The Butterfly Effect

by Rachel Mans McKenny

  “Are you a medical student?” The mother’s voice startled Greta, whose internal antennae had been set on the boy. Some little boys pulled wings off butterflies and left them wriggling on the path. Some little girls did too. Greta had before she knew better. She had thought, as a kid, that would make them caterpillars again.

  “I am not a med student,” Greta said.

  The woman didn’t push the issue. “Well, looks interesting,” the mother said. Her words could have been taken as an indictment on Greta’s inattention, but the tone was chide-less.

  It was that tone that made Greta close the book. “It is, actually.”

  Strangers were easy. Strangers required little social energy. If she wanted to, she could talk to strangers all day. It was strangers that tried to get to know her that bothered Greta.

  The mother sat on the bench next to Greta and raised her voice unnaturally loud, enunciating clearly so that Greta raised her eyebrows. “So, butterfly brains don’t look like that, do they?”

  “No. Their brains are much less complex, but …” Greta cleared her throat. Out of the side of her eye, she saw the boy watching, but she didn’t turn toward him. “But their brains can do some cool things.”

  The boy turned reluctantly from the computer program, which had frozen anyway. It had a bug, she would have joked to Max. No one else liked puns.

  Greta mapped a butterfly brain on her palm, showed him a relative size and told him about the crazy shit that fit inside such a small space, removing the expletive. Insect brains were more complex than people gave them credit for. Consider the sensory capacity of the average insect. Smell and touch meant life. Beyond the highly developed sense of smell, many butterflies could register colors humans didn’t, like ultraviolet. The boy listened for a minute, and when his attention was drawn away again, at least it was by a butterfly.

  As they left the wing, Greta instructed them to check themselves in the mirrored exit room for clinging butterflies. Hitchhikers. The mother gave Greta a genuine smile as they left, and Greta thought maybe she wouldn’t be a terrible employee after all.

  * * *

  After work she brought the textbook to Danny’s room. His transfer back to Ames was a relief. In fact, over the course of the last week she had spent more time with her brother than in the whole past year. Even living in the same town, their threads had become parallel after Meg entered his life. Now, knotted together again, Greta found that she wanted nothing more than to tell him about what she was learning about his condition. He would find something beautiful in it. Maybe, in the colored brain scans. Maybe in the complex terminology. He would somehow hear music in all of it that Greta desperately needed to hear.

  Greta had a sandwich in one hand and a book in the other when the neurologist arrived. Dr. Traeger greeted her, then did his assessment while dictating his remarks to a resident. The neurologist was a man in his seventies with a monk’s cap of baldness. Three brown liver spots dotted his forehead, reminding Greta of the finger holes on a bowling ball. “Heavy reading,” Traeger remarked.

  Greta grunted.

  “What do you make of Steiger’s case studies?” Traeger’s voice smelled of condescension. Greta assumed he would offer her a wowwy pop next.

  The cure for condescension in every scientific context she’d ever been in had been facts, repeated with cool certainty. Luckily, she had both facts and certainty, and added a dash of suspicion. “Well, I went back through his charts and noticed that you didn’t follow the guidelines for a perfusion CT on day nine. The day of the vasospasm.”

  That iced it. “Recommendations, not guidelines,” Traeger said, his tone careful. “And he had one scheduled that afternoon. If he had made it until the afternoon without incident.”

  The resident excused himself, and Traeger seemed ready to do the same. He paused at Greta’s shoulder, obscuring her reading light. “What?” she asked.

  He adjusted his glasses. “Recovery is never as simple as the books make it out to be.”

  “I haven’t gotten to the recovery section yet.”

  “If you don’t trust me as Danny’s specialist, I’ll let someone else take his case.”

  Greta didn’t close the book, but she looked up at him. She had scanned the charts. She had read the recommendations for post-surgery treatment, and Traeger had complied with those. “It’s probably just a shit situation.”

  “Your words, not mine.” Traeger coughed and beat his chest with a fist. When it settled, he spoke again. “Let me be the doctor. Once he leaves, he’ll need your help with things I can’t necessarily foresee. He might not be the same as he was before.”

