“Well can I at least say happy birthday?”
She put the phone on speaker and held it up and David cried out, “Happy birthday, Viv!” and then a bunch of instruments started playing an elaborate rendition of “Happy Birthday,” and Viv gulped and grinned, and when the song was over, Viv yelled back, “Happy birthday, Daddy!”
9
“Who is Ben’s mommy?” Molly said.
“This lemon is Ben’s mommy,” Viv replied.
“Who is Ben’s mommy?”
“This fork is Ben’s mommy.”
“Who is Ben’s mommy?”
“The ceiling is Ben’s mommy.”
The kids found this game infinitely amusing. Every time they played it, Molly thought of a running joke she had with David, a question they would ask each other whenever the kids seemed eerily similar: Had Viv left messages scribbled in secret sibling graffiti on the walls of the uterus, information about what’s funny and what’s scary, memos that Ben had memorized in the womb?
“Again, Mommy.”
For instance, that ludicrous stage they had each gone through at around nine months of age, when they screamed at the sight of yellow kitchen gloves.
“Mommy, again.”
It frightened her how distant these memories seemed at this particular moment (the running joke, the yellow kitchen gloves), as though they were the quips and idiosyncrasies of another couple, another family.
She attempted to bring her focus to the task at hand: spooning their applesauce into two small bowls lined up on the kitchen counter. But her hands were uncooperative. Willing her fingers to still themselves, she carried the bowls to the table.
“Mommy. Again.”
“Who is Ben’s mommy?” Molly said.
“Ben’s diaper is Ben’s mommy!”
Molly shifted into autopilot, reciting her four assigned words every few seconds while Viv’s responses sent the children ever deeper into hilarity.
She felt eyes on her. She kept looking out at the backyard, looking at the evergreen bush by the window, looking into it. No body among the branches. A relief.
Yet not.
The thing was: if it were her, had it been her, she knew she would be in the evergreen bush, watching, starving, envious, agonized.
It was where she would have been, wasn’t it? So where was the other, if not there?
“Who is Ben’s mommy?”
“Stop it,” Viv was saying to her mother.
“Who is Ben’s mommy?”
“I said stop,” Viv said. “Stop saying that. We’re done. We’re done now.”
10
Molly could always tell exactly when Ben fell asleep because his body took on a sort of god-weight, a sudden and exceptional heaviness that pressed her into the rocking chair, a reverberation of the god-weight she had first experienced during pregnancy, that superhuman bulk manifesting within her own body.
From the beginning she had felt that her primary responsibility to them was to their bodies. Enabling each to grow from two cells into trillions of cells, into a body, and then ensuring that the body kept growing and growing. Come on, go ahead, take the milk from me, take it that your body may become far bigger than it is today.
But now, in the drowsy bedroom, Ben’s mouth separated from her nipple. His sleep lulled her to sleep. As she rocked him she kept losing herself for a few seconds. Each time she awoke she panicked, sensing an intruder in the home, forgetting and then remembering that Viv was in the hallway right outside the bedroom door, lining up fifty-two playing cards side by side. Viv loved the queen of clubs best.
“Viv?” she whispered, for the fourth or seventh or thirteenth time.
“Yessa?” Viv said, exasperated, her voice at the doorway.
“You still there?”
“Of course.”
She needed to stand up, put him in the crib, talk Viv into napping before the party. But she was having trouble moving. If she could just stay here floating forever then everything would be so much easier. Her right foot had fallen asleep, as had a muscle on the left side of her torso. Sleeplessness was a drug, but so was sleep. A doorway to another world. She let herself go through, fine, fine, it was okay to go, the queen of clubs was babysitting Viv, there was this long gray hallway to walk down, a place that was not too hot and not too cold but just right, a place that was not too bright and not too dark but just right, and at the end of the hallway something was happening, something luminous, she hurried to see, she felt herself smiling, anticipating, but the luminous thing was an explosion, not a cocktail party.
She woke with a start, a jerk, looked down at Ben; he wasn’t breathing, had her negligence in falling asleep caused him to stop breathing?—it had, it had!—but then, mercifully, he breathed, he was fine, he was not purple, he was the normal butterscotch color of himself.
She managed to rise from the rocking chair. With superfluous caution, she placed his body in the crib. She found a trail of playing cards leading down the hallway. She followed the trail out to the living room. The cards stopped at the couch, and there was Viv: asleep, hugging the queen of clubs to her chest.
The house had slipped into its alternate state of being, the sublime calm that envelops a space when its undomesticated residents are, at last, at rest. It was as though the house, too, slept, as though the walls themselves breathed, matching the pace of their breathing to the extra slow in and out of children sleeping, the lungs of the universe.
It was not right, she thought uneasily, not right at all; the ostentatious peace of her home, this deceitful normalcy, the rhombus of sunlight on the wooden floor.
11
She was slicing through the tape of the box of party decorations she had ordered online, extricating plastic fishes from among Styrofoam peanuts, when David called, the known ringtone.
Tears in her eyes at the sound of it.
Yet when she saw that he was requesting a video chat, she very nearly pressed the red Decline option, an instinct more than an intention.
She was scared of scaring him with her face.
He would see things there; he always did.
The reception, however, was terrible. His face pixelated and his voice monstrous. The room behind him looked dark and full of candles. His shadowy head moved glacially back and forth across the small screen. She placed the phone on the counter.
“. . . it there?”
“One o’clock,” she said.
“. . . knew”—his voice, abruptly, clear—“two-hour time difference. So you—”
But then he was saying something else and she had no idea, the reception again fragile, his words a blurred roar.
It would be a relief to tell him. It would mitigate this dread. It would mean reassurance, assistance, a path out of the labyrinth.
Though perhaps he couldn’t hear her any more than she could hear him. Perhaps her voice too was an indecipherable growl.
Perhaps it wouldn’t be a relief; his incredulity, the weight of his confusion and concern. And his inability to alter any of the facts.
Then it was all there: the video, the sound, David in the room with her.
“—fast?” he was saying. “For the next seven seconds.”
She noticed a bruise on her lower arm, a bruise whose presence she couldn’t peg to any particular moment, surely just another tiny injury procured in the distracted rush of caring for the kids, yet it disconcerted her.