The Butterfly Effect

by Rachel Mans McKenny

  She should ask him then how he was. She should ask him, and she could ask him, but she wouldn’t. “Hoping for a tornado to sweep you up into the sky? See the wizard?”

  “Greta,” he said, “I would miss you if a house fell on you.”

  She elbowed him, but gently, so gently that he wouldn’t lose his perch, leaning against her. The reassuring weight of his head on her shoulder would anchor even the lightest thing in a tornado.

  * * *

  Greta wasn’t exactly lying to Brandon—at least, it wasn’t a lie the first time. So maybe it had been months ago that she thought she heard Meg tell her to pick Danny up at one. Maybe she had continued to leave work at twelve forty-five to have a long lunch every Tuesday before picking up her brother. What was Brandon going to do—tramp down to Noodles & Company and wreck the place? It wasn’t like she was working on issues of national security. Honestly, things were going so well with her ant-eradication prototype that she doubted Brandon would care that she took a little extra time—off the clock, mind you—for herself.

  Her pad Thai was getting cold. She closed the book she had been reading— saving the known universe from an alien pathogen would have to wait until later—and slurped the rest of the noodles down.

  She had always wondered what happened at Danny’s appointments. When she was a kid, her mother had insisted that she and Danny both take gymnastics. The place had a balcony where parents could watch over the railing while kids who weren’t Greta did twirly, flippy things that Greta didn’t remember the names for anymore, while Greta tried not to sprain an ankle. The parent balcony also had a snack machine that was the ultimate bribe if she and Danny were “good.” Nine-year-old Greta would do nearly anything for Oreos. Greta reassured herself that thirty-year-old Greta required at least a full sleeve of double-stuffed Oreos to consider doing things in leotards.

  The building that housed physical therapy was called Medical Arts, which made her feel vaguely like it belonged at Hogwarts. Despite picking him up for weeks, she hadn’t ventured inside. Danny usually waited by the curb when she pulled up. Greta assumed that he was ready to get home, tired, but as she pulled into the parking spot this time, she had a thought that maybe Danny didn’t want her to meet his friends. Or his therapists or whatever they were. Maybe he was embarrassed about her.

  Greta knew she wasn’t the easiest person to get along with, but the one person she had always managed not to piss off too badly was her twin. Unwillingly, she thought of birthday candles and microwave popcorn. Of that day Danny left the rehab center. Maybe Danny was different. Not like a different person, but more like he was muted under striations of rock.

  With a whoosh, the clinic doors spread apart and closed behind her. The clinic walls were stuck with decals of Easter eggs and demonically cheerful rabbits. Greta tried to avoid their gaze as she went to the check-in desk and tapped the bell lightly to get the attention of the woman in the cabinets in back.

  “I’m here for Danny Oto. I’m his ride.”

  The woman rifled through some paperwork. She was broad, with expansive shoulders only made larger by her Looney Tunes scrubs. “Danny? I think he’s gone. It’s already one thirty.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You might be his ride, but I can’t actually tell you about his treatment. HIPPA.”

  Greta blinked twice, at first picturing hippos on a riverbank with paperwork. She consulted her watch-less wrist, then the cell phone in her pocket. The time was, as she said, one thirty. But it wasn’t two, and that was the important part. “I’m his sister. I’m here to drive him home.”

  The woman sighed and headed toward the cabinets, Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny on her scrubs wrinkling with each movement. She spoke over her shoulder. “My best guess is to check in the cafeteria. It’s in the building across the road—main floor. Follow the signs.”

  Greta crossed the street and found the aforementioned signs. Sans-serif, all caps: “CAFETERIA,” with a bold arrow pointing the way. Oh, this broom closet isn’t a dining center? As she grew closer, she was also led by the telltale smells of mass-prepared food. There were tater tots somewhere nearby, and Danny might be with them.

  When she turned the final corner toward the line of cash registers, Danny was walking toward her. He stared down, his face blank, but he had a smudge of ketchup near his cheek that she could see from a distance.

