Flight Behavior

by Barbara Kingsolver

  Cub laughed. "A lot of help you'll be, moving a chifforobe."

  "Brains instead of brawn, okay? I'll open doors and stuff. We can leave Cordie with Hester for a couple of hours, they'll both live. Just give me a sec to gather up those clothes." Dellarobia got dressed and efficiently culled the kids' drawers, where the outgrown items seemed to outnumber those that fit by a margin of two to one. Within thirty minutes they had packed up five grocery bags of donations and descended on Hester without warning, Cordelia and her toy bag in tow. Hester was in her living room with the niddy-noddy out and yarn all over everywhere, engrossed in winding skeins and measuring yardage. Cordie was going to be no help with this endeavor, it was plain to see, but Hester resigned herself, sending the parents upstairs to size up the chifforobe and carry down the boxes she'd packed. Dellarobia followed Cub's slow climb up to the room that had contained his boyhood and, for its first few months, their marriage.

  The room was unchanged, which hardly surprised Dellarobia. Nothing about it was ever altered even to accommodate the large life events she'd brought into it. She quaked at the barren familiarity of the 4H ribbons tacked along the crown molding, the ancient comic book collection, the two unopened bottles of Coca-Cola that were some special commemorative of something. Cub's football trophies ran along the bookshelf, a string of small golden men all frozen in the same sprint, helmeted jaw thrust forward, left foot off the ground. She knew their look was deceptive; the little athletes were not really bronze but some kind of weightless plastic.

  "I wonder if Hester's even changed the sheets since we moved out," she said. The bedspread was the same white chenille, extremely thin and to Dellarobia's mind ungenerous, considering all the quilts that were folded away elsewhere in the house. But it was what they got. That was the weirdest part of living here as a married person, just accepting: this bedspread, this room, supper at seven. Cub's parents in the adjacent room. She fell onto the bed, face up, arms flung out. "Oh, man. Remember this bed?"

  "I ought to," Cub said. He went to the wardrobe and pulled the metal cube of a tape measure from his pocket. The piece was massive, with twin oak doors and an inlaid cornice on top. Probably worth something. Dellarobia wondered what had possessed Hester suddenly to give it away. Anything to impress Bobby Ogle.

  "I never really felt like a wife in this room, you know? Much less a newlywed."

  "Well, what did you feel like?" Cub asked.

  "I don't know. Like a kid. I know this sounds weird, but more like a sister." She laughed. "A really pregnant one."

  "Dang it," Cub said. "Four inches too long for the truck bed."

  Dellarobia viewed the ceiling. Old houses were supposed to give a warm vibe, but this one was bleak. The large, uncurtained window didn't help. North facing; maybe that was it. There used to be curtains in here, she was sure. She remembered the print, NFL team logos on a blue ground. Hester must have run across that bolt of fabric when Cub was just little, a Tom Thumb linebacker with big dreams. Strange, that those curtains came down.

  "Dad says this thing comes apart," Cub said, sounding vexed. He ran his hand along the seam between the top of the doors and the cornice. "The base and the top are supposed to be separate pieces. That would sure make this easier to get in the truck."

  Dellarobia rolled off the bed and went to get the desk chair, which she knew to have been the least used piece of furniture in this room. Her early married life had involved nagging her spouse to sit and do his homework. She carried the chair over to the wardrobe and stood on it to examine the cornice, peering between the back of it and the wall. "Get me a Phillips-head," she commanded lightly. "There's a long brace up the back that holds it together. We'll have to pull it out from the wall a little to get at it, so ask Hester for some throw rugs too, so we won't scratch the floor."

  Cub hitched up his jeans and trudged off, thankful for clear instructions.

  Heavy clouds scooted across the sky with disconcerting speed. After Cub and his father loaded the wardrobe in the truck they'd tied a tarp over it, and sure enough, a spittle of freezing rain began hitting the windshield before they got to Mountain Fellowship. On Highway 7 they sat waiting to make the left turn as a long line of cars with their lights on crawled toward them. A funeral, maybe, or just the weather. The turn signal clicked its untiring intentions.

  "We shouldn't have let Bear carry that thing," Dellarobia said. "I thought he was going to have a heart attack when you all were halfway down the stairs."

