Helen Phillips - The Need

The car smelled of stale graham crackers and papier-mâché. Molly took refuge in the smell. As she drove she thought: something terrible happened to you but that thing didn’t happen to me, I feel horribly sorry for you but the daily grind of my little life is mine and mine alone, why should I out of the blue have to share my children with a stranger, something terrible happened to you but that thing didn’t happen to me, I feel horribly sorry for you but the daily grind of my little life is mine and mine alone, why should I out of the blue have to share my children with a stranger.

Molly parked and jumped out of the car and ran toward her lit-up home.

She could see Erika in the kitchen, laughing into her phone.

But then, on the pavement leading up to the front door, a broken beer bottle, the pointed threat of the green shards.

But then the recognition that the shattered glass was just a few scattered leaves.

“—so my sister, you know, the one who’s studying marine biology—so it seems like one of the male dolphins wants to have sex with her, and it’s—like, she can’t go into the water without—so it’s creating some problems—it’s essentially the same as when a guy at a bar—but she does kind of love this dolphin, I mean, he’s really smart, but—”

“We’ll have to tell Viv that a dolphin fell in love with your sister,” Molly returned, her tone as bright and amused as Erika’s, yet she felt like an actor—the right lines, the right gestures, the known world.

“Speaking of—I tried on the fish costume yesterday. It’s kind of amazing, I have to say—where did you find it? I swear I won’t say a word, she won’t have any idea it’s me.” They had agreed that, in the interest of mystique, Erika was to be a mute fish. A mime fish. “I’ve been refining some pretty fancy fish tricks—Two forty-five, right?”

“Yeah, that’s great… the party starts at three, so—thank you. So have the kids been—”

“They’ve been—”

Their voices overlapped, interrupted.

“—asleep,” Erika continued. “No action whatsoever around here. Except my sister freaking out on the phone.”

“That’s really totally crazy,” Molly said, as she was supposed to.

“Oh nice Orly and Jordan are here,” Erika said, quick to notice an old Corolla pulling up in front of the house. “Amazing timing. It’s seriously been one of those days when everything just works out.”

“I don’t have cash—can I pay you tomorrow?”

“No prob,” said Erika, who, in a very slightly different life, had died two weeks ago. “I don’t want to keep them waiting, they’re trying to make it in time for the drink special.”

Only then, pulling on her jean jacket, did Erika look at Molly’s face.

“Oh,” she said reflexively, as though taken aback.

“What?” Molly said.

“Oh”—she paused—“nothing, I’m sorry. I just had this weird—never mind. I’m a weirdo.”

And then she was in the doorway, and then she was gone, she and her dolphin-sex stories and drink specials and fancy fish tricks.

Wait , Molly wanted to say. Don’t go. Don’t leave me. Please, stay. Say “amazing” once more.

Molly walked around her home, locking things. First she double-locked the front door. Then she double-locked the back door. Then she locked all the windows, including the one in the bathroom. She couldn’t remember ever locking it before. She had to step into the tub to reach the lock.

Stepping out of the tub, she gasped, startled by the enormous dark insect on the bathroom floor, until she realized it was a snarl of black tangled thread.

She had to confirm that the window in the children’s room was locked, even though she knew she had locked it. She opened the door slowly, frightened of them, of the possibility of rousing them, of how it would shake her to have to interact with them at this particular moment.

Entering their room was like trespassing in a greenhouse containing rare tomatoes, tomatoes grown from her own flesh. She listened to the tomatoes breathe. Her awe tinged with horror, disbelief, humidity.

This moist smell of their room at night: sweet and sour.

These two lives for which she was (irrevocably, unbearably) responsible.

Back in the living room, she pulled down all the blinds. She wanted her home to feel like a closed box, a self-contained unit capable of levitation, inaccessible and impenetrable.

But: that set of identical keys, somewhere nearby, moving through the night, weighing down a pocket or a hand.

She sat on the couch. She put her feet on the coffee table, stunned by the serenity of her home.

A baby was crying.

It was 5:03 in the morning.

A baby was crying and then a child was crying too.

She lay in bliss on the other side of the door, listening to them, their lungs and fervor. She wanted to listen to them forever.

But her delay caused the cries to escalate to such a pitch that, by 5:06, she was extricating herself from the makeshift bed she had thrown together in the hallway outside their room, was rushing exuberant through their doorway.

She rescued the baby from the crib and plopped him down on his sister’s bed. They were both still crying but had lost their commitment to it now that its target had arrived. They began to distract each other. The baby pressed his face into his sister’s neck. She squirmed at the flutter of his damp eyelashes against her skin.

“Pee-pee-peacock,” the sister called the brother.

“Happy birthday,” Molly said to Viv.

“Presents?” Viv said.

“Later. At your party.”

The children wrestled on the bed, alternately laughing and squawking, and she watched them, obsessed with them, as though both had been born overnight. They were whole, perfect. She didn’t recall any time when they had interfered with her sleep, drained her day with their demands. She saw how they filled her home outrageously, with a force far larger than they were, like angels or aliens. Their skin so fresh it was as though they had automatic halos around every part of them.

From 5:07 until 5:13, it was: Look at his hand, twining into her hair! Look at her fingers, unsnapping his pajamas! Look at his teeth, clamping down on the arm of the baby doll! Look at her calves, tensing as she stands on tiptoe to reach the breakable music box!

5:18 in the morning. A vulgar time to be awake. Ben was whimpering for milk and Viv was on the toilet, asking for some paper and a blue marker and a gold marker or if not gold then yellow so she could draw while she tried to push the poop out. And a book to rest the paper on. Please. So the marker would have a thing to press against.

When Molly stood up to fetch the stuff for Viv, who had historically struggled with constipation, Ben shrieked as though she was abandoning him on a street corner.

“I’ll be back in a sec,” she said.

She ran to get the supplies. Delivering them to Viv, she glanced at her toothbrush, fantasized about brushing the old wine breath away, restoring herself with peppermint, making some kind of plan, calling David. But by now Ben had worked himself up into such a state that she could hear him gagging on his own tears in the other room.