Flight Behavior (51 page)

“In the same school?”

“No. Different ones. You’ll see. Dr. Byron did this totally amazing nice thing and talked to professors over at CCC. He’s like a superhero. They set me up with a job and stuff. I went over there one day when you were at school.”

“What will you be?”

“I’ll work in a lab, like now. Except not in a barn. It’s work-study, they pay you and you go to college. It’s not very much, so I’ll probably be something else too, like a waitress. We’ll see. We’ll be eating beans and rice, let me tell you.”

“Like at Josefina’s?” he asked, interested.

“Yeah,” she said, a little surprised, unsure she had meant it literally. But he obviously had a taste for the fare. Here she went, one more step down the Mr. Akins lifestyle pledge into the “Not Applicable” basement. If that list was the wave of the future, as he’d declared it, her kids were way out ahead of the game. Thriftiness skills: check.

“But what will you
be
?” Preston asked.

“You mean, like, when I grow up? I don’t even know. There’s too many choices. Maybe a vet. So people would pay sixty dollars to see me get out of a truck.”

Preston eyed her, his tongue under his lower lip, wary of her spoofing. Which was fair, given the full complement of unbelievables she’d just laid on him.

“Okay, seriously?” she asked. “Some kind of scientist, I think. Like you, Preston. We’re peas in a pod.”

“But will you still be my mom?”

“Well,
yeah
. You don’t get to fire me.”

Preston’s voice dropped to a different level, registering something new. “Where will Dad sleep in the apartment?”

“Oh. No. Dad stays here. You and Cordie will visit him.”

Preston looked at her as if she had gone insane.

“Not visit. I don’t mean that. You’ll live here too, this will still be your home part of the time. Like on weekends, or after school. And you’ll see Mammaw and Pappaw. And the lambs. All the time.”

“And it will be your home too?”

“No. I’m the apartment. You get to go here and go there, you’ll migrate. Like the monarchs. Alternation is supposed to make you sturdy. You and Cordie will grow up ready for anything.” This was probably beyond him, she realized. But then again, he was Preston. And he wasn’t liking it. He still had one glove off, and now began rubbing his thumb sideways across the grain of his brown corduroys, making a tiny zipping noise.

“Why do you have to go have an apartment?” he said. “Daddy will
kill
you.”

“Preston, what a thing to say. Your dad wouldn’t hurt a fly. He knows about all this. He thinks it’s an okay idea.”

“Why does he?” Preston insisted, not looking at her. Over and over he ripped his thumb across his corduroy knee, making that sound, like strumming an instrument. Her powerful inclination was to make up a better-days-ahead story. Nobody ever thought kids wanted the truth. And right on from there it went: the never-ending story.

“Well, I’ll tell you,” she said. “Daddy and I got married kind of accidentally.”

Preston’s brow took an angular dive, anxiety tinged with improbable remorse. With that expression and the hair flopped in front of his glasses, he was the very image of his father. That’s what killed her. The laws of biology. She would never escape that particular face. It occurred to her that this was not an ideal choice of words, either:
accident
. He would be picturing car wrecks, or first-graders wetting their pants.

“It wasn’t the end of the world, that’s the thing, honey. Dad and I made you and Cordie. On purpose, we wanted to. So that part was totally good.”

“And the dead one.”

“Yes,” she said, surprised he already thought to claim this sibling, the dead one. Her mind ran onto forbidden ground: the kind and influential uncle, the sweet twin cousins. She’d finally dismantled one secret on the cusp of another rising. Dellarobia doubted she could sit on all those Ogles as long as Hester had, but they would have to play it by ear. Her children had people, and that was important. Kinship systems.

“Why did you and Dad get married by accident?” he asked.

“People do wrong things all the time, Preston. Grown-ups. You’re going to find that out. You will be amazed. There’s some kind of juice in our brains that makes us only care about what’s in front of us right this minute. Even if we know something different will happen later and we should think about that too. Our brains trick us. They say: Fight this thing right now, or run away from it. Tomorrow doesn’t matter, dude.”

He stopped strumming his knee, and appeared to think this over.

