Flight Behavior (25 page)

“What’s gone?”

“The whole thing. Now they’ve gone over to . . .” Dovey paused. “I don’t know, some war thing in Africa. The whole spot with you only lasted, like, one or two minutes. Maybe more than that. It was almost the top story. They showed you talking, and some other guy I didn’t know. One of your neighbors?”

“The Cooks? They talked to the Cooks, next door.”

“Maybe him, yeah. He said you all were going to log the mountain and had no concern for the butterflies, and then it said you were the sole . . . something. Sole voice of reason, or something like that, against your family.”

“Oh, wonderful,” Dellarobia said. She prayed Bear and Hester hadn’t seen this. There was a good chance. They didn’t watch the news.

“But then this thing about you being suicidal. ‘Dellarobia Turnbow has her own reason for believing the butterflies are a special something-or-other. They saved her life.’ I can’t repeat it exactly. Mind you, I’m here crapping my pants while this is all going on. I’m like, Whoa, that’s my best friend! I totally did her hair!”

“Where in the world would they get that, about suicide?”

“Maybe they’ll run it again at ten.”

“Christ. Maybe I
will
jump off a cliff.” She put her head on her knees, genuinely feeling she could pass out. Cub stirred next to her, starting to rouse.

“Here’s the thing,” Dovey said. “You looked bookoo hot. Can I borrow that sweater?”

T
he interview did air again, many times in various forms, first as national news and then local. In Cleary it was headline news that a local person had made the news. Reporters called the house repeatedly, and Dellarobia’s heart raced every time the phone rang. If she ever saw a camera again, she planned to run for her life. Cub was stupefied by the attention. The local TV channel made it a top story, with nightly updates. The headline banner was always the same still shot of Dellarobia with the butterflies behind her, and a caption: “Battle over Butterflies.” These updates made Dellarobia nauseous with anxiety. Waiting for her image to appear onscreen felt like waiting to be slapped. But she couldn’t stop herself from watching, either. People at church and the grocery were basically congratulating her nonstop, without regard to anything she’d said, just operating on the guiding principle that being on TV was the peak human experience. It seemed ungracious to tell them it felt like having her skin peeled off, so she held her tongue and let them go on wishing they’d get their turn someday.

Dellarobia referred every interviewer to Bear and Hester. Cub worried that his father was shaping up in this story to be the bad guy, willful destroyer of butterflies, and they deserved a say at this point, but Bear and Hester never turned up on the screen. As crazy as it seemed as a deciding factor, Dellarobia suspected they might not be photogenic enough to be news. Handsome Mr. Cook was interviewed often, sitting on the sofa with his sad wife and their poor little bald son. So was Bobby Ogle, who seemed perfectly at ease with the camera as he spoke of caring for God’s Creation. There was even some footage of him preaching at their church on a regular Sunday, which floored Dellarobia. When had news cameras been in there?

The local powers definitely were coming down on the pro-butterfly side. The Cleary news team invited the mayor, Jack Stell, and a heavyset man from the Chamber of Commerce to sit at their big curved desk and discuss tourism opportunity. People all over the world would want to come see the monarchs. The heavyset man used Disneyland as a comparison. Dellarobia felt they should get their act together on some family lodgings other than the Wayside, if that was their game plan. She also felt Ovid Byron should be sitting at that desk. She wished he would get here. Nobody was asking why the butterflies were here; the big news was just that they
were
.

The Battle of the Butterflies was presumably a conflict between people, although the opposers were something of a ragbag army, hard to pin down. One view was that all the outside attention on the butterflies might disrupt normal life. Dellarobia had heard this sentiment at church and elsewhere, but only oddballs were shown to espouse it on the news: a skinny old man in an undershirt in his trailer home said the crime would go up. Some kids in front of the Feathertown Exxon, who looked like hoodlums, declared they didn’t need outsiders in this town. Dellarobia realized these people were being mocked, and remembered with almost an electric shock the old man she’d seen being ridiculed on the late-night program. Billy Ray Hatch. If she’d remembered that painful setup while Tina Ultner was here, she might have slammed the door on her perfectly powdered nose. But she hadn’t. Real life and the things inside the TV set belonged to different universes. People on the outside could not imagine they would ever end up as monkeys in that box.

And yet they did, it was unendingly strange. She and Cub watched wide-eyed each night, gasping at each sighting of people or places they knew. They never did see the original interview with Tina, although clips from it appeared repeatedly on the Cleary news, mostly as background like the banner shot. As far as Dellarobia could tell, the suicide angle had been dropped. Initially, in fact, she was sure Dovey had invented it, due to shell shock, but Dovey had not. Clever girl, she figured out how to get the whole clip downloaded on her phone and came over two days after the fact with proof in hand. With Preston away at school and Cub at work, they sat in the kitchen and watched it.

