What would it be this time? A president other than Lincoln? Or the profile of a leader unknown to her? The word PEACE or ORDER rather than the word LIBERTY? A sunburst instead of a shield? An alphabet she didn’t recognize? Or, more likely, some subtle shift of typography or proportion barely perceptible even to her eye trained in tracing the faintest veins of ancient leaves.
Just then her milk came down. It often came at moments of high emotion. That slight ache or buzz, valves pressured into opening, the simultaneous relief and frustration, her bra damp in two focused spots. Reminder: Mother. Reminder: Animal.
Her breast pump was somewhere in the darkness beneath the old metal desk. When had she last rinsed the shields and the valves? It was a hassle to clean them. She would need to scrub them before pumping. If she were more on top of things, she would have taken them home to boil them in hot water for five minutes.
But for now: the two pennies, side by side. Mundane and sacred at the same time. She thought of her children.
The penny from the Pit. Heads side: above Lincoln’s profile, the words IN GOD WE TRUST. To the left of his profile, the word LIBERTY. To the right, the current year.
She searched for a difference in Abe’s facial expression; was he perhaps a tad more wry, a tad less stern, in the penny from the Pit?
But eventually she had to admit that the penny from the Pit was identical to the penny from her wallet. The difference would lie, perhaps, on the other side.
Her bra damper by the second.
Because her fingers were quivering, it took two tries before she managed to flip over the coin from her wallet, three tries for the coin from the Pit.
Tails: beneath the declaration UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, a shield emblazoned at the top with the phrase E PLURIBUS UNUM, and, on a banner in front of the shield, the words ONE CENT.
On both, the shields were the same shape, each bearing thirteen stripes. Beneath the shields, the same miniscule LB on the left-hand side and JFM on the right-hand side.
Two identical pennies.
She felt ridiculous. So she or Corey or Roz had accidentally dropped a penny at the bottom of the Pit. So what.
She picked up both pennies and put them in her wallet.
The burden of the milk.
Her fatigue returned like a hand pressing down on her skull.
5
There was almost no time between the instant she heard the scream and the instant she was back in the bedroom. Yet it was more than enough time for the image: their small bodies, their blood on the gray quilt, their eyes four huge hurting questions. How could she be so stupid, she’d done the idiotic horror-movie thing, leaving the vulnerable flank unguarded while bumbling about in search of the threat.
But in the bedroom there was no blood.
There was just a baby sleeping on the bed and a kid jumping up and down beside him, grabbing her crotch and anxiously apologizing: “I’m sorry I peed on your bed!”
Usually she would have chided Viv for jumping so close to the baby, for ignoring her fifteen minutes earlier when Molly had asked if she needed to pee, for the unnecessarily alarming scream. Instead, she seized her, airlifted her to the bathroom, used the situation as an excuse to hold her daughter closer than close. She grabbed the potty insert and plopped Viv down on the toilet and yanked off her urine-soaked pants and undies.
“Why are you crying?” Viv said.
In the bedroom, Ben began to cry.
6
Never mind Corey’s touching touches (the potpourri, the lemon soap, the wrought-iron tissue box): a convenience store bathroom is a convenience store bathroom. It was one of those faucets that would run for only ten seconds before turning itself off. She did the best she could, then held the pump parts beneath the hand dryer mounted to the wall. She returned to her office, pulled closed the curtain that served as a door, unbuttoned her shirt, unfastened the cups of her nursing bra, inserted the tubes into the shields, hooked herself up to the machine, turned the dial to its highest setting.
Viv had covered her face in horror the first time she witnessed her mother pumping milk for her brother. “What it doing to you?” she said, staring at the machine through her fingers, at her mother’s nipples extending and retracting, misshapen by the plastic funnels.
But Viv had since grown accustomed to it, its distinctive wheeze, and came to consider it a sort of pet. She would sit beside her mother on the couch, matching her breathing to the breathing of the pump, hyperventilating along with it, stroking the pump with one hand as though her presence was somehow facilitating the process.
Here, now, in Molly’s office, the milk was not coming, not quickly enough. A drop from the right, two drops from the left. She needed at least three ounces from each. And after that, she needed to deliver the milk to the minifridge and transform from one kind of person into another, pull herself back together before the tour—which, if the past two and a half weeks were any indication, would be larger than the previous day’s.
She thought, with longing, of the time—it already seemed so distant—when the daily tour consisted of just a handful of paleobotany amateurs or foreign tourists. On the fateful day, less than a month ago, when she had brought the Bible out from her office at the end of the tour to show it off, there were just three people in her tour group, a kindly Brazilian couple and an elderly paleo enthusiast. Perhaps it was a slight act of defiance, after Shaina’s and Roz’s and Corey’s overall dismissive attitudes toward her nonfossil finds (“Molly’s little litter,” Corey dubbed it; “H-O-A-X,” Roz spelled dryly). Or perhaps it was just that they had somehow clicked, their tiny tour group; the Q and A had gone on for forty-five minutes longer than usual, and when the wife asked if they’d ever found anything in the Pit aside from plant fossils, Molly had felt safe, open, eager to share this incredible thing.
Molly assumed it was the elderly paleo enthusiast who had called the local paper; anyway, there was a reporter on the tour the next day.
Still the milk would not come. Every time she pumped she felt sorry for cows. When she poured cow’s milk for Viv she experienced a flash of mother-to-mother gratitude: Thank you, Ma Cow, for letting me steal your milk for my own offspring.
She looked up at the drop ceiling with its uneven tiles, marveled yet again that the Phillips 66 retained its gas-station smell even now, that eternal mix of Jolly Rancher and beef jerky, the scent of quarry dust just a thin overlay. She waited impatiently for the milk to flow. But the more impatient you were, the more the milk resisted the pump.
She thought again of the twin pennies. Stalwart, insignificant.
The milk gushed into the bottles.
7
She ran into the bedroom, where Ben—crying—had flipped himself over and crawled toward the bottom of the bed. She caught him right as he tumbled off. She could have felt victorious for the improbable save, but instead she just felt guilty for having left him alone on the bed when she knew better than anyone how mobile he had become, how swift.
Yet there was little opportunity to indulge her guilt, to reflect upon it and make resolutions for the future, because in the bathroom Viv was calling for her, and Ben was clawing affectionately at her neck (she needed to trim his nails, she’d been meaning to do it for days, but he guarded them so ferociously whenever she brought out the clippers), and her heart rate was elevated as it always was when she was the sole caretaker of her children, imaginary footsteps or no. She wondered if other mothers experienced it, this permanent state of mild panic, and worried that perhaps they didn’t, that perhaps there was something wrong with her. What a phenomenon it was to be with her children, to spend every moment so acutely aware of the abyss, the potential injury flickering within each second.