When Greta was a teen, there had been a surge of reinterest in the theory of the butterfly effect. Magazines covered it, and experts were interviewed on 60 Minutes. It was a dramatic time—September 11th and natural disasters. As the theory stated, if a butterfly flaps its wings in Argentina, there’s a monsoon in Singapore. She understood the attraction then, and she understood it now—human beings like to think that everything they do matters. That Egg McMuffin was the right breakfast choice, Chuck. Look at the third-quarter report you gave to the board afterward! Not that she didn’t think actions had consequences—her research had focused on climate change, after all—but if the butterfly effect were true, it was paralyzing. Sometimes shit just happened.
She met with Plank in his office before heading to the bar. Tom’s office always gave an impression of something collapsing in on itself. Gravity worked differently there, and the rickety shelves full of academic journals and books leaned slightly forward. If one of the flies he studied were to land on the top of a teetering shelf, it might come crashing forward, but Tom’s office worked magic. Even with its full-to-the-brim bookshelves, not a thing looked out of place. Except herself as she scrunched into a chair, fully aware she took up too much space.
“I’m concerned.” Plank didn’t beat around bushes. He, in fact, wouldn’t have planted bushes anyway because they would have disrupted the ease of mowing his lawn.
“Don’t be.”
“I am. Larry’s research continues without you—he can’t stop the work. It’s time sensitive. We can’t stop the butterflies from mating.”
“Have you tried putting their mothers in the room?”
Plank paused, then gave a hearty guffaw. “You’re funny. More than that, you’re a good student, but—”
“I can’t leave my brother.”
“I get it, Greta. I do.” Tom took a deep breath and leaned against his desk. “I had a long chat with Larry, and he’s finishing the research season solo. I’ve offered to supervise whatever project you do. I’m open to ideas—but you’re slated to do your prelims soon.”
“I’ll be ready.” She wished she sounded half as confident as she should have, saying that. She was an actor cold-reading a script. Preliminary exams meant writing for a week straight on any issue in the field they could devise, anything within the field of her general entomology coursework. If she didn’t pass them, then nothing else mattered. She would fail.
As if sensing a lack of awareness of her screwed-ness, Tom continued. “Plus, alienating Larry isn’t going to win you any friends.”
“I swear I’ll work on it.” She didn’t even know what she meant by “it.”
“Sooner rather than later.”
“I swear.”
“Don’t swear, show. And be ready for prelims in May.” Like a gavel coming down, those words marked his judgment. She didn’t get evicted, but she got a strong final warning. Science, if nothing else, studied a consistent set of observable conditions. Her current condition was ricketier than Plank’s bookshelves and currently less valuable to the program than they were.
She swore under her breath the entire ride back to work. Succeeding in entomology was all she wanted to do with her life. To understand the vastness of the field by understanding its details, and now they were doubting her competence because of—what? A family emergency? She had to bite her lip not to spit out expletives in front of some fourth-graders while giving them a tour. At least she could go out and drink tonight. And drink she would.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Having not had one that she wasn’t related to, Greta didn’t know the protocol for roommates and nights out. Usually, Meg was the social butterfly and Greta was the one preoccupied with the real thing. Should she leave a note at the house? Text Meg? Write a note on a Post-it and slap it on Danny’s forehead? He was about as mobile as a whiteboard these days.
Although he was awake more and had even started making noises, Greta sometimes didn’t know why she stopped at the hospital on her way home from work, even though she felt herself drawn there as surely as a compass needle drawn North. The nurses gave her a wide berth, knowing her schedule. She had been watching Star Trek’s The Next Generation with him, season five. The show was her happy place, and aboard the starship Enterprise she could pretend she was ten years old again, watching it with her dad on a school night, homework ignored on her lap. Danny never used to watch it with them. While he might not have chosen to watch the show had he been conscious, she didn’t feel bad running an out-loud commentary as the show played. Yesterday, it was the episode about the game that trapped the crew with its mind control. It made her think of Danny’s comments about his middle schoolers and their cell phones. She wanted to inflict her taste on Danny when he was awake sometime, just to see if he agreed.
