The Butterfly Effect

by Rachel Mans McKenny

  Martha stayed squatting and didn’t look up at her. Greta made it halfway to her car, rummaging in her pocket for her keys, and came out with them gripped between her fingers like she was in a dark parking lot. She let them fall into her pocket again and turned to where her mother still stared down at the gray stone she’d had nothing to do with choosing.

  “You can’t pretend you’ve always been here,” Greta shouted back from beside her car.

  “It was fifteen years ago.”

  Greta took a few steps toward Martha again, blood pulsing in her throat. “It doesn’t matter. That’s the thing. It doesn’t matter. You chose someone else over us.”

  “That’s not what—”

  Greta took a deep breath before interrupting Martha’s interruption. “And that would have been okay. Right? Like, I could have gotten over it. But then you left him. You left your better option, your greener grass.”

  “This isn’t about a man, Greta. And if you’d just let me—”

  “No.” Somehow the argument had dragged Greta off the street and back into the mud. Just five feet away from the gravestone again, she saw the gray roots of her mother’s head as she looked down at the gravestone.

  “If I thought you wanted to talk like adults, I would talk,” Martha said, still not glancing up at her. It was the same time-out voice Greta remembered from childhood—that achingly calm voice in the face of a tantrum.

  Greta grabbed her keys again, cutting her palm against their sharp edges. Her tennis shoes sank in the mud as she stomped back to the car. Parked below was Martha’s car, an unassuming white Camry. No one would guess that it belonged to the bride of Satan, but you know, she would probably leave him, too, if there were better options. When Greta sat on the front seat, she set off the whoopee cushion in her pocket. A low, loud belch of air under her. And suddenly she was gulping air between loud gasps of laughter. That’s what I get for American Spirits, huh, Dad? Her car kicked into gear.

  She dialed Max’s number, cradling the phone between her ear and shoulder as she pulled out of the cemetery. The phone rang. Rang again. Where the hell could he be on a Sunday afternoon? His family went to church, but even Greta knew that was a morning kind of thing. When his voicemail flipped on, she didn’t even leave a message, though there were a few seconds between the beep and her turning off the phone. Empty air on his voicemail.

  Meg’s words rang in Greta’s head: “Do you even let someone try to get close to you?”

  She felt like she was trying to draw on an empty bank account with Max. How much could she exploit his good will?

  But there were other people who tolerated her, right? Or used to.

  She shouldn’t have done it, but she drove past Brandon’s place on the way home. Brandon lived on the other edge of the chain-link fence. Turned out, the houses were rentals filled with PhD students on a budget. It also turned out that the first time she and Brandon had sex in that house, Greta got up afterward and noticed something strange. The neon Marlboro cowboy, which served as ironic decoration in a nonsmoker’s man cave, fell off the wall during a freak breeze from a window that Brandon didn’t remember leaving open. In the car on the way home, she warned her dad that he needed to stay out of her personal life, whispered into the air like he inhabited the pine tree air freshener hanging from her rearview mirror.

  It wasn’t her father she was trying to exorcise as she pulled into Brandon’s driveway. It was four o’clock in the afternoon on a weekend. This was a normal friend kind of time to drop by, right? With or without prior authorization, it was less bad for an ex-girlfriend to stop by unannounced when it was daytime on a day when people somewhere sat in pews and folded their hands. She knocked on the door.

  Eden answered, her almost-metallic blonde hair in a balletic bun poised on top of her head. Even on a Sunday, she had a full face of makeup in the way that Greta identified with women not from the Midwest. Thick mascara, purposeful eyeliner, and a soft-pink lip. Below this getup, she wore slouchy sweatpants and a pink sweatshirt. The pristine condition of both reminded Greta that Eden didn’t need to work out, or didn’t sweat if she did. “Hey, Greta,” Eden said, because of course she would remember someone’s name she’d met only once. She waved Greta in with a wide smile. “We were just watching some hoops. Right, babe?”

