The Butterfly Effect

by Rachel Mans McKenny

  As she drove away, Greta kept waiting for the moment to feel triumphant somehow, like beating a boss in a video game. Explosions of gold coins and experience points enough to level up. She should feel different facing Martha down, but she didn’t. She was too mad to go home and instead drove twenty miles south to the town she’d grown up in. She skirted along the old neighborhood past her old house. A bike in the front yard, dead grass, a flag at half-staff. Her father had put in that flagpole the year before they moved, hit it into the ground with a mallet. Every day it wasn’t raining or snowing, he’d go out at dawn and raise the flag, sometimes with Greta at his side and sometimes alone. Danny learned “Taps” and played it on the trumpet they rented from the school. They left that flagpole behind, with all its memories and weight, when they moved away. Sometimes it was untenable to keep that big a part of yourself. Even big things—especially big things—you had to jettison to stay afloat.

  * * *

  Martha’s perfume hadn’t diffused in the hallway when Greta got back to the apartment. Before Meg said anything, Greta knew Martha had been there.

  Meg knit on the floor. Franz occupied the same spot on the couch where Greta had left him that morning. As if expecting an argument, he covered his head with a paw.

  “So, Martha stopped by.” Meg didn’t say “your mother.” She meant to say the sentence casually, but it still sounded weighed down with rocks.

  “I’m not talking to her again.” Greta tried to walk into the kitchen to end the conversation, but Meg trailed behind her.

  “I didn’t ask you to talk to her. I just wanted to tell you she was here.”

  Greta poured a glass of water and took a sip. “What, so she wanted you to override me?”

  “You know I couldn’t. Legally.”

  Meg stood too close, and Greta wanted to tell her to back off. She wanted to duck. She wanted to avoid this conversation, fast forward it, because she knew she couldn’t stop herself. “I thought maybe you’d feel sorry for her.”

  “I do feel sorry for her,” Meg said.

  That admission was all it took for Greta to let it out, let pop that kernel she’d been holding close inside for three years. Fuck it. “Oh yeah? Probably because she was a cheater too.”

  Greta saw Meg’s demeanor change, saw the tiny crack in the dam open. Her voice was quiet. “Leave, Greta. I’ve given you time. Get out.”

  Greta took a final sip and slammed the glass down on the counter. No shouting, no tears or begging, and no bargaining. She skipped the stages of grief—as if there were grief in breaking off a temporary truce. Greta’s things were packed in five minutes, and she was gone. Nothing as big as a flagpole to leave behind—only the small face of a terrier pressed to the second-floor window of an apartment that Greta refused to look at as she drove away.

  PART TWO

  SPRING

  “Can I even walk on the land without gutting it? Maybe not: Acts have their consequences. If it does happen that without being aware of it in time, we immutably change and destroy what we have sought and found, we will, of course, not be unique.”

  —Paul Lehmberg, In the Strong Woods: A Season Alone in the North Country

  CHAPTER TEN

  On the first night after getting kicked out of Danny’s apartment, Greta slept in her storage unit. She’d rented it for the semester, after all. It wasn’t heated, and after one sleepless night she abandoned that plan. On the second night, Greta got a room at the cheapest motel she could find in town. It stood on an industrial road leading to a highway, one of those long, two-tiered motel structures with metal railings along the top balcony. The scratchy bedsheet covered a lumpy mattress, and the side table didn’t even house a Bible. If Jesus didn’t want to hang out there, Greta should have been more nervous. The hotelier had cut so many corners the room should have been round. But nothing in the world—not cheap amenities, not even bed bugs—would send her begging to Meg again. That door had closed.

  Language shaped perception. Even Greta, who nearly failed her humanities requirements in college, could prove that. For instance, the story The Very Hungry Caterpillar was most kids’ introduction to the process of metamorphosis. Wasn’t it cute to show a caterpillar eat tiny hole-punched holes through everything? It was all a question of perspective. If the story was told by the strawberries and oranges and sausages and slices of cherry pie, the caterpillar was a menace. It didn’t even finish what it started. Just because butterflies had pretty wings at the end of it all didn’t make the destruction they left in their wake any less real.

