She tried to assimilate this news while her brain crashed with thoughts of the Mexican mudslide, the smashed and twisted cars, houses lifted from their moorings, floating downstream. A secret she had thought she was keeping from him.
"The report is nothing," she repeated. "You mean the butterflies aren't there."
"Not in the ordinary numbers. This is not yet public information, so I ask you to keep it private. Not that anyone hereabouts is likely to be very interested."
The insult was unnecessary. She felt accosted. "So what are you saying? That these butterflies here--"
"That this roosting colony is a significant proportion of the entire North American monarch butterfly population."
"Most of the ones that exist?"
"Most of the migratory population, yes," he said. "In terms of genetic viability, reproductive viability, what we have here is nearly the whole lot."
Like Job, in the Bible, she thought. All his children gathered in one place for a wedding when a great wind rose and collapsed the roof upon them. All hope and future lost in a day. Of all sad stories, that parable was meant to be the saddest, a loss to make a man fall down on the ash heap and meet his maker or else run to the arms of darkness. She wondered if Ovid Byron knew the story of Job.
"So why does it even matter what you do here?" She looked at the laboratory in a different way. Mission control of a boggling heartbreak. "I'm sorry to ask. But, you know what I'm saying?"
He avoided meeting her eye. "We should be physicians, or some kind of superheroes saving the patient with special powers. That's what people want."
She didn't reply, wondering if he was right about that. Probably it was true. People resisted hearing the details of a problem, even when it was something personal, like their own cancer. What they wanted was the fix.
"We are only scientists," he said. "Maybe foolish ones. Normally it would take years to do what we are trying to accomplish here in a few weeks. We are seeing . . ." He paused. She followed his gaze to the plastic-covered window, a filmy rectangle of light and nothing more. Whatever he saw, it was not there.
"We are seeing a bizarre alteration of a previously stable pattern," he said finally. "A continental ecosystem breaking down. Most likely, this is due to climate change. Really I can tell you I'm sure of that. Climate change has disrupted this system. For the scientific record, we want to get to the bottom of that as best we can, before events of this winter destroy a beautiful species and the chain of evidence we might use for tracking its demise. It's not a happy scenario."
What came to her mind on the spot was one of Cub's shows on Spike TV, 1000 Ways to Die. People thrived on unhappy scenarios. In this case it was just the one way, freezing to death, and millions of unfortunates. She stilled her mind, trying to embrace this sadness Dr. Byron had asked her to understand.
"One of God's creatures of this world, meeting its End of Days," she said after a quiet minute. Not words of science, she knew that, but it was a truth she could feel. The forest of flame that had lifted her despair, the migratory pulse that had rocked in the arms of a continent for all time: these fell like stones in her heart. This was the bad news he'd received over the holiday. The one thing most beloved to him was dying. Not a death in the family, then, but maybe as serious as that. He'd chased this life for all his years; it had brought him this distance, his complicated system. She had only begun to know it. Now began the steps of grief. It would pass through this world like that baby in its pelt of red fur, while most people paid no attention.
"I'm sorry," she said.
He looked away abruptly from those words, a gesture that gave her to know she might be needed here. Ovid was choking up. She spoke quickly to give him some cover. "I didn't know it was that bad. I want to help out here, I'm glad to."
"Nobody knows it is this bad." He recovered himself almost instantly, willfully, she thought. Rubbing his chin. A man's grief.
"But the news people are all over this thing up here," she said. "Why on earth wouldn't you tell them what's going on?"
He looked at her oddly, studying her without speaking, and she flushed deeply, as if he were seeing her naked. The Butterfly Venus, that's what was all over. "I don't know what you've seen," she said. "But it's out of control. I keep telling them they need to talk to you. I swear, I do. Talk to Dr. Byron, because I'm no expert."
Pete startled her by speaking. "That's why they talk to you. Because you don't really know anything." He'd stopped stapling and was listening in on what she'd thought was a private conversation. She felt ambushed.
She turned around in her chair to scowl at Pete. "Excuse me?"
