Helen Phillips - The Need

Ben chortled as Moll lifted him above her head.

“No!” Viv said. “Don’t laugh when you make a problem, B.”

The combination of his sister’s distressed face and his mother’s distressed face was more than he could bear. He launched himself to the height of a scream with no warm-up.

“He should have been wearing a diaper,” Viv chided.

After a moment Ben stopped crying. Moll cleaned the floor, using wet wipes to scoop the poop into a diaper. The children watched, rapt. Then Moll raced to the kitchen, where (Molly assumed) the quesadillas were starting to burn in the toaster.

This woman , Molly thought, could burn my house down .

As though no quesadilla had ever burned under her own watch.

As though she wouldn’t have relieved the babysitter and started playing with them before the other mother got home.

Viv said to Ben, “You have a little baby skeleton inside you. Did you know that?”

Ben looked at Viv.

Viv put a yellow blanket over her head and bobbed around the living room, chanting, “The pillows are haunted. The couch is haunted. The rug is haunted.”

After a while Ben grew bored of her litany. He wandered into the kitchen and came up behind Moll where she was standing at the sink rinsing grapes. He grabbed her legs to steady himself. Moll reached down and patted his head.

When Moll touched him, Molly experienced the sensation on her own hand.

That feeling of his hair. Outrageously soft.

She extricated herself from the bush. She went to the basement to grieve.

In the basement there was a three-foot piece of old metal piping leaned up against the concrete wall behind the guitar stands. It had not been there before. Probably it had been in the basement, somewhere amid the chaos of boxes and junk on the far side. But it had not been on display. Now, it served as proof that Moll did not simply sit all day; that she moved around the cellar, simmering with plans; that she had located at least one weapon.

And, another change from before: in the middle of the futon, awaiting Molly almost like a gift, the spare unit for the baby monitor.

So Moll had been eavesdropping far more profoundly than permitted by the bush. Into the children’s bedroom. Why hadn’t Molly thought to do the same?

The worn-out spot on the rug pulled her to it. She settled herself there, cross-legged, bereft, enraged, the metal pipe heavy across her thighs, the baby monitor light in her hand. She turned the dial:

“—made of plastic?” Viv was saying. Ben was crying.

“Ceramic,” Moll said.

“Wood?” Viv persisted.

Moll soothed Ben.

“Well, wood?”

Ben allowed himself to be soothed.

“Plastic?”

Molly turned off the monitor.

Scornfully she considered herself, her former attitudes and actions. How often had she, naive with privilege, threatened David: If those kids don’t learn to sleep through the night I’m seriously going to move to the basement.

Time passed the way it passed in the basement: not measureable.

Was this now her life: inside the cellar, outside of time?

Like Moll.

Eons later, Moll opened the metal doors and came down the stairs with a cardboard box.

The basement was dark. Moll turned on a lamp. She did not react when she saw the metal pipe lying across Molly’s lap.

Nor did Molly pick it up and use it as she had intended.

When she saw Moll in the lamplight what she saw in the lamplight was herself.

Moll removed things from the box and placed them on the futon: the gray scarf, the blue hoodie, the white T-shirt, the fleece socks. Not even David was aware of her fondness for that particular T-shirt, those particular socks. The most private and mundane of preferences. Known only to her. And to the person who had once owned them, too, elsewhere—the secret softness inside the pockets of the blue hoodie.

“Settling in,” Molly observed, trying to sound cold, but her vocal cords were disobedient, her voice the croak of a creature accustomed to darkness.

“Your turn,” Moll said.

“Turn,” Molly scoffed. Then, “Asleep?”

Moll nodded.

Molly felt depleted, as though it would require superhuman effort to restore herself to sufficient buoyancy to go up the stairs.

She rolled the metal pipe off her legs and stood, with effort.

“Do you feel like you’re losing your children?” Moll said.

The audacity of the question.

Molly hissed her response.

“Good!” Moll said, spitting the word out of her mouth like a curse. “Good! Because that’s what happened to me.”

They were too close to each other, same face to same face, like raging at yourself in the mirror. Molly recalled watching herself cry or laugh in the mirror as a child: observing her face distorted in despair or mirth made her cry or laugh all the harder.

“But your children,” Moll said, “are alive and well. Your grief is the tiniest fraction of mine.”

Molly envisioned them, smooth, asleep, just a few feet above their heads. She needed to be upstairs, near them, in case.

“You should go upstairs,” Moll said.

“We have to find her.”

“Her?”

“The bomber. She’s dead in your world but not— She was driving a black rental car, I saw it.”

“What can we do?” Moll’s voice was hollow. “Some woman in a black rental car two weeks ago? There’s nothing we can do.”

“She could still—” Molly said. “I tried to hide the Bible and the other artifacts but Roz and Corey—”

“Maybe someone killed her children,” Moll said.

“What do you mean?” Panic surged through Molly.

“Maybe,” Moll said, staring at the cement floor, “when your children are killed, you kill in turn.”

Frightened, Molly waited for Moll to say something else.

But Moll was quiet.

“I’m going upstairs,” Molly announced, but she did not move toward the stairs.

“When I’m with them,” Moll said, “I feel like I never lost them. And I feel like I’m losing them every second.”

Molly froze at this confession; found herself, for some reason, remembering the freshness of the amniotic fluid. Whooshing out of her, the cleanest thing she had ever encountered. That otherworldly liquid in which their impeccable bodies had been suspended, safe.

They were already standing so close, but Moll took a step closer, matched her body up to Molly’s: thighs to thighs, torso to torso. The slow and hurting beating of her heart. Molly smelled the unwashed smell of herself, doubled, heady. Moll’s face drooped onto Molly’s neck.

Despite having conceived and borne and birthed and nursed children, this was the most intimate human sensation she had ever experienced: Moll’s warm tears moving across the skin of her collarbone.

It was the lightest touch imaginable, traveling downward toward the indentation between her breasts. She found herself opening to it, open to it, this subtlest interplay between two echoing forms.

But it was too much. She needed to step back.

Yet she could not. She was addicted to it, to the movement of the tears, the lack of gaps between them.

After a while Moll pulled her head up off Molly’s neck, revoking the tears, and Molly braced herself for further distancing. But Moll’s lips too were parted, and their lips matched themselves up, and their teeth.

Upstairs, Molly carried the sleeping children from their room into her bed. It was unwise, disruptive to their rest and to hers, but she needed to sleep, or half sleep, beside them. She needed to look at them and look at them again the whole night long.

She drowsed and woke and drowsed and woke, and, in the in-between states, forgot about Moll and Moll’s children—instead was struck, at the sight and sound and smell of her children, by an outlandish joy, its tinge of sorrow momentarily inexplicable to her, until she remembered.