Flight Behavior (41 page)

“Children are born so small. But yet you love them that way, all dumb and helpless, so you keep on. With a husband you don’t get that chance. Him you’ve got to look up to.”

“I’m five-foot-nothing, Hester. I look up to everybody.”

“No, you don’t. Not Cub. You never did.”

Dellarobia felt socked. The vision that ambushed her was of Crystal in the dollar store that day. How she’d looked, talking to Cub. Craving, yes, but also admiring, cherishing. By any measure, looking up. How much more of a man Cub would be if he’d married some sweet, average-minded girl who thought Cub Turnbow hung the moon. Dellarobia felt loss as wide as a river. For what she’d taken from him.

“You two were no match,” Hester said. “I told Bear that from day one. You wait, I told him. That smart gal will not stick around.”

“But I did!” Dellarobia marched through the thicket of little trees to face down Hester where she sat. “Am I not standing here?”

“Yes!” Hester said back. “But it wasn’t something to count on.”

“What in the
hell
. Sorry for the language, Hester. I’m just a little shocked.” Dellarobia stomped back to the trail, crunching through the leaves, canvas bag rattling. She threw the bag on the ground. There was nothing breakable in there anyway. She wished there had been. She was in the mood to break something into a hundred pieces.

“So I wasn’t good enough for your son. Is that what you’re saying?”

“You know it isn’t.” Hester’s voice had grown quiet. She spoke straight out through the upright trunks of the bare grove as if having a prison visit with God.

“Well, why, in the name of . . . Well,
Jesus
, Hester. You never saw fit to mention this before? Like after we lost that baby? We could have called it quits right there after six weeks of marriage and gone our ways. If you thought I was so unsuitable.”

“Wasn’t my place.”

Dellarobia said nothing to that. They’d just tried to do the right thing. For the sake of Cub’s parents as much as anyone. The breeze made a large and continuous shushing sound in the leafless forest, under the low winter sky.

“But I never made up a feather bed for you either,” Hester said. “If you noticed.”

“Oh, I noticed.” Dellarobia took off her gloves, fished a tissue out of her pocket, and blew her nose. She contemplated walking over there to snatch Hester’s cigarettes and smoke the whole pack.

“If you were going, you were going, I figured. Taking those babies with you.”

“Preston and Cordie?” Dellarobia turned to stare. Could any of this be true? That Hester expected to lose them, all this time? The woman had practically pronounced the marriage vows herself, she and Bear, and thrown together that house before the ink was dry. Built, though not paid for. “You built us a house,” she said.

“It’s what we owed our son.”

“And you think I’ve had one foot out the door. All along.”

“Have you not?”

“No!” Dellarobia drew the vowel out into two syllables as in, No,
stupid
. She made herself breathe slowly, feeling numb. It was an earthquake, an upheaval of buried surfaces in which nothing was added or taken away. Her family was still her family, an alliance of people at odds, surviving like any other by turning the everyday blind eye. But someone had seen the whole thing.

A
fter they had their words, they could only keep walking. The trail climbed to the rocky spine of a ridge that divided the butterfly valley with its dank, looming firs from the broader south-facing hollow above Bear and Hester’s house. The lay of the land was plain from up there, the patchwork of brown farmlands below and the blue-gray wall of mountains that contained all. The sky opened by degrees, and it grew nearly too warm for brisk walking inside layers of winter wool. As they descended the south-facing incline, Dellarobia saw a glint of sun reflected off the steep tin roof of Bear and Hester’s farmhouse far below. They passed through more groves of these little trees that held on to their leaves for no good reason she could guess, except to rattle like worn-out lungs with any faint movement of air. The woods possessed but one color, brown, to all appearances dead. Yet each trunk rose up in its way distinct. Shaggy bark and smooth, all reaching for the sky, come what may. Hester could have said what they were. She was a fount of strange woodland names like boneset and virgin’s bower, for which no person of their acquaintance seemed to have any use. That must be lonely, Dellarobia thought, to have answers whose questions had all died of natural causes. The trees were skinnier here and the woods more open, though still as varied as any standing congregation of human beings. She knew this valley had been cleared of its timber in Cub’s youth. So this had all grown up during her own time on earth. The thought amazed her.

