Helen Phillips - The Need

In the process of sedating Viv, she sedated herself too. She fell into a sort of drowse, and when she finally managed to extricate herself from it, she found that her anxiety had slipped away. A dark, solemn peace filled her. The house was clean, the children sacrificed to sleep.

But then, going down the hallway back toward the living room, she heard something.

The kaboom , kaboom , kaboom of a beating heart.

She tried to be logical. Maybe her phone had somehow started playing one of David’s tracks that included this sound effect. Maybe a nearby car was blasting music with this exact drumbeat. Maybe the neighbors were watching a horror movie.

But what it sounded like, what it really sounded like, was a heart beating right in her living room.

And what she knew, what she fully knew, was that Moll was responsible for it.

The sound, she realized, originated from the couch.

She did not want to approach the couch, did not want to find whatever she would find beneath the cushion from which (she was now nearly certain) the sound emanated.

A huntsman ripping a heart out of a girl or a deer, carrying it back to the evil queen in a wooden box. She half covered her eyes with one hand and yanked the cushion off the couch with the other.

The heartbeat stopped.

The children’s stethoscope. The cushion had been compressing the red heartbeat button.

She laughed, alone, the hardest she had ever laughed alone in her life.

Once she had recovered, still giddy, she thought of Moll, below her in the cellar. Pacing, perhaps, or perhaps sitting, or perhaps somber in sleep. She would go to Moll. She would tell her about the heartbeat.

Then she would insist that Moll run upstairs to sleep in the big bed. Would urge her to carry the children from their room into hers. Go up, she would say. Go sleep in the grass of their sleep.

Her heart was shockingly light as she stepped barefoot across the dark yard. Here she was, about to do the right thing. It occurred to her to surprise Moll, to give her this gift with that extra flourish, so she lifted the heavy doors as deftly as possible.

The cellar was unlit, but there were sounds coming from it.

Could she blame Moll, though? Hadn’t it crossed her mind more than once, during those desolate basement hours, to do the same, surrounded by his instruments and the smells of him? To use it as a brief but absolute escape. A momentary entry into an alternate mode of being.

The sound of Moll’s—of her own—hungry breathing.

She took another step down the staircase, creating a creak, but the breathing continued, ignorant or indifferent. Should she advance or retreat?

She stepped down, and down again, but her movements had no effect on the breathing, the swelling orchestra of breathing coming from the futon.

Her eyes adjusted. The red light of the numbers on the digital clock illuminated the futon.

There were two bodies.

Two familiar bodies.

She was on top, leaning over him so their foreheads touched. Then tilting her head so her teeth met his teeth, that vicious way they sometimes liked to kiss.

She could not fully see the kiss—what she saw was her butt moving up and down, up and down, up and down—but she knew exactly what kind of kiss it was.

She despised her body for its response to the scene. For the way it bore disorientation and envy and rage and desire all at once.

She couldn’t look away: she had to watch it, this righteous, joyous fucking. She recognized it as the sort where you fall back down afterward and laugh together, smug, because now you’ve got something on the whole rest of the world.

His hands grabbed her waist and pulled it down hard to still its movement so he would not come. Inside the cock pulsed: one, two, three times. She felt it. The tenderness of the hands on the hips.

He stretched his neck up off the mattress to take her nipple between his teeth. He flicked it with his tongue.

It was rare, so rare, now, with the kids, that they got to be together this way, but they had, so many times, in their life together, been together this way, and it had been, still was, when it happened, such a good thing. She was hurting, watching. She knew what he was about to do and then he did it: flipped her over so she was beneath him. Trailed his lips down her body, between her breasts, past her belly button, the place where they had grown, the place where they had come out. The place where now she needed his mouth.

From this position, Moll could see Molly. Their eyes met as he began. Molly imagined it on her own body, the uncontainable pleasure, but there was no pleasure in Moll’s eyes: only grief.

Molly lurched back up the steps, across the grass, through the screen door. Only once she was inside did she realize she had neglected to close the cellar doors. But she would not go back out there.

She had sipped of the lust and now she drank of the grief.

She staggered to the couch and lost her children, and lost them, and lost them, and lost them.

She was standing at the sink, washing grapes for the kids’ breakfast, when a hand touched her waist, setting off a startled shiver that vibrated through her body.

But he kept his hand there, and his touch contained everything: the sex from last night, the gratitude for her days alone with the kids, the years and years behind them and ahead of them. Under other circumstances, she would have been so happy.

The last time she had seen him, four hours ago, at three in the morning, she had crept down the cellar stairs to find him asleep on the futon, naked, embracing a pillow with his arms and legs as though it were her, the baby monitor right by his ear and turned up to its highest volume, his unopened suitcase beside the futon, his travel instruments sealed in their cases, awaiting their return to their pedestals.

She had stood over him, worrying about Moll, for there was no sign of Moll.

Molly went back up the stairs but she couldn’t sleep. She had not even tried to sleep in her own bed. She had tried to sleep in Viv’s bed, but it was too cramped for an insomniac.

Moll was gone. The metal pipe was gone.

“You’re all alive and well,” David observed as she continued to rinse the grapes. She didn’t look at him but she could hear his smile, its old wryness, and his relief that her distraction had not been indicative of any grave crisis. “I was beginning to wonder.”

Her mind was empty, incapable of coming up with any response. She imagined Moll feeling the same way last night, stunned at his unexpected arrival. How she might have, probably did, swerve the situation into sex so as to avoid conversation.

“It’s been busy,” she said.

“I’m sure it has,” he said; beneath the four agreeable words lay his reproach for her standoffishness while he was away.

She separated the grapes that were too soft from the grapes that were firm, still unable to reassure him. She was thinking about Moll.

“I thought you were getting home on Saturday,” she said. “It’s only Wednesday.”

“Sacramento,” he said, “remember?”

“Sacramento?”