Helen Phillips - The Need

“Who is Ben’s mommy?”

“Stop it,” Viv was saying to her mother.

“Who is Ben’s mommy?”

“I said stop,” Viv said. “Stop saying that. We’re done. We’re done now.”

Molly could always tell exactly when Ben fell asleep because his body took on a sort of god-weight, a sudden and exceptional heaviness that pressed her into the rocking chair, a reverberation of the god-weight she had first experienced during pregnancy, that superhuman bulk manifesting within her own body.

From the beginning she had felt that her primary responsibility to them was to their bodies. Enabling each to grow from two cells into trillions of cells, into a body, and then ensuring that the body kept growing and growing. Come on, go ahead, take the milk from me, take it that your body may become far bigger than it is today.

But now, in the drowsy bedroom, Ben’s mouth separated from her nipple. His sleep lulled her to sleep. As she rocked him she kept losing herself for a few seconds. Each time she awoke she panicked, sensing an intruder in the home, forgetting and then remembering that Viv was in the hallway right outside the bedroom door, lining up fifty-two playing cards side by side. Viv loved the queen of clubs best.

“Viv?” she whispered, for the fourth or seventh or thirteenth time.

“Yessa?” Viv said, exasperated, her voice at the doorway.

“You still there?”

“Of course.”

She needed to stand up, put him in the crib, talk Viv into napping before the party. But she was having trouble moving. If she could just stay here floating forever then everything would be so much easier. Her right foot had fallen asleep, as had a muscle on the left side of her torso. Sleeplessness was a drug, but so was sleep. A doorway to another world. She let herself go through, fine, fine, it was okay to go, the queen of clubs was babysitting Viv, there was this long gray hallway to walk down, a place that was not too hot and not too cold but just right, a place that was not too bright and not too dark but just right, and at the end of the hallway something was happening, something luminous, she hurried to see, she felt herself smiling, anticipating, but the luminous thing was an explosion, not a cocktail party.

She woke with a start, a jerk, looked down at Ben; he wasn’t breathing, had her negligence in falling asleep caused him to stop breathing?—it had, it had!—but then, mercifully, he breathed, he was fine, he was not purple, he was the normal butterscotch color of himself.

She managed to rise from the rocking chair. With superfluous caution, she placed his body in the crib. She found a trail of playing cards leading down the hallway. She followed the trail out to the living room. The cards stopped at the couch, and there was Viv: asleep, hugging the queen of clubs to her chest.

The house had slipped into its alternate state of being, the sublime calm that envelops a space when its undomesticated residents are, at last, at rest. It was as though the house, too, slept, as though the walls themselves breathed, matching the pace of their breathing to the extra slow in and out of children sleeping, the lungs of the universe.

It was not right, she thought uneasily, not right at all; the ostentatious peace of her home, this deceitful normalcy, the rhombus of sunlight on the wooden floor.

She was slicing through the tape of the box of party decorations she had ordered online, extricating plastic fishes from among Styrofoam peanuts, when David called, the known ringtone.

Tears in her eyes at the sound of it.

Yet when she saw that he was requesting a video chat, she very nearly pressed the red Decline option, an instinct more than an intention.

She was scared of scaring him with her face.

He would see things there; he always did.

The reception, however, was terrible. His face pixelated and his voice monstrous. The room behind him looked dark and full of candles. His shadowy head moved glacially back and forth across the small screen. She placed the phone on the counter.

“…it there?”

“One o’clock,” she said.

“…knew”—his voice, abruptly, clear—“two-hour time difference. So you—”

But then he was saying something else and she had no idea, the reception again fragile, his words a blurred roar.

It would be a relief to tell him. It would mitigate this dread. It would mean reassurance, assistance, a path out of the labyrinth.

Though perhaps he couldn’t hear her any more than she could hear him. Perhaps her voice too was an indecipherable growl.

Perhaps it wouldn’t be a relief; his incredulity, the weight of his confusion and concern. And his inability to alter any of the facts.

Then it was all there: the video, the sound, David in the room with her.

“—fast?” he was saying. “For the next seven seconds.”

She noticed a bruise on her lower arm, a bruise whose presence she couldn’t peg to any particular moment, surely just another tiny injury procured in the distracted rush of caring for the kids, yet it disconcerted her.

“—probably costing a thousand dollars a minute. Can I see them? Birthday kid?”

“Both napping.”

“Lucky you.”

She picked up the phone and flipped the screen and panned over Viv, asleep on the couch, still embracing the queen of clubs. He made a sound of love.

“Lucky kind of.” It was easiest, she discovered, to fall into their regular patter. “If you consider sorting through a bunch of fish crap for party bags restful.”

“So,” he said, “what’s going on?”

They had always prided themselves on their mutual brutal honesty: Your breath stinks , You messed it up, You’ve got lint in your belly button .

There’s another version of me : Why not say it right now, swiftly, courageously?

But she could already tell it would feel wrong to say it, to bestow upon the situation the words that would give it shape. Her panic flared and her courage evaporated.

“It’s getting fuzzy again,” she lied.

“Can I see your face?” he said.

“What?” she feigned.

“Your face.”

She zoomed the phone in front of her, giving him the briefest glimpse before putting it back on the counter. It wasn’t candles behind him, it was three bare bulbs jutting out of an unfinished wall.

“Coy,” he accused.

“Tired,” she rejoined. “Fatigued. Circles under my eyes. You really want to see the evidence of how exhausting it is for you to be gone?”

“Seriously.” His voice was curt with worry. “What happened?”

“Well,” she said. “I broke two mercury light bulbs and she had a tantrum in the grocery store. What’s it like there?” She couldn’t even imagine it, some wondrous place on some other continent where he played music in the middle of the night.

“Lots of plazas and churches and the coffee’s superstrong, okay? So tell me.”

“I’ve got to wash a million strawberries before the party. I still have to fill and hang the piñata.”

“You’re breaking up,” he said. “Piña colada for a four-year-old’s birthday party?”

She was relieved to be breaking up.

“Okay, okay, okay, you win, Moll, fine, go,” he said. “I can tell you’re not in the mood.”

Moll. He had called her that only a handful of times in the past twelve years.

Stunned, she held the phone up in front of her. His face was pixelated again. The little window for her face had gone dark.

She knew from The Why Book that Earth was rotating at a speed of one thousand miles per hour while simultaneously orbiting the sun at a speed of sixty-seven thousand miles per hour, and after he hung up she felt these two speeds in her body at once, and had to crouch down on the kitchen floor.