  Brandon waved a hand from the couch. He had a section of newspaper draped across his lap—exactly how Greta would have chosen to watch basketball too.

  Eden perched on the edge the white loveseat, the one that Greta had once fallen off while making out with Brandon. Her gray eyes tracked the movements of jerseyed figures on the flat screen above Brandon’s unusable fireplace. In Greta’s back pocket, her phone started to vibrate. Probably Max returning her call.

  Brandon patted a seat next to him, and Greta slipped off her shoes. The mud from the cemetery coated a fine ring around her ankles and socks, so she stripped down to bare feet. She tried to hide them under her as she sat on the couch. She wondered if Brandon had watched Eden put her makeup on in the mirror that morning, his arm slung around her waist as he looked on while she painted herself. Once Greta and Brandon had walked through the Younkers makeup section, accepting every perfume sample offered to them—up one arm and down another. Pausing at a makeup display, Greta had grabbed an oversized makeup brush and pretended to apply blush to her butt. “That’s how those monkeys get red asses,” she had said. He’d laughed. They both stunk so badly that her car smelled like a greenhouse had exploded inside it for weeks. Brandon maybe wouldn’t know that Greta actually knew how to use makeup, though. She felt self-consciously naked—her feet and her face and everything, she guessed.

  “So, what’s up?” Brandon asked.

  She shouldn’t be disappointed that he didn’t remember her father’s death day. They weren’t a couple when her father died. She usually observed the anniversary alone, but still she kicked herself for not being more open prior to this moment so that she wouldn’t have to explain everything. A full Greta recap. She knew she couldn’t really talk about everything, or anything, with Eden here and thousands of roaring fans cheering for and against two teams she didn’t have any connection to. “Got into a fight with my mother,” she told him.

  “That sucks,” he said, his voice careful. He was obviously mining his memory for any mention of a mother in the past. He wouldn’t find one. “You okay?”

  Eden stood up, fists pumping. “Tar Heels!”

  Brandon didn’t roll his eyes. It was his nature to be a good boyfriend. He’d never made fun of the stupid shit she liked, either. He’d always watched at least a few minutes of Star Trek before he picked up a book. “Right, well, I’ll get over it.” Greta stood up. “I’m not sure why I came.”

  Brandon stood too. “No, I get it. I mean, we should hang out sometime. Maybe you can bring someone.”

  Someone you’re seeing. Someone you’re kissing and someone who’s seeing more naked skin than your toes. “Yeah, sure. That’d be … something.” Greta rolled her socks into a ball and crammed them into her pocket. She slid over the heels of her shoes so that her bare feet met the wet insoles of the sneakers with a gush.

  Eden waved and broke eye contact with the screen. A commercial break. “Sorry to be a bad host,” she chirped. “Twenty Final Four appearances can’t even compete with this guy’s rugged good looks. But I was a Tar Heel before I was with him.”

  And you’ll be a Tar Heel after, Greta thought as she pulled out of the driveway. Those loathsome thoughts that danced from one lobe to the next with glee. In her head, she didn’t have to pretend she didn’t mean it.

  Max left a blank voicemail, too, in return for hers. When she got back to Danny’s apartment, she logged onto Facebook and sent Max a message:

  Today SUCKED.

  He sent back a beer emoji with a question mark after it.

  I don’t want to talk to anyone ever again.

  We don’t have to talk, he wrote back.

  Okay, Greta texted, and the
y made plans to meet.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Even on Sunday nights, Greta was afraid to run into students at bars in town. Once, two years ago, she happened to be at the same bar as a student celebrating her twenty-first birthday. The student practically fell off her stool while her friends handed her more shots. Greta had felt like one of those creepy, leering men on family dramas in the eighties talking about high school girls. “I keep getting older, but they just stay the same age.”

  One of the only places to duck students were the dive bars on the other side of the railroad tracks. Greta and Max settled on Mikey’s. Ames didn’t have motorcycle gangs exactly, but there were motorcycles parked out front. While in her hometown, twenty miles away, there would be rips in the leather jackets around her, in a college town these were intact, with their patches carefully sewn on, like it was a meeting of a Boy Scout troop on wheels.

