Santa brought Preston the watch he wanted, just like Mako’s. It was Mako’s. He’d knocked on the kitchen door the morning he and the other students were leaving town, and handed her the watch as a gift for Preston. Dellarobia was floored, but Mako insisted. His thanks for the repaired zipper. He claimed it was not an expensive watch. He had a better one at home, he said, and showed her some of the functions on this one that no longer worked. As if she could tell. He wanted it to go to Preston, who called it the “science watch.” Dellarobia had worried about her son being a pest, but now could see the flattery angle for Mako, who must not have little brothers at home pining for his hand-me-downs. She promised she would tell Preston on Christmas morning that the watch was from Mako, his hero.
But the day came, and she broke the promise. Preston tore into the wrapping paper, shouting, “Yesss! I knew it! Santa’s real!” Stammering a little, overexcited, he said he had done an experiment: intentionally, he had not told his parents what he wanted. It never occurred to him that a kindergarten teacher might leak information, or that Mako might have guessed. The watch in his hands was Preston’s proof that Santa had read his mind. Dellarobia found she could not revoke a delusion that made him so happy. “So fantasy won the day,” was how she put it to Dovey.
“As usual,” Dovey agreed.
“He’s so smart, it’s scary,” Dellarobia said. “What kind of child does experiments to test the existence of Santa Claus? Next he’s going to ask me how Santa gets all the way around the world in one night.”
Dovey folded the last towel in the laundry basket. “Will you explain to me why people encourage delusional behavior in children, and medicate it in adults? That’s so random. It’s like this whole shady setup.”
“True. At what age do you cross over the line and say, ‘Now I’ll face reality?’ ”
“When you get there, send me a postcard,” Dovey sang.
Dellarobia thought, but did not say: There’s usually a pregnancy test involved. She rarely acknowledged the gulf between her life and Dovey’s, but it did exist. She separated the clothes into stacks on her bed and tucked hers and Cub’s into the bureau drawers. She and Dovey were spending a morning together in the same spirit that had brought them together since childhood, shoring up one another’s psyches against routine wear and tear. Even in the old days they mostly hung out at Dellarobia’s house, without all those wild little brothers to contend with. After fifth grade, Dellarobia’s household only had the late father and the sad mother, so it was quiet and they could rule.
Now of course it came down to which house had the childproof electric outlets. Dovey lived ten minutes away in a duplex owned by her brother in what passed for suburban Feathertown. This morning she’d helped Dellarobia knock off a pile of year-end tax documents and two loads of laundry, with more to go, plus the deconstruction of the weird Christmas tree, which made the kids whiny. No, mine, no, Cordelia shrieked as Dellarobia wrested nickels from her little paws, to discard the hooks. She asked Preston to unfold the dollar bills and flatten them for future use, but he was sentimental about Mako’s birds. “We have to keep them for next Christmas!” he wailed as Dellarobia pocketed them one by one, criminally hoping they’d add up to a carton of cigarettes.
“We’ll make more next Christmas,” she said.
Preston threw himself on the couch. “Mako probably won’t even be here.”
Dovey asked if some law of physics made children apply equal and opposite energy to both ends of the Christmas season. They made no real protest when Dellarobia sent them to their room. Cordie made a nest of toys on the floor and Preston sat on his bed attending to The Watch, pressing its buttons and holding it to his ear, an activity that might engage him into his teenage years, from the looks of it. He was also fond of his gift from Dr. Byron, a calendar with a huge color photo of a different endangered species for every month. Preston could not yet name all the months in order, but had memorized these animals in a day.
Dellarobia fetched the next load of laundry from the dryer and dumped it on the bed in her cluttered bedroom, where she and Dovey could hide, out of the kids’ line of sight. She turned on the radio to cover their conversation, keeping it low enough she would still hear a slap fight, should one arise. Cordie was always the instigator. Dellarobia began dismantling the octopus of warm, stuck-together clothing, pulling out socks, while Dovey tried to fold tiny flannel shirts whose seams puckered like lettuce.
“I forgot to tell you, I have a date,” Dovey said. “You can do my hair. I brought over this new flatiron I bought. It’s got, like, an earth’s-core setting.”
“You’re straightening your hair for some guy? Must be love.” Dellarobia yanked on a twist of threads that connected two unmatched socks like an umbilical cord. “Is this Felix? I thought he was just the flavor of the month.” Felix was a bartender in Cleary, allegedly hot. Dellarobia had not met him and doubted she would.
“Scam potential,” Dovey said. “It’s this big bartender-wait-staff blowout, so other guys will be there too. They all worked long shifts last night, so tonight they rage.”
New Year’s Eve was the occasion of their long shifts the previous night. Dellarobia and Cub had put the kids to bed and split one beer on the couch watching a CMT special while waiting to watch that sparkly ball drop for reasons no one seemed to recall anymore. Cub agreed to stop changing channels for nearly an hour, which for Cub signaled high romance. The girl hosting the CMT show in her teetery high heels was one of those national talent-search winners they couldn’t have named, young enough she probably thought having to work on New Year’s Eve was awesome. Cub had declared that women who hadn’t had children weren’t really sexy, they looked like dresses on a hanger waiting to get a body in them. Dellarobia was touched. One thing about Cub, you knew he wasn’t faking a compliment. He could also declare your new sunglasses reminded him of a frog, with no offense intended. All that entered his mind’s highway went straight onto cruise control. Somewhere between Toby Keith and Kitty Wells they’d both conked out, and a few hours later woke up couch-racked and disoriented, having missed the big event. She dragged herself and Cub to bed feeling achy and sad, hung over without cause. The mood had followed her into this day.
It wasn’t that she envied Dovey’s social life. Felix was already history, she suspected, certainly no impetus for special preparations. Hair was a long-standing recreation between herself and Dovey that allowed them to preen and tuggle each other like beagle pups. “Beauty shop,” they used to call this, with increasing irony in high school, but still rising faithfully to the challenge of curling Dellarobia’s arrow-straight hair and straightening Dovey’s ringlets. Which, in all honesty, struck Dellarobia as part of the same unending march of uselessness that had occurred to her in the dollar store that day, the factory workers and shoppers canceling each other out. So much human effort went into alteration of nonessential components. Especially for women, it could not be denied.
They flipped a coin for the first turn at bat. Dellarobia won, which meant she sat at the mirrored dresser while Dovey clicked on the hot rollers and went to work. She held the metal clips in her mouth and hummed with the radio, classic country, the stuff they’d loved in high school: Patty Loveless on “Long Stretch of Lonesome,” Pam Tillis with “All the Good Ones Are Gone.” Dellarobia wondered how her favorite music got declared “classic” while she was still under thirty. The sight of Dovey with the clips in her mouth made her homesick for her mother, who used to spend afternoons with that same mouth-full-of-pins frown, pinning pattern pieces to a bolt of fabric spread over the dining table. The more expensive the fabric, the deeper the quiet and that frown, lest she make a wrong cut and have to swallow the expense. Dellarobia would pull up a chair and read her library book, A Wrinkle in Time or It’s Me, Margaret or The Name of the Rose, depending on the year. The oak table had been built by her father, a broad, smooth-grained surface underpinning the family endeavors long after he was gone. She missed that too, the table. Where was it?
