The Butterfly Effect

by Rachel Mans McKenny

“Meg,” he repeated, his voice level but threatening to seesaw into either a laugh or a shout. “We’re helping each other. Meg is a friend.”

  The term “helping” was too suggestive to leave alone. She repeated it back. “Friend, huh?”

  “My mother is dying, Greta.” The statement was so matter-of-fact, the narrowing of his eyes so pointed, that Greta felt the line as though he had repeated it a million times.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Pancreatic cancer. Stage four.”

  Greta leaned on Max’s desk, knocking the calendar sideways. The air in her lungs suddenly took up too much space. Her ribs felt tight. Her whole body felt tight, and she couldn’t meet his gaze. “I didn’t know.”

  But Max didn’t stop talking, closer with each sentence so that she could feel how wrong it was to be on this side of the divider. “Meg’s been going to the caregiver meetings with me. She’s been sitting with my mom after school.”

  Greta slid off his desk and moved to the corner of his cubicle. His voice followed her.

  “They’ve become friends,” Max said. “Again, if you don’t know what that term means, I can define it. A friend is someone who supports, who gives. Who doesn’t suspect someone’s motives and take and take.”

  Unwelcome tears stung Greta’s eyes. “I didn’t know, I swear.”

  Max just shook his head. He took three steps closer to her, and she had no place to retreat to from his voice. She wished he would shout, but instead his voice had gone slack. “I wanted you to. That’s the thing. I don’t know why, but I did. When you came by with that silverfish? You could have come in, met her. Met both of my parents. I wanted you to ask, to know. At least now you do.” He stepped back from her cubicle and knelt, opening the top file drawer in his desk. Once he had drawn out the stack of folders, he tucked them under an arm and headed down the hall without another word.

  For a long time after he left, Greta stood with her head in her hands.

  Not for the first time, she wished to redo the entire year. Parallel universe syndrome again. How long had he had the diagnosis? Before which beer night did he find out, or did he know all the way back to that drive from the airport?

  Monday she would be packing to leave for a conference that would change her life, and she was leaving him angry and leaving angry with herself.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  It rained in Florida—a lot. Greta checked that piece of trivia off on her first day. Since she hadn’t traveled much, her maroon rolling bag appreciated its second-ever trip. Unlike both Meg and Max, her family hadn’t taken a picture with mouse ears in front of a castle. They had one in front of the Iowa State Capital, in front of a butter cow at the State Fair, and—on her dad’s direction—even one with both herself and Danny wrist deep in a deer carcass that her father was stripping. If nothing else, the rain here was like the rain in Iowa—perhaps here it was more persistent and less polite. The rain was not Iowa Nice. She’d forgotten to pack an umbrella, and that summed up Greta’s luck in a nutshell. Her clothes were soaked as she sat at a large table in front of a roomful of people, some of whom had received grants worth more than a small country’s assets. If anything good had come out of the rain, at least her damp hair wasn’t standing up awkwardly. Instead, the dampness made it lie flat against her scalp like an otter in a pantsuit. The wet slacks—well, at least those were hidden by the table.

  Brandon prepared the presentation, checking cords and adjusting projector settings. Greta hated talking, hated the feeling of a million eyes on her. Funny how it didn’t matter when bugs stared at her. It should be more unnerving to have multi-sectioned eyes staring than to have an audience full of human ones. Complex brain function on both sides, though, meant that while flies might have creepy eyes, they probably weren’t judging her clothes or the pitch of her voice, or … Greta urped back a sudden rise of bile.

  She took a deep breath. Brandon planned to handle most of this. Brandon immediately charmed everyone that he ever met … well, except for herself. And Max. And if whip scorpions could hold grudges, Gary. Despite their argument, Max had sent her a good luck e-mail that morning. A cat in a graduation cap at a podium, “Have a Purrfect Presentation.” He said he would text Danny later to check in. How the fuck did she deserve a friend like Max? She didn’t. What if there were an audience full of Maxes? Her pulse picked up again. A room full of men dressed in Starfleet uniforms, with fade haircuts, thin wrists, and dark brown eyes. Slight men with a punny sense of humor who were also mad at her but somehow able to get over it. She couldn’t picture more than one of those, but maybe that was a good thing. She was realizing that he was one of the few people she actually cared to impress.