“If I could teach you one thing, Preston, that’s it. Think about what’s coming at you later on. But see, all parents say that to all kids. We don’t follow our own advice.”

He sat perfectly still, staring at snow.

“You know what else? Grown-ups will
never
admit what I just told you. They’ll basically poop their own beds without saying they made a mistake. Even the ones that think they are A-number-one good citizens. They’ll lie there saying, ‘Hey, I didn’t make this mess, somebody else pooped this bed.’ ”

The tiniest of smiles pulled his mouth out of line, like a snag in a stocking.

“You and Cordie are going to grow up in some deep crap, let me tell you. You won’t even get a choice. You’ll have to be different.”

At that moment the glazed yellow cartridge of the school bus appeared on the road down below. It paused in front of the house, in case Preston should by chance emerge, but he and his mother laid low in their spot in the snowy field. They did not wave or call attention to their truancy, and eventually the bus went on its charted way. Despite everything, the end of the world impending, Dellarobia had a glimpse of strange fortune. The sun was well up now and the sky clear, suggesting some huge shift was under way. Scraps of snow were falling from the trees along the road, silently letting go, drifting down like shredded tissues from the big maple by the driveway. In the woods behind them she heard a quiet steady prickling sound of falling ice needles. A whole melting world surrounded them. She noticed Preston’s eyes wandering back to their house, and could read his thoughts like a book: Mom, Dad, apartment, etcetera, all starting to sink in. The loss or rearrangement of everything he’d ever known and trusted. Bravely he did not cry, though his mouth turned down at the sides and his eyes pinched.

“What if I want everything to stay how it is?” he asked.

“Oh, man. That’s the bite. Grown-ups want that too. Honestly? That’s what makes them crap the bed and stay in it. I’m not even kidding.”

His eyes scooted away from hers, avoiding the verdict.

“It won’t ever go back to how it was, Preston. You have to say that right now, okay? Just say it, and I’ll give you a pod-thing.”

He glanced at her, making sure, and said it. “It won’t ever go back how it was.”

“Okay.” She handed it over. “You’re the man.”

O
n Friday she expected both the children home at noon, Preston from school, Cordelia and her father from Hester’s, where they’d gone while she prepared for her son’s birthday. But well before that hour she was pulled outdoors by the flood. She left a cake in the oven and many things undone to walk out the kitchen door in a state of inflated edginess, as if she had become suddenly too large in her skin. The radio had churned all morning with strange accounts, regardless of station. Flood and weather warnings, disasters. Something beyond terrible in Japan, fire and flood.

Outdoors she was startled by watery brightness. The ground was spongy with snowmelt and sank strangely under her feet. The hill on the other side of the road remained fully snow-covered in its own bluish shadow, north facing, but on this side the sun had leveled its light and the whole mountain of snow was melting in a torrent. Every channel gouged in this slope by a long wet winter was now filled to overflowing, and the runoff swelled out into sheet flow across the full breadth of the pasture. Ovid’s vehicle was gone for the weekend, nearly gone for good, and the sheep had retreated into the barn, alarmed by the running hillside and unaccustomed roar. She was alone out here. Water poured over the tops of her boots, as clear and cold as the ice it had recently been, and numbed her feet and pressed down the grass all around, the sodden pelt of a drowned earth. Tall weed stalks intermittently rose at angles above the water and were slammed down again, waving like skeletal arms.

Her feet sank deeper as the water reached her knees and the current pulled in a way she understood to be dangerous. This was where she lived. The phone was in her sweatshirt pocket, but she knew of no one to call in the event of something like this. She aimed for higher ground, slogging toward a spot where she could stand on a hummock in the high pasture, close to the spot where she’d rescued the lamb. That sheep must have had a nose for the terrain. It was the pasture’s summit, and now that she had climbed onto it, a tiny island nation of one. She was completely surrounded here by moving water. She turned to face south and the whole field lifted to her eyes as a single reflected sheet of brightness. An ocean, stippled and roiling in waves over submerged rock and rill, rising as she watched. She felt the reckless thrill of being at sea. Like Columbus on his ship, maybe, after he’d spent his life begging himself into debt, getting cornered. In no other way could a person strike out for probable disaster at the edge of the known world. Insofar as a person could understand that, she did.

