Helen Phillips - The Need

She lay down in the small bed beside Viv and whispered into her ear: “We can’t turn on the light to read books because it might wake B.”

But Viv, as it turned out, had already followed her brother into sleep; the background whisper of his baby dreams, his body slumbering aggressively in the crib, had entranced Viv out of the known world.

Molly wanted to sway to sleep in the hammock of her children’s breathing.

In her back pocket, her phone buzzed with a text. So how’d it go, Queen Fish? Costume fit OK? Still trying to recover from yr bait & switch ;) seriously tho no hard feelings LOL, I get it. Give the birthday girl six million kisses from me. And then a series of Erika-esque emoticons: a mermaid, a dolphin, a pair of hearts, a red balloon, a kiss.

Moll had removed the fish mask and set it on the table beside her. Her hair was moist and her face looked rubbery, waterlogged. The sight of it made Molly feel as though she too had just spent several hours inside a barely ventilated fish mask.

She wished she had the baseball bat in her hand. But going to get it seemed more dangerous than standing still. Not that she knew what she would do with the weapon if she did have it.

Molly watched herself, her body yet not her body, breathing, blinking, shifting in the chair, adorned with iridescent scales. Moll had done something (picked off her scabs? put makeup on her bruises?) so now her resemblance to Molly was impeccable. Her hands folded on the table before her; her nails tidy, clean. Molly could not look away, the way sometimes you cannot pull yourself away from your face in the mirror. She sank into the chair across from Moll. She couldn’t contain the twin sensations at war within her: one of utter familiarity, one of utter unfamiliarity.

“Share them with me,” Moll said.

“I can give you money,” Molly said. “I can give you my clothes. I can help you find a place to live.”

“I can give David the letter when he gets back next Saturday.”

“The letter?”

“Asking for a separation.”

“What?”

“I had forgotten about it too. But then I remembered. Last June. That rage. Sitting at the kitchen table at two in the morning. Insomnia between Ben’s night feedings.”

“I wrote that in a nightmare. It doesn’t even exist.”

“But it does. I have it. You—I—we saved it in the filing cabinet.”

The chair slunk out from under Molly. She slid to the floor. Pressed her back up against the wall. Covered her face with her hands. Considered the other secrets Moll possessed: the amount of stress she felt about how little money he made, the envy she occasionally felt toward unmarried, childless Roz, that night he thought she was happy when actually she was sad, the sexual positions that were more satisfying with her ex. The infinite blackmail material we all have on ourselves.

Eventually, the sound of a body standing and moving toward her and sitting next to her against the wall. A leg and hip and arm alongside her leg and hip and arm. A throbbing awareness, a sort of tingling heat, at each point where their bodies touched.

Molly scooted away. She did not want to be contaminated.

“You’re evil,” Molly said.

“Then you’re evil,” Moll said.

Moll’s hand was too fast, a snake around Molly’s wrist, tightening. She could tell that Moll was stronger, much stronger, than she had ever been. Two weeks leaner, two weeks fiercer, powered by grief. Moll’s other hand now gripping Molly’s hair, wrenching the roots. The tingling heat increasing to a boil.

I have suffered so much more than you, you woman of comfort and happiness, you unperturbed wife, you mother of two unbroken children , why do you keep forgetting that you would behave the exact same way if the tables were turned?

You aren’t thinking straight. I’m sorry, but you’re not well, you’ve been through too much. It’s untenable. Absurd. To share the children. Think of them. How bizarre it would be to have two mothers rotating in and out. Even if they couldn’t tell us apart, they would know—kids know—and they would be wounded.

The kids would be fine. It’s you who would have to give something up, you of the perfect life.

When at last Moll released her, Molly’s eye landed on Viv’s long purple marker mark on the wall. The mark somehow steadied her.

She went to the kitchen, looking back to make sure Moll wasn’t following, and dampened a sponge and brought the sponge over to the marred wall. She rubbed at one end of the mark. The purple ink began to run.

Moll sprang up off the floor and lunged for the sponge and seized it.

Enraged, Molly reached to reclaim it.

Moll strained to keep the sponge away, her arms at full extension. She stood before Molly in this position of abandon, her skin and hair reeking of rubber, the blue fabric of her fins quivering. Her eyes urgent, unveiled.

“Don’t wash them away,” Moll said.

She woke up in the Pit. She was alone. The Pit was its normal color. So was the sky. She cried for joy, realizing it had all been a nightmare, though she was confused about how she had managed to fall asleep in the Pit. She was partway up the ladder when she glanced back and noticed a penny glinting down there, half-covered with dirt already, must have fallen out of her pocket; even though she had always been conscientious about avoiding that sort of contamination, she did not go back down to pick it up. She told herself she would get it first thing in the morning, but for now she was dying to get home to the kids. The parking lot was empty, which was strange, because she had driven to work that day. Or maybe she hadn’t, maybe David had dropped her off. The morning felt long ago and fuzzy. She ran toward the Phillips 66, which was undamaged. She looked through the big window and saw that the Bible was there, its glass case not shattered. The whole place had its normal serene early-evening feel, Corey and Roz already gone home. Her bag wasn’t beside her desk where she usually left it, which was also strange, but at least her keys were in her pocket. She wanted to see David, to tell him about this blip in her day and try to figure out what had happened. She would walk home. She felt elated. She would surprise the kids and David.

She would be happier than she had ever been.

She was wearing dark clothing and it wasn’t until she reached the second telephone pole on the frontage road (a passing trucker honked and flashed his lights and yelled out the window, “You okay?”) that she admitted to herself that her jeans and black shirt were hardened with a sticky, rusty substance. She had been so brilliantly ignoring the brownish smears on her hands, the throb of her temples. She ran back to the Phillips 66. She unlocked her locker and grabbed her change of clothes and went into the bathroom and washed herself and swapped the clothes and shoved the messed-up clothes in the locker and worked hard to forget about them.

She walked along the frontage road as night fell. She watched handfuls of birds reel in the sky. Her elation had dulled but she pretended it hadn’t. She needed to be home and she began to run and by the time she reached the thoroughfare she was nearly sprinting. She treated the neon sign of Excellent Laundromat like a finish line. After passing the Laundromat, she turned right. She was ecstatic because even from two blocks away she could see that they were playing out in front of the house. She could hear them and she could see their bodies, perfectly intact. David was holding Ben and counting nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, ready or not, here I come! Viv was hiding in a silly place, in plain sight, only a quarter-hidden by the crab-apple tree.