The Butterfly Effect

by Rachel Mans McKenny

  Meg planned to collect her things during his final physical therapy appointment on Friday. Greta mentally divided that which had been Meg’s and that which was Danny’s. While mentally calculating, she saw the grimace on Danny’s face. She suddenly had a terrible premonition of a late-night phone call she might miss, and didn’t stop herself this time. “Do you want me to move in?” she asked him.

  He swallowed his last bite of toast. “Do you need a place to stay?”

  She thought about the money she had saved for her apartment, for those sparse and beautiful eight hundred square feet all to herself, and then she met her brother’s gaze. “Yeah.”

  * * *

  Greta submitted the written portion of her preliminary examination early—at least twenty minutes before the requested midnight deadline on Thursday. All that remained was the oral portion before her full committee. Too nervous to sleep, she packed.

  It was surprisingly mind clearing to pack someone else’s shit, especially if that someone was Meg. Before Danny’s bedtime, she had moved an old dresser from his room into the sitting area, whose couch she would reside on for the duration. From the closet, she carried armfuls of Meg’s things, lumping them into a pile. Meg had a closet full of dresses and pressed skirts, some still in dry cleaning bags. It had taken Greta until last year to realize what those little hooks were for in the back seats of cars.

  With Danny in bed hours ago and her prelims turned in, Greta started with the dresser. For the first few hours, Franz kept Greta company as she pieced through Meg’s things, drawer by drawer. He nudged at the boxes and whined. Greta scratched his ears, and he settled onto his haunches. Named by Danny or not, Franz was really Meg’s. Even if they kept him for a while, when Meg got settled, this dog would be just another stranger’s dog, and the thought made Greta sadder than she wanted to admit.

  The piles grew larger. Size small T-shirts. Size four pants. It felt like doing laundry that had shrunk in the wash. When she got to the underwear drawer, she picked up the items with a T-shirt on her hand as a makeshift glove. The underwear dropped into the box, some lacy and some frilly and others ordinary, but all small and clean and previously folded. She found the bra that she’d baked months ago and noted it was no worse for wear. The rest of the underwear drawer baffled her. Who folded their underwear? Who folded their T-shirts, in fact? None of it was folded by the time it landed in the box. By the time the clothes were sorted, the novelty of the exercise wore off for Franz, and he curled up on the couch.

  On top of one of the less full boxes, she tucked the photographs she knew were Meg’s. They featured a smiling, short man in a tacky T-shirt and three women who looked nearly identical to her—a mother and two sisters, Greta assumed. Meg herself had Mickey Mouse ears and was about ten years younger. Greta moved on to the bookshelves and tried to separate his books from hers. Who would have read Freakonomics? Meg, probably. The fantasy books were Danny’s, she was sure. She thumbed through a few and noticed they had been hers originally, her name crossed off with a thin line to be replaced by her brother’s. Ass. She continued her assessment. The wedding planning notebooks, Meg’s.

  The whole activity felt like a question of how well she knew her twin. Something like a metal detector pinged in her. She felt confident about her piles by two in the morning. After this initial sorting, only the Calvin and Hobbes comics remained on the shelf, and Greta bit her lip. She flipped the cover of one of the anthologies and noticed handwriting on the title page.

  To my boy: you make me real.

  The looping script practically begged for hearts over “i’s” and “j’s,” if there had been any of those letters. Underneath, a second note in jagged, familiar handwriting.

  To my tiger: I’d fly off a cliff in a wagon with you any day.

  Gag, thought Greta, flipping the book closed. She couldn’t help herself at opening one of the other volumes, however. She skipped the title page, turning to the strips themselves. Beside every fifth or sixth one was a penciled comment in the margin, or a smiley carefully circled and embellished into a full stick figure in varying thicknesses of lead. Obviously passed back and forth like a note in a classroom.

  Leaving these shared comics here felt like a self-pity time bomb set to explode whenever some unfathomable date creeped up on Danny: Meg’s birthday or the anniversary of some silly milestone like the first time he complimented her pierced ears.

