“Charley,” Molly said. “Thank you.”
“Been there,” Charley said. She looked too young to be a mother.
“Just let me say goodbye to the No sign,” Viv said, queen of serenity. She licked her lollipop and stood too close to the glass case, petting the circle with the line through it. Ben wanted a toothpick, and Molly gave in, gave him one. He was pleased. He threw it on the floor.
Charley vanished. Molly tried to find her at the registers when they were checking out, but she didn’t see her anywhere.
In the parking lot the cars glowed in the weak sun, emitting a color of light that seemed to come from another world. Molly felt slow, drugged by fear and fatigue, moving as though through water. She was thankful that their car was still there, right where she had parked it. But what did she think anyway, that Moll was going to steal their car and leave them stranded at the grocery store?
It was not the car that Moll wanted.
Molly couldn’t go back home with the kids. Not yet. She wasn’t ready. She needed to clear her head. She needed to figure out how to keep them safe. Her milk was going to come down; she could feel the buildup, that heaviness.
She needed to take them somewhere to nurse and play—somewhere Moll would never think of, so somewhere Molly had never before thought of.
7
There was one ragged forsythia bush in the median, issuing forth a few crumpled yellow blossoms. Viv greeted the bush as though it were a lavish garden. The ground was mud and old grass, but they found a spot where they could spread the blue tarp from the back of the car and it would lie mainly on the latter. It was a grayish day, yet weirdly warm. Molly took off her sweatshirt and used it to soften the tarp for Ben. She lifted her T-shirt and unhooked her nursing bra and placed her body alongside his. While he took the milk, Viv orbited the forsythia bush, whispering to it, pretending its smallest branches were flutes.
The median was in the nicest residential area in town, blocks of grand old homes. Though there were cars passing on both sides, their pace was sedate enough. She applauded herself for remembering about these tree-lined malls. On any other day, she would not have considered a median in a tony neighborhood an appropriate playground for her children. Who knew what the residents might think, peeking past the drapes at the exposed breast of the mother, the dirt-darkened knees of the kid?
But Viv was happy, encircling the forsythia with her magic spells, and Ben was happy, gazing up at the crisscross of branches as he nursed. The birds were out; they were nowhere to be seen but their songs were extravagant. It felt somehow safe, this muddy ornamental island protected by the threat of passing cars.
I can do this, Molly thought. She did not know exactly what she meant by this.
Viv wanted to play hide-and-seek. There was no place to hide on the median. The bushes were still leafless from the winter, and the three trees were saplings.
“There’s tons of places to hide!” Viv insisted. “Just, come on, close your eyes and count to ten.”
Molly squinted enough to convince Viv that her eyes were really closed, and counted to ten. Ready or not, here I come.
Viv was fully visible on the other side of the forsythia, but she had turned away, as though her own inability to see her mother rendered her invisible.
Molly left Ben in the middle of the tarp with his squeaky giraffe and made a show of looking for Viv behind each sapling and under each bush. When she finally stalked around the forsythia—those short red-panted legs bright among the branches—and mimed surprise, Viv shrieked with joy. Sometimes she seemed so old, filled with complex understandings, but she was still so little. Molly held Viv for the few seconds allotted her before Viv refused to be held.
“Hey why is B allowed to have that?”
He had crawled to the edge of the median and was systematically yanking bulbs—daffodils? tulips?—out of the damp soil.
Molly rushed over to him, yanked him up as he had yanked the bulbs. One still dangled from his hand. Viv was perturbed by the mess, the disturbed dirt and ripped roots.
“We, we,” she fretted, “we have to fix it, Mommy.” Viv crouched over the mud and began to dig. Her feet were on the median, her knees jutting out toward the street. “Hey a worm.”
A car came by, too fast. The whoosh of it destabilized Viv, sent her tumbling backward onto the dead grass, and the driver, a thin woman, screamed something awful at Molly.
What the driver had said, though, was true. Molly felt crazy—crazy because only now did it strike her how dangerous this was, idiotic, their perch on the median.
She grabbed armful after armful of muddy tarp, balanced that on one side and Ben on the other, instructed Viv to keep close and hang on to Ben’s foot as they stepped off the median, crossed the street, returned to the sidewalk, leaving the pile of ravaged bulbs and upturned worms in their wake.
Ben’s diaper, she discovered, was leaking poop.
8
The kids were buckled into their car seats and she was sitting in the parked car, calling David. The car smelled of Ben, not the good smells of Ben but the bad smells of Ben. Viv, in the rearview mirror, made a big show of pinching her nose and gasping for air while the phone rang, went to voice mail.
Molly called him a second time, wondering why she hadn’t thought to call him last night, why she hadn’t called him this morning, why she had considered the median a reasonable place for the children. Doubting herself on multiple counts; unsteady with self-doubt.
On the fourth ring, he picked up. She could hear the sounds of rehearsal—instruments being tuned, strummed—in the background.
“Hey,” she said.
“What’s wrong?” he said, and she felt a flicker of relief, a flicker of calm, at how well he knew her—merely the tone of her voice, its slight unhingedness as she uttered a three-letter word, paired with her calling him twice in a row, and he understood that there was a problem.
Though now that she had the opening, his full attention from the southern hemisphere, she didn’t quite know what to do with it.
“Something,” she said, “happened last night.”
“What— Are the kids okay?”
She didn’t know what to say. “Yes,” she said.
She could hear him waiting for her to elaborate. But what were the words, the words she should use, and what was the effect that they would have? Not only on David, not only summoning him back across the globe, frantic about her sanity, about the children, but also on her, and on Moll, making it all the more true by articulating it.
“Molly?” he said.
There is another version of me. She came through the Pit. Her children are dead. She wants our children.
“If you need to confess that you had a one-night stand with someone, can it wait till I get home?” he said.
“No,” she said with a half laugh for his benefit. “Not that. It was—”
But then she sensed an alertness in the back seat, the acute presence of her children, and sure enough when she turned around there were four curious eyes on her, Viv’s so sharp, so intent, her entire body perked up; Ben craning around the side of his rear-facing car seat.
“You’re in the middle of rehearsal, aren’t you?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“The teapots are listening. I guess let’s talk later.”