Sanctuary

The Interruption

She was on a conference call with her boss and one of their major donors—the major donor, actually—when her son, Jake, pushed through the door even though he knew perfectly well she didn’t want to be disturbed. They’d discussed it at breakfast. Eleven to twelve, clear the decks, she’d told him, because funding was the bottom line here, and what with the lawsuits she’d filed on behalf of the sanctuary and the countersuits that came boomeranging back at her, she was going to need all the help she could get.

She put her hand over the receiver. “Shhhh! Not now.”

He was wearing one of the T-shirts they offered for sale at the front desk, along with day passes and memberships, which helped with their revenue stream, no matter if it was only a trickle. Rita was wearing one herself, though Jake took a medium and she the extra-large, which accommodated her hips without bunching and grabbing. Jake had chosen the orange fritillary, its wings spread like a protective shield across his achingly thin breastbone; she was wearing an American lady, not quite as bright an orange, but no less pretty, plus she liked the fact that its name could as easily apply to her.

“There’s somebody out there—these two women?” her son said, making a question of it. “They refuse to pay and they won’t leave either—they say they want to go down to the river and see where the Mexicans are coming across, so point the way, and I told them they had to pay, same as anybody else, and then the one says she’s a candidate for Congress and she drove all the way down here from South Carolina and the other one says she’s with the F.B.I. and this is a government priority.”

Jake was fifteen and he was filling in at the desk for her because three of her employees were out with COVID and he was on spring break. He was polite and dutiful and a good kid—but a kid all the same. “Did they give their names?”

“The one did.” He handed her a card, which read, Mindy Gallagher (R), candidate for the United States House of Representatives, Fourth Congressional District, State of South Carolina, then left the door wide open and went back to the front desk to keep an eye on things.

She lifted her hand, put the phone to her ear. The donor—Anton Sloniker, whose foundation supported ecological projects not only in this country but worldwide—was saying something and her boss was agreeing with it, Right, yeah, uh-huh. When he paused for breath, she said, “Listen, Jack, Anton? Sorry for the interruption but there seems to be a problem at the front desk—can I call you back? In five minutes, five minutes at the most.”

Saving the Children

The twins were acting up. Loretta was elbowing Dolly and Dolly was fighting back, which made the chassis rock even though the road was straight as an arrow and she was only going fifty-five. Wynette, who was squeezed up against the door and texting complaints to her friends back at home along the lines of Texas is the butthole of the earth, whined, “Mom, make them stop!”

Robin, her best friend in the world, her best bud, absolutely, who’d been a rock during her divorce, was riding shotgun, but she was no help in the present circumstance because she had no kids of her own and never knew whether to dip honey or pour vinegar. Robin turned in her seat and said, lamely, “Kids, come on.”

It had been a morning, the kids moving like slugs, the breakfast at Hardee’s barely palatable—and the biscuits, the biscuits were like little individual stones dropped in cement, but maybe that was the way people liked them out here in the Lone Star State. At least they knew who to vote for, give them credit there. “Don’t make me stop this car,” Mindy said, “because if I stop this car you’re in it deep, both of you.”

“We’re almost there,” Robin said. “Ten minutes, I think. Or fifteen. Maybe fifteen.”

Wynette looked up from her phone. “I don’t want to see butterflies. Who wants to see butterflies?”

“You promised a motel with a pool,” Loretta put in.

“It’s too early for a motel, you know that,” she said, taking her eyes off the road for just an instant to turn round and glare at them. “This isn’t a vacation. You know your mother’s on a mission here—we have to save the kids, remember?”

