Brandon rose and crossed the room in three strides, those long legs of his. He put a hand on the door and pushed it closed. The movement was sudden, but not violent. “Greta, listen to me for one minute before you never listen to me again, okay?”
Her hand reached for the doorknob again, but his hand covered it first. “What?”
“You push people away, Greta. You sprout pins.” He closed his eyes, and when they opened again his expression was softer. “When I got the job in New York, you were the one who said that meant we were breaking up. I didn’t want to. I would have made it work long distance.”
“Easy to say now.”
“No, nothing is easy to say when it comes to you and serious conversations.” His tone was flat. “We kept dating all summer before I left. I called you, made dates, made dinner. Didn’t you think that was strange? I kept waiting for you to say that we should at least try. I sat in my apartment in New York for the whole first week and thought, ‘So she’ll call tonight and tell me she misses me.’”
Greta had missed him, but she wasn’t going to tell him that now. “You could have called me.”
He let go of the door. “I could have. That was probably when I knew it was over. The second week, it hurt less. The third week, less. I found distractions.”
She laughed out loud, but she knew it sounded bitter. A coffee grounds laugh, dark and strangely bracing. “Distraction, huh? Cute nickname for Eden.”
“You need to trust people that you love, and I loved you, the you under twenty-thousand layers of jokes and defense mechanisms. I’m still attracted to you. I admit it. But I don’t love you anymore. And Eden is not you, but I love her. I do. Eden says what she means and does what she says she’s going to do.”
Greta could think of a million comebacks, but she didn’t know what she was coming back against. Eden’s entire character? Her whitened teeth, the flip of her blonde hair, her fanatic worship of a basketball team? Greta didn’t say anything. She gave Brandon a steady frown. It must have been a key, because he swung the door open and moved aside to let her leave.
He leaned into the hallway to call after her, “Hey. Safe flight tomorrow.”
Greta raised an arm, and then a middle finger like its extension. Her fingernail could nearly graze the ceiling as she strode down the hallway, not turning back.
She only had to ride two floors down, but the mirrored elevator showed copies of her red eyes and blotchy face from all sides, staring at the other red-eyed women. She flicked them off too. Looking at herself from so many angles, she could almost see through herself to the nugget inside, the soft caramel center. Looking at herself from so many angles she could see what everyone else saw looking at her straight on, the left, the right, above. She was everywhere, but none of those things were her, and she knew that no one else knew that. She thought of her butterflies. Her butterflies back in Costa Rica with panes of glass worn on their backs. So translucent it was their protection from predators. It felt like love in that way. A lack of protection, and true camouflage, was letting someone see straight through you.
She didn’t get on her plane home the next day.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Thank the good lord of cell phones, Danny actually picked up. “Hey, dummy. I need a favor.”
His reply was more growl than speech, but she still caught the gist. “Gret. It’s like five thirty.”
No, it was exactly five thirty, at least in his time zone. “Is Meg there?”
“Why would Meg be here?”
“You need to talk to her. I need Max to sub for me today.”
“This is a problem e-mail should take care of.”
“No e-mail. I’m stuck at customs. I’m being detained. You’re my fricking phone call. Just get Max to sub for me, okay?”
She felt the words steep in his brain, and his next question was more alert. “Do you need a lawyer?”
“No. I’m being deported today.”
“Where are you?” She pictured him sitting up straight in bed. She also pictured a blood clot, imagined and menacing, pulsing in his brain.
“Calm down. I’m in Costa Rica. At least for the next, oh, hour and a half.” Greta appraised the holding cell, the long stretch of concrete she had spent the night on. It could have been anywhere, really, but she knew it wasn’t.
“What the hell?”
“Blame Brandon. He was leading me on, I think. I don’t know—”
An exasperated sigh traveled through the earpiece to her. “Jesus, Greta, when a guy is worth it, there won’t be any leading. Or any running away. It’ll all just, I don’t know, fall together.”
“I really appreciate the romantic advice.” Her guard held up a finger and raised his eyebrows. Her time was almost up. “Okay, listen. They’re cutting me off, so get Max to sub, okay? Oh, and I need one more favor. Credit card?”
“I only have Martha’s.”
She swallowed hard. “Martha is letting you use her credit card?”
“It was to pay for Uber rides while you were gone. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind.”
The guard was gesturing again. Rapidly. Pointing to an invisible watch on his wrist.
“Okay. Okay,” she said. “What’s the number?”
* * *
Perhaps Greta hadn’t fully realized what privilege meant until she broke an actual law, but sitting in customs as a special snowflake because she was a white American woman certainly made the process faster. “You cannot enter without a valid return ticket,” the customs officer said. It was the third time he said it, and he was the fourth customs officer since she had been detained hours ago.
“Right,” she told them. She’d maxed out one credit card to buy a spur-of-the-moment one-way ticket to Costa Rica. One-way because she didn’t know when she’d go back. One-way because it was cheaper. Standing at the airport ticketing desk in Orlando, she felt grateful that she always traveled with her passport. She could blame the doomsday corner of her brain or having a military father. But when she landed in Costa Rica, she discovered that the passport wasn’t enough. They wanted to make sure she would leave eventually too. The customs official saw hundreds of tourists a day, could categorize them as easily as Greta could her butterfly collection. In this case, Greta was a moth and didn’t belong there.
