Helen Phillips - The Need

Molly dragged the duffel out to the living room. She unzipped it: a good bit of the kids’ clothing, some of their favorite stuffed animals and blankets.

She found her phone. She called David. It was time.

But his phone went straight to voice mail.

She called him again, staring at the duffel. She had the urge to scream, to leave such a scream on his voice mail that he would come to them at once; that even if they were gone when he arrived, he would know to search for them, would know to assume the worst.

But instead she left a message: asked him to call her as soon as possible, put enough of an edge in her voice that he would understand she meant it. He would recognize that she was ready, now, to explain why she had been the way she had been.

After hanging up, she was struck by the silence coming from the children’s room.

The scream lingered just inside her, searing, awaiting its moment.

She gathered herself before opening their bedroom door.

Moll was not in the basement.

Molly said her name once, twice.

So where was she? Out in the world? With the Bible and the other artifacts? Enacting some plan? Laying the groundwork for a kidnapping?

Then, she spotted Moll beyond a stack of cardboard boxes, on the folding chair at the base of the window well, staring upward at the slight light, holding the metal pipe upright in her left hand like a cane.

It was the chair where Molly sat when she came down late at night to listen to him play. Once in a while she could see the moon from there, bright at the top of the window well. It gave her an odd sense of familiarity, to see Moll there, to witness herself perched on her perch.

“Please,” Moll said. “Go away.”

The cold voice of someone looking back on two pregnancies, two births, all the months of breastfeeding, the years of exhaustion and bliss? The cold voice of someone considering the androgyny of the skeletons of children?

“Why did you pack the duffel?” Molly said.

Moll cleared her throat, a painful sound.

“You,” Moll said, “always have to check to make sure their fingers aren’t in the door.”

Molly’s first instinct was to defend herself, she was only human, but when instead she agreed, “I should have been more careful,” the self-flagellation came as a relief.

“I should have been more careful,” Moll repeated.

She had yet to look at Molly. She was only looking upward, outward, into the window well. Molly watched her every movement, kept her eyes on the metal pipe that could at any second become a weapon. But Moll hardly moved.

“We were playing,” Moll said. “Vacation.”

It was then that Molly registered the five-by-seven white rectangle placed directly, deliberately, beneath the folding chair. Though the photograph was facing downward, Molly knew what it was: the single image David kept in the basement, taped above his keyboard, a picture he had taken last Halloween of Molly holding Viv and Ben (a spider, a ladybug) on the front steps. She recalled their resistance, their glee, their bodies straining away from her.

A photograph, she realized, is a fossil.

“You can do dinner,” Molly said. Astonished, as she said it, by her exceptional generosity, momentarily forgetting that it was a generosity tinged with fear. She took off her black shirt and unzipped her jeans and awaited Moll’s happiness. That permanent raw greediness in her eyes abating somewhat in the moments before she was reunited with them.

But still Moll did not look at her, standing there in bra and underwear in the chill of her cellar.

Molly held her shed clothes out to Moll.

Moll wouldn’t touch them.

Only then did Molly (stupid) remember what these clothes were.

“They both fell asleep in his crib,” Molly said to ward off the silence.

“Okay,” Moll said wearily. “I’ll go up.”

It was silent upstairs. Molly pictured Moll standing in the kitchen, not moving a muscle. Standing in the living room, not moving a muscle. Wearing sweatpants and a stained T-shirt so she wouldn’t have to wear the clothing she was wearing when.

Then the children broke the silence and Moll’s footsteps hurried to their bedroom. Molly listened to their varied tones: excited to insistent to tender to pleading to agreeable, the many emotions passing in and out of her children’s voices, all of them met by Moll’s equanimity.

Molly searched for the baby monitor, found it under the futon, listened to her own voice speaking to her own children with love. She turned the monitor off and tossed it back under the futon.

She both wanted and didn’t want to creep up the basement steps into the bush.

From inside the evergreen, she could see Viv and Ben stacking blocks on the living room floor while Moll made dinner in the kitchen.

That perfect peace of children playing when they know their mother is nearby. Knowing she is there, they can ignore her completely.

When Moll called the children to the table, both were alarmingly compliant, going right over and submitting themselves to their respective seats.

Moll had prepared a plate for herself too, had gotten herself a glass of water, and sat down across from them.

Molly, when David was out of town, never sat with the kids to eat; while they had dinner, she rushed around getting a head start on the end-of-day cleanup.

“There’s a big party going on inside our bodies,” Viv said.

Viv’s voice was far louder than Moll’s; Molly couldn’t hear Moll’s response.

“A party of blood and bones and our brain and stuff,” Viv clarified.

Again Molly couldn’t hear Moll’s response. But she could see that Moll was smiling.

Molly exited the bush. Instead of returning to the basement she walked around the house to the sidewalk.

She felt reckless, uncareful. March was about to give way to April and she could feel it in the air, a certain levity. The dusk was gray but there was a glimmer at its edges, a silver indication in the clouds. The neighborhood starting to smell more like plants, less like car exhaust.

She never took walks by herself at dusk. This was the time of day when her home demanded everything of her. Once in a while she would peek out the window at the tail end of a sunset. But always she was needed inside.

Now, though, having achieved her wish, walking these streets alone at the sunset hour, she felt unmoored, the appalling vertigo of her freedom.

She walked. The glimmer spread across the sky, black birds writing cursive on it with their bodies.

Moll was lying on the rug in the living room with her eyes closed. Viv and Ben were circling around her, poking at her with instruments from their toy doctor kit.

Molly watched from the evergreen, straining to catch every gesture: Ben smacking Moll’s knee with the thermometer, Viv struggling to fit the child-size blood pressure cuff around Moll’s upper arm.

Frustrated, Viv threw the blood pressure cuff to the side and grabbed the thermometer out of Ben’s hand. Ben shrieked and stumbled over Moll’s body in his effort to reclaim the thermometer. But Moll did not stir, did not use her arms to brace his fall. His cheek hit the floor and he began to cry.

Still Moll did not move. Viv tried to wrench Moll’s mouth open in order to shove the thermometer in. Ben, ignored by both of them, stopped wailing and began whimpering. He crawled to the doctor kit and pulled out the stethoscope. When Viv saw that he had the stethoscope, she ran over and snatched it away, relaunching his crying fit.

Moll remained immobile, unspeaking, on the floor.

Was she asleep?

But she was not. Her face (Molly craned, craned harder, to spy through the window at the necessary angle) was tight, tense, not the face of a sleeper.