The fact was, there was nobody at home to watch them, not since Ronnie left and her mother died, and so she’d combined this fact-finding mission, which she was recording on her phone and posting on social media for her constituents-to-be, with a trip for the kids, to open their eyes and see firsthand the kind of world their mother was fighting so hard to change. The Wall was going up, but not nearly fast enough—and there were gaps everywhere, like this Texas Butterfly Sanctuary, which was really just a front for cartels bringing women and children across to exploit them—and rape them. Rape them. That was what was going on here and she was going to get to the bottom of it, not that she could tell that to the kids, not explicitly—the twins were too young for that level of reality or even an explanation of what rape was, though Wynette, at thirteen, right out there in the full glare of cancel culture and all the filth broadcast 24/7 on TV and the internet and Spotify and everywhere else certainly knew more than she let on. Still, as a mother, she had a duty to preserve their innocence, of course she did, but she had another duty too—to her country, to Mothers Fighting for America, of which she was a founding member, and to the abused children, them above all.

She Hated Confrontation

She hated confrontation. But confrontation was all she seemed to get these days, ever since she’d filed suit against the federal government and the Build the Wall Now! people two years back. And no, she wasn’t attempting to make a political statement, but only trying to prevent the taking of sanctuary land for the border wall, this eighteen-foot-high monstrosity that ran right up to the western boundary of the property and was to continue on through, all the way down the Rio Grande to the Gulf. People said what’s the big deal, your butterflies can just fly over it, can’t they?, but that point of view was limited to the point of asininity. This was a wildlife corridor, open to all the cross-border species that crawled, walked or flew, including the odd coatimundi, jaguar, or underfed Mexican bear that couldn’t really be expected to sprout wings.

What she was hoping was that these women, whoever they were, would just give up and go back where they came from, and if that was South Carolina, well, good—the farther the better. Just as she was about to push herself up from the desk and go deal with the situation, she thought to do a quick search on Mindy Gallagher, whose picture popped right up on her campaign page—Bingo!—MAGA cap and all.

When she came down the hallway she saw the three figures hovering there at the desk, the two women and Jake, who was saying, “My mom’ll tell you, because we’re a non-profit and we depend on our admission fee—and donations, of course . . .”

“Twenty bucks for the two of us? And what, five each for the kids? If it’s even worth getting them out of the car,” the taller woman said. “Just to see a couple of butterflies?” She was in her forties, her hair dyed the color of the fritillary on Jake’s tee, a pair of Quay aviators perched on the tip of her nose so she could look over top of them and fix him with her official F.B.I. stare.

“I’m not here for butterflies,” the other one—Mindy Gallagher—said, turning to her now because she obviously wasn’t getting what she wanted out of Jake.. She was a blonde, on the verge of being heavyset, dressed in white culottes and a blouse designed to bring out the color of her eyes, which were a rapt staring sacrosanct green. “I want to know where you’re hiding the children.”

Armadillo

Dolly was the first to spot it there alongside the road, a dun thing, half-crushed, feebly wagging its head. “Stop the car!” she shrieked. “Stop! Stop!”

She didn’t want to stop. They were running late as it was because after the butterfly place, there was a visit she’d scheduled at the local Border Patrol holding facility, which would offer up a feast of information and photo ops, and then an interview with the mayor of Ruby City, the nearest town of any size (pop 77,004, according to Google), where they were going to spend the night at the motel—with pool—she’d already called ahead and booked. But Dolly was an animal lover par excellence, sweet-natured and kind and overflowing with empathy for all God’s creatures, and she didn’t want to discourage that, so she hit her panic lights and pulled over on the shoulder. Before she could warn her daughter to watch for traffic and look both ways and not to touch the thing because it could have rabies or who knew what, Dolly was out of the car and bolting up the strip of blasted dirt and desiccated weed that constituted the shoulder of the highway and Loretta was right behind her.

By the time she got there herself, Robin at her side (Wynette just tossed her head and went back to texting), Dolly had already taken off her jacket and wrapped something up in it. Not the adult—a mother, as she saw now, with three of her babies lying dead beside her—but the sole survivor of the litter. She knew that nine-banded armadillos nearly always gave birth to identical quadruplets, one of the facts she’d made a point of learning because they were invading South Carolina and destroying everybody’s lawns and flowerbeds and voters were angry about it, just one more issue to confront when the whole world was falling to pieces. And here was the last of the four wrapped up in her daughter’s jacket—Alo Yoga, a hundred eighty-eight bucks she couldn’t afford, in stainable beige—and her daughter was about to say, “Please, please, can we keep it?”