  "Nah, he's tough," Cub said, resting his forearms on the wheel.

  "So you think," Dellarobia said. She'd seen the man's face. Straining, neck veins and ligaments bulging. He looked like a tied-up horse in a barn fire.

  At length they reached the fellowship hall and drove around back, as per Hester's instructions, to find Blanchie Bise and two other women inside, sorting donated clothes. They had layette sets arrayed all over the long, steel-legged folding tables, bringing to mind the shower these church matrons had thrown for Dellarobia, way back when. A sort of baby-wedding-come-to-Jesus package, not well attended. Evidently this strategy of welcoming pregnant sinners worked well for the likes of Crystal, but it had soured Dellarobia for life on this fellowship hall, which never failed to stir the same post-traumatic stew of panic and rejection. She stood in the doorway now trying to put those thoughts in their place, after this many years, good grief, while Cub had an overly long discussion with Blanchie down at the other end of the hall. This was one of those days when Dellarobia's past was tagging her around like a hungry cur. Finally Cub started back toward her, shaking his head. "They want us to take it downtown, to the mission. We can unload the boxes here for sorting, but they don't want to have to haul that chifforobe twice."

  "Makes sense," Dellarobia said. "Is there somebody there to help us unload it?"

  Cub turned on his heel and headed back to Blanchie, having neglected to ask. Unfortunately, they learned, Beulah Rasberry was down at the storefront running things by herself today. Beulah was no furniture mover, at eighty, with her string-bean arms. Blanchie called her son at Cleary Compressors to drive over on his lunch break to meet them in Feathertown and help unload the cabinet. He could be there in an hour.

  "We can just wait here," Cub said, heading for his truck. Dellarobia slid in on the passenger side in time to watch him relax, letting his head fall back to its angle of repose. The man could not hold on to tension with a baseball glove. Dellarobia flipped open the glove compartment, which was tightly packed with tools, work gloves, napkins, and one squashed paper cup with a straw-impaled plastic lid. Extra pressure was required to get the door to close again and latch. Cub's breathing slowed to an oceanic hiss. She was envious of her husband's on-off switch. The prospect of sitting in here for an hour with nothing whatsoever to occupy her, not even a bad magazine, confronted Dellarobia as purely impossible. She checked her phone and found she'd missed a text, probably while they were at Hester's. It was one of Dovey's church-sign sightings, she must have sent it on her way to work: FORBIDDEN FRUITS PRODUCE A LOT OF JAMS.

  Right, Dellarobia thought. Such as my entire adult life.

  She closed her phone and punched Cub. "Let's go to the Dairy Prince."

  He sat up straight, looking startled. "Really?"

  "I'm not suggesting we rob a bank. Just Dairy Prince. We haven't gone out to eat in over two years."

  "Really?" he asked again.

  "Well. I haven't." She rolled her eyes toward the glove box. "Let's go get a milk shake or something. I'll buy. Come on, take a shot. Your wife's gone wild."

  Obediently he turned over the engine and slung the truck into gear. On the way to town they passed Dovey's white duplex, its grounds fully claimed by her brothers' automotive collection, and drove the length of Feathertown's mostly dead main street. The Fellowship Mission had had its pick of empty storefronts from which to operate its charities. Dellarobia tried to remember what used to be in the other buildings. A drugstore, a hardware, the diner where she'd worked. T
he fabric shop, her mother's mainstay. A little grocery run by a man with one arm who doled out hard candies to kids, probably to make them less afraid of him. Mr. Squire. People went to Walmart now, for all of the above. Even the Dairy Prince looked bombed out, with a square of brown cardboard like an eye patch covering one of the two walk-up windows in front. Cub went to place their order, which was valiant. The freezing rain was picking up. He came back with her milkshake and a burger and fries for himself. Their seductive fatty fragrance filled the cab, making her wish she'd gone a little more crazy here. She swiped his fries one at a time while they watched the windshield pale from blurry to opaque. Rain slammed the roof, isolating them from the world in their metal capsule.

  "Here we are on a date," she said. "Right back where we started from."

  "Not really," he murmured, having just taken a big bite. She waited while he chewed and swallowed, curious to know what he felt had changed.

  "Truck's got a different engine," he finally observed.

