But still Moll did not look at her, standing there in bra and underwear in the chill of her cellar.
Molly held her shed clothes out to Moll.
Moll wouldn’t touch them.
Only then did Molly (stupid) remember what these clothes were.
“They both fell asleep in his crib,” Molly said to ward off the silence.
“Okay,” Moll said wearily. “I’ll go up.”
20
It was silent upstairs. Molly pictured Moll standing in the kitchen, not moving a muscle. Standing in the living room, not moving a muscle. Wearing sweatpants and a stained T-shirt so she wouldn’t have to wear the clothing she was wearing when.
Then the children broke the silence and Moll’s footsteps hurried to their bedroom. Molly listened to their varied tones: excited to insistent to tender to pleading to agreeable, the many emotions passing in and out of her children’s voices, all of them met by Moll’s equanimity.
Molly searched for the baby monitor, found it under the futon, listened to her own voice speaking to her own children with love. She turned the monitor off and tossed it back under the futon.
She both wanted and didn’t want to creep up the basement steps into the bush.
From inside the evergreen, she could see Viv and Ben stacking blocks on the living room floor while Moll made dinner in the kitchen.
That perfect peace of children playing when they know their mother is nearby. Knowing she is there, they can ignore her completely.
When Moll called the children to the table, both were alarmingly compliant, going right over and submitting themselves to their respective seats.
Moll had prepared a plate for herself too, had gotten herself a glass of water, and sat down across from them.
Molly, when David was out of town, never sat with the kids to eat; while they had dinner, she rushed around getting a head start on the end-of-day cleanup.
“There’s a big party going on inside our bodies,” Viv said.
Viv’s voice was far louder than Moll’s; Molly couldn’t hear Moll’s response.
“A party of blood and bones and our brain and stuff,” Viv clarified.
Again Molly couldn’t hear Moll’s response. But she could see that Moll was smiling.
Molly exited the bush. Instead of returning to the basement she walked around the house to the sidewalk.
She felt reckless, uncareful. March was about to give way to April and she could feel it in the air, a certain levity. The dusk was gray but there was a glimmer at its edges, a silver indication in the clouds. The neighborhood starting to smell more like plants, less like car exhaust.
She never took walks by herself at dusk. This was the time of day when her home demanded everything of her. Once in a while she would peek out the window at the tail end of a sunset. But always she was needed inside.
Now, though, having achieved her wish, walking these streets alone at the sunset hour, she felt unmoored, the appalling vertigo of her freedom.
She walked. The glimmer spread across the sky, black birds writing cursive on it with their bodies.
21
Moll was lying on the rug in the living room with her eyes closed. Viv and Ben were circling around her, poking at her with instruments from their toy doctor kit.
Molly watched from the evergreen, straining to catch every gesture: Ben smacking Moll’s knee with the thermometer, Viv struggling to fit the child-size blood pressure cuff around Moll’s upper arm.
Frustrated, Viv threw the blood pressure cuff to the side and grabbed the thermometer out of Ben’s hand. Ben shrieked and stumbled over Moll’s body in his effort to reclaim the thermometer. But Moll did not stir, did not use her arms to brace his fall. His cheek hit the floor and he began to cry.
Still Moll did not move. Viv tried to wrench Moll’s mouth open in order to shove the thermometer in. Ben, ignored by both of them, stopped wailing and began whimpering. He crawled to the doctor kit and pulled out the stethoscope. When Viv saw that he had the stethoscope, she ran over and snatched it away, relaunching his crying fit.
Moll remained immobile, unspeaking, on the floor.
Was she asleep?
But she was not. Her face (Molly craned, craned harder, to spy through the window at the necessary angle) was tight, tense, not the face of a sleeper.
“Mommy!” the children yelled as they pulled on opposite ends of the stethoscope, waiting for her to intervene with some just plan. “Mommy! Mommy!”
When Moll failed to respond, they looked over at her. Their shared chant took on a tenor of doubt: “Mommy? Mommy? Mommy?”
Viv flung herself on the prone body, and then Ben did too, Viv ferociously patting Moll’s face, Ben tugging on her hair and fingers.
Moll did not react.
The children scooted back a bit, stared at her.
“Are you alive?” Viv shouted at Moll’s body, beginning to cry.
Molly had to go in. Never mind that they shouldn’t see two mothers at once. Their caretaker was toxic with grief. It was insane that she had ever let Moll be with them.
She was at the back door, about to stride through it, when Moll opened her eyes.
“Oh Mama,” Viv said. Her voice sounded like the voice of a much older person.
Ben threw himself over Moll, matching his torso to her torso, his arms and legs miniature versions atop hers. That well-known weight of him.
Viv sat cross-legged at the crown of Moll’s head, prying Moll’s head off the floor and into her lap. Moll should have resisted (it was ridiculous, a grown woman with her head in a little girl’s lap), but she did not resist, she put her head in Viv’s lap, and Viv stroked her face.
22
Molly in the cellar, listening on the baby monitor, knew when Moll went in to nurse Ben in the rocking chair (the milk itching in her own echoing breasts); knew when she stood to place him in the crib; knew when Viv ran to the bookshelf to choose a book.
Moll had gathered herself. Was managing to do everything just so.
Once she was certain that Moll was ensconced in the children’s room, getting Viv to sleep and probably, in the process, accidentally falling asleep herself, Molly exited the basement and entered through the back door.
She sat on the couch, preparing her words, gathering her bravery and her cruelty.
You have to admit.
This is not.
This cannot.
You are a danger to them.
It was a long time before Moll came down the hallway, unsteady. Molly knew that feeling, felt it in herself as she witnessed it in Moll, the effort of pulling oneself out of sleep after those involuntary bedtime naps. The slight nausea, the bloodshot eyes.
Moll, foggy, did not notice Molly. She stood in the entry to the kitchen, leaning against the wall, devastated, surveying the detritus of dinner, the dishes and the crumbs, but Moll’s devastation was universes away from Molly’s nightly despair of resurfacing from the children’s bedroom into the disorder of the house, that mundane fleeting luxurious despair.
Watching Moll staring at the mess (staring at it, not seeing it), Molly found her severity softening, losing its shape. She tried to keep it firm, its hard edges intact.
But Moll’s face was the color of grief.
“I can help,” Molly said eventually.
She had struggled to land on those three words. She had considered so many others. You have to. You are a.
When Moll glanced over at her, Molly realized that she had in fact already registered her presence. Was not surprised by her voice.