Flight Behavior

“People make mistakes,” she said finally.

“According to you, that’s all you and I ever did.”

She nodded. “Mistakes wreck your life. But they make what you have. It’s kind of all one.” She felt a humorless ripple move through her chest. “You know what Hester told me when we were working the sheep one time? She said it’s no good to complain about your flock, because it’s the put-together of all your past choices.”

Cub nodded slowly, understanding this. He set his hands on the wheel. Soon he would start the engine, and they would go. “I can’t help it,” he said. “I still wish they’d never lit down here. Those butterflies.”

You and the butterflies both, she thought. We wish.

Dellarobia lay in the darkness trying not to begrudge her husband’s profound and tranquil sleep. It could not be as easy as it looked, to be Cub Turnbow. After their conversation in the truck they’d said no more, and slipped back into a day that seemed bizarrely untouched. Furniture delivered, Cordie picked up, Cub congenial throughout. The sorrow she’d laid bare for him did not disperse. It would hang around as the long-toothed phantom it had always been, haunting even the commonest transactions of her household, haunting her skin, everywhere. While Cub failed to see it.

But something did follow them into the house, unsettling them both during supper with the children, making the air in their bedroom cold. He’d said good night as if they were friends parting ways, then rolled to his side and slept the sleep of a mountain range while she stared at the black air, dividing the river of her desperation into rivulets until some of them seemed navigable. At moments she felt light and untethered, the same glimpse of release she’d had many times before. The thrill of throwing a good life away, she remembered thinking once: one part rapture. Outweighed by the immense and measurable parameters of a family’s life. She refused to be the first to act. If Cub saw fit to walk through eleven more years of marriage, after the blunt truths she’d told him, she could do the same. Maybe she didn’t want Hester to be right about her character. For one thing. And maybe she was more like Cub than not, simply believing in what had come to pass. Marriage had its own heft, and that had to be respected. She watched lines of light grow slowly along the window blind as a day began to fill the void. The one impulse that transfixed her, that she understood to be of no real use, was to go to the window and look out. To see if his camper had returned.

He hadn’t said how long he would be gone. Probably she would have time to turn over every conversation with Ovid she could recall, as she always did. That enterprise had a way of becoming furtive and miserable, like handling gritty coins at the bottom of a purse. Finding all the regrettable notes, her badly spoken self, her brashness, led on by Dovey, in forcing notoriety on him this week. It hadn’t been wrong for her to bring Tina to the lab to interview him, but she could have protected him from the rest. Instead she’d claimed that video as an act of Ovid’s courage. It proved his integrity, she’d told him many times, allowing him no other option. She avoided thinking about the selfish undertones of her enthusiasm: that the video redeemed Dellarobia, striking down all the falsehoods committed in her name, and with her image. There was no beautiful miracle, no small-town drama starring herself as the Butterfly Venus, she was no party to that lie. The butterflies were a symptom of vast biological malignancies, and all nicer bets were off. Ovid needed to set the record straight, whether or not he was ready to do that. This was the weight Dellarobia laid down like a sandbag at her center: that he did need her.

She waited until the clock’s red numbers squared off at 7:00 before getting up, and she did not look out from the bedroom. In the kitchen, after making coffee, she allowed herself to lift the shade and see nothing. The barren rectangle of his absence. After she had poured bowls of cereal for the kids and listened awhile to their morning chatter, Preston in his robot pajamas, Cordie eating with a blanket over her head and bowl, Dellarobia allowed herself to get up and go look again. Each time, bereavement slammed her. An empty socket, an amputation. He must be angry with her.

After breakfast Preston stood on tiptoe and nearly pressed his glasses against the kitchen window to count the monarch pairs circling above the back pasture, committing themselves to family life above the placid pregnant flock. His thrill was electric. They were waking up. She tried to tap into that current but failed, standing beside her son at the window, waiting stupidly. She got out the roasting pan for the lamb shoulder roast Hester had sent home with them yesterday. She would slow-cook it all afternoon and they’d have leftovers for a week. On a different day she would have felt the joy of that too, the relief of plenty. She opened the curtains in the living room, stunned by her wooden spirit, gaining no purchase on the bright sky. She felt sealed inside her airtight house, a feeling so entirely familiar, wondering how long before they breathed up all the oxygen. With mechanical hands she vacuumed the kids’ bedroom, then the living room. Cordie climbed onto the sofa and stood looking over its back, out at the road, having inferred that on this day windows held the key.

After a time she pointed. “Mama look. Lady.”

The lady wore a short winter coat over a long skirt and strode slowly along the roadside, bearing her magnificent large head. Dellarobia shut off the vacuum and went to kneel next to Cordie on the sofa. It was moving toward them. Or she was, certainly a she, lean and graceful like a slow-motion shot of a fashion model striding down the runway of this landscape. Maybe from one of those project shows where people fashioned fantastical outfits out of silk handkerchiefs and dandelion fluff. The oversize head was an illusion, stout locks of hair emerging from a blue headscarf elaborately wound and tucked. A gift-wrapped head. The blue print skirt with its manifold tiny pleats rippled like curtains in front of a window fan. In the gravel margin between road and weedy ditch she came along at a dreamy pace, her head tilted back on the long recurved stem of her neck, with time stopped around her, it seemed. No cars passed, the cattle did not look up. Her skin was the brown color of winter pasture, her face a mysterious clause between the commas of long gold earrings: a completely impossible person to see out the window. Dellarobia and both the kids watched wide-eyed as she turned up their driveway and proceeded without hesitation alongside the house toward their back field. They all charged to the bedroom where Cub still slept, crowding close together to peer through the blinds. The camper was there. While Dellarobia was vacuuming, it had materialized. The lady moved unhurriedly toward the vehicle. The lady went to the metal door and disappeared inside.