  One thing that kept her coming back to Star Trek was the idea of the Prime Directive, the purity of it. Don’t interfere. Observe. Study. Better to help prevent the problem before it came up. She took the stack of books and put them in Meg’s pile, then thought better of it. She slid the comics between the futon and the frame, feeling the same relief one might in disarming a bomb. As for the rest, she boxed it all up with the authoritative scritch of tape torn off a roll.

  * * *

  “So, how’s Danny?” After an hour of drilling on entomology, with her dissertation in progress and her sudden shift of focus, this question unsettled her. This question, asked so many times by so many people, sounded different from Larry’s mouth. Pointed somehow. She’d only seen him in passing since he got back to the States.

  What was she supposed to say: bad? Good? Geez, Lar, she imagined herself saying with a wide-eyed smile. It is a good thing I came home because, you know what? Turns out it wasn’t an aneurysm, but a radioactive spider bite and what he really needed was a sister who knew a little something about arachnids and had seen most of the superhero movie canon. She bit her tongue, literally, and tasted iron. “He’s getting better every day.”

  Larry nodded seriously. “Good.”

  Both assembled professors filed through paperwork, pausing every few seconds to mark something in damning red ink. Tom Plank, the bigger guy, and deep red in the overheated conference room. Larry Almond, shorter and deeply tan, probably from the Costa Rican sun. Even that intensification of melanin, which could signal early risk for skin cancer, made Greta’s stomach churn with jealousy. Lucky bastard.

  Larry passed a piece of paper to Tom, who glanced at it and nodded.

  Tom cleared his throat. “Your entomological knowledge is extensive. We did get a status report from Brandon, and he thinks your design will work well for research and hopefully for practical applications as well.”

  Greta nodded, unsure if they expected her to say anything.

  “I move that we approve the candidate’s preliminary examinations,” Tom said, glancing up the table.

  * * *

  It took a moment for Larry to chime in his affirmative, but when he did, Greta felt a genuine smile curl her lips. The hard part was over—well, all but the dissertation. All but defended. ABD. She claimed the title proudly.

  She texted Max from the hallway. “ABD. You?”

  He sent a dancing hippo gif and the message, “ABD.”

  “I was going to eat a whole cake by myself, but I’ll give you a slice,” she texted back, and included Danny’s address.

  Half an hour later, she sat down at Danny’s table with a small sheet cake in front of her. The HyVee bakery had at least half a dozen to pick from, but this was the only chocolate cake with chocolate frosting. Who cared if it was decorated with race cars? Who cared if the name Joseph was misspelled “Joeseph” across the bottom in blue icing? She had just grabbed two forks when she heard a knock at the door.

  She opened it in a quick motion, a smile already on her lips. It melted when she saw Meg waiting on the other side.

  Meg’s eyes took in the apartment as if she hadn’t left it days ago, scanning left to right until her gaze fell on the stack of boxes. Her voice was hard. “You touched my things?”

  “I thought you wouldn’t want to linger.”

  Meg stepped inside the apartment, pushing past Greta and walking over to the bookshelves. Franz yipped along behind her, but Meg didn’t seem to notice. Dazed, she touched their blank spaces with such a deep frown on her face that Greta thought she might be a dentist looki
ng at a mouth half empty of teeth. Meg and Franz disappeared into the bedroom and then came back out again after a few minutes, a piece of paper in Meg’s hand. The small neat swirls and swoops were familiar to Greta when Meg put the paper on the table. “You actually got a lot of it, but I wrote down some of the furniture I need. Ginger said she can pick it up later in her truck—I mean, some of it we bought together, and I don’t … She swallowed, her attention on the table itself now. “Did you get a cake?”

  “No, it actually just appeared. Didn’t cake materialize when you lived here?”

  Meg’s voice rose. “That is so like you, Greta. To celebrate him breaking up with me. To be so happy when I’m upset.”

