The Butterfly Effect

by Rachel Mans McKenny

  “Which is?”

  He raised an eyebrow like she was testing him. She glanced down at his nametag. “Fallon” had a too-large mouth and thin eyebrows behind his glasses. “Down the hallway.”

  Danny’s door was closed, but no one was around. This corridor was quiet and clear. Greta put her ear to Danny’s door like she used to when they were kids, when she was up before him and wondering if they could sneak downstairs together to watch TV. It was always more fun with him, with two overflowing bowls of Lucky Charms mixed with chocolate milk. After Captain Planet, the rinsed-clean bowls got stuck back on the shelf to hide the evidence (not incredibly hygienic, she realized). Now, like on some of those mornings, she didn’t hear anything.

  Just like on some of those mornings, she went in anyway. Not to wake him up, like she did in those days, but to watch him. She imagined telling her seven-year-old self that one day the only thing she would want would be to see her twin sleeping, and seven-year-old Greta would have gagged and made “you’re crazy” spinning fingers round and round her ears.

  She opened the door, then pressed her back against it like she was barring it from attacking zombies. Hospitals cost too much money to let a zombie in. They had rooms in hospitals for dead people, unlike dead butterflies. Maura said she swept dead butterflies from the exhibit paths each morning, or else they decomposed in the tropical garden that made up the biome.

  She looked around the room, wishing she could find comfort in the place like she had in the recovery room. No worn leather recliner, no table for displaying “get well soon” cards. Did people not get well soon here?

  The room wasn’t designed for visitors, but machines. Like the inside of the Matrix, with wires and beeping boxes surrounding a single comatose human. Where was Meg? She had half expected to find her here, but instead she had discovered the inside of a clock—gears and ticking noises.

  The door behind her opened, shoving Greta into the room with its force. She turned to face the doctor staring at her, mouth agape. “Who are you?”

  “Greta Oto. I’m Danny’s sister.”

  The doctor was tall enough to match Greta’s height, and obviously pregnant. She could have set her clipboard on her rounded stomach. “You’re not supposed to be in here. And you’re not …” She gestured at Greta. “I should have security come. I should call the police.”

  Greta froze, her brain feeling as blue and exposed as Danny’s skull. “What?”

  “You can’t impersonate a doctor.”

  “What?” Greta repeated, a record stuck in a groove. Finally she looked down where the doctor still pointed, at Greta’s white lab coat. “I came right from work. I swear I’m not—”

  The door opened, and the nurse named Fallon walked in. “I thought you were—”

  “—I never said.” And suddenly voices competed with one another. Danny didn’t stir in the noise.

  The doctor held up her arms. Greta and the nurse fell silent. “Out of here. He doesn’t need infection introduced along with everything else. Come on.”

  Greta took a last peek at her brother and stepped into the hallway. The doctor straightened her starched coat, bright white, with a hangtag from the hospital. Greta looked nothing like a doctor with her wrinkled, ill-fitting mess of linen.

  “I sent his wife home,” the doctor said. “I’m Dr. Ambrose. I’ve taken over his case post-surgery. I’ve got more experience in brain bleeds.”

  “Fiancée. She’s his fiancée.”

  The doctor paged through her notes as though there were a picture of Meg there. “And your mother. I sent them home, and I’m going to do the same to you. He won’t be up for visitors for another day or two, at the very earliest. When I say that you could jeopardize his health, I’m not exaggerating.”

  Greta’s head felt filled with mashed potatoes, stuck on a single phrase. “My mother?”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  When she flung open the apartment door, Greta looked one way, then the other, as if checking a busy intersection for traffic. Actually, Greta felt as if she were the traffic looking for someone to hit. Meg was nowhere in sight. Instead, Martha sat on the spot where Greta had slept just hours ago. The pillows and comforter were shoved to the side to make way for Martha’s patchwork purse. Martha didn’t glance up from the deck of cards she was shuffling, until Greta stood a few inches from her.

  “What are you doing here?