They took away her luggage and put it in a large, caged closet. She spent one night in a holding cell by herself, smaller than the closet had been. In another cell across from her, also barred, two men were sleeping when she arrived. While their cell had two cement benches, hers had only one. She couldn’t picture where in the anatomy of the building she was exactly, but everything smelled like the sterile airport air. Her guards spoke rapid-fire Spanish and called her a spoiled American, and she couldn’t think of a retort in Spanish good enough. Maybe that’s what had kept her out of trouble—her lack of knowledge of Spanish cuss words.
In the morning, a uniformed official leaned against the bars to talk to her. “So, you don’t get to stay,” the official said again. “You can either purchase a one-way trip on your own and skip the legal process, or you can wait to be tried in court.”
“Is there a court in the airport?”
“Judges come here,” the official said, shaking his head. “And you don’t want that, so buy a ticket.”
“Right,” she said. “Fine. I’ve got a credit card number written here.”
“Is it yours?”
She shrugged. “My mom’s.”
She must have looked irresponsible enough that that was expected. The customs officer switched to Spanish, turning to the other officials behind him. “An hour until the flight to Orlando. Get her bag.”
The cell clinked open, and thirty minutes later she was on her way to the United States, handcuffed to the seat. The steward eyed her warily as he walked the aisle with drink carts, probably thinking she was some crazy person. Maybe she was, actually. What would she have done if she’d made it back to her research, back to the bird calls and serenity
of the Cloud Forest?
She saw the holes in her plan now, from several thousand feet up. The resort—which she had no money to pay for—was booked up months in advance. Without that room, she was hardly Girl Scout enough to camp in the mud. All that malarial mosquito knowledge wouldn’t repel mosquitos—she didn’t even have a lousy bottle of OFF!, let alone clothes for field research. She went to a conference with a bag packed with black slacks and white dress shirts. She dressed like the waitstaff at the hotel. Someone at the conference had actually handed her a tray and pointed to glasses of water to clear from a table. She wore the same sweatpants that she’d flown out to Florida in five days ago. Was it only five days ago?
Always pushing people away, Brandon said. Always running away. It was hard to run from herself. It was more like she was trying to run back to herself, who she’d been nine months ago.
She was lucky she wasn’t blacklisted from entering Costa Rica again. She was lucky she was taken about as seriously as a balloon animal. Poor young American who’d lost her mind. Pack her onto a plane and get her some peanuts and a glass of water, but don’t take off the handcuffs until she’s on US soil.
On the plane ride, Greta dreamed about Martha. Martha, the unknown benefactor of her flight home, the woman she had refused to talk to since the cold soup, cold shoulder dinner. In the dream they were making cookies, but the kitchen was outdoors with a full star-slung sky above them. The cookies burned, since they both forgot to set a timer. Without the stars, it could have been a memory, Greta thought when she woke up. She yawned, tried to stretch, but her handcuffed wrist caught on the armrest.
The man across the aisle eyed her, and with no more prompting than his raised eyebrow she murmured, “I thought it was legal there.” His eyes widened and he turned away, and she imagined what he imagined of her.
She got a literal slap on the wrist at the airport in Orlando. The handcuffs banged against her skin as they slung off, but she managed not to swear. Airport security met her at the gate, and she spent two hours in yet another customs office. After much shrugging and excuse-making (didn’t my visa say this year?), they let her go. After all, she had paid her way there and back and never left the airport in Costa Rica. There and back again, an awkward tale. A two-day tour of airports and no one the wiser, including herself.
Thank God for Max. What he would say about all this, why he would help her after all this, she had no idea. He didn’t deserve this. She didn’t deserve him—his friendship or his help.
She plugged her cell phone into a charging port at the airport and waited for her flight back to Iowa (well, back to Chicago and then back to Iowa). Her e-mail overflowed with student questions because—surprise, surprise—the sub didn’t know how to explain the new assignment. Well, duh, because the sub wasn’t prepared to sub because she’d put him in a terrible position.
Sometimes a lack of a thing proved more telling than its existence. There were no e-mails from her advisor and no e-mails from the department. Max must not have ratted her out. There were also no e-mails from Brandon. As far as anyone was concerned, it might as well have been last week, and she wished it were.
She should text Danny. She should text Max. Instead, she sent a text message to “Don’t Answer.”
At least Martha would know to expect her.
* * *
It was four thirty by the time she got to campus. The entire drive to Ames, she thought about her dream of burnt cookies, the smell of smoke and ashen sugar. She parked in front of Student Health and steeled herself in the car. Her heart thumped and her body told her to run, to just drive away, but that had been the problem all along.
At almost closing time, the chairs in the front lobby were empty. Informational posters about venereal diseases and flu shots decorated the walls—definitely more venereal diseases than flu shots. Glass canisters sat on counters in the lobby, each one filled with colorful, individually wrapped condoms—sex gumball machines, or some stupid metaphor. No one sat at the front desk, but Greta spied a bellhop’s bell. She dinged it lightly, and a man appeared from behind a row of cabinets. He inquired about whether she had an appointment and she shook her head. “Martha here?” He looked puzzled, so she clarified, “I’m her daughter.”
