The Butterfly Effect

by Rachel Mans McKenny

  If he had been allowed to stay, to finish that program, where would he be now? Sick or well? Famous or unknown?

  It had been ten years since that envelope arrived. His right hand clenched and unclenched against his thigh, closing jerkily like a Venus fly trap. She caught herself watching the movement and noticed the lingering silence between them. When Danny didn’t say anything for another moment, Greta checked her watch. Almost the end of her lunch hour, always just enough time for an episode on the Enterprise and not much else. “Are you tired? Want me to get out of here?”

  “Are you watching out for Meg while I’m here?” he asked. He closed his eyes and couldn’t see the expression that crossed her face.

  In fact, she had hardly said anything to Meg since their fight three weeks ago. “Something like that.”

  “She’s not like Mom.”

  Greta ignored this. “Get some rest. You’re getting out of here in a week, and we’re gonna train for a Starfleet Academy fitness exam to celebrate.”

  He didn’t laugh this time, already half asleep.

  * * *

  That afternoon at work, Maura and another aide rushed into the lab with the release nets in hand. They wore identical lab coats and frantic expressions. Maura said, “Dr. Utz, we have a problem. There are these ants—”

  Brandon didn’t ask a question, didn’t even let her finish her sentence. Instead, he pushed through the locked lab doors into the butterfly dome. Greta was two steps behind. “Show me,” he said to the aides at his heels.

  Maura cleared her throat, catching her breath from the sprint. “There’s this line of them. I think they might have come from the new tree.”

  Brandon swore under his breath and then waved a hand toward the docent at the door to the exhibit. “Put out the velvet rope for a while. We’re doing some maintenance in here.”

  The line of ants drew a red thread across the rocky path. It led directly from the base of a bulbous tree, across the walking trail through the exhibit, and into the center garden of flowers and ferns. “The damn gardeners and their damn new plantings,” he said. “I bet they hitchhiked in on the new rubber tree.”

  The pairing made Greta think about that stupid kids’ song about rubber trees and ants. “High Hopes” was one of Martha’s favorite songs—she used to whistle it sometimes while she cleaned. These ants were harvesters, and the damage that a harvester colony could wreak in a place like Reiman was unimaginable. Besides having lots of plants to build habitat in, the butterflies also had access to food plates scattered throughout the garden. These spots gathered the insects for better patron viewing. Even without those delicacies, the plants themselves were sweet and full of pollen. Ants would take down the most delicate plants that the butterflies needed to survive for their food and building materials. “Should we use ant traps?”

  “For this big of a problem?” Brandon raised an eyebrow.

  “Fumigator?”

  “And risk damaging the butterflies? It’s not like we can catch all of them. Or leave things closed for that long. It is winter—this is the only reason people are coming to the gardens.” She could see him formulating theories and solutions, a chalkboard behind his eyes. “We can’t use industrial-strength poisons. And narrow poison usage would still seep into the rest of the habitat,” he muttered. “We can’t rip everything out.”

  “Well, start smashing, then, I guess,” Greta said, and she stamped her foot on a line of brown bodies. She felt a delicious schadenfreude as her foot cracked their carapaces in one go. She looked at Brandon, whose eyebrow was cocked. “I’m sure it’s moments like this that make you miss me,” she said.

  “Move over,” he said. “We’ll have to figure out a plan for the long term, but for now my feet have a bigger surface area.”

  “Plenty of ants to go around, boss,” she said as she made room for him. She didn’t admit how nice it was to have a distraction. She didn’t admit how good it felt to crush something.

  * * *

  One week to go. One week, and Greta couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have Danny out of the hospital. When she admitted that to Nadine in their weekly meetings, Nadine pressed a handout into her hand for the third time. It advertised a support group for caregivers that met in a hospital conference room. “It would help Danny if you knew a few people who were in it for the long term too.”

  Greta glanced up from the paper. “Does Meg go?”

  “Not that I know of,” Nadine said. “She seems just as reluctant as you.”

