“Yes,” Viv said, “because I was waiting for you.”
“You were waiting for me?”
“Yes.”
“Where were you waiting for me?”
“Everywhere.”
8
She needed to be the first to arrive at work, and, thanks to driving too fast after dropping off Viv at school, here she was, in the empty parking lot. She ran toward the Phillips 66, key chain in hand, overwhelmed by the sensation of being chased, though the parking lot couldn’t have been more peaceful.
A scattering of birds, no wind.
She used the thickest key to open the front door of the display room. It was dim and still, smelling of dust and fossils and old coffee, as always. She flicked the lights: the noise of the fluorescence.
How innocent the Bible looked, there in its glass case; undisturbed, undisturbing.
She ran through the glass door that led from the display room to the offices and lab. The cardboard box where she had initially gathered the artifacts was still there, in the shadows beneath her desk.
She grabbed the box and returned to the display room and used the smallest key to unlock the glass case bearing the Bible. Then she unlocked the glass case containing the other objects. Gingerly, she placed the Coca-Cola bottle, the Altoids tin, the potsherd, and the toy soldier in the cardboard box with the Bible.
She was stupid to have shared them. She should have hidden them all away.
She remembered the day, only a month ago, when she had perused the Bible cover to cover to confirm that every single mention of God was feminized.
Molly carried the box back to her cubicle and pushed it as far under her desk as possible.
Now she felt a little bit safe. She was, she realized, breathing hard.
Then she remembered that there was a sixth object. The penny she had found in the Pit and quickly dismissed—the penny from Moll’s world.
She remembered change scattering out of her pocket as she slid to the bottom of the Pit, laden. She remembered a penny in the mud. Her daughter is always on the lookout for pennies, heads up for good luck.
But where was that penny now?
In Molly’s wallet, still, probably, where she had dropped it along with the control penny on Friday.
She pulled her wallet out of her bag. She felt as though she could sense the penny in there, burning with its otherness, the change purse suddenly toxic.
She dumped the coins out onto her desk and pulled all six pennies toward her. There were only two possible contenders, as only two had been minted in the current year. One penny belonging to her, one belonging to Moll. But there was nothing to distinguish them from each other. She found herself wishing for a hint, some telltale sign (a fleck of blood?) so that she could know which penny was the dangerous one—and then was horrorstruck by her wish.
She tossed both pennies into the cardboard box along with the other objects and tried to forget about them.
The Phillips 66 felt acutely abandoned. She kept having the sensation that this wasn’t quite the same workplace she had left on Friday. It was always odd to reemerge from the fog of the weekend into work on Monday mornings, but today it was a hundred times so. She questioned every object—the dimensions of her desk, the hue of her chair, the angle of her computer monitor.
She turned the computer on. She had to write a notice for today’s tourists. And then would borrow the language from that to write a press release. And then would send it to all the relevant news outlets.
As she waited for her computer to awaken, she began to compose the letter in her head: Dear Tourists. But that sounded off somehow. Dear Customers? Dear Guests? Dear Enthusiasts? Dear People? To Whom It May Concern? Her mind was too frenetic. She could sort out the salutation later. It has come to our attention that the artifacts that have been (lately? recently? in recent times?) discovered at our site alongside our (notable? noteworthy? legendary?) fossils are, in fact, as originally suspected by many, a hoax… an elaborate hoax… please forgive our… when initially unearthed, these objects defied our understanding, but… it has been proven beyond a doubt… with 100 percent confidence… with absolute certainty… after consultation with (multiple? numerous?) experts… have been found to be… including, most significantly, the Bible… we hope you can forgive… upon this revelation, were immediately removed from the eye of the public… the thorny road of truth… the thorny path of science… the… the…
The computer screen, now bright, confronted her with the photograph: the kids hugging each other, wearing adult backpacks and fearful expressions.
She couldn’t last a minute with those four eyes on her.
She had to get rid of the picture before doing anything else. She clicked on her desktop settings and began scrolling through the ravishing stock images: a waterfall cascading through ferns, a beach under a red sun, a forest of aspen and columbine.
