He was in the bathtub, lying on his stomach.
“Ba,” he said again when they pulled back the shower curtain and looked down at him. There were seven mismatched puzzle pieces in the bathtub with him.
“We thought you were dead,” Viv said.
Molly scooped him up and crouched on the tiles, her back propped against the toilet, holding her children, but her children did not want to be held. They squirmed away from her.
“Sirens!” Viv observed. They were nearby, and coming closer.
“Sirens.” Molly was giddy with relief. “That’s the sound of humanity taking care of itself, did you know that?”
6
It felt like a small miracle to be here, in the normal light of the grocery store, the normal hum of it, the baby enduring his entrapment in the shopping cart with equanimity, the child gripping the lip of the display table, gazing up at pyramids of strawberries.
The strawberries were on sale; Molly stacked box after box in the cart, imagining a couple of generous bowls of strawberries adorning the table at her daughter’s fourth birthday party, though the image of the strawberries was followed almost immediately by the image of their destruction, berries dismembered by imprecise baby teeth, smears of red on the walls and floors, scattered bits of green too small to pick up with adult fingers.
A woman with short dark hair turned the corner from the cereal aisle into the produce section.
Upon an additional instant of inspection: not Moll.
And yet.
Shaky with the ebbing alarm, Molly found herself missing David, missing him desperately, missing him as she had not missed him in a very long time, in years, perhaps. She needed him: the shape of his body, the balm of his irreverence.
But it was only Saturday morning; a week yet before he’d be back at her side. And she could not imagine anything—no wisecrack, no wisdom—he might offer that would neutralize the fact of Moll.
“You said juice,” Viv was reminding her in the distance. “You said juice,” Viv repeated, and her voice grew closer, louder. Ben was twisting against the safety belt of the grocery cart. Viv was pulling on her hand. “Hey, are there tiny cubes today?”
Brilliant, Molly thought; the cheese samples would absorb the kids while she finished the last bit of shopping for the party—the juice boxes, the rainbow sprinkles, the streamers, the other expenses and excesses of the exhausted mother. What a thing it was, grocery shopping, so tedious and so crucial.
She steered the cart toward the butcher section, Viv jogging alongside to keep up. It ashamed her how ardently she hoped the store was offering cheese samples today, and how glad she felt upon seeing the plastic pedestal, the ziggurat of cheese.
“Sword, please,” Viv said. She liked the toothpicks even more than the cheese. But as soon as Viv had a toothpick, Ben wanted one too. He reached and strained.
“It’s not safe for a baby,” Molly said.
“Yeah, sorry, B,” Viv said, relishing it, “it’s not safe for a baby to eat cheese off a sword.”
His face collapsed, his cheeks instantly covered in tears. It pained Molly how cute he looked when he cried.
“Viv,” she said. “Don’t gloat. That’s not nice. I guess neither of you should get a toothpick.”
“What’s gloat?”
“Look,” Molly said to Ben. “I can’t give you a toothpick but what if instead”—she didn’t know what was going to follow, something compromising, some devil’s bargain—“I let you out of the cart?”
He stopped crying and smiled, knowing he had gotten the long end of the stick. She regretted her offer. But there was no going back.
She unbuckled him and lifted him out. Viv was on her third or maybe fourth piece of cheese.
“Viv, there are other people in the world, you can’t—”
Ben was already at the pedestal, using it to support his unsteady stance, stretching for cheese and toothpicks.
“Wait, Ben, stop—” She swooped him up and grabbed a handful of cheese cubes and shoved one into his mouth.
“Hey,” Viv said, “you got so many pieces for B, what about me?”
They could be dead. In another world, they were.
Molly grabbed a second handful of cheese from the display and distributed the cubes to the children.
“What’s this no?” Viv said, chewing cheese.
“What?” Molly was trying to catch the dribbles of cheese from Ben’s mouth before they hit the floor.
“What’s this NO?” Viv was pointing at a sign on the glass case of the butchery. She had recently developed an obsession with No signs: No Smoking, No Pets, No Barbecuing. The Circle With The Line Through It.
Molly examined the sign. It depicted a woman with a shopping cart containing a baby. Beside the woman stood a child leaning against the glass of the butcher’s case. All enclosed within a circle, all crossed out with a line.
“It looks like us,” Viv observed.
She was right. It did.
“So, what’s it saying?” Viv said. “No us?”
“I think,” Molly said, gathering herself, trying to overcome the agitation the sign had set off in her, “it means Don’t Let Your Kid Lean On the Glass.” An explanation intended as much to comfort herself as to inform Viv. Of course they didn’t want kids leaning on the glass, leaving their fingerprints. It was a generic informational sign.
“You mean like leaning on the glass like the way how I’m doing right now?”
“Exactly.” Molly couldn’t believe how chipper her voice sounded. “So don’t.”
“Okay,” Viv said. “I won’t. But I want to keep looking at this sign.”
“But we have to finish the shopping,” Molly said. “Remember, the juice boxes? You can have one as soon as we pay for it.” She didn’t respect herself, her never-ending tactics and bribery.
“I love this sign,” Viv declared. “And it’s my birthday. And I want to stay right here. Looking at it. Forever.”
“We have to finish the shopping,” Molly said.
Some moments later, Viv was on the floor, kicking and slapping the linoleum. Her barrettes had fallen out. She was screaming, not words but syllables.
Molly took a step back, clinging to Ben, who clung to her. Other shoppers had begun to assemble, to witness. Molly felt hot and helpless. The witnesses murmured and muttered, trying to help.
“I’m sorry,” Molly kept saying to everyone, to the world as a whole. “I’m sorry.”
She wished she had methods for ushering Viv back into her tamed self. But she had never developed any methods. The beast within fought its way out while the mother watched in awe.
As the tantrum continued alongside Molly’s repeated apologies, the witnesses either lost interest or trained their increasingly judgmental eyes on the mother.
The employee’s name was CHARLEY, and she had a lollipop. She knelt down some feet away from Viv and held the lollipop out with caution, as one would offer a treat to a stray dog.
Viv—from her post flat on the floor—reached for the lollipop, the rope back to the grocery store, to civilization.
Molly was astonished. Charley tore off the wrapper. The witnesses dispersed.