Legs tangled between sheets—dull light similarly mingled through lace curtains. She remained in the moment as long as she could.

Every morning was self-same: sleep interrupted by the creak of a door, the subsequent shuffle of tiny feet, and tiny matching hands that crawled up with mustered might to the top of the bed. Each day, her hollowed night was filled with the marrow of this moment that came at dawn. 

She would remain with eyes closed and listen to her son’s staccato breath as he tried to match his lungs' movement with hers. It had been a near-daily routine, and every time, he thought she was asleep. She liked it that way. She would lay motionless and listen, feel.

This morning, he traced her wrist in rings with his index finger. The pad of his finger dragged along the wrinkle found there—back and forth, movements in sync with each exhale. She allowed a slit to form between her eyelids. Keeping still, she looked at him: ashy brown hair, light freckles surrounding his nose, creamy pale skin like her own. His small frame somehow warmed her as their legs overlapped. 

The sweetness of the morning is something she clung to. Something she soaked in with every sinew she was made of.

She shut her eyes again and then muttered a sudden fake snore. Jack hauled his hand back and gasped, only for a moment.

“Mom, you scared me!” he said, now letting a smile crawl across his freckled face, replacing the look of shock.

She laughed, eyes still shut. Another snore broke loose, this time even bigger. He leaped.

“Mom, stop! Mommy, wake up,” he said.

She reached over and grabbed his body as he squirmed. They laughed in unison. “I don’t want to, bug. Let’s just stay in bed all day. You and me.”

He looked up at her with caramel colored eyes, “but today we are going to butterflies, right mommy?”

“That’s right, hon. Today, we go to the butterflies.”

A book he had brought home from the library reminded her of the place, the Butterfly Pavilion. She went there as a girl; the butterflies would always land on her grandma’s wrinkled hands. Today, she would take her son there, to the place of caged flight and iridescent wings.

“And I have just the thing we need to bring,” she said as she recalled those hazy afternoons with her grandma. She pictured the pair of bulky yellow binoculars that used to hang across her neck. “Come on, sleepyhead, let’s get up!”

They danced across the small, stuffy room. “They should be somewhere in here,” she said, pulling back the drapes that constituted her closet door. “Here, I’ll hold you up, and you can grab it. That big cardboard box at the top.” She placed her hands around his skinny waist. “One, two, three,” she said, holding him high.

“Got it!” he said. But just then, the box shifted above his grasp and teetered off the edge of the makeshift shelf. It fell to their left, the corner cutting into her shoulder before hitting the carpet.

“Uh oh. Sorry, Mommy, I didn’t mean to,” he said calmly. “I thought I got it, but it fell.”

“Oh honey, that’s alright,” she said with a grunt as her slender arms let him back down. Fuck, she thought, that hurts. The cut on her shoulder was beginning to pool with red. “Hang on,” she said, fast-walking to the kitchen. She grabbed a napkin and held it there for a while, running through the contents of that box in her head, wondering if there was anything that could have broken.

When she got back to the room, the contents were splayed out in a pile, the cardboard box off to the side. Jack sat in the middle of it all, facing away from her. “Watcha doin’, bud?” she asked. He didn’t look up. His head was turned down; his eyes were fixed. “Jack,” she said again.

She walked up to him, her shoulder pulsating beneath the flesh-colored Band-Aid she’d placed over the wound. He was holding something, she realized. But she couldn’t make out what.

“Jack, honey, what is that?” she said. He looked up, but not at her. She waited a few seconds and then walked around to face him, but he got up and ran out of the room before she could see what had him so entranced.

Jack rarely threw fits, but when he did they lasted all day, and tore at her more than they probably did he. Even though he was her child, she hated when they fought. I am not up for this today, she thought. Today is supposed to be about butterflies, not moody seven-year-olds. 

She looked down at the mess. Cassettes, an old Polaroid, a Ziploc of never-developed film. Everything was coated in a luster of dust. She hadn’t touched these things since they had moved into the apartment years ago. Carefully picking up the box, she placed everything back in it one by one.

Jack was sitting on the ground against his window when she walked in. His face was hidden from view. “Come on, Jack. Let’s get breakfast so we can go.” He didn’t respond. God damnit, she thought. “Jack! I said let’s go. Come on.”

Nothing. No response, not one movement.

“Seriously?” she groaned, pacing up to where he sat. It looked like a paper he was holding, or maybe a photograph.

“What is that?” she asked, almost close enough to see.

“It’s Jude and me,” he said, still looking down at whatever it was his fingers clutched.

She stopped breathing. That name. Jude.

The single syllable still stamped her lungs with pain whenever it was spoken.

She swallowed, hard, as if to suppress rusted grief that had begun to surface from its hiding place.

