This part, the end, was her favorite. Rockets shot up ten at a time, overlapped and bled into one another. She knew it was designed, but the end of a fireworks show had the feeling of a going-out-of-business sale, the carelessness of a toddler throwing everything into one toy bin. Sudden silence, and the sky was all smoke. The assembled crowd packed up their chairs, and soon only the three of them were left on the dark hill by the school. Brandon turned to Greta. “It’ll take us forever to get out of the parking lot with this crowd.”
Greta dug around in her purse and held out the box of sparklers. “I brought supplies.” She paused and corrected herself. “Shit, but no lighter.”
“I think I’ve got one. Just a sec.” Eden opened her purse with a manicured hand and pulled out a dainty pink lighter. She gave a mischievous smile and tugged a plastic baggie out as well. A single white joint hung in the bag—or that was what Greta assumed it was. Greta felt, suddenly, years of DARE training spin uselessly in her mind.
None of them noticed the disappearance of headlights from the parking lot. In the shade of the trees near the baseball field, no one would see them, even with their sparklers. Eden took a puff of the joint and handed it off to Brandon before lighting a sparkler. It fizzed in her hand and she traced her name in cursive in the dark sky. The afterimage of Eden’s name written backward printed itself on the inside of Greta’s eyelids.
The sparkler had nearly burnt down to the handle when Greta saw a flame leap from the metal to the tip of Eden’s long hair. A strand, coated with hairspray, caught the spark like a kid with a firefly. Greta turned to Brandon first, but his mouth went slack-jawed in surprise, and his hands were full of lighters and drugs. Without pausing, Greta grabbed the water bottle sticking out of Eden’s purse and poured it all over her burning blonde skull. The elapsed time from flame to smolder was just seconds, but still a lock of Eden’s hair had burnt like a wick from its original past-shoulder length to near her ear. “Holy shit,” Eden gasped, dropping the used sparkler on the ground. “Thank you.”
It was then, and only then, that Greta began to laugh so hard her stomach hurt. “Jesus Christ. I wish I’d gotten that on video.”
A few minutes passed before Eden said anything. She sat in the grass, holding the strand of burned hair like it had nerves. Brandon settled where he had been standing and motioned for Greta to join him. He passed the joint to her.
She held it between her thumb and forefinger and looked at it before passing it back. “I don’t smoke. Sorry.”
Brandon chuckled as he took in another breath. “It’s funny. That kind of video used to earn you money. Remember the old shows? Ten thousand dollars for a kid falling on a birthday cake. Now they’re all over YouTube for free.”
“They want to be watched,” Greta said. “Just to be seen.”
“Maybe that’s harder now than when we were kids, huh?” His voice was soft, directed toward her as if through a cone.
She knew he was looking at her, even in the dark. She could still barely see the backward “Eden” in cursive, swirled in light on her inner eyelids, so Greta stared at him through the name. “Maybe,” she said.
Eden slunk over to them and sat next to Brandon, practically falling into his lap. She draped a lazy arm onto Greta’s leg. “I owe you my life, Greta Oto. I swear I do.”
Greta inched her leg away. “Don’t mention it,” she said, hoping that if Eden wouldn’t, Greta could pretend Eden didn’t exist at all.
* * *
The thought of ending her time at Reiman in a few weeks almost made Greta mournful. The routine of the lab felt like a time table to her, and even on her days off she felt herself checking the clock to see when the next task needed to be completed. Brandon even let her fill out a request form for the next shipment from a pupa distributor, though they both knew she wouldn’t be there to unpack it when it arrived. One day, in early August, Greta saw something in the butterfly wing that she scarcely believed. She ran back to the lab to get a capture box that they had been using for their ant experiments and put the thing inside. When Brandon got back from his lunch break, she presented it to him with a trumpet noise: “Ta-dah!”
He narrowed his eyes at the little plastic cube, then widened them when he saw. “Really?”
She nodded. “So what do we do?”