  Greta nodded, pretending she hadn’t been imagining just that despite her research.

  “I wish I could give you a solid answer on what life will be like. But one thing this field has taught me is that if you meet one patient with a brain injury, you meet one patient with a brain injury.” Trager’s shadow moved out of her light, and he opened the door to the hallway. “You might think about, well, talking to some people.”

  “I met Nadine,” Greta said. Now her voice dripped condescension.

  “There’s a group,” Traeger said. “Look in your packets for information. I think—well, I think it would add to your research. About the after.”

  The After. It sounded like the name of a parallel universe in Star Trek. Let’s go to the other side of the anomaly, Mr. Data. Engage.

  When the neurologist left, Greta stared at Danny’s closed eyes and realized that she did, actually, feel alone. Alone in the room. Alone in Ames. Alone.

  As if he could sense it, Danny’s eyelids flicked open, then closed. An indictment. A shaming.

  The boy in the butterfly wing reminded her of Danny, something in his hair sticking out at awkward angles. Something in the uncareful turned cuff on just one leg of his jeans. Something about the way he turned when something else caught his attention. But Danny never saw things like Greta saw them.

  In fact, Danny was wired more like a butterfly. Pretty things caught his eyes. The Megs. That, and the fact Danny could see colors that Greta never could. The term for it came later, much later: synesthesia. But the experience came when they were both five. The whole family had been at a military band concert on the day of Dad’s deployment. To Danny, the concept of “daddy leaving” only extended as far as he could count, which was to twenty. Count to twenty, then go find Dad. Greta knew it wasn’t a game, knew Dad wouldn’t be in finding range. He would be in another country; Martha had showed them a map, pictures from the encyclopedia of lumpy desert plains. “Does he get a camel?” was all Danny could think to ask, and he said if Dad did get a camel, maybe he could bring it home afterward.

  “Camels spit,” Martha had said.

  “I spit too, but you keep me,” Greta returned.

  Greta had crossed her arms the whole concert, but Danny had never seen a conductor before and couldn’t stop watching. It reminded Greta of the Magician’s Apprentice, with Mickey swooping his hands over the brooms and them doing his bidding. Greta didn’t care about the conductor. She watched the lines of her Dad’s face crease and uncrease on the outdoor stage at the park. When the band kicked into the romping thump-thump of the first military march, Danny turned to Greta and tugged on her sleeve. “It’s red,” Danny said.

  She shook her head and rolled her eyes in a way that mimicked Mom.

  “Nothing’s red, doofus,” Greta had said.

  “The music is red,” Danny whispered, and Martha shushed them. Martha’s eyes were wet, like shiny mirrors, but she hadn’t been crying, or Greta pretended she hadn’t.

  Years later, when his ability to explain himself improved, Greta realized Danny saw colors. Saw them whenever he heard music. He explained it like a piece of colored plastic shone in front of a white light, but in his head. Whether that was tied to his musical abilities, she couldn’t begin to guess.

  What he would be like in the After, not even the doctors could predict. What she did know:
even after the reading on brain injury, she felt constantly as she did on the day at that band concert, watching her Dad get onto a bus that would take him to a place she couldn’t imagine. The lost feeling steeped like tea, darkening in her. She waited for a sign.

  Then his eyes fluttered open and stayed. Coincidence is a funny thing. Coincidentally, his eyes opened at the same second that Martha walked in the door. Greta smelled her before she saw her. Her perfume was like a pheromone cloud.

  Danny’s eyes roved side to side. Blinked hard, slow, a first crack in an eggshell. After a blink, his lids glued closed again.

  “Stay with me, Danny,” Martha said from the doorway.

  Greta got off the chair by the window and knelt, taking the place where Dr. Traeger had stood a few minutes earlier. “Hey, Danny. Dan. Wake up.”

  “Danny,” Martha said, her voice unsteady.

  Danny’s eyes opened again. Greta had forgotten how green they really were. Freshly mown grass mixed with stripes of highlighter brightness. He turned those eyes again toward Martha’s face as she reached out a hand to him.