Well, they couldn’t. It was dirty, a wild animal, it could scratch and bite and they weren’t at home where it could live in a cardboard box in the basement till somebody forgot to feed it and it died, but on the road, staying in motels. “There’s no way we’re bringing that animal with us,” she said.

Dolly just stared at her, cradling the thing to her chest.

Cars rocketed past, people glancing out the windows, no doubt thinking they were the ones who’d run over the mother and thinking further, Stopping for an armadillo? What planet are they from?

The animal at their feet let out a groan. Its head thrashed. The blood was bright on the rippled armor of its flanks. Robin, who was standing right there beside her, said, “You want me to put it out of its misery?”

Dolly let out a long trailing bleat of woe, “Noooo!”

As if she were an expert on such things, her sister informed her that it was just going to die anyway, “So don’t let it suffer, right?”

Another car thrashed by, the wind it generated tasting of dirt hammered to fine particles. “I’m on a schedule here,” she said, glancing at her watch. “Back to the car, kids, come on, let’s go,” and then they were moving single file back up the road, the armadillo pup, which was no bigger than a clenched human fist, riding along with them while Robin lingered a moment to bring her bootheel down on the skull of its mother. Mercifully.

WWG1WGA

The taller one was wearing a long-sleeved denim shirt with a pair of bright glinting buttons pinned to the breast pocket. One read “Mindy for Congress” and the other bore the acronym “WWG1WGA.” There was a time when she wouldn’t have had a clue as to what that stood for, but now it was as apparent as the barrel of a gun pointed right between her eyes. Where We Go One We Go All was the rallying cry of the brain-dead faction that had been on her case 24/7 because she’d had the temerity to oppose the Wall. Every day brought a sheaf of hate mail. Half the time she couldn’t even answer the phone without some hoarse worked-up voice exploding over the line to call her a traitor, a bitch, a child abuser and worse. Someone tore down the sanctuary’s sign out on the main road and kept tearing it down as fast as she could replace it.

She didn’t say, “Can I help you?” or “I’m sorry, the entry fee’s required, no exceptions,” but instead threw Mindy Gallagher’s question right back at her: “Children? What are you talking about? The only children here come with their parents or on school buses, on school trips, to learn about ecology and the three hundred species of butterflies we provide habitat for. And I’m sorry to say there are no groups scheduled for today.”

“Don’t give me that bull, you know damn well what I’m talking about.”

“Frankly,” she said, “I don’t. And this is private property, in case you’re interested.”

The tall one pushed the sunglasses back up the bridge of her nose, as if to appear more menacing, and informed her that she was an officer of the agency, on agency business, and could go wherever she wanted. Especially when laws were being broken.

There was a wave inside her, rolling toward the shore, and it could have flattened and washed up harmlessly on the beach, but instead it broke over her with a crash and hiss and she let out a bitter laugh. “Really? And what agency might that be?”

“F.B.I.”

“You wouldn’t have any I.D., would you?”

Mindy Gallagher said, “She doesn’t need any I.D. You’re the one that needs I.D.”

All the while, Jake had been standing there, his shoulders slumped, looking as if he wanted to be someplace else. He didn’t need this. She didn’t need it either. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” she said.

The Evidence

Mindy stood her ground. Of course she did. She was a fighter—she would have made a pretty piss-poor representative if she wasn’t—and so what if she was in the middle of some tacky butterfly gift shop thirteen hundred miles from home? It was a public place, open to the public, and she wasn’t going anywhere.

