Flight Behavior (13 page)

She towel-dried the macaroni pot and kneeled to put it away, dodging Cordie, who staggered into the kitchen with the green baby blanket over her head. Cub leaned over to scoop her up and squash the happy, squealing bundle of her onto his lap.

“What’s in this old bunch of rags?” he asked, jostling her from side to side, eliciting peals of giggles. Half the time Cub didn’t seem to recall he’d fathered children, and then there was this, the fact of the matter. They were the apple of his eye. “Honey, have you seen the baby anywhere?” he asked.

“Not for weeks and weeks,” Dellarobia replied.

“Do you reckon we ought to throw these old rags in the garbage?” He lifted the green fuzzy bundle over his head, invoking loud hysteria that a stranger might take for anguish, but Dellarobia knew better. Cordie loved disappearing. Which was funny, because not that long ago, Preston could throw that blanket over a toy she was crawling after and Cordie would sit up and howl with despair at its sudden disappearance. She didn’t know to look under the blanket, and Preston couldn’t resist repeating the experiment, amazed at his sister’s conviction that unseen things did not exist. Some time between then and now, Cordie had conquered the biggest truth in the world.

“I ought to go on and feed the kids,” Dellarobia said. “I mean, look, it’s getting dark. What could a person do outside on a mountain all day?”

Cub set his daughter’s bare feet on the linoleum, and off she flew to the living room. “Whatever it was,” he said, “I’m sure we’ll hear all about it.”

“You don’t sound thrilled.”

“Since when do we grab people off the street into our home to feed them supper?”

Well, here it comes after all, she thought. Leave it to Cub to take a full sixty minutes to realize he was mad. “I guess since we decided to behave like Christians,” she said. “Why, what were you planning for tonight, to watch ADHD TV like always?”

Cub loudly exhaled his disgust and went back to his sports page. It wasn’t kind, the attention-deficit remark. Cub had barely followed the thread of high school. But it drove her nuts the way he thumbed the remote and trolled the channels from News to Spike to Comedy to Shopping. What was the use of so many channels? So often, some crazy thing would pique her on the fly-by: a woman swimming alone across an ocean, or a blind couple taking in a multitude of foundling babies. But she would have to snatch the clicker from Cub and sit on it, if she wanted enough time to connect the dots.

She was dying for a smoke, but didn’t want to hear what she’d hear from Cub if she stepped out on the porch right now. Instead she checked the oven and yelled for the kids, thinking it best to go ahead and put Cordie in the high chair while she finished setting the table. Preston came obediently when called, shepherding Cordelia into the kitchen and struggling to pick her up, as if he might be able to lift her into the high chair. His desire to be helpful was boundless. Just like Roy and Charlie, she thought. My son has the personality of a border collie. She moved quickly to take Cordie.

“Honey, you can’t pick up your sister. She weighs half as much as you do.”

“You could get a hernia,” Cub offered from behind the newspaper.

She had hoped to feed the kids much earlier and put them in front of the TV while the guest was here. Mr. Byron might not be accustomed to the hullaballoo of the toddler dining experience. But Preston had caught wind of the plan and would have none of it, even when she tried coaxing him with dessert, a no-bake gelatin and cookie thing the kids loved. Preston was no dessert-first man, and he wasn’t easy to bribe. If a mysterious stranger had come to town, he was calling dibs.

“I’ll be the lookout,” he declared now, glancing from the back door to the front, then to his mother. “Which way will he come?”

“I don’t know, I guess he’s still up the mountain. Cub, do you think we should send out a search party? He’s been up there since eight o’clock this morning.”

“Lucky for him it’s not raining pitchforks,” Cub said tersely.

“Not at the moment, for a blessed change,” she agreed. Cub folded his newspaper but made no other concession to her sense of this occasion, which would be a disaster if he planned to sulk. She needed his cooperation. “He’s a visitor in our town,” she said quietly, “not just some homeless person off the road. And anyway, what if he was? Be not forgetful to entertain strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares. That’s the Bible.”

Cub gave her a penitent look. The resemblance between him and Preston sometimes knocked the wind out of her.

“He came all this way to see our special blessing up there,” she offered carefully. “I thought maybe I could tell him some things about the butterflies. Since he’s interested.”