Tonight she wouldn’t be anywhere near a hospital ward or the Enterprise. Tonight she would be in a den of lions with her ex-boyfriend, and as she applied eye liner to her lids for the first time in months, she refused to admit to herself how much she anticipated it. That didn’t mean she wouldn’t love some backup.
She texted Max. Free tonight?
An ellipsis. A pause. A response, finally: No. Family stuff.
She wasn’t going to text back Please, especially after such a short response. She was half mad at him, but it was typical Max behavior. He always had family stuff. That was the problem with having two parents alive and in town. And parents that he liked and talked to, presumably, since he lived with them
Another ellipsis and another reply from Max. Catch up later?
Yeah, she said, but they didn’t make plans.
* * *
The bar smelled like smoke despite the smoking ban in place for years. The entrance was blocked by a large folding table. Of all of the people in Ames, she recognized the woman staffing the table as Meg’s friend Leanne. Leanne was a tall, thin black woman with a shaved head. “Greta!” she said warmly. “So good to see you.”
Greta had no opinion about the goodness of the situation.
“It’s a ten-dollar donation,” Leanne said, patting a tall blue mason jar in front of her. “And feel free to take any lit you’d like.”
Greta glanced at the brochures on the table. “No thanks.” She handed over her ten dollars, Leanne shoved it into the jar with the other Hamiltons.
She was about to push past the entrance, when Leanne stopped her. “Hey,” she said. “I know you’re staying with Meg. You’re Danny’s twin, aren’t you?”
She should be used to the question by now. Even in high school, she was “Danny’s twin.” She didn’t think it was popularity this time that made the woman ask. “Yeah,” Greta mumbled.
“How is he doing?”
It was hard to talk to strangers about Danny without defining a million data points. His recovery was now a game of Chutes and Ladders. Even after his coma ended, there would be a new scale: the Rancho Los Amigos Scale of Cognitive Functioning. Greta was a firm believer that there were too many acronyms in the world, but she knew she needed a way to shorten it. If she just called it Rancho, it sounded like either a salad dressing or a dude ranch. If she called it Los Amigos, she pictured that annoying animated preschooler speaking Spanish at her. Whatever name she called it, the new scale would track Danny after he woke up and could respond to stimuli in a meaningful way. Her mind shuffled through explanations before realizing she didn’t owe one. “Danny’s fine,” Greta said. “I mean, I don’t know. Meg could probably fill you in just as well.”
Leanne gazed at Greta for another long minute. Luckily, the door to the bar opened, and Greta had to cede her spot to make room for another round of supporters waiting to pony up their donations.
The bar resonated with bodies and voices, but the voices disconnected from the bodies in the small space so that everyone was a bad dub of themselves. Most of the lighting came from neon beer signs for defunct brands, and a corner of leather couches sat opposite the long bar. It took a minute to spot her group, but finally
Greta noticed Brandon sitting on the arm of one of the couches, and Marketing Mike leaned against the wall so close to a sign that his hair glowed pink from the light. Greta went to the bar first and grabbed a beer to steady herself before approaching the group.
“Little lady,” Mike said, though Greta was neither. Mike pushed himself off the wall and out of his Hollywood cowboy lean. The beam of pink light traveled down his shirt and returned his hair to black. “Glad to see that even a skeptic could come put ten dollars toward free community college and better health care.”
Greta bit her tongue. If she wanted giveaways, she would go to a baseball game. That’s what she wanted to say, but instead she said, “Yeah, well. A night out’s a night out.”
Brandon smiled at her. “How’s your brother?”
“Same as yesterday. The flip-book version of his hospital stay wouldn’t sell any copies, that’s for sure.” The leather couch was half full of people. The end farthest from Brandon had a pair of twenty-somethings, simultaneously texting and talking too loud. Brandon’s arm, ropey and long, hung across the back of the couch and corralled the only free spot. She saw the place to sit but couldn’t make her feet move toward it. To be that close to Brandon in a dark room, even with layers of winter coat and air between them, would feel like old times. Not that old, she knew—a year ago. Since before he left for New York. Long enough that her skin cells were completely sloughed from the last time his skin had rubbed against hers. She had a new layer of herself.
