The Butterfly Effect

by Rachel Mans McKenny

  Greta moved her hands out of reach.

  Meg cleared her throat and looked sideways at Greta. “How do I apply? For FMLA?”

  Nadine adjusted the paperwork and smiled at her. “Just submit a claim to your human resources, along with whatever documentation they require. For spouses—”

  “Oh,” Meg said. “I mean, we’re engaged.”

  Nadine turned to her computer as if it had just become sentient. She tapped loudly on the keyboard. “I had it down that you were the wife?”

  Greta snorted and Meg shook her head.

  “You might be his emergency contact, but you wouldn’t be allowed to file for FMLA.”

  “Then who is going to help me?” Meg’s voice sounded as thin and reedy as she was.

  Neither Nadine nor her computer had an answer for that.

  Meg glanced at Greta, and in that look Greta sensed an entire rain forest receding into the mist.

  * * *

  The administrative wing of the hospital smelled less like ammonia than the floor Danny was on, replaced by a Pine Sol scent that reminded Greta of a retirement home. She and Meg left with brochures. Meg tucked them reverently into her purse and turned to Greta as soon as the door to Nadine’s office closed. “So, what are we going to do?”

  “Nothing is certain until you’re dead,” Greta’s dad had once told her. And then he’d died and left them, years before he was supposed to. And now what? If death wasn’t a certainty here—and it wasn’t, thank God—then Greta had responsibility for her twin. For all her preferences to be alone, that loneliness was better as a choice than a forced condition. That still didn’t answer the question of what the hell she would do now for money, for data—

  “I need a place to stay while I figure out what to do,” Greta said.

  “The hotel—”

  Greta raised an eyebrow. “A free place.”

  Meg’s mouth flattened and pulled in at the sides like a minus sign. The last time Danny had lent her money, maybe a year and a half ago, Meg had called. Greta never would have picked up if Meg hadn’t called from Danny’s phone. As it was, Meg got halfway into a lecture before Greta hung up. The long and short of it, in Meg’s opinion, was that if Greta couldn’t afford to be in her PhD program and if Greta couldn’t afford to have an apartment alone, then Greta needed to make changes. Greta had wanted to hang up earlier, but she’d heard Danny as her advocate in the background. Meg turned away from the phone after he interjected something, but Greta could still hear her. “She should be an adult by now,” Meg scolded him. “Let Greta grow up.”

  She couldn’t meet Greta’s eye now. “I don’t know, Greta. Can’t you ask one of your friends?”

  Her assumption of the plural as concerned Greta’s “friends” was incorrect. “Max lives with his parents. So, no. And I don’t want this either,” Greta said.

  Meg laughed, short and humorless. “As if that makes it better. Tonight, okay? You can stay with me for tonight, but you need to sort it out. Find someplace else.”

  * * *

  It only took ten minutes to gather her things from the hotel and check out, which left three hours until Meg would unlock the apartment for her. Meg had to rush back to school to teach her afternoon sections of pre-algebra and geometry and coach the middle-school cheer squad.

  Oh no—mustn’t disappoint thirteen-year-old cheerleaders.

  But wasn’t that just Meg in a nutshell? Jumping, waving, with tiny Barbie feet permanently pointed inside her pumps. The first time Greta met Meg, she’d had her pegged for a former cheerleader. Meg’s arm around Danny’s waist, Danny’s arm around Meg’s shoulder as they walked through the movie theater lobby. Greta walked ten paces behind them, unsure until he turned his head that it really was Danny. Danny with this petite, blonde stranger.

  With a few hours to waste and an entire stretch of unplanned months in front of her, Greta loaded her things in the car and walked across campus. The snow from her arrival day had been shoveled into neat walls along the sidewalk. Greta reminded herself to go to her storage unit to retrieve better winter clothes.

  The ATRB—Advanced Teaching and Research Building—loomed across from the campus stables. The ATRB was a windowed behemoth, as tall and creatively named as scientists could devise. Housed inside were the labs and offices of the entomology department and some other departments that Greta hadn’t explored. A PhD program is a special kind of bubble. While the undergraduate students flitted from building to building across campus, graduate students holed up in a single hallway for six or seven years—educational pupa—and emerged as exhausted academics.