The lab was empty except for the three of them: Brandon, Greta, and this illicit caterpillar. It was bristly and squirming against the side of the box. “I think it’s a morpho. You know we can’t keep it,” Brandon said.
“But I’d take it for walks and everything,” Greta said, her voice falsely earnest. She took a breath. “Why can’t we just let it pupate?”
“Our license doesn’t allow for breeding, Gret. You know that. We don’t want to get revoked over a free morpho.”
Cost wasn’t even a consideration in Greta’s mind, but simply the wonder of a caterpillar hatching in the strict conditions of the butterfly house. The likelihood of it was preposterous—the controls in place, the lack of patches of host plants for egg laying, the limited numbers of the right species, and yet here was this lone caterpillar. “I guess I just thought it was cool.”
Brandon ran a hand through his hair and sighed. “No one else saw it?”
With the glass fronts to the lab, she couldn’t say for sure. Still, she had tried to be as careful as she could in retrieving it. She didn’t feel like she was lying when she shook her head. “If you get caught, you can blame it on me anyway. I’m leaving in a month.”
“Fine,” he said. “But don’t name it, and don’t let the assistants get attached. They’re too young to know not to think of lab specimen as pets.”
Despite the warnings, by the end of the day, Maura had named the caterpillar Morpheus and had constructed a variety of fake pieces of furniture taped to the outside of its box, complete with television set and a replica of the Mona Lisa.
Greta realized the irony of anthropomorphizing a caterpillar. After all, caterpillars were just larvae, in the same way that maggots were. When she was ten or eleven, her father used to take her to his friend’s taxidermy shop on weekends while her brother shuffled from one music lesson to another. One Saturday, a man with a beard and a sleeve of tattoos had brought in the biggest specimen she had ever seen. The client had been on a hunting expedition to Northern Minnesota and come back with a bull moose. It was clear that the animal hadn’t been shot, but been hit by some sort of vehicle. The client said he’d hunted it, but even Greta didn’t believe him. In her memory now, she believed him even less.
By the time the specimen found had its way to the shop, time, heat, and flies had all taken their turns at it. The biggest wound in the beast was along its right side, near the front leg. It was obviously the spot of impact. In the curdled flesh was a mass of maggots, writhing. That sight nearly turned Greta from a future in entomology to law. Greta’s father, though, didn’t even blanch. He and his friend salted the wound and put the moose in the industrial-sized freezer that he had for just such occasions. When the client picked it up a few months later, they had expertly patched the missing hide. What he couldn’t fix with material, he fixed in the setting of the beast—curling the leg up in mid-stomp to minimize the wound’s visibility.
Those wriggling white larvae had just been hatched fly eggs. They shouldn’t be more or less adorable than Morpheus, but such was the way of the world that, even in her supposedly rigid scientific view, she couldn’t stop herself from showing Danny a picture of the caterpillar that night.
“Sounds like you and Brandon are getting pretty close again,” Danny said. His tone was unreadable; ditto his expression.
“It’s just work.”
He clucked his tongue. “Whatever.”
“And don’t tell anyone,” she warned, putting a finger up in librarian-esque caution. “About the caterpillar.”
“Greta, literally, who would I tell?” he asked. His eyes flicked over the picture on her screen and back to the book he was reading called G
uitar Repair: A Manual.
“The guys down at the shop. Seems like they take up all your time lately. Shouldn’t you be—I don’t know—prepping your classroom?”
He rolled his eyes. “I’ve got a few weeks. It’ll be fine.”
As much as he said that—and he repeated this script each time she brought the topic up—time started to contract upon itself. On her way to work, he had her drop him off at the music store instead of the middle school. Meanwhile, Morpheus went through his larval instars, shedding his skin each time and changing his appearance. Greta gave up using gender-neutral language the second day and sexed the caterpillar to give a true pronoun. Morpheus neared the end of his fifth instar and stopped eating as much. His frass became less solid as he moved to pre-pupa stage. Finally, he began to construct his chrysalis.
