Amy Gustine - You Should Pity Us Instead

Molly follows her along the garage through a tangle of shady plants she doesn’t know the names of. She’s beginning to suspect they’re mostly weeds.

Three baskets sit half-finished on the table. The women poke their heads into the house, but don’t hear anything. Elizabeth goes around front while Molly does a quick check in the living room and calls up the stairs. Nothing. She goes back outside.

“They couldn’t have gone anywhere. We were here the whole time.”

“Maybe hide and seek,” Elizabeth says.

They return to the yard and peer between the tangle of plants along the fence. In the back, where there’s a huge lilac, Molly catches sight of a bare foot on the ground. For a crazy second she imagines Adoo has dragged the girls’ bodies to a hiding place. Plunging into the bushes, Molly shrieks at the sight of Sarah, Kate, and Emma lying in a row, a garden snake slithering across their necks. In a flash the snake disappears into a pile of leaves and grass clippings.

“Mom!” Emma complains. “You ruined it!”

“What were you doing?”

“We were trying to see if there’s a God,” Sarah says, then sees her mother and goes pale. “I mean, I was proving it to Kate.”

Emma brushes off the seat of her pink shorts and rolls her eyes. “Adoo says snakes are special and making friends with them gives you magical powers.”

“No,” Sarah objects, “I did it because Kate is afraid of snakes. I told her if God doesn’t want you to die, nothing can kill you.”

Elizabeth and Molly exchange a glance, then Elizabeth sits down and pulls Sarah into her lap. “That’s not quite right. You still have to be careful. If you purposely do dangerous things, that’s like testing God, okay? And we can’t test God. That’s wrong.”

Kate looks at Molly, the need in her expression plain. Molly puts an arm around her shoulders. “Don’t mess with snakes. Wild animals are unpredictable.”

Though she knows it’s only her grandfather’s recorded voice—“Molly, it’s Grandpa. I need help”—in the haze of four thirty a.m. the digitized sound summons the altered voice of kidnappers demanding ransom and stalkers knitting terror. In her panic, Molly makes it as far as the garage before remembering Simon is out of town, she’ll have to bring the girls.

It’s a ten-minute drive if you go like a bat out of hell, take the freeways and catch all the lights. Molly doesn’t catch the lights, but she clocks ninety on the interstate and once, after slowing and looking, runs a red. She thinks mostly of what she’ll find at the house. Did he fall down the stairs? Another broken vessel, this one’s flow too generous for a bread bag to contain? If he had to use the emergency button that means he can’t get to a phone. Molly doesn’t know what to do about the girls. What if he’s already blue? For several minutes before Molly’s grandmother died, she would stop breathing, then her whole body would shudder and she’d grab a single, long breath as if trying to capture something going by. Molly cannot get that shudder and gasp out of her mind.

She skids onto the loose stones. “You girls stay in the car. I’m locking it.”

“No!” Kate protests.

“It’s too dark,” Emma agrees.

The darkness isn’t what bothers Molly. It’s the pink-orange of the sodium lights across the street in the cheese plant’s parking lot. They remind her of The Twilight Zone . Nothing is safe, nothing can be anticipated, even in the end everything remains a mystery.

“Okay, but you girls sit in the kitchen. Don’t move. I have to help Grandpa Hank.”

Key in the lock, Molly hears movement and the door is opened from inside. Her grandfather has on an undershirt and khakis. “Oh, shucks, I tried to call you. I’m just fine. Relax.”

Molly looks him up and down. No blood, no palsy. He’s had time to put on socks and shoes. “I must have rolled over on the button while sleeping. I tried to call you, but the phone was busy.”

Molly guesses she left it off the hook.

“Hi, Grandpa,” Emma says.

“Hi there, little one. Your mother got you out of bed this time in the morning?”

“We had to come. Daddy’s out of town.”

There’s already water boiling for tea. “You want some eggs and toast?”

“No thanks, tea’s good.”

“I think what I’ll do,” he says as he gets out a bag of the girls’ favorite cookies, “I’ll take that thing off at night. Then it won’t be causing all this trouble.”

Molly reminds him he could fall out of bed or forget to put it back on the next morning.

“I won’t forget,” he says. “The old noggin still works pretty good.”

The girls want more cookies. Molly nods, too tired, yet buzzed on adrenaline, to deal with complaints. She stares outside. The pink-orange sodium lights cast an alien glow over her car. Assimilation is the mortar and pestle of humanity. That’s what Simon said when she told him Elizabeth was having second thoughts about bringing Adoo to America. Suddenly, Molly feels sure he won’t make it. The modern world will swallow him. Maybe not at fourteen, or eighteen or twenty. But it will. Does that mean they should have left him in the jungles of Peru? It seems to her if you don’t belong where you’re born, you’ll never belong anywhere.

Grandpa Hank sits down with his eggs and toast, asks again doesn’t she want anything. Molly shakes her head. “I’m just glad you’re okay.”

“Well, sure I am. Next time don’t be rushing out so quick. I don’t want you getting hurt hightailing it over here.”

Of course, one of these times he won’t be okay. But most likely she won’t get a call. At the morning or night check, his answering machine will pick up. Molly will wait ten minutes, then call back in case he’s in the bathroom. After the second call, then one from her cell on the way over, her car will crunch onto the familiar stones, but she won’t feel the familiar relief. She’ll put her key, hand unsteady, into the lock, and lift the warped door, her grandfather’s name already vibrating on the air. “Grandpa Hank? It’s me, Molly.” She’ll step up to the vinyl booth, proceed through the narrow kitchen and into the future without expecting an answer. One thing she has learned — death is like God: it answers every question with silence, but that doesn’t mean it’s not waiting for you.

It is a hot day in June when Lavinia returns from the market, the scent of burned diesel in the air, sun shining on her house with a glaring light that does it no favors. She rolls her groceries — canned fruit, bread, peanut butter, milk, coffee, spaghetti, tomato sauce, forty cans of wet and three bags of dry cat food — behind her on a rickety dolly. Every few steps she stops to be sure the bungee cords are still secure.

For thirty years Lavinia and her husband Carl lived in apartments, moving whenever the appliances broke and the landlord wouldn’t fix them. Then, five years ago, long after their son Christopher had moved on, Lavinia inherited her mother’s house at the corner of Newton and Wade, just across the street from where three tracks converge at the Amtrak station. Brown and gold asbestos shingles cover the outside, as if someone used roof tiles for siding. The front steps are crumbling, pried away from the sill by fifty years of freeze-thaw cycles. A plastic pot of geraniums, gone to twigs three seasons ago, slumps from a rusty bracket.

Lavinia turns up the gravel path between her house and old man Pultwock’s — no garages in this neighborhood — and trudges to the back door, coming to a breathless stop on the five-foot-square patio Carl laid. Propping the screen door open with a bag of cat food, she unlocks the main door. Taped above its lock is half a used envelope: At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman .