Helen Phillips - The Need

“I’m bad, I’m bad.” Viv was weeping. “I just threw up on our baby.”

Molly was too unsteady to speak but she sat on the bed and pulled Viv toward her. Ben slept on, splattered.

“Will he be okay?” Viv said.

Molly let go of Viv and ran back to the toilet. When she was done, she turned her head to see Viv in the doorway, freaking out.

“I’m okay,” Molly lied. “Don’t worry.”

“He’s awake now,” Viv cried. “He’s sick!”

There was no way she could handle this. It was impossible.

“Help me up,” Molly said.

Viv looked at her and cried harder. But she did move closer to offer a useless little hand. Bolstered by the gesture alone, Molly somehow made it to her feet.

On the bed, Ben was crawling around in vomit (apparently had just added to it himself), whimpering. She tried to pick him up but her arms were too wobbly. Instead, she sat them both on the edge of the bed and knelt down before them and laid her head half in his lap, half in her lap.

It was unclear whether this position indicated that she was reassuring them or that they were reassuring her. With extraordinary effort, she pulled her head up off their laps. They stared at her, their eyes moist.

Someone needed to do something.

She would call the doctor. That was something, a thing a person could do.

The pediatrician’s twenty-four-hour hotline put her on hold. The children continued to stare at her. She held the slim phone with her shoulder and cupped the children’s knees with her hands. After a while a young man told her, brightly, that she would receive a callback within forty-five minutes.

“Forty-five minutes?” She laughed. There was no way she would last that long.

“Erika?” Viv suggested as Molly hung up with a wrathful sob.

It was a brilliant idea. But Molly didn’t pause to applaud Viv before texting Erika: Can u come now? Emergency everyone throwing up.

Only after pressing send did she note that the time was 6:03 a.m. So Erika would be deep asleep, childless, in the apartment she shared with several attractive roommates, dreaming of her upcoming backpacking trip, her alarm not set to go off for another hour and a half yet.

But an instant later Molly’s phone buzzed with a text and she seized it.

Me 2! Erika replied. Bad bug got us all, I’m destroyed, literally can’t stand up, good luck lady! This sucks right

So what now?

Norma, with her walker and her medications?

Those four scared and trusting eyes.

She called David. His phone went to voice mail. She called him six more times. Voice mail every time. Predawn Sacramento. She thought hateful thoughts about him.

She was still always about to throw up.

Moll , she thought with an odd flash of longing. And instantly corrected herself: Moll would be more dangerous than ever now, at this moment of utter vulnerability. If she were Moll, she acknowledged darkly, she would, yes, use this opportunity to—

The doctor called. It had been far less than forty-five minutes. She wept with gratitude.

The doctor was not concerned. The doctor said, “Don’t give them any liquids for an hour after they vomit. Any liquid at all, including water, and they’ll vomit again.”

It was true that, all night long, worried about dehydration, she had given them sips of water after they threw up, and, yes, they had kept throwing up.

“What about dehydration?” she said.

“Liquids are acceptable and essential, after an hour.”

“What about breast milk?”

“ After an hour.”

“I’m sick too. I’m throwing up too.”

“Oh,” the doctor said.

Oh? she wanted to repeat back nastily, mocking the indifferent tone of this person who had taken the Hippocratic oath.

But instead she said, “Thank you.”

Somehow the kids were in the bathtub. Somehow they had their bath toys. But the toys drifted, ignored, because what the children wanted was water to drink.

“Water, Mommy, please, water, please!” Viv entreated.

“Wawa,” Ben joined in, “wawa, wawa,” wailing.

“No,” Molly kept saying like a wicked stepmother. “No water for you.”

“Water, please! Just water!”

A woman denying her children water.

“Wawa, petah!” Rubbing his hand across his chest, the sign language for please that Erika had taught him, pleading with his words and his body, any way he knew how.

“I will,” she said feebly, “set a timer. You have to wait a while longer or you’ll throw up again. That’s what the doctor said. Do you want to throw up again?”

“I’m so thirsty, Mommy. It hurts, please.”

Being a mother: it was too much.

“If you don’t give me water then I’ll drink the yucky bathwater,” Viv threatened, changing tactics.

The bathwater was beyond yucky, a film of yellowish something on its surface.

“If you drink it you’ll throw up again!” Molly rejoined, matching Viv’s tone.

Viv’s threats were paper-thin, and at the violence of her mother’s response, she collapsed into tears. “Water, just water, please, please!”

“Fine!” Molly bellowed. “Fine, fine,” unable to keep saying no. “Just a little.”

She poured water into the metal cup by the sink. First Viv drank deep, then Ben. They smiled at her like she had given them chocolate milk.

Ill at the thought of Moll, ill in anticipation of what would soon emerge from them thanks to her weakness, she pulled up the toilet seat and vomited once more. They watched, appalled, from the bathtub.

The bed was a bog. The bog sucked downward on their three bodies, keeping them close, trapped. It would help if she changed the sheets. Perhaps if she changed the sheets the bog would go away. On clean sheets, they might have some chance of escape. Some chance of striking a defensive pose.

But there were no clean sheets. Last night she had changed the sheets again and again and now there were no more. She could not go to the basement to do laundry. She was not strong enough, not brave enough, to pull open those metal doors.

So these sheets, this bog.

And outside the window, a movement, a threat. A head, maybe, or a branch.

At least time had passed and now she could, every ten minutes or so, pull herself out of the haze to give each child a sip of water, which she poured into a teaspoon and ladled into the arid, stinking mouths.

She had tried, many times, to get Ben to nurse, wanting so much to give him something pure of hers, but he kept turning away as though revolted, and she felt her milk vanishing, drying up.

They passed in and out of sleep. When she was asleep she dreamed of them and when they were asleep they probably dreamed of her.

Only while they slept did she permit herself to believe that she would never make it out of this bed alive. That the next time they woke from nightmares she would be lying dead between them, and they would have to slide off the mattress by themselves and pull the fridge open and forage for food and drink water out of the bathtub faucet or the toilet until some adult heard them crying and came to take them away from her forever.

There was no one to take care of anyone.

She woke to the sensation of something on her skin, weird movements beneath her, the mattress sweaty and sentient; she didn’t want to open her eyes but when at last she was bold enough to do so, she discovered that the bed was made of bodies, the naked bodies of sleeping women, women identical to Moll, identical to her, their bodies supporting her body, and she realized that she too was naked, indistinguishable from the rest, the heat of the others’ skin partway pleasant, partway repulsive.