  At five on a Sunday, the crowd in Mikey’s was thin and lazy—thin as in few people; the men had plenty of girth. The whole place smelled like popcorn, even though the popcorn machine was empty. Like at Brandon’s, some basketball game played in the background. Max was already there when Greta arrived. He was reading a thick book that looked like a presidential biography, under the light of a hanging lamp. He turned when she approached and stowed it before she could ask what it was. She missed the days before the aneurysm, when she’d had time to read horror and sci-fi and fantasy—to escape into something that was wholly in her head but apart from herself. Now, all the reading she did was either about brain injury or bugs, with little room for space exploration or ax murder. If anyone could conjure up free time where there was none, it would be Max. Max had been the single most organized person Greta had ever met, and while she had never told him so, he would have made a good doctor had he not dropped out of medical school after the first year. He said he’d been “winnowed out,” but she always suspected the truth was something murkier. Even in the bar, he looked like a young professional, ready to slip a thermometer out of the pocket of his pressed button-down. He didn’t fit into the bar dressed like that, and he would never have fit into her hometown. Maybe that was why she liked him.

  Greta took the stool next to Max, but he had switched from focusing on his book to his phone, and didn’t look at her. When her own phone buzzed, she realized what he was doing. No talking, his message said. He caught her gaze and gave a half smile. When the bartender approached, she held up two fingers. She didn’t know what they’d get by just specifying a number and not a product, but it produced a result. Two mugs of watery beer appeared in front of them. They clinked them together and drank in silence. Almost silence. The soundtrack was her, slurping, and him, sipping, and the bar’s country music and sleepy middle-aged men yelling at referees someplace far away.

  Beers acquired, he sent another text. We’ll start with the good stuff. Promise.

  She barely had time to question what he meant when she noticed a tablet perched on the bar in between them. Max opened Netflix and scrolled to the downloaded shows. He had an entire season of Star Trek Voyager.

  She was about to text her protest, when the first episode began, and by the second she was three beers in and enjoying the flavor of the show more than her drink. Max knew that she never strayed beyond The Next Generation, but for once, she didn’t feel like fighting. She didn’t love Captain Janeway’s crew, but Max had started at an exciting episode during a Borg attack. The Borg episodes from TNG had been some of her favorites. The Borg, half humanoid and half machine, lived in colonies like bees. They were even called drones, with a queen as their head. The entomological connections in sci-fi were one of the things that drove her love of the genre. Somehow the imagination of writers drew connections from insect to alien so easily that these trails were everywhere. At the end of the second episode, it was clear that a Borg was joining Janeway’s crew, and slightly tipsy Greta had to admit it was an interesting turn of events. Not that she would admit that to Max.

  Not saying anything at all felt so good that Greta was silent the rest of the night. When she got back into the apartment, Franz Liszt nosed his way out of Meg’s bedroom and curled up on the couch next to Greta. He was a cute dog. A Wheaton terrier mix—she’d done a little digging around. She thought she would have named him Wil if it had been up to her. Ensign Puppy. Why weren’t there any dogs on the starship Enterprise? Data had that cat. She’d never been around a dog much, but she liked the silence between them. It was like he could sense the things she didn’t say, and soon they both fell asleep, his wet muzzle resting on her leg.

  * * *

  Monday morning, Greta spoke again. This time, to the nursing staff, and it didn’t go well. She had woken up with a plan to protect Danny from Martha.

  “I didn’t ask if it was easy. I asked if it was possible.” Greta’s hands on her hips defiantly. She didn’t know if it was a genetic predisposition to cock one’s hips when making a stand or if it reflected learned behavior. Someone’s dissertation could come from that stance.

  “The patient’s wishes need to be taken into consideration,” the nurse responded.

  “And once the patient regains the power of complex speech, then maybe we can ask him.”

