Dellarobia referred every interviewer to Bear and Hester. Cub worried that his father was shaping up in this story to be the bad guy, willful destroyer of butterflies, and they deserved a say at this point, but Bear and Hester never turned up on the screen. As crazy as it seemed as a deciding factor, Dellarobia suspected they might not be photogenic enough to be news. Handsome Mr. Cook was interviewed often, sitting on the sofa with his sad wife and their poor little bald son. So was Bobby Ogle, who seemed perfectly at ease with the camera as he spoke of caring for God’s Creation. There was even some footage of him preaching at their church on a regular Sunday, which floored Dellarobia. When had news cameras been in there?

The local powers definitely were coming down on the pro-butterfly side. The Cleary news team invited the mayor, Jack Stell, and a heavyset man from the Chamber of Commerce to sit at their big curved desk and discuss tourism opportunity. People all over the world would want to come see the monarchs. The heavyset man used Disneyland as a comparison. Dellarobia felt they should get their act together on some family lodgings other than the Wayside, if that was their game plan. She also felt Ovid Byron should be sitting at that desk. She wished he would get here. Nobody was asking why the butterflies were here; the big news was just that they were.

The Battle of the Butterflies was presumably a conflict between people, although the opposers were something of a ragbag army, hard to pin down. One view was that all the outside attention on the butterflies might disrupt normal life. Dellarobia had heard this sentiment at church and elsewhere, but only oddballs were shown to espouse it on the news: a skinny old man in an undershirt in his trailer home said the crime would go up. Some kids in front of the Feathertown Exxon, who looked like hoodlums, declared they didn’t need outsiders in this town. Dellarobia realized these people were being mocked, and remembered with almost an electric shock the old man she’d seen being ridiculed on the late-night program. Billy Ray Hatch. If she’d remembered that painful setup while Tina Ultner was here, she might have slammed the door on her perfectly powdered nose. But she hadn’t. Real life and the things inside the TV set belonged to different universes. People on the outside could not imagine they would ever end up as monkeys in that box.

And yet they did, it was unendingly strange. She and Cub watched wide-eyed each night, gasping at each sighting of people or places they knew. They never did see the original interview with Tina, although clips from it appeared repeatedly on the Cleary news, mostly as background like the banner shot. As far as Dellarobia could tell, the suicide angle had been dropped. Initially, in fact, she was sure Dovey had invented it, due to shell shock, but Dovey had not. Clever girl, she figured out how to get the whole clip downloaded on her phone and came over two days after the fact with proof in hand. With Preston away at school and Cub at work, they sat in the kitchen and watched it.

“My life. I guess. I couldn’t live it anymore . . . ,” said the little Dellarobia on the phone’s screen, in a tinny voice that could not be hers. “I came up here by myself, ready to throw everything away. And . . . this stopped me.” The voice continued while the screen panned to a wide view of the butterflies covering the trees and filling the air. “Here was something so much bigger. I had to come back and live a different life.”

“I swear I never said that.”

“It sure looks like you did,” said Dovey.

“It sure looks like I did.” She could not imagine the carnage if the family saw this. And Hester might, if it was on the computer. Just not Cub, she prayed. For his sake. Dellarobia had almost no memory of the interview itself. She recalled a few false starts, blurting out nonsense that Tina had promised not to use.

“Okay, now check this out,” Dovey said, clicking masterfully at the buttons on her very swank phone, like Preston with his watch. “There. This just showed up today.”

Dellarobia scowled at the screen, baffled. “The Butterfly Venus,” it said. It was Dellarobia, but someone had messed with the image. She appeared to be standing on the open wings of a huge monarch. Little butterflies floated in the air all around her.

“What is this?” Dellarobia asked.

“You’re that famous painting, the naked chick standing on the shell.” Dovey scrolled over to another image that Dellarobia recognized. The Birth of Venus. Someone had put the two images together and sent it out over the Internet. The similarity was surreal. It couldn’t possibly be herself, but it was, her own orange hair blowing loose from its ribbon in back, her left hand in her pocket and her right hand across her chest, posed like the naked Venus girl on the open wings of her shell. Dellarobia couldn’t even remember standing like that, touching her chest. She was not exactly naked in the picture, her clothing was faded to a neutral shade, but naked was how she felt. Scared and exposed. This thing looked vaguely pornographic.

“Who can see this?” she asked.

“Everybody can see this,” Dovey said. This image that was not real and had never happened was flying around the world.

She remembered then. Why she’d brought her hand up to her chest like that in front of Ron’s camera. She was afraid her buttons had fallen open.

9

Continental Ecosystem

“Name?” he asked, not really asking. He answered himself, spelling aloud as he wrote on the form, D-E-L-L-A . . . He paused, his pen poised over the clipboard balanced on his knee. “Is it one word, or two?”

The interview was a formality, Dr. Byron had said. For a government-funded position he had to file certain forms proving he’d gone to the trouble of equal-opportunity hiring. She’d replied that hiring someone like herself should be ample proof he had scraped the bottom of the barrel. She felt nervous when he did not laugh. She had no idea how to behave as an employed person.

“All one word,” she told him. They sat facing one another on metal folding chairs. She’d dressed up for this, beige slacks and a black sweater. Dr. Byron wore jeans as always, sitting with his long legs crossed up ankle-over-knee like a grasshopper.

“Ah,” he said. “The Italian sculptor is two. My wife confirmed that.”

The mention made her blush. A wife there was, then, with whom he had discussed Dellarobia. She imagined them together at a computer viewing the image of her essentially naked, perched on butterfly wings as the Venus. From now on she had to rise each day into a world that had seen her like that. Tellers at the bank, the boys who bagged her groceries, Preston’s schoolteachers, present and future. It felt like stepping again and again into scalding water. Blushing had become her skin’s normal pastime.