Unlike her mother, Dovey had no stamina for silence. After a couple of minutes she spit out the clips and tossed them on the vanity. “So what happened to Ovid, Lord of the Dance. When’s he coming back?”
“Next Tuesday.” Dellarobia blushed.
Dovey lifted her eyebrows. “What hour and what minute? Have we got butterflies over Mr. Butterfly?”
“Dr. Butterfly to you.”
“Excuse me? I got him to moonwalk.”
“Because you’re a ho. I totally saw him first.”
“We can share,” Dovey said. “Like we did with Nate Coyle. Remember that?”
“Wow, poor little Nate. Was that sixth?”
“Fifth. I bet he’s in counseling to this day.” With convincing expertise Dovey used a rat-tailed comb to nick out each long strand of tomato-colored hair, raise it high, and spool it down, a process Dellarobia found entertaining to watch without her glasses. Gradually her head grew enlarged by the corona of rollers. From time to time they heard the thump of Cub’s pipe wrench under the house as he made himself useful down there, wrapping the pipes with new insulation tape. The temperature had finally dropped to something close to winter range.
“Hey, here’s one for you,” Dovey said. “I saw it on the way over here. ‘Lukewarm Now, Burn Later!’ ”
“The thing about you and church, Dovey, is you think everything is about hell.”
“Hell yeah!”
Dellarobia found it hard to resist the idea of her parents together in some other sphere, maybe rocking the grandbaby that never got loved in this one. But she had no heart for a system that would punish Dovey and reward the likes of herself, solely on the basis of attendance. “I don’t think I believe in hell,” she said. “It’s kind of going out of style, like spanking kids in school. Pastor Ogle never even mentions it.”
“Wait a sec, they canceled hell? Man, will my mom be pissed off.”
“I’m serious, Dovey. Who do you know that’s inspired by the idea of burning flesh? People our age, I mean.”
“Mmm-hm,” she said, holding the comb in her teeth for a two-handed maneuver. “Too campy. Like some Halloween drive-in movie.”
Dellarobia realized this was true, exactly. The last generation’s worst fears became the next one’s B-grade entertainment. “I’ve heard people say Bobby Ogle is a no-hell preacher,” she said. “Like that’s some official denomination.”
Dovey took the comb out of her teeth and pointed it at the mirror. “You know what? I think Ralph Stanley is one of them. Now that you mention it. I read this interview with him in a magazine.”
“Wow.” Dellarobia could not quite imagine the magazine that would probe country legends for gossip about their spiritual lives. But Dovey was a wellspring of weird facts that turned out to be true.
“So you’re saying this famous Bobby Ogle is like a new-millennium preacher? I pictured him kind of played out. Way older.” Dovey lifted a strand at Dellarobia’s nape, making her shudder.
“No. Early thirties, I’d guess. Don’t you remember his picture in the hallway, in high school? He was part of the football team that went to state.”
“Whoa, that was recent history.”
“Well, not anymore it isn’t, Dovey. But it was when we were in high school. I guess he just seems more ahead of us in spirit. His parents were old—maybe that’s part of it. They were sixty or something when they adopted him.”
“He’s adopted?”
“Like Moses. A basket case.”
Suddenly Cub was at the back door, calling out from the kitchen. “Hon, do you know where my truck keys are at?”
Dellarobia bugged her eyes at the mirror. “No more sex till he quits ending every g-d sentence with a preposition.”
Dovey crooned, “Do you know where my truck keys are at, bitch?”
“What’s funny?” he asked from the bedroom doorway. His face was unreadable, backlit as he was from the bright living room, but Dellarobia could see in his posture the reluctance to enter their zone. Cub was a little afraid of Dovey and herself in tandem, a fact she felt bad about but would never change. Their communal disloyalties were like medicine: bitter and measured, life-prolonging.
“You going over to Bear and Hester’s?” she asked. His key ring was on the dresser. She reached to toss them and he caught them out of the air one-handed, chank. He was surprisingly coordinated, for someone who moved through the world as if underwater.
“Yeah. I think Mother wants to worm the pregnant ewes today.”
“On New Year’s Day, how festive.” It hadn’t been much of a holiday. Cub had spent his days off with Bear repairing the High Road after the floods. He’d brought in two truckloads of gravel on the employee discount. Hester would be able to resume her tour business, and Bear was keen to get the road in shape for the logging trucks, though technically that was the company’s job. Bear felt they would make a mess of it.
“She’s been after me to help drench them,” Cub said. “It’s been so warm. I don’t know if this cold snap changed her mind, we’ll see.”
“Okay. See you at supper.” She kissed her fingertips and waved them. Cub pointed his finger like a pistol, winked, and was gone.
As habitually as a prayer, Dellarobia wished she were a different wife, for whom Cub’s good heart outweighed his bad grammar. Some sickness made her deride his simplicity. Really the infection was everywhere. On television, deriding people was hip. The elderly, the naive—it shocked her sometimes how the rules had changed. A night or two ago they’d seen comedians mocking some old guy in camo coveralls who could have been anybody, a neighbor. Not an actor, this was a real man, standing near his barn someplace with a plug of tobacco in his lip, discussing the weather and his coonhounds. Billy Ray Hatch: she and Cub repeated the name aloud, as though he might be some kin. It was one of the late-night shows that archly twisted comedy with news. Somehow they’d found this fellow and traveled to his home to ask ridiculous questions. After each reply the interviewer nodded in a stagy way, creasing his eyebrows in fake fascination. So the whole world could see Billy Ray Hatch made into a monkey. Cub changed the channel.
“What does that mean, drench the ewes?” Dovey asked, lifting her chin, inspecting herself in the vanity mirror. “I always picture you all running the sheep through a car wash.”
“Nowhere near that exciting. It means shooting drugs down their throat with a squirt-gun thing. Leave it to Hester to celebrate a national holiday with deworming meds.”
Dovey patted both Dellarobia’s shoulders with her hands. “Okay, you’re rolled up. Swap.” Dellarobia gave up her seat and took up the new flatiron Dovey had brought for a test run. The thing was so hot it scared her a little. It could have set things ablaze while heating up on the dresser. She divided Dovey’s massive mane into reasonable paddocks and went to work.
“So,” Dovey said, “back to his hotness Dr. Butterfly. He’s coming when?”
“Tuesday. And b-t-w, there’s probably a Mrs. Butterfly. He wears a ring.”
“You never know. Widower, maybe. Or she split, and he’s in denial.”
“I don’t think the man’s in mourning. Oh, and Pete’s coming back too. Speaking of men with wives.”
“How do you know all this?”
“He called, day before yesterday. Ovid.” Speaking his name aloud altered Dellarobia’s pulse. His voice coming through the phone had connected her with an unexpected longing, as if she’d been on hold for a time, and then there he was. “He and Pete are driving from New Mexico with a van load of equipment. They’re setting up some kind of lab out there in the sheep shed, believe it or not.”
“Are you kidding? A mad scientist in your creepy old barn. I saw that movie.”
