The butterflies are dying today. I heard them beating against the windowpane in my sleep. They fell from the skies in translucent blankets, hundreds of thousands of them, a menagerie of corpses smeared onto a canvas of mountains and waterfalls, little dots of painted powder stains. I mourned for them whenever I had the heart to spare.

I am an artist, when I feel like it. Have you ever seen those calligraphy paintings of Chinese mountains crisscrossed with ink trees and smudged waterfalls? I can’t do that. Instead I’m painting the acrylic equivalent today: same scenery, different medium. For the background I chose a yellow-blue wash, a hazy kind of morning, and for the foreground I chose a nice safe set of mountain ranges with all sorts of crooks and crevices shoved in between, and for the fore-foreground, I chose butterflies. They were bright blue and lay dead on the ground of the closest plateaus, but I’d only painted in a few of them. I’ll paint more in later. Dad loved Chinese mountain ranges and used to hang pictures of those things all over the house. Naturally, I thought it’d be nice if I gave him a customized one. It’s supposed to be a wedding gift, this work-in-progress, and I had to finish it by Saturday. This was the case because by Sunday, my dad would no longer be mine but would belong to his new wife, little Ashlan Monet, the girl who was my age.

“Baba’s plane is going to be late,” Mom says. She’s standing in the doorway and partially blocked by my dirty canvas. “Snow in New York. Thunderstorm here.”

“Must be El Niño,” I say back.

She asks if I want breakfast. No, that’s okay. I’m watching my weight. Mom makes a comment about how my cheeks have looked a little chubbier ever since I’d gotten married, and after Saatchi & Saatchi, the advertising firm where I’d just gotten a promotion. Then she leaves and comes back with a tray of porridge and deviled eggs. Her eyes are different now, after Dad left. They’ve always hinted at sadness because they tilt like that, because Grandmother had belonged to China’s last royal family and the Communists had punished her for it, but now her eyes sagged each morning as if the lashes drooped with fruit, waiting for Harvest Day.

My brush sank back into the paint and stroked another butterfly onto the fabric.

I wonder who taught Ashlan how to ride a bicycle. My father taught me. He and I had gone out to a parking lot when I turned six and I’d learned in a few afternoons. He did it by pushing me forward and watching me fall. When I got back up, cheeks red and knees smeared with blood, he would say:

“Come on. Get the bicycle and we try again.”

Another shove, and I would go flying across the parking lot alone, upright for a second, pedaling furiously, and then down I’d go. We did this for hours. When I finally limped home, my mother said a neighbor had stopped by after watching our escapade and expressed concern that the lesson bordered on child abuse. We laughed a little about that. Dad never abused me. He was just straightforward, always and forever, a man of no nonsense as far as he was concerned.

“When did he meet her, anyway?” I ask over dinner.

Mom scolds me with a silent look. “She worked in his office.” My mother has a knack for answering my questions without answering them at all.

“Does he love her? He couldn’t have known her for more than a year.”

“Aiya, daughter,” Mom says, and refills my soup bowl. “I understand even less than you. Your father is a changed man now, see?” Her eyes get that look again, so I stop talking and bow my head and turn my full fascination onto the soup.

Our house feels strange to me after so many years in adulthood, as if I’ve always been a guest and never a member of a family. When my mother and I set the table, it is for two. Our dog, a White German Shepherd, passed away some years ago and now our cat snuggles up to us all the time. Earlier this autumn I had spent an entire day staring out into our backyard, watching the leaves fall and the wind rattle the windowpanes, and sometimes I could see butterflies lying out on the concrete patio, broken wings smeared across the ground like rainbows cast out of Heaven. They didn’t start appearing until this year, these dying butterflies. Or maybe I never noticed them before because I was inside, watching basketball on the couch with my father.

We had some nice holidays. One Christmas we ended up flying all the way to Hawaii and the three of us spent a day floating around in Hanauma Bay. Mom and I stayed away from the coral where the water came up too shallow, but my father didn’t believe the warnings. He ended up stranded on the reef at low tide, unable to go anywhere because of the sting of sharp coral rock beneath his feet. We teased him afterward, a human beached on the reefs like a whale, belly side down, flopping away until the ocean rose again. Later on Mom felt bad about the whole thing, so we bought him a nice Hawaiian shirt. We didn’t mention it again—at least, until he kicked a coral bed two days later and won himself a bandaged foot.

