Flight Behavior

“I would never cheat on you,” Cub said, exhaling spasmodically, close to tears.

“I know you wouldn’t, Cub. You’re a good man. Better than I deserve.”

“Don’t say that,” he said, running his thumb against the inside corners of both eyes. They had arrived at the gate between pasture and backyard. With effort she avoided looking at the shell-like casing of the trailer hunched between their house and the barn. Everything was close together here, the house and driveway crowded into a corner of the farm that had been carved out of the pasture, back when Bear and Hester built the house. Like the wedding and the house itself, it was a hurry-up kind of fence. They’d used metal T-posts and cheap wire that still looked provisional after these many years, like the afterthought it was. She’d always despised that webbed wire crossing the view from her bedroom window. But it was after all just a fence, whose full perimeter she had walked and repaired. The house stood outside of it, belonging instead to the open road frontage it faced. Cub lifted the gate, and she passed ahead of him into the yard, registering the small metallic knuckling of the chain he latched behind her.

Pete banged loudly at the kitchen door early Monday, startling Dellarobia and the kids, to let her know the work was up on the mountain that day. Dr. Byron was already there, Pete was headed up now, and she was to follow as soon as she was free. He asked her to bring pillowcases. After bafflement over the pillowcases, her first emotion was relief. It would be easier to face him up there than to walk into the lab with the weight of her spy’s conscience. Dr. Byron in the woods would be intent on the butterflies and possibly up a tree. Only secondly did she think to worry on the butterflies’ behalf. The sky had cleared overnight, and the gust of cold air that rushed in at the door’s brief opening lingered unkindly in the kitchen. It must have been worry that sent the men up the mountain at this hour.

The kids were still in their pajamas, eating breakfast. Cordie had a cold that had kept her moody and congested for weeks, mouth-breathing like a bulldog. Dellarobia ached to turn up the heat, but, thinking of the electric bill, did not. Preston would catch the bus at seven forty-five, Cub would be dropping off Cordelia at Lupe’s apartment on his way to work, and the house would stand empty all day. How she would get everyone dressed and ready in the next forty minutes was beyond comprehension, but somehow her lunch-packing, coffee-swilling gallop around the kitchen always got the job done.

Pillowcases? Did Pete mean she should bring pillows as well? There was no end to their ingenuity in applying household items to the cause of science, asking her for clothespins or coat hangers or kitchen sponges for their various contraptions. She had revised her notion of them as spendthrifts as she watched them improvise and make do. Even Gatorade had its use in the lab, as fuel for captive butterflies that had to be kept alive for some experiment. But pillows? She held at bay a vision of twisted bedsheets and Ovid Byron’s body, though her mind pulled in that direction. She slammed the refrigerator door with her hip. Cordie’s hair looked like a golden haystack, but the child was in a rare compliant state, shoveling in breakfast one-handed while keeping a grip on a plaid stuffed bear that dangled from her high chair tray in button-eyed desperation. That was Cordie; from birth she’d kept an eternal hold on something, a toy or blanket or any ponytail that swung into reach. Preston was more self-contained, maybe a boy thing.

Or just a Preston thing. Right now he was ignoring his cereal and poring over his sheep book, one of several Cub had borrowed from Hester to prepare them for possible lambing emergencies after they brought the ewes over. She wished Cub had chosen something more age-appropriate. Preston of course went for the giant veterinary manual filled with every imaginable thing that could go wrong in the barnyard. Poor little guy, he hefted this concrete block of a book from room to room and had asked to take it to school, provoking Cub’s twin admonishments that he couldn’t read, and that people would call him an egghead. Preston registered both as immaterial. He liked being the teeny guy with the big book. And pictures were abundant. He’d easily found the chapter on lambing. Its many line drawings of unborn twin lambs curled together with twined limbs, nose-to-nose or nose-to-tail, made her think of a sex manual.

Cordelia’s attentive eye followed her brother’s. “Goggies,” she pronounced.

“It’s not dogs,” Preston corrected. “They’re baby lambies.”

Dellarobia sat down with a bowl of cottage cheese, her makeshift breakfast, and Preston looked up at her with his eyes full of questions. “Why are they taking a nap in a dog bed?” he asked.

She carefully did not laugh, and told him the oval shape was the womb. The pictures were supposed to show how the lambs looked inside the mother sheep. “They’re still in her tummy waiting to be born, like when Cordie was in mine. Remember that?”

He nodded gravely. They both looked at Cordelia, her face spackled with cream of wheat and her runny nose. Probably they were thinking variations of the same question: Who knew this was coming?

“Don’t forget to eat, big guy. Two more minutes and you’ve got to run and get dressed. The school bus waits for no man.”

He spooned in Cheerios absently while leaning into the text, his interest redoubled by the latest revelation. His earnest expression and level brow moved Dellarobia to a second sight: Preston would go far. Maybe he’d be a vet, farmers were crying for them around here. Or even the kind of vet that looks after elephants in zoos. For all her worry about his lack of advantages, Preston would be like Ovid Byron. Already he seemed set apart by a devotion to his own pursuits that was brave and unconforming. People were so rarely like that, despite universally stated intentions. Most were like herself and Dovey, the one-time rebel girls with their big plans to fly out of here. Her boldness had been confined to such tiny quarters, it counted for about as much as mouse turds in a cookie jar. Until recently, when the lid blew off, and the whole world could peer in at Dellarobia, and what do you know, she was a mouse. But here sat her lionhearted son. Maybe it wasn’t a decision, but something drawn from the soup of birth. A lightning strike.

“Mama, what’s this man doing?” he asked, sounding anxious.

“Let me see.” She slid the book over, hoping he hadn’t come across something that would warp him for life. The drawing baffled her: the man in the picture was holding a lamb by its hindquarters, apparently swinging it through the air. She studied the caption. “Resuscitation,” she said. “He’s bringing it back to life.”