A flush of defensiveness surprised Dellarobia, on behalf of the scientists or the barn, she was not sure. “It’s not as bad as you’d think out there. They’re using the room that used to be the milking parlor back when they had dairy cows here, like, fifty years ago.” Ovid had checked out the barn before he left, choosing the milking parlor for its enclosing walls and cement floor that could be hosed down. Bear and Hester had drawn up a three-month lease, for a fee that seemed shocking. The balloon payment on the loan was officially covered. “Pete’s just staying a few weeks, and then he’ll drive the van back. I guess the vehicle belongs to the college. But the equipment stays awhile.”
“Equipment for what?”
She reorganized Dovey’s wild mane, trying to separate layers in order to flatten them. The faint odor of scorched hair filled her nostrils, but Dovey seemed unalarmed. “I don’t know for what. Analysis, he said. Analys-ees,” she corrected herself.
“Busy bees, checking out the butter-flees.”
“Well, I think it’s interesting. I know it seems crazy to put so much work into butterflies, or kind of trivial, I guess. But what’s not trivial?”
Dovey leaned into the mirror and intoned, “Hair and makeup.”
“You spend your days cutting up meat. How’s that saving lives?”
“People have to eat to live.”
“They buy chuck roasts for Sunday dinner, but they’re hungry again on Monday. We raise sheep for sweaters that will wind up wadded up in people’s closets because they’ve got ten other sweaters and that one’s the wrong color.”
“Your father-in-law makes guardrails. Not trivial. Sorry to bring that up.”
“He used to, before the interstate ran out of money. And if you think about it, ninety-nine drivers out of a hundred never touch the guardrail. Maybe it’s not even one in a million that’s affected. So to most people, guardrails are trivial.”
“You make a strong case. Let me just go jump off a bridge right now.”
“I’m just saying you never know what’s important. He said he’s going to need assistants. Ovid.” She blushed again, but Dovey gave her a pass, maybe seeing something important was at stake. Dellarobia needed to close herself in a closet and practice saying that name: Ovidovidovid. “He’s putting an ad in the Courier to get volunteers, when school is back in session. But he’s hiring, too. He said he’d be training at least one assistant for pay. I feel like he was hinting I should apply for a job.”
“Why don’t you?”
“Are you kidding? Check my résumé. Experienced at mashing peas and arbitrating tantrums. He’ll get somebody from Cleary that’s gone to college.”
“Don’t sell yourself short.”
“I am short. What do you think I’d sell for?”
“She’s a rocket, she was made to burn,” Dovey sang alongside Kathy Mattea on the radio with perfect timing, pointing her finger at Dellarobia. “Just make sure you wear that to your job interview.” Dellarobia laughed. Her huge black T-shirt had a constellation of holes and a stretched-out neck that slipped off her shoulder. It was one of Cub’s, pulled over jeans and tank top as a housework smock. Charlie Daniels Band. It pre-dated their marriage.
“Cub wouldn’t want me working,” she said. “With the kids and everything. Can you imagine what Hester would say?”
“That right there is why you ought to do it.”
“To tell you the truth, Cub and I had a fight about it already. Right after he called.”
“What, you told Cub you’re going for it?”
“I asked. He said no. It was pretty predictable. ‘What will people think? Who will watch the kids?’ I told him I could work all that out.”
“I don’t see why you’re not just going for this.” Dovey looked her in the eyes, in the mirror. “You are a rocket. You go for things, Dellarobia. That is you. When did you ever not?”
Dellarobia shut her eyes. “When there was nothing out there to land on, I guess.”
“Now, see,” Dovey clucked, “that’s a woman thing. Men and kids get to just light out and fly, without even worrying about what comes next.”
“No, Dovey, it’s an everybody thing. It’s just a question of how well you can picture the crash landing.”
“Don’t picture it, then.”
“It’s a strategy,” Dellarobia conceded. “Works for some.”
“I’d help with Preston and Cordie. Any time I could.”
“I know you would. And it wouldn’t kill Hester to watch them once in a while, either. Or I could even pay somebody. It’s good money.”
“How good?”
“He said thirteen dollars an hour. Which is more than Cub’s making.”
“Ouch. There’s your trouble.”
“It is. But he can’t say that to me, you know? Instead he’s on a tear about some stranger raising our kids. ‘Raising our kids,’ he said. News flash, I told him, your son is in school. Strangers are teaching him his ABC’s. As opposed to his father, who is teaching him to watch the Dirtcathlon on Spike.”
“Your marriage is inspiring.”
“I know, for you to stay single. You sure I’m not burning up your hair with this?”
“Positive. Scorch it till next Tuesday if you want, it’ll still want to bounce back.”
“Me with a job, Dovey. Can you picture it? Maybe I’d learn something.”
“Like?”
“I have no idea. Like, how do those butterflies know where they’re going? You want to know something? It’s not even the same ones that fly south every winter, it’s the kids of the kids of the ones that went last winter. They hatch out up north somewhere and it’s just in them. Their beady little insect brains tell them how to fly all the way to this one mountain in Mexico where their grandparents hooked up. It’s like they’ve all got the same map of the big picture inside, but the craving to travel skips a few generations.”
Dovey was examining her nails, disappointingly unamazed. Nothing ever really surprised Dovey, but still. “Think about it,” Dellarobia insisted. “How do they find this one place thousands of miles away, where they’ve never been before?”
“I’ve never been anywhere,” Dovey pointed out, “but I could get to Mexico with the map app in my phone. It’s probably about the same size as an insect brain. Heck, my brain is probably the size of an insect brain.”
“Okay, here’s the big question. What if your map thing all of a sudden started sending you to the wrong place? Because that’s what’s happening here.” She pointed her finger to stop Dovey from saying something flippant. “I’m serious. The butterflies can’t just go out and get a new brain. Why did they even come here?”
Her friend got the message, and kept quiet.
“I mean, what in the world would make that happen now, when it never did before? Maybe it’s something we ought to be worried about.”
Dovey reached back and pretended to yank an imaginary ponytail. “Children, get with Jesus, it’s the End of Days.”
“Dovey,” she complained.
“Well, what? You’re a downer.”
Dellarobia was now making her third pass with the flatiron over Dovey’s curls, but they still wanted to spring back. The girl had fortitude, any way you looked at it. Deana Carter came on the radio, singing “Did I Shave My Legs for This?” Once upon a time she and Dovey used to howl this empty-marriage anthem at the top of their lungs, thinking that was funny. The ache in her belly made her want to curl herself into a full-body fist. “Do you know what today is?” she asked.
“National hangover day. Technically we shouldn’t be out of bed yet.”
“It’s the day I had that first baby. That didn’t live.”
Dovey’s face went through several arrangements of surprise. “January first? How could I not know that?”
“You weren’t there.”
“Well, no, because it’s the one month of our lives I was mad at you.”
Dellarobia hated the salty burn that sprang to her eyes. This was not planned. She held the hot iron out and up toward the ceiling, like a gun, afraid to aim at anything with blurred vision.
Dovey reached up and held her other hand. “Sweetie, you didn’t even tell me for a week or something. You weren’t answering your phone. I thought you’d abandoned me for marriage and you guys were out on some monster bender.”
“We were at home, asleep. Or whatever you want to call that place. Our one-room marriage at Bear and Hester’s house.”