“My life. I guess. I couldn’t live it anymore . . . ,” said the little Dellarobia on the phone’s screen, in a tinny voice that could not be hers. “I came up here by myself, ready to throw everything away. And . . . this stopped me.” The voice continued while the screen panned to a wide view of the butterflies covering the trees and filling the air. “Here was something so much bigger. I had to come back and live a different life.”

“I swear I never said that.”

“It sure looks like you did,” said Dovey.

“It sure looks like I did.” She could not imagine the carnage if the family saw this. And Hester might, if it was on the computer. Just not Cub, she prayed. For his sake. Dellarobia had almost no memory of the interview itself. She recalled a few false starts, blurting out nonsense that Tina had promised not to use.

“Okay, now check this out,” Dovey said, clicking masterfully at the buttons on her very swank phone, like Preston with his watch. “There. This just showed up today.”

Dellarobia scowled at the screen, baffled. “The Butterfly Venus,” it said. It was Dellarobia, but someone had messed with the image. She appeared to be standing on the open wings of a huge monarch. Little butterflies floated in the air all around her.

“What is this?” Dellarobia asked.

“You’re that famous painting, the naked chick standing on the shell.” Dovey scrolled over to another image that Dellarobia recognized. The Birth of Venus. Someone had put the two images together and sent it out over the Internet. The similarity was surreal. It couldn’t possibly be herself, but it was, her own orange hair blowing loose from its ribbon in back, her left hand in her pocket and her right hand across her chest, posed like the naked Venus girl on the open wings of her shell. Dellarobia couldn’t even remember standing like that, touching her chest. She was not exactly naked in the picture, her clothing was faded to a neutral shade, but naked was how she felt. Scared and exposed. This thing looked vaguely pornographic.

“Who can see this?” she asked.

“Everybody can see this,” Dovey said. This image that was not real and had never happened was flying around the world.

She remembered then. Why she’d brought her hand up to her chest like that in front of Ron’s camera. She was afraid her buttons had fallen open.

9

Continental Ecosystem

“N
ame?” he asked, not really asking. He answered himself, spelling aloud as he wrote on the form, D-E-L-L-A . . . He paused, his pen poised over the clipboard balanced on his knee. “Is it one word, or two?”

The interview was a formality, Dr. Byron had said. For a government-funded position he had to file certain forms proving he’d gone to the trouble of equal-opportunity hiring. She’d replied that hiring someone like herself should be ample proof he had scraped the bottom of the barrel. She felt nervous when he did not laugh. She had no idea how to behave as an employed person.

“All one word,” she told him. They sat facing one another on metal folding chairs. She’d dressed up for this, beige slacks and a black sweater. Dr. Byron wore jeans as always, sitting with his long legs crossed up ankle-over-knee like a grasshopper.

“Ah,” he said. “The Italian sculptor is two. My wife confirmed that.”

The mention made her blush. A wife there was, then, with whom he had discussed Dellarobia. She imagined them together at a computer viewing the image of her essentially naked, perched on butterfly wings as the Venus. From now on she had to rise each day into a world that had seen her like that. Tellers at the bank, the boys who bagged her groceries, Preston’s schoolteachers, present and future. It felt like stepping again and again into scalding water. Blushing had become her skin’s normal pastime.

“Do you prefer Mrs. or Ms. or none of the above?”

“Mrs., I guess.” She let out a joyless laugh. “Until my husband divorces me for doing this.”

He glanced up at her over his reading glasses. “For doing?”

“Taking this job. Don’t worry, that was a joke. He won’t.”

“He has some concerns about you in this lab?”

“It’s nothing personal. My family is just, I guess, typical. They feel like a wife working outside the home is a reflection on the husband.”

Dr. Byron’s look suggested he found this not typical. He didn’t know the half of it. People were praying for her family now, on account of that picture on the Internet. Cub’s father had told him a woman got such attention only if she asked for it.

“I spoke out of turn,” she said. “I’ll handle my family.”

“Is it a question of safety?” he asked, taking off his skinny glasses and holding them by the earpiece. “Because I can assure you, we will be taking every precaution here, exactly as if we were in a more permanent facility.”

Everything, she wanted to scream at him, was a question of safety. All human endeavor bent itself to the same lost cause. Being kept inside a pumpkin shell your whole life was no guarantee against getting flung into space.

“Seriously, don’t worry about it,” she repeated. Dr. Byron wrote something on his clipboard without comment.

