Helen Phillips - The Need

Perhaps those twin velocities, she hypothesized, explained the occasional dizziness that had haunted her ever since she became a mother, as though bearing children had somehow made her body excruciatingly attuned to Earth’s double revolutions.

But it had never been this bad, a woman trapped on her kitchen floor, the tiles tilting beneath her, a kaleidoscope of trillions of Mollies, a Molly singing with perfect pitch, a Molly smoking a cigarette, a Molly tending a vegetable garden, a Molly in the middle of a car crash, a Molly failing to catch her baby as he falls off the bed, a Molly running shrieking into the ocean as her daughter gets pulled out by the undertow.

She forced herself to imagine a hand on her shoulder, a still and solid presence, and the vision of that hand enabled her to at last open her eyes.

But it was not a vision. It was the hand of Viv.

“Mother?” Viv said, which she never said.

It was Viv’s job to remove the strawberries from the colander after Molly rinsed them in the sink. It was Viv’s job to arrange them in a bowl. Viv wanted many bowls of strawberries, very many bowls, too many. She positioned three strawberries in one of the yellow bowls and stalked around the living room, speculating about the most ideal placement for this particular offering.

“We could fit them all in two big bowls,” Molly said. “That’s how people usually do this kind of thing.”

“No,” Viv said.

Molly was in no state to resist. She reached up into the cupboard and pulled down the entire stack of yellow bowls and placed it on the counter near Viv’s stool.

Then Molly laid out the ocean-themed plates and cups and napkins on the table. She taped the streamers to the walls. The waste of it all, and the magic on Viv’s face as the room transformed. The tape had gotten stuck to itself and Molly needed to peel more off, but her nails were too short, bitten.

The buzz of her phone in her back pocket launched a swift hysterical shiver through her body.

But it was just a text from Erika: on front steps won’t ring bell don’t want kids to see me

Molly glanced at Viv, who was deeply absorbed in arranging yet another bowl of strawberries, and snuck off to open the door.

Erika held aloft an enormous bunch of silver balloons.

“Surprise,” Erika whispered.

“You didn’t need to get those!” Molly whispered back, moved to the point of tears: another adult around.

“Fish duty,” Erika said, waving off her thanks and shoving the unwieldy balloons through the doorway. “But anyhow I had to rush to pick these up so I didn’t have time to get in costume, it’s in my car, so should I—”

“The basement,” Molly said. “Those cellar doors in the backyard. They kind of stick, you’ll have to tug hard. There’s a bathroom down there too if you—”

“The square key, right?”

“Mommy!” Viv cried out in the background.

Erika winked and zipped her fingers across her mouth, my-lips-are-sealed, before closing the front door.

Viv gasped as she came around the corner. “Where’s those from?”

“From a seagull,” Molly said.

“A seagull!” Viv was in rapture. She seized the knotted ribbons of the balloons and pulled them, with some effort, down the hallway, toward the living room. “Look, we don’t need flowers.”

Molly was distracted, navigating the balloons along from behind.

“Because we have silver and red and yellow,” Viv declared.

Molly and Viv and the balloons burst forth from the hallway into the living room, which was dotted with fifteen or so yellow bowls of red strawberries, placed here and there on every surface, including the floor.

“What if people step on them?” Molly said.

Though they looked, actually, very beautiful.

When the doorbell rang, Viv ran on tiptoe, the skin of her feet barely making contact with the floorboards. She was just now tall enough to unlock the door and turn the knob and pull it open.

The fish’s scales were resplendent, iridescent. Its mask culminated in a fan-shaped headdress that descended from the crown of its head all the way down its spine. The tail took the form of blue spandex bell-bottomed pants. The fish wore silver sneakers, as planned, and blue satin gloves.

When Erika spread her hands wide to greet Viv, blue gauze fins became apparent, hanging from her arms like undermounted wings.

Molly had forgotten what a dramatic costume it was. Another item ordered online, scarcely glanced at before being passed along. She waved at Erika inside the glittering rubber mask, its metallic sheen and bulbous eyes. Erika offered a silent wave in response.

Viv was scared of the fish and in awe of the fish. When the fish extended a blue satin hand, Viv took it, majestically, and led her through the doorway.

Yes: the strawberries were dismembered by imprecise baby teeth, smears of red on the walls and floors, scattered bits of green too small to pick up with adult fingers. Also all the drawers in the kids’ bedroom had been opened and emptied, every book removed from the bookshelves, the train tracks and the blocks and the cars and the dinosaur puzzle, a stew of toys simmering on the floor amid discarded candy wrappers, the enduring evidence of the mauled piñata.

In the living room the adults drank; the wizened parents of four-year-olds knew always to bring along a six-pack to these infernal birthday parties. Molly, sober, somber, couldn’t bear the droll jollity of the other parents, they who rolled their eyes at themselves for having virulent opinions about various shows aimed at preschoolers, for considering a trip to sign one’s will with one’s spouse a date (as long as you spring for lattes en route). Three weeks ago, at a similar birthday party, with a similar crowd, she had been a force for droll jollity herself. Now she was fighting the urge to remind them that their children could die any day in any number of ways. Then perhaps they would not find it so amusing to gripe about the rotten pancake discovered at the bottom of the toy chest, about the inexplicable refusal to eat this or that vegetable that had heretofore been a reliable staple.

“Where’s David?” everyone kept asking her, and she kept explaining. Aside from that she hardly spoke, four or five words here and there. The phrase the tsunami of the party was running through her head, and whenever she spoke, it was an effort to make sure those words didn’t emerge from her mouth.

The children, caught up in their private momentum, grew bolder and more obnoxious by the minute. While the parents commiserated about parenthood, the children built and destroyed many towers. Molly gave herself over to the bustle of refilling bowls of chips, distributing juice boxes, snatching choking hazards away from Ben. She made herself dizzy from it, and when she took a second to look up at all the people idling around her overheated overcrowded home she could have sworn she was moving through a fever dream, a bright chaos to which she had no access whatsoever.

Dorothy’s mother, with Dorothy’s newborn sister strapped to her chest, asked Molly a question. It was a question about breastfeeding, about whether Viv had initially been jealous when Molly nursed Ben. Dorothy’s mother was a good-hearted woman who had incredible patience for in-depth conversations about sleeping schedules and teething troubles.

“Well,” Molly began (of course Viv had been jealous, she was human, wasn’t she?), “the thing, in my, in our, experience, about the postmortem period with the second kid is that—”

Dorothy’s mother looked stricken. “You mean,” she corrected, “post partum .”