“No more than you do. From a world where Hitler was just an artist? Or where Columbus’s ship sank? Or where some cave woman ate one berry rather than another on one particular afternoon? Who knows.”
A world where. A world where.
Understanding buzzed electric through Molly.
The thing she had known and not known for a long time. The unfathomable fossils. The unfathomable artifacts. Evidence of other iterations of the universe.
“What did Viv do in your world at three in the morning on the fourth day after Ben was born?” Molly had to ask. She still bore the sense memory of it: stitches straining while she crouched to scoop vomit off the bathroom floor while both children howled in David’s arms. Later, when David quipped, Our cup vomiteth over, she didn’t smile.
“The floor of the bathroom,” Moll said with a terse nod. “The strain of the stiches.” There was something dark in her eyes, something dark and distant.
“That time,” Molly said, frantic to test another secret memory, “nursing Ben when he was a month old and his palm happened to be in just the right position to catch a droplet of milk, did you—”
“Please!” Moll said. The ferocity of her voice startled Molly. Just one polite word, yet in her mouth it became a vicious insistence on silence.
Moll folded inward on herself, pulling up the hood of her black sweatshirt. Molly recognized it then as one of David’s old hoodies, the smudge of gold spray paint at the elbow. Hooded, Moll stood up and walked over to the fridge. She opened the freezer and put her face into the coldness, inviting it to numb her features.
When Moll finally drew back, her face was shiny and incapable of forming any expression. The scab on her face seemed more distinct than before, a black slash.
Only then did Molly notice a companion to that scab, just above the clavicle, two inches long, hidden by the sweatshirt at most angles. And, nearly concealed beneath the chin of the chilled face: a pair of bruises.
Moll stepped from the fridge to the kitchen sink. She unzipped her sweatshirt and pulled up her T-shirt and unhooked her black nursing bra. Molly was wearing its twin, though Moll’s looked more worn. She watched Moll cup the breast (same freckle), right hand on the bottom, left hand on the top, the exact position. Moll squeezed, and the milk shot out, six slender arcs into the steel sink. The soft hiss of milk hitting metal.
Molly stared.
“I’ve been hand-expressing for fourteen days,” Moll said.
Watching it made Molly’s breasts sore and her wrists ache. “Why?”
Moll looked at her with scorn. “Because I don’t want my milk to go dry.”
“You don’t want your milk to go dry?” Molly couldn’t come up with her own words.
“Do you remember,” Moll said, “two Fridays ago, after the firestorm about the Bible began, a woman on the tour? A thirtysomething in a baseball cap and sweatshirt?”
A sudden hardness in Molly’s stomach.
“The same day,” Moll said, “I put up that photo of the kids as the wallpaper on my computer at work.”
“With the backpacks?” Molly said, trying to ignore her ever-expanding terror.
“Even though that picture caught them in between smiles, I thought it was cute, but when I saw it big on the screen—”
Molly’s mug tipped over, milky tea spraying and gushing. Clearly her elbow had done the deed, though she hadn’t been aware of it.
Neither of them moved to fetch paper towels.
Instead, Moll let go of her breast, though it was nowhere near drained, and rehooked the bra. She went to the fridge and pulled out the wine and got one of Norma’s blue glass goblets from the cupboard and brought it to the table and placed it on top of the spilled tea and opened the wine and poured the wine.
Molly drank. Moll watched.
7
The wine was gone. Molly had drunk it too quickly. Moll refilled her glass.
“I’ll come home with you,” Moll said, “to nurse Ben.”
It occurred to her that Moll wasn’t drinking any wine.
It occurred to her that Moll had poisoned the wine.
It occurred to her that wine is already a kind of poison.
“No,” Molly said.
“You shouldn’t nurse him when you have alcohol in your bloodstream.”
“It was only one glass.”
“I can do it for you,” Moll said. Her tone was casual, accommodating, but Molly was repulsed by the hunger shimmering in her eyes.
“No,” Molly said.
“Let me,” Moll said, reaching for Molly with her fingers, those bloody cuticles.
“Go nurse your own child.”
Molly leaned away from her, just out of grasp, but Moll lunged across the table and caught Molly’s upper arm. There was something strange about Moll’s touch, something searing even through the fabric of Molly’s shirt. She could not bear it, the sensation of those fingers on her. The untended nails, sharp and dirty.
“My children are not here,” Moll said.
“Back where you came from.”
“They are not there.”
“Let go of me.”
“You have to let me. Because your children are perfectly intact.”
“ ‘Perfectly intact’?”
“Your children are perfectly intact.”
“And your children?”
“Your children are alive.”
8
The brief relief (after pulling away from Moll, after being released by Moll) of the moments spent in Norma’s powder room without that wounded mirror face, the sight of the face in the actual bathroom mirror, the straightforward act of pulling tissues out of the decorative hen cozy perched behind the toilet; for an instant Molly felt almost sane, moored by the Dove soap, the red hand towel.
But then, exiting the bathroom, returning to the kitchen, a cosmic precariousness. The anguish of the other was a contaminating force spreading throughout Norma’s house, the hallway, the floor, the ceiling, and Molly found herself polluted, debilitated, by images she could no longer keep out of her head.
When he picked up Viv, she was so limp that her head lolled back and her hair dangled wildly.
Moll was sitting at the table as still as anyone could possibly sit. Her eyes closed. Not a twitch behind her eyelids. The spilled tea continued to drip and spread, untended.
The need to go home. The need to dispense with this intruder, this nightmare, and return to two small impeccable bodies. The excruciating need.
Moll opened her eyes and saw Molly and made a gesture at her own body, her scabs, her bruises, the borrowed kitchen, the wine bought with money that didn’t quite belong to her, as though to say: It could have been you.
They stared at each other, the Molly with the live children and the Molly with the dead children.
9
Molly was standing by the doorway and Moll was insisting on saying: “. . . and Erika died. And Corey. And two or three or four tourists. And, of course, that woman.”
Molly was standing by the doorway and Moll was offering her water: “Here, come on, drink. Drink.”
Molly refused the water. Instead, she said: “It’s time to let your milk dry up.”
Moll fell back against the wall as though slapped.