The Butterfly Effect

by Rachel Mans McKenny

  “I knew the man, not just the father,” Martha said.

  “Look,” Danny interposed, “we’re going to have lunch, like we do on Tuesdays. If you want to join us, you’re welcome. Otherwise, I can get a different ride home.”

  The comment stung. Tuesdays were their time together, just them. The time that, between appointments and Meg and work, she felt like she had family. If there was one thing Martha knew how to do, it was break apart a family. Greta’s chest hurt.

  “I need to get back to the library.” Her tray of food spoke as she abandoned it on the table. Her lies smelled like meatloaf and mashed potatoes.

  Martha put a hand on Danny’s arm, and Greta flinched as if her mother had reached for her own arm. After Danny had been taking piano lessons for three years, Martha had insisted that Greta try it too. The rationale: “It’ll be good for you.” Martha always imagined duets, the four peaceful hands of her twins working together in ways they never did when they washed dishes. In the end, all that happened was Greta had made the piano teacher cry, and Danny had to apologize. Couldn’t Danny feel the looming disaster?

  “Ten minutes in the same place,” Martha said. “Think of it as aversion therapy.” Goddamn if Martha and Danny didn’t have the same patronizing grin.

  Greta’s eyebrows contracted, but she didn’t pick up her tray. “Ten minutes.”

  Martha held Danny’s tray and walked a step ahead of him while he chose his items off the buffet. He couldn’t grip things steadily, but Greta saw how she made Danny scoop his own pudding, spear his own pickle. She pushed him, and more than that, Danny glanced at her when he grabbed the tray from her hand and insisted on carrying it. For approval? For support? It didn’t matter the reason behind it, because the look on his face rewound time by twenty years.

  Greta disappeared from the table before they returned.

  * * *

  The door to the study room opened, sometime past three or four AM, and a flashlight shone in. “Ma’am?”

  Greta sat up in her sleeping bag, her arm falling off her eyes. She’d never been “ma’am-ed” before, and she’d aged ten years in the two hours she had been sleeping.

  The lights flicked on. A library page—gawkish and wide-eyed—stood with a campus police office. “Ma’am, I’m afraid we’re going to have to ask you to leave the premises. You can’t sleep here.”

  “I go here.” Greta rubbed her eyes. “I’m a PhD student. I’m catching a nap before I get back to studying.”

  “You’ll have to go home to do that. It’s a safety concern to have people sleeping in the library.”

  The bag unzipped as Greta moved her legs. “If I weren’t a ‘ma’am,’ would this still be a problem?”

  “This would be a problem.”

  The library page scurried out of the room, but the cop waited until Greta collected her things, and escorted her to the entrance of the library. The campus slept at four in the morning. Without the campus buses shouldering her off the road, she could walk in the middle of the street, and that was just what she did. Ames had so little pollution that she could see the stars. She’d never taken an astronomy class in undergrad. Looking up hadn’t been her habit, since her studies more often led her into the dirt than the heavens. As she walked, the stars kept her company, though she didn’t remember any of their names. It was like every party she’d ever been to. She was alone and unobserved and the least shiny thing around.

  It didn’t take long to fall asleep again in her office. The cubicle hive was empty, so she moved the chair out from under her desk to unroll the sleeping bag there. With her head sheltered by the clumsy metal desk, she couldn’t see the blink blink of the fire alarm light directly above her. Her brain registered some movement nearby after a while, but it passed. Greta slept longer than she meant to. Maybe she should have been sleeping here this whole time. The floor seemed to move next to her body, and Greta pushed the “Home” button on her phone. Seven thirty.

  She sat up fast, slamming her forehead into the desk above her. “Fuck. Fuck fuck.” Blood from her forehead bubbled under her palm. She could feel the welt there as she fell backward on her makeshift pillow.

  Max stood above her. “There’s a desk there.”

  “Fuck you too.”

  He moved to her desk and offered a hand. “Can you get out of there without a crowbar? Or a stretcher?”