“You could,” Cub said. “That’s true.” She’d been bending Cub’s ear with everything she’d read on Wikipedia about the monarch butterflies. He would probably be happy to take the night off and let someone else take a shift.

A knock at the front door made them all jump. The whole family was wound up tight, even the kids. She would bet money on Cordie setting up a wail, just from the stress. Dellarobia whipped off her apron and scurried to get the door.

“Hello! Welcome to our home!” she said, sounding to herself like a Stepford wife. She led him to the kitchen and introduced him to Cub and the children, then grabbed some potholders and dived for the oven to desist with humiliating herself. She had changed out of her mom clothes into a pink knit tunic and leggings and hoop earrings, and now that felt wrong too. She was overdressed. Mr. Byron asked if he could use their facilities to freshen up.

“You certainly may. Of course! You’ve been out in the elements all day. Preston, honey, could you show Mr. Byron where it is?” She knelt to peer into the oven. Her original plan was meat loaf, but then she’d panicked: What if he was a vegetarian? It wasn’t unheard of, especially among those from other lands. Did sensible homemakers have a plan for the complete-stranger dinner party? She’d decided finally on a macaroni and tuna casserole, a slightly fancy recipe that called for a can of shoestring potatoes and two cans of French-cut green beans. That seemed safe. He surely wasn’t French.

Preston leaped from his chair when called upon to help the guest, but then took two sideways steps toward his mother and whispered in her ear: “What’s facilities?”

She whispered back, “The bathroom.”

Preston nodded and soldiered forth, with the towering stranger behind him. Dellarobia noticed that his hiking boots looked expensive but the rest of his clothes were fairly ordinary—a well-worn jacket, blue corduroy shirt, and jeans. If you could call a thirty-eight-inch inseam ordinary. He would have to cruise the extra-tall shopping lanes, that’s for certain. Or his wife would, if applicable. Dellarobia set the casserole on the table and spooned some of the soft, cheesy macaroni into Cordelia’s bowl, blowing to cool it. Cordie had a spoon in each hand and was beating the tray of her high chair, eerily like a heavy metal drummer, throwing her fuzzy head to the beat. When Preston returned to the kitchen he gave his sister the once-over and flung his mother a wide-eyed glance:
Please tell me I was never that age.
But at least she wasn’t wailing. Cub got the pitcher of sweet tea out of the fridge as she’d asked, and he wasn’t wailing either. So far, so good. When the guest returned and everyone was seated, Cub said the blessing: “Father we thank you for this food and fellowship amen.” She noticed Mr. Byron didn’t close his eyes for the prayer, either. They had that in common.

“So, Mr. Byron, tell us about yourself,” Cub said.

The man held up one long, narrow hand like a traffic cop. “Please! Just Ovid. You will make me feel like an old man.”
An old mon.

“Of course,” Dellarobia said, though she knew Cub would not attempt a name that sounded so much like
olive
or
oblong
. She might be loath to try it herself, though she’d been forward with him at the outset. Now she feared the Bob Marley lyrics in her head would burst out of her mouth.
No woo-mon, no cry.
“Except for you, Preston,” she added. “You need to call him Mr. Byron.”

Preston nodded, his fork poised halfway to his mouth.

“Well, sir,” Cub asked, “what do you make of all that, up on our mountain?”

Ovid shook his head very slowly. He took a long drink of his iced tea. “I can hardly begin to tell you what I make of all that, up on your mountain.”

“They’re monarchs,” Dellarobia told him.

Ovid looked at her a little oddly.

“The butterflies,” she quickly explained. “Monarch butterflies. You wouldn’t believe it, but they are the most amazing of all insects. They gather up like that.”

The guest smiled broadly, appearing to understand now. “They do indeed. Gather up like that.”

“I mean, not just here, this once. Every winter they come from all over the United States and even Canada I guess, and fly south for the winter, and gang up together in a bunch like that. Just millions. We saw pictures on the Internet, Preston and I. It’s the same as what’s up there, clusters of butterflies hanging on the trees and practically covering up whole forests. Can you picture it? I mean, of course you can picture it, you just saw them. But can you picture such a little flimsy thing making that long trip?”

“My wife’s an expert,” Cub said proudly. “She’s the one that led us to find them up there in the first place.”

Ovid nodded, listening and chewing thoughtfully. “I would like to hear about that,” he said. She noticed he had tiny corkscrews of gray in his short-cropped hair, near the temples, and crinkly smile lines at the corners of his eyes.

She shook her head to fend off Cub’s compliment, but was nowhere near finished with the subject. “They fly thousands of miles to go south, like birds do. The only insect capable of flying great distances and even over ocean. They can go a hundred miles in a single day. It’s unbelievable. They hardly weigh more than a quarter, I bet.”

“Not even half that, I would say,” Ovid replied.

“Right. But here’s the part you will not believe.”

“Try me,” he said.

“Usually, they go to Mexico.” She set down her fork and leaned forward. “Millions of butterflies pile up in this one spot on top of a mountain in Mexico. Always the same one. I mean, why Mexico? What’s so special about that one mountain?”

“Good question,” Ovid replied.

“Well, I guess a few of them go to California,” she said. “I’m not sure how that part works. But about, I think, ninety-nine percent of them normally wind up in Mexico.” The visit from the Mexican family and their disaster darkened her mind, but she was not going to bring that up now. She would like just one beautiful thing to her name, with no downside. She pushed her hair behind her shoulders and beamed at the guest. “Year in and year out, they’ve been going to the same place I guess forever. Since God made them. And now for whatever reason, instead of going to Mexico it looks like they decided to come here.
Here
.”

“This property’s been in my dad’s family for close to a hundred years,” Cub said, as if that mattered in the slightest. Dellarobia took a bite of her supper, trying to be patient with her husband’s view of things. Next he’d be bringing up the logging contract. Who knew, maybe Mr. Byron would be interested in man talk. She couldn’t read him very well. She reached over and tried to wipe Cordie’s face, but the wild child batted the napkin away, singing “nananana.” The artistic temperament of the family. Dellarobia watched her daughter finger-paint with cheese sauce on the tray of her high chair, moving both hands in big circles. Landscape of a planet with two suns, by Cordelia Turnbow.

Everyone had stopped speaking for the moment. In the conversational pause Dellarobia heard muted applause from the living room, the TV no one had thought to turn off. It sounded like some dumb Spike thing, which the kids had no business watching. About once a week she threatened to cut off the cable, but they had a weird package with Bear and Hester that made it essentially free. Also Dellarobia doubted the family could live without it. It was like drugs. These companies mainlined you.

“They eat poison milkweed, too,” Preston piped up. “Tell him that, Mama.”

“That’s right, they eat milkweed, which is toxic I guess. Not the butterflies, they don’t have chewing mouthparts, they just go around drinking nectar from flowers. But when they go to lay their eggs, they lay them on a milkweed plant. So when the eggs hatch out as caterpillars, those babies will eat nothing but poison leaves.”

Preston added breathlessly, “And when they, when they eat that and grow up, it turns the butterflies poison, too. So nothing will come along and eat them!”

“Poisonous or distasteful to birds,” Dellarobia corroborated, quoting from memory.

Ovid crossed his arms over his chest and made a face that said,
Very impressed
, nodding admiringly at Preston. “What a smart young fellow. A little bird tells me”—he circled his finger in the air, then pointed it right at Preston—“that you are a scientist.”

“They’re also called King Billies,” Dellarobia said. “That’s what people call them around here. I have no idea why.” Was she competing with her five-year-old for this man’s approval? She bit her lip.

“King Billy, I have not heard that one,” Ovid said. He turned his chair a little toward Preston and asked in his lilting way, “Now, tell me something. Why do you suppose a butterfly would fly so far to join his companions in the winter?”

Preston put down his fork and closed his eyes, the better to engage every brain cell. Finally he gave it a shot: “He’s lonely?”

“A reasonable hypothesis,” Ovid replied. “His friends are very dispersed, you know. They fly all about. They cover a large territory. So, coming back to the group gives him a chance to find a wife, right? An extra good wife, from another part of the country, you know? You are too young to be thinking about dat, of course,” Ovid winked at Cub. “But one day, when you have a car—” He rolled his eyes and whistled. “Then you will know what I mean.”

Dellarobia was taken aback at this turn of the conversation, and prevailed upon herself to keep her mouth shut. She couldn’t tell what her husband was thinking as he shoveled in the calories over there. Cub seemed cordial, hungry, slightly out of the loop. His normal self, in other words.