Helen Phillips - The Need

The median was in the nicest residential area in town, blocks of grand old homes. Though there were cars passing on both sides, their pace was sedate enough. She applauded herself for remembering about these tree-lined malls. On any other day, she would not have considered a median in a tony neighborhood an appropriate playground for her children. Who knew what the residents might think, peeking past the drapes at the exposed breast of the mother, the dirt-darkened knees of the kid?

But Viv was happy, encircling the forsythia with her magic spells, and Ben was happy, gazing up at the crisscross of branches as he nursed. The birds were out; they were nowhere to be seen but their songs were extravagant. It felt somehow safe, this muddy ornamental island protected by the threat of passing cars.

I can do this , Molly thought. She did not know exactly what she meant by this .

Viv wanted to play hide-and-seek. There was no place to hide on the median. The bushes were still leafless from the winter, and the three trees were saplings.

“There’s tons of places to hide!” Viv insisted. “Just, come on, close your eyes and count to ten.”

Molly squinted enough to convince Viv that her eyes were really closed, and counted to ten. Ready or not, here I come.

Viv was fully visible on the other side of the forsythia, but she had turned away, as though her own inability to see her mother rendered her invisible.

Molly left Ben in the middle of the tarp with his squeaky giraffe and made a show of looking for Viv behind each sapling and under each bush. When she finally stalked around the forsythia—those short red-panted legs bright among the branches—and mimed surprise, Viv shrieked with joy. Sometimes she seemed so old, filled with complex understandings, but she was still so little. Molly held Viv for the few seconds allotted her before Viv refused to be held.

“Hey why is B allowed to have that?”

He had crawled to the edge of the median and was systematically yanking bulbs—daffodils? tulips?—out of the damp soil.

Molly rushed over to him, yanked him up as he had yanked the bulbs. One still dangled from his hand. Viv was perturbed by the mess, the disturbed dirt and ripped roots.

“We, we,” she fretted, “we have to fix it, Mommy.” Viv crouched over the mud and began to dig. Her feet were on the median, her knees jutting out toward the street. “Hey a worm.”

A car came by, too fast. The whoosh of it destabilized Viv, sent her tumbling backward onto the dead grass, and the driver, a thin woman, screamed something awful at Molly.

What the driver had said, though, was true. Molly felt crazy—crazy because only now did it strike her how dangerous this was, idiotic, their perch on the median.

She grabbed armful after armful of muddy tarp, balanced that on one side and Ben on the other, instructed Viv to keep close and hang on to Ben’s foot as they stepped off the median, crossed the street, returned to the sidewalk, leaving the pile of ravaged bulbs and upturned worms in their wake.

Ben’s diaper, she discovered, was leaking poop.

The kids were buckled into their car seats and she was sitting in the parked car, calling David. The car smelled of Ben, not the good smells of Ben but the bad smells of Ben. Viv, in the rearview mirror, made a big show of pinching her nose and gasping for air while the phone rang, went to voice mail.

Molly called him a second time, wondering why she hadn’t thought to call him last night, why she hadn’t called him this morning, why she had considered the median a reasonable place for the children. Doubting herself on multiple counts; unsteady with self-doubt.

On the fourth ring, he picked up. She could hear the sounds of rehearsal—instruments being tuned, strummed—in the background.

“Hey,” she said.

“What’s wrong?” he said, and she felt a flicker of relief, a flicker of calm, at how well he knew her—merely the tone of her voice, its slight unhingedness as she uttered a three-letter word, paired with her calling him twice in a row, and he understood that there was a problem.

Though now that she had the opening, his full attention from the southern hemisphere, she didn’t quite know what to do with it.

“Something,” she said, “happened last night.”

“What— Are the kids okay?”

She didn’t know what to say. “Yes,” she said.

She could hear him waiting for her to elaborate. But what were the words, the words she should use, and what was the effect that they would have? Not only on David, not only summoning him back across the globe, frantic about her sanity, about the children, but also on her, and on Moll, making it all the more true by articulating it.

“Molly?” he said.

There is another version of me. She came through the Pit. Her children are dead. She wants our children.

“If you need to confess that you had a one-night stand with someone, can it wait till I get home?” he said.

“No,” she said with a half laugh for his benefit. “Not that. It was—”

But then she sensed an alertness in the back seat, the acute presence of her children, and sure enough when she turned around there were four curious eyes on her, Viv’s so sharp, so intent, her entire body perked up; Ben craning around the side of his rear-facing car seat.

“You’re in the middle of rehearsal, aren’t you?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“The teapots are listening. I guess let’s talk later.”

“Well can I at least say happy birthday?”

She put the phone on speaker and held it up and David cried out, “Happy birthday, Viv!” and then a bunch of instruments started playing an elaborate rendition of “Happy Birthday,” and Viv gulped and grinned, and when the song was over, Viv yelled back, “Happy birthday, Daddy!”

“Who is Ben’s mommy?” Molly said.

“This lemon is Ben’s mommy,” Viv replied.

“Who is Ben’s mommy?”

“This fork is Ben’s mommy.”

“Who is Ben’s mommy?”

“The ceiling is Ben’s mommy.”

The kids found this game infinitely amusing. Every time they played it, Molly thought of a running joke she had with David, a question they would ask each other whenever the kids seemed eerily similar: Had Viv left messages scribbled in secret sibling graffiti on the walls of the uterus, information about what’s funny and what’s scary, memos that Ben had memorized in the womb?

“Again, Mommy.”

For instance, that ludicrous stage they had each gone through at around nine months of age, when they screamed at the sight of yellow kitchen gloves.

“Mommy, again.”

It frightened her how distant these memories seemed at this particular moment (the running joke, the yellow kitchen gloves), as though they were the quips and idiosyncrasies of another couple, another family.

She attempted to bring her focus to the task at hand: spooning their applesauce into two small bowls lined up on the kitchen counter. But her hands were uncooperative. Willing her fingers to still themselves, she carried the bowls to the table.

“Mommy. Again.”

“Who is Ben’s mommy?” Molly said.

“Ben’s diaper is Ben’s mommy!”

Molly shifted into autopilot, reciting her four assigned words every few seconds while Viv’s responses sent the children ever deeper into hilarity.

She felt eyes on her. She kept looking out at the backyard, looking at the evergreen bush by the window, looking into it. No body among the branches. A relief.

Yet not.

The thing was: if it were her, had it been her, she knew she would be in the evergreen bush, watching, starving, envious, agonized.

It was where she would have been, wasn’t it? So where was the other, if not there?