  “Maybe a concussion will give me the inspiration I need to pass prelims.”

  “Move over and let me have a shot.”

  Greta grunted. She managed to shimmy the sleeping bag out from under the desk. She grabbed his outstretched hand and clambered into a sitting position. His hands were cool against her warm ones. “It was easier to get under there than it was to get out.”

  “Seemed like a good idea at the time, I’m sure.”

  “How are the wasps?”

  “As waspy as ever.” While Max settled himself into his desk chair, Greta relayed her incident with the library police. Max turned his attention from the e-mail on his laptop when she finished. “Used your privilege to get out of trouble, then?”

  Greta rolled her eyes. “I’m a student.”

  “You think everyone gets off so easy? After sleeping in the library for a week?”

  “Three days.”

  “Okay, white girl. Okay. I get it. Just three days.” Max laughed, and Greta couldn’t help but smile in response. In years of friendship, she had seen many wry smiles and ironic eyebrow raises, but laughs were few and far between. He probably thought the same thing about her, though. He knelt by her on the floor. “That’s going to bruise,” he said as he examined her forehead. “May I?”

  “May you what?” Greta asked.

  Max sighed and moved her hair aside with gentle fingers. Greta felt a residue of grease that the strands left behind, reminding her she hadn’t washed it in three days. If Max noticed that, he didn’t give any sign.

  “Will I live, Doc?” she asked, her voice mimicking Meg’s earnestness. “Give me the truth.”

  Greta’s skin tingled as he traced the area of impact. “I can diagnose a bump on the head.”

  “Medical school paid off,” Greta said, laughing and pulling back.

  His fingers hung there, over her head, as if in benediction. Then Max pulled his hand back and pursed his lips, suddenly serious. “I try not to regret any choices I make.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  Max interrupted her. “After that first year, I knew I didn’t really want to be a doctor. Not a medical one, at least. I moved back from Iowa City, and anyway, it’s good to be around my parents. I don’t regret it.”

  The admission felt so personal, it almost felt like a transaction was requested. Was this what Max meant about being reciprocal? “I just got kicked out of a hospital group therapy thing for being an asshole,” she admitted. Even if that wasn’t exactly what had happened, it was exactly why she felt she couldn’t go back.

  “Therapy for what?”

  They sat cross-legged on the carpet now, a few feet from their own office chairs. Sitting on the floor of the empty cubicle corridor was such a different perspective. She noticed someone else’s gum on the underside of her desk. “Caregivers. Because of Danny.”

  “How is he, anyway?”

  “Physically, fine. He finishes PT next week. Otherwise, I don’t know.” Greta ran a hand through her hair, the grease rubbing off on her hands. “How are you? Is that what I’m supposed to ask?”

  “I’m tired,” Max said. “And you can always ask that.”

  She nodded. “I think I’m going to shower at the gym. Prelims make me all sweaty.”

  “I noticed,” Max said. Even with her back turned to him, rolling up her sleeping bag, she heard the smile in his voice.

  Greta left her pile of belongings at her desk, the desk she’d been absent from for so long. Overheated or not, it still felt like being a kid again and touching home base. Something about seeing the familiarity of Max’s sparse desk made her
relax. Her desk wore a dress of papers. Anything she had left in the “In” box on her desk had multiplied with Xerox babies and tumbled into the “Out.” “I’ll be back in a bit,” Greta said over her shoulder, as if Max cared. As if someone would come searching for her.

  What happened next she would hear from multiple accounts, the looming disaster she wouldn’t feel the shockwaves of for hours. She ignored three phone calls in that time because she was showering.

  As she rubbed the combination hand wash and shampoo into her short hair, Greta pondered that in a parallel universe, she would have been just finishing up the research with the eminent Dr. Lawrence Almond. He had stayed in paradise while Greta got kicked out of the library by a campus cop and a library page who appeared to be about twelve years old.