  She swallowed too much of the icy milkshake and an ache seized her throat. "That's it?" she asked, when the pain passed. "Eleven years of marriage, and that's what we've got, a rebuilt engine?"

  He retreated into his lunch. She stole some more fries and stared out through the blur. Like a cataract. Rushing water, a blindness. Her father hadn't lived long enough to be old, but he'd had cataracts, brought on by some trauma she'd never quite understood.

  "So," she said. "Are we just never going to talk about the other stuff?"

  "What other stuff?"

  "Any of it. Why we did this. That poor little baby."

  "What for? It's gone."

  "It is not gone. Not like something that never existed. It was, Cub."

  "But then it wasn't. Anyway, we had more kids. Just let bygones be bygones."

  A change in the density of the rain now gave a vague visibility to certain shapes: the red rectangle of the Dairy Prince sign, a dark green Dumpster. She considered what her father must have endured with that kind of diminished vision. Seeing without seeing.

  "They're not bygone," she said. "Everything changed, and that's still here."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Great day in the morning, Cub. We should have used a condom, and we didn't. No going back. Look at what's in your life. A house, a wife, Preston and Cordie. All because we accidentally got me pregnant in high school."

  Cub looked hurt. "You're acting like we wouldn't have got married."

  She blinked her eyes. "Cub, seriously? Were you, like, thinking of popping the question? Before that happened?"

  He looked away from her, toward the shapes that came and went with the waves of rain. Dellarobia could imagine the inner structure of her husband's world, in which events confirmed themselves. Their marriage must be good, because marriages were. It had come to pass.

  "I appreciate you for manning up. I do," she said. "I had no family, and then all of a sudden I had your family. But you were there too, Cub. You know what I'm saying. We were headed in different directions. You can't tell me we weren't."

  Cub pressed his thumbs against the inside corners of his eyes, and his breathing grew ragged, and she felt terrible and cruel, as if she were prodding him with a stick. She should just let him be. It's what she had always done, let him be. "I honestly thought I was going to college," she said in a low, flat voice. "You'd find some nice girl and settle down. How come we can't say what's true?"

  "We love each other now," he said. "That's what matters."

  "I know. People say that. We do. You can make yourself love a person, we've done a fair job of that. But there's other stuff, Cub."

  "Like what?"

  "I don't know. Respect? You can't manufacture that. You can't demand it at gunpoint. Whatever. You earn it. Like a salary or something."

  "I respect you," he said.

  "I know. And you're sweet to me. It's just never quite--I don't know how to put this--" She pressed her lips together and shook her head. "It's like I'm standing by the mailbox waiting all the time for a letter. Every day you come along and put something else in there. A socket wrench, or a milkshake. It's not bad stuff. Just the wrong things for me."

  Cub now sat forward with his arms and head on the steering wheel, mute with grief, his shoulders shaking. Dellarobia felt stunned. His reaction made this real. She could easily have stayed home and skipped this conversation. She leaned over to give him an awkward hug. "I'm sorry," she said. "I'm thankful for our children. But I'm not what you need."

  He spoke without lifting his head. "You're different, Dellarobia. It's because of all that business up the mountain. I wish they'd never lit down here."

  "That's not true. It started way before that. I never told you. But I went up there by myself one day before anybody else knew about the butterflies, and I saw them." She felt breathless, as if falling through air. "I was running off."

  He sat up and gave her a wary glance before reaching across to flip open the glove box. She helped him get a handful of the fast food napkins that were crammed in there. She took some herself, and they blew their noses in a companionable, married way.

  "I knew about that," he finally said.

  "What? What did you know?"

  Cub looked at her directly, though it seemed to take more effort than he could sustain. "Mother found out some way. She said you meant to do away with yourself."

  Dellarobia's heart thrummed in her ears. "Hester told you this? When?"

  "I don't know," he said. "A while back. She's fretted over it."

  The world in Dellarobia's mind took a tumble, and nothing in it felt true at all. Hester's strange confessions, Cub's attentiveness. She felt like a blind person grappling for the doorway. "That's not it," was all she could say. She sat quiet for a moment, considering the threshold where she found herself. "I wasn't going to kill myself. They put that on the news, but it's a lie. I was going to run out on our marriage in a stupid way. I'm sorry. I ended up not doing it. I ran into that . . . whatever it was, the butterflies, on my way up there. And it knocked me on my butt. It was like I had to come back and do the right thing."

