“The Queen of the Elk,” Moll said.
Molly hadn’t mentioned her labor hallucination to anyone, not even to David; had left it behind in the haze of the hospital until this moment, when it rushed back over her—as her delivery of Viv approached, her inhabitation of the body of a great female elk bellowing on a grassy hilltop. She remembered the sublime pain, the big window at the hospital beyond which the sun kept setting. There was a storm or there had been a storm and there were black branches blown against a brightly glowing and darkly glowing sunset that went on and on and on and from the tip-top of her pain she demanded of David, Why is the sun still setting? and he said, What? But before she could repeat herself she had to hurry back to blow the great horn of the Queen of the Elk. Later, when she asked him what time it was, he said 6:23, and then when she asked him again seven hours after that, he said 6:24, and then when she asked him again three minutes after that, he said midnight.
Molly felt hot, overheated. How absurd it sounded now, the Queen of the Elk, yet how essential it had felt at the time, four years ago as of tomorrow.
“Six twenty-three and six twenty-four,” Moll said, “seven hours apart. Tomorrow her—” She stopped.
“Your life is identical to mine?”
“It was.” Her gaze was cold, condescending.
“You worked at the Pit? With Corey and Roz?”
“I did.”
“You found a Coca-Cola bottle too? And the Bible—”
“Oh yes. I had my little collection, just like you.”
“So—do you know where those things came from?”
“No more than you do. From a world where Hitler was just an artist? Or where Columbus’s ship sank? Or where some cave woman ate one berry rather than another on one particular afternoon? Who knows.”
A world where. A world where.
Understanding buzzed electric through Molly.
The thing she had known and not known for a long time. The unfathomable fossils. The unfathomable artifacts. Evidence of other iterations of the universe.
“What did Viv do in your world at three in the morning on the fourth day after Ben was born?” Molly had to ask. She still bore the sense memory of it: stitches straining while she crouched to scoop vomit off the bathroom floor while both children howled in David’s arms. Later, when David quipped, Our cup vomiteth over, she didn’t smile.
“The floor of the bathroom,” Moll said with a terse nod. “The strain of the stiches.” There was something dark in her eyes, something dark and distant.
“That time,” Molly said, frantic to test another secret memory, “nursing Ben when he was a month old and his palm happened to be in just the right position to catch a droplet of milk, did you—”
“Please!” Moll said. The ferocity of her voice startled Molly. Just one polite word, yet in her mouth it became a vicious insistence on silence.
Moll folded inward on herself, pulling up the hood of her black sweatshirt. Molly recognized it then as one of David’s old hoodies, the smudge of gold spray paint at the elbow. Hooded, Moll stood up and walked over to the fridge. She opened the freezer and put her face into the coldness, inviting it to numb her features.
When Moll finally drew back, her face was shiny and incapable of forming any expression. The scab on her face seemed more distinct than before, a black slash.
Only then did Molly notice a companion to that scab, just above the clavicle, two inches long, hidden by the sweatshirt at most angles. And, nearly concealed beneath the chin of the chilled face: a pair of bruises.
Moll stepped from the fridge to the kitchen sink. She unzipped her sweatshirt and pulled up her T-shirt and unhooked her black nursing bra. Molly was wearing its twin, though Moll’s looked more worn. She watched Moll cup the breast (same freckle), right hand on the bottom, left hand on the top, the exact position. Moll squeezed, and the milk shot out, six slender arcs into the steel sink. The soft hiss of milk hitting metal.
Molly stared.
“I’ve been hand-expressing for fourteen days,” Moll said.
Watching it made Molly’s breasts sore and her wrists ache. “Why?”
Moll looked at her with scorn. “Because I don’t want my milk to go dry.”
“You don’t want your milk to go dry?” Molly couldn’t come up with her own words.
“Do you remember,” Moll said, “two Fridays ago, after the firestorm about the Bible began, a woman on the tour? A thirtysomething in a baseball cap and sweatshirt?”
A sudden hardness in Molly’s stomach.
“The same day,” Moll said, “I put up that photo of the kids as the wallpaper on my computer at work.”
“With the backpacks?” Molly said, trying to ignore her ever-expanding terror.
“Even though that picture caught them in between smiles, I thought it was cute, but when I saw it big on the screen—”
Molly’s mug tipped over, milky tea spraying and gushing. Clearly her elbow had done the deed, though she hadn’t been aware of it.
Neither of them moved to fetch paper towels.
Instead, Moll let go of her breast, though it was nowhere near drained, and rehooked the bra. She went to the fridge and pulled out the wine and got one of Norma’s blue glass goblets from the cupboard and brought it to the table and placed it on top of the spilled tea and opened the wine and poured the wine.
Molly drank. Moll watched.
7
The wine was gone. Molly had drunk it too quickly. Moll refilled her glass.
“I’ll come home with you,” Moll said, “to nurse Ben.”
It occurred to her that Moll wasn’t drinking any wine.
It occurred to her that Moll had poisoned the wine.
It occurred to her that wine is already a kind of poison.
“No,” Molly said.
“You shouldn’t nurse him when you have alcohol in your bloodstream.”
“It was only one glass.”
“I can do it for you,” Moll said. Her tone was casual, accommodating, but Molly was repulsed by the hunger shimmering in her eyes.
“No,” Molly said.
“Let me,” Moll said, reaching for Molly with her fingers, those bloody cuticles.
“Go nurse your own child.”
Molly leaned away from her, just out of grasp, but Moll lunged across the table and caught Molly’s upper arm. There was something strange about Moll’s touch, something searing even through the fabric of Molly’s shirt. She could not bear it, the sensation of those fingers on her. The untended nails, sharp and dirty.
“My children are not here,” Moll said.
“Back where you came from.”
“They are not there.”
“Let go of me.”
“You have to let me. Because your children are perfectly intact.”
“‘Perfectly intact’?”
“Your children are perfectly intact.”
“And your children?”
“Your children are alive.”
8
The brief relief (after pulling away from Moll, after being released by Moll) of the moments spent in Norma’s powder room without that wounded mirror face, the sight of the face in the actual bathroom mirror, the straightforward act of pulling tissues out of the decorative hen cozy perched behind the toilet; for an instant Molly felt almost sane, moored by the Dove soap, the red hand towel.
But then, exiting the bathroom, returning to the kitchen, a cosmic precariousness. The anguish of the other was a contaminating force spreading throughout Norma’s house, the hallway, the floor, the ceiling, and Molly found herself polluted, debilitated, by images she could no longer keep out of her head.