Dellarobia turned off the flatiron and set it down, giving up the fight. She glanced toward the door, then opened the vanity drawer that hid her cigarettes and ashtray and scootched Dovey over to sit with her on the one seat. They were both so small they sort of fit, like children squashed on a bench at the grown-ups’ table. She lit up, inhaled.
“And it just happened. I woke up with horrible cramps and then we were in the hospital and then it was over. My due date was May—I’d been thinking it might even hold off until after graduation. All I could think was, this couldn’t be happening yet.”
“What did you know?” Dovey said quietly. “You were seventeen.”
Dellarobia nodded slowly. “You know what Cub kept saying? It was going to be the first baby of the year. You get your picture in the paper and a year of free diapers or something. Poor Cub. He’s always the last one to get it when the joke’s on him.”
Dovey picked up Dellarobia’s left hand again and stroked it, turning the wedding ring around and around on her finger. “I can’t believe we never talked about this,” she said finally. “I mean not like, how it mattered. You always said it was for the best.”
“Nobody talked about it. Cub and I didn’t. You don’t get to feel sad about a baby that never had a name and doesn’t exist.” Dellarobia was startled to look up and see tears streaming down her face in the mirror. She couldn’t feel herself being sad. The emotions on Dovey’s face looked more real to her than her own. Without a word, Dovey got up and stood behind her. She started taking out the rollers, spilling long tendrils that didn’t look like anyone’s hair.
“Listen,” Dovey said after a minute. “I’ve never said this, either. But I don’t get why you stayed.”
“Stayed where?”
“The hurry-up wedding, yes, I get that. But when you guys were living upstairs at Bear and Hester’s, you hated everything and everybody. After that miscarriage, why not just walk? You two were so not ready to be married.”
“Walk where, into hospice with Mama? Do you even remember what things were like at that point?”
Dovey was quiet, her dark eyes round. It was possible she didn’t.
“We’d already let the house go. I put our furniture and stuff in storage, but I couldn’t keep it paid up.” That’s where her father’s table must have gone. The self-storage place would have auctioned off the contents of unpaid lockers. All that handmade furniture, what a score for someone. Probably some upscale dealer in Knoxville. Those people would know where to go for their treasure hunts.
Dovey leaned down and lifted the cigarette from Dellarobia’s hand, took a drag, and shook her head, exhaling smoke in rapid little bursts as she gave it back. Dovey only smoked occasionally to be sociable, and had a knack for making the enterprise look toxic. “You could have moved in with me,” she said.
“Oh, right. Your mom didn’t even like me staying for supper. You were sharing a room with your baby brother and had that diaper pail in your closet. I remember you having a fit because your prom dress smelled like pee.”
Dellarobia got up and opened the bedroom window a crack for ventilation. The pasture fence ran so close to the house on this side, its wire mesh spanned her view like bars on a window. The day outside was hazy and indefinite, a seasonless new year that held no more promise than the old one.
“Here’s the thing,” she said, sitting down again at the vanity. “Bear and Hester had gotten the bank loan to build this house. That was such a big deal. They’d poured the footers, and it was supposed to be move-in ready by May when the baby came. Cub and I would make the loan payments. That was the plan.”
“Well, it wasn’t May when you all moved in here. With your two suitcases and your zero furniture.”
“No, it took them longer to finish. Baby was early, house was late.”
Dovey squinted at the air. “It was Fourth of July weekend, right? Cub and his friends shot off all those fireworks in the yard. What were their names, those two brothers? They were both missing fingers, which did not seem like a good sign.”
“Rasp. Jerry and Noel.”
“No offense, Dellarobia, but somebody builds you a cozy little box, and you just move in? That’s basically one of the concepts they use in pest control.”
“No offense, Dovey, but you’ve always had a home. Rewinding back to sixteen and getting a do-over wasn’t an option for me. You kind of need parents for that.”
Dellarobia took a long, slow drag on her cigarette, feeling the chemical rush arrive little by little in her blood, her hands and feet, the answer to a longing that seemed larger than her body. “And anyway I’d felt that baby move. It would get the hiccups whenever I tried to lie down. Cub was the happiest he’d ever been in his life. We were going to be this little family. There’s stuff you can’t see from the outside.”
Dovey stood very still, holding her in the eye in the mirror.
“We had to use up our savings to buy it a cemetery plot.”
At that, Dovey sat down beside her and put her head on her shoulder, close to tears, an uncommon and worrisome sight. If they both fell apart at the same time, some greater collapse might follow. “Here’s the thing,” Dellarobia said. “He’d be turning eleven today. If the child had lived, he’d be that old now. We’d be having a fifth-grader birthday party here. I can’t find any possible way to make that real in my head.”
Preston suddenly appeared in the mirror behind them, standing in the doorway, startling Dellarobia so badly she nearly dropped her cigarette.
“Mama,” he said, “smoking gives you cancer and makes you die.”
“Honey, I heard about that too. I ought to quit right now, hadn’t I?”
He nodded soberly. Dellarobia made a show of grinding out her unfinished cigarette in the ashtray. She opened the vanity drawer, pulled out her pack of cigarettes, and flung it into the trash basket. It floated like a shipwreck survivor among the wadded tissues and crumpled receipts. Already Dellarobia was plotting its rescue, her mind darting forward to the next time she’d be able to sneak off for a secret hookup with her most enduring passion, nicotine. Who needed hell when you had a demon like this?
“So,” Dovey said quietly, after Preston had disappeared again, “how many times have you been through that little routine?”
“I hate myself for it.”
“Just don’t picture the crash landing in the cancer ward,” Dovey said, raising one eyebrow. “Like you say, it’s a strategy. Works for some.”
“Okay, fine, I’m a jerk, like the rest of them. Lying to Preston, of all people. The congenital Eagle Scout. He deserves a more honest mother than me.”
“Who do you think is doing any better? You should see what I do at work—the meat counter is guilty-conscience central. People with ‘heart attack’ written all over their faces, buying bacon. Or these hateful old ladies commanding me to get them a twenty-pound Thanksgiving turkey, like that’s going to bring the kids back home this year. The human person cannot face up to a bad outcome, that’s just the deal. We’re all Cleopatra, like that Pam Tillis song. Cruising down that river in Egypt. Queens of de-Nile.”
The word had weight for Dellarobia, who had been through school-sponsored grief groups after each parent’s death. The stillbirth was an unofficial add-on to the second round, in those dim final months of high school she otherwise barely remembered. Denial-anger-bargaining-acceptance, get it over with, was the counselor’s advice. “I’m a lot of things,” she said, “but not in denial, I don’t think.”
“Case rests, sugar.”
Dellarobia felt disoriented, with all those years inside her that added up to naught. Twenty-eight. She felt so young, especially with Dovey here anchoring her to the girl she’d been at seventeen, and at seven. She and Dovey could make each other over until their hair fell out, but nothing in the core of a person really altered.
“I look like a preteen runaway,” Dovey pronounced, startling Dellarobia with her similar frame of mind. But that wasn’t it. Dovey’s focus was on the flat, flyaway hair. “Who were the little orphan girls in those books we read?”
“The boxcar children.”
“Them! I’m a boxcar child.”
“You always say that, and you’re wrong. You turn out looking like Posh Spice, and I wind up like Scary. Why do we keep doing this?”
“Repetition of the same behavior, expecting different results: that’s actually one definition of mental illness.” Dovey read a lot of magazines.
