She would not picture Brandon naked.
She would not mention that he had made her see Lepidoptera as intrinsic signs of an ecological order, not as decoration.
She would not write “Dear Brandon” or “Hey Brandon” or “Attention, Dr. Utz.” Instead, she skipped any introduction and jumped right to the query.
The e-mail took her three hours to write. Brandon e-mailed back fifteen minutes later that they should talk in person. She took the bus from Danny’s apartment and tramped the mile from the station toward the botanical gardens. Her path took her past the football stadium and the lines and lines of student commuter vehicles. As she got farther from the main traffic, her footsteps made a new path in the fresh snow. Each boot print looked like child’s artwork on a fresh plaster cast.
The parking lot in front of the Reiman Gardens was almost empty at ten in the morning. Acres of outdoor plantings attracted visitors usually, but snow covered those beds now. In the spring and summer, Reiman Gardens grew formal tea roses and giant circles of peonies. The tulips drew a large crowd around Easter each year, the beds of school-spirit red and yellow so big they mimicked a stadium crowd. In the winter, Reiman only housed an indoor train exhibit as well as the only all-year, unchanging attraction: the butterflies.
The butterfly wing jutted out from the side Reiman Gardens like an open glass book. The butterfly wing’s prestige came from being one of the only university-adjacent butterfly conservatories in the country. Most butterfly houses were run by museums or zoos, but Reiman offered opportunities for research, not just tourism, and thus could hire a PhD to be its head.
Dr. Brandon Utz leaned on the welcome desk in the front lobby, still as tall and thick as ever. She imagined Brandon formed from potter’s clay, the incredible solidness of every part of him. Even his hair grew in thick, brown and wavy and longer than she liked it when they dated. He made her feel small. At several inches over six feet, he had always made her feel small, but that had been in an all-encompassing, bear-hug kind of way. Now she felt like a kid trick or treating after the lights had been shut off at a house. He waved her inside, past the gift shop and the fingerprint-covered window separating visitors from a display of pupa.
She wondered if they were too familiar for small talk. During their walk to his office, the conversation came out rehearsed and flat. When Midwestern people don’t know what to talk about, they recruit the weather into service. Talking about snowfall and sleet with someone who had run his tongue over her breasts felt wrong.
They turned into the administration hallway, and Brandon opened a door. His office reminded her of his grad student office, except his new desk bore a taller stack of paperwork and no framed photo of them near his computer. She tried not to notice that there wasn’t a photograph of anyone else either. She ordered her heart to beat slower, but it took orders about as well as she did. He motioned for her to sit across from him and placed his large hands on the desk. “Your brother okay?”
“Okay is a relative term. Better than a few days ago.”
“But you lost your research, your former advisor, and your fieldwork funding.”
Her stomach clenched. “Yep. Misplaced that funding along with those pesky single socks at the laundromat.” She should be nicer. She should be kowtowing. She imagined her checking account like Dickensian orphan, kneeling at her feet. “Please, we want some more.” After a deep breath, Greta wrangled her mouth into a smile.
“I mean, technically you’ve caught me at a good time. I’ve got funding for a research partner approved for half a year, through the summer. But we have already interviewed some potentially great hires.”
“So potentially I’m shit out of luck.”
He used the tone he took on with strangers at dinner parties. Cool, collected, impartial. “Listen, my main concern is professionalism. You’re great at data collection, but—”
“My father called me prickly. Is that what you mean?”
“No, I mean our history.” He said the word with as little enthusiasm as a kid studying the subject. “I’m the lead researcher here, and I need a team player who can be coached. With me as the coach.”
What’s with everyone and teamwork these days? “I can do that.”
“Are you sure?”
She centered herself around the solid lump in her stomach. “Look, I need money. You need help. I think ‘symbiosis’ is the right term here.”
He took a sheet of paper out of his desk, her name already printed on it. He’d known from the beginning that these terms would be agreeable. He’d known that whatever fire between them could be easily iced in the name of science. Instead of feeling reassured, her chest hurt as she signed the contract, the tax forms, the background-check release form. She would start tomorrow.
CHAPTER FOUR
Brandon had acted as a fence around Greta’s graduate school experience, always there and marking the edges. On her first day of TA training, Brandon handed out informational packets. At first, she thought of him as Dr. Almond’s minion. Larry Almond’s Igor: a little too brawny to be brainy. He reminded Greta of a wrestler, and a year later, after a particularly acrobatic session of tangling under his sheets, she revealed her first impression of him.
“I thought you were moody,” he said.
“Resting bitch face. Also, short haircut. Something about me doesn’t scream ‘damsel in distress.’”
“And you didn’t need much help those first few weeks.”
But he had pressed his help upon her, and it rankled. She found out later that he was required to mentor all incoming research and teaching assistants as part of his contract. As a final-year candidate and the winner of the departmental teaching award for PhDs for two years running, he’d been assigned to the care and tending of baby graduate students. While the other students in her year lauded him and, in some cases, searched him out to lean too casually against his desk, Greta never did. She made up half of a two-person anti-fan club for the first year. Only Max stood with her against Brandon. On the first day, Brandon committed the cardinal sin of making fun of Max’s whip scorpion, who he had brought to orientation with him. “This is an arachnid-free tour,” Brandon had said, smiling too large. The tour group had included a few incoming math PhDs who had missed their own campus tour and must have complained to “teacher.”
It’s unfair, Greta had thought, as Max was forced to leave the arachnid on the floor in the administration building. The whip scorpion hadn’t been cute exactly, but it was one of the larger of the species that Greta had ever seen. It was a fascinating little monster, with front appendages like scorpion claws, and a ridged spine. In the wild, they would have a “whip” at its back, a feeling appendage, but the pets were whipless varieties. Greta knew without closer examination that underneath that whip were its secretion organs. The distinctive scent their spray emitted gave them their nickname. “Nice vinegaroon,” she had told Max, and they had been friends ever since. She and Max, that was, though perhaps Gary was fond of her too.
Greta and Max’s appreciation of small stinging animals and mutual distrust of Brandon were the first things that bonded them as office mates, even before they figured out that they had grown up thirty miles apart. Max was Ames stock—he’d graduated as a Little Cyclone. She had been a Madrid Tiger. At the time, she studied bees and he studied fruit flies and spiders. They both loved Star Trek, but her comfort re-watches were all Picard’s crew aboard the Enterprise, whereas his ranged across every season. Trekkie that he was, he even, she found out one Halloween, had a Star Fleet lieutenant uniform that he wore completely unironically, combadge and all.
While Max learned to ignore Brandon, Greta had bristled under his offers to help. Brandon offered sample lab syllabi and an ear to listen to any concerns she had. He tried too hard. He acted too friendly while she was too busy to be friendly in return. Grad school was about learning to swim, and while she would swallow a mouthful of water every now and then, she wouldn’t drown.
Now, years
later, on her first day at Reiman Gardens she did feel like she was drowning. She took the bus to campus and by the time she got there, a docent was unlocking the doors, and Brandon was already in a meeting. An undergraduate student met her at the door of the lab. The student, Maura, handed her a white, USDA-required coat on their way in and had her sign into a log. “Because, you know, if there’s an outbreak of some crazy tropical disease, we need to know who patient zero is.” She laughed and swept her long black braids over her shoulder.
Greta recognized her. “Did I have you in intro bio last year?”
Maura nodded. “Yep. I got this as my work study job because of that butterfly lab you had us do. I got kind of, I don’t know, intrigued.” She took the log from Greta and put it in a drawer. Greta was glad to hear that, despite her terrible student evaluations, someone had taken something from her course.