  “Hey, dork!” she shouted at him. The hallways of a hospital, it turned out, made perfect acoustics for the echoing of sibling insults. “You’ve got ketchup on your face.”

  Danny stared at her, wide-eyed. His eyes were lighter green today, his mood-ring eyes that changed colors, and he blinked them twice before taking a step toward her. “I thought we said two o’clock.”

  “Came to surprise you. I didn’t know you treated yourself to some culinary delights after your sessions.”

  “Just on Tuesdays.”

  “Just on your sister’s watch, you mean.” Greta caught his left arm in her right. Even to her, her voice sounded falsely cheerful. He had lied to her. Under her fingers his muscles tightened. Whether because of her gesture or her words, she didn’t know, so she continued, “I won’t tell Meg, if that’s your issue.”

  “I’m not a kid. Like, I’m not under house arrest.”

  They didn’t speak much on the ride to Danny’s apartment. When she parked outside the front door, he bristled in the seat next to her. “You don’t need to park in the handicap spot.”

  “I’m dropping you off.”

  “You don’t have a sticker.”

  “I’m leaving in two minutes. I can help you upstairs.”

  He unclicked the belt with his left hand. from Greta’s position in the driver’s seat, his elbow appeared to be bent wrong. “Don’t want help. Don’t need it.” He hit the car door closed with his hip and was at the front door before she could stop him.

  She rolled down her window as he fumbled with the door code. “Fine. But you’ve still got ketchup on your face.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Preliminary examinations: invented by the devil and the dean and judged by everyone who could secure her success.

  Maybe the devil actually had inroads here. She should investigate that.

  Brandon had given her a week off during exams, out of pity—or maybe friendship. The exams were like some dastardly reality show. In a single week, the department assigned a topic, from outside a candidate’s specialty, on which to write a research paper. Besides this, she would have to present her dissertation and general knowledge before a committee. Her randomly assigned research topic wasn’t butterfly mating, carpenter ants, or even honeybees. Her topic: genetic alterations in mosquito populations for reduction of malaria.

  Because of course it was. First on the list of things she couldn’t care less about: the medical applications of her field. Some of this disregard came from her feelings about her mother’s job as a nurse. Beyond that, Greta had spent so much time in hospitals lately, and, well, while she could dissect any insect specimen, kneel in the dirt for hours, and barehand fistfuls of maggots, she hated blood. Mosquitos wouldn’t be her first, second, or millionth choice.

  After she received the assignment in her e-mail, she decided to move into the Iowa State library for the week. Literally. In her car, she had a sleeping bag small enough to fit into her backpack—meant for use in Costa Rica—several boxes of energy bars, and a canteen. The price of the motel had added up. Or rather, it subtracted down. Even with the steady paycheck, financial worries nudged at her. To reserve her old apartment, the one she’d been subletting out that semester, she needed an entirely new deposit by the middle of the month. Subletting had forfeited her old one. The contract came via e-mail and made her mouth water. Her home, that cozy eight hundred square feet.

  A partial financial solution? The library stayed open 24-7 leading up to and during finals week on campus. She knew enough secretive corners that she figured she could get away with sleeping there. To ensure
it, she reserved one of the “study rooms” from two to six AM every morning. She figured no one would reserve it after midnight anyway, so she might sneak in a full undisturbed five hours.

  An imposing four-floor stairway led from the library’s lobby high into the stacks, but that route took her right by the busiest sections of students with the most amount of foot traffic. Any chance to avoid human interaction was worth a few extra steps. She walked through the main floor and circled around the Grant Wood paintings to climb the back stairs. A large mural greeted her on the second floor, a bright painting full of cyclone shapes hidden in springs, a girl’s hair, and a replicated DNA sequence. After passing through rows and rows of dusty books, she came to a lone table in the corner. Campus lore whispered about this part of the stacks as haunted. Greta knew enough ghosts now that this didn’t trouble her. She plopped her large backpack on the metal table and dug out her laptop.

  Mosquitos.

  She opened a Word document and at the top typed, “Fuck mosquitos.” She then saved her document as Fuckmosquitos.docx, the suggested name—thank you Microsoft. Finally, she opened a research database and got to work.