“I look like Little Orphan Annie.” Dellarobia stood up and shook her curls. Maybe she could get a Flashdance thing going, in the off-the-shoulder T-shirt. But there was no question about which of them was the real orphan. Dovey rolled her dark silk floss around like a shampoo commercial, relishing her own existence in any form.
“Or some kind of hooker,” Dellarobia persisted, fussing with the curly tendrils around her face. “You have to admit, I look like I have more hair than brains.”
“But here’s the thing, peach. You don’t.”
Dellarobia shot her a look. “ ‘Peach.’ Where’d that come from?”
Dovey laughed. “This guy that comes into Cash Club calls me that. He’s tried to hit on me more times than he’s bought ground beef. Cute as the devil, b-t-w.”
“How long’s this been going on?”
“I don’t know, a year? I’m just using him as ammo against the guys I work with. They’re always drooling over the ladies that come to the meat counter.” She deepened her voice and grunted: “ ‘Hey, I see my future ex-wife out there.’ ”
Dellarobia did not laugh.
Dovey shrugged. “So this guy’s drool bait. My future ex.”
“And jailbait, more or less. Am I right, he’s real young?”
“Of course,” Dovey said.
“A dimple in his chin, right here? Works out, really good pecs and shoulders? A silver gauge in his left ear?”
They read each other’s faces in the mirror. “You are totally—”
“I’m not.”
“Him?”
“Him.”
“I swear to God, I’m going to take a couple of hams out of that jackass. I mean it. I’ve got the knives to do it.”
“No, Dovey, let him be. He’s nothing to me anymore.”
Dovey reached up to clasp her wrist and gently pull her down onto the seat next to her. Their side-by-side faces in the mirror were like photos in the twin halves of a locket, some long-gone children in a bargain bin of dead people’s jewelry. “This is not turning out to be your day, is it?” Dovey asked.
Dellarobia shrugged.
“Honey, I had no idea.”
“How could you have?”
“Shit. Your telephone guy.”
“Shit. Everybody’s telephone guy.”
Dellarobia wasted too much of a night and all the next morning on a project of self-loathing. She had been two-timed, and probably worse, by the man with whom she was prepared to cheat on her husband. So she’d been nothing special to him, even as an adulterer. To whom could she possibly complain? She had made her peace with that mistake and taken pains to put it behind her. Yet he still had the power to wreck her.
It never wavered, this bleak helplessness she felt when confronting her undignified obsessions. Before Jimmy it was the man at Rural Incorporated, when she was pregnant with Cordie, which she’d told herself was not a true flirtation. He had steel gray hair and a gold wedding band, and a confidential kindness that completely unwound her. Those appointments got her from week to week. He always had a lot more time for her and her Medicaid papers than for the other people waiting outside his office, and Dellarobia hadn’t minded taking it. She never minded. Cub’s old friend Strickland, who lifted weights and ran his own tree-trimming business, kept delivering wood chips for mulching the flower beds she didn’t have, and she’d taken that too, letting pile it up for years behind the barn. New Heights, his business was called, emblematic of a can-do spirit she found hard to resist. Cub never knew. She had never let things go that far. Yet she understood the betrayal was real. She envisioned the internal part of a person that buttressed a faithful marriage, some delicate calcified scaffold like a rib cage, and knew hers to be malformed, probably from the beginning.
All of Dellarobia’s personal turmoil notwithstanding, the second of January must have been a slow news day. At the stroke of noon, while she was putting out bologna sandwiches for the kids, a TV crew showed up at her door.
She flew to answer the knock, leaving Cordie strapped in the high chair and Preston in charge of making sure she took little bites. Dellarobia was startled to see two strangers on her porch: a beautiful woman in perfect makeup and a man with a bald, pointy head and little horn-rimmed glasses. A huge camera sat on the man’s shoulder as if it just lived there, possibly attached somehow to his complicated all-weather coat that had extra pockets and zippers, even on the sleeves. Strangest of all was their vehicle parked in the drive, some sort of Jeep tricked out with oversize tires and a satellite dish.
“Dellarobia, is it?” The pale woman looked her straight in the eye with a shocking force, like a faucet left on. “We’re from News Nine—we were hoping for just a few minutes of your time to talk about the phenomenon on your farm.”
The phenomenon. The man was looking all around the front of the house, as if casing the joint for a break-in.
“I’ve got small children here that I can’t leave unattended.” Dellarobia stepped outside, pulling the door closed behind her. No way was she letting these people into her trashed house. It had been a long day already, and it wasn’t even noon. Whose idea was it to keep kids home from school a full week and more after Christmas? Preston was having a rocket-science day, using toys as projectiles and sofa cushions as the landing pad. Cordelia did something she called “farmer” with the Cheerios, planting the entire box like seeds in the living room carpet while Dellarobia was in the bathroom less than five minutes. She could see her future in that carpet, the endless vacuuming, the grit on the soles of everyone’s feet. Like a beach vacation minus the beach, and the vacation.
“We only need a few minutes of your time,” the woman repeated. “I’m Tina Ultner, this is my associate Ron Rains.” She shook Dellarobia’s hand in her firm grip. Tina Ultner was amazing to look at, a woman with slender everything: face, nose, fingers, wrists. Her hair was the true pale blond that can’t be faked, with matching almost white eyebrows and a candlewax complexion. She was only a few inches taller than Dellarobia, but with those looks she could own the world. Her makeup alone was a miracle, eyeliner applied so perfectly, her wide blue eyes resembled exotic flowers.
“Listen, I’m sorry,” Dellarobia said, “we’re not presentable in here. My kids are eating lunch. I don’t know what to tell you.”
Tina cocked her head to the side. “How old?”
“Five and almost two.”
Tina’s face crumpled into a combination of anguish and high-beam smile. “You’re kidding me! I have been there, let me tell you. Mine are six and nine, and I never thought we’d see the day. Two boys. What are yours?”
“What are they, good question. This morning I’m thinking monkeys, maybe. So you’re telling me there’s life after kindergarten and diapers?”
“There is, I promise. It’s like principal and interest or something. I don’t know why, but at age six they shift from a liability to an asset.”
“Perfect,” Dellarobia said. “That’s when I’ll sell them.”
Tina laughed, a two-note, descending peal like a door chime, a laugh as tidy as the rest of her. “What I mean is, they start following instructions. You can tell them to go get Daddy, and they’ll do it.”
Dellarobia grinned sadly. “And that’s a plus?”
“Oh, I hear you,” Tina said, seeming as if she really might. Was it possible she had done anything as messy as child-rearing with those white-tipped fingernails? Dellarobia was mortified by her baggy T-shirt and naked face in the light of Tina’s glow, but Tina seemed not to notice. She appeared ready to abandon her cameraman friend and run off for coffee and gossip. He must not be that interested in children, was Dellarobia’s hunch.
“Here’s the truth,” she confessed to Tina. “If I let you all see my living room right now, I’d have to kill you. And the kids are alone in there, so they’re probably scheming to drink the Clorox. I just don’t see any way I can help you out.”
“Should we come back another time, when you’re not tied up?”
Dellarobia shrugged. “After their high school graduations?”
