on her face, the iridescent blue eyes, the slightly crooked smile. He thought of her hand in his, the first time they’d danced, the long, serious conversations as they walked the hilly streets of Galena in the rain.
    He was deluding himself to imagine that he’d have returned to Butterfly, the man he was in his earlier days. He’d been footloose then, with girls in Cuba, Brazil, California. It had taken Kate to make him want to settle down. She was intelligent without making too much of it, they had interests in common, had both lived in the Orient, and she had an appealing feminine warmth. During their walks, her intimate gaze had invited confidence: He’d told her about his yearning to go to sea ever since he’d read
Two Years Before the Mast
as a young man; about the falling-out with his father and his flight to Hampton Roads; and he confessed his disappointment in the Navy—the inertia of the top brass, the leaking dinosaur of a ship to which he’d been assigned.
    He looked at the expanse of land, the island of