  When she paused, four hours had passed, and she needed to use the bathroom. It was tricky to decide if her place was safe enough to leave for five minutes. She weighed the odds until her bladder won out, and she abandoned her computer. For once, her reluctant bet paid off. Human beings were essentially good—or at least not around, which was better—and her things were untouched when she returned.

  At hour five, she ate a vanilla chip energy bar and choked it down with two swallows of water. Her chapped lips proved she was not taking good care of herself, but at least she was learning about the procreative weak links of certain species of mosquito. Some of the stream-of-consciousness notes she was taking included the impressive number of times that mosquitoes procreate in their short lifespan.

  Procreation wasn’t a goal of hers, but she didn’t consider herself a failure of the species. She’d slept with Brandon, but, like any good scientist, she’d required multiple sets of protection against the elements. The sexual equivalent of rubber gloves and hand wash. It wasn’t so much that she wanted to be “child-less,” though that was part of it. It was more like she wanted to be science-more, research-more, travel-more, and not being a parent often went hand in hand with that. Insect success was measured on the number of sets of offspring produced. She didn’t lay any eggs in stagnant water, to hatch and infect the population around her, and her main goals in life weren’t to suck blood and die. She was exempt from the biological imperative. My, what would Darwin say about her?

  If she had begun rationalizing her reproductive choices, she needed a break. Facebook hummed with notifications about acquaintances’ birthdays she had missed and the next big meme. Brandon had never unfriended her after he left for New York. She’d never unfriended him either. His photo hadn’t changed. It was a picture of him holding up a kite he’d made with his grandfather. Greta knew that was a picture from the last time he’d ever seen his grandfather alive, but she wondered if Eden knew. Below Brandon’s name and basic information (he was a Gemini), was the line “In a Relationship with Eden Palatino.”

  It was Eden’s fault that she didn’t have better privacy settings. What person over thirteen didn’t know how to adjust their account so that any ex-girlfriend in the world couldn’t go waltzing onto it? The things Eden loved were on display everywhere. Her favorite bands, “Tar Heel Nation” groups, and recipes that Greta couldn’t picture Brandon liking—even though he “liked” the posts. He didn’t eat bacon, for one thing. He didn’t like pork—how the poor guy ended up in Iowa was beyond her.

  Footsteps behind her. How could someone creep up on her at midnight in the library? Clippy, save me! It was the perfect tagline for a boring horror movie. Or it was a ghost? The figure cast a shadow across her work. She felt the presence before she turned around. Once she saw who it was, her body untensed as she laughed in relief.

  It did more than untense. She felt her cheeks warm as Max smiled at her. “Hi.”

  “Hi,” Max returned. “Prelims?”

  She nodded. “You?”

  “I got fig wasps and related plant-insect pairings. What did you get?”

  “Mosquitoes and malaria.”

  He looked like he was weighing the topics in his mind. “Yeah, I’ll keep wasps.”

  “As if we had a choice.”

  He leaned against her desk and lowered his voice. Considerate, even with the lack of anyone around them. “Gary enjoyed the snack you brought. Sorry for being weird the other day.”

  “Me too.” There were too many spinning plates in the air above her head to create any real apology. Danny nearly getting kicked out of the program, and her dissertation topic change. She feared that pausing long enough to consider any of those problems would make them all come crashing down on her.

  “Well, good luck. I mean, good defense.”

  “No, good luck is fine. I’m going to need it.”

  Max stood, staring for a moment like he wanted to say something else. Finally, he shook his dark hair out of his eyes. He seemed as tired as she felt, but she knew they both had hours to go before they slept. He turned to walk farther down the dusty corridor of books. “Hey. Max,” she called.

  He swiveled around to face her again. “Yeah?”

  “I reserved a room in the third-floor study section all week to sleep. If you need a place to crash between academic journals.”

  He gave her one of his rare smiles. “I’ve got an actual bed to go home to,” he said. “But thanks, Gret.”

