Helen Phillips - The Need

Molly sat with her back up against a tree, facing away from the playground that was uninhabited aside from them, listening to herself and her daughter count to one hundred.

Fifty-three (Viv), fifty-four (Ben), fifty-five (Viv), fifty-six (Ben), fifty-seven (Viv), fifty-eight (Ben), fifty-nine (Viv), sixty (Ben)…

For Moll, though, the numbers were not a slog. There was joy in her voice.

Later Viv was going down the slide and Moll was nursing Ben on a sun-soaked bench. Molly’s glimpse of the scene made her aware of the weight of her own milk. Her need for relief. He was hungry, urgent, embracing the other woman with every part of his body. They sat as one in the sun: the extreme heat of the mother, the extreme heat of the nursing baby, the furnace of the universe.

Molly peeked around the tree, her face wet. She knew she ought to be more careful, keep herself better hidden, shield herself from Moll’s rage, protect her children from the sight of two mothers.

Eventually Ben fell away from the breast and Moll refastened herself. But their intimacy did not end there. He was holding his squeaky giraffe and it seemed that he wished for Moll to bite it. Molly would have refused to let him put it in her mouth, but Moll accepted the giraffe’s head and bit until it squeaked. Ben had never seen anything so amusing. He bit and squeaked the legs of the giraffe. She bit and squeaked the giraffe’s head. He bit, she bit, on and on, excruciating.

Viv was nowhere to be seen. She was not on the slide. She was not climbing the ladder. She was not reaching for the monkey bars.

She was weaving among the trees, picking things up off the ground, getting closer and closer to Molly. Molly inched around the tree trunk, out of view.

“Mommy?” Viv said, sounding just slightly lost. “Mom?”

Molly waited for Moll to say something, to call out to Viv, “Over here!”

But she didn’t.

And Molly was suddenly appalled at herself: she had handed her children over to a woman mangled by grief. There was no way such a mother could do all that needed to be done.

“I got treasures,” Viv said, veering back toward the playground.

“Oh, show me!” Moll cried out then from the bench.

As Moll examined the bits of glittering litter in Viv’s hands, Molly left them. She would go home and shut herself up in the basement until nightfall. She would prepare the right words to cast Moll out of her life forever.

Yet approaching the perimeter of the park, she found herself unable to exit. She sprinted back to the playground.

They were gone. Afternoon was shading into night. Maybe they had gone home along a different path. But then she heard the distant insistent tinkle and clang.

Moll stood out from afar, wearing her favorite sweatshirt, encircling her son with both arms, stationed between the pair of unreal-colored horses that carried her children into the falling darkness. Each time they went around it seemed that they were riding off into the shadows, but of course they kept circling back, again and again, protected always by the rows of merry lights. The children’s faces were wondrous, ecstatic, but Moll looked solemn, straight-necked, almost ceremonial, as though she bore the world atop her orbiting body.

Often there were spiders in the metal sink in the half bath in the basement. Her unneeded milk hissed against the metal and rivuleted down the sides toward the black hole of the drain. Her wrists ached.

It was getting harder by the minute, each second a wound.

Her body could not contain this longing.

Maybe if she sat. Maybe if she just sat silently on the rug, waiting. Cross-legged.

Time would pass over and around her.

Time would, eventually, deliver them to her.

Would deliver her to the moment in which she articulated her refusal.

Unless—unless— (the possibility of which she declined to contemplate.)

Only after a while did it dawn on her that she was sitting on the rug in the exact same location and position as Moll had been when she came down to the basement this morning.

Yet she did not move. She sat.

A few decades of silence.

Then, that scrape of steel on brick.

Moll came down the steep stairs. Her body rigid, her expression cold.

Molly felt feverish, spastic, in comparison.

“Don’t ever follow me again,” Moll said, “or I will kill you.”

There was a glint in her eye—sarcasm or menace? The hint of a more direct reckoning, a convenient disappearance (the outskirts of town, those sparse desolate groves) followed by the seamless insertion of herself into Molly’s life?

Molly’s struggle to decipher Moll’s tone caused her own anguish to lose its focus. She imagined what she herself would be capable of, if; the thought shook her and she had to shake it off.

“Are they asleep?” Molly said.

Moll nodded.

“We shouldn’t be down here,” Molly said. Viv often woke in the early hours of the night, thirsty and scared, needing a mother.

Moll nodded again.

Molly led the way up the stairs and out the bulkhead. Moll stood on the grass, unhelpful, while Molly heaved the metal doors shut.

“The blinds,” Moll said flatly when they were both in the living room, the back door locked behind them. She watched as Molly pulled down all the blinds until they were protected from outside eyes.

Moll settled onto the couch, put her feet up on the coffee table where she had hidden when she was a deer, focused her gaze on Molly.

“So,” Moll said, a statement or a question.

This was the time to use the words that would cast Moll out of her life forever.

And she searched, she searched, but she could not quite find the right words.

The unassailable argument against their arrangement—it eluded her.

The phone buzzed in the pocket of the sweatshirt Moll was wearing. She pulled it out and handed it to Molly. David, again; Decline , again. Poor David. But she could not answer the phone, could not speak to him; not with Moll’s eyes drilling into her.

“Seventh time today,” Moll said.

Molly was struck, for the first time, by the thought of Moll’s David, in Moll’s world, the grieving David, and it sickened her.

She felt guilty toward her own David, and missed him, but the emotions were distant, misty, as though they belonged to someone else.

“We’ll tell him in person,” Moll said. “Once he’s back. In six days.”

Molly stiffened, alarmed. Tell him? Tell him—what?

Down the hallway, the children’s doorknob began to turn, the well-known squeak.

They darted in different directions, Moll into the bathtub, pulling the shower curtain shut behind her, Molly into the bedroom, into the darkness of the mirrored closet.

Viv, coming down the hall. That slight damp quality of her bare feet on the wood.

“I’m scared from my dream,” Viv said to the empty kitchen, the empty couch.

Her footsteps became hastier, panicked.

Molly emerged from the dark closet into the dark bedroom, feeling her daughter’s panic as though it were her own (was it?), desperate to arrive at the instant a few seconds from now when she would be holding Viv close, reunited, the comfort of the home reasserting itself.

But Viv had gone into the bathroom. And now the sound of the shower curtain being pulled to the side. So it was Moll who enveloped Viv, Moll whose body cast Viv’s nightmare out of the house.

Molly couldn’t hear Moll’s words, too low and quiet, but she could hear Viv’s as she tiptoed past the bathroom, toward the back door, the night, the basement, her unplanned banishment: “…you playing hide-and-seek with me?… Juice… Okay fine water… a worm as big as a moon…”