  Bodies shuffled into place, landing and alighting to move next to colleagues. People scooted toward the center of the ballroom to make more room on the aisles for latecomers. This was the largest crowd that she had ever spoken in front of, and certainly the most accomplished. How many graduate degrees were there from how many countries? Shit, it’s just ants, people, she wanted to tell them. Go home. It’s just ants.

  Brandon started before she was ready, but if his cue were to come based on her readiness, there would be a skeleton audience instead. He showed a few slides of the issue, the carefully documented infestation. He tossed in jokes. “These are the most photographed ants in history. The Real World: Ant Hill.” Polite laughs.

  But her part was coming. Brandon insisted that she had to say something. They had forty minutes, plus questions, and the design was hers. She needed to have fewer good ideas if it meant having to present on them. But this was science too. She knew that. It wasn’t enough to learn if you didn’t share your data.

  To his credit, Danny had offered to help her practice. He sat on the couch, watching her. He didn’t have segmented eyes, or the scary glare of the audience full of experts, but his puppy-dog expression was bad enough.

  She went through it once. Damn teacher; he made her do it again. A third time.

  “Slow down. Take a breath,” Danny told her. He demonstrated. “Right down here. From the abdomen. Breath support.”

  “I’m not singing a fucking aria.”

  All the same, Greta took a deep breath and stood when Brandon clicked over to the slide with her ant-trap design.

  And then her mind went blank.

  * * *

  “It wasn’t that bad,” Brandon told her afterward. They sat next to each other in the hotel bar. To his credit, he let Greta bitch for half an hour before cutting in. He waved a finger at the bartender, signaling two more of whatever they were gulping down to forget. At least, that was why she drank. “We are supposed to be celebrating. We got some great comments.”

  “After my train wreck.”

  “You didn’t actually vomit. It only sounded like it.”

  “If I had eaten anything I would have vomited.”

  “Maybe if you had eaten, you wouldn’t have almost fainted afterward.”

  “Fair point,” Greta admitted, taking a long sip. Her drink was pink, fruity, and not what she ever would have ordered at home. She also had a full stomach now, but despite a plate of chicken nachos as buffer, the vodka had gone to her head. Her cheeks felt numb, and it made her brain feel a little numb too.

  The numb brain might be from all the people she had met the past few days. The last day of a conference was always full of hand-pumping and exchanging numbers, but Greta found that even truer when she was actually presenting. Someone had asked her if she had a website or was on LinkedIn. After the presentation, even with the almost puking, a man from Boston slipped her a card and encouraged her to apply for a postdoc. A gentleman from South Africa pressed a brochure into her hand and tried to engage her in conversation about ants. She hated to tell them that she wanted to do what Brandon did. His job—half education and half research—seemed like what she wanted to do. I might look like an ant girl, she wanted to tell the man from Boston, but really I love butterflies. Really. Still. It was a h
abit she didn’t want to unlearn.

  Brandon had just called for the check, when a man from the restaurant side of the bar came over. “Hey!” His merry voice came muffled through a thick black beard. “I tried to talk to you both after your presentation, but this is destiny. Plop. Right into my lap.”

  Brandon shot a glance toward the man’s lap, probably unconsciously or perhaps to ensure that the man didn’t have other-than-academic motives in mind. It turned out the guy, Jeremy Plumber wanted to talk about butterfly house management. He was the curator of the butterfly collection at Florida State and the only other USDA-recognized facility in the country of its kind, which made Florida State and Iowa State lepidopterous cousins, or something. Suddenly there were handshakes and back slaps, memories of e-mails sent back and forth, and name-dropping of colleagues and paper co-authors. Jeremy led them deeper inside the bar. Another round. A few funny stories. She finished her third drink and Brandon, his fourth. After Jeremy finished his beer, he handed Brandon his card and checked his watch. “Promised my wife I would drive home tonight,” he said. “But keep in touch.”