  The parallel universe trap was an easy one to fall into these days. If Danny hadn’t had an aneurysm, she would have been there. Her data collection would be about glasswings, not harvester ants. Her funding would be intact, and she wouldn’t have to defend her oral preliminary exams until fall. She wouldn’t have had to talk to her mother again or beg Brandon for a favor.

  She wouldn’t have this welt in the middle of her forehead. It burned as the soap hit it. She must have broken the skin.

  Greta rinsed her hair and mused that if Danny hadn’t survived his aneurysm, she would have gone back too. A darker parallel universe that had, by all accounts, been the more likely outcome. No rehab centers, just a funeral. No PT, just a pine box. Different decisions, all worse and all over so quickly. After Dad had died, after the funeral, Greta felt guilty at how little her grief debilitated her. It didn’t chain her down or force her into bed. If anything, grief followed her around. It shadowed her while she worked and covered her eyes with its hands, occasionally, to remind her that things couldn’t ever be like they were. It would have been that way with Danny too. Two shadows following her, holding hands as they trailed her on the plane to Costa Rica after a few weeks’ absence.

  Guilt. A rush of it as she toweled off her body. She didn’t wish her brother was dead. That was the last thing she wanted. She hated herself the entire bus ride to her office. She hadn’t brought her phone with her to the gym, or she might have called Danny then and there, as she rode, and told him that she loved him, that she was glad he was alive, that it didn’t matter if he had a relationship with their mother as long as he included her too.

  Danny had always put up with her. Always. No one else, not even Brandon, could claim that distinction.

  Max was gone when she got to the office, but he had left a note in his messy scrawl on her desk. She recognized the “y’s” and “l’s” across the room. He used to copy her notes from lecture when he was absent—it happened a lot—and always had returned the notes with sarcastic commentary along the side, and doodles, as if he had been sitting through the lecture alongside her. “Call your brother,” the note said.

  She paused for a second, wondering if he were psychic, but then she saw her phone sitting on the desk alongside the note. The phone she had all but ignored for the last twenty-four hours registered six missed calls. Two were from “Don’t Answer.” The most recent was from Danny, ten minutes ago.

  When she called him back, Danny’s voice sounded weird, like he was speaking through a gag. “Are you being held hostage?” she asked.

  “I had a few drinks.”

  Greta turned abruptly and changed course for the bus stop, performing mental calculations. The commuter parking lot was at least a five-minute bus ride away, and then she needed ten minutes to drive to Danny’s place. “Danny, don’t drink anything else. Your meds.” The spring air blew through her wet hair. Handheld dryers weren’t the most effective at getting hair dry, but the wind did a better job of it. “What’s going on?”

  “I crashed the car.”

  “What? What car?”

  “And we broke up, Greta. Last night.” His voice cracked, like the imaginary cloth gag over his mouth had torn. She hadn’t seen him cry since their father’s funeral, and pictured the way his eyes filled and overflowed. He never cried aloud, not even when he had fallen off his bike and broken his arm in two places.

  “I’ll be there in fifteen. I swear. Don’t move.”

  On the bus ride, an early-season mosquito blew in through the open window and taunted her with its buzzing. The department had assigned her to study up on its kin and their ability to reproduce and spread harm, but the harm was already here. She would pass her prelims; after three solid days of work, her confidence had increased. She had always known how to get by in school, but Danny faced a challenge that she couldn’t study for and didn’t know how to help with. Danny didn’t respond to her further texts, and she dug her fingernails into her palms until she could get to his apartment. Her nails made half-moon dents, so deep that one of them bled.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  When Greta arrived, a horror movie was playing while Danny curled into a fetal position on the couch in front of it. He seemed to be sleeping, but she grabbed his wrist and felt for a pulse to make sure. It thrummed slowly under her fingertips, and she released her breath. “Danny,” Greta said, giving his shoulder a gentle shake.

  He roused briefly and mumbled.

  She lowered herself onto the floor and leaned against the couch. Over the next few hours, she watched him and the movie. It was The Exorcist. Go figure.