“What did you just say?” she asked him, her voice shaking, her cheeks flushed.

I must have heard wrong, she convinced herself. I have never even said the name aloud to him. There is no way he just did.

“Jude, mommy. He’s right here.”

She walked over and yanked it from his hands with more force than anticipated. She wasn’t ever harsh with him. He was a good boy, the best boy.

The thick paper immediately became a heaviness upon her fingertips.

It can’t be, she thought. She had gotten rid of every trace of him seven years ago, the day Jack was born.

But she hadn’t checked the box at the top of the closet. Her eyes began to blur, but she strained to focus on the ultrasound. Two shapes could be made out on the glossy film: two heads, two slight bodies, two pairs of arms – hands seeming to overlap. Two sons.

Her two sons.

She glanced up at Jack, who remained leaning against the window, his legs pulled up against his chest as he sat. He was staring at the wall, expressionless.

“What did you say about this, Jack?” she asked.

Blank-faced, he said the name a third time: “I said Jude. My brother.”

Hours had passed since she had slid the sheen of black and white paper back into the box. She hadn’t been able to look Jack in the eye. She had barely been able to breathe. But she somehow managed to grab coats and keys, and they drove.

There weren’t as many butterflies as she remembered. The building felt cold and confining. In place of vivid fluttering wings were buzzing bland-colored things like moths. The place was empty except for a young girl and her parents. The camera around the girl’s neck immediately reminded her of the yellow binoculars.

Shit, she thought. I forgot them.

“Sorry I forgot the binoculars, Jack,” she said to him, her eyes fixed on a butterfly that caught her attention. It was a pale blue, the only colorful one she’d seen since they got there.

“What binoculars?” he replied.

“Oh,” she mumbled, realizing she had never told him what it was that she was getting from the box on the shelf. “Never mind.”

A while later, she sat on a metal bench that had been painted to look like a tree stump. The coat of shitty paint had nearly peeled all the way off and scratched at her legs. She looked around; the place had cleared. There was just the faint drone of an overhead fan. This is nothing like I remember, she thought.

“Mom?” Jack said, now by her side again. “That picture was before he died, wasn’t it.”

She didn’t understand. She never told her son about Jude, that he had been a twin. That on that day seven years ago, she screamed and screamed and pushed not one boy into this broken world, but two.

That only one had cried.

That only one had life pumping through his veins.

“It was before he saved me,” Jack said, seemingly indifferent to his mother’s ensuing silence.

Now, she turned her face towards him, puzzled. Perplexed. “How do you know Jude’s name?” Her body shook as she said the name for the first time since it had belonged to something within her. A being—a shape overlapping with another. “And what do you mean he saved you?” she added.

“Before me and Jude were born, he saved me because we were gonna die. But he died so I didn’t have to.”

She froze. The pain from her shoulder seemingly overtook her whole body.

“He saved me,” Jack repeated.

“What, what do you mean,” she stuttered. “Jack, what do you mean he ‘saved’ you?”

“He told me,” Jack said, reaching out towards one of the butterflies as it hovered near where they sat.

“I talk to him after I go to sleep sometimes. And then I wake up, and he isn’t there,” he said, as the thing landed near his feet.

She remembered him coming in and waking her up this morning. The way his finger had traced along the skin of her wrist. Had her son dreamt of his brother? How could he possibly know?

She picked Jack up and plopped him on her lap, suddenly longing to be close to him, to feel his warmth like she had this morning.

She leaned down and brushed her lips against his shaggy hair. “You see him? You see Jude?” she asked him, her voice a near whisper in his ear.

“Yeah,” he said. She could tell he was smiling. He looked up, and the winged blur flew away. “I always see him mommy. He tells me stuff.”

“What does he say, hon?” she asked, utterly enthralled by her son in this moment.

“Um, he tells me about before. About when we were in that picture in the box.”

“About when you were in here?” she asked, placing his hand over her belly. The place he once occupied.

He giggled. “Yeah! In there.”

“Well, what exactly has he told you?” she said.

“He says we were in there together,” Jack said, putting his warm hand back on his mother’s stomach. “He said it was dark and hot and that we could feel every time you breathed.” He paused. “He said something was killing us. He says he had to die, Mommy.”

She intertwined her fingers with his and began to weep.

“Jude says we will always be brothers.”

She pulled him tighter.

“Mommy?” he asked.

She opened her mouth but couldn’t speak. He turned his head back to look at her, into her wet eyes. The curve of smile hadn’t left his face.

“Tonight, if I see Jude, I am going to tell him.”

She finally managed to form words. “Tell him what, Jack?”

“About today. About the butterflies”

Somewhere within her, she felt a gap close.