  Greta was about to ask him for a card, too, but he had disappeared, and Brandon had tucked the rectangle into his back pocket.

  “I’m conferenced out,” Brandon said with a sigh.

  Greta nodded, and they strolled back into the hotel lobby. Scientists milled in pairs and trios, talking in a variety of romance languages. Not romantically, but Latinate. Greta sometimes wished she’d learned a different language instead of Spanish, something more useful to science. But her knowledge of Spanish still allowed her insight into snatches of conversation as she passed by. Discussions about bugs, in Spanish, caused a pang for the Costa Rican rain forest again. Maybe someday.

  Brandon pressed the elevator button, extricating them from a conversation with some old hands from the USDA. The elevator door closed, the only noise from the ambient piano music bouncing off the burgundy carpet and mirrored walls of the elevator. “I’m sick of people,” Greta said. “God, I’m ready to go home.”

  “There aren’t people at home?”

  “I’m a hermit. You know that.”

  “I think you like people more than you admit. At least when you can study them.”

  “I don’t study people,” she shot back. “They mess up the microscope lenses and don’t fit into petri dishes.”

  “Well, I guess you can only study people when you let yourself get close enough to them.”

  She noticed the weight of his body on the elevator railing next to hers. They both leaned against the mirrored wall, side by side. He was at least four inches taller than her. She examined him, studied him in the mirror in her periphery until she noticed him looking at her too. The elevator dinged. His floor.

  “Want to come in? We can watch TV.” He put a hand in front of the door sensor. A mirror version of Brandon watched her from every angle, fingers outstretched.

  She could have made an excuse. Early flight. Long day. “Yeah, okay.”

  His suitcase must have exploded upon entry, because not a single speck of clothing was left inside of it. She almost made a comment, but then he would know that she noticed his dirty clothes spread around the room. Maybe he would assume that she was thinking about him naked. Which she was definitely not doing, even though some of his underwear was new—black boxers, name brand.

  She rubbed a hand through her hair. “I don’t get cable anymore. This is a treat, actually,” she said. “More than the beach.”

  “Well, it’s been raining all week.”

  “Right.” He must know she wouldn’t have gone to the beach anyway. Even swimsuits on catalog pages made her blush. She wore a ten-year-old tankini when Brandon took her to a lake before he left for New York. Eden probably wore a string bikini.

  Brandon flipped on a home makeover show and cleared a space on the bed for her to sit. It was a bed. Just a substitution for a couch. Just a substitution for two separate chairs, really. She sat near the bottom of the bed, where his jeans used to be, and tried to follow the plot while he leaned against the headboard. The show was even more ridiculous than sci-fi. After ten minutes, they were laughing at the outlandish budget of the couple on the show. They wanted a greenhouse. The wife didn’t like the first one because it was ‘too much glass.’

  * * *

  Brandon put in a call to room service for dessert. “Bread pudding,” he said. “Your favorite.”

  “Usually putting bread in front of a word makes it sound less delicious, but shit, with pudding it’s magic.”

  “Bread spaghetti doesn’t sound appetizing to you? Bread cake?”

  It was like playing tennis to talk to him. The easy back and forth. Volleys across the net. “Bread sauce? Bread salad?”

  “I think bread salad is a thing, actually,” Brandon mused. Commercial break. A vacuum cleaner, animated and magically sucking up the rain clouds from the sky. Fine print: this vacuum will not affect the weather. She tried to point out the fine print to him, but the commercial ended before he saw it. They watched the channel for another half an hour until the commercial came on again so that she could point out the small font at the bottom of the screen.

  “You’re so good at noticing those little things.”

  She shrugged. “Noticing the ridiculous. Do you think someone would sue because a vacuum didn’t literally make the sun come out?”

  A knock at the door. She’d forgotten about the bread pudding. The serving was dinner-sized, with a scoop of vanilla ice cream in the center—the fancy kind with the specks of vanilla bean in it. Brandon had remembered to ask for two spoons. He sat next to her near the foot of the bed, setting the room’s phonebook as a table between them.