“What I’m going to do,” she said, levelling a look on this woman with the wrinkled Dress for Less blouse and laughable bleach job who couldn’t hope to pass for a blonde no matter how much peroxide she used, “is march right on down to that river whether you like it or not.” Her voice cracked, she couldn’t help herself. “This is life and death. This is about the children, don’t you care about the children?”

“Boots on the ground,” Robin said.

“That’s right,” she said, “boots on the ground, because we’re gathering evidence here, that’s the whole point.”

The butterfly woman gave her a look she didn’t like at all, the look of a person hiding something and trying to bluster her way through it. “Evidence?” the woman echoed, as if she’d never heard the term before. “Do you even know what you’re talking about?”

“We’re talking about child trafficking—rape, rape of children,” Robin said, and they both glanced at the boy, who looked every bit as guilty as his mother, which was beyond belief, actually, to think that any mother, any child . . . “Or colluding in it, which is a felony offense, whether you know it or not.”

“Jake,” the woman said, turning sharply to where her son stood poised behind the desk, his hands resting protectively on either side of the credit card reader, as if credit was the problem here, when it was credibility, falsification, outright lies. “Call the sheriff.”

Nobody was going to ruffle her. Go ahead, she was thinking, call the sheriff and try to explain it to him, and as calmly as she’d ever done anything in her life, she opened her purse, extracted the photos and began laying them out on the desk, one beside the other, like a winning poker hand.

The Problem of the Bear

They welcomed all forms of wildlife—that was the defining purpose of the sanctuary, because this wasn’t just about butterflies but the whole suite of species that coexisted with them—yet the bear that had shown up three weeks back was another story altogether. She was a sow, with two cubs, which made her a potential threat if any of the visitors or employees should run across her, but she was secretive and nocturnal and as far as Rita knew, nobody had ever even laid eyes on her. Aside from her. Twice. The first time, working late, she’d been startled by a noise out back of the building and froze at her desk, on edge now, on edge all the time, sure it was one of the Build-the-Wall yahoos come to vandalize the place—or worse. She held her breath. Then she heard the tinny rattle of the aluminum trashcan, a scrape, a rustle, a thump, and relaxed—it was only a raccoon or skunk after a half-eaten chocolate bar or bag of chips people had tossed in the can that afternoon. Still, she pushed herself up, flipped on the floodlight and went out to shoo away whatever it was, if only to spare Jake the cleanup in the morning.

The bear was right there on the porch, not twenty feet away, its head emerging from the trashcan in a nimbus of greasy sandwich wrappers and wadded-up napkins, the two cubs just out of range of the floodlight, their eyes lit like pilots on a gas stove. She had a gun—the pistol her boss had insisted she keep in the desk drawer after the death threats started pouring in—but it was behind her in the office and she wouldn’t have used it anyway, not even to scare the thing off. She wasn’t a gun person, just the opposite. Guns scared her. Guns provided the lever for mass murder. People wore them on their hips. Flouted them. And what was the result? School shootings, the weekly carnage, ten dead, sixteen wounded. But her boss was adamant and the sheriff said there was nothing he could do about anonymous threats except that he would keep an eye out. And she should be careful, of course, though he never explained quite what that meant. Careful how? With what? When?

At any rate, wings or no wings, the bear had practically flown off the porch and dissolved in the undergrowth as soon as it caught sight of her. Two days later, as she was taking her wakeup tour of the property on a morning so saturated with fog she could barely make out the trail at her feet, all three bears appeared like wraiths for just an instant, then vanished as if they’d never been there at all. Not a problem—they were clearly people-averse, no doubt used to being hunted and harassed—but the question was, did bears tear up the vegetation? The Lepidoptera-friendly shrubs and wildflowers she and her staff had painstakingly planted over the course of the years? They did. They tore up the polyethylene driplines too. And that was a problem.