  Danny always liked horror, but never liked the monster movies—which Greta preferred. Instead, he liked ordinary things doing damage. Deranged kids, haunted movie tapes, the serial killer next door—he loved it. Once he told her that his original interest came from the movie scores, specifically for The Exorcist, which he’d watched at a friend’s house when he was about the same age as the possessed girl in the movie. Danny always heard music differently than Greta did, and so when he told her that he saw the movie score in slashes of red and goldenrod, and a sickening puce during the main theme, she had to believe him. When she closed her eyes now, she tried to picture the notes landing on an empty music scale in blots of sunrise.

  The priest on the screen mumbled some sort of prayer, and Danny finally stirred, rolling over and pulling himself up on his elbows. “Has the head spun yet?”

  “No.”

  They watched in silence for a while. Greta stared straight ahead, more afraid to look at his expression than at the horror on the screen. “How much did you drink?”

  “A few shots of whiskey. Most of it came up.”

  The head spun. Pea soup. Demonic garbling.

  “You freaked me out, Danny. What were you thinking?”

  “She’s gone.”

  “Then she’s gone, and we’ll figure it out.” Greta’s head hurt. “You’re doing better every day.”

  He grunted at that, his words slurring a little. “Is it normal to feel like your brain is against you?”

  “Your brain is you,” Greta said, finally turning to him. “What else do you think ‘you’ are?”

  “And that’s supposed to make me feel better?”

  “You think you’re possessed or something?” She was joking, and she could see from his raised eyebrows that he got it. Joking as a defense mechanism. Dad didn’t leave money, but he sure left behind a legacy of joking avoidance. She raised herself to the couch, shoving his feet aside to make a space next to him. “No matter what kind of hijinks your brain is doing, you know I’m here for you, so either start talking or shut up so we can watch the movie.”

  He fell asleep before she could get anything else out of him—the car crash, the breakup. She could almost guess the cast of characters from the missed calls on her phone that she refused to return. Meg. Then of course, the two calls from “Don’t Answer”—Martha. If she’d actually answered them, would something have gone better? The ending credits rolled, leaving Greta nothing to watch but the steady rise and fall of Danny’s chest.

  * * *

  Over a bribe of cinnamon toast later, he gave up the information. After Greta had left the
cafeteria, Martha said she would take him home. By the time they reached her car, Martha offered him the keys since it was such a short drive. “A short little drive,” she had said. Dad had taught them both to drive; Martha had been gone for two years by the time Greta received her school permit. Greta wondered, during that time, if Martha would have white-knuckled the center console even when Greta drove under fifteen miles an hour.

  Supposedly, Danny’s drive was going fine until Martha turned on the radio.

  “Just a mailbox,” he mumbled when Greta asked what he had hit.

  The first missed call on her phone lined up with the time of the accident and came from “Don’t Answer.” When Greta told Danny Martha had called her, he crumpled. “Well, that’s probably how Meg found out.”

  Greta swallowed. “So you didn’t tell your girlfriend you got in a car accident?”

  Danny glanced away. He mumbled, mouth full of toast, “It was just a mailbox.”

  When Meg had gotten home last night, she knew about the crash, and she also knew that Danny hadn’t told her. She didn’t say a word to him as she walked into the apartment, just started making spaghetti on the stove. Danny had heard her in the kitchen, filling the pasta pot. Then the pop of a jar of sauce unsealing, but he hadn’t gone in. He’d let her and the sauce simmer, and then at dinner she had asked him how his day was. She’d put the bait out there, had begged him to take it, and he hadn’t.

  Of course, that wasn’t how Danny saw it.

  “She was waiting to catch me out. The look on her face,” he said, unable to finish what that look was.

  Greta could imagine it was something like that blank doll’s face of shock she’d seen the day of the birthday party. She filled in the rest of the details herself. A call from Meg around nine. A call from Danny at ten. And then the string of Danny calls that morning. She pictured Danny sitting on the couch from nine to ten last night, waiting for Meg to come back in the door. Waiting for whatever fight they had to retract itself, but you couldn’t un-pop a balloon. Once that air was out, you could never contain it all again.