The Butterfly Effect

by Rachel Mans McKenny

  The hive was distinctly quieter than the others around it. Only a low hum came from inside. “So what do you do?”

  “I wait. Bees usually sort themselves out,” he said.

  “But it’s so quiet.”

  “My suspicion,” the apiarist said, “is that a virgin queen is in there eating her sisters and mates. She’ll take over and re-establish the hive.”

  The day Martha had left them was the day of Greta’s first period. Ever since she’d been little, Greta couldn’t handle the sight of blood, and seeing it come out of herself made her hate her body in a way she hadn’t known was possible. It was like her body had driven Martha away. In her mind, for years, the two events were inexorably linked as if there could be only one grown female in a house, one queen bee in a hive. But Greta hadn’t been a queen bee, she’d been terrified and grossed out even with the health class lectures.

  The day Martha left was warm, too hot even, though it was autumn. It was nearly Halloween and their carved pumpkin nearly rotted in the heat wave. Besides the smoldering temperature and a new strange cramp, Greta hadn’t suspected anything was off in her teenage universe. Life ran in the courses it usually had—her father worked his metal and polished his bow for deer season. Danny took his piano lessons and fiddled around in the band room after school on actual fiddles or whatever else he could get his hands on. Greta dodged packs of other girls at the bus stop and buried herself in sci-fi novels and her bug collection. Martha did what she had always done: work as a school nurse and then disappear for hours at night and on weekends. Continuing education, she said, though Greta never thought to ask what she was educating herself in.

  Greta’s dad never asked questions, not about any of them. He never pushed them on their answers. Greta didn’t know if he had always been like that, or if the change came after his tours of duty, but the way she remembered her father was as a man who didn’t like confined spaces, either in life or in his relationships. He didn’t corner her or Danny for an account of how they spent their time. Knowing would somehow make it his responsibility. He never checked on them to see if they went where they said they did, and he hadn’t done that with Martha either. If Greta or Danny had been different kids, their father’s laissez-faire attitude would have been trouble. But although Danny occasionally drank in high school or stayed out too late, he never lied about it to their dad.

  Martha lied, even when not pressed on it. She must have, because the day she left she told them she hadn’t had a job for a month. The mornings getting ready for school, eating cereal all together, and Martha’s blue or green or pink scrubs—lies. The day Martha left, the day Greta started to bleed, a strange man waited beside a strange car in front of their house. Martha gave him a peck on the cheek before heaving the suitcases inside his trunk. It was October, but Martha had worn cut-off jean shorts on the day she left and a sleeveless, floral top. The details burned into Greta’s mind like she might have to report them someday. No one had ever asked for them, though, and her stomach had cramped and contracted as Martha said, “I just have to go. I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

  Every twelve weeks when Greta got her birth control shot, she thought about Martha leaving. A little pinch, a prick, no blood except at the sight of injection, and the memory of being left at fourteen with a rust-colored spot on her underwear.

  They had gotten postcards every few months for the first year. Danny kept his, and Greta threw hers away. Eventually, the postcards stopped coming too, but she had an eye for handwriting. Maybe it came along with identifying the finer characteristics of genus and species. When she returned to work at Reiman that day, she studied the note left for her in her mailbox and knew instantly where it had come from. Greta still recognized the short “m” and looping, bulbous “e’s.” Martha had written, “Call me, Greta” and a scrawl of digits that Greta knew she wouldn’t ever call. The act felt like a shot into an empty sky on the off chance of hitting something. Greta wouldn’t let herself be hit, not that easily. Martha wouldn’t get a reward for coming to her workplace. As if to spite her, Greta entered the number in her phone as “Don’t answer.”

  Brandon had already led the butterfly wing cleanup before she arrived. It was morbid most mornings, counting the deceased on the path and entering totals in the spreadsheet. Since he couldn’t hand count the butterflies, averaging was the next best thing. With their short life spans, the time and expense to tag the butterflies didn’t make sense. Anyway, the butterflies’ main duty was to exist and fly around in a pretty way, so it didn’t matter too much if they were off their counts by a dozen. The research was mainly done in the lab, prodding pupae.

  She was about to put on her lab coat and sign in when Brandon grabbed her arm. “Hey, one second. I wanted to show you some trap ideas.”

  He pulled her down the main corridor toward his office. She hadn’t been inside since the interview a month and a half ago. His desk had a new decoration, a framed photograph of Eden. Her mouth gaped wide open in a laugh so hard that her eyes closed. Even without having ever heard his girlfriend laugh, Greta knew Eden would sound like a tinkling music box. The laugh that would come from a girl whose nickname used to be Princess when she was little. Meg had a laugh like that.

  “Okay, so take a look at this.” He passed a sheet of graph paper across the table.

  Greta eyed the schematics warily. The box mimicked a starter apiarist kit. Bees and ants didn’t construct the same kinds of structures, however. She shook her head. “I purposefully didn’t major in engineering in college so I wouldn’t have to do this kind of stuff.”

  “Examine it like an ant might.”

