Moll nodded again.
Molly led the way up the stairs and out the bulkhead. Moll stood on the grass, unhelpful, while Molly heaved the metal doors shut.
“The blinds,” Moll said flatly when they were both in the living room, the back door locked behind them. She watched as Molly pulled down all the blinds until they were protected from outside eyes.
Moll settled onto the couch, put her feet up on the coffee table where she had hidden when she was a deer, focused her gaze on Molly.
“So,” Moll said, a statement or a question.
This was the time to use the words that would cast Moll out of her life forever.
And she searched, she searched, but she could not quite find the right words.
The unassailable argument against their arrangement—it eluded her.
The phone buzzed in the pocket of the sweatshirt Moll was wearing. She pulled it out and handed it to Molly. David, again; Decline, again. Poor David. But she could not answer the phone, could not speak to him; not with Moll’s eyes drilling into her.
“Seventh time today,” Moll said.
Molly was struck, for the first time, by the thought of Moll’s David, in Moll’s world, the grieving David, and it sickened her.
She felt guilty toward her own David, and missed him, but the emotions were distant, misty, as though they belonged to someone else.
“We’ll tell him in person,” Moll said. “Once he’s back. In six days.”
Molly stiffened, alarmed. Tell him? Tell him—what?
Down the hallway, the children’s doorknob began to turn, the well-known squeak.
They darted in different directions, Moll into the bathtub, pulling the shower curtain shut behind her, Molly into the bedroom, into the darkness of the mirrored closet.
Viv, coming down the hall. That slight damp quality of her bare feet on the wood.
“I’m scared from my dream,” Viv said to the empty kitchen, the empty couch.
Her footsteps became hastier, panicked.
Molly emerged from the dark closet into the dark bedroom, feeling her daughter’s panic as though it were her own (was it?), desperate to arrive at the instant a few seconds from now when she would be holding Viv close, reunited, the comfort of the home reasserting itself.
But Viv had gone into the bathroom. And now the sound of the shower curtain being pulled to the side. So it was Moll who enveloped Viv, Moll whose body cast Viv’s nightmare out of the house.
Molly couldn’t hear Moll’s words, too low and quiet, but she could hear Viv’s as she tiptoed past the bathroom, toward the back door, the night, the basement, her unplanned banishment: “…you playing hide-and-seek with me?… Juice… Okay fine water… a worm as big as a moon…”
7
She waited for Moll, praying that she would honor her own proposed schedule and swap Molly in as soon as she got Viv back to sleep.
She thought of the spiders all around her, maybe crawling up her.
She cursed Moll. She felt as though she had not touched their bodies in weeks.
She had the phone now. She could call someone. 911, or Erika, or David.
She thought of what she could do to Moll. With what household implements.
She horrified herself. She tried to soothe herself by turning her thoughts to other things: to visions of round, smooth surfaces. The image of a wooden bowl. The image of a sand dune. The image of Ben’s forehead. But any serene image, she realized, bore within itself the opposite of serenity, the possibility of the shattering of the surface.
The screech of the doors woke her. It was morning, white and damp. She was sprawled messily on the futon. Her vision was blurry with sleep and lack of sleep.
“I fell asleep when I was putting her down,” Moll said. “I woke up just now.”
Molly pretended it was a lie, though she knew it wasn’t—how many times had it happened to her, the tendrils of her child’s sleep gripping at her, tying her to the little bed?
“Are they awake?”
“Not yet.”
Moll settled herself onto her spot on the worn rug, cross-legged and grave, as though she had no intention of moving a muscle for the next twelve hours, her docility at once reassuring and unsettling.
Upstairs, Molly locked the back door behind her. The home was silent with the silence of sleeping children. She went into the bathroom—when had she last cleaned herself?—and shed the stupid T-shirt and sweatpants, and turned the shower on, very hot, and stood under it for a while, but not too long, because they would be up any second.
It was strange to see strands of dark hair in the bathtub drain and not know if they were hers or hers.
She pulled the towel off the hook (had she pulled this towel off this hook?). She was half-dry when Ben called for her. She swooped him out of the crib and onto her big bed, where, finally, so warm, that heat of him, he nursed, at first frenetic and then indifferent, sucking lazily, detaching.
Now Viv was up, jumping on the bed, jumping on them, and Molly was in the chaos of it, the impeccable chaos, while two yards below a woman sat in the dark.
“Too tight!” Viv cried out. “Let me go!” And Ben, also, following his sister’s lead, writhed out of Molly’s grasp.
Usually they felt endless, these mornings alone with the kids, the minutes unreliable, expanding infinitely, but today two hours felt like a few moments, and then Erika was coming through the door.
“Happy Monday!” Erika very nearly shouted as she entered. “Well Miss Viv, I hear there was an exceptionally beautiful fish at your party.” Erika winked at Molly, who couldn’t bring herself to wink back.
She ought to send Erika home, call in sick to work, spend the whole day with the kids, maybe pack them into the car and drive away forever.
But she had to go to work. It was even more important that she go to work.
“Of course,” Viv said. She was on the rug, stuck beneath Ben, who was trying to lick her eye. She was having fun with him and then she wasn’t. “Get him off me!”
Erika picked him up and smeared kisses across his forehead. Molly got a pang, watching another woman kiss her boy, but it wasn’t Erika’s fault.
“Mommy, since Ben licked my eye, can I lick your eye?”
“No,” Molly said.
“Please?” Viv said. “You’ll like it.”
“Your saliva might sting my eye.”
“It what?” Viv was distraught.
“Just kidding.”
“So I can lick your eye?”
“No. Get your backpack. We’re almost late.”
On their walk to the car—a block and a half away, the nearest parking spot she could find upon their return from the dangerous frolic in the median a hundred years ago—Viv gripped her hand, and Molly could feel the stretching of her daughter’s tendons. She brought her awareness, too much awareness, to the union of their hands, until she felt Viv’s heartbeat in her palm like a thing she was holding.
She jerked her hand out of Viv’s.
“Excuse me,” Viv said to a puddle, jumping over it, unbothered.
They were stopped at the first red light when Viv said, from her car seat in the back, “Once upon a time we went to the carousel yesterday.”
The light turned green.
“Right, Mom?”
“That’s right,” Molly said.
But Viv was in a great mood and did not notice the tightness in her mother’s voice.
“I can’t believe I’m four,” she said.
“Do you like being four?”
“I love it. But also I want to be five and six and eight and nine and stuff.”
“Why?”
“I want to get older so I can be a mommy.”
“Yes, I had to get old enough,” Molly said, resisting the urge to correct Viv, to say that she should look forward to being older so she could be a scientist or artist or president as well as a mother. “So that I could be yours.”