  So, the story of the relationship of Danny and Meg from the Eric Carle perspective might show a meet-cute scenario in a middle school parking lot. Meg had just finished her job interview. Still clad in some adorable, probably pink skirt and pantyhose (Greta imagined Meg was the type to wear pantyhose in August), she offered to help Danny. Danny needed to load a bus full of instruments to bring to a band competition because his parent volunteers had ditched. The first hole through the first piece of fruit.

  Danny liked her, but maybe it feels good to be eaten—not in the sexual way. God, she didn’t even want to think about sex and Danny and Meg and biological urges and all that. She meant “eaten” in the falling for someone kind of way. If Danny had been her only piece of fruit, her only apple, it wouldn’t be an issue. It was those multiple pages of greed that made it all a problem.

  He didn’t lie about who Meg was, not even the first time when she had seen them together at the movies. She had only been down there to do some Christmas shopping; it had been a fluke. Her twin two rows ahead of her, his lips smashed against the lips of a girl with long blonde hair wrapped in a red kerchief. Greta waited for them by the 3D glasses recycling case outside of the theater and caught his arm. “Who’s this?”

  “This is my secret girlfriend, Meg,” he told Greta. He wore that infuriating wry smile, a kid with his hand caught stealing a candy bar. “I’m the other man.”

  Meg turned pink, but Danny’s mouth tilted sideways. “It’s okay,” Danny said. “I chose this. You didn’t kidnap me.”

  Greta could have slapped him, but she wasn’t given the chance. They disappeared out the front doors of the movie theater, released into the wider world.

  That night Greta called Danny. “What’s the boyfriend’s name?” Greta asked, even though she didn’t know why. Maybe she wanted to remind him of the implications. Maybe she wanted to remind him of the feeling of being left on the porch while Martha drove away with someone else.

  “It’s her fiancé.”

  Greta swore at him but heard discussion in the background. Soft voices.

  “Ex-fiancé,” Danny clarified, this time into the phone again. “They’ve been taking a break.”

  “How much of a break? Does he know?”

  Silence on the other end.

  Dad had been dead for a year. Good thing, too, or this would have killed him. It was enough to have a cheater for an ex-wife, but a son? Greta’s thoughts outpaced her mouth, for once. If he hadn’t died, though, Danny could have stayed at Oberlin. He wouldn’t have dropped out of his performance program, and he’d be touring the world. He wouldn’t have had to come back to Iowa to finish college. He wouldn’t have gotten a job teaching music. The debt would have still been there, but in hibernation. Waiting to emerge. He wouldn’t have met her, done this. “Break it off, Danny. What’s that story about the wise man building his house on rocks or sand or some such shit?”

  Danny had the nerve to laugh. “Are you trying to quote parables to me? Seriously?”

  “I don’t remember it, but this is a bad foundation. Do you want her to cheat on you? She can’t change her nature.”

  “And you can’t change yours, Greta. She is the first thing that’s made me feel solid in years. She makes me feel like—” Danny said.

  “Don’t give me a music metaphor, Danny, or so help me.”

  He laughed. “You’ll like her when you get to know her. You’ll love her.”

>   “You love too easily.”

  “And you hate too easily.”

  “I call that discerning taste,” she mumbled, but she could tell he wasn’t listening.

  Another conversation out of earshot. Then, “She’s telling him tomorrow. And then it’ll be official, okay?”

  But it hadn’t been okay. It still wasn’t okay. So they’d stopped talking, she and Danny. And now Danny needed her and so like an itch she got used to, like an infestation of a pest that you had to live with, she tolerated Meg. She tolerated Meg until she couldn’t anymore. She even lived with Meg, and side by side they made their pilgrimages to Danny’s bedside. Danny was their common religion— that was too dramatic; Danny was their common language, maybe. They could speak Danny together. Now, they couldn’t speak at all.

  * * *

  Not surprisingly, Greta’s motel didn’t offer premier internet service included in the price—it didn’t even offer a bagel for breakfast. The lobby didn’t even have furniture outside of a moth-eaten couch and a long check-in desk with laminate coating. When she got to work, she logged onto the Reiman Wi-Fi to check her e-mail.