On the hill behind her crows flew one by one into the bare trees, arranging their dark blots in the scrim of branches and adding their warnings to the drear sounds of this day. Gone, gone, they rasped. Here was a dead world learning to speak in dissonant, unbearable sounds. The topsoil, the slim profit margin of this farm, the ground itself, rushed away from her, and when water spilled over her boots again she backed slowly into the violent current to find a better place. A chill of fear evacuated all her thoughts beyond simple locomotion. A slip could be the end of things. She wondered about the sheep in the barn, but concentrated on her own two feet, inching slowly uphill to avoid her demise. When she felt the fence behind her she rejoiced to meet that cold safety net of wire. She turned around to grip the mesh with both hands and pull herself along the fence line. At the upper gate she tucked in her toes and climbed over to the higher side, gaining dry ground again, at the foot of the forest this time. She sized up a stand of medium-young trees, any of which would hold her, she thought, if it came to that. Then looked back downhill.

She was stunned to see the water had now risen level with the porch and doorsills of her house. Its foundation and cement steps were no longer visible and the yard had eerily vanished, its embankment dissolved into the road, all memories of her home’s particular geography erased. All morning she’d listened to water pouring through the huge metal culvert under the road, echoing its thunderous threats of inundation over those that came in on the radio. Now that roar was engulfed, the culvert had been overwhelmed and the road was a broad, muddy river. Something floated there, a ragged V-shaped assembly of lumber that moved slowly past from the west. A portion of a roof she guessed, inverted. It moved with such ponderous, unhurried purpose it seemed to be yielding to a migratory urge. She noted that her station wagon was also following the call, relocating itself gently without a driver in an eastward direction.

She comprehended the terms of what she saw, but couldn’t turn away from it. Her children were elsewhere, at Hester’s and at school, facing this by other means, as she understood they would have to do. For the moment her fascination transcended ordinary fear and safety. It struck her that she had stood here months ago with her heels newly unearthed and her mind aflame, unexpectedly turned back to the place she’d fled. She remembered scrutinizing the dark roof and white corners of her home for signs of change or surrender, invisible then. Now they were plain. One corner of the house appeared to tilt as she watched, shifting the structure a scant but perceptible few inches on its foundation. This time she had to see. Soon the whole thing would drift away from its anchored steps and cement-block foundation, departing as gently as an ocean liner. Then it would not be a home, but a rigid, rectangular balloon with siding and shingles and weather-stripped doors, improbably serene, floating on the buoyant command of the air sealed carefully inside. Its windows would hold their vacant gaze on the wheeling view as the whole construction slowly turned in the current.

And even now, little dark birds gathered on the few high spots that shouldered above the flood. They poked in the mud for drowned earthworms, sustaining a far-fetched and implausible appetite for staying alive. Starlings, they must be. The day was absurdly temperate and bright. Last week she’d seen the pointy-nosed buds of daffodils coming up, and Preston had found hyacinths in their yard. The inundated, the gone, the somewhere-else-now yard. She’d forgotten she ever planted those. Their snub green leaf bundles had looked to her like the beaks of turtles rising from an underworld.

Some of the starlings let out a collective metal cry and flew off at low angles across the field. Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward, she thought, words from the book of Job, made for a world unraveling into fire and flood. Among the dark birds were wavering flints of light, the same fire that had unsettled her so drastically on first sight. Now it was irresistible. She’d come out here to see the butterflies. Since yesterday she had watched them leave their clusters in the dead peach orchard and scatter downhill into cedars and tangled brush along the roadsides. Now they dotted every small muddy rise that was not yet swamped. Wherever she looked she saw their aggregations on the dwindling emergent places: forming bristling lines along tree branches and the topmost wire of the fence, clustered on driftwood, speckling even the distant, gleaming roof of her car. Orange clouds of the undecided hovered in the air space above them. The vivid blur of their reflections glowed on the rumpled surface of the water, not clearly defined as individual butterflies but as masses of pooled, streaky color, like the sheen of floating oil, only brighter, like a lava flow. That many.