  “Ants don’t rely on sight as their primary sense. I can’t exactly sense the pheromones on your image.”

  He took the picture back. “Well, we’ll try one. Maybe a few designs. I think you should work one up too, so we have a few to compare to because …” He rapped his fingers on the desk in a drum roll. “I may have gotten a paper on the subject accepted at a conference.”

  “What the hell, Brandon?” She stood up without realizing that she did.

  His smile faltered. “What’s the matter? I thought you’d be thrilled. Orlando. September. Butterfly breeders and curators, all in one location. It’s not as stuffy as a normal academic conference, I promise.”

  She didn’t know exactly why she was mad. Maybe because this wasn’t the project she had wanted to make her name on. Maybe it was that she would be adjacent to projects she would have loved to work on, but she was squishing ants instead, or maybe it was the fact that Brandon didn’t ask for her say-so on the application. Maybe the fact that nothing had gone as she planned for the past three months, or year, if she included their breakup. “I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, that’s great but …”

  “Great nothing. This is where connections are made. This is where you find the right lab to join. You will graduate in, what, a few years? This is the kind of stuff that will find you a home.”

  “Don’t talk to me like I’m a child. I know that.”

  “I thought you’d be excited.”

  “I am. I am.” She took a breath and felt for the first time the rush of endorphins after someone told you they liked you. It was a rush she hadn’t felt in a while. “I just can’t believe they accepted it.”

  “Well, we’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  She swallowed. Six months to get data and write it up. Doable, but not ideal. The idea stuck in her head for a second, a skipping record. Then she caught the gaze of the picture on Brandon’s desk. Eden’s eyes laughed with the rest of her, laughing for Brandon. Laughing at a joke he told her. Or laughing at the way he touched her.

  He pushed a piece of blank graph paper across the table, breaking her concentration. “Start drafting, Gret.”

  * * *

  At two o’clock, Danny waited by the front of the clinic. He was quiet for the first minute of the drive, a repeat of the morning. Greta had steeled herself for silence when suddenly he sp
oke. “You all came in shifts. While I was in the hospital.”

  “Who is ‘all’?” Greta asked. The real question was, did he mean Martha? The letter at work had gotten under her skin, as if Martha had invaded her castle. Greta assumed he didn’t remember enough about the early recovery days, didn’t remember enough to know that she had been there for a week or two. God, Martha didn’t even fight hard enough.

  “You, Meg, and Dad.”

  Greta glanced sideways at him, then back at the road. “Dad is dead, you know.”

  “I know,” he said. “He sat with me in my dreams. We talked.”

  “Talked? That really doesn’t sound like Dad.”

  Danny tapped his fingers on the armrest. “He had a lot of papers with him, and he laid them all out. A program from my first-grade school concert, my acceptance from Oberlin, the FAFSA filled out for the scholarships I didn’t end up getting enough money for, the birthday card he sent the day before his heart attack, the stack of bills we got in the mail a month after his death. And do you know what he said?”

  “In your dream?”

  “In my dream,” Danny confirmed.

  “No, what?”

  Danny leaned against the window and the finger tapping ceased. “He said he was sorry. ‘Sorry, I died. Sorry we had debt. Sorry I made you drop out of college.’”

  “Better late than never,” Greta said, even though she was thinking, But really, this is never. This is all in his head. The aneurysm was all in his head too, though, and look how real that had been.

  “And you know what I told him?” Even out of the side of her eyes, she could see his face screwed up like it always did before a punch line. Danny had no poker face. “I didn’t want to be a star anyway, because stars burn out only after a million years. That’s exhausting. Teachers burn out after twenty and get good pensions.”

  “Jesus, Danny,” Greta said, a laugh escaping against her will. After a second, both stopped as if caught by something.

  They pulled into the parking lot of Danny’s apartment building and sat there for a few minutes. “Someone else is teaching my kids. I think it’d be jazz band right now.”

  “You’ll be back before you know it,” Greta said.

  “Will I?”

  Greta didn’t have anything to say to that. His face didn’t look the same. Even if she hadn’t stared at his face more often and longer than any other person’s she had ever known, she would have seen it. One eye drooped, and he was thinner. She knew he might never be the same again—the neurologist had warned as much. But what was the same? Was anyone really the same from day to day, and wasn’t that the whole freaking issue with people? At least with Danny, un-knowableness was a known quantity.

  He clicked off his seatbelt, and she did the same. “Hey,” she said, catching him before he could open the car door. “I’m sorry for being an asshole last year. For us not talking. For everything actually.”

  “Fuck, it only took an emergency to get an apology from you?” But he was smiling, or almost smiling. “Greta, you know I love you, right?”

  The words embarrassed her, even from him, her other half. “I love you too.”

  Her arm ached where she’d gotten the birth control shot that morning, but she kept herself from rubbing it. She walked with him into the lobby, but he stopped her there, telling her he could ride up on his own. A feeling of helplessness bloomed in Greta’s stomach as she heard the elevator lurch upward. She didn’t know how to be his family more than this, this watching him go behind a closed door and disappear. She wanted to understand him.