Dad started sleeping with her long before the separation.

He’s usually somewhere in Yemen these days, according to his employees over in Russia. I can’t be entirely sure what he looks like anymore. Some years ago, when he last came home, Mom overheard him talking on the phone with That Girl and worked up the courage to tell me several weeks later. I suppose I took it well. I had my own life now, a family of my creation to care for, and so I nodded at the phone without saying a word and returned to my morning prenatal exercises. My husband could tell something was wrong because of the way my hands shook, but observations like that came from the Mozart part of his mind, always paying attention to my hands. Sometimes I wonder if he knew before I even told him, because he bought me a single plane ticket home without ever bringing it up.

The wedding should be beautiful, lilacs in front of the altar and guests in bright new shoes. I heard Ashlan would make the cake herself.

“What should I call her?” I say to Mom as we window-shop in the halls of the Galleria.

“Call her what makes you happy,” she replies. She keeps her eyes fixed on a dress inside Ann Taylor. “Try to be nice. Rudeness will get us nowhere.”

“Maybe I’ll call her Miss Monet.” I picture a blank face in my mind. “Ashlan. Ahyi?”

Mom laughs. “Is she so old to be an ahyi?”

I try it out. “Welcome to our home, ahyi. I’m a huge fan of Monet.”

“Goodness, where you learn such ideas?” My mother shakes her head at me and clicks her tongue softly. One of her hands loops around my arm, partially for support. “How I raise such a mischievous daughter.”

When his plane finally lands two nights later and they get off rumpled and sleepy after the 22-hour commute, I choose to be nice and end up calling her Ashlan. She looks pretty but not as pretty as Mom was when she first married Dad, and she is too young. She could be my sister. Ashlan is going to start graduate school in America soon, and no doubt make her way to the top of her engineering class. Dad couldn’t stop talking about her intelligence. She said little herself, though, and spent a large part of dinner glancing toward my growing belly. She told me she would like a child of her own someday. I wanted to laugh at the thought, that an infant may soon be my sister-in-law, but I said nothing because her eyes were so sincere, and reminded me of myself when I was engaged.

She was too young to marry such an old man, but she was happy. I could not stand in her way.

On the morning before the wedding, I catch myself standing in front of the acrylic Chinese painting and staring at the smears of butterflies thrown across the canvas. They’ve been dying ever since I left, to tell the truth, these poor little pieces of innocence. The blue really sticks out. So I stand there, quiet, contemplating, concentrating on the thick strokes of paint, but I can’t concentrate, not right now.

Then, for some reason, one by one, I begin to paint over them.

The butterflies didn’t really matter anymore because my father had someone else now, someone to care for him in his old age, and this painting would hang in his living room to watch life go by every morning of the year, no butterflies needed to keep him company. I paint over them without too much trouble, but one of them gets away from me. I see it from the corner of my eyes. Two pairs of blue wings, made from nothing but color and translucent paper, too easy to tear. It lifts away from the canvas and immediately seeks out the light, flying against the glass of my window as if it could not breathe. I remember my dream from the previous night. My hands leave the painting and I step toward the light as well, turn the latches above the windowpane, and lift it so that the open air pours in. The butterfly takes off. I stick my head out of the window, suddenly curious, and then swing my legs over the edge of the windowsill to follow it. The blue really stands out against the wash of trees. I look down toward the ground, past my cotton dress and bare feet, and see a man and a child and a bicycle, the child with arms outstretched as if for balance, the man letting go. Or, perhaps the child let go of his hands first. Above me, the butterfly continues upwards toward the clouds, until it does not stand out so much against the blue of the sky and I cannot see it anymore.

And then I was back in my room, the painting before me, brush in my hand, the butterflies gone. I dip the brush in water and wash the blue from its fibers. On the other side of the window are the trees and sky. No more.

The butterflies are still around, I am sure of that. I’ll wake up in the morning and see them strewn across the grass, but through the windowpane I can also see the ones that keep flying, in search of new gardens.