Molly had forgotten what a dramatic costume it was. Another item ordered online, scarcely glanced at before being passed along. She waved at Erika inside the glittering rubber mask, its metallic sheen and bulbous eyes. Erika offered a silent wave in response.
Viv was scared of the fish and in awe of the fish. When the fish extended a blue satin hand, Viv took it, majestically, and led her through the doorway.
15
Yes: the strawberries were 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. Also all the drawers in the kids’ bedroom had been opened and emptied, every book removed from the bookshelves, the train tracks and the blocks and the cars and the dinosaur puzzle, a stew of toys simmering on the floor amid discarded candy wrappers, the enduring evidence of the mauled piñata.
In the living room the adults drank; the wizened parents of four-year-olds knew always to bring along a six-pack to these infernal birthday parties. Molly, sober, somber, couldn’t bear the droll jollity of the other parents, they who rolled their eyes at themselves for having virulent opinions about various shows aimed at preschoolers, for considering a trip to sign one’s will with one’s spouse a date (as long as you spring for lattes en route). Three weeks ago, at a similar birthday party, with a similar crowd, she had been a force for droll jollity herself. Now she was fighting the urge to remind them that their children could die any day in any number of ways. Then perhaps they would not find it so amusing to gripe about the rotten pancake discovered at the bottom of the toy chest, about the inexplicable refusal to eat this or that vegetable that had heretofore been a reliable staple.
“Where’s David?” everyone kept asking her, and she kept explaining. Aside from that she hardly spoke, four or five words here and there. The phrase the tsunami of the party was running through her head, and whenever she spoke, it was an effort to make sure those words didn’t emerge from her mouth.
The children, caught up in their private momentum, grew bolder and more obnoxious by the minute. While the parents commiserated about parenthood, the children built and destroyed many towers. Molly gave herself over to the bustle of refilling bowls of chips, distributing juice boxes, snatching choking hazards away from Ben. She made herself dizzy from it, and when she took a second to look up at all the people idling around her overheated overcrowded home she could have sworn she was moving through a fever dream, a bright chaos to which she had no access whatsoever.
Dorothy’s mother, with Dorothy’s newborn sister strapped to her chest, asked Molly a question. It was a question about breastfeeding, about whether Viv had initially been jealous when Molly nursed Ben. Dorothy’s mother was a good-hearted woman who had incredible patience for in-depth conversations about sleeping schedules and teething troubles.
“Well,” Molly began (of course Viv had been jealous, she was human, wasn’t she?), “the thing, in my, in our, experience, about the postmortem period with the second kid is that—”
Dorothy’s mother looked stricken. “You mean,” she corrected, “postpartum.”
“Yes,” Molly said, “yes, postpartum.”
If Erika hadn’t been there, she would have been unable to endure it—but Erika was there, locating the bottle opener, catching the cup an instant before it tipped off the table, reaching under the couch to retrieve Ben’s ball. And the children were enamored of the fish, their mad dashes through the rooms always lurching back around to her. They wanted to stroke her fins and scales. Molly didn’t blame them.
A bunch of the children, Viv included, had crawled under the gray quilt of the big bed, pretending it was a cave. Erika yanked the quilt off them, exposing them to the light and triggering a spurt of screams, but their indignation was replaced almost immediately by delight, for the fish had a long blue rope, and it was clear that they were now supposed to take hold of this rope and follow the fish to the ends of the earth. Erika led them through the rooms, collecting more children as she went, until the blue rope was a twisting eel of small humans. The fish cleared the living room rug of adults with a few insistent arm gestures. Molly hurried to her phone to cue David’s whale-sounds mix on the speakers. The human eel encircled the fish, and the performance began.
It was not much. Erika juggled three scarves. She gave each child a length of turquoise ribbon taped to a pencil. She had a bubble blower that produced twenty-plus bubbles with each breath. It was not much, yet the children were entranced, swirling around the room amid the bubbles, waving their turquoise ribbons, spinning to the sounds of the whales.
Soon after the fish show, the party fell apart. Viv lost interest in her peers and instead shadowed her mother, following her into the bathroom, where she intently watched her pee. As Molly pulled up her underwear and jeans, Viv said, “Phew, now I don’t have to look at your skeleton anymore.”
When they returned to the party, Viv wouldn’t stop muttering, “IloveyouMommyIloveyouMommy,” a mutter verging on a whine, leaving Molly equal parts touched and annoyed. Viv clung so hard to Molly’s leg as she searched for the misplaced birthday candles that eventually she had to shake her off.
Viv wept as everyone sang “Happy Birthday” (Erika bearing the platter of ocean-colored cupcakes she had baked yesterday with the kids), but refused to explain why. So absorbed was Molly in trying to ascertain the source of Viv’s angst that she didn’t notice Ben, straining to reach the lighter on the table, the beautiful green toy of it. It was Erika who scooped him up and away.
Molly lost track of Viv in the pandemonium of the cupcake distribution. She watched her own hands passing out cupcakes as though she were acting in a play in which a mother passes out cupcakes.
She was overseeing Ben’s dismemberment of his cupcake when Viv reappeared at her elbow, bearing on her flat palm that selfsame hand cast in plaster, a gift from their kindly dentist.
“Please,” Viv said, lifting the hand on her hand, “put this somewhere away from these noisy children.”
Erika took the hand and placed it atop the bookshelf with utmost care.
The hand was precious indeed, a darling souvenir, a sweet little preservation of time, Viv at age three and a half, yet the sight of it always chilled Molly. It looked like an object associated with a dead child. David agreed; between themselves they referred to it as Viv’s memento mori. Molly didn’t like having it on display, but Viv insisted.
When the first guests to leave opened the front door, a pair of the silver balloons somehow escaped the confines of the house. There was a light but adamant wind, and the balloons rose quickly, alarmingly so.
Viv knew, from The Why Book, what happens to balloons let loose in the sky. What they can do to sea creatures, and to birds.
“Call the 911!” she screamed. “Call the 911!”
The rest of the guests were escorted out to their cars by the mournful howls of the birthday girl. The fish held her as she cried.
16
Ben was asleep at the wrong time. He had crashed around 5:00 p.m., too late for a nap and too early for bed. Viv was sitting on the toilet watching The Nutcracker on the computer, as she had been for who knows how long. The exhausted aftermath of the party: Erika cleaning the kitchen (still in costume, to maintain the illusion for Viv), Molly bunching up wrapping paper and gathering snarls of ribbon and restoring the children’s room to order.