Along the back and side walls of the lab hung plastic-coated cabinets with cheap hardware. It reminded her of an IKEA store. She opened the fridge along one wall and saw bowls of strawberries and peeled oranges. “For the butterflies in the exhibit,” Maura explained, as she noticed Greta peeking around. “Release boxes are up there, above the cabinets. Have you really never been in here before?”
“No, just seen it through the window.” Greta pointed to the last wall, the clear one at the front of the room that housed the emergence windows. The three glassy chambers measured as tall as a person and housed pupa, each as distinct as a fingerprint. Some of them had off-green, thin skin—an oblong tomatillo. Some were longer and browner.
Brandon entered, and Greta avoided thinking about the way he filled out a lab coat. He scrawled his messy signature onto the log and shoved it back into the drawer before hoisting a cardboard box onto the wide central countertop.
“Oh no. Specimen unpack?” Maura’s tone hinted at an eye roll.
Brandon tapped a clipboard with a pencil. “And inventory.”
Greta’s phone rang in her purse. She could hear it outside of the door in the locked corridor between the main lobby and the lab. Brandon didn’t look up from his box cutter as he drew it across the packing tape. “You can answer if you have to.”
First day of work. First day working for an ex-boyfriend, who, despite everything personal, she knew to be immensely qualified for his job. Qualified in the itchy, too-perfect kind of way. He had to do things as dissimilar as taking butterflies to kindergarten classrooms and presenting research at national conferences, and could do each side of the teeter-totter as easily as the other. He loved research too. She remembered him filling out postdoc applications at her kitchen table and knowing somehow that he would get into the one farthest away. She joked with him, grabbing the pen out of his hands, kissing him on the neck. “You’re too much of a distraction,” he had said, and had gone to work in the living room without the hint of a laugh in his voice.
She didn’t seem distracting to him now, but the phone did. She held up a hand. “Sorry. I thought it was on silent.” She opened the door, dismissed the call, and closed it again. Meg’s number. In her head, she toyed with the words “future sister-in-law,” and they tasted sour. Greta had expected an eviction notice days ago, and she guessed Meg looked forward to making that call.
Greta turned her attention back to the unpack. Some of the pupa emerged in transit, and Brandon made ticks on his inventory sheet. The too-early butterflies lay, wings twisted, on top of the layer of cotton next to the intact pupa. “We don’t raise from caterpillar here,” Brandon noted as he removed a long brown pupa and hung it in the first case. “Don’t have the space or the license, but our domestic and foreign suppliers keep us pretty well stocked. Maura, did you take estimates in the butterfly house this morning?”
“Yeah, just a second.” Maura scrambled on the counter for her notebook. “Found twenty deceased on the sidewalks. Are we doing a release this afternoon?”
Brandon nodded. He gestured to the glass cases without looking at them, his attention on the second layer of pupa underneath the first. “These chambers control for humidity, air flow, and temperature. We’ve been tweaking the variables but have gotten as high as ninety-five percent emergence.” He turned to Greta, his palms covered in pupa the same texture as fall leaves. “Hands clean? Can you hang these?”
Greta nodded. “How many butterflies can you stock at a time?”
“Pop quiz, Maura,” Brandon said, turning to his lab assistant.
“Eight hundred.” Maura grabbed a pint of fresh strawberries from the fridge and began to slice off their stems and quarter them. “Give me a harder one.”
Greta’s phone buzzed.
Brandon didn’t even glance at her. He was in his elements—all of them. Teaching and butterflies and performer, all in one. “All right, all right. We’re only two thousand five hundred square feet, but we can support more butterflies than larger facilities. Why’s that, Maura?”
“All our plants produce nectar,” Maura said. “We don’t rely on augmented food systems like food dishes. These strawberries, for instance, are just a failsafe.”
“Aced it.” Brandon gave her a fist bump.