  Greta stopped her. “He broke it off?”

  “He said he couldn’t see how all this could work. All this, meaning everything, I guess. When I asked him—”

  Greta waved a hand in front of her face. “I don’t need the details.” The less she knew, the more she could disconnect from the situation. To know was to become part. Danny’s choice? That was hard to believe from the look on Danny’s face that morning, the whiskey, the mourning tone in everything he said. When even “pass the cornflakes” sounded like a eulogy, she wouldn’t have guessed he was the one who’d broken it off.

  “And this cake. Race cars?” Meg lowered herself into a chair at the table, a table she had probably helped assemble from some box kit years ago. She had purple rings underneath her eyes like bruises. Her voice shook when she continued, “Cars? Is that because of the crash?”

  “You think I’m celebrating your breakup with some kind of voodoo cake? That I’ve renamed your relationship ‘Joseph’? Not everything is about you guys,” Greta said. A laugh bubbled up inside of her, which she stifled when she saw Meg’s face. She flicked the second fork in Meg’s direction. “It’s just a cheap chocolate cake. Jesus, have some if you want.”

  The fork landed inches from Meg’s head, which she had just laid on the tabletop, cheek against faux wood. “I don’t even have a place for Franz right now,” Meg said, her voice muffled. She turned her head to let more sound escape. “But I will. I mean, along with everything else—”

  Greta cleared her throat. “I can take care of him until—”

  A rap at the door signaled Max’s appearance. Greta called him in, and the surprise on his face at seeing someone else in the apartment was almost worth having a pitiful Meg around.

  “Meg, Max,” Greta said, pointing with her fork from man to woman. “Max, Meg.”

  Max’s eyebrows raised. He knew Meg from Greta’s stories. He seated himself across from them. Meg silently bit an empty fork, staring toward the bookshelves.

  “So, who’s Joe and why are we eating his cake?” Max asked after a quiet minute. His eyes asked several more questions, but Greta liked holding him in suspense.

  “It’s Joe because I already ate the ‘seph.’” Greta said, standing. “Lemme get you a fork.”

  In the end, the three of them ate until only a smear of brown frosting and the inedible car decals remained. Max helped Meg load boxes when it was time for Greta to pick up Danny, the choreography working so all parties exited the stage at once to clear it for the next act.

  * * *

  When Greta picked Danny up, he had the nerve to slide into the passenger seat and ask, “So, pass me the keys?” His face had the slimmest smile on it, that agonizing slice of charm that had gotten him out of sticky places when they were younger.

  Greta chose not to dignify that with a response. She started the car and floored it for a few meters before stopping abruptly at a stop sign. “God damn, I forgot how many stop signs this neighborhood has.”

  “They should move the pesky hospital. Maybe that would fix it.”

  “Ha. Good session?”

  “Good or not, it’s the last one,” Danny said. “Insurance says I’m healed, so I should be happy about that. Actually it was okay. And your exam thing?”

  “Passed,” Greta said. She pulled forward again and turned onto the backroad she usually took to avoid campus traffic. She cruised for a few blocks, only to have to stop when a line of orange cones appeared in the middle of the road. “Damn, did they start summer construction already?”

  A line of cars were stopped in front of them, six or seven. An ominous one-lane-will-disappear-into-oblivion sign stood in the median a few cars away. A construction worker waved traffic from the opposite side past the obstruction. Taking turns had always been a weakness for Greta. She didn’t have much choice. The cones blocked the way from the intersection to the next possible turn.

  As they stalled, the car at the front of the line laid on the horn.

  “Oh, that’s helpful,” Greta said. She beeped her own horn twice. Still, the horn continued, a droning bagpipe of a honk. “I’m not going to be stuck in traffic with that going on, I can tell you that.”

  At least four cars had stopped behind her now, and she put the car in park. After casting a sidelong glance at her brother, she shut the engine off and pocketed the keys before locking him in the car. He gave her a “what?” face through the window.

