Helen Phillips - The Need

“Almost a decade of mind-bending plant-fossil finds, a bunch of them unplaceable based on our current understanding of the fossil record ,” Corey had griped last week, “and no one but us and a handful of other paleobotany dorks gave a damn about this site until now.”

As Molly stood in the Pit, her focus eluded her, the obsessive focus that had been the trademark of her working life, the longtime source of mockery and admiration from her colleagues and her husband alike. Your freak focus , David called it.

Now, though, she was just outrageously tired: soggy logic, fuzzy vision. It was inconceivable that in forty-five minutes she would be standing in front of a tour group, saying things.

The night prior, Ben had awoken every hour or so to howl for a few moments before dropping back into silence. Again and again she almost went to him. Finally, at 3:34 a.m., she entered the children’s room to find him standing naked in the crib, gripping the wooden bars. He had somehow managed to remove his red footed pajamas by himself, a skill she would have guessed was still months off. When he saw her, he stopped shrieking and smiled proudly.

“Good for you,” she whispered, nauseated with exhaustion.

She lifted him out of the crib, anxious about the possibility of waking Viv, and sank down into the rocking chair to nurse him. She shouldn’t do it. It was bad for his freshly grown teeth to have milk on them at night. He was too old for night nursing. But in the dark, disoriented, she sometimes gave in, less to his nagging and more to her own desire to hold a person close and, effortlessly, give him what he most wanted.

Yet tonight, for the first time ever, he didn’t want to nurse. Instead, he pressed his head against her clavicle and then patted her cheek four times before leaning away from her, leaning back toward the crib.

“Shouldn’t we put your pajamas on?”

He was woozy, though, already almost asleep again, and anyway the radiator was going too strong for this uncannily warm early spring, so she returned him to the crib in just his diaper.

She had finally fallen back to sleep in her own bed when there was a mouth an inch from her face.

“I’m carrying a tree.”

“What?”

“I’m carrying a tree .”

“You’re carrying a tree?”

“No! Not a tree, a dream !”

“You’re carrying a dream?”

“ No ! I-HAD-A-SCARY-DREAM.”

She and David had a running joke about how they both feared their kids at night the same way that, as children, they’d feared monsters under the bed. Beasts that would rise up from the side of your bed, seize you with sharp nails and demand things of you.

She shouldn’t do it, but she did: hauled Viv into bed, parked the kid between her body and David’s, which slumbered through everything, even through Viv’s sleep dance, her spread eagle evolving into pirouette evolving into breaststroke, her almost-four years swelling to take up far more space in the bed than their combined sixty-eight.

So you wake up ill with tiredness but it’s your own fault for not being better, stricter. So you stand there at work wondering what you have to offer the world, just your strained, drained body and your weakness. But somehow you crouch down again, again you hack at the unyielding earth.

And that was when she saw it.

That unmistakable brightness, the warm color of childhood, a wish in water.

A penny, lodged deep in the dirt at the bottom of the Pit.

A new penny, that glow of the recently minted.

So, the most current artifact of the five to date: the Coca-Cola bottle, the toy soldier, the Altoids tin, the potsherd, the Bible. Her strange discoveries had taken place gradually, over the course of the past nine months, starting with the Coca-Cola bottle her first week back at work after Ben’s birth (she had picked it up, tilted her head this way and that, trying to figure out whether the oddity lay in her or in the font). Just the tiniest dribble of random objects amid the tsunami of plant fossils. But, here, another find, only a month after the Bible.

As she photographed the penny and recorded its GPS coordinates (hoping her own stupid footsteps hadn’t already altered its location), adrenaline blasted through her fatigue. She ought to leave it in situ and call Shaina to find out how soon she could drive across town to come take a look. Shaina was the first person Molly had contacted when she found the Coca-Cola bottle, needing the archaeologist perspective from her old grad-school friend. But from the start Shaina had taken a dubious stance on the objects: she complained that Molly and Corey and Roz, all with their typical paleobotanist’s disregard for the maintenance of the stratigraphy, had long ago made any meaningful archaeological analysis very nearly impossible. “You work by way of sledgehammer,” Shaina had said. “I work by way of sieve.”

“But you think the Bible was really printed in the early 1900s?”

“Look,” Shaina had said over beers at the nearest bar, “for all I know, some high-tech prankster buried that Bible in the Pit hours before you uncovered it.”

“And the others?” Molly pressed.

“Same. Sure, like, with the potsherd: yes, interesting, it’s not a pattern I’ve ever seen before. But it’s so small, and with no organic material found nearby that I could use to confidently carbon-date it… Yes, sure, I’m weirded out by an old Altoids tin that’s slightly the wrong shape. Yes, I’d like to identify somewhere, sometime, another plastic toy soldier that was manufactured with a monkey tail. I’ll study them a bit more because I can tell you care a lot. But there’s just not really enough to work with.”

The penny glinted up at Molly. She and it, alone together. This was what had drawn her to a field that involved unveiling the layers of the earth, unsure what you were seeking: this throb of fascination. She used the tip of her trowel to dislodge the penny.

“Excuse me,” she said to the penny as she pried it out. Minted this year, she noted as she slid it into a baggie from her pocket. She would postpone any further examination until she was back in the lab. She wanted to pause here, between not-knowing and knowing. She looked up: above her, beyond the twenty-foot walls of the Pit, the sky was the color of milk.

She had no choice but to look out into the living room herself.

What could she do to make sure he would shoot her and spare the children?

“Did you really see a man?” she whispered.

Viv smiled up at her.

“Move,” Molly said, trying to scoot her daughter out of the doorway with her hip.

But Viv, sensing her mother’s urgency, tensed her muscles and refused to budge.

“Viv,” she said, suddenly nonchalant, “go on out to the living room. I’m putting B down on my bed and you can’t bother him while he sleeps.”

That was all it took. Viv let go of the doorjamb, jumped onto the bed beside her brother, began harassing him with coos and kisses.

The ploy bought Molly perhaps forty-five seconds before the baby woke or the big sister tired of the provocation. She hurried to the doorway. A peculiar half laugh rose in her: hurrying to see who had broken into their home, just as she was always hurrying to get ready for work, hurrying to put the groceries away, hurrying to take a shit, every single thing in life shoved between the needs of a pair of people who weighed a cumulative fifty-seven pounds.

Who’s that guy?

But as she looked out at the living room, she saw only its normal end-of-day chaos, a scattering of Cheerios, a ruin of blocks, the crayons splayed like many fingers pointing. Usually the sight would have wearied her, but at this moment, colored by her relief, it seemed terribly beautiful.