  "Which is what?" Cub asked, sounding more dismayed than angry.

  "Which is I don't know what," she said. "I'm still trying to figure that out. To do something for the right reasons? Instead of another mistake that can't be turned back. That's my whole life, Cub. Just flying from one darn thing to the next."

  "You're in love with him." Cub stated it, rather than asking, which relieved her of the burden of answering. Now he did look angry, heavy-browed. He scowled at the windshield. She wished this rain would stop. It felt like the end of the world.

  "People make mistakes," she said finally.

  "According to you, that's all you and I ever did."

  She nodded. "Mistakes wreck your life. But they make what you have. It's kind of all one." She felt a humorless ripple move through her chest. "You know what Hester told me when we were working the sheep one time? She said it's no good to complain about your flock, because it's the put-together of all your past choices."

  Cub nodded slowly, understanding this. He set his hands on the wheel. Soon he would start the engine, and they would go. "I can't help it," he said. "I still wish they'd never lit down here. Those butterflies."

  You and the butterflies both, she thought. We wish.

  Dellarobia lay in the darkness trying not to begrudge her husband's profound and tranquil sleep. It could not be as easy as it looked, to be Cub Turnbow. After their conversation in the truck they'd said no more, and slipped back into a day that seemed bizarrely untouched. Furniture delivered, Cordie picked up, Cub congenial throughout. The sorrow she'd laid bare for him did not disperse. It would hang around as the long-toothed phantom it had always been, haunting even the commonest transactions of her household, haunting her skin, everywhere. While Cub failed to see it.

  But something did follow them into the house, unsettling them both during supper with the children, making the air in th
eir bedroom cold. He'd said good night as if they were friends parting ways, then rolled to his side and slept the sleep of a mountain range while she stared at the black air, dividing the river of her desperation into rivulets until some of them seemed navigable. At moments she felt light and untethered, the same glimpse of release she'd had many times before. The thrill of throwing a good life away, she remembered thinking once: one part rapture. Outweighed by the immense and measurable parameters of a family's life. She refused to be the first to act. If Cub saw fit to walk through eleven more years of marriage, after the blunt truths she'd told him, she could do the same. Maybe she didn't want Hester to be right about her character. For one thing. And maybe she was more like Cub than not, simply believing in what had come to pass. Marriage had its own heft, and that had to be respected. She watched lines of light grow slowly along the window blind as a day began to fill the void. The one impulse that transfixed her, that she understood to be of no real use, was to go to the window and look out. To see if his camper had returned.

  He hadn't said how long he would be gone. Probably she would have time to turn over every conversation with Ovid she could recall, as she always did. That enterprise had a way of becoming furtive and miserable, like handling gritty coins at the bottom of a purse. Finding all the regrettable notes, her badly spoken self, her brashness, led on by Dovey, in forcing notoriety on him this week. It hadn't been wrong for her to bring Tina to the lab to interview him, but she could have protected him from the rest. Instead she'd claimed that video as an act of Ovid's courage. It proved his integrity, she'd told him many times, allowing him no other option. She avoided thinking about the selfish undertones of her enthusiasm: that the video redeemed Dellarobia, striking down all the falsehoods committed in her name, and with her image. There was no beautiful miracle, no small-town drama starring herself as the Butterfly Venus, she was no party to that lie. The butterflies were a symptom of vast biological malignancies, and all nicer bets were off. Ovid needed to set the record straight, whether or not he was ready to do that. This was the weight Dellarobia laid down like a sandbag at her center: that he did need her.

  She waited until the clock's red numbers squared off at 7:00 before getting up, and she did not look out from the bedroom. In the kitchen, after making coffee, she allowed herself to lift the shade and see nothing. The barren rectangle of his absence. After she had poured bowls of cereal for the kids and listened awhile to their morning chatter, Preston in his robot pajamas, Cordie eating with a blanket over her head and bowl, Dellarobia allowed herself to get up and go look again. Each time, bereavement slammed her. An empty socket, an amputation. He must be angry with her.