“Are there any women on the tour?” Molly said.
He looked at her funny. “Um, yes.”
“Like what age?”
“Molly,” Corey said, “whatever this is, it’ll pass. I promise. Can you get the things now, please?”
“I don’t have them.”
The bark that was Roz’s laugh. Something about that laugh, its unassailable confidence, set Molly off.
“Where,” Molly said, “do you think they come from? All these fossils and the Bible and the rest?”
“From a parallel universe, of course,” Roz singsonged.
Roz was joking. But Molly decided to run with it anyway.
“Well, what about it?” she said. “What if the Pit really is some kind of seam where things from other possible worlds come through, like from the world where the Neanderthals didn’t go extinct, or where, I don’t know, Hitler was just an artist?” She felt herself carried by a peculiar momentum: the Pit, the cosmic trash heap, the dumping ground for debris from infinity, the rip in the fabric of the multiverse; the precarious, hazardous seam. “Or the world where the three of us are religious zealots rather than paleobotanists, or maybe just the world where once I put strawberry jam on my sandwich in seventh grade rather than apricot jam. What if stuff from all those places slips through the Pit into our—”
She stopped, noticing how intently Roz and Corey were gazing at her.
“Yeah,” Roz said. “I get what you mean.”
Corey sighed grandly. “Hey, I love sci-fi as much as the next dork.”
“It’s not science fiction,” Roz countered.
Molly looked at her. Had Roz, too, met her double, another Roz?
Her milk came down.
“It’s a metaphor,” Roz continued. “That’s what fossils from dead lineages are, you know? Messengers from alternate realities. Fifi is just one possible future that didn’t pan out. I think of it that way too. So, is the Bible on the premises?”
“I don’t know where it is.” Not a metaphor, Molly wanted to say, feeling extraordinarily lonely, not a—
But she need not be lonely. There was someone. One person who understood everything, and more.
“Just bring the Bible and the other artifacts back tomorrow,” Roz said.
“I can keep them at bay for one day,” Corey said, “maybe.”
“After all, we have to make a living, right?” Roz said.
“Living-ish,” Corey quipped on his way out.
15
It was a warm, raw day. Standing in front of the Phillips 66 she saw many shades of gray and white (the field, the sky, the highway entrance ramp). She had stepped out for fresh air, to clear her head, to try to make some kind of plan, but when she opened the door all the people on Corey’s Tuesday-morning tour turned to look at her, and kept looking over at her amid their questions as to the current whereabouts of the Bible, and she went back inside after less than a minute.
She was sweating, sweating an excessive amount, and her bra was damp; her self-created wetnesses were increasing her anxiety.
Who had taken the Bible?
She went to the bank of lockers in the windowless employee room in the back—a holdover from the gas station days—where she and Corey and Roz kept spare clothes for when they got too dirty in the Pit. She couldn’t remember the last time she had opened her locker but she was pretty sure there was a spare shirt in there.
When she opened it, a clot of clothing fell onto her feet.
She leaped back.
A clot of blood-encrusted clothing.
She could smell it. The rust.
Jeans, a black shirt.
That stiffness of the jeans.
The same black shirt she happened to be wearing today.
16
Molly was pulling out of the parking lot of the Phillips 66 when the black car pulled into the parking lot: a clean, compact vehicle with that rental-car gleam.
She reached for her bag, on the passenger seat beside her, shoving past the bloody clothing in search of her phone. She dialed Corey with her thumb as she drove along the frontage road. She could pull a U-turn—she could, she should.
But the extent of her bravery was to call Corey.
“Wait did you leave?” Corey said. “Roz was just—”
“Is there a woman in a black car in the parking lot?”
“I’m in my office.”
“Can you go and check?”
“Sure.”
She waited.
“Corey?”
“Just a sec. I just have to send this email.”
“Please, quick, check, right now. But stay inside. Don’t go outside. Okay?”
“Molly! Okay, okay, okay. Okay, I’m walking to the front. Okay, I’m looking at the parking lot.”
“And?”
“Yep. Black car. About to park.”
“Is she wearing a sweatshirt?”
“Wait, never mind. Not parking. Just passing through.”
Just passing through.
“Is she wearing a sweatshirt?”
“I’m not even sure she’s a she. But anyway it’s leaving now.”
Molly did pull a U-turn then, but by the time she was back in front of the Phillips 66 parking lot, there was no black car in sight.
She pulled a second U-turn. She was making herself dizzy.
She opened all the windows in the hope that the wind would clear her head, but it just increased the dizziness. She closed the windows. But that was too airless. She opened them again.
Stopped at a red light, she watched a woman with a baby in a carrier in the crosswalk. The woman was missing both forearms. Molly was filled with pity (How would you bathe it, nurse it, put it to bed?) until the angle changed and she realized the missing forearms had been a trick of her eyes.
She kept waiting for the bloody clothing to shimmer or disappear or otherwise start to seem less real than the corresponding clothing she was wearing.
But it remained there on the passenger seat, spilling out of her bag, unchanging, inactive: real.
That blood was the blood of her children.
That’s what it was.
She could take it to a lab, get it tested, find out if the DNA matched.
She made a left where she should have made a right, drove toward the reservoir. The day was still gray and white. There was green in places, blue in places, but what she saw was the gray and the white. She parked in the turnabout beside the bridge and cradled the clothing as she walked to the middle of the bridge, acutely aware of the two wet patches of milk on her chest.
She hesitated only an instant before hurling the clothes into the water. The cars and trucks rushed behind her, loud and divinely indifferent.
She thought she would feel relieved but she did not feel relieved.
There was one other pedestrian on the bridge, a gaunt man with a small camera. He stared at her. Then he pointed his camera straight up and took a picture of the sky.
17
The children were cranky. Maybe everyone would be better off if Erika had stayed until the appointed time. If Molly, after parting with the clothes, had continued to drive dizzy around the gray and white world with the wind in the car.
But at least today she had not been usurped by Moll.
She couldn’t stand her phone, the long record of missed calls and declined video chats and neglected texts from David. She couldn’t stand the cluttered surface of her home desk, all the unopened mail, couldn’t stand to glance at her email, the untended in-box overgrown with notifications from Viv’s school and pleas from good causes and notes from various people she knew. How exotic, outrageous, the normal business of life.