Helen Phillips - The Need

When the sky lightened, she pulled herself away from the meadow of their sleep. She took a shower and dressed for work and pulled open the window beside the evergreen, and then carried her pajamas to the basement. Moll was asleep on the futon, which had been pressed down into its bed form at last, the sheets spread out properly.

Only when Molly saw Moll sleeping there did she realize how much she had been dreading the sight of her sitting stiffly on the worn-out spot, cross-legged and unrested.

Her body still felt to her like an echo of Moll’s and when she looked at Moll’s body it still felt like an echo of hers.

She perched on the edge of the futon and watched Moll as she had watched her children. This was no meadow. Asleep, Moll’s face was still and sad, the menace faded into mournfulness.

Ben was eating yogurt naked in his high chair. Viv was jumping naked from the coffee table to the couch. Moll, in Molly’s pajamas, moved through the space with the serenity that Molly longed for on these solo mornings of getting the kids ready when David was gone.

Molly watched from inside the evergreen, straining to catch each word through the window she had opened.

“Hey,” Viv said (clear, loud), “do you know why I have such a huge belly?”

“No,” Moll said, surprising Molly with the flatness of her voice.

“Well actually it’s because I’m going to have a baby.”

Moll wiped the trail of yogurt off Ben’s chin, neck, belly.

“And do you know who that baby is going to be?”

“No.” Moll held out a pair of underwear for Viv to step into.

“You. Baby Mommy.”

Why wasn’t Moll more amused, more vivacious?

“You smell funny,” Viv said to Moll. “Why do you smell that way?”

Moll pulled a shirt over Viv’s head and said something that Molly couldn’t hear.

“Can I lick your eye?” Viv smiled in anticipation of the refusal, the begging.

But Moll nodded and knelt.

“I can?” Viv said with awe.

Molly had to stretch, stand on tiptoe, to witness them together on the floor. Viv put her hands on Moll’s cheeks and pulled her close and licked her eye.

“You taste different,” Viv said.

“Different from what?” Moll said.

But Viv just laughed.

And then they all left the room, no longer visible from Molly’s vantage within the evergreen.

Molly pulled open the curtain of her cubicle to find Roz and Corey inside, waiting.

“Where is it?” Roz said.

“It’s okay, Molly,” Corey said. “Just give it all back.”

“Give what back?” she said.

“At least this time you relocked the cases.” Roz was at her flintiest.

Molly panicked, wondered: Moll? The bomber? Some other extremist?

It would have been her, had she gotten the opportunity; that was why she had come to work.

But it had not been her.

“Molly,” Corey said gently. “Where are they, dear?” Corey, who, on another Earth, was appearing in newspaper headlines, was being remembered in an obituary. Were the articles mentioning his recent hundred-mile bike ride to raise money for science textbooks in local schools? Those killed in the blast include…

“I’m not feeling great,” Molly said.

“I can tell,” Corey said.

“Where’s the Bible?” Roz said.

“If we can just get the old girl back on her throne before the tour starts,” Corey said. “They’re already starting to gather outside. A rather devout-looking group, I’d say.”

His jolly declaration chilled her.

“The devout ones are the scary ones,” Molly said.

“I guess,” he said. “But we know what they’re here for, so let’s give it to them.”

“Are there any women on the tour?” Molly said.

He looked at her funny. “Um, yes.”

“Like what age?”

“Molly,” Corey said, “whatever this is, it’ll pass. I promise. Can you get the things now, please?”

“I don’t have them.”

The bark that was Roz’s laugh. Something about that laugh, its unassailable confidence, set Molly off.

“Where,” Molly said, “do you think they come from? All these fossils and the Bible and the rest?”

“From a parallel universe, of course,” Roz singsonged.

Roz was joking. But Molly decided to run with it anyway.

“Well, what about it?” she said. “What if the Pit really is some kind of seam where things from other possible worlds come through, like from the world where the Neanderthals didn’t go extinct, or where, I don’t know, Hitler was just an artist?” She felt herself carried by a peculiar momentum: the Pit, the cosmic trash heap, the dumping ground for debris from infinity, the rip in the fabric of the multiverse; the precarious, hazardous seam. “Or the world where the three of us are religious zealots rather than paleobotanists, or maybe just the world where once I put strawberry jam on my sandwich in seventh grade rather than apricot jam. What if stuff from all those places slips through the Pit into our—”

She stopped, noticing how intently Roz and Corey were gazing at her.

“Yeah,” Roz said. “I get what you mean.”

Corey sighed grandly. “Hey, I love sci-fi as much as the next dork.”

“It’s not science fiction,” Roz countered.

Molly looked at her. Had Roz, too, met her double, another Roz?

Her milk came down.

“It’s a metaphor,” Roz continued. “That’s what fossils from dead lineages are, you know? Messengers from alternate realities. Fifi is just one possible future that didn’t pan out. I think of it that way too. So, is the Bible on the premises?”

“I don’t know where it is.” Not a metaphor , Molly wanted to say, feeling extraordinarily lonely, not a —

But she need not be lonely. There was someone. One person who understood everything, and more.

“Just bring the Bible and the other artifacts back tomorrow,” Roz said.

“I can keep them at bay for one day,” Corey said, “maybe.”

“After all, we have to make a living, right?” Roz said.

“Living-ish,” Corey quipped on his way out.

It was a warm, raw day. Standing in front of the Phillips 66 she saw many shades of gray and white (the field, the sky, the highway entrance ramp). She had stepped out for fresh air, to clear her head, to try to make some kind of plan, but when she opened the door all the people on Corey’s Tuesday-morning tour turned to look at her, and kept looking over at her amid their questions as to the current whereabouts of the Bible, and she went back inside after less than a minute.

She was sweating, sweating an excessive amount, and her bra was damp; her self-created wetnesses were increasing her anxiety.

Who had taken the Bible?

She went to the bank of lockers in the windowless employee room in the back—a holdover from the gas station days—where she and Corey and Roz kept spare clothes for when they got too dirty in the Pit. She couldn’t remember the last time she had opened her locker but she was pretty sure there was a spare shirt in there.

When she opened it, a clot of clothing fell onto her feet.

She leaped back.

A clot of blood-encrusted clothing.

She could smell it. The rust.

Jeans, a black shirt.

That stiffness of the jeans.

The same black shirt she happened to be wearing today.

Molly was pulling out of the parking lot of the Phillips 66 when the black car pulled into the parking lot: a clean, compact vehicle with that rental-car gleam.

She reached for her bag, on the passenger seat beside her, shoving past the bloody clothing in search of her phone. She dialed Corey with her thumb as she drove along the frontage road. She could pull a U-turn—she could, she should.