“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.
9
Waiting at the light to turn right off the thoroughfare, she couldn’t believe she was already almost home; couldn’t recall a single second of her drive. That bizarre thing of getting in the car and then arriving at your destination with no memory of what had passed around you.
But here she was, 4:23 p.m. She rolled down all four windows, inviting in the wind. Erika always took Ben in the stroller to walk Viv home from school; probably they had returned ten or fifteen minutes ago. It would be so fun to surprise them, to seize them both and spin them around and dazzle them with her presence. To let Erika go an hour and a half early but still pay her the full amount.
They were always desperate for her by this time of day. And she was desperate for them. The desire manifested itself physically, an actual itch at her wrist, an actual ache when she breathed in: the need for their bodies.