  And that comparison was all it took to get a rise out of Greta.

  If Greta were to make a list of things she didn’t like, touchy-feely conversation would rank on the top of the list, closely followed by bad coffee and uncomfortable chairs. The fiendish combination of all three in a single location could only have been designed by a social worker, also on the ever-growing list of dislikes. Still, she forced herself to go. Greta had to admit she was not handling things well, however. She had even considered starting text therapy, but the intake form on the therapy website was so personal that she closed the tab before the form asked about bra size and worst memory from the sixth grade.

  When Greta arrived in the conference room on Tuesday evening, two men and a woman were busy dragging the chairs into a blobby circle. One of the men, an older gentleman with a short-cropped gray beard, waved her over. “Care to grab one?”

  A circle had an infinite number of points along its outer edge, but this circle, once complete, contained only eight stiff chairs. A bearded man poured coffee from an industrial carafe. He offered a cup of the offensive stuff to Greta, who shook her head. Styrofoam cups were on her list of dislikes too.

  After a few minutes, the rest of the participants in the support group arrived. What did they call themselves, the supporters? The groupers? Some of them looked like fish: older people with jowls and thick jaws. Since she’d always been tall and prickly, Greta rarely felt young. It’s hard to picture a miniature saguaro cactus. The groupers settled into chairs while Greta hung back. When it seemed like the meeting was about to get started, a woman in a teddy bear sweater gestured to the only empty chair. “I assume you’re Greta?” she asked. Greta was wearing a name tag that declared this, so she did not take offense. This woman, this middle-aged woman who introduced herself as Pam, could have been any casserole-bearing neighbor from Greta’s old neighborhood. She had permed brown hair, and Greta was just deciding whether she would bring a tater tot casserole or a chicken enchilada bake, when she told Greta they were about to begin.

  Reluctantly, Greta sat down. “Everyone set?” Pam asked, turning expectantly around to each person. “Well, then let’s bow our heads for a minute of centering and silence.”

  Heads bobbed around the room, but Greta’s stayed upright. She wished she’d accepted the tarry coffee to give her fingers something to tangle around besides each other. Greta didn’t know if the groupers were praying or falling asleep; she didn’t do the former and it was usually hard to do the latter. After a second, and as if on some peripheral cue, the heads came up together.

  The bearded man next to Greta cleared his throat. “I’ll start,” he said. “Lisa’s been better this week. Her hips aren’t bothering her, and she’s mostly been sleeping through the night.”

  “That’s great,” Pam said.

  “Angelo’s birthday is next week,” the woman next to Pam said. “He invited the kids because he’s convinced it’s his last. I mean, we thought that it might be his last ‘last’ year, you know, and so one of our sons can’t leave his work. Vacation time, you know? As if this is a vacation.”

  “That must be frustrating,” Pam said. And so it went around the room—status report. The entire bare-your-soul-and-kumbaya business made Greta squirm. The room swelled with an echo of uh-huhs, of “I understand.” Right. They understood. Greta watched them nodding to one another in empathy and felt more and more like she’d made a mistake. Finally, Greta’s turn came. She could tell by the way the
y turned toward her, smiles plastered on their faces, as unnatural as the ones on the teddy bears.

  “No thanks,” Greta said. “I’ll sit this round out.”

  “Well, who do you care for? Can we start there?” Pam asked. She obviously thought Greta was shy.

  Greta was not shy, and she prickled against the hint of condescension in her voice. She stood up. “My twin. My brother. Can I end there?”

  Pam gave a soft tut. “Oh, sit down.”

  Something about her tone made Greta do just that. Greta forced her glance up from the parade of grinning bears on the woman’s sweater to her face as she continued, “We were all new once. Just tell us something. What kind of care does he need?”

  “Uh, brain injury,” Greta said. “He had an aneurysm.”

  The group nodded as one. “I can imagine that is hard,” the bearded man said, his voice neutral and slow as a jazz announcer’s. “And do you have much help?”