The Photos And What They Revealed

The kids were in the car. She’d told them to just sit tight till she and Robin could see which way the wind was blowing, because you never knew what level of nastiness you were going to encounter with people like this—Butterfly sanctuary. Yeah, right. Wynette didn’t care one way or the other—she was at that stage where everything bored her, no matter what it was, unless it was texting her friends or slouching in front of her laptop with the headphones clamped over her ears and her head bobbing to a rhythm only she was master of—and the twins were absorbed with their new toy, the armadillo, wondering if it needed water and was it warm enough and what did it eat and how were you supposed to know if it was hungry or not?

When she looked at video of herself addressing a potluck crowd in the paneled den of one of her supporters or the ten or twelve people who showed up under the harsh lights in the back room of the library, she realized she needed to stand up straighter, throw back her shoulders and suck in her gut. She’d put on some weight—nothing outrageous but something she had to watch, her diet not the best what with work and the crazy campaign schedule she’d been keeping most nights and every weekend without fail—but if she remembered to square up her shoulders, that slack look she hated just seemed to go away. So what she did now, after leaning into the desk to lay out the photos, was take a deep breath and arch her back, her eyes fixed on the butterfly woman’s face as if it were the readout of a lie detector.

“Where did you get these?” the woman demanded, and only in that moment did Mindy notice she was wearing a nametag—Rita Santos-Brownlee, it read in minuscule handwritten letters pressed inside a frayed plastic shield. Was she Mexican, was that it? She didn’t look Mexican. In fact, and this came as a bit of a shock—she looked almost like her, same age, same hairstyle, same figure even, or almost, though her own roots weren’t showing because she had no need to bleach her hair and her eyes weren’t the color of brownie mix, but still . . . It gave her pause, it did. What if this woman really was only a butterfly lover, what if she was innocent? But no. The photos she’d downloaded were right there, incontrovertible, and there was no hiding from the truth.

The butterfly woman snatched up a photo that showed the sun-bleached wooden dock right there at the back of the sanctuary, which she wasn’t letting them enter—and the bright green heartbreaking rowboat the cartels used to ferry children across the river and sell them into sex slavery. And addiction, addiction to drugs too. That was their modus operandi. Get them strung out so they don’t even know who they are. This was the face of evil—and the rowboat too. The rowboat of evil.

“Never mind where we got them—this is your dock, isn’t it?”

Robin said, “Don’t try to deny it because we know it is. And look, look here, you see what’s on the seat there, in the front? A doll.” Robin’s voice rose a notch. “A little girl’s doll!”

She Wanted To Get Her Hands Dirty

The major reason she’d taken this job in the first place, beyond her lifelong interest in the environment, was to spend as much time outdoors as possible. She wanted to get her hands dirty, help the crew plant Asclepias for the monarchs, heartleaf hibiscus for the hairstreaks and hackberry for the emperors and the red-bordered metalmarks, tailoring the vegetation to the needs of as many species as possible, build it and they will come. She’d been sleepwalking through corporate America for nineteen long dreary years, so far under she didn’t even know she was asleep, until she heard through her ex that the sanctuary was looking for a director and she finally woke up. She didn’t think she had a chance, despite her minor in environmental studies, but the interview went well and when Jack Bissell called to say she was the unanimous choice of the board, she said yes before he could even make his pitch, as if salary and benefits were beyond irrelevant. And that worked. That really worked. For six years she was outside more than she was in, but then the Wall came along and the politics of division it brought with it, and she spent so much time at her desk her muscles went slack and her tan faded away to nothing..

So yes, she was resentful of people like Mindy Gallagher and this so-called F.B.I. agent who was as phony as a two-way mirror. She wanted to be about butterflies, not politics, but they wouldn’t let her. “We don’t have a green rowboat,” she said. “And never have. The picture’s been photoshopped. Obviously.”

The tall one snatched up another photo and waved it in her face. It showed a lean white thirty-something man with inflamed eyes posing on the dock, her dock, displaying a child’s shoe for the camera as if it were a prize fish he’d hauled out of the river. “What do you say about this?” the woman demanded.