  Cinnamon. Butter. Rum. Still, in some ways it didn’t taste quite as good as she’d imagined it might. Underneath the ice cream, the dessert lost its heat and became an eggy, lukewarm sponge. She took a few bites and put the spoon down. Brandon didn’t notice, scooping the bowl clean, then moved the bowl and phonebook to the TV table.

  She yawned and glanced at the clock. Eleven. But it was only ten in her time zone. She waited for him to say something, to tell her to get out, but the next show started. It must have been a marathon, and she knew the personalities of the two relators now, which one played idealist and which shot straight. She went to the bathroom and splashed water on her face. The numbness fled, leaving her head less fuzzy than it had been in the bar. When she entered the main room, Brandon lay on his stomach as he watched TV, head propped in his hands. Greta mirrored his pose, flopping a foot away from him on the bed.

  A bed was just a couch substitute.

  A bed was just a place for sleeping.

  A bed was just the only convenient furniture in the room.

  The scientific method enforced rigorous questioning. Forming multiple possible hypotheses. A bed didn’t allow for much space between people, and so just because she reclined close to him didn’t mean that he caused her shallower breathing. Maybe the higher elevation on this floor of the hotel had increased her need for respiration. Maybe her body, as it broke down the alcohol, required more oxygen. Maybe the blood rushing to her cheeks was a response not to the smell of him, a foot away from her, but to, shit, something else. Anything else.

  It had been easy to return to campus and teach and not be near him every day. It was easy because he wasn’t her boyfriend. Easier, maybe, not being with him every day than having him footsteps away typing at his computer with his awkward pecking motions because he still sucked at typing.

  She gasped for air—quietly, but still gasping.

  “You okay?” Brandon asked.

  “I think so,” she said.

  He pushed himself up to a seated position. His hair was messy, like it used to be in the mornings. Sex hair without the sex. “You look like you might vomit.”

  “It’s the theme today,” she said.

  He glanced at the clock. “Tomorrow’s theme too.”

  “Yeah, I should g
et out of here. Early flight and whatever.” She said it, but she didn’t move.

  He didn’t check the clock again. Instead, he ran a hand over her cheek and moved a strand of hair aside. “You sure you’re okay? You look kind of pale.”

  His hand warmed her cheek. His gaze was soft. How many data points did she have to glean to confirm her guess? Someone else would know how to say something. Someone else would know the joke to make in some kind of artful, round-about way. She wasn’t art. She was science. Run a test. Run a test, stupid.

  She leaned toward him. In the old days, he would have leaned halfway, or more than half. He would have covered the distance and closed it. His lips were usually chapped, and he carried around a tube of Blistex. He was sensitive about it, but now his lips looked soft. All the humidity from the rain, maybe, or the magic of Florida.

  But he didn’t lean in. Instead, he pulled his hand from her cheek like she had burned him.

  Voices in the hallway of the hotel. Female voices, giggling drunkenly together. Their high-heeled clomps covered the silence. Is this how it started with Meg and Danny? The silence, like the wait for divine intervention. A sign you were doing the right thing, wrong thing, very wrong thing. Thinking of them made her stomach ache.

  Brandon wasn’t looking at her anymore. “I’m confused, Greta. I don’t know. Maybe I shouldn’t have invited you here.”

  “Because of Eden?”

  He nodded. “I, um …” He cleared his throat and started again. “I asked her to marry me a few weeks ago, and she said yes.”

  Greta didn’t remember standing or turning off the television, but she must have. “Well, congrats.”

  “She and I had been in this fight, and—”

  Greta held up her hand like a crossing guard. She wanted the world to stop, her heart to stop beating so fast.

  She would have settled for Brandon to stop speaking, but instead he continued. “I’m sorry.”

  Her stomach was steel. “Sorry? Seriously. “You’re dating her. You’re engaged now.” She grabbed her bag in one hand, the door in the other. “What are you apologizing for? You’re such a great catch that every single woman must be devastated?”