“Making pollution,” Dellarobia added, thinking a neutral word might head off trouble, but Miss Rose was all over this. They’d discussed it in class.
“And what are some of the things we can do to help out?” Miss Rose prompted.
“Shut off the lights when we’re done,” one boy said.
“Pick up our beer cans,” said another.
Miss Rose laughed. “Whose beer cans?”
“Our dads’,” another replied, eliciting general agreement.
They were shy about asking questions, but then got over it. They wanted to know what could kill a butterfly. Dellarobia knew some answers, but Ovid could list many more, including cars! He said scientists in Illinois discovered that cars smashed half a million monarchs there in just one summer. The kids rallied to the word “smashed,” yet there was a collective “Awww” for the roadkill monarchs. A boy put up his hand, pulled it down, then put it up again, and finally asked, “Are you the president?”
Ovid laughed heartily. “No, I am not,” he said. “What makes you think I might be the president? Is it because my skin is dark?”
The little boy appeared forthright. “Because you’re wearing a tie.”
Ovid looked startled. “A lot of men wear a tie when they go to work,” he said. “Maybe your dad does that?”
“No,” said the boy, and Dellarobia could see Ovid taking this in: no on the tie, or no on the going to work, maybe no dad, period. She felt this was a productive meeting of minds. The kids wanted to know a great deal more about Dr. Byron: if he lived in the lab, and if those were his sheep. Preston waited patiently for his turn and asked, a little out of step with the crowd, whether the butterflies were like flying ants that go out and start new colonies. Ovid said that was different, the ants had to stay together almost always because of their kinship system. He said insects have many different ways of being families, and they could discuss it more at lunchtime, which he proposed was now.
It was a good call, given the extent of eruption already under way among the lunch boxes. Dellarobia was surprised at how quickly the kids fell back into their former social groupings: the Chosen, the Beetle Throwers, the Shriekers. One troupe of permanently smitten girls tracked Miss Rose like bridesmaids. The Michelin Man–coat boy sought solitude as if long accustomed to it, finding acorn caps as he went. And, Dellarobia noted, her son left Josefina flat for the chance to talk shop with Dr. Byron. She’d have the loyalty chat with Preston, later. She moved quickly to fill the gap. “I know the best lunch spot,” she offered, and Josefina gratefully took her hand. The true best spot, the big mossy log across the creek, was already taken, so they headed to the uphill edge of the clearing and sat on a smooth spot at the base of a fir colossus.
Dellarobia felt buoyant. Everything had gone better than planned. Ovid needed to do this; he was obviously good at public relations but harbored a blind spot, an inexplicable breach in his confidence. A breach she had filled. The word that rose in her thoughts was partnership, and it thrilled and sent her reeling as such thoughts did, in a life spent flying from pillar to post. He was sitting down there on the log with Preston, he had the best seat in the house, he who occupied her thoughts while at work and at rest and probably when she slept. He sat with his lunch on his lap and seven kids lined up like ducks in a row, but it was Preston who had his ear. She could see the two of them chatting it up about insects and the different kinds of families. She looked in her purse for the tuna fish sandwich she’d barely had time to slap together this morning, while Josefina extracted from her little paper bag a fully cooked meal in several parts: the sandwich-equivalent rolled inside tortillas like long, yellow cigars, the sauce in a paper cup covered with cellophane, the brown beans in another. A large reused sour cream carton held crisp, triangular chips.
“Wow, you’ve got the gold-star mom,” Dellarobia said, realizing that might be an obscure way to put it for a newcomer to the language. But Josefina thanked her, seeming to get it. Her English had improved noticeably. Lupe said the time the kids spent together helped. Dellarobia watched Josefina lay out her complicated lunch without self-consciousness on a cloth napkin, and wondered what it would feel like to be in that kind of a family. Or any kind, other than the one whose walls contained her. Whatever incentive she might have for flying away, there it was, family, her own full measure, surrounded by a cheap wire fence built in one afternoon a long time ago. Her Turnbow dynasty. Where she’d never belonged in the first place, according to Hester. What kind of ties were those, what did they bind? She could so easily belong to someone else.
Josefina ate her meal with a fork, but after a moment paused to push her dark hair back over her shoulders and look straight up. Dellarobia was moved by the sight of her throat, the vulnerable little bulb of her Adam’s apple, rising from her zipped corduroy coat, and this child’s unaccountable poise in the midst of a life that had been wrecked. A house borne away on shifting ground, a world away. Dellarobia looked up too, taking in the dizzying view of the butterfly tower anchored behind their backs. Butterflies prickled all the way up the trunk in perfect alignment, like a weathervane collection. Butterflies drooped heavily from the branches. “What do you call the bunches?” Dellarobia asked.
“Racimos.”
She repeated the word, trying to remember this time. She’d asked before. It seemed better than cluster or colonnade or any other word Ovid used. More specific. “Does this remind you of home, being up here?” she asked. “I mean home in Mexico?”
Josefina nodded. “In Mexico people say they are children.”
“The caterpillars are the children, though. These are the grown-ups.”
Josefina shook her head quickly, like an erasure, starting over. “Not children. Something that comes out of children when they die.”
Dellarobia thought this sounded like a horror movie. But she could see it mattered to Josefina, who had put down her fork. “I can’t remember the word,” she said. “When a baby dies, the thing that goes out.” She placed both hands on her chest, thumbs linked, and lifted them fluttering like a pair of wings. “It flies away from the body.”
Suddenly Dellarobia understood. “The soul.”
“The soul,” Josefina repeated.
“They believe a monarch is the soul of a baby that’s died?”