12
Moll closed the Bible and placed it on the windowsill beside her, between the Coca-Cola bottle and the Altoids tin.
“That should be destroyed,” Molly said from the bed, her mouth sour from sickness. Sadness rippled through her at the thought of obliterating the Bible. But presumably there was, somewhere, a world containing many thousands of copies of it.
“So,” Moll said, “you agree with her.”
“Her?”
“The bomber.”
“What?”
“She, too, wanted to destroy the Bible.”
Molly struggled to sit up in bed. She felt weak, dehydrated, uncertain of her abilities.
“Can you,” Moll continued, “imagine any circumstance under which you could do what she did?”
“No!” Molly said.
She looked at Moll and Moll looked at her.
“Only,” Molly admitted, “if. The children.”
It was true, she knew it, she could feel it solid within her, she bore inside herself all the dark possibilities: she would hide and lie and steal and starve and plot and be merciless and insinuate herself into someone else’s life. She would kill and she would die. If.
“Where is she now?” Molly said. “The one in this world, the one who… didn’t.” She pictured her crouching in every shadow, lingering behind every tree.
“Who knows,” Moll said.
And Molly saw her: running through a parking lot, crying at a bus stop, drinking desperately from a water fountain.
“The thing about that woman,” Moll said, very quietly. “The bomber. She.” Moll paused. “She really looked a lot like us.”
13
“Are you okay?”
“Well, I’m dizzy.”
Dizziness was one word for it: this sense of increasing distance from the known facts of her own life.
Billions of Mollies in billions of universes. Billions of Davids. All those other Vivs and Bens, their voices echoing through infinity, their eyes multiplied across the void like stars.
“Me too.”
Molly considered the Molly before her: a slight woman perched on a windowsill. This person was her nemesis, yet the sight of Moll inspired only a strange sense of calm.
She found herself thinking of the Pit, vaguely sodden at the bottom, its innocuous smell of dust and water.
“E pluribus unum,” Moll said.
“What?”
Moll picked up the penny off the windowsill and carried it to the bed and dropped it into Molly’s palm. It was surprisingly warm, almost searing, and Molly understood that it burned with its otherworldliness, until she remembered that the radiator beneath the windowsill had turned on for the evening.
Moll returned to the windowsill and closed her eyes.
Molly, too, closed her eyes, wondering what Moll saw on the inside of her lids.
Two parents form a circle around two small naked children.
“The umbilical cord,” Moll said, “runs both directions. The mother keeps the children alive and the children keep the mother alive.”
Molly opened her eyes. Moll’s were still closed.
“Whenever I’m playing with them,” Moll said, “I’m grieving them.”
Then Moll opened her eyes and made a gesture with her hand, a sort of flicking away of the words.
Molly knew she would never forget that hopeless gesture of Moll’s hand.
Moll, who belonged nowhere.
Molly, who did now sometimes grieve them when she was playing with them, but not always.
On the windowsill, the Coca-Cola bottle glimmered with its own light, and the toy soldier fluttered its monkey tail.
“Come here,” Molly said, but Moll stayed on the windowsill.
“It’s always going to be a duel,” Moll said.
Or maybe she said, “It’s always going to be a dual.”
At last Moll came down off the windowsill. Stepped across the room to Molly and lay down beside her on the bed and took her hand.
“My palm is sweaty.”
“Mine too.”
“Well, yes.”
Moll placed her other hand on Molly’s forehead. Again, the perfect steadiness.
“Fever’s broken.”
Molly knew that it was, but she did not want Moll to remove her hand, and when Moll did, she suffered a minor sensation of bereavement.
They lay side by side, holding hands.
And then Moll was on top of her, Moll’s face so close to her face. Their identical arms met, elbow to elbow. There was a moment when Molly could have thrown her off, could have asked indignantly what the hell Moll was doing, but that moment passed. She matched her shoulders to her shoulders. Her feet to her feet. Her thighs to her thighs. Her forehead to her forehead. Lungs to lungs, womb to womb, teeth to teeth.
She pressed down on her as though trying to press past her skin, into her blood, her muscles, her bones.
The sublime pressure.
It felt good, she had to admit, so good, until all at once it became too much, far too much to bear.
EPILOGUE
She woke, new.
The morning bright and quiet.
When her feet touched the floor beside the bed, an intense vitality surged through her legs.
This superhuman strength carried her down the hallway to the place where they slept. She opened the door and every single bit of love she had accumulated for them over the months and years was present in the room, or was the room.
After watching them sleep for some minutes, she went to the hall closet to get the backpack. She filled it with the necessary things: the diapers, the wipes, the apples, the string cheese, the crackers, the nuts, the water bottle, the sunscreen, the hats, the charger, the tablets, the first-aid kit, the Coca-Cola bottle, the toy soldier, the Altoids tin, the potsherd, the penny. The Bible.
On her phone, there was a text from him, a cheeky tender pair of sentences sent just before dawn, and, abundant with love, she replied in kind.
The moment had arrived to awaken them into the renewed happiness of the home. Recognizing it, they were happy too, and ate well, drank well, were amenable to the application of sunscreen. The baby took the milk he needed from her, rich, dripping white as he laughed.
When she went to the bathroom, leaving them alone together on the rug for a moment, she overheard the girl saying to the boy: “How could you be such cuter?”
She donned the backpack and opened the front door, the children pressing behind her. Holding the girl’s hand, carrying the boy effortlessly on her hip, she walked up and down the blocks in the surprising heat, searching for the car.
But she could not find it anywhere. She had no memory of parking it. All the blocks blurred into one.
They went back home and got the stroller, the baby carrier. She strapped the baby to her. She snapped the girl into the stroller. The children were agreeable, curious.
She could do the miles, even in this heat. She was in awe of her vigor, her rigor.
That familiar old slog of marching somewhere with both, pushing the kid in the stroller while the baby grows ever sweatier, ever heavier, against your chest, the diaper full. Today, though, her energies doubled, she could more than handle it. She did not ache. She moved quickly, despite her burdens. She was hyperaware of her thighs, her calves, the power with which they propelled her and the children across the pavement.