  The nurse must have seen a sign from the monitors in their nurse’s station too, because moments later, white coats and scrubs crowded around the bed and forced them both from their positions. Greta and Martha were displaced into the hallway. There they stood, not speaking, positioned on opposite sides of the corridor. They might have been two queens on a very small chessboard, only a dozen squares between them to cross.

  After a minute, Martha’s posture changed, softened. She checked her watch. “Want to share an elevator?”

  Greta didn’t move. She had the position closer to Danny’s room, and she put her hand against his doorplate. “Why? I’m not going anywhere.”

  Martha didn’t break her gaze. “You should let the medical professionals do their work.”

  Greta scoffed. “Why would I think you’d start fighting for him now? How could I ever guess that the first thing you’d want to do was leave?”

  “Greta, sometimes the best thing we can do is wait. And I can wait at home too.”

  “Jesus, I’m some kind of Sherlock Holmes now, solving the case of the missing mother. Turns out, she didn’t do it because she never did anything.” Greta slumped down the wall, crouching. “If you want to give up being here for him, go ahead. Seems like it’s easy for you.”

  Martha rocked foot to foot for a moment. Greta didn’t want to look at her face. Didn’t want to see if there were tears there again. God, the tears hadn’t saved her dad from getting on that bus, and they weren’t going to restart Danny’s brain either. When Martha left, Greta expected to feel the weight of her leave too, the weight off her chest. Her legs began to ache as she crouched, still feeling like she’d made the wrong move on that chessboard. She didn’t know any other moves to make.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Greta slept horribly on Meg’s couch. Franz was a good dog, but he had the habit of licking her hand at midnight and bringing her the leash at six AM. The couch hated her, or at least it seemed that way from its lack of support. On top of that, she kept having a reoccurring dream focused on Halloween twenty years ago. Paired costumes: Hansel and Gretel. The whole thing had rankled Greta at the time, reminding her yet again that she got the “weird” name and Danny’s was normal. Reminding her again that she was a pair, always, even though all they had in common was a shared uterus for nine months. In real life, they had gotten their biggest candy haul that year—their quaint faux-German apron and pantaloons winning over the houses sick of superheroes. In the dream, Danny and Greta got lost. Greta left behind Skittles to follow back. The witch’s house wasn’t candy, but as cottony as a spider’s web, and Danny got caught. Greta tried to wrench him out, tugging his arms, legs, and failing, flailing.

  So that dream wasn’t great, and neither were the backaches she got rolling off the couch every morning, or the adaptation to someone else’s schedule. Meg showered both in the morning, as well as the evening on nights when there was cheerleading practice. Greta showered every three days unless she actively spilled something on herself. Meg ate bowls of cereal with names like LeanFit Plus with smiling suns on it that totally would not murder you if they had the chance, nope. When Meg noticed Greta eating Reese’s Puffs cereal, she had gotten about four words into a spiel about corn syrup when Greta interrupted to say that she must really hate the farmers, huh? Someone had to eat the corn.

  Meg was built from an entirely different blueprint than Greta. Meg craved other people as much as Greta hoped to avoid them. Most nights, Meg took her social gatherings away from the apartment, but once or twice her closest friends, Ginger and Leanne, came over for mojitos and board games. They seemed skeptical that Greta didn’t want to be included in their “fun.”

  Lately, it had been more personal arguments. Meg washed her bras in the bathroom sink. They dried, plinking aggravating drops of water into the bathtub adjoining the living room, where Greta spent most of her free hours. Because Franz scratched at closed doors—no matter what door it was—closing off the bathroom wasn’t an option. Every few days, plink plink plink came the sound of the bras dripping. Instead of pointing this out, one Saturday afternoon Greta removed the problem—the bras—by putting them in the oven on the very lowest setting to dry. She had kept as careful an eye on them as she would have for any bra during this process. If Meg hadn’t walked in and found Greta “baking my favorite bras,” Greta thought she probably never would have noticed it happened.

  “They are crispy!” Meg said, shaking a pink flower-patterned bra in Greta’s face.

