Flight Behavior

“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.