Tina laughed again, the same two-note ripple, and glanced over at the man, sending him some kind of signal. Ron pulled his head to the side in obvious irritation. He had not yet said a word, and now walked away toward their vehicle. Tina waited until he got in the Jeep before she spoke again in a lowered voice.
“Ron’s a little intense,” she confided. “He’ll go ballistic if we don’t meet our deadline on this assignment. He’s already talked to the neighbors down the road about getting the story from them, but I just can’t see going that way. I’m in a bind.”
“I’m sorry,” Dellarobia said. After only three minutes in the acquaintance of Tina Ultner, it seemed very important not to let her down.
Tina glanced around, appearing to size up the options. “I’ll tell you what. Go and do what you need to do with the kids, I’ll do damage control out here. But do you think in maybe, about, fifteen minutes we could put the kids in the Jeep and just scoot up there to where the things are, the butterflies, and do the shot? We’ll keep everything tight, and the kids won’t have to be out of your sight for a single minute. Maybe bring something to keep them occupied in the car?”
Dellarobia studied the Jeep. Ron was in the driver’s seat, making a phone call. You go for things, Dovey had said.
“Could we get a car seat in that thing? Does it have belts in the back?”
“Absolutely,” Tina said.
Dellarobia charged back into the house, feeling jinxed after what she’d said about their drinking the Clorox. And that crack about selling her children—what must Tina Ultner think of her? The kids were fully intact in the kitchen, praise heaven, eating their sandwiches. Dellarobia flew into action, throwing the sofa cushions back together and doing a quick pickup of the living room in case Tina had to come in later to use the bathroom. She stuffed Preston’s beloved watch and Cordie’s animal-farm toy into the diaper bag, and made quick work of her lipstick and eyeliner. The day was sunny and too warm for a coat, which was good luck, her farm jacket or dorky ten-year-old church coat being the choices. She put on a cream-colored ribbed cardigan the kids had given her for Christmas. Meaning it was picked out by her at Target, wrapped by Cub. And never yet worn, also good luck, so she wouldn’t look down and see a big stain somewhere on her front side, as per usual when she went out in public. Jewelry or not, she couldn’t decide, so opted for small fake-pearl earrings that seemed classy. Her hair still had some curl left over from yesterday’s nonsense with Dovey, so she pulled it back loosely with a baby-blue ribbon, and that was that. Before the kids knew what hit them, they were wedged with their mother into the backseat of the News Nine–mobile, bouncing toward the High Road. Dellarobia didn’t find any seat belts, but there was no room for the car seat anyway, she just held Cordie in her lap. They wouldn’t be getting up much speed. No actual car had tried out that road yet, save for Cub’s pickup with the gravel. But that was the point of all Bear’s work, as she understood it. Access to the goods. She leaned forward to direct Ron up through the field toward the gate.
“Preston and Cordelia, I am so glad to meet you both,” Tina said, turning completely around in the passenger seat. “What great names!”
“Preston was my dad’s name,” Dellarobia offered.
“And Cordelia is from King Lear. Of course!” Tina reached over the back of the seat to extend her hand to each of the kids. Preston gave the slim fingers a shake, but Cordie just stared, probably mesmerized as Dellarobia was by the manicure. Once again she wondered about Tina’s children. Where were they now, while their mother was gallivanting around? She had no idea where these folks had driven from with all their gear. Knoxville? They didn’t sound like it. Tina had turned back to Ron and was speaking in a totally different voice, more businesslike.
King Lear, of course! Dellarobia couldn’t vouch for having known that, she just liked the sound of Cordelia. Maybe, like her own mother, she had gleaned the name and forgotten the source. She heard Tina ask Ron in a low voice, “Do you think the white will go okay on camera?”
Dellarobia put a hand to her chest, realizing Tina had been scrutinizing her sweater during the introductions. “Should I have worn something else?” she asked.
“No, it’s great. Beautiful. Sometimes white goes a little dancey on the camera, is the thing. White, and stripes.”
“Actually it’s ivory,” Dellarobia said. The color of her wedding dress, worn for an audience that was very clear on the difference between off- and white. Maybe Tina wasn’t. Dellarobia could have spent all day studying the construction of her coffee-colored trench coat, which had neat parallel lines of white topstitching on the placket and belt and cuffs. Probably designer.
“So, the neighbors,” Tina said, again turning backward in the seat to use her let’s-be-friends voice. “What’s up over there? They don’t seem to be on great terms with your family.”
Dellarobia was embarrassed about her relationship with her neighbors, or lack thereof. Tina probably knew more about the Cooks now than she did. “Really the bad blood is between them and my in-laws, I’ve got nothing against them. They’ve had a run of terrible times. Their little boy came down with cancer, and it got them kind of born-again about using chemicals, so they’re into the organic thing. They lost their whole tomato crop. And they put in that peach orchard, which is dying. My father-in-law says when it rains so much you have to spray those kinds of things, or they’ll just rot.”
“So your father-in-law is not keen on the organic thing.” Tina had her left elbow cocked on the back of the seat, her other hand in her lap. Earlier, when they’d gotten in, Dellarobia saw she had a small tape recorder. She wondered if it was running.
“Well, that’s kind of typical with farming, people are slow to take up new things. You know, they have to be. When you could lose everything in a season, it’s not smart to gamble. I think my in-laws resent the healthy-and-organic business because it makes it sound like what we’re doing must be unhealthy and unorganic.”
“And your in-laws’ view of what’s happening up here, with the butterflies. Can you talk about that?”
“I don’t know. I mean, their view is their view. You should probably ask them.”
Dellarobia was distracted by the renovated road, which she hadn’t seen yet. She knew Cub and his father had squared away a lot of downed trees and flood damage, but it was the thick layer of new, whitish gravel that altered everything. They’d turned this little wilderness track into a road, with clean, defined edges against the muddy surroundings. Just a country road like any other, inviting no special expectations, its wildness tamed. Against her will, she thought of Jimmy. And of the person she must have been that day, full of desire, full of herself. Now paved over.
She began seeing the butterflies before Tina did, but soon they couldn’t be missed, they were everywhere: the phenomenon. At the overlook, the road had been widened into a compact turnaround spot, and Ron stopped the Jeep there, facing out. Tina stared, still belted into her seat. Cordie and Preston also sat up straight and took notice, as they did when a favored program came on television.
“Dat,” Cordelia said, pointing through the windshield.
The cavernous valley before them was filled with golden motion. Cordelia had never seen the butterflies, Dellarobia realized. And Preston just the once, on a rainy day when they weren’t flying around. She let Preston get out of the car.
“Stay close, honey, and don’t go near the edge where it drops off.” She pulled open the door on her side and shifted Cordie to her hip, leaving the diaper bag. “Yes, ma’am, there’s the King Billies,” she said quietly, “just like at Grandma’s.” She didn’t want Tina to know her kids had not seen this before. It seemed so lazy and housebound or something. It made the butterflies belong to her less. Tina wouldn’t understand, the road was new, prior to this week there had been no way to bring a toddler up here.