  Another e-mail asking about her research.

  Shit.

  She should have guessed that the lab wouldn’t want to fund someone for next year who had no research, no goals, and no fucking idea of what she wanted now that Costa Rica was gone.

  She knew she still needed to stay in the program, even if it meant digging her fingernails into the ledge to keep herself from falling. Entomology had been the first thing to really make sense to her. There were more insects than humans on the planet, and understanding that larger group made her feel better about not understanding the smaller one. Maybe she could scrape together the money tomorrow to fly back to Costa Rica and finish her research season on her own dime. The cost of the butterfly transmitters started to total in her mind. It was more likely that Danny would contract a new species of lice in the hospital, and he could be her test subject. He needed to grow his hair back faster in that case.

  When she turned around, Brandon was behind her. She tried to stow her phone in her lab coat pocket without him noticing, but he did. “Hey, sorry. Writing to Plank. Funding shit.” She couldn’t speak in a full sentence. The nerves choked her English abilities.

  “You look terrible.” He didn’t mention her showing up at his door two days ago, and his not mentioning it made the whole thing a million times more awkward.

  “Haven’t been sleeping well.”

  “Couch problems?”

  “Lack-of-couch problems. Got in a fight with Meg.”

  Brandon gave her the barest smile. When they used to fight, Brandon stood and took her yelling, her insults, her complaints, and her concerns. He let her walk away from a fight when she needed to. He took her anger in like a black hole sucking the light and matter out of the universe. It wasn’t even arguing in a vacuum, it was arguing with a vacuum. He sucked up everything and shot nothing back except a blank stare. She could have been speaking in German for all he noticed.

  It had been like that for their last fight, the one about his post-grad opportunities. She knew it was improbable for him to stay in the Midwest, but part of her still wanted him to. A one-year position for a visiting lecturer in New York came up, and Brandon was floored when he was accepted. Other acceptances rolled in, but Greta knew he would pick the one farthest away—which he did. He told her they could still date long distance. “What’s the point?” Greta barked. “How are you here for me when you’re over there?”

  “It’s only a year.”

  “Which is longer than we’ve been together.”

  He had shrugged, which made her madder. “If you can’t wait a year, then I guess that this isn’t the right relationship.” He had said it so calmly, not a single caps lock moment. She left anyway, slept in the car in the middle of the winter. It was even worse than sleeping in her storage unit, seeing as her face nearly froze to the car window. The next time they had seen each other he spoke so evenly, with such control, that it lulled her. She might have called him a snake charmer if it didn’t imply she was a cobra. After that fight, they’d shaped a relationship past its expiration date. They had stayed together, in a kind of frozen animation, for the three months until he left. If he hadn’t been so cool and collected, they wouldn’t have had those three months. Those three summer months of hikes in Ledges Park, swatting mosquitos by Gray’s Lake, and eating gelato.

  Getting a rise out of him took too much energy. She missed that, about their fights. She always wore herself out crashing into his silence. He always let her get a word in edgewise, and in fact, offered his edges for her to throw words at.

  “I’m homeless, and I’m doing prelims in May and learning to fence the other grad students for a spot in the fall TA lineup.”

  “Anyone need research assistants? Funding there, maybe?”

  “Unlikely.”

  “You could always work here.” He grinned at her and gestured around. “This is the Taj Mahal of butterflies, no? We’ve even got a coffee shop across the hall.”

  “And complete my dissertation when exactly in this nine-to-five job of yours?” Two adolescent girls watched their discussion from the other side of the plexiglass. She worked in a goldfish bowl—if goldfish bowls could be full of butterflies.

  “Get creative, Oto,” he said, and with that, he left the lab.

  She turned back to the pupa. Inside each of them, the soon-to-be-butterfly was reassembling itself to accommodate wings. Most of them, at least. She touched the pupae in turn—cool, cool, cool, warm. She picked up the warm one. It was for a swallowtail, or it had been. She held it up to the light, and it looked dark and splotchy. The cremaster—the tip that attached with silk to a branch in the wild—had split. It was the warmth that was the first clue. They died in transit sometimes, or some just failed to fully metamorphose. Change or die, the common rule for both business and nature. Greta disposed of the pupa in the hazardous materials bin in the lab and washed her hands.

