“Well, you’re hardly the first,” he said. “People always want the full predicament revealed and proven in sixty seconds or less. You may have noticed I avoid cameras.”
“You did well, though,” she insisted. “Explaining it to me. I’m not saying I don’t believe you, I’m saying I can’t.”
“You underestimate yourself. You have a talent for this endeavor, Dellarobia. I see how you take to it. But choose your path carefully. For scientists, reality is not optional.”
“Are we at least allowed to hope the butterflies will make it through this winter?”
He leaned forward, peering up at the sky. “That is not a little hope,” he said.
She thought of other times, other dire news. Pregnancies, wanted or not. It was never real at first. She recalled the day of her mother’s diagnosis, holding her bone-thin arm, its yielding skin, walking her out of the doctor’s office onto the crumbling, shaded parking lot. Little humps of moss that swelled along a scar in the asphalt like drops of green blood. All these vivid external details suggesting nothing had changed. They’d decided to go to the grocery with no more mention, that day, of the end of the world.
Suddenly she felt an acute craving for the Diet Coke she knew to be in her purse. She dug it out with little trouble, cracked it open, and offered Ovid the first sip, but he held up a hand and shuddered as if she’d offered a bite of dirt. “My wife drinks those diet things,” he said. “Aspartame, or whatever it is. It tastes like soap to me.”
She threw back a slug of the fizzy, tepid liquid, noting that it did as a matter of fact taste a little soapy. But caffeinated. She pictured an obese wife chugging diet sodas and burning toast in the kitchen. “What’s your wife’s name?”
“Juliet,” he said.
Give me a break, she thought. “So, Pete says I need to hang up those pillowcases indoors, to give the sleepers a chance to wake up. I count the ones that crawl up the sides, and keep track of numbers, and then what? Do I bring them back up here?”
He clapped his hands together, smiling. “No. This is good, you will like this. We give the sleepers one last chance to sink or swim. It can be a lot—maybe two-thirds of these bodies on the ground are actually alive. But you have to give them every chance.”
She thought of Preston’s veterinary book, with its surprising advice on lamb resuscitation. “What do we do, butterfly CPR?”
“We pitch them into the air one at a time. It’s sink or fly, really. Last winter in Mexico we launched them from the balcony of our hotel over a courtyard where people were dining. Everyone was cheering for the flyers.” His smile grew, remembering that happier place. Dellarobia wished she had been there with him, or anywhere at all, even if it meant flinging herself to the void. To be given the same chance.
“I will come back down to the lab while we still have enough light,” he said. “To help with that. I don’t suppose you have any balconies at your house.”
She raised one eyebrow. “Not hardly. Do you?”
She should let him speak of his home and his wife, if that’s what he wanted. His Juliet. She did ask. But he merely said, “No balconies.”
So that’s how it would be. She would go home to make soup that was better than Juliet’s, and return here as queen of this tribe. At dusk she and Ovid would climb together to the barn loft. They would stand in the open door of the haymow and take these butterflies in hand, one at a time, and toss them into the air. Some would crash. And some would fly.
11
Community Dynamics
Dellarobia’s phone buzzed. A text from Dovey, one of her church sightings: GET RIGHT OR GET LEFT. Dellarobia texted back: LTS GO.
She was nowhere near ready to go, still in her bathrobe and ratty yellow slippers. But Dovey was one of those people who traveled in a medium-size pod of tardiness on which others came to rely. Dellarobia poured herself a second cup of coffee and pulled out a kitchen chair to put her feet up. In a lifetime of hearing people celebrate weekends, she finally saw what all the fuss was about. By no means did her workload cease on Saturday, but it did shift gears. If her kids wanted to pull everything out of the laundry basket to make a bird’s nest and sit in it, fine. Dellarobia could even sit in there with them and incubate, if she so desired. Household chores no longer called her name exclusively. She had an income. She’d never before understood how much her life in this little house had felt to her like confinement in a sinking vehicle after driving off a bridge. Scooping at the toys and dirty dishes rising from every surface was a natural response to inundation. To open a hatch and swim away felt miraculous. Working outside the home took her about fifty yards from her kitchen, which was far enough. She couldn’t see the dishes in the sink.
A steady ruckus rose from the living room, where Cordie sang at the top of her lungs, “Lo mio lo mio,” something she’d learned from Lupe’s little boys. It meant “mine” in Spanish, Preston had explained, astonishing Dellarobia with her first sense of being an outsider to her children’s lives. Preston was now making vocal crashing noises, each followed by howls of make-believe pain from Cub. She scooted her chair forward to peek through the doorway. Cub lay on his back on a blanket outstretched on the living room floor, with Preston beside him arranging an armada of vehicles: Matchbox cars, a red plush fire engine, a plastic tractor.
“What in the Sam Hill are you all doing?” she called out.
“It’s a parking lot,” Preston replied. “I’m running over Daddy with everything.”
“Poor Daddy. Does your victim need a refill?”
Cub lifted his coffee cup. She carried in the coffeepot and kneeled on a corner of the blanket to fill his mug. “Should we call this a blood transfusion?”
“Nah,” Preston said. “He’s just smooshed.”
A far cry from veterinary medicine, she thought. But Cub was good about letting the whole boy out for a run, where Dellarobia would have reined him in. Cub was not always in the mood, but when the kids did get him down on the floor he gave himself over wholly, letting them direct their play, however silly or tedious or grotesque.
“Lo mio lo mio!” Cordie’s voice bounced with her fast little steps as she came running from her bedroom carrying a board book, which she pretended to stuff into Cub’s mouth. Cub made chomping sounds, gnowm gnowm, and Cordie shouted gleefully, “Dat’s hay!” She dropped the book and ran to fetch another bale.