“I say it’s a shoe. And whoever that shitbird in the photo is, he’s trespassing on my property. And so are you, both of you. Maybe you’re hard of hearing—I asked you to leave and I’m not going to ask again.”

“Bitch,” Mindy Gallagher said. “I guess you’re okay with innocent little children being raped right under your nose and women trafficked like, like—"

“Or maybe you enjoy it,” the tall one said. “Maybe you do it yourself.”

That was it. That was enough, more than enough. She thought of the gun in the drawer in her office, of how satisfying it would be to hold it in her hand, brandish it, end of discussion, but as furious as she was she knew she could never do that. She did the next best thing: whipped out her cell and punched in 911.

She Wasn’t A Violent Person

That was the moment things escalated. To think that this woman couldn’t show even the smallest little worn-out scrap of human decency—that she was accusing them—just pushed her over the line. 911. What a joke.

“I want to report two trespassers threatening me and my fifteen-year-old son and refusing to leave the premises,” the butterfly woman said into her phone, locking eyes with her as if this had nothing to do with abused children or anything else beyond just sticking it to her. As if that wasn’t enough, she started filming them, filming her and Robin, with her cheap shitty Samsung Galaxy, like she was going to show them once and for all. But guess what, she had a phone too, and she started filming right back. “Don’t you dare!” the butterfly woman snapped, and tried to slap it out of her hand.

She wasn’t a violent person, anybody could tell you that, but when she got her back up she could give as good as she got. What she meant to do, in the confusion of the moment, was block the lens of the other woman’s camera, but her feet got tangled up and she lost her balance, and if she wound up lurching into her it was completely accidental. Ditto the way the rack of T-shirts and cheap souvenirs and butterfly bric-a-brac went sprawling all over the floor and the butterfly bitch with it. As for the phone, she had no idea how it wound up in her hand.

Robin was repeating her name, Mindy, Mindy, calling to her, warning her, and the kid, the boy who was probably as deep in the shit as his mother, just stood there as if he’d been cemented in place. Was she cursing? Did she let out a couple of epithets unbecoming a congressional candidate? It wasn’t a good look, she knew that, and when Robin took hold of her arm and tugged her toward the door she went along with it because she just wanted out of this place and knew in that moment she’d gone too far. Even if it was justified.

The bitch came up screaming. “She’s got my phone! Stop her, Jake—lock the gate!”

She wasn’t running, not exactly, because if she’d been running from the scene it would have implied culpability, but Robin had her by the arm and they were both moving, well, briskly.

There was another car in the lot now, a Chevy pickup with a white-bearded man sitting in the driver’s seat staring at a map, and he could have been a witness if anybody wanted one, not that she had time to do any more than file the thought because here came the kid in his black high-tops racing like all hell to beat them to the gate. In the next moment she was in the driver’s seat and Robin slamming in beside her. Wynette whined, “Jesus, Mom!,” but that barely registered. She was out of breath. She was sweating. But her foot hit the accelerator, the steering wheel jumped in her hands and the tires spun across the pavement with a long trailing screech.

The Price Of It All

The car—it was a Ford Explorer, burgundy, South Carolina license plate ZVF 973, write it down—shot out of control, narrowly missing the only other car in the lot, then straightened out and made a beeline for the gate. Only then did she realize she’d put Jake in harm’s way. Her sole thought had been to stop these people who’d knocked her to the floor and stolen her phone, thinking Jake could slam the gate shut till the sheriff arrived to sort things out—handcuff them, assault and battery, vandalism, false pretexts, every charge in the book—but now he was in the middle of the road, head down, running hard, and they were right behind him. For one sickening moment she was sure they were going to hit him, but at the last instant the car swerved onto the shoulder in a tornado of dust and twigs and leaves. The gate stood wide open, as it always did during business hours. Beyond it, the blacktop road to Ruby City and the interstate and the rest of the wide world glistened in the sun.