  Martha’s curtain of brown hair parted as she glanced up at Greta. It was hard to say whether she looked the same or different than she had fifteen years ago. Mentally, Greta had tried to black out her hazel eyes and the mole on her cheek that she had always covered with concealer. Martha had the nerve to smile at her. “Good to see you too. Want to play something?” she asked.

  The question felt as out of place as party balloons. “You’re kidding.”

  Martha shrugged. “Your loss.” Her voice had a tinge of Greta’s own in it, the gravelly sarcasm that Greta swore was all inherited. Weekday mornings swam back into her memory, that voice before the first cup of coffee. That grouchy snarl that had always shoved Greta onto the bus until it wasn’t there to shove any more.

  Greta balled her fists. The bottoms of her feet sweat into her socks. She could feel the cotton working to absorb the flood. She didn’t know what she was about to say before Meg walked in.

  Meg’s eyes were red and small. She carried a cup of coffee in each hand and offered one to Greta. “I didn’t know how else to contact you. I knew you were at work, but—”

  Greta repeated her initial question to Meg. “What is she doing here?”

  Meg didn’t make eye contact and placed the coffee cups on the table. “When I couldn’t reach you, I made a judgment call. It’s too hard to balance two sides of the family. So balance yourselves.”

  Martha smirked at her deck of cards. In the past few minutes, she had taken a card in each hand to lean against one another, long sides flat against the table. Another triangle, a few inches away, then a card set across the top to bridge the gap. Another triangle. Another bridge. Two stories, then three. It was a rainy-day thing they used to do. It was using Greta’s own memories against her. She wanted to sweep the entire thing aside with the side of her palm, but part of her wanted to see how tall it could go. Strong buildings were made in triangles. Triangles leaning on one another. The tension—that’s what built skyscrapers. The tense angles of steel that made New York a broken-toothed smile of a skyline versus Ames’s seven-story brick buildings.

  If only all tension could build rather than tear down.

  Martha broke the silence “It shouldn’t be left up to Meg. You should have told me that Daniel had an aneurysm. That’s a thing a mother should know.” Her voice was thin and taut, a tightrope.

  Greta was as good at tightropes as she was at avoiding arguments. She plowed ahead, decibel-doubling Martha’s voice. “You should have kept in contact if you think we owe you something. Jesus, I didn’t know you were back in Iowa.”

  “I got a job at Student Health on campus. You knew that.”

  “How could I know that?”

  “You should have tried to find out.”

  “You should have tried,” Greta echoed back, harder. “You should have tried to keep our family going. You should have come to Dad’s funeral. You should have called me on my college graduation day, or Danny’s.”

  “I sent a card.”

  “A postcard. From Vegas. Two months late.” Greta tented a palm over her face. Between her fingers she saw Martha’s hands stumble on the fourth level. That was always the one that sunk Greta’s towers. “Do what you want. Sure, visit Danny. Play nurse.”

  “I am a nurse.” Martha let irony ripple under the remark, an eyebrow raised like a flag.

  “Play mom, then.” Greta said it like the word had grown teeth and bit her.

  Martha reacted accordingly, the eyebrow lowering by degrees until it flatlined. Her eyes had new creases around them. Greta remembered enough of her face to see t
hat.

  “I’d like you to leave.” Greta willed her voice steady.

  Martha turned to Meg. Even though it wasn’t Greta’s house to kick Martha out of, Meg didn’t open her mouth.

  Martha picked up her bag. “You want me here, I’m here. You want me gone, I’m still here.” The door closed behind her, the breeze from the door not enough to knock down the card tower. Martha’s boots stomped down the hallway until the building elevator dinged and took those boots somewhere else.

  Meg picked up the breakfast bowls that littered the countertop and brought them into the kitchen. Greta heard the noise of a dishwasher being stacked. The domestic noises she wasn’t used to sharing with someone else. The card tower wobbled suddenly, provoked by nothing except Greta’s glare. She had often wished, especially in her teen years, to possess Carrie-like powers. She had a feeling they hadn’t just materialized, however, especially once she noticed the air vent stationed above the coffee table.