Pete shrugged. "It's not your fault. They just don't want to talk to a scientist. It would mess with their story."
Dellarobia looked from Pete to Ovid Byron.
"A journalist's job is to collect information," Ovid said to Pete.
"Nope," Pete said. "That's what we do. It's not what they do."
Dellarobia was unready to be pushed out of the conversation just like that. "Then what do you think the news people drive their Jeeps all the way out here for?"
"To shore up the prevailing view of their audience and sponsors."
"Pete takes a dim view of his fellow humans," Ovid said. "He prefers insects."
Dellarobia turned her chair halfway around to face Pete, scraping noisily against the cement floor. "You're saying people only tune in to news they know they're going to agree with?"
"Bingo," said Pete.
"Well, see, I agree with you," she said. "I've thought that too. How often do you tune in to Johnny Midgeon?"
"You're right," Pete said. "I don't want to hear those guys."
"So," she said, "you're the same as everybody."
"Well, but it's because I already know what they're going to say."
"That's what everybody thinks. Maybe you do, and maybe you don't."
"The official view of a major demographic," Pete said in an overly tired voice that reminded her weirdly of Crystal, "is that we aren't sure about climate change. It's too confusing. So every environmental impact story has to be made into something else. Sex it up if possible, that's what your news people drove out here for. It's what sells."
"For God's sake, man," Ovid nearly shouted, "the damn globe is catching fire, and the islands are drowning. The evidence is staring them in the face."
Dellarobia's scalp burned with rage and bewilderment. Pete had just accused her of peddling sex, if she wasn't mistaken, and Ovid hadn't noticed because he was on a rant of his own. His voice was thick with the accent of his childhood. De eye-lands are drowning. Were they?
Pete picked up his stepladder and hefted it to the opposite side of the room, setting it down hard. End of discussion. He unfurled a length of the clear plastic, dragged it up the ladder, and started shooting the beams again. Bang, bang.
She spoke carefully to the room. "I think people are scared to face up to a bad outcome. That's just human. Like not going to the doctor when you've found a lump. If fight or flight is the choice, it's way easier to fly."
"Or to sleepwalk," Ovid said. "As you put it."
"I was probably selling my own team short." Defensiveness returned to her in full feather. "Can I tell you one more thing about myself, in this hiring process? I was going to college. It's not out of the question for someone here to do that. My teachers said I should. I wanted it so bad my teeth hurt. I know you can't put 'wanted to' on a job application, or we'd all be the president of Walmart or something." She waited for some response, belief or disbelief, which was not forthcoming.
"But I have proof," she added. "I drove over to Knoxville to take the ACT test."
Both men were looking at her. With what kind of interest, she couldn't tell.
"Just me," she said. "I was the only one in my class to try for college, and Mrs. Lake said I had to go take that. I had to start out at four in the morning to get there and figure out those city streets to find the place. All the other kids looked like t
hey'd had a good night's sleep, I'll tell you what. And I'm sure their mamas drove them."
"Really." Ovid seemed impressed by her initiative.
"Yeah, well. A tank of gas wasted. I did okay on the English but math and science, holy Moses. I'd never even heard of most of the stuff they asked. Plus, a baby on the way. That doesn't lend itself."
"Well," he said. "It lends itself to having a child. A recompense of its own kind."
"Do you have children?" she asked.
"I don't. My wife and I are looking forward to that."
She elected not to tell him that first baby only lasted long enough to kick college in the butt and go on its way. He would ask why she didn't try to go to school afterward. People who hadn't been through it would think it was that simple: just get back on the bus, ride to the next stop. He would have no inkling of the great slog of effort that tied up people like her in the day-to-day. Or the quaking misgivings that infected every step forward, after a loss. Even now, dread still struck her down sometimes if she found herself counting on things being fine. Meaning her now-living children and their future, those things. She had so much more to lose now than just herself or her own plans. If Ovid Byron was torn up over butterflies, he should see how it felt to look past a child's baby teeth into this future world he claimed was falling apart. Like poor Job lying on the ash heap wailing, cutting his flesh with a husk. That's where love could take you.