In the clearing she spied a flower and let out a small
oh.
Hester must have seen it too, the sole speck of white in the winter-killed monotony, just a handful of little fringed blossoms no taller than a shoe. Dellarobia knelt down to get close, the myopic’s everlasting impulse, and saw each blossom was a whole cluster of petaled flowers. Black specks danced on filaments held above the flowers’ gullets. There were no green leaves, only the floral bunches on naked pink stems poking straight up through matted dead leaves. That looked eerie, like some posy handed over from the other side, from death.

“That’s them,” Hester said. “I thought there’d be more.”

“Well, there might be.” Dellarobia was not about to dig this one up if it was the sole delegate. She remained on her knees, connected through her thigh muscles to all the hours she’d spent in that posture as if in prayer or surrender, counting dead butterflies. She feared taking her eyes off this one live thing. It could disappear.

“Mommy called them harbingers. Some of them says salt-and-pepper flower.”

Dellarobia found it hard to imagine the people who knew, much less disagreed about, the name of a Cheerio-size flower that bloomed in the dead of February. What would possess them to come out here and find it?

“I see more,” Hester said. Dellarobia removed her pink wool scarf and laid it in a ring around the first one so as not to lose it, but Hester was right, there were more. Salted across the dun floor of the woods she counted three, four, a dozen small bouquets. Once her eyes knew how to see them, they became abundant. She took the trowel from her bag and dug into the dank forest floor, which was wet and gravelly just under the top inch of matted leaves. While she chipped at the inhospitable garden, the air stirred and in plain sight the experiment ran ahead of itself. Monarchs were already here, this source discovered. She saw two bright drifters coasting tentatively in the woods, and near Hester’s boots, the duller orange of folded wings at rest on a flower cluster. Nectaring, that was the verb. King Billy nectaring on the harbinger.

B
eyond all half-answers and evasions one question had persisted, since forever, and it was
why.
In Dellarobia’s childhood it plagued and compelled her, one word, like one silver dollar on the floor of a wishing well, begging to be plucked up but strategically untouchable. Unsatisfactory answers crowded the waters around it, she could measure her life in those: because you are too young, because it was his time, because it isn’t done, because I didn’t raise you to behave that way, because it’s too late, because the baby came early, because life is like that, just
because
. Because God moves, it goes without saying, in mysterious ways.

Why the butterflies, why now. Why
here
?

Ovid had three theories. Not at first. In the beginning he resisted, wielding nonanswers with the best of them: untestable hypotheses, too many variables. Herbicides, for example. Their sole larval food is milkweed, a plant whose last name is “weed.” Pesticides too, spraying on the increase, as warming temperatures bring in the West Nile mosquito. New weather patterns affect everything in the migratory pathways. Both the fire and the flood. But at length he consented to certainty about these few things: It has become much too warm at the Mexican roost sites. With climate change the whole forest moves up those mountain slopes, a slow-motion slipping uphill, a thing she could imagine. The trees have their requirements. With arboreal stoicism they edge toward the peaks, and from there they cannot levitate.

But that explains
why not there
. That is not
why here
.

His second line of thinking was the OE parasites he’d shown her under the microscope. They stunt wingspan and lifespan. Monarchs highly infected with this parasite cannot fly very far. The annual trip to Mexico seems to weed out the most burdened, keeping the population healthy. But west of the Rockies is a different group, an outsider’s club of monarchs that are very infected, and do not fly to Mexico but seek their winter shelter in scattered groves of trees along the California coast. Maybe they portend what is coming. Warmer temperatures correlate with rising infection rates. If the parasite reached a critical level in eastern populations, natural selection might favor short migrations and dispersed winter roosting everywhere, not just in California. The hypothesis is immense, with its multiple bonds of cause and effect, some of them testable. To this end she cut small squares of cellophane tape, pressed them against the abdomens of one hundred live monarchs, and under the scope, counted the dark parasite spores nestled among the ridged, translucent scales. It took hours of acute ocular focus, a headache beyond all known proportions, and an appointment with the eye doctor for new glasses (overdue). Counting the microscopic dots on every centimeter-square of tape was not unlike counting butterflies on squares of forest floor, except that the numbers kept rising. Measuring and counting are the tasks of science. Not guessing, and not wishing. The potential answers are infinite, and no preference among them is allowed: there will be no just-because, or unjust-because.