  Greta ran some water over her burning face in the bathroom. She left the tap on, staring at her reflection in the mirror for echoes of Martha that had come on without any warning. Without a comparison, without looking at pictures of her for years, Greta had never realized how her nose settled into a bony point like her mother’s. Those attached earlobes. The arch of her eyebrows, so like Martha’s.

  A tap on a door, followed by Meg’s voice. “Greta? You in there?”

  “Obviously.” Greta shut off the tap and, after a thought, flushed the toilet to cover the time lapse. The stress was getting to her, making her feel accountable for Meg’s opinion of her. When she swung back the door, Meg was inches away from her with a knee-height brown dog behind her knees. The dog, Franz Liszt, was a shelter rescue and a Christmas present from last year. Greta remembered him only from pictures and had assumed she would hate him as much as everything that Meg loved. Instead, she found herself reaching a hand toward the dog as he ambled over toward her.

  Meg watched Franz offer his nose for Greta to scratch. “You okay?”

  “That’s a relative term,” Greta said. “I’m breathing on my own and not strapped to monitors in a hospital, so everything is better than it could be. You could have mentioned in your four zillion messages that we weren’t allowed to see him yet.”

  Meg cleared her throat, uncomfortable. Uncomfortable, like she hadn’t thought about a machine breathing for Danny. Greta hadn’t been able to think of anything else. And the sickest thing was that a joke kept popping into her head. She and Danny had been laughing just a year ago about his job being robot-proof. “No robot could teach music to middle schoolers,” he claimed.

  “That’s because robots still have pride,” Greta said in return.

  He’d put his pointer finger in the pressure point beneath her knee and squeezed. Her weak spot, and Danny knew it. She might never have that again, one of those spasmodic laughing fits that made her hate him and love him. And here he was, a machine breathing for him, keeping that heart pumping.

  Franz wandered back to the bedrooms, his fuzzy behind waving goodbye.

  “Are you hungry?” Meg asked. She opened the fridge and peered inside at the pitiful contents.

  “No.”

  “Me neither.” She chewed her lip for a moment and turned back to the dishwasher. “Maybe you should try. You know. With your mom.”

  “I don’t need advice.”

  “I don’t need your attitude.”

  That stopped Greta, and she looked at Meg. “I am trying. I’m trying to find a new place, and I’m trying not to get fired, and I’m trying not to get kicked out of my program.”

  “Are things that bad?”

  “I might get my funding revoked since I can’t complete my research. I might get fired since I ran out from my job like a wild ape on the first day. And it’s not like you want me to live here.”

  “You don’t need to find a new place right away. I mean, I have the space.” Meg rinsed the breakfast bowls in the sink and held one in each hand, examining them. “I hate this table setting.”

  Greta had nothing to say about dishes. She hated the automatic conversation people seemed to need to fill the gaps. All she wanted was for silence to scab over her headache.

  “I mean, this pattern is terrible. Danny’s old stuff from college. See this?” She turned the bowl for Greta’s closer inspection. The blue-striped bowls still had tiny particles of cereal clinging to the rim. Their edges were marked with chips and fork scrapes in the enamel. Meg stacked the bowls. “‘Don’t worry,’ he told me. ‘We’ll register for new plates, and we can smash these one by one by one.’”

  Sounded like Danny. Sounded like Greta too, actually. And their father, who took them skeet shooting with the wedding china after Martha left, even when they could have sold them. Some things were worth more than money.

  “How did, um …” Meg’s mouth tripped over the words. She clinked a handful of dirty spoons in her hand. “How did Danny look?”

  Honesty came easier than lies. “Like death.”

  “Like death?”

  “Like a scream mask. White face. Black eyes.”

  “Did they say anything about transferring him back?”

  Her optimism made Greta want to scream. Meg’s hope made her a bug stopped under a spyglass, temporarily stunned by the light. Stunned long enough for it to burn. Greta tried to never let herself get stunned; she would rather live entirely in the dark than let something throw her off, like Martha had. “Don’t you get that he might die? Like, that he might never, ever badmouth the Yankees or play the harmonica or make his Rice Krispies again?” Greta emptied Martha’s mug of coffee into the sink and handed the cup to Meg. Her headache beat behind her eyes, a drum urging her on. “He might never wake up.”