  That night, she went back to the caregiver group.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Mikey’s bartenders had grown used to Greta and Max’s wordless beer meetings. Weekly they poured a beer before she even sat down, and they didn’t mention the tablet propped on the bar. She couldn’t pretend they were onboard The Enterprise. The bartender wasn’t Guinan—or at least, Greta hadn’t seen Whoopi Goldberg hanging around Ames yet, but Mikey’s was homey enough. There wasn’t even a Ten Forward in Voyager, just the crew mess. Something about that felt like a cop-out. If she were in space with access to a replicator, there would be more drinking.

  She and Max had made it through a whole season, but still Greta didn’t know what the actors sounded like. Max put on closed captioning, and they watched the dialogue with the endless twang of country music behind them. She had muted herself too. It was three weeks in before either of them broke the silence rule. Greta had a cold that night, and her constant nose blowing unsettled a stack of napkins on the bar top. After an especially big sneeze, Max said, “Bless you.”

  Greta side-eyed him, deciding for a moment not to say anything in return. He raised his eyebrows before looking down into his beer like a wishing well.

  She didn’t want to disappoint him—not the only office mate who hadn’t complained when her papers and figurines took up too much space. Not the only person she had in her life who didn’t mind the friend who preferred lab reports to personal e-mails and dissection to self-disclosure. She could tell him that the relief of these nights wasn’t the weak beer or the clack of pool balls in the background, but the fact that no one expected anything of her. If that were so, he might think that it was only because she considered him no one. That wasn’t true at all. She cleared her throat and pushed “Pause” on Max’s tablet. “Thanks,” she said, five minutes too late.

  Max must have had his own internal monologue going on, because he looked away from the screen, startled.

  Greta called out to the bartender for two more beers, and he seemed just as surprised to hear her voice. When the beers arrived, Max rubbed the condensation with his finger on his mug, a pensive expression on his face. After taking a sip, he asked, “What does six months mean to you?”

  “What, twenty thousand light years closer to home?”

  “Not to Voyager, to you.”

  “I don’t know. A growing season.” Greta said. What she actually thought was that six months equaled her lost time in Costa Rica, the length of the grant that had disappeared as quickly as a lightning flash.

  Max’s fingers traced the glass. Patterns she didn’t recognize, which could have as easily been chemical structures as stick figures. “Aren’t you going to ask me what six months means to me?” he asked, finally lifting his glass to drink. His tone was calm, but with something behind it that Greta didn’t quite catch. She wanted to hear it again, to sample.

  “No,” Greta said honestly. “The idea didn’t occur to me.”

  He laughed and put his glass down. “Figures.”

  “What?” she asked, not joining his laugh. Something about it didn’t invite joining. His laugh pointed at and indicted her.

  “Greta, you need to ask the reciprocal question sometimes.” He took her pursed lips as an invitation to continue. “When someone asks how you are, what do you do?”

  “Answer them.”

  “And do you ask how they are?”

  She blinked twice. “Why?”

  “Because you should care.”

  “I care. Do I have to parrot back whatever someone wants me to say to show I care?” Her beer was empty already. She’d been glugging it down in the uncomfortable silences in the conversation. Silence a few minutes ago had felt like a warm bath, but it was boiling now.

  “Jesus, you’re as bad as the Borg.”

  She felt his judgment acutely, like her personality was twisted in a funhouse mirror. “I’m a scientist first.”

  “Which precludes you from caring?”

  “No, it just means I’m used to asking and answering my own questions. I’m used to answering when prompted.”

  Max was only too happy to take counterpoint in the discussion of her vices. “But you’re also a teacher, so you should get used to asking questions too.”

  “I’m not a very good teacher,” she defended. They had both seen her evaluations. Hitleresque in all caps was a memorable comment.

  He laughed at th
at, a laugh that she would have joined in on this time, but his phone rang. When he saw the name on the display, he cleared his throat and slapped a ten-dollar bill on the bar. “Next week?” he asked.

  She nodded. “Talk to you then.”

  “Or not talk,” he said, pulling his arms into the sleeves of his leather jacket.

  “Either way,” she said, and he gave her a grim smile on his way out, just as hard to read as his tone had been.

  * * *

  Despite those reassurances, Max cancelled their next night out and the one after. After the second week, she sent a reply text. You get bubonic plague or something?

  Just busy.

  She almost offered to stop by, but the idea was ridiculous. Shit, they could have watched Netflix every week at his place if he had wanted. She always got the impression he was ashamed to live with his parents. Or more likely, he was ashamed of her, her messiness. She pictured their barnwood-floored house, the neatly stacked bookshelves that would be in their living room. Her edges would scrape up the corners of his tidy life. Suddenly, she wanted him to think good things of her, to erase the chalkboard of their friendship she had scrawled all over. He had seen her in manic study mode, cramming for exams; and with her mouth open, drooling in deep sleep on her desk afterward. Of course he wouldn’t want to take her somewhere that people recognized them. Take her to his house.