In the Q and A following the tour, in the saga of extracting the kids from Corey’s attentions and getting them buckled into their car seats, the eerie sensation the woman had elicited in her was overshadowed by everything else. That was the same day Ben got a random bloody nose at the dinner table, a thin red thread that kept snaking out his nostril and down his lips, chin, neck, chest, no matter how many times she wiped it away.
11
She held tight to Ben, who struggled against her. Viv had reached the hall closet. Molly could hear the doors sliding open. She could hear Viv rustling around among the coats and hats and scarves and shoes and balls and toys.
She looked back to see if Viv was coming yet with the bat, but the hallway remained empty. Her head was still turned when Ben stiffened in her arms. She jerked back around. He was staring at the coffee table, gripping her shirt with his instinctual primate grasp.
There was no sign of the intruder, no audible breathing coming from the coffee table.
Yet the coffee table seemed to possess a different quality than before, a new sharpness to its lines, a sort of hyperrealness, almost a glow.
Nonsense.
12
Molly led the tour group the thirty yards over to the Pit. She thanked them for their interest in this unique paleontological site, as though she didn’t know what had really drawn them to the Phillips 66. She told, as always, the story of how Dr. Roz Moto, completing her doctoral research at a nearby fossil quarry, suspected and then ascertained (after some clandestine nighttime visits) that the field adjacent to the abandoned gas station was indeed fossil-rich. After receiving a small inheritance from her favorite great-aunt, she managed to purchase the land, which had been for sale for years.
It wasn’t long before Dr. Moto’s quarry was yielding a significant quantity of fossils—fifty, seventy, even a hundred per day. Peculiarly, though, about 15 percent of the species that she and her team had found in the eight years since the quarry opened did not match anything in the known fossil record or in our modern flora, which had caused a great deal of controversy among experts, including accusations that the fossils were fakes. It was frequently enough a challenge for paleobotanists to situate fossils in the record, and new taxa were identified all the time, but the quantity of mystifying fossils made the Phillips 66 unique. Dr. Moto had always liberally invited and warmly welcomed any and all paleobotanists, national and international, to visit the site and try to help make sense of their finds—but even so, comprehension remained elusive.
Then Molly made her standard joke (originally stolen from Corey) related to the fact that, sorry everyone, there are no signs of dinosaurs at this paleobotany site. Think how many more leaves there are on the planet than animals; so, plant fossils are a lot more common than animal fossils, if not quite as exciting.
Molly led them back to the old gas station, which housed, in its front half, the ad hoc display room overcrowded with glass cases exhibiting the most impressive and enigmatic fossils ever excavated at the site; once Roz concluded there was nothing more they could understand about Fifi Flower at this time, it would be added to the mix. Roz’s in-depth typed analysis of each fossil often went unread, especially nowadays. As soon as the tour group passed through the doorway, Molly could sense people peering across the room, straining toward the curio corner, the two small glass cases dedicated to the handful of human artifacts she had uncovered in the Pit over the course of the past nine months. She always waited until the very end of the tour to show them the Bible—less time for emotions to flare.
Increasingly she was coming to believe that she ought to have kept the objects in the cardboard box under her desk. Hidden, private. Why had she felt so strongly the urge to share them, especially the Bible?
Molly presented the various fossils, doing everything in her power to engage the tour group, to get them to contemplate the fact that this or that plant had gone so profoundly extinct that it was marooned without linkages in the fossil record.
But when the time finally came to approach the two glass cases of human artifacts, she fell silent. She allowed them to experience it for themselves, just as she had experienced it alone at the bottom of the Pit: the eeriness of a recognizable object that was slightly yet fundamentally off. A glass Coca-Cola bottle with the unmistakable white script tilting to the left rather than to the right on the red background. Wait, am I imagining this? A rusty Altoids tin that was a bit deeper and narrower than usual. The gorgeous hint of potsherd. And, Viv’s favorite: the small plastic soldier with a monkey tail emerging through a hole in the back of his uniform.
“Is this a museum or a dream?” a girl in a wheelchair had asked on a tour a few days back.
Molly agreed with Shaina’s (and Corey’s, and Roz’s) assessment that a sophisticated prank was the most sensible explanation. Yet how could any prankster—no matter how skilled—achieve such authenticity, such perfection, with such a random array of items from different time periods? Aside from their eccentricities, the artifacts seemed to correspond to similar known objects from specific eras: the pre-Columbian potsherd, the Bible from the early 1900s, the toy soldier from the 1960s, the Coca-Cola bottle from the mid-1970s, the Altoids tin from the 1980s.
Anyhow: on the tours, Molly let the objects speak for themselves.
The Bible was small, five and a half inches by three and three-quarters inches, an inch and a half thick; slightly water-damaged on the lower right-hand corner; its maroon binding worn to pink in places; the words HOLY BIBLE golden on the cover.
It looked like any other old-fashioned Bible.
Roz had left it open in the glass case to the first page of text:
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void;
and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
And God saw the light, that it was good:
and God divided the light from the darkness.
And God called the light Day, and the darkness she called Night.
The tour group pressed in around the glass case, while the children, bored, ran figure-eight loops among the cases containing fossils. Several people moved their mouths over the well-known words; Molly took in their faces, their awe, and it carried her once again toward her own awe.
Every time she saw the Bible, even there beneath the glass, Molly experienced the same dangerous charge, that buzz in her fingertips a month ago when she first carved away the dirt around it. The bliss of spotting that maroon edge, the shock that she hadn’t noticed it until this second, the ridiculous passing conviction that it had just sprung into existence. She felt the slightest sensation of heightened gravity at that moment; even now she could sometimes almost feel it, an extra heaviness tugging at her in the Pit.