Flight Behavior (43 page)

Dellarobia shot back:
TXT WHILE DRIVING IF . . .

:) was the prompt reply.

Dovey wasn’t the fish-stick type but would eat gravel to get away from her duplex, where her landlord brother was tearing out tile for no apparent reason. Dovey was
seriously
moving out, she said, like the boy who cried wolf, his cries ignored by all. She would stay put as long as Dellarobia’s place served her so well as a halfway house. Just as Cordie and Preston provided her the option of halfway motherhood.

Dellarobia was surprised to hear them pull up in the driveway so soon. Roy went to the front door and signaled an alert: ears up, tail down. Dellarobia went to look out the little upper windows in the door and was startled to see the white News Nine Jeep in her driveway. Tina Ultner in a belted white coat was out of the car, head down, the corn-silk hair pulsing with each fast step as she came up the walk. Dellarobia dropped to the floor to sit face to face with Roy, her back pressed against the doorjamb. There was not time to run and hide in the bedroom. She heard the hollow tick of a woman’s heels on the porch steps, and felt the shift of light as Tina moved in close to the door’s glass panes. Roy looked at Dellarobia and cocked his head to one side, the collie question mark. She held up a finger and Roy stood fast. The house took on the feel of a bomb shelter.

Rap rap
, came the little knock.
Rap rap
, again. Then silence.

Roy glanced from the door to Dellarobia. He licked his lips and yawned, dog signs of nervousness. The tidy knock revived.

Dellarobia remembered she’d pocketed her phone after Dovey’s text, praise be. She put it on vibrate before keying carefully:
DON’T COME TO THE HOUSE
.

The reply from Dovey was immediate: ???

GO AWAY. XPLAIN LATER

WE R HERE. BEHIND JEEP. WTF?

Tina rang the doorbell. Roy yawned again, but didn’t move.

I M HIDING. GO!

A minute passed. Roy did an anxious little skitter, stepping back and forward, dancing at the edge of self-restraint. Dellarobia stared at the screen until the reply appeared.
PRESTON HAS TO P. ME TOO. CORDIE ALREADY DID.

DO U HAVE DIAPERS?

FOR ALL US???

Dellarobia’s mind went blank. The knocking had stopped. Another text came from Dovey.
OMG. SHE SEES US.

Then, ten seconds later:
DON’T WORRY I’LL HANDLE. COMING IN
.

Dellarobia knew not to bet the farm on Dovey’s don’t-worry-I’ll-handle plans. This one failed faster than most. She heard Dovey explaining with fair conviction that Dellarobia wasn’t home while Preston opened the door, plunging Dellarobia and Roy unexpectedly into the scene, at eye level with a pair of gorgeous gray suede boots. Dellarobia took them in, then turned her eyes upward into the nostrils of Tina Ultner.

“Dellarobia,
hi
,” Tina said, waiting for Dellarobia to find her feet before extending the cool little hand. The whole effect of Tina rushed her like a hit of some numbing drug. The pale eyebrows and huge, direct eyes, the otherworldly complexion. Her coat was winter white, the color she’d frowned on when Dellarobia wore it that first time. Both kids rushed into the house, followed by Dovey, then Roy, leaving Dellarobia on the porch with Tina.

“I’m not doing this,” she said. “Not again.”

“Listen,” Tina said, “this is a really special thing we do. Hear me out. It’s called our ‘in-depth’ segment. Very few stories get this kind of coverage, just the absolute viewer favorites. When there’s a ton of interest, what we’ll do is we go back and follow up on a story six weeks later, to see how things turned out.”

“Six weeks?” Dellarobia said, thinking several questions at once. Did Tina even have a clue how her camera trickery had upended Dellarobia’s life? Had it been six weeks, and had anything turned out? This was in-depth? She remembered Ovid’s complaint about the media’s short attention span. The living room blinds waggled sideways and Dovey stepped into view in the front window, behind Tina’s back. Dovey held up crossed index fingers as if to ward off a vampire.

“Is that Ron in the car?” Dellarobia asked. The figure in the Jeep looked slighter and blonder than Ron, with more hair.

“It’s not Ron,” Tina said, with some diffidence. “That’s Everett.”

