Alive: Excerpt from a novel in progress

This is Seville, I say to you now. A place that rains flowers in the sun. This is Seville, and suddenly I’m so homesick I can’t stand it. Suddenly I need your dad, and mine, too, and I’m remembering last summer, with Kevin, when I thought the world had lost its color and he kept trying to convince me that it hadn’t. He would drive me to sunsets and moonrises and gardens; he’d say, “Look.” He’d pick me up after my mother had driven, in her preposterous hurry, off, and take me down roads that he’d found when he was running and the rest of us were standing still. “Look,” he’d say, “Jessa. The color’s still here,” and I tried to believe him, but he knew. And then one day he said he had concocted a solution, and he picked me up and drove me to his house and walked with me to his backyard. He told me to sit in one of those Adirondack chairs. He said I should close my eyes.

“Come on, Kevin. Tell me.”

“Just wait.”

“Where are you going?”

“Sit. And close your eyes.”

I did, at last, and he was gone a long time. When I heard his voice again I was nearly sleeping. “All right,” he said, and I turned, and there he was, by the basement door, and there, by his head, were butterflies, an entire swarm. He had a pot of aster in one hand and joe-pye in another, and I thought that maybe I was sleeping, that this was my strange dream.

“I bought eggs,” he said. “They’ve been hatching in the basement.”

“Butterfly eggs?”

“Yeah. You can get them. Mail order.” He was walking toward me, with those pots in each hand. The butterflies swarmed, and they flew. Satyrs and swallowtails and sulphurs and skippers—the S butterflies, the ones we’d learned in science and had decided to remember.

“Kevin,” I said, but that’s all I could say.

“Color,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “Color.”

“You’re still alive, Jessa. Your father, of all people, wants you living."