Greta fit the rest of the pupa into the foam crevices lining the top of the window box. A toddler watched her through the glass, his palms on either side of his face, eyes wide. He tapped twice with his index finger, then turned his head to speak to his mother. Then, when his mother turned away, the little boy stuck out his tongue and waved it side to side. Greta returned the gesture before closing the door, and wondered if zoo animals ever liked some of their observers better than others.
Her phone buzzed again. Maura released the newly emerged butterflies, and a group of Red Hat ladies positioned their noses on the outer glass, a full foot and a half up from where the toddler had touched. Windex could sponsor this place. After a school group left, she squeegeed the front glass. She checked on the pupa again before lunch, and after she closed the window and washed her hands, her phone rang a fourth time. A pause, then a fifth. A pause, then a sixth. Finally, a soft knock came on the front glass that divided the visitor lobby from the lab. An elderly docent held up a handwritten sign: “Phone call for Great.”
Brandon looked over at her from the lab computer. “I think that’s you, Great.” Despite his amused tone, his gaze spoke a boss’s language.
“I am sorry. Seriously.”
He turned his head back to his computer without clucking or agreeing, and she left the lab. The docent handed over the phone, and on the other end was Meg. “They moved Danny. He had a stroke. He—”
“What?”
“Check your voicemail.” And Meg was gone again.
Greta’s call history was all from Meg. She was glad to be alone in the hallway when she listened to the voicemails. First one, then the next few in varying degrees of panic and with the odd word jumping through the speaker like a knife in her ear.
Vasospasm.
Life Flight.
The word “surgery” sounded scary enough without adding the word emergency in front of it. Without adding the words “possibly life-saving.” Did possibly life-saving mean most likely life-ending?
Greta didn’t make excuses to Brandon or remember to remove her lab coat as she rushed outside. She got as far as the parking lot before she realized two things. First, that it was snowing and, second, that since she took the bus, she didn’t have transportation to Des Moines. “Oh shit,” she said to the flakes falling around her. “Fuck it,” she said to an empty cement planter. “Goddamn,” she said to the main door of the Reiman as she entered it again.
Brandon stood in the lobby. He wore his old “helping-newbie-lab-instructors” look. He took a large hand and brushed the flakes from her shoulder. “What happened?”
Greta didn’t realize she was crying until her voice cracked. “Danny.”
* * *
In five minutes, she had buckled herself into the front seat of Brandon’s truck. She still wore her lab coat, but at least she now had her regular coat
on top. On the drive, he adjusted the heat setting on her side to what she used to set it at, three degrees higher than his, and turned on her seat warmer to the middle setting. The creeping warmth along her back rubbed at her shoulders like his hands used to. When she got out of the truck, nearly jumping into the parking lot of Meg’s apartment, she forgot to say thank you or goodbye.
She had a quarter tank of gas, just enough to go down and come back. Maybe there would be a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow somewhere along the interstate. The image helped distract her from turning over in her mind the worst scenarios on the drive. When she got to this new, even statelier hospital, she took off her coat and draped it over her arm. What if he had died while she squeegeed handprints off the emergence window? While she was sticking out her tongue at some kid? What if she arrived five minutes too late because she’d run headlong into the snow instead of thinking through the situation? She’d rather immunize herself against emotions than make mistakes because of them.
The elevator chimed open on an unfamiliar floor in the unfamiliar hospital. Unlike the recovery wing’s lazy pace and hushed surroundings, the critical care unit ran fast but quiet, like a mouse on speed. Nurses moved at quicker paces, and she barely caught one’s arm as he power walked down the hall. “Hey,” she said, meeting his pace, “Daniel Oto’s room.”
“You new here?” he asked, looking her up and down.
“Just transferred.” Hours ago Danny had been in a helicopter, whirling his way south, with blood vessels exploding in his head.
“Well, uh …” He paused and shuffled over to the nurses’ station, which had obviously been his destination. A computer pointed outward, and stacks of folders hung in a wire rack. He tapped the rack. “He’s in three-two-two-oh.”
The Butterfly Effect Page 4