As she stood, rocking foot to foot to find her own bubble in the area, a body pushed past her into the circle of couches. The body, the person, fit herself into the space under Brandon’s arm. “The line for the bathroom was so long I finished my beer while waiting and could have had a second.”
“Need me to flag a server?” Brandon asked.
Greta watched the two of them like she might in a chemistry lab, observing for actions and reactions. When Brandon used to look at her, did other people see them this way? His half-closed lids, the swoop of his hair as he leaned closer to her to make sure she could hear him over the roar and laughter. Greta knew she could hear, this woman, because Greta could hear every word he said. Or maybe Greta still tuned into the frequency of his voice, catching its waves because she unconsciously searched for them.
“Oh, sure. If we can get someone in this mess,” the woman said. She smiled at Brandon and glanced around so that her face caught the red light. In the dark, Greta couldn’t get a good read on her details: Did she have blue eyes or hazel? Brown or dirty-blonde hair? It looked vaguely RainbowBrite-y in this light. Still, Greta couldn’t help but notice the fineness of her face, as if carved. Plucked eyebrows, not a hair out of place. Thin, sloped nose like a ski jump. Greta thought of her own nose, slightly bulbous at its base from a softball pitch gone awry in high school gym class. They were different mediums, she and this woman. Granite versus Play-Doh. The woman must have caught Greta watching her. “You Greta?”
Me Tarzan, you Jane. Greta chose to respond in a full sentence, two if she could muster them. “I am Greta. Who are you?” She realized after she spoke how much she sounded like the help feature voice on a cell phone.
“Who do you want me to be?” The woman gave a wink of her much better eye-lined eyes, whatever color they were. The wink, plus Brandon’s thin-lipped smile, wrote the story. This woman had no clue about Greta, not really. “I’m Eden. So great to finally be meeting some of Brandon’s friends. He can be so secretive.” Eden raised a perfect eyebrow at Brandon. “I swear he’s a spy and not a butterfly house curator.”
Brandon laughed. “Curator would be for a museum job. I’m more like babysitter, friend, mentor of butterflies.”
“He’s a bad influence. Buys them booze,” Marketing Mike cut in. The line struck Greta as funny, actually. It would have been funnier if Greta had remembered Mike was there. When her attention snapped over to him, Mike took an actual step backward, as if she’d pushed him. Greta didn’t relish being the third wheel, but being the fourth felt worse in some ways. This couldn’t be a setup.
Oh, but that’s exactly what it was. When Greta asked where everyone else from Reiman was, she got a shrug and the reply that they’d texted and said they couldn’t make it. “They” could mean anyone, the undefined group of “them” that Greta wouldn’t know the names of if Mike had spouted them off. She was new, but she wasn’t dumb. When Mike offered to buy her a drink, she shook her empty bottle as if there were still beer there and said she was still working on this one. And when Marketing Mike tried to hold her hand during the “speaker” (the shouter, the spouter of clichés about progress), Greta leaned in so that he would hear her when she said, louder than she needed to, “I have less than zero interest in you.”
He didn’t market himself well, especially when he mouthed the word “bitch” and went to get a drink. Or cocktail, she supposed.
Brandon and Eden disappeared after the speaker finished. Greta didn’t see them go, didn’t know if they left together—her tugging him—or separately, with chaste kisses on the curb of Main Street. At the end of the speech, music started—dance music—and some men shoved the couches against the wall. Marketing Mike found some hippy (body-shaped) hippie (patchouli-smelling) chick to rub against, and soon everyone was grinding in pairs and trios to a song with a heavy bass beat. Greta stood for a few minutes against the wall, then closed her tab and left.
