Helen Phillips - The Need

The movement on her skin was not the movement of bodies but rather the movement of Viv’s fingers, tugging at her arm hairs.

“I want Mommy,” Viv was saying, “I want Mommy,” her voice rising.

The desire, the urgency and straightforwardness of it, yanked Molly into the moment. She was needed here; this she could do.

She sat up in the bog and brought Viv (eyes wide open, glazed) into her lap.

“I’m here,” she said, sounding to herself like a mother in a movie, “I’m here.”

“I want Mommy.”

“I’m here. I’m here. I’m right here.”

“I want Mommy.”

“I’m here.”

“I want Mommy. I want Mommy.”

“I’m here!” she cried out.

“I want Mommy! I want Mommy! I want Mommy! I want Mommy!”

At some point Viv stopped screaming the three unbearable words. Stopped midsentence, closed her eyes and was asleep. Ben, who Molly thought had managed to sleep through Viv’s frenzy, was in fact not asleep: he was watching his mother and sister, his cheek pressed against the stained sheet, perfectly still aside from the whimper she could hear only now that Viv had fallen silent.

“Little boy,” Molly said to him.

His whimper escalated.

“Do you want to feel safe?” she whispered.

He looked deep into her eyes.

“Let’s make a house,” she said, pulling the dank bedding up over their heads so the three of them were covered. He found his way to her like a creature born in the dark, accustomed to the dark, and nuzzled his head into her stomach. She ignored the suggestion of nausea this set off within her. They could be anywhere—in a log cabin on a mountaintop, in a submarine, in a capsule floating through the universe.

She searched for his hand and found it. It was so small. In the darkness they held hands. She could feel his heart beating in his hand.

The footsteps in the other room served as an echo of it, just another manifestation of the quick tip-tap , tip-tap , tip-tap of his heart. She did not believe in the footsteps as a real thing, an actual sound outside the tiny world she had created for her offspring beneath the blankets. She lay there amid her children, glistening.

No, not glistening.

Listening.

When Moll peeled the covers back, Ben smiled and reached for her, unperturbed by the sight of two identical mothers.

Molly would have been shocked at his reaction had she possessed any remaining energy for shock. Now that Moll was here, though, now that she had checked Moll’s hands for weapons (no gun, no knife, no metal pipe), her final resources exited her body.

“Sleep,” Moll said simply, and carried Ben out of the room.

And Molly could muster no resistance, no rage, only an irrepressible sensation of relief. So what if someone was taking advantage of her in her weakest moment? So what if someone was taking care of her in her weakest moment?

She rolled over toward moist, slumbering Viv, embraced her, and slept.

When she awoke, hours or days later, the sheets were clean and the bed empty of children. The sky outside was half-light, heading either toward morning or night.

She did not know how the sheets could have been changed while she slept. It was a miracle, the explanation of which she hoped never to learn.

She stood up. Something was unsteady: the world, or herself. The thought of walking, of speaking, demolished her. Yet she managed to put on her robe and open the door and limp a few feet.

“Here’s the church, here’s the steeple, open the doors, see all the people!”

The children, seated at the table on either side of Moll, clapped. They were wearing clean pajamas. Their hair was wet and brushed, their fevers broken. There was food (toast, applesauce) on their plates. There was drink (neon, Gatorade) in their cups.

All three turned toward her, noticing her at the same instant.

They looked interrupted. She felt like an intruder.

Ben almost immediately turned his attention back to Moll in hopes that she would once again make her fingers into a church, a steeple, a row of people.

The children seemed vibrant, recovered.

“Hi, other Mommy,” Viv said.

Terror, or nausea, swelled in Molly. She leaned against the wall.

“Are you feeling obnoxious?” Viv said.

“Obnoxious?” Distantly, Molly marveled at her daughter’s big word.

“She means nauseous ,” Moll said. She stood and filled a glass with Gatorade and stuck in a straw and handed it to Molly. “Go back to bed.”

“Yeah,” Viv added giddily. “Go back to bed!”

And because her legs refused to hold her up, she obeyed.

There was nothing she could do. There was nothing her body would allow her to do.

She was loath to admit that this was the realization of an old fantasy of hers: to be in two places at once. To have two bodies. To give herself over to her own recovery while her children were in the hands of someone who loved them exactly as she did.

But her fatigue overmastered her anguish, and she fell asleep. She slept, woke, slept, woke.

“Ready or not, here I come. Ready or not, here I come.” Viv’s voice, moving fast down the hallway. “Ready or not, here I come.”

The six words triggered in Molly the same charge of animal fear she had always experienced during hide-and-seek, even when the seeker was just a four-year-old. Every time it was a minuscule version of hiding from men with boots and guns.

“…or… not… here… I…” Viv wandered back up the hallway, despondent, lonely, no longer running.

“Viv!” Molly called out from the bed. “Vivian!”

But by then Moll and Ben had emerged from somewhere, by then there were shrieks of surprise and laughter.

Unheeded, unneeded, Molly slept.

The scariest dream of all is the one that takes place in the room where you’re sleeping.

When Moll shepherded them into their room for bedtime, Molly crept out of bed and crouched beside their door. She could hear Moll reading to them. Talking to them. Put this on. Here you go. Yes, that’s right.

She opened the door.

Moll had claimed her spot, lodged between them on Viv’s bed, nursing Ben.

Moll looked at her, startled, a criminal caught in the act. A reaction, a jolt, that she had not manifested at all when Molly had come upon her and David.

“Go away,” Viv said to Molly.

“Don’t say that,” Moll chided.

“Well, Mommy, how about I snuggle with you for six days, and then Mommy may come in and tell me an animal story?”

“…Now the days of David drew nigh that he should die;

and he charged Solomon his son, saying,

‘I go the way of all the earth: be thou strong therefore, and shew thyself a man;

and keep the charge of the Lord thy God, to walk in her ways, to keep her statutes,

and her commandments, and her judgments, and her testimonies,

as it is written in the law of Moses,

that thou mayest prosper in all that thou doest,

and withersoever thou turnest thyself…’”

The familiar voice fell silent.

A steady hand on her forehead.

Just the thing she was craving.

A warm, steady hand.

Dangerous, this comfort.

Ice clinking in a glass. The fizz of ginger ale.

A figure perched on the wide windowsill, almost invisible, beneath the incomplete moon. She, too, liked to perch there, almost invisible. More than once she had frightened David when he entered the bedroom, believing it empty.

Now, lined up on the windowsill: a Coca-Cola bottle, an Altoids tin, a toy soldier, a potsherd, a penny.

“Then came there two women, that were harlots, unto the king,