The man turned down the hallway then, calling out like everything was normal. Everything was normal because a daughter would of course come visit her mother at work. Greta used to visit her dad at work and watched him weld from five feet, with her own kid-sized safety equipment. Martha came out, glancing around like someone had played a trick on her. Maybe someone had, but they might be playing a trick on both of them. That would be dead Dad’s sense of humor.
“Oh, hi, Greta. I didn’t know if you were serious about coming.”
Greta rubbed an arm. “Well, I am.”
“Did you want to come back?”
Greta nodded, following Martha down the hallway into a small examination room. “Do you spend most of your day telling nineteen-year-olds to have safe sex?” Greta asked, eyeing the gynecologically correct illustrations on the wall.
“I have a binder full of pictures of boils to dissuade them from other options,” Martha said. She closed the door behind them. “Want to sit?”
“Not when I know people have been in here with boils. No thanks.” She looked around the room, and the room looked back at her from the faces of trendy teens pushing flu shots. In the enclosed space, she smelled herself for the first time. She smelled like she had been in an airport detainment cell for a day and hadn’t showered in three. Accurate. “I charged your credit card for my flight home. I just wanted to say I’ll pay you back next Friday.”
Martha leaned against the paper-covered table. “Well, I should have guessed you wouldn’t be here for small talk.”
“I just didn’t want you to see it on your credit card statement. I don’t smell good enough for small talk,” Greta said. “I’m going to go—”
Martha stood and put a hand on Greta’s shoulder as Greta tried to open the door. “Oh, come on,” Martha said. “I think you owe me more than that.”
“I owe you? I owe you?” Greta’s mouth gaped open as she wheeled on her. Her heart rate jumped, then jumped again as her mother’s steady gaze met hers. “Oh my God, you are serious.”
“Sit. I don’t care about the money, Greta. Just let me have twenty minutes.”
“No, let me get this straight. What do you think I owe you?” Greta asked.
“A chance—”
Greta had to sit down. She lowered herself onto the doctor’s stool and put her head between her knees. The breath wouldn’t come. When she felt Martha’s hand on her shoulder again, asking if she was okay, she flung it off. “Don’t touch me.”
Martha stepped backward, pressing her back against the door.
In the silence, Greta’s breath returned. The stool swiveled under her as she steadied herself. Greta’s gaze flitted around at the passive audience on the walls around her. They wouldn’t judge her for coming onto Brandon, not unless she was going to have sex without protection (“Your future; your choice,” read the caption underneath the teen in a jean jacket ahead of her). Her mother couldn’t judge her for what she had wanted to do in that hotel room. Martha couldn’t throw stones in that glass house. Meg and Danny couldn’t have judged her. They started as cheaters. Maybe the problem was everyone had a glass house. Everyone she had ever loved or hated had been living in one, and Greta had been throwing stones her whole life. It didn’t make putting down the rock any easier now.
When Greta turned back to her mother, she was unsurprised to see her looking back at her, waiting. “You kissed that man,” Greta said. “You said it was all about gambling, but the day you left you kissed him. I saw you.”
“Kurt. Yeah. I did. But—” Martha paused. “The sex is never really just about the sex.”
“I don’t need to hear about sex with you and Kurt.” Greta couldn’t hide her disgust. “Or with you and Dad, or with you and Bozo the clown.
”
Martha raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t think you came here to talk about sex, Gret.”
If she got it all out in one breath, it would be easier. Greta felt the words rush from her. “What if it’s your fault I’m like this—like I am.”
“What are you like?”
Greta’s forehead crinkled. She thought about the words Brandon had thrown at her, the expression on Max’s face when he saw her leaning over his files. “I don’t know. What am I like?”
Martha took a deep breath. “Greta, you were never a cheerful child—”
“But happy doesn’t always look cheerful. Just because I wasn’t always smiling didn’t mean I wasn’t—” She swallowed back the tears that threatened to come now, but she couldn’t choke them down far enough. “I broke when you left. We broke. Danny and I, and Dad. What if because you left, I don’t know how to stay. With anyone.”
“You’ve stayed with Danny,” Martha pointed out.
Greta narrowed her eyes. “Somebody had to.”
Martha paused. “Do you want an apology?”
“Don’t you think it’s not a real apology if I have to ask for it?”
When Martha she spoke again, her words were careful. “You’re not destined to be me.”
Greta laughed, a tearful bark.
Martha continued, undeterred. “And you’re not destined to be your father, who didn’t know how to say what the hell bothered him because he worried it would scare me. Love is scary. I would have been okay with being scared if it meant knowing what was actually wrong with him. With us.”
“You can’t blame your leaving on Dad. I won’t let you.”
“You shouldn’t.” Martha’s tone was firm. “Maybe I ran because I didn’t know how to make things better. If I could run, it was at least a choice. I ran away from who I was. I hated the me I was when I was home.”
The Butterfly Effect Page 25