“Molly!” Corey startled her. She had been absorbed in toggling back and forth between the waterfall and the forest.
“Hey,” she said. He had yanked aside the curtain in the doorway.
“We have to call the police.”
“Why?”
“Someone broke in. The cases are open. The Bible and everything is gone.”
“No,” Molly said. “I have it all. Right here.”
“Oh.” He gave a quick laugh. “Okay. Good. Shit. I was freaking out.”
“I don’t think we should display them anymore.”
“What?”
She didn’t know what to tell him or not tell him.
“Molly?” he said.
“The culprit,” Roz said dryly, appearing in the doorway behind him.
Corey looked at Molly, waited for her to speak.
“Molly doesn’t want to display the Bible anymore,” Corey said.
“Abandoning your pet project?” Roz said.
Molly loved these two, her dear colleagues, wry Roz and kind Corey, but right now they seemed somehow different to her, capable of unpleasantness.
“Think of the ticket sales,” Corey said.
She was sitting and they were standing. She disliked this difference in her position and theirs. She stood.
“What about all the hate mail?” Molly said.
“What about it?” Roz said.
“Getting used to it,” Corey said.
“What if someone—”
“Like what,” Roz said, “like some kind of religious extremist shooter or something?”
Molly didn’t know whether to be comforted or frightened by Roz’s immediate understanding.
“Well,” Roz said, “vivir con miedo es vivir a medias.”
“What?” Corey said.
“A life lived in fear is a life half-lived,” Molly translated. “But I have kids.”
“I’ll put the stuff back in the cases,” Roz said.
“No.” Molly should have taken the Bible off-site, destroyed it, thrown it in the reservoir.
“Come on, Molly,” Corey said.
“No,” she said.
“I insist.” Roz could be fierce, and she was becoming fierce.
“It’s dangerous,” Molly said. “I had a—”
“A what?”
Molly couldn’t say it.
“A what?” Roz insisted.
“A dream,” Molly said, backing down.
“Of?”
“A bomber. My children—”
“Oh, your kids,” Corey said, kind again. “Oh, poor Molly.”
“Yes, poor Molly,” Roz said. “But a dream is a dream is a dream.”
“Well,” Molly said, at a loss, “it didn’t feel like a dream.”
“Well, sometimes they don’t,” Roz said. “So, hand it over.”
“Fine,” Molly said, brashness rising in her, “but if you display it, then I refuse to give any tours.”
How could she give a tour, every woman in a baseball cap a possible bomber?
“Okay,” Corey said. “Okay, that’s fine. You can do excavation today.”
But she couldn’t go into the Pit, sacrifice herself to the vagaries of a seam that might spit her out into a reality where her children were dead or whatever else. How ridiculous that she had ever taken comfort in the Pit, had ever leaned against its dirt wall and appreciated its solidity—the treacherous, porous Pit.
She was running so fast to get them away and then she ran over the edge of the Pit and they sort of fell down into it, the three of them, his body in her right arm and her body in her left arm, slipping and scooting down the mud, and because they were not laughing, she knew.
“Or,” Corey added, looking closely at her face, “you can do desk duty for now. I was going to update the website with the new schedule and file the hate mail and tabulate ticket sales and proofread the grant proposal.”
“No one should be giving tours,” Molly said. “No one should be excavating.”
“Okay,” Roz said, reaching under Molly’s desk to grab the box. “See you guys.”
Molly could feel her adrenaline draining away, leaving her feeble, empty. She didn’t even try to stop Roz.
“God,” Corey said, “do I seriously hear a tour bus already?”
After he was gone, she toggled back and forth between the desktop images for another long while before settling on the forest.
Then she began to type the hoax announcement. But her fingers didn’t work well on the keyboard; the words came too slowly, refused to blend into sentences.
After a while she had to give up.
She sat numb at her desk. Her milk came down but she did not pump. She thought of Moll in the basement. Wondered if her milk too had come down. If she was at this moment squeezing it out into the metal sink.
