Helen Phillips - The Need

There were three thirtysomething women on the tour, one of them wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, and as much as she wanted to run in there and save Corey, her body moved her back to her cubicle, into the dark space beneath her desk.

Her phone buzzed in her pocket and she answered it accidentally, her finger’s swipe to decline the video call landing on the wrong part of the phone’s surface.

“Where are you?” David said.

She crawled out from under her desk.

“Were you under your desk?”

“Cords,” she said.

His face looked distant in the small window. It calmed her to see him, but the calmness was fleeting, almost immediately overthrown by despair. She wished that her life hadn’t changed. That she could be at peace, briefly video-chatting with her wondrous husband during her engaging workday while her children thrived and napped.

“Molly?”

She tried to think of how to talk to him; if she told him anything right now, she feared it would come out as a scream.

“Molly.” His voice was accusatory. “Where were you guys yesterday? Why didn’t you pick up ever?”

“At the carousel.” It sounded thin; she could hear how thin it sounded.

A few beats passed between them. She wanted to tell him everything. She wanted them to be united, all-powerful, capable of ejecting Moll from their lives. The fantasy spiraled quickly, absurdly—superhero masks and capes, lightning bolts shooting out of their fingers; Moll shocked, meek, terrified, slinking away forever.

“What the fuck is going on, Molly?”

She was disturbed by the image of Moll that had sprung up in her mind, Moll reduced and pitiful; the words from the song David sang so well came to her, burned out from exhaustion, buried in the hail, poisoned in the bushes and blown out on the trail, hunted like a crocodile, ravaged in the corn.

“I’m burned out from exhaustion,” she borrowed.

“Buried in the hail,” he said, without missing a beat, and she loved him.

It was he who had stood in the doorway the same day as the car accident and said What the hell, let’s have a kid . Molly remembered the ensuing sex, how directly it had led to Viv, how urgent it had been, sex following a car accident in which people could have been hurt but no one was hurt.

“I’m sorry,” she said, straining to hear Corey droning on, still alive.

“Molly?” he implored. “Molly?”

She thought of Moll. Of Moll’s David.

“Later,” she promised. “Soon. I’m at work.”

He stared at her through the screen. She looked away from the screen.

“I’m going to call you tonight,” he said finally. “And if you don’t pick up—”

He hung up. She sat in her chair. She stared at the list of website updates Corey had emailed her. She looked at the black letters on the screen, trying to see the pixels.

It was long and not long before a text message dinged into her phone: Erika.

Hey is it really true that Viv can get pizza dough to play with if we swing by the back door before the pizza place opens?

The question pulled Molly back into her life: her life, the delight of it all, all the things that made you forget you were hurtling through space moving two colossal speeds at once, the precious guys at the pizza place with their accents and generosity.

Yeah Viv sometimes dies! she texted back.

It took her an instant to notice the typo.

DOES , she corrected.

But the damage was done. The catastrophic typo. She had to get home to them.

Waiting at the light to turn right off the thoroughfare, she couldn’t believe she was already almost home; couldn’t recall a single second of her drive. That bizarre thing of getting in the car and then arriving at your destination with no memory of what had passed around you.

But here she was, 4:23 p.m. She rolled down all four windows, inviting in the wind. Erika always took Ben in the stroller to walk Viv home from school; probably they had returned ten or fifteen minutes ago. It would be so fun to surprise them, to seize them both and spin them around and dazzle them with her presence. To let Erika go an hour and a half early but still pay her the full amount.

They were always desperate for her by this time of day. And she was desperate for them. The desire manifested itself physically, an actual itch at her wrist, an actual ache when she breathed in: the need for their bodies.

She heard them (their unmistakable screeches, their stabs of laughter) an instant before she spotted them. They must be out front with Erika.

She got closer. They were in the front yard. But not with Erika.

She was spinning them, had seized them up, was spinning both of them at once.

There was nothing to do but glide past them unnoticed, for they were caught up in their ecstatic dizziness.

There was nothing to do but park the car on a different block and sneak through backyards toward the evergreen bush. Nothing to do but let her mute rage accumulate.

She could call Erika, explain everything, get Erika on board. That woman wasn’t me , she would say. We’re going to fucking save these amazing kids , Erika would say, swearing to be at Molly’s side ASAP . Or, Erika would be initially amused, thinking it a joke, and then deeply concerned about Molly’s mental health.

When Molly reached her own backyard, Moll and the children were still out front. Talking with affable Capria Lewis, their neighbor from half a block down. Who was confused.

“But you were in the car,” Capria Lewis said.

“The car?” Moll said.

So it was Capria who would call them out, who would shatter their flimsy, reckless arrangement.

“I was—” Capria said, “you were—but now you’re—”

“Do you have lollipops,” Viv wanted to know.

“Do you have a toothbrush,” Capria rejoined, their habitual exchange.

“Thank you,” Viv said, and, “Say ‘Thank you,’ B.”

“Well I guess I’m just getting old,” Capria said insincerely.

“Hey look!” Viv yelled, and they all moved to the other side of the front yard, and Molly could no longer hear them.

She felt like an intruder, crouching in the evergreen bush, catapulted out of her life, transformed into someone with nothing. She tried to shake the feeling. She reminded herself that no neighbor would ever call the police to tell them that Molly had been seen stalking around her own backyard.

When after too long they came into the house through the front door, Viv was saying, “—spell Molly?”

“Actually,” Moll said, “a lot like the way you spell Mommy. But with L s rather than M s.”

“L-O-L-L-Y?”

They all went into the bathroom together and closed the door. Molly strained but could hear nothing.

After a while they emerged from the bathroom. Ben wasn’t wearing pants or a diaper. He ought to be wearing a diaper , Molly thought. Go to the bedroom and get him a diaper. But Moll went to the kitchen.

From inside the bush, Molly bore witness to Moll’s comfort as she rinsed the carrots, as she grated the cheese, as she instructed Viv to choose napkins, as she slid the quesadillas into the toaster: a woman rushing around her kitchen, her life, in motion and at peace, erasing that other universe with her every gesture, the infiltration perfecting itself. She wondered if Moll knew or cared that she was there, watching, in the bush.

Ben squatted and pooped on the floor near the table. He stood up and gazed down at it. He knelt to examine it. Molly was about to shout a warning, but Viv beat her to it:

“No B don’t!”

Moll sprinted over and grabbed him an instant before his fingers sank in.