The kids would be fine. It’s you who would have to give something up, you of the perfect life.
When at last Moll released her, Molly’s eye landed on Viv’s long purple marker mark on the wall. The mark somehow steadied her.
She went to the kitchen, looking back to make sure Moll wasn’t following, and dampened a sponge and brought the sponge over to the marred wall. She rubbed at one end of the mark. The purple ink began to run.
Moll sprang up off the floor and lunged for the sponge and seized it.
Enraged, Molly reached to reclaim it.
Moll strained to keep the sponge away, her arms at full extension. She stood before Molly in this position of abandon, her skin and hair reeking of rubber, the blue fabric of her fins quivering. Her eyes urgent, unveiled.
“Don’t wash them away,” Moll said.
19
She woke up in the Pit. She was alone. The Pit was its normal color. So was the sky. She cried for joy, realizing it had all been a nightmare, though she was confused about how she had managed to fall asleep in the Pit. She was partway up the ladder when she glanced back and noticed a penny glinting down there, half-covered with dirt already, must have fallen out of her pocket; even though she had always been conscientious about avoiding that sort of contamination, she did not go back down to pick it up. She told herself she would get it first thing in the morning, but for now she was dying to get home to the kids. The parking lot was empty, which was strange, because she had driven to work that day. Or maybe she hadn’t, maybe David had dropped her off. The morning felt long ago and fuzzy. She ran toward the Phillips 66, which was undamaged. She looked through the big window and saw that the Bible was there, its glass case not shattered. The whole place had its normal serene early-evening feel, Corey and Roz already gone home. Her bag wasn’t beside her desk where she usually left it, which was also strange, but at least her keys were in her pocket. She wanted to see David, to tell him about this blip in her day and try to figure out what had happened. She would walk home. She felt elated. She would surprise the kids and David.
She would be happier than she had ever been.
She was wearing dark clothing and it wasn’t until she reached the second telephone pole on the frontage road (a passing trucker honked and flashed his lights and yelled out the window, “You okay?”) that she admitted to herself that her jeans and black shirt were hardened with a sticky, rusty substance. She had been so brilliantly ignoring the brownish smears on her hands, the throb of her temples. She ran back to the Phillips 66. She unlocked her locker and grabbed her change of clothes and went into the bathroom and washed herself and swapped the clothes and shoved the messed-up clothes in the locker and worked hard to forget about them.
She walked along the frontage road as night fell. She watched handfuls of birds reel in the sky. Her elation had dulled but she pretended it hadn’t. She needed to be home and she began to run and by the time she reached the thoroughfare she was nearly sprinting. She treated the neon sign of Excellent Laundromat like a finish line. After passing the Laundromat, she turned right. She was ecstatic because even from two blocks away she could see that they were playing out in front of the house. She could hear them and she could see their bodies, perfectly intact. David was holding Ben and counting nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, ready or not, here I come! Viv was hiding in a silly place, in plain sight, only a quarter-hidden by the crab-apple tree.
“Got you, got you,” David growled.
Got you! she was about to growl too when someone opened the front door and released out onto the lawn that Scotch-colored light cast by her favorite lamp. Erika, dear Erika, she assumed, but the children turned their faces toward the light and cried out, “Mamamamamama!”
“Spaghetti,” the woman promised with her same voice.
By the time she reached the front steps, they were all inside. She walked around to the back. She didn’t try to hide herself. She didn’t sneak through the bushes. She had no reason to. The other woman was, obviously, an imposter. But inside, on the other side of the window, they were all behaving as though everything was normal, David carrying forks to the table, Ben reaching for the saltshaker, Viv testing each chair to see which one suited her tonight, David pulling the saltshaker away from Ben before he dropped it on the floor.
The woman inside passed by the window, which she herself had pulled up twelve hours earlier to let in fresh air. She witnessed an instant of weariness pass over the woman’s features as she glanced out at the dusk. How dare she look so weary. If the woman inside spotted the woman outside, she could have easily assumed it was her reflection.
“I got you something special,” she heard the woman say to her daughter.
She had grabbed, at the convenience store on the way to work that morning, at the last second, as the guy was ringing her up, a fruit leather for Viv. She had been short with the kids when she was leaving because they had taken every single pot and pan and lid out of the cabinet while she was in the shower and scattered them all across the floor. “It’s just pots and pans,” David had said, and she had hissed, “Easy for you to say,” and the children had stared at the parents with those four huge eyes of theirs.
The woman told Viv that she could have the special treat after dinner if she ate four spinach leaves and twenty-one peas; Viv had recently begun to find numerical precision very convincing.
She walked around the corner of the house, crunching through dead leaves, pressing forth into the evergreen bush in order to access the other window, the one with a better angle on the dining area. There was a sudden hubbub at the dinner table; at first she assumed their acknowledgment of her presence was the source of the crisis, but then she saw that Ben had a bloody nose, a red thread snaking from his nostril all the way down his bare chest to his diaper (someone, presumably the woman, had taken his shirt off so it wouldn’t get messy at dinner). Viv was crying because of the blood. Ben was laughing because Viv was crying. David was running for tissues. The woman looked tired, worried and tired.
It was then that she noticed, there inside on the coffee table, her keys, the ones she had used not an hour earlier to open her locker at work, that unmistakable beaded loop Viv had made at preschool. How had this woman possibly gotten ahold of her key chain? Enraged, she reached into her pocket. But her keys were there. The exact same keys. The identical one-of-a-kind beaded loop. It was horrifying to see them both at once, Viv’s random beadwork impeccably replicated, the implication of her still-babyish fingers struggling to string the beads, the image of twin Vivs laboring over the green bead, the yellow bead, the purple bead.
She left the window that was not her window and the house that was not her house and the husband who was not her husband and the children who were not her children. She walked all night, numb to the world around her. She walked in areas she had only ever driven by and areas she didn’t know existed. At some point she slept on concrete and awoke beneath a highway overpass. She had no idea where she was but she walked until she recognized something and, after many hours, she returned to the house, to the evergreen bush. Her children were in the living room, perfectly intact, with Erika, perfectly intact. They were surrounded by hundreds of crayons and puzzle pieces and then they opened the back door and yelled at the squirrel trying to get into the bird feeder and it became a game for them to open the door and yell “Go away!” even long after the squirrel had gone away. She watched them from deep inside the evergreen until the mother and father returned. It had given her solace to watch the children but it wounded her to watch the family. Again she walked all night and slept somewhere. She used the toilet at convenience stores or squatted in the woods in the park, and she squeezed her milk out into unclean sinks or into the dirt, and when she couldn’t bear her thirst she drank from water fountains, but she did not eat anything and she was ready to die. She stank and being a vagrant made sense to her. She didn’t believe that her body was still alive now that their bodies weren’t alive. She thought of the way their room smelled in the middle of the night, sweet and sour. She walked in the dark and thought about her errors. She should have destroyed the Bible, and the other artifacts too, without ever showing them to anyone. She should have been more scared of the threats. She should have refused to give any tours. She should have kept her children safe in a beautiful locked attic somewhere. A sky painted on the ceiling. She walked along the highway softly screaming and eager to die.