“Okay, get Everett. Get whatever you need and come with me.” Dellarobia strode down the steps and around to the back of the house, leaving it to Tina to get her game on. She did not want to knock on the metal door of the camper, which felt too intimate, so was relieved to see lights on in the lab. She led Tina through the mucky barn, in those boots. If Tina was horrified by her surroundings she was good at pretending otherwise, looking around with the calculating eye Dellarobia remembered, as if storing away all these sights for later. They paused outside the lab door to wait for Everett, and Dellarobia threw down some background info on Dr. Ovid Byron. She spelled the name so Tina could type it into her phone device. Tina stood frowning at the little screen, intermittently tapping it in frenzied bursts with her manicured fingertips. “You’re kidding me,” she finally said. “You’ve got this man here? In a
barn
?”

The diminutive cameraman Everett arrived in haste, organizing and shoving black cables into his coat pockets as he came, disheveled in every aspect except for his hair, which looked shellacked. He gratified Dellarobia with a grimace of frank horror at the barn floor. Dellarobia rapped on the plastic-covered door, and they entered as a group to find Ovid sitting down, writing notes. To accommodate his reading glasses, he had pushed up his safety goggles on his forehead like a skin diver briefly out of water. His look of vulnerable surprise demoralized Dellarobia utterly. He stood up to meet Tina’s forthright handshake and quickly shed the goggles and glasses, revealing a small, surprising vanity that fueled Dellarobia’s anguish. Astonished, she watched Tina drop her former mom-to-mom allegiance as if it had never been, aiming the force of her charm in a brand-new direction. This lab was so great, unbelievable, she’d wanted to be a science major in college but the math, oh man! After the introductions Tina said they had to go up on the mountain to repeat the shot with the butterflies flying in the background. That was customary for these spots, to help key in the viewer visually to the earlier story. Ovid told her the follow-up in this case was that most of the butterflies were dead. Also it was too cold for them to be flying, and too late in the day. Tina clicked her tongue. They’d planned to get here earlier, but she’d had a breaking spot on a homicide.

She drummed her white-tipped nails on the plywood lab table, looking all around. “You know what?” she finally pronounced. “It’s fine. We still have all that great footage from the first interview. We’ll just cut the butterflies into this one when we do the edit.”

Ovid eyed her, looking piqued. Make the butterflies undead?

Tina set herself to the project of framing what she called a doable shot in the lab. She loved the caterpillar poster on the wall, colorful. She liked Ovid in his lab coat, but not all the mess. The pile of aluminum pans from the last lipid analysis had to go. Tina directed the cleanup with a slightly pained expression, as if confronting grime, though really it was just clutter: glass reagent bottles, blue wire test tube racks, rectangular plastic containers stacked up like blocks, computer printouts. And this was
clean
. Dellarobia always tidied up on Fridays. Ovid was first reluctant and then unnerved by all the shuffling. When Everett approached the Tissuemizer, Ovid barked at him not to touch it. Tina laughed sweetly at this to make it a joke. Dellarobia suddenly had full recall of that little two-note laugh, and its many uses.

Ovid said, “I think you had better go ahead and take your shot.”

Tina and Everett exchanged a consequential glance, and she moved in to clip a little mike to Ovid’s lapel and slip its attending box device into a pocket of his lab coat. Dellarobia saw his eyes roll upward as Tina fussed with him, just exactly as Preston’s did when Dellarobia knotted his tie for church. Gone was the friendly confidence of the scientist meeting the kindergartners. Tina powdered her nose and cheekbones, then snapped her compact closed and nodded at Everett. She switched on her lubricated news voice. “Dr. Ovid Byron, you’ve been studying the monarch butterfly for more than twenty years. Have you ever encountered a sight like this?”

“No,” he replied. He looked desperate for escape.

Tina waited. Like a store mannequin, Dellarobia thought, with the waxy complexion and flower-stem posture. She’d been too struck, when she herself was in the headlights, to notice that the woman was far from perfect. The bones in her face looked stony under the colorless skin, too prominent. She looked unhealthy.

Tina began again. “Dr. Byron, you’re one of the world’s leading experts on the monarch butterfly, so we’re looking to you for answers about this beautiful phenomenon. I understand these butterflies often flock together in Mexico for the winter. So tell me, in a nutshell, what brings them here?”

Ovid actually laughed. “In a nutshell?”

Tina gave a stern little nod, signaling him to go on.

“That won’t fit in a nutshell.”