Pheromones and lekking. God, it all reminded her of Costa Rica. Danny had been right all along. Or maybe, in this flashing semi-darkness it was more like fireflies. Everything in science had a name. The enzyme that made fireflies luminescent? Luciferase. It reacted to another substance: leciferin. Both sounded like they were gifts of the devil himself, but really they shared the root for the word “light.” Hell and brightness, two ends of the spectrum of a romance.
During her campouts in the backyard, she used to flash signals to the fireflies. Sometimes, flashing in the same sequence—timed just right—it tricked a few to swarm to her. She spoke their language, repeated it, even though she wasn’t exactly sure what she was saying. Here, she didn’t want to say anything to anybody. Part of her wanted to curl into a body, though. Pick a guy at random. Invite him back to—where exactly? She didn’t have anywhere.
One thing she knew was that insects didn’t masturbate. They were more virtuous than she was. She couldn’t even do that. On the drive home she listened to classical music and opened the window a crack to let the cold air run across her face. The air didn’t brush her face like Brandon’s fingertips, warm and calloused. It wasn’t his mouth, the way his lips cracked in the winter. His lips, crinkled paper against hers, until they softened. Cold, sobering air kept her from imagining Eden slip off her dress the way the nurse imagined butterflies shed their cocoons. As if a cocoon had a zipper down the back.
* * *
Danny’s feeding tube came out, and Greta sat with him for his first meal. “Hope you like pudding,” she said, sitting on the edge of his bed. “Not that this is pudding. It’s maybe soup?”
Meg spooned a little into Danny’s mouth, and he held it there before swallowing. “Drink?” Meg asked.
“No,” Danny said. He’d started to speak again, single words. It would be a while before he could give his opinion about Picard’s leadership in season six, but he didn’t seem to hate watching the show with her. He never said no when Greta asked if he wanted to start an episode.
His voice sounded like he had laryngitis, but with every word, Meg looked at him like he was reciting an epic poem. She beamed at this rejection.
After Meg left—she went to Wednesday and Sunday church, for some reason—Greta curled up in the leather recliner next to the bed. It was the only thing she would miss about the hospital when Danny transferred to the outpatient facility in a few days. Greta let Meg handle the tours for that by herself—Greta couldn’t handle nursing facilities. The smell of them always reminded her of the solution in her insect killing jars.
Greta’s collection of jars was in storage. She had four of varying sizes—weaponized mason jars primed with chemicals to knock an insect out without damaging it as a specimen. Yes, it went against the lease agreement of the facility to have deadly chemicals like cyanide in storage. Also, three full containers of acetate might be considered a flammability issue, but it was one of the most effective chemicals to do the job. Killing as a job. Bug assassinator.
When she was pining for a net in one hand and a jar in the other, Greta knew she’d been out of the field for too long. In quiet moments like this one, Greta fought off the urge to get on a plane and sneak back into Costa Rica. Her first paycheck safely deposited, she had enough money now for the flight. The fact that her funding for the project had been revoked, well, that was another issue all together.
Danny woke searching for someone. Not Greta, even though Greta was the one there for him. Probably Meg. “Do you want more food?” she asked.
“No.”
“Drink?”
“No.”
When Greta and Meg were there at the same time, Greta usually stood by and let Meg take over. Alone with Danny, all Greta craved was order, sense, and normalcy. She had the urge to shove a harmonica in his fist and tell him to get at it. Play, like he’d done every infuriating moment when they were kids. Constant music.
When they were five, Dad took her and Danny on a walk through downtown Ames. Danny pulled his hand from hers and got loose. They searched everywhere and found him in the music store, perched on a piano stool plunking out the notes to “Old MacDonald.” Rather than get mad, their father asked about a layaway program. The owner had a better idea. A friend of his (he shouldn’t be telling them this, he prefaced the whole conversation, since he was a businessman) had a free piano. A dozen of them, actually, in his barn. Whenever someone posted “free piano” in the paper, he picked it up in the hopes that someone would adopt it someday. The man used to keep cows but grew too old to tend to them. Now he kept pianos.
The Butterfly Effect Page 7