Somewhere in the room behind her Pete was up on a ladder, loudly stapling plastic sheeting to the walls. They were making their laboratory in the sheep barn. Contrary to her expectations, a butterfly lab looked something like a kitchen with outlandishly expensive appliances. For two days she’d been helping them unpack the crates they’d brought from New Mexico, and she knew it was bad manners but couldn’t stop herself from asking about the costs of things. They couldn’t give her exact answers. The equipment was not necessarily new. Most of it, in fact, seemed to be older than she was, “pre–Reagan administration,” they both remarked dolefully, as if that had been some Appomattox Court House with the scientists on the losing side. But when she pressed them for estimates, they blew her mind. A glass box called the Mettler balance, which they handled like a newborn baby, was “maybe a few thousand dollars.” So was the drying oven, a drab gray thing about the size of any oven, and the antique-looking round tub called a centrifuge, which weighed so much they left it in its case until Pete could build a heavy table to serve as its throne. The wooden shipping crates, bulky as coffins, would become the foundations of a lab counter, which they called a bench.

When she unscrolled the bubble wrap from a fierce-looking little blender, Ovid had remarked, “Now
that
is a nifty item.” In the neighborhood of two grand, he’d said, made in Germany. Its name was Tissuemizer, and its special task was to make a kind of butterfly soup that no one would be eating, as the ingredients were both toxic and flammable. They had ordered a venting hood of the type usually installed over kitchen ranges to eliminate cooking odors, something Dellarobia had never owned. She’d just learned the hard way never to cook anything too fishy. But Dr. Byron needed a range hood, so the appliance department at Sears had been called to come and install one in the Turnbow sheep barn, pronto. They would also be delivering a freezer, the cheapest model available, but even so, a stand-alone freezer. Not a compartment in the top of the fridge, into which ordinary mothers crammed Popsicles and freeze-packs for their kids’ bruises. Dellarobia found herself coveting a freezer that was not yet even technically, until delivery, thy neighbor’s goods.

The official plan was to keep this lab in operation until the butterflies flew away from their winter roost, which under normal circumstances occurred in March, she was told. Then Ovid would pack up all this equipment and fly away also. She wondered if the freezer might come on the market for a secondhand price at that time, or if he would take it with him. And the nearly new range hood? Would he think to arrange for repair of the hole it left behind? The science crew was going through money in a manner she could scarcely imagine.

“I’m going to ask you to fill in most of this yourself,” Dr. Byron said finally, after leafing through several pages on his clipboard. “Date of birth, social security. Employment history, all that sort of thing. It’s only this first box, it looks like I am supposed to do that myself.”

She wondered how much he knew of her miserable notoriety, the naked-ish picture, the suicide business. Her days swung between fury and humiliation, tethered on nights of permanent anxiety, as she waited for Cub to find out. She envisioned crash landings everywhere. Dr. Byron might be taking her on as a pity case. Or even as some kind of leverage against the family’s logging plan. The lease he’d signed for this lab space gave Bear some breathing room, financially, and Dellarobia knew he and Hester were involved in some renegotiations with Money Tree. It was possible they could return the advance money and rescind the contract. They’d been given until March to come to terms. But as long as Bear could wipe out these scientists’ reason for being here with a stroke of heavy machinery, she didn’t trust him. That might be just the sucker punch that would make him feel big in this town again. And Hester wouldn’t hold with that. In Dellarobia’s in-law career she had never seen so much light between those two.

“How much science in your background?” Dr. Byron asked.

“Science?” She considered this. “None? Well, biology and stuff. High school.”

He looked surprised. “No college?”

“No college. Sorry.” She wondered if humiliation ever ran its natural course and peeled off, like sunburn, or just kept blazing. She watched him fill in more lines on his form without comment. He didn’t even look up at her. She tried not to flinch with each of Pete’s explosive blasts overhead, like repeating rifle shots. Pete was using a construction-grade staple gun to secure giant sheets of plastic over every inch of the walls, for the sake of creating cleanable surfaces. She could see the domestic advantages of plastic sheeting, at least until her kids were grown. Now he was stretching it even across the rough wooden beams of the ceiling.

“Even the ceiling gets covered?” she asked quietly.

Dr. Byron’s eyes went upward and then down again, like a man watching a pop-up fly ball. “There’s no telling what could fall out of that ceiling,” he said. “The number-one enemy of everything is dust.”

She’d heard theories in her time regarding the number-one enemy of everything, ranging from Osama bin Laden to premarital sex. The dust theory she liked. Here was a danger she seemed situated to control. Before the men unpacked their crates she had attacked the cement floor with practiced vigor using an industrial mop bucket they’d bought at the Walmart in Cleary, along with the plastic sheeting. And back before they arrived she’d spent a Sunday morning chipping out fossilized manure with a screwdriver and flat-bottomed shovel. She’d like to see some college ho do that.