  Above the sink was an article with Brandon’s face on it. The text detailed some experiment he had run about wine and butterflies—local news in Ames was so thrilling. But his open smile beamed at her as she ran water over her palms. She realized, suddenly, that he’d had no purpose to come into the lab earlier except to speak with her. Despite herself, despite the embarrassment at his apartment, despite him being her boss, she felt her cheeks warm.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “Episode’s over.” Danny said it too loud, but at least in that loudness he sounded like himself. That, paired with the fact that Danny seemed to actually like Captain Picard, nearly brought tears to Greta’s eyes.

  She shot a glance sideways to check if the guy in the bed next to Danny’s was still asleep. The rehab center’s dual occupancy rooms were the only ones approved under Danny’s insurance. Danny had been in the center for two weeks, and Greta still hadn’t seen the guy in the bed awake. She had, however, noticed a pair of knit mittens for him on the side table. Meg had befriended him somehow, and Greta felt that the comatose guy had taken sides. “You don’t have to be so loud. Jesus. I can hear you,” she complained.

  “I didn’t rise from the dead,” he replied

  “You might recover, but your humor doesn’t stand a chance.”

  Danny sometimes tripped over his thoughts the way Martha’s fabric used to fold over in the sewing machine when she wasn’t watching. She always made their Halloween costumes, and the zippers and seams ran crooked, turning in on themselves.

  Greta had so much she wanted to ask Danny, and so few things she wanted him to find out in return. It was easier to turn the focus on him. After so many weeks in the hospital, he was used to that anyway. Greta finally asked the question that had been weighing on her. “What did it feel like? How did you know what happened?”

  He sighed. “A headache.”

  “Oh God. Don’t make me paranoid about headaches.”

  “But it starte
d that way. One of my students raised his hand and asked what was wrong with my face. Some of the kids laughed.” Danny paused, yawned. “But then I thought about Dad. About seeing him in the hospital bed, dead. And then suddenly I couldn’t think anymore.”

  “That was the worst day of my life.”

  “Can worst days be tied?” Danny laughed. “A smart-ass eighth-grader saved my life.”

  “I thought smart-ass eighth-graders only saved the world in books.”

  “He didn’t save the world. He only saved me.”

  Greta didn’t say anything for a moment, afraid for him to hear the fear in her voice. Same difference, she would have said. She had only been alive ten minutes without him in this world. Ten separate minutes in different spheres—he inside, she out. Martha had said they used to kick in unison inside her, like choreography. “Has the whole music thing gotten better?”

  He looked at her straight on. His hair had started to grow back in uneven patches. “I lost it.”

  “What?”

  “Music. And the colors,” he said. “And there’s this constant sound. I thought maybe it was something in the hospital, but you don’t hear it, do you?”

  Greta shook her head.

  He closed his eyes and leaned back against the pillow. “It’s like the sound beneath a lake. Like swimming, the pressure and the swish of water against water. Like that. All the time.”

  “Maybe the colors will come back,” Greta said. “Maybe the sound will disappear.”

  Maybe “maybes” would start meaning something too, but that was unlikely.

  How many piano recitals had Greta sat through in her life, watching her twin’s fingers sail up and down the keyboard like they were possessed? Private performances with “Taps” played to a silent neighborhood while her father folded the flag into reverent triangles. She had been to more band concerts than any sister should ever be forced to sit through. She had even helped record his audition tape for Oberlin. They’d borrowed a camcorder from a teacher and sat in the music room of the high school. Greta knew she would go to Iowa State—it was nearby, it was cheaper—but she blindly scrabbled in the dark for what to study. Here was her sure-footed brother bounding up the side of his mountain. Even as they recorded the video, and although she didn’t have the musical knowledge her brother possessed, she had known he would get in. No surprise to her when the thick envelope arrived. The only surprise had been his surprise. She realized then that he truly had no idea how good he was.