  At one thirty, she closed her laptop and unrolled her sleeping bag on the confetti carpet in the study room. In the atrium outside, she heard the faint whirr of an industrial vacuum and dreamed of getting sucked up in a cyclone made of DNA and mosquitoes. She woke at six on Tuesday morning, her eyes as crusty and heavy as if she had applied rubber cement as a beauty mask.

  The main level of the library housed a coffee shop. Although the air in the shop smelled over-roasted, anything would improve Greta’s breath. Her mouth tasted like an animal had farted in it, and as she sipped her first cup of coffee, she bemoaned her forgotten toothbrush, somewhere in a box in her car. She didn’t see Max again before she left at noon, but didn’t go looking for him either. Her stomach grumbled too loudly to start a search party. Woman cannot live on energy bar alone. As she drove away from campus, she had a thought. Why not meet her brother in the cafeteria for one of his illicit lunches? She’d kept his secret, so now it was time to cash in. Her body had been running on oats and corn syrup for the past two days, and maybe an item from every part of the food pyramid, plus a little sibling ribbing, was what she needed.

  And ribs—but what kind of hospital made ribs? Probably not this hospital.

  Her legs burned as she walked the distance from her car to the door. Too much sitting the past few days. Her eyes burned too, from real-world things more than six inches from her face. PhD programs should come with pages of warnings. Hazardous to your health, love life, muscle strength, family relationships, and sense of humor. Her head was full of mosquitoes, and she hoped that the cafeteria coffee came in refillable all-you-can-drink cups.

  Danny wasn’t there yet, but it was only 12:55. Maybe he had changed his routine too, but that was unlikely. Danny liked routines. He always had. When they were kids, he insisted on having the same lunch every day for seven years: peanut butter and jelly, yogurt with fruit on the bottom, and a banana (with no brown spots). He had started making his own lunch at age eight because their mother bought grape jelly once, instead of strawberry. Although he outgrew his love of peanut butter sandwiches, he still liked things just so.

  Greta filled her hospital tray with a pound of food: meatloaf, mashed potatoes, cottage cheese slathered with peach slices, and a mixed green salad topped with pickled beets. Her plate held a rainbow of comfort food in individual plastic bowls. She paid—cheaper than campus food
—and her mind formulated reasons to visit the hospital more. It would be good for the budget. Sure, it would be better for the budget to learn how to cook, but that was as unlikely as her turning into a giant lizard and knocking over the Campanile.

  Seated at a table facing the entrance to the cafeteria, Greta picked at her plate and watched for her brother. She had the perfect view to see him enter. A woman walked ten paces behind him, a woman who had been ghosting Greta since January.

  Greta stood up, leaving her food on the tray, already shaking her head. “All this time?”

  Danny stopped, feet flat and fingers still for the moment. Martha stepped forward and put a hand up as if to break up a fight. “Let’s do this somewhere else.”

  “There is no ‘this.’ I’m an adult,” Danny said, his look forcing her hand down. He turned to Greta. “Why did you ban her in the hospital?”

  Greta couldn’t believe she was being put on the defensive. “She was taking over.”

  “From who, the doctors? You’re the one that impersonated a doctor.”

  “I didn’t. It was an accident.” How had he heard about that? She was on shaky ground, and she knew it. “Does Meg know? About your little meetings?”

  Danny ignored her question. When he spoke again, his voice was calm. That tantrum-control voice. He must have inherited it. “Greta, you’re the one barring the doors. She’s been knocking on them for years,” Danny said. “We started talking last October, before all this. I wanted her here.”

  The revelation made her eyes sting. “I don’t get it. Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “Like you would listen.” His mouth twitched up again. He knew the worst parts of Martha, and he still wanted to talk to her. “I have a right to make my own choices, and Mom and I—”

  “You’re calling her ‘Mom’ now?”

  “Mom was telling me about Dad, about Dad before. And it’s helping me get through this.”

  Greta scoffed audibly. And as she did so, she thought she could hear why the sound was called a scoff—this scuffing of an “o” sound, disgusted, against her palate. “Like she knew Dad.”