Flight Behavior (50 page)

“Mother says if there’s no sign of life when it comes out, it’s dead.”

“You came back up here to tell me that.”

“That’s what she said. She says lay it in the straw with the mother in the barn. If you let it be dead with the ewe awhile, that helps them some way.”

Dellarobia glared. “Helps
who
?”

“I don’t know. I’m sorry.” Cub retreated to the familiar grounds of remorse and insufficiency, the terms of his existence, ratified by marriage. He could construct defeat from any available material and live inside it, but for once Dellarobia didn’t go there with him. She was going ahead. She found she could not abandon the effort. Accepting death, she’d done that, but here was another story: bringing life in. Not good-bye but hello, screaming it,
please
. She massaged the dark curly hide until her own knuckles glowed red against it, and when she paused, the lamb tried to lift its head again. It opened its eyes and looked out. Life arrived. Dellarobia began to cry, yelping sobs.

“What do we do?” Cub kept asking.

Get it warm, get it to nurse, make the mother accept it. She told Cub to go get grain and lead the mother into the barn while she warmed up the lamb in the house. They would milk that stupid ewe right now, because the colostrum was crucial. The newborn intestine only stays open a few hours to receive the mother’s antibodies. They had a bottle somewhere. But instead of jumping to her feet, Dellarobia found herself curled like a fist around the lamb with Cub’s arms around her so tightly she could hardly draw breath. The sobs in his great chest racked them both like the bucking of a terrified animal. She sobbed too, for nothing, it seemed. It was all impermanent, the square white corners of house and home, everything. This one little life signified nothing in the long run; it would get eaten.

“It wasn’t all a waste,” she told him over and over, holding on. Some things they got right, she was sure of that. The children. And for all the rest they wept, a merged keening that felt bottomless. For the years and years of things that didn’t exist, fantasies of flight where there was no flight. Nothing, really, but walking away on your own two feet. She felt tears frozen on her face.

“How can you know?” he kept asking her. She told him she was never really sure how she knew. Reading, filing stuff away, or just guessing, if that was the only choice. She and Preston had read about swinging around a newborn lamb. But never in a million years did she think she’d actually do that. Things look impossible when you’ve not done them.

She pulled away in order to look her husband in the eye. “This is all going to scare us to death,” she said. “You and me. But we’re still going to have to do it.”

“Maybe,” he said.

“Not maybe, Cub. For real.”

They found their feet and edged down the precarious slope to their separate tasks. With the lamb cradled inside her coat Dellarobia followed the fence line, for something to hang on to. She thought of the times she’d walked this fence with Cub, tearing out honeysuckle and briars to mend it. But the weeds were still here, it was plain to see, encircling the whole pasture, threaded through wire and post and skeletal trees. With their glassy stems encased in ice the weeds looked more substantial than the fence itself, the seasons of secret growth revealed in a sudden disclosure of terrible, cold beauty.

S
he felt Preston’s hand slip into hers while she stood at the stove making pancakes. She’d decided to tell him today, before the bus, and not tomorrow on his birthday. In her mind he was still in bed, so the cool hand startled her and the eyes rising solemnly to hers made her heart seize. “What’s wrong, honey?”

He tugged on her hand. She turned off the range and followed him to his bedroom, where Cordie breathed in her crib, asleep. She knelt with Preston on his unmade bed and looked out the window and saw what he saw, a bud colony on the neighbors’ dead peach orchard.

She knew what it was, despite the absence of any expectation. Ovid had apprised her to be on the lookout for something like this, in the unlikely event, but not to look
there
, on these puny saplings whose tops now drooped over like Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree. Whose limbs were copiously flocked with vivid orange. “Oh my gosh, Preston,” she said, bouncing on her knees, looking at him openmouthed, bounding off the bed. “Look how many. Put on your boots and coat. Let’s go see.”

The resurrection and the life
, she kept thinking over and over, a natural hazard with words like those, as she bundled wool onto Preston and they crunched out over the yard. Those little trees looked alive again, resurrected. Enveloped with the souls of dead children. It was no easy trek across the field. Preston had to hang on to her hand as they stomped through thick layers of melting, collapsing snow. Sometimes they broke all the way through to the dark, soaked ground that stood as wet pools in the bottoms of their footprints. It was hard to see where all this could possibly go when it melted. But the deep snow remained, the white of it dazzling them all over again, even now at dawn.

More dazzling still were the monarchs. Down here in the open without the camouflage of forest, with their cover utterly blown, it looked as if some other world had touched this one and bled orange. She could not guess the number of individuals in these clusters, maybe a few thousand. She was still no good at estimating. It wasn’t a million, that much she knew, and if these were the sole survivors, it wasn’t enough. It would take a bigger gene pool to get them through. And mortality was still dogging them, she saw; dark flecks of bodies were sprinkled over the snowy ground here like pepper on mashed potatoes. Maybe those were males that had already mated, their DNA packaged to go. Ovid had shown her pictures of bud colonies in Mexico where the butterflies descended from their roosts in March to cluster in the valleys, staged for liftoff, blanketing roofs and hedges and fields of dry cornstalks. Theoretically this meant they were ready to launch out. In the known world, anyway, it meant that.

Preston had brought his sit-upon from the kindergarten field trip so they could sit on the snow in the dead peach orchard and look at the butterflies. Dellarobia brought a raincoat to sit on. They chose a spot at the base of a little tree high on the hill so they could look up at butterflies, and down at butterflies. She had never allowed herself to picture this. After the storm on Tuesday Ovid had told her they were still on the trees up there, a few million butterflies frozen onto the branches beneath a covering of snow. Probably they would slough off with the thaw like so much dead skin. In the last two days he’d packed up the lab with the mood of closing a house after a death in the family. Deciding what to keep, what to give away. Survival wasn’t possible, he said, given the mortality under that snow. It would take a crowd of variations and mistakes and resilience, at least a million individuals, he thought, to add up to survival of a species. So what about the animals two-by-two on Noah’s ark, she’d asked, and he replied that they would have marched off that boat to die out in a couple of malformed generations, thanks to inbreeding. His bitterness was understandable. As they broke his laboratory down to its bones, Dellarobia watched the void of this man where once there had been wonder, and she despaired of her future. In such a short time he had relieved her of a lifetime of illusions, and already she missed them. Noah’s Ark and better days ahead. She found herself still rooting for this sliver of a generation that had made its way down the precarious mountain to rest on a blighted orchard.

They were so beautiful, that was the thing. The hardest work of all was to resist taking comfort. She and Preston gazed up together at their spindly butterfly tree. The wings were mostly still, but a few slowly opened as the sun arrived. A week ago she’d seen the sun come up at seven, and today it was well ahead of that. Dellarobia felt her heart slide, everything moving fast. Today was the day. Every day was the day.

“Mom,” Preston said, sounding anxious. “What if we miss the bus?”

“If we miss it, we miss it. I’ll drive you. Miss Rose won’t care if you’re late this once. It’s your birthday tomorrow!”

Preston seemed profoundly unconvinced. Dellarobia despaired to see her worldly powers already trumped by those of Miss Rose. She persisted.

“We’ll just sit here and yell at those kids when it goes by.
So long, suckers!
” she yelled aloud, to no one, nonetheless embarrassing her son. She tickled him and he tensed and then relaxed, finally, laughing.

More of the butterflies opened their vanes, drinking light. They looked more purplish here than in the woods, a richer brown, more red. Changeable in the light. She noticed they had covered the trees disproportionately on their eastern sides, where the first sunlight fell, though the butterflies must have landed here in the evening. For the souls of dead children, they were good at planning ahead. She thought of Josefina’s small hands fluttering out from her chest. And the little black lamb blinking its eyes open, drawing its breath, taking hers away. They’d gotten the mother to accept it eventually, after Dellarobia had done the hard part. Preston was still giving it a few bottles a day for good measure. He knew they weren’t out of the woods.

“So. I’ve got something to tell you.”