After transferring him to the emergence cage, she felt the weight of the secret lifted from her. She and Brandon wouldn’t shut down the Gardens after all. She washed out Morpheus’s box and unstuck the ever-growing collection of paper furniture from its walls. Inside the cage, Morpheus’s chrysalis looked like all morphos’ did. When Brandon walked into the lab, she pointed to the line of hung moth cocoons and chrysalises. “The Eagle has landed.”
Brandon nodded and set down a folder. When he turned back to her, he held out a few pieces of paper toward her. “Here.”
She stared at the proffered papers. “What’s this?”
“Concert tickets.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Really?”
“For you and your brother. Eden bought them as a thank-you …” Brandon’s words came out quickly, begging her to interrupt, which she did after examining the tickets more closely.
“Liszt? Did she know that’s what he studied?” After a third read-through, Greta found an even better detail. She knew she had a stupid grin on her face but couldn’t dampen it for Brandon’s benefit. “It’s his friend. Oh man. His friend Henry is the pianist.”
“So you’re free?” Brandon asked, relief evident in his voice.
“Duh,” Greta mumbled, folding the tickets in half.
“We can pick you up at five on Saturday, then. Carpool down to Des Moines.”
Brandon’s wide grin made Greta realize that he had no idea of the wriggling unease in her stomach when he stood like this, hand on the desk, leaning casually toward her. “Sure,” she said. “Why not?”
And in her head, like a true scientist, she came up with three dozen possible answers to her own question.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Greta’s keys were in her hand, held out to the lock, when she heard it—that opening cascade of notes, Danny’s fingers hopping over each other. It was that song, the opening song from that old show about astronomy on public television. “Keep looking up,” the astronomer would intone at the end of the program. That was her real introduction to space, between squinting up at stars in the backyard and hopping aboard the Enterprise. It had been Stargazer and those too-late Saturday nights by the TV.
She put her ear against the apartment door, and just as certainly as she had heard the cresting waves, the waves faltered and skidded to a halt. A jarring pound on the keys and then silence inside the apartment.
Greta began to rethink her strategy.
Should she have told him about the concert earlier in the week? Maybe.
Should she wait in the hall long enough to pretend she hadn’t heard him playing? Probably.
After a few heartbeats, she unlocked the door and surveyed the scene. Five o’clock on a Saturday night and ten thousand pieces of sheet music littered the floor of Greta’s apartment. Danny sat in the middle of a pile of music, the notes of a hundred black eyes staring up from an open score. Other piles of music stood in corners of the room, precariously tilting against table legs.
After setting down her backpack, Greta picked up the closest sheet of music. It bore pencil marks of indiscernible gibberish on the front. “What the hell are you doing?”
“School starts next week and my old system of music organization …” Danny raised himself to his knees. “I just can’t use it anymore. It was by color. By the color I heard it as. So, a new system. Two rooms—the living room and the bedroom. One for choral and one for orchestral.”
Greta turned to face the bedroom. “You mean there’s more in there? Seriously? Did my taxes pay for all this music?”
Danny ignored her and continued, “And then in the bedroom, four quadrants: unison, two-part, soprano-alto-baritone, and more than three-part. Within those, I’m making alphabetical and seasonal piles. Plus pop, jazz, and classical piles.”
She surveyed the piles and thought about the slam on the piano keys. The evening’s plans felt all wrong somehow, but she knew that Brandon would be at the apartment in fifteen minutes. “That sounds boring.”
“Seriously, Greta, you are the one that—”
“I’ve got a surprise for you.”
A suspicious grimace came over Danny’s face. “What is it?”
“Franz Liszt,” she said, as if that explained everything. “And not the dog. Put on a real shirt and a pair of shoes, and let’s get going.” She turned to the dresser in the middle of the living room and removed a wrinkled skirt from the back of a drawer. She shook it out and held it against her waist.
“Is that the skirt you wore to Dad’s funeral?” Danny asked. “Is that your only skirt?”