  The question nearly set Greta off again. She pictured Martha, hands on hips in the center of the hallway of the recovery center. “His fiancée.”

  “Good to have an ally,” Pam said.

  Greta didn’t have anything to say to that.

  “When’s the wedding?” the man on Pam’s other side asked.

  “October. I mean, it’s supposed to be.”

  “Having a goal to work toward helps recovery,” Pam said.

  Greta swallowed and her stomach congealed. Coming was a mistake. A room full of strangers with more advice she didn’t need. Greta was about to stand when Pam continued.

  “My husband had a stroke, and his recovery has been slow. I love all of you here,” Pam said, smiling at the people in the circle, “but I know we face different challenges. Ed lost his wife to breast cancer, and Heather’s son has severe epilepsy. I can’t say that I know what you’re going through, but I do know that my experience of recovery hasn’t been easy. Caregiving for brain injury can mean grieving in real time, even as you’re trying to take care of the person, and they are different.”

  Greta’s hands hurt, and she looked down only to realize that she had balled them into tight fists.

  “But we’re here. Five years on, we’re still here. A few months in, I made a reservation for a cruise and told him he needed to be healthy enough for it by the time we shipped off. He worked on walking with me every day because, he said, he didn’t want to stay in the cabin the whole time.”

  “He didn’t want to snuggle with you the entire time, Pam?” one of the other women said.

  “Well, you can only canoodle so many hours,” Pam said, laughing. “We know it’s hard. It’s hard to be one and a half people when your better half is a bit less than himself. But things change, for the good and bad. Glad you’re here.” Pam bridged the distance between the cheap plastic chairs and put a hand on Greta’s arm.

  The woman’s warm fingers made Greta’s arm hair prickle. Out of shock more than permission, Greta let the hand rest for a second before she shook it off. The whole ride back to the motel, Greta felt the imprint like the woman had marked her with inky fingerprints. It was the first time someone had touched her since Meg had in the kitchen. Greta realized what it was about the group that bothered her. It went against everything in her nature to convene like that. It was dangerous. Those ants, for instance. Without their telltale line and shared living quarters, they might have lived in the butterfly house for years, scavenging and surviving. Most insects, as a rule, lived alone. It was the rare social insects that drew attention to themselves—those ant hills, with people buried in them, in the Old West. That was what the meeting felt like, being buried in ants, and Greta doubted she would go back.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The ants returned after a week. They reconvened their forces, and for once Greta wanted to thank the little demons. The ants had bought her some time.

  “It could be worth considering.” Greta produced her preliminary observations for Plank. She had secured ten minutes to make her case before he rushed off to a faculty meeting. “Besides chemical analysis and studying the behavior of the colony, there could be an eradication method we need to invent to fix the problem. Since toxins are out of the question, we need to be creative. We’re not the only butterfly house in the country, and many of them are for-profit ventures. If we come up with something, those product applications could actually reach the market.”

  Plank rubbed his beard. “Are you planning this as your research focus now?”

  She chewed her lip. “Yeah.” The point of a PhD program was to finish a PhD program. She wanted the research, the connections, the experience, but she needed the letters after her name too. Ants, though? The ants had a smell to them, especially after being smushed. “Smushed” was her internal term—eradicated might be the more procedural one. The first day that she and Brandon went into manual eradication mode, she went home smelling earthy and sharp, like sour milk mixed with pine needles. The acetic acid in their defensive glands was the same primary ingredient as the sprays of whip scorpions and cockroaches. She dreamed that night of ants lining up to her bed because she smelled so much like their pheromone trails.

  “Your coursework would support it, and I would still feel comfortable overseeing it as your dissertation. Especially if you could get Brandon to sign off on the project.”

  Greta cornered Brandon that day by the specimen cases. He was unloading a shipment of pupa, removing the tissue paper and holding the specimens up to the light to check for imperfections. “Sure, I’ll help. I think this has strong potential. Actionable. I know it wasn’t your first choice, but look.” He dug into the box in front of him and pulled out a cotton-wrapped lump. “I ordered something for you. For your other research.”

