Flight Behavior

“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.