Moll appeared unable to step forth into the room.
“Aren’t you so glad toothbrushes are alive?” Viv said, her uninhibited voice perfectly audible through the half-open window. “If they weren’t alive then we’d all have such brown teeth, right?”
Viv didn’t even glance over at Moll, who seemed to be relying on the wall to remain upright.
“Mommy?” Viv said. “Right?” Still she didn’t look at Moll; she was busy revoking a Cheerio from Ben.
Moll pressed herself off the wall and walked toward the table.
“Right,” she said to Viv, the word little more than a breath. “But actually toothbrushes aren’t alive,” Moll continued, her voice stronger with each syllable.
“Oh.” Viv looked at the bowl of fruit on the table. “Are those apples alive?”
“No. Well, yes. I don’t know. Kind of.”
Finally Viv, laughing, looked at Moll.
“Mama, don’t you know things?”
“Ba wa,” Ben demanded, antsy in his high chair.
Molly had the urge to run inside and translate Ben’s request for Moll, but Moll was already moving toward the kitchen to fill a bottle with water for him.
She caressed his shoulder as she passed him.
It was an injury, a sizzle on her own palm, the sight of Moll touching her son’s body.
Moll returned with the bottle; so eager was Ben that he grabbed the nipple with his teeth when it was still at a sharp angle, which forced him to strain upward like a gerbil as he drank.
“Hey gerbil,” Moll said.
“Why gerbil?” Viv said.
“Gerbils’ water bottles are mounted on the sides of their cages so they have to drink like this.”
“What’s a gerbil?”
“Come on, B, let go for a sec, then you can hold it yourself.” Moll wrenched the bottle out from between his teeth and handed it to him.
“What’s a gerbil?”
Moll twisted her body away from the table, away from Viv’s question, and stared directly at Molly in her hiding place inside the bush.
Molly realized, with a chill, that Moll had hidden in the same spot plenty of times.
“Go,” Moll mouthed at her, ferocious.
“What, Mommy? What?” Viv said.
“What what?” Moll said, turning back to the table, the savagery vanished from her tone.
“What’s a gerbil?”
3
Because the basement wasn’t soundproof, David couldn’t record if anyone was upstairs. The microphone would capture the sound of the kids running around, the tone of their conversations.
But today Molly was thankful for the basement’s penetrability. She listened: their footsteps, their voices, the rhythms of their interactions. She understood, or believed she understood, everything: now someone was hurrying to the bathroom (Viv), now someone (Moll) was offering someone something, now someone (Ben) thumped hard against something and began to scream, now someone (Moll) rushed to him, now someone (Moll, carrying Ben) walked to the children’s room (to nurse), now someone (Viv) called for help (couldn’t reach the toilet paper).
And so. An average Sunday morning. Buffeted between their needs.
But after a while she came to wish the basement were soundproof. It was too much, the tenor of Moll’s voice, the way it successfully placated them. The mutual, palpable bliss of mother and children.
The infinite patience of the mother who was incapable of taking them for granted.
Pained, Molly pulled a pair of David’s headphones over her ears to block it all.
She felt uneasy without her phone.
There were plenty of books in the basement, books she wanted to read but never had time to; she often told David that her fantasy was to go to a cabin by herself for a week and read novels for six hours a day. But when she opened one such book and began to read, she felt almost illiterate: she read the same sentence over and over again until the words collapsed into letters and the letters collapsed into lines and circles.
She tried to remember what the kids had been wearing that Friday two weeks ago when Erika brought them to meet her after work. Perhaps Viv had been wearing the jean dress and Ben the yellow sweatshirt. She could picture them in those clothes, heading into the Phillips 66 with Erika. But she didn’t know for sure. What she did know was that the jean dress was at this moment hanging in the children’s closet, that the yellow sweatshirt (blueberry-stained) was dangling over the side of the laundry hamper.
She yanked off the headphones.
Upstairs, the energy was moving toward the front door, the jitter of feet near the hall closet. Then, the front door opened. Molly shut the book and stepped over the accusatory pile of laundry beside the washing machine in order to reach the end of the basement directly beneath the hall closet.
The front door closed. The house was silent. They were gone; they had gone out.
She was livid. Moll had taken them out without asking her.
Though she well knew that by 9:00 a.m. on a Sunday, some kind of outing was essential.
She should follow them. She would follow them.
She could not be asked to bear this unbearable situation.
She leaned against the cold concrete wall of the basement. Tired. So tired. She had not slept well last night, not on her makeshift bed of blankets in the hallway outside the children’s room, not with Moll down here glowing or glowering in her basement.
That viciousness in Moll’s eyes. The threat of the word Go.
Molly stepped away from the wall, dizzy with the double speeds of Earth, one thousand miles per hour, sixty-seven thousand miles per hour. She wilted onto the futon and realized it would be a very long time before she would have the wherewithal to stand up again.
From this position, with the right side of her face heavy on the mattress, she had a close-up view of the plastic chair with metal legs where David often sat to play.
She considered her reflection in metal legs, her stretched-out alien face. The light from the lamp appeared in the metal legs as four dashes of brilliance; she was outlandish amid the brilliance.
Later, she woke to witness the plastic chair: expectant. Nothing can look as empty as a piece of furniture intended to house the human body.
She remembered, for the first time in a long time, an old fear of hers from when Viv was newborn: that she would go into the baby’s room in the morning after letting her cry herself back to sleep in the night only to find an empty crib with a scribble of blood on the sheet, identical to the scribble of blood where a mouse thrashed its way out of the trap on the concrete floor of the basement of her childhood home.
She reached to turn off the lamp. In the dark, a woman walked past the futon. And then another. And another. And another. One after the other after the other after the other after the other.
4
When she again woke, there was once more the jitter of feet near the hall closet, the front door opening, as though no time had passed; as though she had, for hours now, remained stuck in the same instant.
But when she located the alarm clock in the mess of David’s stuff beneath the futon and the flashing red numerals yielded the time (3:37), she understood that Ben had recently woken from his nap, that they were now headed out for the requisite second outing of Sunday.
The front door slammed; she pictured Viv pulling it shut with all her might.