She watched wonder and light come into her daughter’s eyes. Preston stood with the toes of his sneakers at the very edge of the gravel road and his arms outstretched, as if he might take flight. Dellarobia felt the same; the sight of all this never wore out. The trees were covered with butterflies at rest, and the air was filled with life. She inhaled the scent of the trees. Finally a clear winter day, blue dome, dark green firs, and all the space between filled with fluttering gold flakes, like a snow globe. She could see they were finding lift here and there, upwelling over the trees. Millions of monarchs, orange confetti, winked light into their eyes.
“This is your shot,” Tina said, out of the car now and suddenly bossing Ron around bluntly, calling into doubt Dellarobia’s earlier impression that Tina was afraid of him. She pointed to where he should set up his tripod, and stood Dellarobia on the precipice, so to speak, with the view of the valley and backdrop of butterflies behind her. Tina patted Dellarobia’s face with a powderpuff so she wouldn’t shine, and explained that they would talk for a while with the camera on Dellarobia, then briefly move it around to shoot Tina as well. Later they would patch it together into one conversation. It didn’t matter if Dellarobia said things in the wrong order, or made mistakes. They could cut and paste, Tina said. They would make it all look good.
Dellarobia was flattened with anxiety. The questions Tina asked were mostly personal: Who was she, where did she live, how did she and her family feel about what had happened here? To her shock, even Tina knew the circulating story about a miracle involving Dellarobia and some kind of vision or second sight. Did she want to talk about that? Not especially, was Dellarobia’s reply.
“Then say whatever you want. Whatever you think is important,” Tina said.
“Well, here’s what I think is probably important. Usually these butterflies go to Mexico for the winter. They’ve never come here before, in something like a million years, and now all of a sudden here they are. As you can see. He said . . . okay, wait. Stop. Can I tell you something?”
“Sure.”
“There’s a scientist that came here, Dr. Byron. You need to talk to him, he’ll be back in a few days. He knows everything there is to know about these butterflies. Could you come back maybe later this week and talk to him?”
“Maybe, sure. Absolutely. But for right now, let’s just be here.” Tina gave Dellarobia an indulgent smile. She felt the depths of her own incompetence.
“Okay, sorry. Can I start again?” She stuck her hands in her jeans pockets and tried to calm down. She was supposed to be good with words. Cub always said she could argue the wire off a fence post. She’d done speech and drama in high school.
“As many times as you want. No worries. Just be you.” Tina put up her hands and waved them, as if to chase everything away and start all over. “What we want is to be up close and personal with Dellarobia. Tell me about the first time you saw the butterflies. What did that feel like?”
“The first time.” She glanced at her kids. Cordie was safely tucked into the Jeep now, playing with her plastic barn, but Preston was inching his way out to the edge of the overlook. “Preston!” she yelled. “Not one more inch, mister! I mean it. Or else you will go sit in the car with your sister.” She winced apologetically at Tina, who was still smiling. The patience of a saint. “Sorry,” Dellarobia said.
“Nothing to be sorry about. Go ahead.”
“What I was going to say before is that these butterflies migrated to the wrong place this year, for the first time ever. I guess in the history of the world. So even though it looks really pretty, it might be a problem. It could actually be terrible.”
“And why is that?” Tina asked.
Why was that. Words left her mind. Her hair was slipping out of its tie, the curls around her face moving in the breeze, distracting her, and suddenly she felt completely sure her sweater was buttoned wrong. Or not buttoned at all. This day was crazy. She touched her chest with one hand, checking the button placket. “Hang on a sec, can I just, is my sweater buttoned wrong? I’m sure I look horrible.”
Tina cocked her head, a little gesture Dellarobia was starting to recognize. “Do you know what I was thinking just then? Honestly? That this is probably the most gorgeous shot we’ve set up in I don’t know how long. Months. You, that gorgeous hair, the butterflies behind you. It’s just about killing me. I’m going to look like a corpse next to you and all that ambery light. You’ll die when you see it. How’s the light, Ron?”
“Gorgeous,” Ron said from behind the camera, startling Dellarobia. Since when was Ron on her side? Gorgeous. She wondered if Jimmy would see her on the news, and felt a simmering fury, largely the result of nicotine deprivation and not entirely at Jimmy. But partly at him. Flirting with everything in a skirt. Had he never been serious about her at all? Just because she was older, and married, he’d seen her as a sure thing, sex without risk of attachment. Did he even care that she’d ended it? She hoped the sweater looked as good on her now as it had in the store, the rare dressing-room event. She did not have the vaguest idea what Tina had just asked her. “What was the question?”
“Start wherever you want,” Tina said, possibly with a pinch of impatience.
She wished she could just tell the truth. The whole of it. That Bear was about to clear-cut this mountain for cash, and that they really did need the money. Which some people could never understand. Being boxed in. Which is really what brought her up here in the first place, not a man but a desperation. Defective as that impulse may have been, it got her here. She was the first to see.
“This phenomenon is very special to you,” Tina said. “The story we’re hearing in this town is that you had a vision. So Dellarobia, what happened that day, when you first knew the miracle of the monarchs had come to your farm?”
“I was running away from things. That’s the long and the short of it,” Dellarobia said. She wanted Jimmy gone, out of her story. Would he see this on television?
“From what?” Tina asked with a softer, concerned voice.
Dellarobia turned her head a little to the side so she could see the butterflies. Just like the first time, it felt like a dream to see that cold fire rising. It was impossible to believe what she saw was real. The end of the world, as good a guess as any. She slowly exhaled. “My life, I guess. I couldn’t live it anymore. I wanted out. So I came up here by myself, ready to throw everything away. And I saw this. This stopped me.”
“How so?”
“I don’t know. I was so focused on my own little life. Just one person. And here was something so much bigger. I had to come back and live a different life.”
Tina blinked, casting a glance at Ron.
“Okay, that was, I don’t even know what that was,” Dellarobia said. A turn down a wrong-way street in crazy town, was what it was. She held up her hand like a cop, shaking her head. “Way too personal. If my family heard that, can you imagine? My kids?”
Thankfully, she saw that Preston had inched his way down the road until he was probably out of earshot. “So, that’s off the record, we cut all that and start over, right?”
“Absolutely,” said Tina.
Both their phones rang at once, at around ten after nine. Cub had worked late and passed out on the couch watching television, so his phone jangled on and on in his pocket while Dellarobia ran to her purse to get hers. It was Dovey, incoherent. Dovey screaming to turn on the TV.
“It’s on,” Dellarobia said, her heart lurching. Had she missed some disaster?
“It’s you,” Dovey kept saying. “Go to CNN.”
This was the sort of thing that happened in movies, Dellarobia thought. But movie people could always find the remote control. Dovey kept yelling through the phone while her search grew more frantic. Under the cushions, under Cub, under the couch. The people in movies didn’t live with petty criminals who dismantled small electronics for parts and batteries. “Hang on!” she yelled back, abandoning the hunt and going to kneel in front of the television set itself. Sure enough, she found there was no way to control it from the object itself, not even an on-off switch. What sense did that make? A TV set was a modern God! You could only send it your requests from afar.
“What do you mean, it’s me?” she asked, trying to calm down.
“That thing you did yesterday! That interview with Barbie. But they’re not showing her. It’s all you, Dellarobia.”
Dellarobia stood up, surveyed the room. Cub was still out cold. She could actually hear the murmur of Dovey’s television through the phone.
“Oh, my God,” Dovey shrieked. “This is crazy. They’re saying you tried to kill yourself!”
Shock began to fill Dellarobia with its watery weight, starting from her feet and nearly taking her out at the knees. She shoved at Cub with all her strength to make room for herself on the couch, and kept the phone to her ear while she slid one hand around underneath him, again, unable to call off her hopeless search. Cub’s phone had stopped ringing and made the sharp little beep of a new message.
“This is crazy,” she said to Dovey. “Say that again. What you just said.”
“You were on your way to jump off a cliff or something, and saw the butterflies and changed your mind. It’s gone now.”
“What’s gone?”
“The whole thing. Now they’ve gone over to . . .” Dovey paused. “I don’t know, some war thing in Africa. The whole spot with you only lasted, like, one or two minutes. Maybe more than that. It was almost the top story. They showed you talking, and some other guy I didn’t know. One of your neighbors?”
“The Cooks? They talked to the Cooks, next door.”
“Maybe him, yeah. He said you all were going to log the mountain and had no concern for the butterflies, and then it said you were the sole . . . something. Sole voice of reason, or something like that, against your family.”
“Oh, wonderful,” Dellarobia said. She prayed Bear and Hester hadn’t seen this. There was a good chance. They didn’t watch the news.
“But then this thing about you being suicidal. ‘Dellarobia Turnbow has her own reason for believing the butterflies are a special something-or-other. They saved her life.’ I can’t repeat it exactly. Mind you, I’m here crapping my pants while this is all going on. I’m like, Whoa, that’s my best friend! I totally did her hair!”
“Where in the world would they get that, about suicide?”
“Maybe they’ll run it again at ten.”
“Christ. Maybe I will jump off a cliff.” She put her head on her knees, genuinely feeling she could pass out. Cub stirred next to her, starting to rouse.
“Here’s the thing,” Dovey said. “You looked bookoo hot. Can I borrow that sweater?”
The interview did air again, many times in various forms, first as national news and then local. In Cleary it was headline news that a local person had made the news. Reporters called the house repeatedly, and Dellarobia’s heart raced every time the phone rang. If she ever saw a camera again, she planned to run for her life. Cub was stupefied by the attention. The local TV channel made it a top story, with nightly updates. The headline banner was always the same still shot of Dellarobia with the butterflies behind her, and a caption: “Battle over Butterflies.” These updates made Dellarobia nauseous with anxiety. Waiting for her image to appear onscreen felt like waiting to be slapped. But she couldn’t stop herself from watching, either. People at church and the grocery were basically congratulating her nonstop, without regard to anything she’d said, just operating on the guiding principle that being on TV was the peak human experience. It seemed ungracious to tell them it felt like having her skin peeled off, so she held her tongue and let them go on wishing they’d get their turn someday.
Dellarobia referred every interviewer to Bear and Hester. Cub worried that his father was shaping up in this story to be the bad guy, willful destroyer of butterflies, and they deserved a say at this point, but Bear and Hester never turned up on the screen. As crazy as it seemed as a deciding factor, Dellarobia suspected they might not be photogenic enough to be news. Handsome Mr. Cook was interviewed often, sitting on the sofa with his sad wife and their poor little bald son. So was Bobby Ogle, who seemed perfectly at ease with the camera as he spoke of caring for God’s Creation. There was even some footage of him preaching at their church on a regular Sunday, which floored Dellarobia. When had news cameras been in there?
The local powers definitely were coming down on the pro-butterfly side. The Cleary news team invited the mayor, Jack Stell, and a heavyset man from the Chamber of Commerce to sit at their big curved desk and discuss tourism opportunity. People all over the world would want to come see the monarchs. The heavyset man used Disneyland as a comparison. Dellarobia felt they should get their act together on some family lodgings other than the Wayside, if that was their game plan. She also felt Ovid Byron should be sitting at that desk. She wished he would get here. Nobody was asking why the butterflies were here; the big news was just that they were.
The Battle of the Butterflies was presumably a conflict between people, although the opposers were something of a ragbag army, hard to pin down. One view was that all the outside attention on the butterflies might disrupt normal life. Dellarobia had heard this sentiment at church and elsewhere, but only oddballs were shown to espouse it on the news: a skinny old man in an undershirt in his trailer home said the crime would go up. Some kids in front of the Feathertown Exxon, who looked like hoodlums, declared they didn’t need outsiders in this town. Dellarobia realized these people were being mocked, and remembered with almost an electric shock the old man she’d seen being ridiculed on the late-night program. Billy Ray Hatch. If she’d remembered that painful setup while Tina Ultner was here, she might have slammed the door on her perfectly powdered nose. But she hadn’t. Real life and the things inside the TV set belonged to different universes. People on the outside could not imagine they would ever end up as monkeys in that box.
And yet they did, it was unendingly strange. She and Cub watched wide-eyed each night, gasping at each sighting of people or places they knew. They never did see the original interview with Tina, although clips from it appeared repeatedly on the Cleary news, mostly as background like the banner shot. As far as Dellarobia could tell, the suicide angle had been dropped. Initially, in fact, she was sure Dovey had invented it, due to shell shock, but Dovey had not. Clever girl, she figured out how to get the whole clip downloaded on her phone and came over two days after the fact with proof in hand. With Preston away at school and Cub at work, they sat in the kitchen and watched it.
“My life. I guess. I couldn’t live it anymore . . . ,” said the little Dellarobia on the phone’s screen, in a tinny voice that could not be hers. “I came up here by myself, ready to throw everything away. And . . . this stopped me.” The voice continued while the screen panned to a wide view of the butterflies covering the trees and filling the air. “Here was something so much bigger. I had to come back and live a different life.”
“I swear I never said that.”
“It sure looks like you did,” said Dovey.
“It sure looks like I did.” She could not imagine the carnage if the family saw this. And Hester might, if it was on the computer. Just not Cub, she prayed. For his sake. Dellarobia had almost no memory of the interview itself. She recalled a few false starts, blurting out nonsense that Tina had promised not to use.
“Okay, now check this out,” Dovey said, clicking masterfully at the buttons on her very swank phone, like Preston with his watch. “There. This just showed up today.”
Dellarobia scowled at the screen, baffled. “The Butterfly Venus,” it said. It was Dellarobia, but someone had messed with the image. She appeared to be standing on the open wings of a huge monarch. Little butterflies floated in the air all around her.
“What is this?” Dellarobia asked.
“You’re that famous painting, the naked chick standing on the shell.” Dovey scrolled over to another image that Dellarobia recognized. The Birth of Venus. Someone had put the two images together and sent it out over the Internet. The similarity was surreal. It couldn’t possibly be herself, but it was, her own orange hair blowing loose from its ribbon in back, her left hand in her pocket and her right hand across her chest, posed like the naked Venus girl on the open wings of her shell. Dellarobia couldn’t even remember standing like that, touching her chest. She was not exactly naked in the picture, her clothing was faded to a neutral shade, but naked was how she felt. Scared and exposed. This thing looked vaguely pornographic.
“Who can see this?” she asked.
“Everybody can see this,” Dovey said. This image that was not real and had never happened was flying around the world.
She remembered then. Why she’d brought her hand up to her chest like that in front of Ron’s camera. She was afraid her buttons had fallen open.