His happy eagerness looked so complete, she felt something inside her splitting. Like a flowerpot left outside to freeze, some stupid wasted thing like that. Belatedly she identified it as
hope
, just as the word itself drifted out of reach. She stared downhill at all the snowy little hummocks with meltwater flowing through them, a miniature river in a forest of white, conical, snow-covered weeds that looked like tiny fir trees. A small world, melting.

“I’ve got several somethings to tell you,” she said. “Actually. One’s kind of sad, so we’ll just get it over with. The second one is awesome, that’s your present, a day early. And the third one is, I don’t know what. Kind of a shocker. You ready?”

He nodded earnestly, bobbing the red pom-pom on his stocking cap. His bangs had gotten long, spilling out the front of his cap.

“Your remember what Josefina said about the monarchs, that when a baby dies, it turns into a butterfly?”

He frowned. “Is that real?”

“No. It’s just a story people tell, to feel better. What I want to tell you is, one of those is ours. We had a baby that died.”

He gave her an acute look. “Where is it?”

That was so Preston, wanting the GPS coordinates. “In the cemetery,” she said. “There’s a grave, no stone. But see, Preston, that was your brother. He came first, a long time before you. So you should know about him.”

Down on the road, cars began to pass. People going to work, restarting their lives. Preston looked sober but not really sad, probably maintaining appropriate sentiments for her sake, she realized. This grief was not his.

“You know how every year I tell the story of the day you were born? Going to the hospital and the whole deal. And sometimes I back up and tell you one more thing, right? Like how I was vacuuming under the bed and kind of got stuck under there and had to yell for Daddy because my water broke?”

He nodded.

“We’ll do all those stories tomorrow. We’ll have a cake and everything with Dad and Cordie, after you come home from school. But I’ve been wanting to tell you about the other baby that came first. Because if that one hadn’t come and gone, there’d be no Preston. He cleared the way, with Dad and me. So later on I would get to carry you around in my tummy until you were born on your birthday. Make sense?”

“Not really,” he said.

“Yeah, I know. Stuff doesn’t always. You don’t have to be sad about this. I’m just telling you the whole story. There’s tons of people that aren’t alive anymore, like my Mom and Dad and that little baby, that all helped get you here. The other baby gave us a present, which was you.”

Preston avoided looking at her.

“Ta-daa! Preston gets to exist!” She coaxed out the smallest of smiles. “Okay, now for the totally awesome surprise, your big present from me. This is a snap decision, to give it to you a day early. I didn’t wrap it yet. I just happen to have it in my coat pocket. Reach in.”

She held open her pocket. He gave her a skeptical look and moved his gloved hand slowly into her coat’s interior, as if something rabid might be in there.

“Whoa! A pod-thing!” he yelled, cradling the smooth little tablet close to his face. He pulled off a glove with his teeth and immediately revealed a knowledge of things Dovey had spent half an hour teaching Dellarobia: how to turn it on, touch the tiny icons on its face, brush the screen to move the pictures around. How to reach into the river of all knowledge and pull out your own darn fish.

“It has a little keyboard,” she said. “So you can type in your search.” He already knew that too. She could not imagine kids in his school actually had these. The monthly payment was going to be her biggest expense, after rent.

“Is it mine?” he asked.

“Here’s the deal. I’ll hang on to it when you’re at school, and when you’re home it’s yours. Your own computer. You can go on the Internet, whatever you want. Within reason. But when it rings, you have to give it to me, because it’s my new phone.”

“What’s wrong with your old one?” he asked. Ninety seconds in possession, and already miserly. She laughed.

“Here, give me that, you stinker. I’ve been saving up for three months to get you online, but we have to share.” He surrendered the phone with a good-natured grin, the type of kid who already knew very well, there was no free lunch.

“Surprise number three,” she said. “I need a new phone because we’re moving.”

“Moving! Gaa, Mom, no way.”

“Yes way. We’re getting an apartment in Cleary with Aunt Dovey. We already checked it out, there’s a bedroom for her, and one for Cordie and me, and a kind of a sunporch thing that will be all yours. You get a special bed that’s a couch in the daytime and a bed at night. And get ready for the shock of your life. Ready?”

He nodded doubtfully.

“I’m going to college. We’ll both be in school this fall. In Cleary. We can do our homework together.”