Dellarobia saw the door budge. Dovey appeared, scooting quickly inside with the kids. Dellarobia sidled over to lift Cordie onto her hip for safekeeping, and they all stayed near the door. Tina marched to the table to dispatch a blue-handled pair of scissors and a roll of tape from the background of her shot, and yanked at the crumpled plastic dust sheath that covered the microscope. Ovid spoke miserably. “It’s not a movie set.”

Tina eyed him, and he spread his hands. “This is what science looks like.”

“Fine,” she replied. She returned to her spot and composed herself to come out of the starting gate again. Dellarobia grasped her strategy now, setting up the interview in different ways so it could be cut to ribbons later.

“Dr. Byron, you’ve studied the monarch butterfly for over twenty years, and you say you have never seen anything like this. It seems everyone has a different idea about what’s going on here, but certainly we can agree these butterflies are a beautiful sight.”

“I don’t agree,” he said. “I am very distressed.”

Tina’s teeth showed. “And why is that?”

“Why?” He ran one hand over his close-cropped head, a nervous habit Dellarobia had seen before, though rarely. “This is evidence of a disordered system,” he said at last. “Obviously we’re looking at damage. At the normal roosting sites in Mexico, in the spring range, all over the migratory pathways. To say the takeaway lesson here is beauty, my goodness. What is your name again?”

“Tina Ultner,” she said, in a different, off-camera voice.

“Tina. To see only beauty here is very superficial. Certainly in terms of news coverage, I would say it’s off message.”

“You’re saying there’s a message here. And what is that?”

Ovid shot Dellarobia a vivid, trapped look. She felt sick. He was so good at explanations, he had all that education, he could handle little bony-nosed Tina, that’s what she’d thought. She’d been out of her mind. After a long pause Tina tried again. “Dr. Byron, something new is happening here. Most of us are struck by the beauty of this phenomenon. But”—she cocked her head theatrically, as if burdened by keen insight—“do you think it might possibly be a sign of some deeper problem with the ecology?”

“Yes!” Ovid cried. “A problem with the environment, is what you’re trying to say. Pervasive environmental damage. This is a biological system falling apart along its seams. Yes. Very good, Tina Ultner.”

“And briefly, Dr. Byron, tell us the nature of the problem.”

“Briefly? Unseasonable temperature shifts, droughts, a loss of synchronization between foragers and their host plants. Everything hinges on the climate.”

She blinked a couple of times. “Are we talking about global warming?”

“Yes, we are.”

Tina made a downward wave at Everett to stop the camera, and bizarrely her own animation clicked off too, her face slack as she walked across the lab, maybe starting to feel homesick for her average flaming interstate wreck. Tina checked something on the camera, then walked back to her interview spot and spoke in a subdued voice. “The station has gotten about five hundred e-mails about these butterflies, almost all favorable. Is this really where you want to go with this segment? Because I think you’re going to lose your audience.”

Ovid looked genuinely startled. “I am a scientist. Are you suggesting I change my answer to improve your ratings?”

“Not at all,” Tina said frostily. Her composure was losing its smooth edge. She had an irritable way of sucking her front teeth and exhaling through her nose that gave Dellarobia to know this woman probably did have children, after all. After looking down at the floor for a moment, Tina signaled Everett and lifted her features to greet the camera. “Dr. Byron, let’s talk about global warming. Scientists of course are in disagreement about whether this is happening, and whether humans have a role.”

Ovid’s eyebrows lifted in a familiar way, almost amused. “I’m afraid you have missed the boat, Tina. Even the most recalcitrant climate scientists agree now, the place is heating up. Pretty much every one of the lot. Unless some other outcome is written on the subject line of his paycheck.”

She raised her jaw slightly, an edgier look, and started over once again. Her stamina for replays was unbelievable. “Dr. Byron, let’s talk about global warming. Many environmentalists contend that burning fuel puts greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.”

He pulled back his chin in such skeptical dismay he looked like a startled turtle. “They
contend
this? That burning carbon puts carbon in the air, this is a
contention
?” His voice notched up so severely it squeaked a little. “Tina, Tina. Think about what you are saying. All the coal that has ever been mined, that’s carbon. All the oil wells, carbon, again! We have evaporated that into the air. What’s in the world stays in the world, it does not go
poof
and disappear. It’s called the conservation of matter. The question was settled well before the time of Sir Isaac Newton.”