  Her education was mostly funded by fieldwork for agricultural companies on pesticide testing, but her dissertation was supposed to be all hers. Now, not only would she lose out on a week—or maybe all—of the research she needed, she’d lost her funding that paid for that corner of heaven. If she was stuck in Ames this semester, she had no salary, and there was an actual laugh track that played in her head when she checked her savings account.

  As she walked the hall, it occurred to Greta that she should have called or e-mailed first. Larry had assumed she was returning, and unless Max had blabbed, everyone in the department assumed that she was in Central America. The look on her department chair’s face as she caught him by the copy machine said Max had been as good a secret keeper as he was an office mate. Tom Plank was a round man, shorter than Greta (though many men were shorter than Greta). His face appeared even rounder as his mouth gaped open, his eyes stretching from waning crescents to full moons in an instant. He ran her lab, had been the one who’d accepted her into the program all those years ago, and was the person who spread the budget to various projects. She wondered if his shock was worth anything, a pittance for his pity.

  “Greta, what the hell are you doing here?”

  Greta never could make small talk, so it was just as well he jumped to the main event. In science, there was a reassuringly exact vocabulary. Caterpillars were a good example of this. Caterpillar feces had its own artful term: “frass.” Frass. When in the middle of a frassy situation herself, Greta struggled with a simple way to explain. She settled on the catchall: “Family emergency.”

  Plank’s eyes lost their owlish wideness. “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “And it looks like I’ll be here for a few months.”

  The copy machine whirred in the silence of the elapsing minute. Like Larry, still in the rain forest hard at work, Tom had a stake in Greta’s research. Only six PhD candidates were meant to defend their dissertations in the next thirty months, and Greta was supposed to be among them. The copy machine finished burping out exams, and Plank turned to Greta. “So what are you going to do?”

  “I thought you might have some advice for that.” In the optimistic corner of her brain (a very small corner, cordoned off from the rest), she hoped a late staffing issue might necessitate her picking up a class or lab section.

  Plank removed the papers from the copier, moving to a counter to staple them into packets. Greta trailed him. “The copy machine can collate and staple for you.”

  Plank turned back to her, stapler in hand. “Really?”

  “Trade you a lab section for the secret,” she said. “Or if there’s a research assistantship, you know—”

  Plank raised an eyebrow and resumed stapling. “Quid pro quo, eh? It’s three weeks into the semester. I’m sorry, Greta, but we don’t have any classes for you.” He straightened his pile of exams. “Plus, I bet Leslie can teach me how to do the copy-machine thingy.”

  Greta made some pretense about checking her office mailbox, and then turned to go. Plank stopped her before she left. “A piece of advice.”

  She turned, her hand full of mailers from the local pizza place. “Yeah?”

  “Get your emergency sorted out. With the economy like it is, not so many grants coming down the pipe for your type of project. Stay on track.”

  The words echoed in Greta’s head. The work she did was so dif
ferent from the work of the other PhDs in her lab. It was easy to see the purpose of the PhD candidates’ work around her: they would solve huge challenges with global food supply. Her questions were less easily quantified: one butterfly against the unstoppable tide of global climate change. While she studied butterflies, they studied bean beetles. She hatched pupa while they picked at aphids. She could admit that aphids were fascinating. Take reproduction, which was a research area of interest for her (God, how often Danny had riffed on that). Aphids reproduced by a process called parthenogenesis—no males involved in fertilization and all offspring genetically identical to the mother, who birthed them live, tiny clones released into the world.

  Thank God that wasn’t how humans worked.

  Interesting reproductive cycles or not, she couldn’t get fully excited about the agricultural applications of her field, even at one of the best agricultural programs in the country. She had fallen in love with butterflies at the same time she had fallen in love with her ex-boyfriend, Brandon, and sadly, an intense interest in butterflies didn’t break up with her when he did.

