You are a, Molly wanted to say, you are a, but found herself unable.
You could go back, or try to, she thought to say.
But go back how? Who knew what rules governed the Pit, the seam?
And to what? To whom?
She thought of the other David, the bereaved one. She saw his face with sudden, terrible clarity.
Molly got up off the couch and walked over to Moll, who scooted into the kitchen, perhaps to make room for Molly in the space, though it seemed more like someone straining out of the reach of flames.
Molly opened the cabinet under the sink and got the orange-clove spray and misted the countertops. The spray bottle sputtered, almost empty.
“We’re running out,” Molly said, to combat the void, Moll’s epic silence. It took her a second to notice that she had said we. She could pretend she had intended the we to refer to herself and David. But she knew whom she had meant by we.
They cleaned together in the known order, listening to the sound—or the nonsound—of the children’s sleep. A curious camaraderie with the person she wanted to eliminate, the person who wanted to eliminate her.
“What’s this?” Molly said, reaching under the table to pick up a piece of paper. It bore a series of letters in Viv’s oversize handwriting: ILVBTULVMIEXEBX.
“‘I love you because you love my coloring book,’” Moll translated.
Amused, Molly looked at Moll, but she kept her head down, sweeping the floor.
“Bebock,” Moll said, “means peacock. When he says peacock, he means pigeon.”
And Molly thought, a passing flash: Maybe. Maybe we could—
“Mommy,” Viv sang out from the bedroom. “I’m not asleep anymore.”
Molly stiffened, awaited Moll’s request. Her begging eyes.
But Moll had already given up, had already put down the broom, was already heading toward the back door, her shoulders wilting with fatigue.
23
“I have to pee,” Viv said, emerging from the bedroom just as Moll vanished.
She looked skinny and sleepy, her curly hair dark and huge around her small face.
Molly fell toward her, grabbed her and held her.
“Mom,” Viv said, “I said I have to pee.”
Molly smelled her hair, her eyebrows.
“Excuse me,” Viv said. “Mom!”
“Okay fine go.”
After Viv had mounted the toilet, she requested a coloring book.
“No way,” Molly said. “You’re going right back to bed.”
Viv sighed.
“Ready to get off or are you still peeing?”
“Still peeing,” Viv lied.
Molly decided to let her sit for another couple of minutes while she completed Moll’s interrupted sweeping task.
“The bugs are coming!” Viv cried out.
Molly ran back into the bathroom. It was illuminated only by the glow of a night-light.
“Where?” Molly said.
“What?” Viv said.
“The bugs.”
“What bugs?”
“You screamed ‘The bugs are coming!’”
Viv laughed. “I did?”
Perplexed, Molly handed her three squares of toilet paper.
“Can you stay with me the whole night?” Viv said.
“You don’t sleep as well if I’m in your bed.”
“But I’m so scared tonight.”
“Why?” Viv’s fear refreshed Molly’s anxiety, made it newly raw and pressing.
“I don’t feel safe.”
“Why not?” A child’s sixth sense that something was unsteady in the household—that her mother was not always her mother?
“Please, just stay with me the whole night.”
“Well,” Molly said, trying to ignore the agitation rising in her, “maybe.”
“Yay.” Viv hopped off the toilet and grabbed Molly’s hand.
It had always seemed a bit deceitful to Molly, the way we put our children to bed in soft pajamas, give them milk, read them books, locate their stuffed creatures, tell them that all is well, there’s nothing to be scared of, as though sleep isn’t one-sixteenth of death. When they resist the prospect of sleep, of long dark lonely hours, intuiting that this is indeed a rehearsal for death, we murmur to them, we rub their backs, pretending they will never die. Little do they know that behind our backs we keep our fingers crossed, and that our hearts too thump with anguish when we turn off our bedside lamps.
She rubbed circles around Viv’s back with the palm of her hand.
“Don’t worry.” Sleep is not a sip of death. “Don’t worry.” I am here and I always will be. “Don’t worry.”
24
In the process of sedating Viv, she sedated herself too. She fell into a sort of drowse, and when she finally managed to extricate herself from it, she found that her anxiety had slipped away. A dark, solemn peace filled her. The house was clean, the children sacrificed to sleep.
But then, going down the hallway back toward the living room, she heard something.
The kaboom, kaboom, kaboom of a beating heart.
She tried to be logical. Maybe her phone had somehow started playing one of David’s tracks that included this sound effect. Maybe a nearby car was blasting music with this exact drumbeat. Maybe the neighbors were watching a horror movie.
But what it sounded like, what it really sounded like, was a heart beating right in her living room.
And what she knew, what she fully knew, was that Moll was responsible for it.
The sound, she realized, originated from the couch.
She did not want to approach the couch, did not want to find whatever she would find beneath the cushion from which (she was now nearly certain) the sound emanated.
A huntsman ripping a heart out of a girl or a deer, carrying it back to the evil queen in a wooden box. She half covered her eyes with one hand and yanked the cushion off the couch with the other.
The heartbeat stopped.
The children’s stethoscope. The cushion had been compressing the red heartbeat button.
She laughed, alone, the hardest she had ever laughed alone in her life.
Once she had recovered, still giddy, she thought of Moll, below her in the cellar. Pacing, perhaps, or perhaps sitting, or perhaps somber in sleep. She would go to Moll. She would tell her about the heartbeat.
Then she would insist that Moll run upstairs to sleep in the big bed. Would urge her to carry the children from their room into hers. Go up, she would say. Go sleep in the grass of their sleep.
25
Her heart was shockingly light as she stepped barefoot across the dark yard. Here she was, about to do the right thing. It occurred to her to surprise Moll, to give her this gift with that extra flourish, so she lifted the heavy doors as deftly as possible.
The cellar was unlit, but there were sounds coming from it.
Could she blame Moll, though? Hadn’t it crossed her mind more than once, during those desolate basement hours, to do the same, surrounded by his instruments and the smells of him? To use it as a brief but absolute escape. A momentary entry into an alternate mode of being.
The sound of Moll’s—of her own—hungry breathing.
She took another step down the staircase, creating a creak, but the breathing continued, ignorant or indifferent. Should she advance or retreat?
She stepped down, and down again, but her movements had no effect on the breathing, the swelling orchestra of breathing coming from the futon.