I thought about it. We had traveled all over the world. Most foreign cultures—most cultures my father admired—preferred cremation to burial. I remembered that my father once bemoaned the “waste” of good land, land that could have been used to grow crops, because it was being used as a graveyard.

Could he have told Mom he wanted to be cremated?

I thought some more. Then I said, “No.”

“You’re sure?”

“If Dad had wanted to be cremated, he wouldn’t then want to be buried too. He’d choose one or the other.”

Ema nodded. “But it was your mother’s signature on the form?”

“Yes.”

“So?”

“So I need to ask her about it. The problem is, she’s not allowed visitors in rehab right now. She’s going through withdrawal.”

“How much longer?”

“I don’t know.” I looked at Ema. Yes, she was interested, but I knew what she was doing. For some reason, she was asking all these questions to stall. “So tell me about your missing boyfriend.”

“Before I do,” Ema said, “I wanted to show you something.”

“Okay.”

She started pulling up her shirt.

“Uh,” I said, because I’m good with words.

“Relax, perv. I want to show you a tattoo.”

“Uh,” I said again.

“You’ll see why.”

Ema was loaded up with tattoos. This helped cultivate her bad-girl image. She wore them almost like a fence, warning people to stay back. Yes, I know a lot of people have tattoos, but Ema was only a high school freshman. Many of the kids were intimidated that a girl so young could have so many. How did she get her parents’ permission?

I had wondered that myself.

But more recently I learned the simple truth: The tattoos were temporary. She had a friend named Agent at a tattoo parlor called Tattoos While U Wait. Agent liked to try out designs before putting them on someone in a permanent way. He used Ema’s skin as a practice canvas.

Ema turned her back to me. “Look.”

There, in the center of her back, was a familiar image to Ema, Spoon, Rachel, and me.

A butterfly. More specifically, the Tisiphone Abeona butterfly.

That image haunted us. I had seen it on a grave behind Bat Lady’s house. I had seen it on Rachel’s hospital room door. I had seen it in an old picture of hippies from the sixties. I had even seen the image of that butterfly in an old photograph of the famous Lizzy Sobek, the young girl who led children to safety during the Holocaust. I saw it atop my father’s “maybe” grave, on the back of a photograph in Bat Lady’s basement, even in a tattoo parlor.

“You told me about that,” I said.

“I know. But I went back to have it redone. You know. Have Agent make it bright or change it. The tattoos usually wear off after a few weeks.”