  The day was warm, and the red bud blossom canopy above her belied the jarring noise. Even birds rose from their nests to get away from the honking. When she reached the car at the front of the line, a blue Elantra with spoilers, she rapped on the window with both fists.

  A startled face stared at her, young and framed by her fists on the window. The guy was younger than twenty, with a baby face, and looked legitimately afraid of the six-foot-tall woman peering in his window. The honking stopped. She motioned for him to roll the window down, and he shook his head. Before she got a chance to rap again, traffic started moving. She had to jog to get back to her car, but by the time she settled in the driver’s seat, her car was forced to yield for opposite traffic again, even though she was at the front of the line.

  Greta swore under her breath. She, too, felt like laying on the horn now.

  Danny chewed his lip in the silence of the car. “I should have told you that I talked to her when she got in touch last year.”

  Greta turned to her brother. “Who are you talking about?”

  “Mom.”

  Greta bristled. “You really think this is the time?”

  “What else are we doing?” Danny asked. When Greta didn’t respond, he rolled down the window and angled an arm across the lowered arc of glass. “She sent an e-mail to the school, an invitation for Thanksgiving, an apology, an attachment of photographs from our childhood I’d never seen. Shit, Greta, you were a cute kid. Who would have guessed?”

  “I grew into such an ogre. Kind of a Shrek thing.”

  “Want to know what’s twisted? I liked not telling you. Not telling anyone. It was my thing.”

  Like the affair with Meg, before she was fiancée Meg. Now ex-fiancée Meg, Greta’s brain corrected. Greta contemplated the horn again. Maybe the dumbass teen had been having an uncomfortable conversation, too, and was trying to drown it out.

  “I was going to tell you when you got home from Costa Rica,” Danny said. “I wanted to let it settle, give myself a chance to work through the knots before you came home.”

  “If our situation was someone else’s—a friend’s, maybe—would you tell that friend to get back in touch? If this friend, an adult, lived without a mother for years and didn’t miss her. Didn’t need her. And when she did need her, this mother wasn’t there.”

  “But when I need her now, she’s there.”

  “To get you in a car accident.” Greta’s breathing pained her. She gripped the steering wheel harder. What she really wanted to say was Why can’t you need me? Why can’t I be enough? Greta felt like she would bend herself for him, learn to be his parachute and landing pad or whatever he needed. They were supposed to be enough. They could be enough.

  Finally, the line of cars moved again, and the construction worker waved them past. For a second, the sound of jackhammers coming through the open window drowned out his w
ords, but she finally caught them and immediately responded with as many rejections as she could find. “No. Way. Nope, Danny. No.”

  “I invited her before this. It’s just a dinner.”

  “Mother’s Day? Really?” Greta turned onto his—their—street and parked.

  “Gret, come on.”

  She got out of the car without another word. She knew, even with his PT, he couldn’t catch up to her if she jogged. Her legs were longer. On the solo ride up the elevator, she realized that she hadn’t even locked her car, but she would rather have her puny stereo stolen than finish that conversation.

  The table still bore the marks of cake crumbs, but Meg’s things were gone. Lighter—the room felt unanchored somehow with half its weight gone. Greta would have to move in her things that weekend just to keep it from floating away. One weakness of the place was that it didn’t offer many spots to hide. Greta stashed herself in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet with her head in her hands.

  It was the shortest hide-and-seek game on record. Greta used to purposely prolong their games as kids, walking past Danny’s spot again and again to hear the giggle he couldn’t suppress. She heard a knock on the door, one-fisted and lighter than the one she’d imposed on the teen honking his car horn. Danny’s voice matched the level of care. “Gret?”

  As if it could be someone else.

  “Look, give me a dinner’s-worth of pity for the ending of the only meaningful romantic relationship I’ve ever had.”

  Greta opened the door a half inch. “Fine. One dinner. Your pity coupon is cashed at that point.”

  Now she had to figure out what kind of Sunday dinner took the least amount of time to eat. The sooner Martha got in and out, the better.