  The ATRB had closed-door offices for the faculty and a series of cubicles for the grad students. She didn’t think the layout was supposed to mimic a beehive, but it felt that way. She had two square feet to herself, and if it hadn’t been Max in the cubicle next to her, she would have verbally stung whoever it was. The cubicles were quiet, but she knew Max was at his desk before she even turned the corner. He always wore Old Spice. She peeked her head over the top of his divide.

  “What is it?” The voice was as grumpy as she remembered it from five days ago. He didn’t look up from his laptop. He was streaming an episode of something that was obviously Star Trek, but she couldn’t catch which series.

  “I’m back.”

  She counted three beats from her greeting to his noticing her. “How’s Danny?”

  She sat down, rolling her chair close so she could talk to him. Her explanation to Max of the frassy situation included more detail, but by the end of it, she noticed the uncharacteristic appearance of wrinkles between Max’s eyebrows.

  “Don’t pity me,” she told him.

  The lines disappeared. “Why would I pity you? You didn’t have the aneurysm.”

  Words caught on her tongue. An argument, half formed, but she swallowed it. The muted Star Trek episode continued playing on the computer behind Max. She saw a glimpse of Captain Sisko. “You don’t get it.”

  “No, I don’t think you do. I hope things go okay for your brother. Can we do anything?”

  “Thanks, but I honestly don’t know what he needs.”

  “Just let us know.”

  It always surprised Greta that Max included his family in his offers. He lived with his parents and had even brought them to departmental picnics. His mother was a short, well-dressed woman who, Greta had noticed, was always smiling. She worked at a bank in town, and Greta assumed it must be part of the job, and mentally thanked God that centipedes never commented that she herself should smile more. Max’s father had a more balanced range of facial expressions, in Greta’s opinion. After moving from China to Iowa, he got into the business of buying and refinishing dilapidated barn wood to sell to city yuppies aiming to add “country charm” to their homes. While Greta hadn’t seen the interior, she had told Max she was surprised to see his house was completely brick. “Brick lasts” was all Max had to say about that.

  Max snapped his laptop closed. “I’ve got to get to the lab. See you around?”

  “Maybe not, since I don’t have funding.”

  He started to gather books on his desk, putting them into the canvas satchel he always carried. “You could always apply to Reiman, you know.”

  She rolled her eyes. “And you know Brandon’s in charge over there now.”

  “It was just a suggestion,” Max said, his voice even. “Did I ever tell you about the cockroach lab where I got my undergrad?”

  “No. I bet he was a terrible grader.”

  Max laughed. “In my intro bio class, the professor refused to make us do the frog lab—you know the one. The pithed frog lab, where they remove the frog’s spine but it still reacts to stimuli.”

  “I remember that one.”

  “My professor swore that headless cockroaches were a more humane way of performing the experiment.”

  “Did she guillotine them in front of you?” Greta pictured a cockroach Marie Antoinette.

  “No, no. Her TA did it the day before, I heard later.” They both sat with that for a moment as current teaching assistants, then Max continued, “It worked as well as any frog could have. It scratched with the leg adjacent to the stimuli. I think it was one of the first times I really thought of an insect like that. Like it could teach you something.”

  “So?”

  “The more I get to know Brandon, the more I think he might have been like that professor.”

  She didn’t say anything, and he slipped by, leaving her with only her ruminations.

  That night, she was still contemplating the pull-out couch in Danny’s apartment, unable to fall asleep. She kept thinking about aphids. Though in the early parts of the year they reproduce asexually, as the season draws to a close, they paired up, laying eggs with each other. Like half of her high school class. Like her parents. Like Danny. Like she and Brandon seemed like they were going to. Maybe. More of the pairing up, less of the offspring.

  Damn it all. She had an e-mail to write to her ex-boyfriend and rewriting it thirty times in her head wouldn’t get it sent.