“You can’t wear skirts in a lab,” Greta said. She slipped it over her jeans, unbuttoned the pants at the waist, and slid them down. Greta assessed her shirt. It was clean enough. “Well, chop chop. Their car will be here soon.”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“Me, Brandon,”—she sighed—“and Eden. Brandon’s girlfriend. They had extra tickets for tonight.”
Danny nodded. “Five minutes.”
Her phone buzzed with a text from Brandon. “I’ll be in the car. And don’t tell them this is my only skirt,” she hissed.
“You don’t think Brandon already knows?”
She didn’t have anything to say to that, only tapped her wrist and closed the apartment door behind her.
* * *
The windows of Brandon’s truck were open, and Danny climbed next to Greta in the rear seat. “All comfy back there?” Brandon asked.
“Yeah,” Danny said. “Thanks for inviting me.”
“It is the biggest pleasure to meet you, Danny,” Eden said.
Greta’s eyes rolled so hard that the car shook. It might have been a pothole, though. Greta could only see the top of Eden’s head from her spot, but she could smell her—vanilla and almond, like a scone.
“I can’t believe I didn’t know something Liszt was coming to Iowa,” Danny muttered.
“You could have missed Liszt?” Greta said with mock surprise. “How terrible!”
“People used to be obsessed with Liszt,” Danny defended. “Treasure his cigar butts, faint during his concerts.”
“I don’t think it’ll go that far tonight, but the guy—the pianist—is supposed to be pretty good. Henry Prasad, I think. Is that it?” Brandon passed the tickets from the beverage console to him.
Danny laughed as he turned to Greta. His eyes showed honest surprise tinged with something else. That something colored his voice, too, and made him sound hesitant. A kid waiting to step into the street. “Yeah. Henry. He was actually a college friend.”
Greta tried to right the ship, distract that note of worry from his voice. “When it’s an elite private music school, I feel like you’re supposed to refer to them as chums.”
“Like fish,” Brandon said. “College fish.”
“School of fish,” Greta said, grateful for someone playing along. Even more grateful it was Brandon.
“Did you think of going into music?” Eden asked.
“He is in music,” Greta said, the humor iced.
Danny cut in. “You mean performance? No. No, I always wanted to teach.”
Greta knew the lie, but she als
o assumed he didn’t want to derail the evening with sob stories of losing Dad, debts, and settling for a life he didn’t want. Meg had been the one thing he had chosen for himself, damn the consequences. And he had been happy then, with Meg. She had been like music after all.
On the highway now, nearing the interstate, the air from the open window blew in earnest now. Danny didn’t seem to notice. He watched the fields go by. Greta realized it had been months since he’d been anywhere farther than a few blocks from home.
The wind blew around Greta’s face, drying out her eyes. “Can you close the window?”
Brandon apologized, and the air-conditioning in the truck hummed on. Brandon peppered Danny with questions about composers, pleased to have an expert in the car. Greta watched the back of Brandon’s head as he drove. When he moved the steering wheel, the muscles in his neck shifted gently left and right.
Halfway into the drive, an ambulance passed them, sirens blaring and lights spiraling. Greta couldn’t stop the thought that this was the way Danny had last traveled. In the back of an ambulance, on his back, and heading somewhere he couldn’t see. Danny caught Greta staring at him. He said, “There’s a name for that siren interval—did you know that? It’s called a tri-tone. Liszt used them in his Dante sonata. Tri-tones up and down the chromatic scale for the whole first movement. When I used to play it, my fingers would ache from how loud it was, but I guess hell isn’t subtle.”
“I wonder if it’s on the program,” Eden mused, her voice mild and unburdened with thoughts of death.
“I wonder,” Danny echoed, his voice aimed at the windowpane.
* * *
The seats were center and about halfway up. The Dante sonata was not part of the program, but even without hellfire evoked, Greta caught herself studying Danny, watching for signs of life. Pleasure, pain—anything, but his face was blank as Henry’s fingers hit the keys. At intermission, Greta caved, finally asking Danny how he liked the performance.
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