  “Don’t talk like that.” Meg held the cup, frozen in place. “Don’t even say that.”

  “What do you care, Meg? You can pick any guy you want, but I can’t pick another brother.”

  The mug slipped from Meg’s hands and broke in uneven shards around Greta’s bare feet. Meg squatted suddenly, body curling downward and inward. Her pale face matched the broken ceramic pieces around them. Greta tried to move out of the kitchen, but Meg grabbed onto her pant leg. “Don’t leave.”

  Greta didn’t. Even if she’d wanted to—and she did want to—she had nowhere to go. She let herself sink to the floor next to Meg, and when Meg’s head fell against her shoulder, she didn’t move away.

  * * *

  Greta now had a whole new scientific discipline’s worth of terminology to unlock. The first new term: “vasospasm”—the rupture of blood vessels in the brain. How it differed from an aneurysm or stroke, she couldn’t yet articulate. All she knew was that for three days after the vasospasm, the drugs coursing through Danny’s body had induced a coma—a coma stiller than his last one. With the possibility of brain trauma heightened further, the medical team wanted to stop the clock, to observe things for a few days. “Like a caterpillar going into a cocoon, hibernating,” one nurse explained when Greta stopped by the hospital that night. She must have heard from Meg that Greta studied Lepidoptera.

  “Actually,” Greta told the nurse, her voice metronomic, precise, “larva—that’s the caterpillar—eats itself inside the pupa. It digests itself—imagine a caterpillar smoothie—until nothing but tiny discs, mock-up of parts, remain to rebuild itself in the goop. It doesn’t hibernate. It breaks apart and eats itself for energy to finish its wings, genitals, legs, antennae. Did my brother become primordial soup before I came back?”

  The nurse stared at her, mouth an em dash of displeasure. “You don’t need to explain.”

  “You don’t need to condescend. I understand the term medically induced coma.”

  Meg brought the nursing staff donuts the next day. Probably an unrelated act of kindness.

  Greta did some extracurricular research on brain surgery—the mechanics, not the practice. She wasn’t planning on becoming Dr. Frankenstein. The materials that Nadine gave h
er were useless for Greta’s purposes. Nadine’s proscribed curriculum about brain injury included too many touchy-feely pastel pamphlets for her liking. Instead of reading the caregiver guides, Greta chose a text that required the installation of a medical dictionary on her phone to peruse during free hours.

  And less-free hours too. Greta completed her rounds with Maura and collected dead butterflies off the paths. Brandon stationed himself in the lab and instructed Maura and Greta to split the butterfly house duties. One of them had to guard the entrance of the wing. The entrance, a small glass room with locking doors on either side, was meant to be a place to explain the rules to patrons before they entered. Basically, don’t touch, don’t take, and don’t go off the paths.

  Since these warnings didn’t always work, another staff member had to be inside the wing. Supposedly this staff member was there to answer patron questions, but Greta usually managed to exude enough antipathy to keep questions away. She sat at one of the benches, book open on her lap.

  The only patrons, first thing in the morning, were usually parents of preschoolers desperate to get out of the house. Like clockwork, two families rushed into Reiman as the docent unlocked the door. Greta swore internally when she saw them. Perhaps she was a bad employee, but she was hardly alone anymore, between sleeping on Danny’s couch and working in a crowded lab. Being alone helped her recharge, and her introvert batteries had been sapped lately.

  One of the families—a mother and kid—wandered around the butterfly house while the other took off running to the conservatory. Greta heard the click of the entrance gate and Maura’s voice wishing the pair a “good visit with the butterflies.”

  Yeah, sure. They were real conversationalists. Ask them to tell you the one about the parasitic wasp.

  Even with her attention on the brain scans and medical terminology in her lap, she felt the presence of the family and tracked their progress around the stone path. The butterfly wing was small, but dense with plant and insect life. Insect life that the little boy was obviously unconcerned with. Instead, he went over to the only glowing screen in the wing—an identification program that only worked about half the time—and started fiddling around with it.