  The strap not held in Meg’s grip smacked lightly against Greta’s cheek, and she took a step back. Greta only wore sports bras despite never having participated in any organized sport. She said, “I don’t think anyone can tell.”

  “I can tell. Bra Pringles. That’s what they feel like.”

  If Greta had liked Meg and wanted to be friends, she would have asked her if they were sour cream and onion or barbecue, but instead she said, “Okay.”

  “What do you mean, ‘okay’? Do you mean ‘sorry’?”

  Greta did not mean sorry, and Meg knew it.

  * * *

  Three weeks of work without running into the snow coatless, but Greta wasn’t patting herself on the back just yet. Three weeks of butterfly releases and maintenance, of sanitizing specimen cases and watching school children tap on the glass. Three weeks of switching her cell to silent the moment she entered.

  Danny wouldn’t die while she worked.

  He wouldn’t.

  He would be one of the lucky ones, and everything would be fine. Was this how optimism worked, by willfully ignoring the truth? After two weeks watching patients in the recovery wing, Greta had enough of a sense of what it meant not to be lucky. Three other cases of brain injury were admitted. Two were traumatic—two motor vehicle accidents—and one was a stroke. The daughter of the stroke victim caught Meg’s arm once while they were both visiting. Greta overheard their conversation in the hall, watched the way Meg laid a hand on the woman’s arm. The next day, the stroke victim died, and they didn’t see the woman again.

  But that wouldn’t be Danny.

  She ignored the possibility like she had ignored an e-mail from her advisor for two days now. It sat, bold and unopened in her e-mail—a constant reminder of a red number one on the envelope icon on her phone’s home screen.

  Schrodinger’s cat. The cat in the box was both alive and dead until someone opened it. She, the doctoral student, was both funded and not—in hot water and not—until she opened the e-mail.

  “Coming tonight?” a voice behind her asked.

  Greta looked up from her phone at the lunch table, from the e-mail she wouldn’t check (whose subject bar said, “RE: Research Status” in Arial font, like all the other subject bars, but appearing so much more ominous). The speaker who had interrupted her was Mike. Mike from Marketing. Greta thought of him as Marketing Mike, with the Nikon camera, who obviously bel
ieved his photography and design degree was too good for the place it brought him. Marketing Mike with the hipster glasses and flannel shirt, as if he were dressing for Seattle autumn instead of Iowa winter.

  “Coming tonight?”

  “Coming to where?”

  “Mixers is throwing a party. A bunch of us are going.”

  Marketing Mike reminded Greta of someone who would call any drink a cocktail. “Who’s the bunch?”

  “Well, me, Brandon, maybe some of the older research help—as in, legal age. It’s a Democratic fundraising thing, you know, before the caucus.”

  “Oh boy. I’ll get out my liberal spray, then.”

  Mike swallowed his yogurt hard as if she’d given him bad news. “Oh, I mean, I thought you were …”

  “You do realize that ‘conservative’ isn’t a dirty word, right? Like, I’m not going to go sticking a balanced budget up your ass or something.”

  Honestly, Greta wasn’t conservative or liberal—or anything. Politics could be more divisive than religion in Iowa, and she was an atheist in both. Still, she knew that annoying this man would be her favorite interaction all day. It lived up to all hopes. Marketing Mike turned purple, about the same shade as his blackberry yogurt. It splooged out of the top of its plastic tube like he was an oversized, facial hair–wearing toddler. “I mean,” he stammered, seeming unsure how to continue.

  “Oh, I’ll totally come,” Greta said, surprising herself but enjoying the surprise on Mike’s face more. “I need a night out.”

  * * *

  When she finally opened the e-mail, it called her to the principal’s office, or at least it felt that way. Trudging to the ATRB, she was a specimen prepared for dissection. She’d explained the situation with Danny via e-mail, but Plank responded that he still wanted to talk in person to discuss “options.” If only she could still be collecting data in the cloud forest. Costa Rica and the resort could have been a sci-fi movie, or maybe her life now was. A parallel universe—make one choice, and it all went a different way.