  CHAPTER THREE

  In the morning, Greta stopped at the hospital. It wasn’t that she was creating distractions from the e-mail she needed to write—or at least it wasn’t only that. Meg had disappeared by the time Greta woke, and they passed each other at the hospital entrance. “Tag team, I guess,” Meg muttered on her way out. Dark circles ringed Meg’s eyes, and her pink pencil skirt looked wrinkled. “See you after school.”

  The recliner next to Danny’s bedside still felt warm from Meg’s body. Greta stood up when she realized that. It gave her a sense of uncomfortable intimacy, like forced hugs at family reunions. So much about the hospital felt forced. The nurses encouraged them to talk to him. Meg probably had tearful blab sessions, but Greta couldn’t do that. The nurses also said that bodily contact could help him gain more consciousness, but Greta couldn’t do that either. She wouldn’t have touched Danny if he were awake, so why would she now?

  As she sat, his eyes fluttered open momentarily, then closed again. She had gotten used to this tease, this promise of awareness. In some ways, it reminded her of backyard campouts as kids, before they moved from their old house. She had owned a Ranger Rick sleeping bag with a broken zipper; his was a Batman one. During their father’s second deployment, she used to beg Martha to let them sleep out every night from May until October. Informal entomology lessons often came through camping. From the heart of firefly season through cicada chirps, Greta hunkered down in that sleeping bag, all the while scratching mosquito bites. In her mind, camping was as close as she could get to her father’s lifestyle. Her mother usually acquiesced, at least when it wasn’t rainy, and Danny would tag along.

  One occasion particularly stood out. They were six years old, and she woke in the middle of the night. Heat lightning streaked the sky, and she’d wet the sleeping bag because of a nightmare. She flipped on the flashlight, and there was Danny. It was the first time she’d ever seen someone else sleep. His eyes roved back and forth behind his closed lids in REM sleep. The whole thing made her wonder what he saw in his dreams that she couldn’t. It was the first of many times that Greta had wondered that.

  But comas didn’t really look like sleep. That was a lie from television. She’d felt like she was on solid scientific ground when the doctor had explained the coma scale to her. Danny’s doctors measured his coma based on body movement, ability to open eyes to stimuli, and speech. Comas were measured on a continuum, not like a switch flicked on and
off. If anything, Danny’s condition reminded her of that episode of The Next Generation when a near-future Picard gets sent back in time and ends up on the Enterprise. When they bring him to Sick Bay, he flits in and out of consciousness. He moves erratically, can’t speak, and can’t focus. For future Picard, the cure was catching up with his own time. For Danny, who knew what it was?

  As she watched, Danny’s mouth twisted and untwisted, and his eyes opened again. They didn’t have the focused expression that she was used to seeing in them. With his eyes open, though, she didn’t feel as silly talking to him.

  “Hey,” she said.

  He didn’t turn to her. The nurse had warned her he wouldn’t be able to make sense of sights and sounds, but that didn’t stop her from trying again.

  “Dan,” she said, softly, “if you don’t wake up, you’ll never get to hear me apologize for being an asshole.”

  But he didn’t stir.

  * * *

  On her way back to the apartment, she stopped by an ATM and checked her account balance. It spoke with all the subtly of a politician. Greta knew she couldn’t leave with Danny in his current condition, but living with Meg wasn’t a long-term solution. She couldn’t put it off any longer. She needed a job, and she needed to complete research, and the only place to combine those interests was the only place in Ames that she didn’t want to set foot in.

  She had been able to shake the irony of studying Brandon’s field of interest after Brandon lost interest in her. He hadn’t hooked her with some sex organ, but he had impregnated her with his research interest and then promptly flitted away to a teaching post in New York for a year. Without Brandon, she might have been elbow deep in honeycomb. Research funding looked like the agricultural stalwarts of honeybees and mites, not butterflies. Was it his fault she was in this mess in the first place? They used to have sex with piles of undergraduate lab reports watching from his desk table, and she wondered once, after Brandon left the bed to shower, if there was hormonal transference airborne from their fucking. If a chemical trail was left such that when handed back, the reports would make the student’s arm hair prickle.