“Look, I’ll take the four p.m. for you,” he said, putting down the dental pick and plucking up a needle. She and Roz mocked him for his tendency to use random utensils to prep fossils; still, he was the best prepper among them.
“You sure?” she said. It had only halfway been her intention to get him to make this offer. There hadn’t even been a 4:00 p.m. Friday tour until it had become a necessity three weeks before.
“Perfect way to start the weekend,” he said, sarcastic yet sincere.
Before heading out to the Pit, Molly stopped by the display room. She loved it at this time of day, between tours, the lights off, the fossils and artifacts emitting a certain quality of silence, a certain fragrance of dust. She wasn’t religious, but this Bible did something to her, quickened her blood. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters she called Seas: and God saw that it was good. Without quite meaning to, she pressed her hands together, as though to pray.
The woman at the British and Foreign Bible Society had been aghast when Molly called to ask if their organization had, in the early 1900s, printed a version of the Bible in which the pronoun for God was female. “But I have one such copy in my hands right now,” Molly was explaining as the woman hung up.
Usually she was pleased to descend into the Pit, a little break from the rest of her life, no one requesting milk from her body or asking her why pee is yellow. But today, as she made her way down, she missed the children vastly, painfully, to the point of distraction.
She missed David too: pictured him at the airport, going through security with multiple instruments, the large cases surely raising suspicions as they always did, schlepping them around during his layover, soon to board a plane that would take him so very far away.
Yet eventually the familiar process, the pattern of shovel, chisel, hammer, razor blade, soothed her, absorbed her, as it had for all these years. Her focus took hold of her and time passed around her. In the Pit, in times of observation, she forgot that she was a mother. That she existed at all, really, except as a pair of eyes and hands.
She worked too hard for a few hours, making up for the penny’s interruption to the day’s fieldwork. The earth offered up eight broken specimens, leaf varieties of which they already had many excellent intact examples.
When she looked up from her labor, the Pit was in shadow and the sky was changing color; soon she would race home to the children. She would come through the doorway and step into her alternate life, the secret animal life where she sliced apples and thawed peas and wiped little butts and let her body be drained again and again and refilled again and again. Where her moniker was cried out in excitement and need dozens of times a day. Where her bed was a nest with four different-size bodies rotating in and out of it, keeping it eternally warm. Where the messy, mobile chaos was the opposite of the hours spent in the Pit, engaged in the slow, endless process of carving through sediment in search of something.
17
The deer held The Why Book out to Viv like an offering.
Viv stopped midstep, hesitating, as though jerked backward by a magical thread, the thread of Molly’s love, the umbilical cord tugging the child toward the mother, holding her back at the edge of the cliff. She glanced at Molly, her eyes wide and glistening, and Molly thought, Yes, that’s right, don’t go, stay close.
But just as she thought it, just as she breathed out with thankfulness for the fact that Viv, very nearly four, had the sense not to run toward a masked stranger, the thread snapped, and Viv sprinted forward to snatch the book out of the deer’s hands.
Viv settled cross-legged on the floor and began flipping through it.
There was an intruder in the living room. They could be killed at any second. Yet her children did not appear frightened. This both distressed and reassured her. Was it true or false that children are like animals that can sense in advance when a tornado is coming?
Ben thrashed in her arms, wanting down. Her muscles were fatigued, but she forced herself to contain him. He grunted in frustration, straining toward the deer.
She felt the dizziness rising in her. She tried to catalog everything she could about the deer, tried to imagine herself filing a police report, detailing it all for David, but there was so little to note: the black clothing, the golden mask, his disarming stillness as he stood in the coffee table, the apparent confidence with which he inhabited their space.
The level of her vulnerability astounded her, destabilized her. David was miles away, thousands of miles away. And her phone might as well have been miles away, in her bag slumped by the front door; fetching it would require her to turn around, to leave Viv at the feet of the intruder.
She had only her body, her words, with which to save her children.
“Are you going to hurt us?” she was shocked to hear herself asking the deer, her voice quiet and even, an instinctual attempt to avoid alarming the children.
“Hurt who?” Viv said, looking up from The Why Book.
“Please, just tell me what you want,” Molly pressed. She gathered herself and looked right at the deer. But David had made the eye slits of the mask so narrow that she could see nothing within, just the darkness of a face and the slight shimmer of eyes.
“What’s this?” Viv said somewhere in the distance.
The intruder stepped out of the coffee table and edged back toward the screen door: a small, slim man. He seemed eager to leave, and she wondered if perhaps they had survived. But at the final moment, just before he exited, he raised his gloved hand and pointed at Viv, his finger sharp as a threat.
18
When she got in the car after work, the electronic beat for David’s song-in-progress came on. He liked to record the background parts onto a CD so he could think about what to layer on top as he drove around. Before the kids were born, she would often drive him around in the evening, all the windows down, the volume way up, and he would stare straight ahead and listen and figure out his music. They would go sometimes forty-five minutes without exchanging a word, just driving in the dusk and the dark, but she always felt closer than close to him then, as though the car itself was his brain.
She still had the sense memory of his arm, weighty and appreciative over her shoulders as they walked back to their little house those nights after parking the car.
It made for boring listening, David’s low looping rhythms with no melody, but today, missing him (missing him for himself, his wryness and his solidarity and whatever unpredictable thing he might say about the man who insisted on praying for her soul; missing his utility to her, to the home, another pair of hands to clean up, another pair of arms to hold a kid), she enjoyed it. The musicless music served to separate her from her workday, which had left her wrung out. It was a good soundtrack for driving past the stalled development, the exposed wooden sides of the unfinished houses and the upturned dirt hardening with time. And then the strip mall, the run-down boulevard.
It was tough, these unexpected gigs, being left alone with the kids for over a week with only a few days’ advance notice. But they needed the money, always. Yet she was weary. She wasn’t sure she had the stamina. She did have the stamina. So many meals, though, so many diapers, so many tantrums between now and next Saturday. The risk of someone throwing up; the risk of someone else crawling over and trying to touch the throw-up. What if the vertigo overcame her, those small intruding moments of disorientation? Plus Viv’s birthday party tomorrow. They couldn’t cancel the party just because he was gone; Viv had been counting the days for weeks. It exhausted Molly to picture the way the living room would look in less than twenty-four hours, the ocean-themed paraphernalia and paper cups and napkins and piñata detritus and cupcake crumbs and spilled juice. At least Erika would be there, inside the fish costume. Molly could pay her a little extra to help with the first round of cleanup.