She was interrupted by Corey, dropping off a pile of hate mail for her to sort. He didn’t say anything, just placed the mail on her desk and shot her a sympathetic look on his way out.
The top postcard bore a Renaissance painting of Mary nursing Jesus, a surprisingly graphic portrait: both her nipple and his penis were exposed. Molly turned it over. No return address. Just a single word in graceful handwriting: See?
The word set off a physical reaction in her: a wavering of her vision, a weakening of her muscles.
She put the postcard down atop the other mail, the white envelopes that looked venomous in their similarity and anonymity, American flag stamps and blue ballpoint ink, implying all the typical sentiments contained within: UNDO THIS HORRIFIC SIN OR YOU WILL BE PUNISHED. GOD IS DISPLEASED. HE IS ENRAGED. YOU ARE ON A COLLISION COURSE WITH GOD AND HIS FAITHFUL CHILDREN. BEWARE THE BLINDING LIGHT. HE ALWAYS KNOWS WHERE YOU ARE.
She needed to get away from it. She needed to be around people. Corey, Roz. She burst out of her cubicle. She could see through the glass door that Corey was in the display room, in the middle of his tour.
There were three thirtysomething women on the tour, one of them wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, and as much as she wanted to run in there and save Corey, her body moved her back to her cubicle, into the dark space beneath her desk.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket and she answered it accidentally, her finger’s swipe to decline the video call landing on the wrong part of the phone’s surface.
“Where are you?” David said.
She crawled out from under her desk.
“Were you under your desk?”
“Cords,” she said.
His face looked distant in the small window. It calmed her to see him, but the calmness was fleeting, almost immediately overthrown by despair. She wished that her life hadn’t changed. That she could be at peace, briefly video-chatting with her wondrous husband during her engaging workday while her children thrived and napped.
“Molly?”
She tried to think of how to talk to him; if she told him anything right now, she feared it would come out as a scream.
“Molly.” His voice was accusatory. “Where were you guys yesterday? Why didn’t you pick up ever?”
“At the carousel.” It sounded thin; she could hear how thin it sounded.
A few beats passed between them. She wanted to tell him everything. She wanted them to be united, all-powerful, capable of ejecting Moll from their lives. The fantasy spiraled quickly, absurdly—superhero masks and capes, lightning bolts shooting out of their fingers; Moll shocked, meek, terrified, slinking away forever.
“What the fuck is going on, Molly?”
She was disturbed by the image of Moll that had sprung up in her mind, Moll reduced and pitiful; the words from the song David sang so well came to her, burned out from exhaustion, buried in the hail, poisoned in the bushes and blown out on the trail, hunted like a crocodile, ravaged in the corn.
“I’m burned out from exhaustion,” she borrowed.
“Buried in the hail,” he said, without missing a beat, and she loved him.
It was he who had stood in the doorway the same day as the car accident and said What the hell, let’s have a kid. Molly remembered the ensuing sex, how directly it had led to Viv, how urgent it had been, sex following a car accident in which people could have been hurt but no one was hurt.
“I’m sorry,” she said, straining to hear Corey droning on, still alive.
“Molly?” he implored. “Molly?”
She thought of Moll. Of Moll’s David.
“Later,” she promised. “Soon. I’m at work.”
He stared at her through the screen. She looked away from the screen.
“I’m going to call you tonight,” he said finally. “And if you don’t pick up—”
He hung up. She sat in her chair. She stared at the list of website updates Corey had emailed her. She looked at the black letters on the screen, trying to see the pixels.
It was long and not long before a text message dinged into her phone: Erika.
Hey is it really true that Viv can get pizza dough to play with if we swing by the back door before the pizza place opens?
The question pulled Molly back into her life: her life, the delight of it all, all the things that made you forget you were hurtling through space moving two colossal speeds at once, the precious guys at the pizza place with their accents and generosity.
Yeah Viv sometimes dies! she texted back.
It took her an instant to notice the typo.
DOES, she corrected.
But the damage was done. The catastrophic typo. She had to get home to them.