Helen Phillips - The Need

She waited for Moll, praying that she would honor her own proposed schedule and swap Molly in as soon as she got Viv back to sleep.

She thought of the spiders all around her, maybe crawling up her.

She cursed Moll. She felt as though she had not touched their bodies in weeks.

She had the phone now. She could call someone. 911, or Erika, or David.

She thought of what she could do to Moll. With what household implements.

She horrified herself. She tried to soothe herself by turning her thoughts to other things: to visions of round, smooth surfaces. The image of a wooden bowl. The image of a sand dune. The image of Ben’s forehead. But any serene image, she realized, bore within itself the opposite of serenity, the possibility of the shattering of the surface.

The screech of the doors woke her. It was morning, white and damp. She was sprawled messily on the futon. Her vision was blurry with sleep and lack of sleep.

“I fell asleep when I was putting her down,” Moll said. “I woke up just now.”

Molly pretended it was a lie, though she knew it wasn’t—how many times had it happened to her, the tendrils of her child’s sleep gripping at her, tying her to the little bed?

“Are they awake?”

“Not yet.”

Moll settled herself onto her spot on the worn rug, cross-legged and grave, as though she had no intention of moving a muscle for the next twelve hours, her docility at once reassuring and unsettling.

Upstairs, Molly locked the back door behind her. The home was silent with the silence of sleeping children. She went into the bathroom—when had she last cleaned herself?—and shed the stupid T-shirt and sweatpants, and turned the shower on, very hot, and stood under it for a while, but not too long, because they would be up any second.

It was strange to see strands of dark hair in the bathtub drain and not know if they were hers or hers.

She pulled the towel off the hook (had she pulled this towel off this hook?). She was half-dry when Ben called for her. She swooped him out of the crib and onto her big bed, where, finally, so warm, that heat of him, he nursed, at first frenetic and then indifferent, sucking lazily, detaching.

Now Viv was up, jumping on the bed, jumping on them, and Molly was in the chaos of it, the impeccable chaos, while two yards below a woman sat in the dark.

“Too tight!” Viv cried out. “Let me go!” And Ben, also, following his sister’s lead, writhed out of Molly’s grasp.

Usually they felt endless, these mornings alone with the kids, the minutes unreliable, expanding infinitely, but today two hours felt like a few moments, and then Erika was coming through the door.

“Happy Monday!” Erika very nearly shouted as she entered. “Well Miss Viv, I hear there was an exceptionally beautiful fish at your party.” Erika winked at Molly, who couldn’t bring herself to wink back.

She ought to send Erika home, call in sick to work, spend the whole day with the kids, maybe pack them into the car and drive away forever.

But she had to go to work. It was even more important that she go to work.

“Of course,” Viv said. She was on the rug, stuck beneath Ben, who was trying to lick her eye. She was having fun with him and then she wasn’t. “Get him off me!”

Erika picked him up and smeared kisses across his forehead. Molly got a pang, watching another woman kiss her boy, but it wasn’t Erika’s fault.

“Mommy, since Ben licked my eye, can I lick your eye?”

“No,” Molly said.

“Please?” Viv said. “You’ll like it.”

“Your saliva might sting my eye.”

“It what?” Viv was distraught.

“Just kidding.”

“So I can lick your eye?”

“No. Get your backpack. We’re almost late.”

On their walk to the car—a block and a half away, the nearest parking spot she could find upon their return from the dangerous frolic in the median a hundred years ago—Viv gripped her hand, and Molly could feel the stretching of her daughter’s tendons. She brought her awareness, too much awareness, to the union of their hands, until she felt Viv’s heartbeat in her palm like a thing she was holding.

She jerked her hand out of Viv’s.

“Excuse me,” Viv said to a puddle, jumping over it, unbothered.

They were stopped at the first red light when Viv said, from her car seat in the back, “Once upon a time we went to the carousel yesterday.”

The light turned green.

“Right, Mom?”

“That’s right,” Molly said.

But Viv was in a great mood and did not notice the tightness in her mother’s voice.

“I can’t believe I’m four,” she said.

“Do you like being four?”

“I love it. But also I want to be five and six and eight and nine and stuff.”

“Why?”

“I want to get older so I can be a mommy.”

“Yes, I had to get old enough,” Molly said, resisting the urge to correct Viv, to say that she should look forward to being older so she could be a scientist or artist or president as well as a mother. “So that I could be yours.”

“Yes,” Viv said, “because I was waiting for you.”

“You were waiting for me?”

“Yes.”

“Where were you waiting for me?”

“Everywhere.”

She needed to be the first to arrive at work, and, thanks to driving too fast after dropping off Viv at school, here she was, in the empty parking lot. She ran toward the Phillips 66, key chain in hand, overwhelmed by the sensation of being chased, though the parking lot couldn’t have been more peaceful.

A scattering of birds, no wind.

She used the thickest key to open the front door of the display room. It was dim and still, smelling of dust and fossils and old coffee, as always. She flicked the lights: the noise of the fluorescence.

How innocent the Bible looked, there in its glass case; undisturbed, undisturbing.

She ran through the glass door that led from the display room to the offices and lab. The cardboard box where she had initially gathered the artifacts was still there, in the shadows beneath her desk.

She grabbed the box and returned to the display room and used the smallest key to unlock the glass case bearing the Bible. Then she unlocked the glass case containing the other objects. Gingerly, she placed the Coca-Cola bottle, the Altoids tin, the potsherd, and the toy soldier in the cardboard box with the Bible.

She was stupid to have shared them. She should have hidden them all away.

She remembered the day, only a month ago, when she had perused the Bible cover to cover to confirm that every single mention of God was feminized.

Molly carried the box back to her cubicle and pushed it as far under her desk as possible.

Now she felt a little bit safe. She was, she realized, breathing hard.

Then she remembered that there was a sixth object. The penny she had found in the Pit and quickly dismissed—the penny from Moll’s world.

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 always on the lookout for pennies, heads up for good luck.

But where was that penny now?

In Molly’s wallet, still, probably, where she had dropped it along with the control penny on Friday.

She pulled her wallet out of her bag. She felt as though she could sense the penny in there, burning with its otherness, the change purse suddenly toxic.

She dumped the coins out onto her desk and pulled all six pennies toward her. There were only two possible contenders, as only two had been minted in the current year. One penny belonging to her, one belonging to Moll. But there was nothing to distinguish them from each other. She found herself wishing for a hint, some telltale sign (a fleck of blood?) so that she could know which penny was the dangerous one—and then was horrorstruck by her wish.