She was still always about to throw up.
Moll, she thought with an odd flash of longing. And instantly corrected herself: Moll would be more dangerous than ever now, at this moment of utter vulnerability. If she were Moll, she acknowledged darkly, she would, yes, use this opportunity to—
The doctor called. It had been far less than forty-five minutes. She wept with gratitude.
The doctor was not concerned. The doctor said, “Don’t give them any liquids for an hour after they vomit. Any liquid at all, including water, and they’ll vomit again.”
It was true that, all night long, worried about dehydration, she had given them sips of water after they threw up, and, yes, they had kept throwing up.
“What about dehydration?” she said.
“Liquids are acceptable and essential, after an hour.”
“What about breast milk?”
“After an hour.”
“I’m sick too. I’m throwing up too.”
“Oh,” the doctor said.
Oh? she wanted to repeat back nastily, mocking the indifferent tone of this person who had taken the Hippocratic oath.
But instead she said, “Thank you.”
Somehow the kids were in the bathtub. Somehow they had their bath toys. But the toys drifted, ignored, because what the children wanted was water to drink.
“Water, Mommy, please, water, please!” Viv entreated.
“Wawa,” Ben joined in, “wawa, wawa,” wailing.
“No,” Molly kept saying like a wicked stepmother. “No water for you.”
“Water, please! Just water!”
A woman denying her children water.
“Wawa, petah!” Rubbing his hand across his chest, the sign language for please that Erika had taught him, pleading with his words and his body, any way he knew how.
“I will,” she said feebly, “set a timer. You have to wait a while longer or you’ll throw up again. That’s what the doctor said. Do you want to throw up again?”
“I’m so thirsty, Mommy. It hurts, please.”
Being a mother: it was too much.
“If you don’t give me water then I’ll drink the yucky bathwater,” Viv threatened, changing tactics.
The bathwater was beyond yucky, a film of yellowish something on its surface.
“If you drink it you’ll throw up again!” Molly rejoined, matching Viv’s tone.
Viv’s threats were paper-thin, and at the violence of her mother’s response, she collapsed into tears. “Water, just water, please, please!”
“Fine!” Molly bellowed. “Fine, fine,” unable to keep saying no. “Just a little.”
She poured water into the metal cup by the sink. First Viv drank deep, then Ben. They smiled at her like she had given them chocolate milk.
Ill at the thought of Moll, ill in anticipation of what would soon emerge from them thanks to her weakness, she pulled up the toilet seat and vomited once more. They watched, appalled, from the bathtub.
8
The bed was a bog. The bog sucked downward on their three bodies, keeping them close, trapped. It would help if she changed the sheets. Perhaps if she changed the sheets the bog would go away. On clean sheets, they might have some chance of escape. Some chance of striking a defensive pose.
But there were no clean sheets. Last night she had changed the sheets again and again and now there were no more. She could not go to the basement to do laundry. She was not strong enough, not brave enough, to pull open those metal doors.
So these sheets, this bog.
And outside the window, a movement, a threat. A head, maybe, or a branch.
At least time had passed and now she could, every ten minutes or so, pull herself out of the haze to give each child a sip of water, which she poured into a teaspoon and ladled into the arid, stinking mouths.
She had tried, many times, to get Ben to nurse, wanting so much to give him something pure of hers, but he kept turning away as though revolted, and she felt her milk vanishing, drying up.
They passed in and out of sleep. When she was asleep she dreamed of them and when they were asleep they probably dreamed of her.
Only while they slept did she permit herself to believe that she would never make it out of this bed alive. That the next time they woke from nightmares she would be lying dead between them, and they would have to slide off the mattress by themselves and pull the fridge open and forage for food and drink water out of the bathtub faucet or the toilet until some adult heard them crying and came to take them away from her forever.
There was no one to take care of anyone.
She woke to the sensation of something on her skin, weird movements beneath her, the mattress sweaty and sentient; she didn’t want to open her eyes but when at last she was bold enough to do so, she discovered that the bed was made of bodies, the naked bodies of sleeping women, women identical to Moll, identical to her, their bodies supporting her body, and she realized that she too was naked, indistinguishable from the rest, the heat of the others’ skin partway pleasant, partway repulsive.
The movement on her skin was not the movement of bodies but rather the movement of Viv’s fingers, tugging at her arm hairs.
“I want Mommy,” Viv was saying, “I want Mommy,” her voice rising.
The desire, the urgency and straightforwardness of it, yanked Molly into the moment. She was needed here; this she could do.
She sat up in the bog and brought Viv (eyes wide open, glazed) into her lap.
“I’m here,” she said, sounding to herself like a mother in a movie, “I’m here.”
“I want Mommy.”
“I’m here. I’m here. I’m right here.”
“I want Mommy.”
“I’m here.”
“I want Mommy. I want Mommy.”
“I’m here!” she cried out.
“I want Mommy! I want Mommy! I want Mommy! I want Mommy!”
9
At some point Viv stopped screaming the three unbearable words. Stopped midsentence, closed her eyes and was asleep. Ben, who Molly thought had managed to sleep through Viv’s frenzy, was in fact not asleep: he was watching his mother and sister, his cheek pressed against the stained sheet, perfectly still aside from the whimper she could hear only now that Viv had fallen silent.
“Little boy,” Molly said to him.
His whimper escalated.
“Do you want to feel safe?” she whispered.
He looked deep into her eyes.
“Let’s make a house,” she said, pulling the dank bedding up over their heads so the three of them were covered. He found his way to her like a creature born in the dark, accustomed to the dark, and nuzzled his head into her stomach. She ignored the suggestion of nausea this set off within her. They could be anywhere—in a log cabin on a mountaintop, in a submarine, in a capsule floating through the universe.
She searched for his hand and found it. It was so small. In the darkness they held hands. She could feel his heart beating in his hand.
The footsteps in the other room served as an echo of it, just another manifestation of the quick tip-tap, tip-tap, tip-tap of his heart. She did not believe in the footsteps as a real thing, an actual sound outside the tiny world she had created for her offspring beneath the blankets. She lay there amid her children, glistening.
No, not glistening.
Listening.
10
When Moll peeled the covers back, Ben smiled and reached for her, unperturbed by the sight of two identical mothers.