Running hard, arms pumping and elbows flashing white, her son managed to reach the gate just before they did but he was only able to pull it partway shut before the SUV bulled through the gap and out onto the blacktop, free and clear and moving way too fast. She was running herself now and she didn’t really know why because Jake was safe and she already had their plate number and the make and model of their car.

That was when she noticed something moving up there in the heat shimmer rising from the road, and what was it? The bears. The people-averse nocturnal bears that apparently weren’t confining themselves to the three-hundred acres of the sanctuary or the south side of the border or the river that demarcated it. No, they were right there, in the road, the sow and the two cubs that were the size of big stocky dogs, all three of them looking guilty of something—stupidity, lack of caution, a fatal vulnerability to the light. The sow and one of the cubs made it across the road, but the other one didn’t.

By the time she and Jake got there the cub was bundled up on the pavement like a throw rug somebody had tripped over and two little girls, seven or eight years old, were standing beside it, along with Mindy Gallagher and her accomplice in the designer sunglasses. “I didn’t see it,” Mindy Gallagher said. “It just ran out in front of me.”

“Is it dead?” Jake asked.

They all stared down at it, at the sprawl of its limbs and the pink strip of its tongue thrust out as if to lick the pavement. There was no blood, beyond a bright red smear on the tip of its nose. It didn’t appear to be breathing.

One of the girls—they were twins, dressed alike—began to cry. “Oh, mom,” she wailed. “You killed it!”

Rita could see another child in the car, a teenage girl, her face suspended in the window like a lantern—the girl looked for a moment, then turned away.

“What do we do now?” Mindy Gallagher wouldn’t make eye contact, but the question was addressed to her.

“Pull it off the road,” the tall one said. “Let the highway department deal with it. Or the vultures.” Looking directly at her now: “You do have vultures, don’t you?”

In the next moment, the tall one—Robin, that was what Mindy Gallagher called her; she’d have to remember that—took the carcass by the hind legs and began dragging it across the pavement. “Jesus, it’s heavy,” she said. “Heavier than a dog any day.”

Nobody said anything. One of the twins stared off in the distance; the other one’s cheeks were slick with tears, moisture generated by the human body in times of duress. In seconds they would be part of the atmosphere.

“Listen,” Mindy Gallagher said finally, turning to her, “I’m sorry, I really am. Maybe I overstepped here.” She had something in her palm, flat, black, shining—the phone—and she leaned forward and handed it to her as if she were presenting her with a gift. “You just have to realize I’m a very emotional person,” she said and her eyes hardened again. “Especially when it comes to the children.”

The Lugubrious Blue Skipper

She kept just a single photo on her desk, one she’d taken herself back in September. She wasn’t the best photographer and the cell didn’t always give her the kind of definition she would have wanted, but on that particular day she’d gotten lucky. The picture showed a lugubrious blue skipper, a butterfly native to Mexico and never yet recorded on this side of the border. When she first spotted it resting on a sugarberry leaf, its wings spread wide, she wasn’t sure what it was, but she always kept an eye out, especially since climate change was pushing more and more exotic species north, so you never knew. She snapped half a dozen photos before a breeze came up and the butterfly rose along with it, receding into a sky the color of stone. It wasn’t till she got back to her office and went online that she realized what she had. First sighting in the U.S. She’d get her picture in the newspaper. The sanctuary would get a welcome dose of publicity.

All good, but what puzzled her was the popular name people had given the species. It wasn’t blue, for one thing, more a uniform tan shading a bit darker in the thorax and abdomen, and why “lugubrious”? What did that even mean? At that point, she didn’t yet know about Mindy Gallagher or the bear or the flexibility of truth, but butterflies were in decline, she knew that. She knew too that the Wall was going up and there was nothing anybody could do to stop it.

She texted a copy of the photo to her boss with a message that read, “Quadrus lugubris, how about that?” Then she printed the picture, went out and got a frame for it and set it on her desk, where it would be the first thing she’d see each morning.