She heard them (their unmistakable screeches, their stabs of laughter) an instant before she spotted them. They must be out front with Erika.
She got closer. They were in the front yard. But not with Erika.
She was spinning them, had seized them up, was spinning both of them at once.
10
There was nothing to do but glide past them unnoticed, for they were caught up in their ecstatic dizziness.
There was nothing to do but park the car on a different block and sneak through backyards toward the evergreen bush. Nothing to do but let her mute rage accumulate.
She could call Erika, explain everything, get Erika on board. That woman wasn’t me, she would say. We’re going to fucking save these amazing kids, Erika would say, swearing to be at Molly’s side ASAP. Or, Erika would be initially amused, thinking it a joke, and then deeply concerned about Molly’s mental health.
When Molly reached her own backyard, Moll and the children were still out front. Talking with affable Capria Lewis, their neighbor from half a block down. Who was confused.
“But you were in the car,” Capria Lewis said.
“The car?” Moll said.
So it was Capria who would call them out, who would shatter their flimsy, reckless arrangement.
“I was—” Capria said, “you were—but now you’re—”
“Do you have lollipops,” Viv wanted to know.
“Do you have a toothbrush,” Capria rejoined, their habitual exchange.
“Thank you,” Viv said, and, “Say ‘Thank you,’ B.”
“Well I guess I’m just getting old,” Capria said insincerely.
“Hey look!” Viv yelled, and they all moved to the other side of the front yard, and Molly could no longer hear them.
She felt like an intruder, crouching in the evergreen bush, catapulted out of her life, transformed into someone with nothing. She tried to shake the feeling. She reminded herself that no neighbor would ever call the police to tell them that Molly had been seen stalking around her own backyard.
When after too long they came into the house through the front door, Viv was saying, “—spell Molly?”
“Actually,” Moll said, “a lot like the way you spell Mommy. But with Ls rather than Ms.”
“L-O-L-L-Y?”
They all went into the bathroom together and closed the door. Molly strained but could hear nothing.
After a while they emerged from the bathroom. Ben wasn’t wearing pants or a diaper. He ought to be wearing a diaper, Molly thought. Go to the bedroom and get him a diaper. But Moll went to the kitchen.
From inside the bush, Molly bore witness to Moll’s comfort as she rinsed the carrots, as she grated the cheese, as she instructed Viv to choose napkins, as she slid the quesadillas into the toaster: a woman rushing around her kitchen, her life, in motion and at peace, erasing that other universe with her every gesture, the infiltration perfecting itself. She wondered if Moll knew or cared that she was there, watching, in the bush.
Ben squatted and pooped on the floor near the table. He stood up and gazed down at it. He knelt to examine it. Molly was about to shout a warning, but Viv beat her to it:
“No B don’t!”
Moll sprinted over and grabbed him an instant before his fingers sank in.
Ben chortled as Moll lifted him above her head.
“No!” Viv said. “Don’t laugh when you make a problem, B.”
The combination of his sister’s distressed face and his mother’s distressed face was more than he could bear. He launched himself to the height of a scream with no warm-up.
“He should have been wearing a diaper,” Viv chided.
After a moment Ben stopped crying. Moll cleaned the floor, using wet wipes to scoop the poop into a diaper. The children watched, rapt. Then Moll raced to the kitchen, where (Molly assumed) the quesadillas were starting to burn in the toaster.
This woman, Molly thought, could burn my house down.
As though no quesadilla had ever burned under her own watch.
As though she wouldn’t have relieved the babysitter and started playing with them before the other mother got home.
Viv said to Ben, “You have a little baby skeleton inside you. Did you know that?”
Ben looked at Viv.
Viv put a yellow blanket over her head and bobbed around the living room, chanting, “The pillows are haunted. The couch is haunted. The rug is haunted.”
After a while Ben grew bored of her litany. He wandered into the kitchen and came up behind Moll where she was standing at the sink rinsing grapes. He grabbed her legs to steady himself. Moll reached down and patted his head.
When Moll touched him, Molly experienced the sensation on her own hand.
That feeling of his hair. Outrageously soft.
She extricated herself from the bush. She went to the basement to grieve.
11
In the basement there was a three-foot piece of old metal piping leaned up against the concrete wall behind the guitar stands. It had not been there before. Probably it had been in the basement, somewhere amid the chaos of boxes and junk on the far side. But it had not been on display. Now, it served as proof that Moll did not simply sit all day; that she moved around the cellar, simmering with plans; that she had located at least one weapon.
And, another change from before: in the middle of the futon, awaiting Molly almost like a gift, the spare unit for the baby monitor.
So Moll had been eavesdropping far more profoundly than permitted by the bush. Into the children’s bedroom. Why hadn’t Molly thought to do the same?
The worn-out spot on the rug pulled her to it. She settled herself there, cross-legged, bereft, enraged, the metal pipe heavy across her thighs, the baby monitor light in her hand. She turned the diaclass="underline"
“—made of plastic?” Viv was saying. Ben was crying.
“Ceramic,” Moll said.
“Wood?” Viv persisted.
Moll soothed Ben.
“Well, wood?”
Ben allowed himself to be soothed.
“Plastic?”
Molly turned off the monitor.
Scornfully she considered herself, her former attitudes and actions. How often had she, naive with privilege, threatened David: If those kids don’t learn to sleep through the night I’m seriously going to move to the basement.
Time passed the way it passed in the basement: not measureable.
Was this now her life: inside the cellar, outside of time?
Like Moll.
Eons later, Moll opened the metal doors and came down the stairs with a cardboard box.
The basement was dark. Moll turned on a lamp. She did not react when she saw the metal pipe lying across Molly’s lap.
Nor did Molly pick it up and use it as she had intended.
When she saw Moll in the lamplight what she saw in the lamplight was herself.
Moll removed things from the box and placed them on the futon: the gray scarf, the blue hoodie, the white T-shirt, the fleece socks. Not even David was aware of her fondness for that particular T-shirt, those particular socks. The most private and mundane of preferences. Known only to her. And to the person who had once owned them, too, elsewhere—the secret softness inside the pockets of the blue hoodie.
“Settling in,” Molly observed, trying to sound cold, but her vocal cords were disobedient, her voice the croak of a creature accustomed to darkness.
“Your turn,” Moll said.