As soon as one child stopped whining, the other child would begin whining. And then, sometimes, a duet.
She needed to make a plan, some way to navigate these hours, to distract the children enough that she could let her thoughts run along their own fretful tracks.
The plan was: Let’s go and sit on the front steps and count the passing cars. Like watching paint dry. Okay, but a plan is a plan. A plan is power, anticipation, kids jumping up and down, clapping their hands, no matter how feeble the plan.
“We’re going to the steps! To count cars!” Viv shepherded Ben to the front door.
“Bebock,” Ben said.
“What?” Molly said.
“Bebock,” he said.
“Come on,” Molly said, rushing them though there was no rush. Just the rush to escort them into a few minutes of peace.
They were both, finally, out the door. She pulled it shut behind them, wanting to draw a solid line between the place where they had been cranky and the place where they would no longer be cranky.
The door would not close. She yanked harder. There was resistance, something preventing it from shutting the final half centimeter, maybe a strong draft blowing through the house? Maybe a toy jammed on the other side of the hinges? Maybe someone pulling on the door with equal force from the opposite side?
Or, she realized only as Ben’s howl took root in his bowels and rose upward: Ben’s right ring finger, somehow lodged in just the wrong place, the place that she had been clamping with all her force.
In horror she reopened the door, releasing the finger, and both she and Viv descended upon him in a fruitless effort to comfort. For a long time the three of them were suspended in a moment from which there was no escape: the shrieking boy, the terrified sister, the guilty mother.
The finger seemed fine.
Or so she told herself. He wouldn’t let her get a good look at it.
After a while, the sound of bagpipes could be heard a long way off.
“What’s that?” Viv said, lifting her head from the spot where she had nuzzled into Molly’s shoulder.
“Bagpipes,” Molly explained to Viv over the noise of Ben’s weeping.
Slowly the bagpipes drew closer. Ben stopped crying. He listened.
“He should have said ‘Excuse me’ to the door. Right, Mom? If he had said ‘Excuse me’ to the door this wouldn’t have happened.”
Ben crawled into Molly’s lap and stood on her legs and wrapped his arms around her neck and let her whisk the tears off his face. He tugged at her shirt. Her unmarred black shirt. She lifted it so he could nurse.
“…up above the world so high, like a diamond in the sky…,” Viv sang along with the bagpipes.
It sounded weird, “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” on the bagpipes.
Still nursing, Ben opened and closed his fingers for the twinkle part, as Viv had trained him to do. His right ring finger moving just as well as the others.
“Am I going to see the pagbipes?”
“Bagpipes. Yes. This is your first time ever seeing them I think.” Yet another item on the near-infinite list of things to which she had introduced Viv.
“And then her mother took her to the ruined schoo-oo-ool!” Viv sang along with the next verse.
“What?”
“And then her mother took her to the ruined schoo-oo-ool!” Viv continued.
“Who told you those words?”
“Made them up.”
The sound of the bagpipes came ever nearer. The musician turned the corner. A young woman. She was not playing the bagpipes. She was playing a reed instrument that Molly didn’t recognize.
“Bagpipes!” Viv said.
18
Viv wanted to go into Ben’s crib with him so they could pretend to be newborns. As Molly lifted them in (thinking that she was not doing a very good job, that in a mere twenty minutes she had wounded the baby and misinformed the child), her foot came into contact with something bulky beneath the crib.
Her big old brown duffel bag, shoved into the shadows, packed so full its contents strained the zipper.
“Why’s the suitcase under here?” Molly said. “What’s in it?”
Viv looked at her strangely.
“Everything we put in it, of course,” she said.
“Toys?”
“Mom, you know.”
Molly reached for it.
“Leave us alone!” Viv said. “Close the door!”
Molly dragged the duffel out to the living room. She unzipped it: a good bit of the kids’ clothing, some of their favorite stuffed animals and blankets.
She found her phone. She called David. It was time.
But his phone went straight to voice mail.
She called him again, staring at the duffel. She had the urge to scream, to leave such a scream on his voice mail that he would come to them at once; that even if they were gone when he arrived, he would know to search for them, would know to assume the worst.
But instead she left a message: asked him to call her as soon as possible, put enough of an edge in her voice that he would understand she meant it. He would recognize that she was ready, now, to explain why she had been the way she had been.
After hanging up, she was struck by the silence coming from the children’s room.
The scream lingered just inside her, searing, awaiting its moment.
She gathered herself before opening their bedroom door.
19
Moll was not in the basement.
Molly said her name once, twice.
So where was she? Out in the world? With the Bible and the other artifacts? Enacting some plan? Laying the groundwork for a kidnapping?
Then, she spotted Moll beyond a stack of cardboard boxes, on the folding chair at the base of the window well, staring upward at the slight light, holding the metal pipe upright in her left hand like a cane.
It was the chair where Molly sat when she came down late at night to listen to him play. Once in a while she could see the moon from there, bright at the top of the window well. It gave her an odd sense of familiarity, to see Moll there, to witness herself perched on her perch.
“Please,” Moll said. “Go away.”
The cold voice of someone looking back on two pregnancies, two births, all the months of breastfeeding, the years of exhaustion and bliss? The cold voice of someone considering the androgyny of the skeletons of children?
“Why did you pack the duffel?” Molly said.
Moll cleared her throat, a painful sound.
“You,” Moll said, “always have to check to make sure their fingers aren’t in the door.”
Molly’s first instinct was to defend herself, she was only human, but when instead she agreed, “I should have been more careful,” the self-flagellation came as a relief.
“I should have been more careful,” Moll repeated.
She had yet to look at Molly. She was only looking upward, outward, into the window well. Molly watched her every movement, kept her eyes on the metal pipe that could at any second become a weapon. But Moll hardly moved.
“We were playing,” Moll said. “Vacation.”
It was then that Molly registered the five-by-seven white rectangle placed directly, deliberately, beneath the folding chair. Though the photograph was facing downward, Molly knew what it was: the single image David kept in the basement, taped above his keyboard, a picture he had taken last Halloween of Molly holding Viv and Ben (a spider, a ladybug) on the front steps. She recalled their resistance, their glee, their bodies straining away from her.
A photograph, she realized, is a fossil.
“You can do dinner,” Molly said. Astonished, as she said it, by her exceptional generosity, momentarily forgetting that it was a generosity tinged with fear. She took off her black shirt and unzipped her jeans and awaited Moll’s happiness. That permanent raw greediness in her eyes abating somewhat in the moments before she was reunited with them.