When Dr. Byron first mentioned this job on the phone, she’d thought he was posing it as a real possibility. Not the long shot it obviously was. She felt embarrassed now, as if caught out on a foray into the kind of false identity hijinks she and Dovey used to pull off in bars, pretending to work for Jane Goodall and the like. Ovid had changed. Gone away was the man who’d moonwalked at her Christmas party, the man with the eyetooth-wide smile. Replaced by a distracted would-be employer grimacing at her poor credentials. She wondered what had happened to darken his mood in the interim. A death in the family, a fight with his wife. Holidays were notorious for family crackups.

Whatever the reason, he’d scarcely noticed she was working her tail off in here already, doing the heavy cleaning, to impress him as a volunteer before asking to upgrade her status. He just stood around looking vexed, listing problems in the making. January had taken a turn, the rain had turned to freezing, his instruments were temperamental. How were they going to heat the lab? He worried about controlling the humidity and temperature fluctuations, the flammable fumes. He was uncertain his chemical reagents could be properly stored here. Something called the NMR he decided to scrap altogether, and would have to send those samples back to New Mexico. There was so much to do, he kept saying. Dellarobia missed the man who’d once come to supper and charmed her clever son. She resented his new list of cares, wondering how they stacked up against, say, a foreclosure notice or a car breakdown you walked home from without any hope of repair. In her experience people had worries or they had tons of money, not both.

“So, no college is a deal-breaker?” she asked. He seemed to have forgotten she was holding her breath here, turning blue. He continued to write for several more seconds. She could not imagine what that was about. He turned a page, looked up.

“Not a deal-breaker, no. Mainly I’m looking for some maturity in this position.”

“Maturity,” she repeated. “Meaning you’re looking to hire an old person?”

He almost smiled. “Responsible, I should have said. When the place is hopping with student volunteers, it can be overwhelming. Sometimes I feel like that old woman in the shoe, you know? How does that one go?”

“So many children she didn’t know what to do, yes sir I do know. Who are these kids, and what all will they be doing?”

He swatted a hand at the empty room, his momentary lightness gone. “So much, I can’t even tell you. Cardenolide fingerprinting maybe, lipid analysis for sure, that’s where we’ll start. I can train you to do a lot of the routine work on that.”

She felt simultaneous hope and defeat. I can train you to lightbulb candlewax drainpipe. The man was speaking in tongues. “Lipids are food, right? Some kind of fat.”

“Fat, yes. We’ll see whether these butterflies fattened up prior to overwintering. Usually they travel light during the migration and then pack away a lot of lipid stores just before they roost for the winter. We want to see if they are behaving as a normal migratory population, even though this is not a normal place for migrants to go. I am also concerned about how their physiology is responding to the cold weather. And we still don’t have a full habitat assessment. Monitoring the site, recording all the data from our iButtons. It’s a whole lot of busywork.”

Was she hired, then? And did he think she had the faintest idea what he was talking about? Her panic must have been obvious. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not going to throw you to the lions.”

“Okay,” she said slowly, noting that some other placement was implied.

“We should be getting a lot of help here soon. The college in Cleary will probably send us biology students for internships, and we’re tapping other options.” He set the clipboard on his knee, interlaced his fingers behind his head, and leaned back, relaxing a little. Those hands, the ultra-long fingers and pale palms, she’d noticed the first time they met. “We’ll train these kids and put them on the simple things. Data entry, body counts, doing parasite counts under the scope. But training them all from the ground up, it costs a lot of time, you know? It’s time we just don’t have.”

“So this position would involve supervising college kids?”

“Pete and I will handle the internships. Oh, I should mention, other researchers will be coming through. From Cornell and Florida, maybe Australia.” She wondered if he could be joking: How many famous scientists would fit in a milking parlor?

“But I’m talking about the day-to-day, you know?” Dr. Byron went on. “The simple, routine stuff. It means logging a lot of hours. We’re looking for some volunteers who can come in after school. High school kids.”

Now she did laugh. “You mean doing science on purpose, on their own time? Good luck with that one. Maybe when it comes out as a video game.”

He clicked his tongue dismissively. “Volunteerism is a very big part of our effort. Monarch Watch, Journey North, these are national networks of kids mostly, with their teachers, doing class projects. Rearing and tagging butterflies, tracking, and so on. They help us plot arrivals and departures, on the Internet.” He tilted his head toward Pete. “Probably half my graduate students got their start as kids doing monarch projects.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but really? These are kids and schoolteachers going outside to study nature stuff?”

“Tell me, Dellarobia. What did you do in science class?”

“In high school? Our science teacher was the basketball coach, if you want to know. Coach Bishop. He hated biology about twenty percent more than the kids did. He’d leave the girls doing study sheets while he took the boys to the gym to shoot hoops.”

“How is that possible?”

“How? He’d take a vote, usually. ‘Who says we shoot hoops today?’ Obviously no girl would vote against it. You’d never get another date in your life.”