She understood. But still, it’s
why not there
. Not
why here
.

His third theory concerned devastation in the “spring range,” which is what he called a funnel-shaped area on the map, fundamentally Texas. Monarchs that eke out winter in the Mexican Neovolcanics awaken from their torpor to an unruly sexual madness. Males are hormonally driven to assail anything—a quaking leaf, other males—eventually enclosing within their embrace the host of congregated females, and afterward they are spent, fulfilled. Their mates flee with gorged ovaries toward a nonnegotiable deadline, the deposit of perfectly timed egg on the first unfurling leaf of a Texan milkweed, moving inside the consecrated clock of a ticking earth. This, he said, tapping the map on the glass screen of his computer, is all our eggs in one basket. The spring range. Steady through the ages, now its rhythms abruptly faltered, ransacked by drought and unquenchable fires. By fire ants marching north, consuming 100 percent of the monarch caterpillars they chance to meet. Suppose a genetic mishap sent a handful of fall migrants just to the northern edge of this realm of fire ant and firestorm. This far south in the autumn, and no farther, he said, drawing one long finger from the Texas panhandle to the Carolinas, a scattering of migrants overwintering here, where they would not be forced to come back across that desert. A Bible Belt latitude, favorable for its mildness, but a mountainous place high enough to cool an insect pulse to dormancy for the winter wait. Suppose there is only one such place. And that they had been coming here for years, in small numbers, cloaked by this forest, mostly unsurviving. Until precipitous natural selection against the Mexican migrants destroyed most of the population, shedding favor on these pioneers. Their gene, suddenly, the inheritance of a species.

The explanation was far from complete. A population was only as valid as its habitat. Winter nectar sources remained problematic, when repeated warm spells broke their dormancy, and so did the spring milkweed emergence. There are always more questions. Science as a process is never complete. It is not a foot race, with a finish line. He warned her about this, as a standard point of contention. People will always be waiting at a particular finish line: journalists with their cameras, impatient crowds eager to call the race, astounded to see the scientists approach, pass the mark, and keep running. It’s a common misunderstanding, he said. They conclude there was no race. As long as we won’t commit to knowing everything, the presumption is we know nothing.

And even while he warned her of these caveats, Dellarobia felt a settling down of her lifelong plague of impatience. He did not claim that God moves in mysterious ways. Instead he seemed to believe, as she did, though they never could have discussed it, that everything else is in motion while God does not move at all. God sits still, perfectly at rest, the silver dollar at the bottom of the well, the question.

O
n the way to the study site a pine cone war broke out among the kindergartners. The boys took it more to heart, predictably, although the instigator was a big, rough girl in a decrepit parka whose fake fur hood was matted like old shag carpet. She shimmied up a pine trunk and fired away, ignoring Miss Rose’s escalating threats about getting sent right straight home with what she called a pink note. Dellarobia had a whole new impression of Miss Rose and what she was up against, in general. This girl, Comorah, exemplified a category of children whose parents, if applicable, would not be impressed by a pink note. She came down when she was good and ready, with gummy black stains all over her clothes and hands that Dellarobia knew would not give in to soap and water. She’d had her own tangles with pine sap up here. Preston seemed both thunderstruck and distressed by Comorah, needing to tell her the munitions were cones, not “pine combs.” Undaunted by her indifference, he sidled up to her with this information again and again, just the way Roy would carry around his old tooth-punctured Frisbee to drop at your feet while you did yard work, all afternoon if need be.

Dellarobia held herself a little apart from her son, curious to observe this ecosystem he regularly navigated without her. She saw that he was reserved but not shy, that other kids ran to him with their special finds such as beetles, and that he stuck close to the willowy, confident Josefina. She was his partner or protector—Dellarobia couldn’t quite read it. For all she knew, they might be the only two free-lunch kids, though she doubted it. Some of these youngsters appeared to be well-heeled—she’d actually spotted a cell phone—and others, like Comorah, were turned out in gear that had seen many generations of hand-me-down. But Josefina and Preston seemed to represent some subtle divide of maturity, like the automatic segregation of seniors from sophomores at a dance. Dellarobia recalled their spontaneous hug, that first day Josefina’s family showed up on their porch. In retrospect she saw in it some element of rescue.