Helen Phillips - The Need

When he picked up Viv, she was so limp that her head lolled back and her hair dangled wildly, as though she were dead; Molly had to shut her eyes against the sight.

She kept her eyes closed until David came back in, locking the door behind him.

“By the way, Ben’s not wearing his pajamas,” he said, though his penis was already in her mouth.

“I know,” she paused to say.

“Oh shit you had to go to him last night?”

She didn’t have the energy to respond to the obvious.

“Do you think he’s cold?”

“Can we talk about something else?” she said. “Or not talk.”

She wanted to go through the doorway with him, into the other mode, where they were just two bodies with straightforward and ecstatic goals.

She was grateful they’d had so much sex together for all those years before they had children. Every time they had sex now implied all those other times, an accumulation of sex, the times they couldn’t remember and the times they could.

How gentle, his hands on her head. They were passing through the doorway and she was glad. He released her head and she released him and she came up to him so they could kiss in the old way, with mouths open and accepting, the savagery of teeth, not those tame, raisin pecks of Mommy and Daddy.

It puzzled her that orgasm wasn’t widely considered a phenomenon that challenges everything we believe about human existence—doesn’t it serve as proof of an alternate state of being? Isn’t the fact that people can feel this way, so in thrall to this enigmatic force, so carried by it, even for an instant, evidence that the state in which we spend most of our time is merely one possibility?

“I love you even though I hate you,” she said to him after they had both come. She felt joyous, lazy with him. She felt rich, richer than a millionaire.

“I love you even though I hate you,” he replied.

It was their shared motto for these early years of parenthood. Because sometimes you had to hate the person who was using the toilet or taking a shower or at work or sleeping or doing any other indulgent thing while you were caught in the cyclone of your children’s needs.

About a week before, Viv had a restless night, coming into their room a bunch, so eventually Molly gave up and went to sleep beside her in her little bed. Then Viv slept well but passed her restlessness on to Molly. The next morning, a Saturday, David complained that he’d had bad dreams, a peculiar night of sleep, and asked Molly why she kept stroking his face all night long when she knew he hated that. “What the fuck are you talking about?” she roared under her breath so the kids couldn’t hear. I was tending to your offspring. Screw your peculiar night of sleep; I had no night of sleep. Believe me, if I had to stay up all night stroking a face, it wouldn’t be yours. I love you even though I hate you.

Now, beyond the locked bedroom door, a small voice was asking for them, but he had somehow fallen back to sleep in the past three seconds, so it was she who got out of bed.

“What’s this?” Viv repeated, waving high above her head an envelope encrusted with golden star stickers.

“Where did you find that?” Molly said as she rushed (capable, now, of swift movement; of effortlessly bearing Ben with her, adrenaline whirring through her) across the room to lock the door through which the deer had just exited.

“In The Why Book of course,” Viv said. She had recently gotten in the habit of ending her sentences with of course .

Molly darted over and yanked the letter out of Viv’s hand, imagining new threats: yellowish powder, whitish powder.

“No,” Viv protested. “It’s mine and it’s covered in my stickers and I found it and I get to open it of course.”

“No.”

“Give me my letter,” Viv insisted.

“It could have poison in it,” Molly snapped, her filter gone.

“What’s poison?” Viv said.

“Something bad.”

“Bad how?” Viv was scared.

“Just very, very bad.” She put Ben down on the floor beside Viv. First she would open the letter. Then she would call 911. “Can you babysit Ben for a sec?”

Viv, frightened into compliance, turned back to The Why Book . “B,” she whispered, “do you know why are moths not as decorated as butterflies?”

Molly went into the kitchen and put on rubber gloves and pulled the sharpest knife out of the knife block. She cut through the golden star stickers. A single sheet of paper fell out, unaccompanied by any suspicious powders. On one side, the paper bore an announcement from Viv’s preschool reminding parents to please bring in extra tissues and paper towels (shit, she kept forgetting). On the other side, there was a numbered list, written painstakingly in capital letters in magenta ink. She recognized the color of the pen, which sat in a jar on her small desk in the bedroom. It chilled her to think of the intruder going from room to room, finding the pen, finding the school notice, finding the stickers, finding the deer mask, finding The Why Book .

1. GIVE V & B DINNER AND PUT THEM TO BED.

2. E BACK BY 7PM.

3. COME OUT TO CAR WHEN E ARRIVES.

4. IF YOU DO NOT COME YOU WILL REGRET IT FOREVER.

5. POLICE WILL THINK YOU ARE CRAZY.

So he knew their names. Item five notwithstanding, she would call 911, of course. But in her head her of course sounded as childish and misplaced as Viv’s.

She ran to her bag and pulled out her phone, which had only 10 percent charge. There was a nonsensical text from Erika: Yeah no prob c u @ 7 . Molly tapped in her passcode so she could read back over their texts. From Molly’s phone, at 6:16 p.m.: So sorry something came up is there any way you can come back and cover a couple more hours tonight? And then, at 6:17 p.m., from Erika: Sure thing, just postponed my drinks, actually works better anyway . From Molly, at 6:18 p.m.: Sweet thanks for swift response see you soon. Can you be here by 7? I’ll get both kids to sleep so you can just chill.

“No, Ben!” Viv cried out. “You’re gonna rip it!”

Calling 911 no longer seemed like a possibility.

A text exchange of which she had written not a word, a text exchange that had taken place while she was crouched in front of the mirror in the dark in the other room—but how would she convince the police ( POLICE WILL THINK YOU ARE CRAZY) that she was not the author of these texts, which were indistinguishable in tone from every other text in her correspondence with Erika?

Her commute was short, the Phillips 66 less than two miles from home. She turned right just past the neon sign of the Excellent Laundromat. Even after more than eight years living here it still caused a physical response in her whenever she rolled off the weary, blaring thoroughfare onto these quiet blocks of tiny timeworn bungalows, the neighborhood soft gray at this darkening hour, an old woman limping beneath old trees, a dog mourning somewhere, a mild melancholy that resonated with her, the imperfect sidewalks and overgrown rhubarb and ill-tended crab-apple trees.

“Thanks for raking,” David had said that morning, staring out at their small yard while downing coffee, his suitcase and instruments beside the door.

She had no idea what he meant; there had been no raking whatsoever in her life of late. But there wasn’t time to probe, for Viv was pulling her toward the hall closet, distressed to the point of tears at not being able to locate her left rain boot. And Ben, who was eating his oatmeal in fistfuls with both hands, had just begun to experiment with tossing globs of it toward the ceiling.