  The nurse bit her lip and referenced her charts. “Look, I’ve been helping your brother for two weeks. He lights up when your mother comes around.”

  “He’s developed phosphorescence? You might want to note that in his paperwork. Probably a side effect of some drug or another.”

  “If you ask me—”

  “I didn’t. I’m listed as the next of kin, right? So take her off. We can take care of him.”

  We. Meg and Greta, an unlikely superhero pairing. How to explain to the nurses that sometimes it isn’t better to have loved and lost. Sometimes it’s better to pretend like you never loved at all, since that person acted like they didn’t love you. Danny didn’t need someone who was just going to leave him again. Greta had put down roots, planted herself back here, and she would be damned if Martha came and fucked everything up again just as she was rebuilding what little family they had left.

  After Martha had left fifteen years ago, her father hadn’t stepped up; he had shut down. Greta hadn’t taken over her mother’s workload either. If anything, Greta’s chores got easier without Martha. Greta sorted and folded the laundry like she always had, but there was a full load less without Martha there. Greta unstacked the plates from the dishwasher as she always had, but time between loads of dishes went a little longer. Danny, on the other hand, tried to fill himself into the holes that their mother had left behind. He carried them for the first month on his shoulders, or tried to, at least until the social worker came. He was the one who made their birthday cake that year. He had walked around with this guilty dog look like he had done something to make her run, and it was remembering that face now that made Greta plant her feet in the hallway, restate her request.

  “I don’t want her here.”

  Trying to create a plan with Martha involved felt like trying to plant a garden in the winter. Better to go at it alone, or with only Meg. Greta might not know what she was doing or how she could help Danny, but she would figure it out fast if she needed to.

  She needed to, she realized.

  Still more noise in the hallway.

  The nurse raised an eyebrow at Greta. “She doesn’t sound happy.”

  Greta nodded. “Is there a back stairway?”

  “Emergency exit only.”

  And this doesn’t count? “Oh, so not coward exit only.”

  The nurse didn’t say anything, but her lips curled in such a deliberate way that Greta would have suspected that the nurse called Martha herself if she hadn’t been with her this whole time.

  Martha stood by the nurse’s station, where one hallway crisscrossed with another. Acoustically, it was the best place to make one’s stand for attention. Martha’s body turned toward Danny’s room as she raised her voice to the nurse at the desk. She turned her attention
as soon as Greta stepped in the hallway. Martha half-ran up to her, so mad that she spat. “They say I’ve been put on the no-contact list. The no-visitor list?”

  Greta felt the cross-hairs on her, and with no option for the flight response, her heart began to beat. Fight it is. Ready the photon torpedoes, Worf. Her voice raised in pitch and volume, like the knob broke off inside her. “Are you the aneurysm fairy, here to exchange his recovery for some sort of favor?”

  Martha let the sarcasm slide. “What did Meg say?”

  “Meg doesn’t know.”

  “That’s right that she doesn’t know. Neither of you know how long this road to recovery is going to be. You can’t do it alone. I’m here. I’m allowed.”

  “You’re allowed? You got your license renewed to come be a mother again? I think that’s up to both of your children, isn’t it?”

  “You cannot shut me out. Danny does better when I’m here. Would you rather he be alone all day?”

  They were in step toward the elevator together now, her mother following her. Greta could still feel the eyes of the nursing staff trailing them. “I would rather that he doesn’t slide backward in a week when his support system crumbles because it wanted out.”

  Three floors down, then the entry level. “I’m not making excuses for leaving your father.”

  “Not just ‘my father.’ Me. Danny.” Greta turned, lowered her voice to a normal volume, hoping her mother would take the hint. “In the animal kingdom, you did your job—birth to infancy, to early childhood. You kept us from getting eaten by predators. Thanks. And bye.”

  The door dinged open and her mother stayed inside the elevator, mouth agape. Greta heard her name called before the door dinged closed in front of her, a curtain closing on the act. Greta jogged through the lobby before it could open again.