“Turn,” Molly scoffed. Then, “Asleep?”
Moll nodded.
Molly felt depleted, as though it would require superhuman effort to restore herself to sufficient buoyancy to go up the stairs.
She rolled the metal pipe off her legs and stood, with effort.
“Do you feel like you’re losing your children?” Moll said.
The audacity of the question.
Molly hissed her response.
“Good!” Moll said, spitting the word out of her mouth like a curse. “Good! Because that’s what happened to me.”
They were too close to each other, same face to same face, like raging at yourself in the mirror. Molly recalled watching herself cry or laugh in the mirror as a child: observing her face distorted in despair or mirth made her cry or laugh all the harder.
“But your children,” Moll said, “are alive and well. Your grief is the tiniest fraction of mine.”
Molly envisioned them, smooth, asleep, just a few feet above their heads. She needed to be upstairs, near them, in case.
“You should go upstairs,” Moll said.
“We have to find her.”
“Her?”
“The bomber. She’s dead in your world but not— She was driving a black rental car, I saw it.”
“What can we do?” Moll’s voice was hollow. “Some woman in a black rental car two weeks ago? There’s nothing we can do.”
“She could still—” Molly said. “I tried to hide the Bible and the other artifacts but Roz and Corey—”
“Maybe someone killed her children,” Moll said.
“What do you mean?” Panic surged through Molly.
“Maybe,” Moll said, staring at the cement floor, “when your children are killed, you kill in turn.”
Frightened, Molly waited for Moll to say something else.
But Moll was quiet.
“I’m going upstairs,” Molly announced, but she did not move toward the stairs.
“When I’m with them,” Moll said, “I feel like I never lost them. And I feel like I’m losing them every second.”
Molly froze at this confession; found herself, for some reason, remembering the freshness of the amniotic fluid. Whooshing out of her, the cleanest thing she had ever encountered. That otherworldly liquid in which their impeccable bodies had been suspended, safe.
They were already standing so close, but Moll took a step closer, matched her body up to Molly’s: thighs to thighs, torso to torso. The slow and hurting beating of her heart. Molly smelled the unwashed smell of herself, doubled, heady. Moll’s face drooped onto Molly’s neck.
Despite having conceived and borne and birthed and nursed children, this was the most intimate human sensation she had ever experienced: Moll’s warm tears moving across the skin of her collarbone.
It was the lightest touch imaginable, traveling downward toward the indentation between her breasts. She found herself opening to it, open to it, this subtlest interplay between two echoing forms.
But it was too much. She needed to step back.
Yet she could not. She was addicted to it, to the movement of the tears, the lack of gaps between them.
After a while Moll pulled her head up off Molly’s neck, revoking the tears, and Molly braced herself for further distancing. But Moll’s lips too were parted, and their lips matched themselves up, and their teeth.
12
Upstairs, Molly carried the sleeping children from their room into her bed. It was unwise, disruptive to their rest and to hers, but she needed to sleep, or half sleep, beside them. She needed to look at them and look at them again the whole night long.
She drowsed and woke and drowsed and woke, and, in the in-between states, forgot about Moll and Moll’s children—instead was struck, at the sight and sound and smell of her children, by an outlandish joy, its tinge of sorrow momentarily inexplicable to her, until she remembered.
When the sky lightened, she pulled herself away from the meadow of their sleep. She took a shower and dressed for work and pulled open the window beside the evergreen, and then carried her pajamas to the basement. Moll was asleep on the futon, which had been pressed down into its bed form at last, the sheets spread out properly.
Only when Molly saw Moll sleeping there did she realize how much she had been dreading the sight of her sitting stiffly on the worn-out spot, cross-legged and unrested.
Her body still felt to her like an echo of Moll’s and when she looked at Moll’s body it still felt like an echo of hers.
She perched on the edge of the futon and watched Moll as she had watched her children. This was no meadow. Asleep, Moll’s face was still and sad, the menace faded into mournfulness.
13
Ben was eating yogurt naked in his high chair. Viv was jumping naked from the coffee table to the couch. Moll, in Molly’s pajamas, moved through the space with the serenity that Molly longed for on these solo mornings of getting the kids ready when David was gone.
Molly watched from inside the evergreen, straining to catch each word through the window she had opened.
“Hey,” Viv said (clear, loud), “do you know why I have such a huge belly?”
“No,” Moll said, surprising Molly with the flatness of her voice.
“Well actually it’s because I’m going to have a baby.”
Moll wiped the trail of yogurt off Ben’s chin, neck, belly.
“And do you know who that baby is going to be?”
“No.” Moll held out a pair of underwear for Viv to step into.
“You. Baby Mommy.”
Why wasn’t Moll more amused, more vivacious?
“You smell funny,” Viv said to Moll. “Why do you smell that way?”
Moll pulled a shirt over Viv’s head and said something that Molly couldn’t hear.
“Can I lick your eye?” Viv smiled in anticipation of the refusal, the begging.
But Moll nodded and knelt.
“I can?” Viv said with awe.
Molly had to stretch, stand on tiptoe, to witness them together on the floor. Viv put her hands on Moll’s cheeks and pulled her close and licked her eye.
“You taste different,” Viv said.
“Different from what?” Moll said.
But Viv just laughed.
And then they all left the room, no longer visible from Molly’s vantage within the evergreen.
14
Molly pulled open the curtain of her cubicle to find Roz and Corey inside, waiting.
“Where is it?” Roz said.
“It’s okay, Molly,” Corey said. “Just give it all back.”
“Give what back?” she said.
“At least this time you relocked the cases.” Roz was at her flintiest.
Molly panicked, wondered: Moll? The bomber? Some other extremist?
It would have been her, had she gotten the opportunity; that was why she had come to work.
But it had not been her.
“Molly,” Corey said gently. “Where are they, dear?” Corey, who, on another Earth, was appearing in newspaper headlines, was being remembered in an obituary. Were the articles mentioning his recent hundred-mile bike ride to raise money for science textbooks in local schools? Those killed in the blast include…
“I’m not feeling great,” Molly said.
“I can tell,” Corey said.
“Where’s the Bible?” Roz said.
“If we can just get the old girl back on her throne before the tour starts,” Corey said. “They’re already starting to gather outside. A rather devout-looking group, I’d say.”
His jolly declaration chilled her.
“The devout ones are the scary ones,” Molly said.
“I guess,” he said. “But we know what they’re here for, so let’s give it to them.”