  He handed her the cotton, and she unwrapped it. It was a small pupa, half the size of her pinky, but she knew it would contain the transparent membranous wings she saw swooping in Costa Rica. “You got a glasswing.”

  “Four, actually,” he said.

  Four. She breathed out and placed the pupa in the covered glass chamber. “Thank you, Brandon.”

  He took the box from her hand and flattened it against his body so that it folded, ready for the recycling bin. He didn’t say anything for a moment. “Return the favor by helping me unpack the rest of these. And by ‘favor,’ I mean that I’m paying you to do this, so get to work.” He wasn’t smiling, but his voice sounded like it.

  The first time Brandon had asked her out, she’d had grass stains on her ass. Spring semester of her first year of graduate school. Central campus was arranged like a clock’s face, with a ring road around its outside. Just near the midnight point on the clock was the Memorial Union and the campus’s bell tower, the Campanile. On sunny days, undergraduates lay in the grass and strung ropes between trees to tightrope walk on them. Normally, Greta wouldn’t have been caught dead around so many people, but she had an odd break between classes that gave her time to stretch her legs and read outside. Brandon had snuck up on her and commented on the series she was reading at the time. Something with pirates and fantasy and other worlds. He had not read it. He asked what it was about, and she wouldn’t tell him. Her exact words were, “I am not Google.”

  “But I can’t ask Google on a date.”

  She glanced up from her novel then. His large body blocked her reading light, the sun shining around his edges like an eclipse. It hurt her eyes to look at him, and so she stared back down again as she rejected him.

  By the time he asked again the next fall, he had read the book—and its sequel. It wasn’t her reason for saying yes. That was something different altogether. She had been on dates before—albeit not many, not recently, and not consecutively with the same person. Strangers were easy when they were strangers. She had the skills to window-shop the variety that the internet provided, swipe her finger in one direction or another, and send brief messages. The resulting dates were nothing like her date with Brandon. He knew her and had asked her out anyway—twice.

 
“Why did you ask again?” she had asked him over that first dinner.

  “You’re smart. Funny. And I don’t really get you, so that’s interesting to me.”

  “Well. You’re in for a treat.” She had cocked an eyebrow and tried to sound droll, but his interest surprised her. His curiosity, for her thoughts and her interests and her turn-ons. And the longer they had dated, the more secondary goodwill came her way. People in the department started treating her differently, as if light passed through him to her, that aura from a hidden sun. They couldn’t see what was good about her, but they figured Brandon had.

  And that was the situation now. Even if her committee hadn’t been gung-ho on the ant proposal, they trusted Brandon.

  She scarcely realized she had crossed the line into flirting with him again. A bad habit, that was all, like a smoker’s urge during a concert. Hard to believe that a year ago he had slept next to her. Never curled into her, because she couldn’t stand the feeling of someone else’s breathing patterns not matching up with hers—it made her hyperventilate. Instead, she slept on her stomach, and he, curled into a letter C next to her.

  Danny had once shared a theory with Greta that people fit one of the basic character types in The Wizard of Oz. Martha had forced them to watch the musical annually, under the guise of tradition, so the repeated viewing obviously gave him time to consider the applications. People could be all sorts: cowardly, brainless, rigid, meandering, a dog, or a general witch. Greta knew herself to be one of the latter, good or bad, depending on the day. She liked to be in charge, to make things happen. Danny admitted to being a Dorothy, or at least he used to be—overly idealistic and a world saver. Greta thought Meg was a Scarecrow. Max was Tin Man—unflappable, clear-headed, calm when everyone else flailed. From his appearance, Brandon looked like he might be a Lion, but he was a Wizard. A little too smart for his own good, a little self-interested, and a lot mysterious. Even after dating him for a year, she couldn’t quite guess what he was thinking.