“Are you all right?” she said, interrupting the tour. “Can I help you?”
As she spoke, she noticed a flicker on the other side of the floor-to-ceiling gas station windows: a child running toward the building from the parking lot. A child who turned out to be Viv, followed by Erika carrying Ben. Corey had already spotted them, was hurrying to open the door for Viv.
She had just been thinking of her children and now here they were, as though her thought had given them body. She was pleased—self-congratulatory—that they had arrived when she was engaged in an act of compassion.
“Would you like to take a seat?” she said to the woman.
Behind the quaking woman, not visible to the quaking woman, Viv was racing through the door, through the small crowd; Ben was attempting to fling himself out of Erika’s arms, reaching in the direction of his mother.
The woman was staring at her, fearful, fragile. She reached to catch the woman in case she fell. But the woman backed away from her, edging closer to the glass case containing the Bible, closer to the doorway where the children had just entered.
The woman reached one hand high up into the air and placed one hand against her stomach. She was crying. Then she reached under her sweatshirt, pressed herself somewhere, and detonated.
PART 4
1
The metallic scrape of the slanted cellar doors (they had never quite joined properly), steel on brick, that familiar painful yank, the sound aching in her teeth.
It was early yet; she assumed she would be waking her. But coming down the steep stairs she saw that she was already awake, perhaps long awake, sitting cross-legged on the worn-out rug in the flat morning light, eerily alert. None of the lamps were on; so she had been waiting in the dark. The futon was in its couch form. The sheets and blanket were folded tidily upon it. The guitars and the banjo and the cello stood undisturbed in their stands, the keyboard and speakers and mixing board unplugged.
She wondered if it brought any solace to her, this space, which she had always found at once comforting and mysterious, the way it smelled of him and mildew and rosin and coffee and Scotch and laundry detergent and spiders.
She wondered if she had slept at all, or if she had just been being polite when she accepted the linens and clothing passed down the concrete stairs last night.
“You came,” Moll observed, remaining seated on the dusty rug.
Molly bristled. The words, which should have evoked her pity, which should have exposed to her a heartsick woman waiting apprehensive in darkness, instead evoked only irritation. She considered not speaking. She considered refusing to go through with it. She imagined buying a padlock for the bulkhead doors, entrapping and starving her adversary. But then she felt, like an actual finger pointing, Moll’s calculating gaze on her forehead.
“He’s in his high chair,” Molly said, untying the belt of her blue robe and starting to pull off her pajama pants. “I gave her a pile of Cheerios to feed him one by one.”
She stripped down to her underwear. Moll followed suit, removing the old sweatpants and T-shirt that neither of them would ever miss from the messy bottom drawer of the dresser. They swapped clothing and redressed quickly. Molly stole a glance at Moll’s body. She couldn’t tell if Moll (she) was attractive or not.
The basement was cool but the clothes were warm from Moll. Molly disliked the warmth.
Her phone, in the pocket of the robe lying on the floor between them, began to buzz. They both reached for it. Moll fell back and allowed Molly to scramble, searching for the phone in one pocket before locating it in the other. David, requesting a video chat. Decline.
Molly kept the phone, and the keys from the same pocket, but handed the robe to Moll. They both shivered. Molly found it ominous, that simultaneous shiver.
“So go,” Molly said curtly.
Moll hesitated.
“Go,” she repeated, unsure how long her vexation, her rage, could hold before giving way to tears.
“So I’ll do all of today, through bedtime,” Moll said, “and then you can do late tonight and tomorrow before and after work, and I’ll do tomorrow night.”
Molly couldn’t tell whether this was a question or a declaration, but the swiftness of Moll’s words, their practiced casualness, indicated that she had carefully prepared this proposition, had rehearsed it many times over.
How about you do none of it? Molly thought. How about let’s not and say we did?
It took her a second to understand that the source of the heat was blood.
Molly half nodded, a gesture that could perhaps be interpreted as compliance.
Still Moll hesitated.
“Go,” Molly said again. She thought of the children, alone at the table.
“I should have the phone,” Moll said.
She was right. She should have the phone. The ability to call 911 or anything else.
“And,” Moll added, “the wallet.”
The wallet, the phone—not your wallet, your phone.
Yet she was not wrong.
Molly handed her the phone, careful to avoid contact with her fingers. “The wallet’s in the bag,” she said. “Hanging on the bedroom doorknob.” Shaken, for she had done it too, unintentionally: the bag, not my bag. “And my keys—” she began, about to hand them over, before remembering that the one thing Moll had was the keys.
“Turn on a lamp,” Moll said. “It’ll be dark in here when I close the bulkhead.”
“She needs her prunes,” Molly said. “At least two. And he’ll need a nap at—”
“I know,” Moll said.
Molly’s face felt hot, stung.
Rather than waiting for Molly to follow her advice, Moll walked a few steps to turn on the standing lamp. Then she ran up the steep stairs.
The metal doors crashed together behind her.
Molly turned off the standing lamp.
The blackness of the basement was disrupted only by the faintest gray rectangle of outside light.
2
The metal doors were still reverberating against each other when Molly ran up the stairs and reopened them.
She would not.
She would not.
She would not rot in the basement.
She caught a glimpse of the edge of the blue robe as Moll stepped through the back door into the living room. So she was already inside. Out of reach, in the children’s domain. She could no longer be stopped, clawed, dragged to the ground.
“Twenty-three,” Molly heard Viv saying loudly before the door slammed shut.
She stood barefoot in the wet grass in her untended backyard, an intruder on her own property. She made her way into the evergreen bush. It must have rained in the night; each needle bore a droplet, and each droplet rolled down onto her, a private storm.
At the table, Viv stood on a chair, on tiptoes, conveying a single Cheerio toward Ben on her flat palm. When the Cheerio was almost close enough for him to touch it, she jerked her hand out of his reach, which was, to him, hilarious.
Moll, it seemed, had not yet spoken to them. She hung back, beside the door, watching them as Molly was watching them.