Flight Behavior

“Do you prefer Mrs. or Ms. or none of the above?”

“Mrs., I guess.” She let out a joyless laugh. “Until my husband divorces me for doing this.”

He glanced up at her over his reading glasses. “For doing?”

“Taking this job. Don’t worry, that was a joke. He won’t.”

“He has some concerns about you in this lab?”

“It’s nothing personal. My family is just, I guess, typical. They feel like a wife working outside the home is a reflection on the husband.”

Dr. Byron’s look suggested he found this not typical. He didn’t know the half of it. People were praying for her family now, on account of that picture on the Internet. Cub’s father had told him a woman got such attention only if she asked for it.

“I spoke out of turn,” she said. “I’ll handle my family.”

“Is it a question of safety?” he asked, taking off his skinny glasses and holding them by the earpiece. “Because I can assure you, we will be taking every precaution here, exactly as if we were in a more permanent facility.”

Everything, she wanted to scream at him, was a question of safety. All human endeavor bent itself to the same lost cause. Being kept inside a pumpkin shell your whole life was no guarantee against getting flung into space.

“Seriously, don’t worry about it,” she repeated. Dr. Byron wrote something on his clipboard without comment.

Somewhere in the room behind her Pete was up on a ladder, loudly stapling plastic sheeting to the walls. They were making their laboratory in the sheep barn. Contrary to her expectations, a butterfly lab looked something like a kitchen with outlandishly expensive appliances. For two days she’d been helping them unpack the crates they’d brought from New Mexico, and she knew it was bad manners but couldn’t stop herself from asking about the costs of things. They couldn’t give her exact answers. The equipment was not necessarily new. Most of it, in fact, seemed to be older than she was, “pre–Reagan administration,” they both remarked dolefully, as if that had been some Appomattox Court House with the scientists on the losing side. But when she pressed them for estimates, they blew her mind. A glass box called the Mettler balance, which they handled like a newborn baby, was “maybe a few thousand dollars.” So was the drying oven, a drab gray thing about the size of any oven, and the antique-looking round tub called a centrifuge, which weighed so much they left it in its case until Pete could build a heavy table to serve as its throne. The wooden shipping crates, bulky as coffins, would become the foundations of a lab counter, which they called a bench.

When she unscrolled the bubble wrap from a fierce-looking little blender, Ovid had remarked, “Now that is a nifty item.” In the neighborhood of two grand, he’d said, made in Germany. Its name was Tissuemizer, and its special task was to make a kind of butterfly soup that no one would be eating, as the ingredients were both toxic and flammable. They had ordered a venting hood of the type usually installed over kitchen ranges to eliminate cooking odors, something Dellarobia had never owned. She’d just learned the hard way never to cook anything too fishy. But Dr. Byron needed a range hood, so the appliance department at Sears had been called to come and install one in the Turnbow sheep barn, pronto. They would also be delivering a freezer, the cheapest model available, but even so, a stand-alone freezer. Not a compartment in the top of the fridge, into which ordinary mothers crammed Popsicles and freeze-packs for their kids’ bruises. Dellarobia found herself coveting a freezer that was not yet even technically, until delivery, thy neighbor’s goods.

The official plan was to keep this lab in operation until the butterflies flew away from their winter roost, which under normal circumstances occurred in March, she was told. Then Ovid would pack up all this equipment and fly away also. She wondered if the freezer might come on the market for a secondhand price at that time, or if he would take it with him. And the nearly new range hood? Would he think to arrange for repair of the hole it left behind? The science crew was going through money in a manner she could scarcely imagine.

“I’m going to ask you to fill in most of this yourself,” Dr. Byron said finally, after leafing through several pages on his clipboard. “Date of birth, social security. Employment history, all that sort of thing. It’s only this first box, it looks like I am supposed to do that myself.”

She wondered how much he knew of her miserable notoriety, the naked-ish picture, the suicide business. Her days swung between fury and humiliation, tethered on nights of permanent anxiety, as she waited for Cub to find out. She envisioned crash landings everywhere. Dr. Byron might be taking her on as a pity case. Or even as some kind of leverage against the family’s logging plan. The lease he’d signed for this lab space gave Bear some breathing room, financially, and Dellarobia knew he and Hester were involved in some renegotiations with Money Tree. It was possible they could return the advance money and rescind the contract. They’d been given until March to come to terms. But as long as Bear could wipe out these scientists’ reason for being here with a stroke of heavy machinery, she didn’t trust him. That might be just the sucker punch that would make him feel big in this town again. And Hester wouldn’t hold with that. In Dellarobia’s in-law career she had never seen so much light between those two.

“How much science in your background?” Dr. Byron asked.

“Science?” She considered this. “None? Well, biology and stuff. High school.”

He looked surprised. “No college?”

“No college. Sorry.” She wondered if humiliation ever ran its natural course and peeled off, like sunburn, or just kept blazing. She watched him fill in more lines on his form without comment. He didn’t even look up at her. She tried not to flinch with each of Pete’s explosive blasts overhead, like repeating rifle shots. Pete was using a construction-grade staple gun to secure giant sheets of plastic over every inch of the walls, for the sake of creating cleanable surfaces. She could see the domestic advantages of plastic sheeting, at least until her kids were grown. Now he was stretching it even across the rough wooden beams of the ceiling.

“Even the ceiling gets covered?” she asked quietly.

Dr. Byron’s eyes went upward and then down again, like a man watching a pop-up fly ball. “There’s no telling what could fall out of that ceiling,” he said. “The number-one enemy of everything is dust.”