Helen Phillips - The Need

“Got you, got you,” David growled.

Got you! she was about to growl too when someone opened the front door and released out onto the lawn that Scotch-colored light cast by her favorite lamp. Erika, dear Erika, she assumed, but the children turned their faces toward the light and cried out, “Mamamamamama!”

“Spaghetti,” the woman promised with her same voice.

By the time she reached the front steps, they were all inside. She walked around to the back. She didn’t try to hide herself. She didn’t sneak through the bushes. She had no reason to. The other woman was, obviously, an imposter. But inside, on the other side of the window, they were all behaving as though everything was normal, David carrying forks to the table, Ben reaching for the saltshaker, Viv testing each chair to see which one suited her tonight, David pulling the saltshaker away from Ben before he dropped it on the floor.

The woman inside passed by the window, which she herself had pulled up twelve hours earlier to let in fresh air. She witnessed an instant of weariness pass over the woman’s features as she glanced out at the dusk. How dare she look so weary. If the woman inside spotted the woman outside, she could have easily assumed it was her reflection.

“I got you something special,” she heard the woman say to her daughter.

She had grabbed, at the convenience store on the way to work that morning, at the last second, as the guy was ringing her up, a fruit leather for Viv. She had been short with the kids when she was leaving because they had taken every single pot and pan and lid out of the cabinet while she was in the shower and scattered them all across the floor. “It’s just pots and pans,” David had said, and she had hissed, “Easy for you to say,” and the children had stared at the parents with those four huge eyes of theirs.

The woman told Viv that she could have the special treat after dinner if she ate four spinach leaves and twenty-one peas; Viv had recently begun to find numerical precision very convincing.

She walked around the corner of the house, crunching through dead leaves, pressing forth into the evergreen bush in order to access the other window, the one with a better angle on the dining area. There was a sudden hubbub at the dinner table; at first she assumed their acknowledgment of her presence was the source of the crisis, but then she saw that Ben had a bloody nose, a red thread snaking from his nostril all the way down his bare chest to his diaper (someone, presumably the woman, had taken his shirt off so it wouldn’t get messy at dinner). Viv was crying because of the blood. Ben was laughing because Viv was crying. David was running for tissues. The woman looked tired, worried and tired.

It was then that she noticed, there inside on the coffee table, her keys, the ones she had used not an hour earlier to open her locker at work, that unmistakable beaded loop Viv had made at preschool. How had this woman possibly gotten ahold of her key chain? Enraged, she reached into her pocket. But her keys were there. The exact same keys. The identical one-of-a-kind beaded loop. It was horrifying to see them both at once, Viv’s random beadwork impeccably replicated, the implication of her still-babyish fingers struggling to string the beads, the image of twin Vivs laboring over the green bead, the yellow bead, the purple bead.

She left the window that was not her window and the house that was not her house and the husband who was not her husband and the children who were not her children. She walked all night, numb to the world around her. She walked in areas she had only ever driven by and areas she didn’t know existed. At some point she slept on concrete and awoke beneath a highway overpass. She had no idea where she was but she walked until she recognized something and, after many hours, she returned to the house, to the evergreen bush. Her children were in the living room, perfectly intact, with Erika, perfectly intact. They were surrounded by hundreds of crayons and puzzle pieces and then they opened the back door and yelled at the squirrel trying to get into the bird feeder and it became a game for them to open the door and yell “Go away!” even long after the squirrel had gone away. She watched them from deep inside the evergreen until the mother and father returned. It had given her solace to watch the children but it wounded her to watch the family. Again she walked all night and slept somewhere. She used the toilet at convenience stores or squatted in the woods in the park, and she squeezed her milk out into unclean sinks or into the dirt, and when she couldn’t bear her thirst she drank from water fountains, but she did not eat anything and she was ready to die. She stank and being a vagrant made sense to her. She didn’t believe that her body was still alive now that their bodies weren’t alive. She thought of the way their room smelled in the middle of the night, sweet and sour. She walked in the dark and thought about her errors. She should have destroyed the Bible, and the other artifacts too, without ever showing them to anyone. She should have been more scared of the threats. She should have refused to give any tours. She should have kept her children safe in a beautiful locked attic somewhere. A sky painted on the ceiling. She walked along the highway softly screaming and eager to die.

After a few days, though, when her head was clear from the starvation, she got the idea. She pulled the keys out of her pocket because they were all she had, and the round key kindly reminded her that it could open the door of Norma’s house, and she went there and she cleaned herself and she ate mandarin oranges from a can and black beans from a can and she drank tea and she chose not to water Norma’s plants and she thought about the idea. She slept in a bed and she woke up and she pictured herself doing it, step by step by step by step by step. She became deliberate in her movements. She considered different ways of going about it. She remembered the deer head David had made for her. She did not think about him, about his devastation, back wherever he was. She went into the house when everyone was out and she took the things she needed. She spied and she eavesdropped. She saw the baby slide The Why Book under the couch. When he cried in the night she unlocked the back door and went to him. He was thirsty and sweaty so she nursed him and took off his pajamas and watched him fall back to sleep. When the mother went to sleep with the daughter in her little bed, she went to sleep in the big bed with the husband; not sex, just beside him in the bed, smelling his neck, stroking his face.

She was crouching in the evergreen on Sunday when the Buenos Aires call came through. She watched his face rise and fall and rise and fall as the conversation moved from enthusiasm to logistics. She envisioned exactly what she would have done if she had been home alone with the children when an intruder entered. She anticipated the woman’s every emotion, every action and reaction.

In the bedroom, Ben began to cry.

First just a whimper, and then the favorite syllable.

They both tensed. They knew how little time they had between his first sounds and his sister’s cranky awakening.

mamamamamamama

It was no surprise that he was stirring, hungry, thirsty, after his non-bedtime. They both had been half expecting it at every instant. They hovered together in the seconds passing too swiftly as the sound intensified, the escalating need, the milk heavy in them.

Molly remembered, kind of, snapping at the kids about the pots and pans a couple weeks back. Remembered purchasing a fruit leather for Viv. Blurs in the great blur.

“My turn,” Moll said.

Molly felt it like a solid thing, the awareness of her outrageous abundance in comparison to this woman, this refugee from a far crueler reality.