Helen Phillips - The Need

mamamamamamama

Molly was so tired, too tired. What she was thinking about was the night a few months earlier, when Viv had first asked about death. Can you please show me a picture of a dead person? Can you please draw me a picture of a dead person?

mamamamamamama

Molly’s nod was barely perceptible, a tiny giving up, yet that slight motion catapulted Moll out of her chair and down the hall toward the children’s room.

The siren song of her baby screaming was unbearable to Molly, she needed to be tied to a mast, beeswax thrust into her ears, so as not to rush down the hall behind Moll and shove her out of the way.

But then the crying ceased, replaced by the measured glide of the rocking chair, the damp animal noise.

A sound, Molly discovered, far more intolerable than the screaming.

She would prefer not to eavesdrop on these sounds of intimacy.

She sat and listened.

Apparently it’s an instinct, a holdover from the time when the infants of our primate ancestors would fling their arms backward in an attempt to grab branches and save themselves upon tumbling off the tree. It always looked religious to her, though, a gesture of religious abandon, giving oneself over to sleep as to a cross as to a god. Every time it moved her, this final divine flinch of his as she placed him in the crib after nursing him.

Moll was luminous, almost unrecognizable, when she returned from the bedroom.

She had never been able to decide whether it was a pleasing sensation or a disconcerting one, when you’re holding their hands and you can feel their hearts beating in their hands.

That awareness of their arteries.

She remembered almost nothing. She remembered change scattering out of her pocket as she slid to the bottom of the Pit, laden. She remembered a penny in the mud. Her daughter is—was—always on the lookout for pennies, heads up for good luck.

It was hot, way too hot, at the bottom of the Pit. It took her a second to understand that the source of the heat was blood.

She was running so fast to get them away and then she ran over the edge of the Pit and they sort of fell down into it, the three of them, his body in her right arm and her body in her left arm, slipping and scooting down the mud, and because they were not laughing, she knew they were dead.

Molly was standing in front of the open freezer, drinking pomegranate vodka straight from the bottle. She had no idea why there was pomegranate vodka in her freezer. There never before had been.

Moll—aglow, atremble—came toward her, and for a millisecond, Molly thought the other woman was going to kiss her. But instead Moll stood beside her in the chill and light pouring out of the freezer.

“Alien greenhouse,” Moll said.

Molly knew what she meant: their room, the rich outlandish smell of it at night, that place where small and perfect bodies were grown, the dark and glowing tomatoes.

Moll took the vodka from Molly’s hand, screwed the cap back on, returned it to the freezer, shut the freezer. She shepherded Molly over to the couch, her hand too hot on the small of Molly’s back, yet Molly acquiesced like a child. The world was spiraling, unreliable, her arms disobedient, her legs monstrous in their defiance of her intentions.

The weight of two small corpses.

Moll went back to the kitchen and turned on the faucet and rinsed an apple.

When Molly was upset, it calmed her to drink water and eat an apple.

She watched Moll move around her kitchen, linger over the wooden knife block, fish scales shimmering.

Moll looked at Molly and pulled out the largest knife—a preposterous knife to use on an apple. She held it up, almost brandished it. Seeing the knife gleam in the kitchen light, Molly knew what she would do if she were Moll. Knew she would do it at knifepoint, at gunpoint, as necessary. But then the knife descended on the apple, and Moll was merely a woman cutting an apple.

Moll strode over to the couch, bearing a plate of sliced apple in one hand and a big mason jar filled with water in the other.

It was her favorite thing to drink out of, a big mason jar.

But she did not dare to eat this apple. She did not dare to drink this water.

She couldn’t put it into words, the quality of those who made her uneasy; often they took the most innocuous form. Sometimes they would give her the creeps for no reason at all.

Something kept pulling her gaze over to the unremarkable woman (plain, bony, thirtysomething, jeans and baseball cap and sweatshirt) as she went through the motions of giving the tour, so that she happened to notice how the woman pressed through the others to get closer to the glass case containing the Bible. And she noticed when the woman began to tremble (though she was by no means the first to react strongly upon encountering the Bible).

Their eyes met, such sad weak bloodshot eyes, how irrational and small of her to dislike this innocent person; the woman was shaking harder by the second and she saw that she needed help. She imagined that this was one of her own children thirty years from now, suffering through a difficult day, quaking with private grief. She would do the kind thing. She took a step toward the woman.

“Are you all right?” she said, interrupting the tour. “Can I help you?”

As she spoke, she noticed a flicker on the other side of the floor-to-ceiling gas station windows: a child running toward the building from the parking lot. A child who turned out to be Viv, followed by Erika carrying Ben. Corey had already spotted them, was hurrying to open the door for Viv.

She had just been thinking of her children and now here they were, as though her thought had given them body. She was pleased—self-congratulatory—that they had arrived when she was engaged in an act of compassion.

“Would you like to take a seat?” she said to the woman.

Behind the quaking woman, not visible to the quaking woman, Viv was racing through the door, through the small crowd; Ben was attempting to fling himself out of Erika’s arms, reaching in the direction of his mother.

The woman was staring at her, fearful, fragile. She reached to catch the woman in case she fell. But the woman backed away from her, edging closer to the glass case containing the Bible, closer to the doorway where the children had just entered.

The woman reached one hand high up into the air and placed one hand against her stomach. She was crying. Then she reached under her sweatshirt, pressed herself somewhere, and detonated.

The metallic scrape of the slanted cellar doors (they had never quite joined properly), steel on brick, that familiar painful yank, the sound aching in her teeth.

It was early yet; she assumed she would be waking her. But coming down the steep stairs she saw that she was already awake, perhaps long awake, sitting cross-legged on the worn-out rug in the flat morning light, eerily alert. None of the lamps were on; so she had been waiting in the dark. The futon was in its couch form. The sheets and blanket were folded tidily upon it. The guitars and the banjo and the cello stood undisturbed in their stands, the keyboard and speakers and mixing board unplugged.