"Great day in the morning!" cried Dellarobia, even though the expression was probably lost on Lupe, and the kids in the back seat were yelling among themselves. At the sight of the crowd Lupe froze, and reached over from the passenger's side to clench Dellarobia's wrist on the steering wheel.
"Okay, don't worry. I'm not taking you in there." Dellarobia trusted Lupe's fear, without knowing the specifics. She waited for the release of her forearm, and carefully pulled the car over onto the shoulder. Tall dead grass swept the undercarriage. It hadn't crossed her mind that her new babysitter might have immigration issues. Lupe was watching her kids for five dollars an hour and Dellarobia was making thirteen, so even after Uncle Sam took his bite she would come out ahead, that's what she knew. And she knew that her yard had been empty this morning when she left to go pick up Lupe. Now it looked like the county fairgrounds.
Lupe whirled around and efficiently shushed the children. Her own two boys, wedged in beside Cordie's car seat, seemed to have mute buttons. Cordie whined a few seconds longer but quickly petered out, getting the memo. Dellarobia fished in her purse for her glasses and put them on, frowning through the windshield. The house was still more than a hundred yards away. They had just rounded the bend in Highway 7 where their farm came into view, but even from here she could count more than a dozen cars parked helter-skelter on both sides of the road directly in front of her house. No police vehicles that she could see, and no news-mobiles, but whatever this was, she wasn't going to drive Lupe into the middle of it. She bit her lip, trying to form a plan.
"Okay, here's what we'll do," she said slowly, watching Lupe to assess comprehension. Their efficient translator, Josefina, was at school with Preston, but for over a week now they'd managed the basics of this arrangement each morning until the kindergartners came home on the bus to help sort out the fine print. "See that old house behind us?" She pointed back to it. "Empty. Nobody home. We'll go there."
She backed slowly along the shoulder and then pulled forward into the long driveway of the Craycroft house, which had been for sale so long it was widely taken to be a lost cause. The Craycrofts' son had put them in a nursing home and priced the house insanely above market. Or maybe where he lived, in Nashville, houses sold for that kind of money. Dellarobia's one hope at present was that it hadn't turned into a meth lab in the interim. It looked more than a tad spooky. Some of its uncurtained windowpanes were cracked, and winter-killed weeds stood shoulder high around the foundations. The son could drag his city butt out here and do a little maintenance. She pulled the car all the way to the back where it could not be seen from the road, and cut the engine.
"Okay," she said to Lupe, "you and the kids stay here. You can get out of the car if they want to play. Nobody will see you here. I'm going to walk over there to my house and see what's up."
Lupe nodded formally. "Okay," she said, "shes can play," then said something to the kids that sounded more on the lines of, "Don't move or I'll kill you." Dellarobia felt ludicrous, hiding her child and babysitting entourage in the bushes in order to sneak up on her own home. Yet, here she went.
The intermittent freezing drizzle picked up again as she walked along the edge of Highway 7, avoiding the weedy and muddy ditch. She pulled the hood of her raincoat forward to keep the rain off her glasses, the better to observe the occasional car that whizzed past her and then inevitably slowed to a crawl just down the road, at her house. Their drivers were rubbernecking, no doubt wondering what the fuss was about. You and me both, she thought. She walked the full road frontage of the Cook place, her immediate neighbors, seeing nothing unusual up at their house, and was reassured generally by the absence of ambulances or cop cars. But she was dismayed by the crowd of people who stood close together on her own front lawn, all facing the house as if expecting it to perform. They looked dressed for a camping trip, in boots and backpacks and puffy down parkas. As she drew closer, she saw some white cardboard placards. And heard chanting. A lot of energy directed toward a house where no one was home. Don't shoot till you see the whites of their eyes, she thought, a directive that was never meant for nearsighted people. Not until she'd crossed onto her own property did she realize it was kids. Teenagers or young adults. They looked so slight and fine-boned in the rain.
"Children ask the world of us!" they were shouting again and again, giving Dellarobia to know for certain she had lost her mind. She eased herself into the edge of the fray near the road, where a young couple were getting out of a dented little silver Honda. They both wore brightly colored knit caps with dangling earflaps, like something you'd put on a toddler. The chant died out, and a new one began. A guy standing on her front porch was pumping his arm like Nate Weaver in church, leading chants that the crowd belted out in an exaggerated, rhythmic refrain.
"Stop the logging, stop the lies! Save the monarch butterflies!"
"Oh, crap," Dellarobia said, loudly enough that the knitted-cap couple shot her a glance. She muscled her way among the kids and up the sidewalk to her porch, expecting at any moment to be recognized as the butterfly celebrity here, but no dice. Not in her present guise, with a hooded raincoat covering everything but her water-speckled glasses. A raincoat purchased in the boy's department, no less. The guy on the porch stopped leading the cheer and looked down at her, puzzled. The shouting abruptly died out.
"Would you mind telling me who you are?" she asked him.
The guy had long black sideburns, a style Dellarobia associated with 1970s movies featuring people wearing horrible clothes, though in other respects he looked pretty okay. Skinny jeans, parka, horn-rimmed glasses. He carried a folder under one arm and seemed out of breath, as if he'd been jogging. "How about you tell me who you are?" he replied.
"Okay. You're on my porch. I'm the person that lives here with my husband and kids. Now you."
He took a step back, nearly pitching himself backward off the edge of the small porch. Her hunch was correct; he'd taken her for a middle-schooler. He looked her over, reassessing what was under that raincoat, then opened his red folder and flipped madly through some papers. "Burley Turnbow? That couldn't possibly be you, right?"
She waited a beat. "The name I was looking for was yours."
"Oh, sorry. Vern Zakas. I'm president of the environment club at CCC. Nice to meet you." He extended his hand, and she shook it. The community college. It figured.
"Nice to meet you," she said. "What's your business with Burley Turnbow?"
He glanced at the crowd. "Okay. We're protesting cutting down all the trees in the butterfly place. Anywho-dot-com listed this as th
e residence of Burley Turnbow, the guy that's logging up there, trying to kill all the butterflies."
She pushed back the hood of her raincoat for a better command of the situation, seeing a second flash of surprise as Vern Zakas registered her as an adult female. And the Butterfly Venus, maybe that too, but mortification had its place, and this was not it. "You don't completely have your story straight," she told Vern. "I hate to tell you this, but you've even got the wrong Burley Turnbow. Believe it or not, there's two. It's the father, Burley Senior, you'd want to speak to. He doesn't live here."
"Oh, Christ, I am so sorry," said Vern. "Somebody messed up." He looked back at his papers as if the fault lay there, the same way people will turn and glare at a sidewalk after they've stumbled over nothing.
"No worries," Dellarobia said. "Look, here's what you want to do. Keep going down this road, that direction, about the length of a football field, and you're going to see their gravel drive on the right. There's a ring of whitewashed stones around the mailbox and this great big planter box shaped like a swan. Really ugly. You can't miss it."
The kids on her lawn stared at her, holding their placards at half-mast in the drizzle. They were a wary-looking bunch, the hoods of their damp parkas zipped close around their faces and their eyes wide, as if standing on a stranger's lawn were way out at the tippy edge of their comfort zone. Their signs were not very impressive. They'd scrawled their demands in such thin marking-pen letters you couldn't even read them from ten feet away. These kids had an anger-deficit problem.
"Yo, people, listen up," she shouted at the crowd. "Thanks for your interest, but you've got the wrong house. You all need to go yell at Bear Turnbow. He lives down that way, less than half a mile. Follow your leader here, Vern. He's got directions."
Vern hoofed it off the porch and headed for his car, beckoning with one arm in the air. The kids folded their placards close to their bodies and filed toward their vehicles, obedient as collies. She saw one sign that said "Resist Authority!"