Her eyes adjusted. The red light of the numbers on the digital clock illuminated the futon.
There were two bodies.
Two familiar bodies.
She was on top, leaning over him so their foreheads touched. Then tilting her head so her teeth met his teeth, that vicious way they sometimes liked to kiss.
She could not fully see the kiss—what she saw was her butt moving up and down, up and down, up and down—but she knew exactly what kind of kiss it was.
She despised her body for its response to the scene. For the way it bore disorientation and envy and rage and desire all at once.
She couldn’t look away: she had to watch it, this righteous, joyous fucking. She recognized it as the sort where you fall back down afterward and laugh together, smug, because now you’ve got something on the whole rest of the world.
His hands grabbed her waist and pulled it down hard to still its movement so he would not come. Inside the cock pulsed: one, two, three times. She felt it. The tenderness of the hands on the hips.
He stretched his neck up off the mattress to take her nipple between his teeth. He flicked it with his tongue.
It was rare, so rare, now, with the kids, that they got to be together this way, but they had, so many times, in their life together, been together this way, and it had been, still was, when it happened, such a good thing. She was hurting, watching. She knew what he was about to do and then he did it: flipped her over so she was beneath him. Trailed his lips down her body, between her breasts, past her belly button, the place where they had grown, the place where they had come out. The place where now she needed his mouth.
From this position, Moll could see Molly. Their eyes met as he began. Molly imagined it on her own body, the uncontainable pleasure, but there was no pleasure in Moll’s eyes: only grief.
26
Molly lurched back up the steps, across the grass, through the screen door. Only once she was inside did she realize she had neglected to close the cellar doors. But she would not go back out there.
She had sipped of the lust and now she drank of the grief.
She staggered to the couch and lost her children, and lost them, and lost them, and lost them.
PART 5
1
She was standing at the sink, washing grapes for the kids’ breakfast, when a hand touched her waist, setting off a startled shiver that vibrated through her body.
But he kept his hand there, and his touch contained everything: the sex from last night, the gratitude for her days alone with the kids, the years and years behind them and ahead of them. Under other circumstances, she would have been so happy.
The last time she had seen him, four hours ago, at three in the morning, she had crept down the cellar stairs to find him asleep on the futon, naked, embracing a pillow with his arms and legs as though it were her, the baby monitor right by his ear and turned up to its highest volume, his unopened suitcase beside the futon, his travel instruments sealed in their cases, awaiting their return to their pedestals.
She had stood over him, worrying about Moll, for there was no sign of Moll.
Molly went back up the stairs but she couldn’t sleep. She had not even tried to sleep in her own bed. She had tried to sleep in Viv’s bed, but it was too cramped for an insomniac.
Moll was gone. The metal pipe was gone.
“You’re all alive and well,” David observed as she continued to rinse the grapes. She didn’t look at him but she could hear his smile, its old wryness, and his relief that her distraction had not been indicative of any grave crisis. “I was beginning to wonder.”
Her mind was empty, incapable of coming up with any response. She imagined Moll feeling the same way last night, stunned at his unexpected arrival. How she might have, probably did, swerve the situation into sex so as to avoid conversation.
“It’s been busy,” she said.
“I’m sure it has,” he said; beneath the four agreeable words lay his reproach for her standoffishness while he was away.
She separated the grapes that were too soft from the grapes that were firm, still unable to reassure him. She was thinking about Moll.
“I thought you were getting home on Saturday,” she said. “It’s only Wednesday.”
“Sacramento,” he said, “remember?”
“Sacramento?”
“I knew you weren’t paying attention.”
She said nothing. She focused on the grapes. He waited.
“My flight leaves at two this afternoon,” he said.
“Okay,” she said, grateful for the noncommittal word.
“They’re paying double because of the change.”
“Okay.” She didn’t want to tell him anything that would unsettle this reality, this well-known reality of them together in the kitchen, soon to be interrupted by the ones they loved above all else.
“I can walk Viv to school and be with Ben till I have to go. I’ll text Erika.”
“Okay.”
He reached around her and turned off the faucet. He said her name twice. He held her. It was good to be held by him. She rested, briefly, against him. It had always been rich between them, it had been hard at times and they had had their times of anger, but it had always been rich and true, and she did not know how to talk to him when she was not being true, when she could not speak truly.
“Daddy?” A quartet of sticky feet coming down the hall. “Daddy?”
2
Corey was looking at her funny, and she realized he had asked her the same question multiple times.
And then the question registered, then it hit her: “Did you go home to shower?”
She responded with a head gesture that could be read either way.
“I saw you out there when I got here,” he said. “Car in the shop? Went to the Pit to say hi after putting coffee on but you were gone.”
“You saw me? What was I wearing?”
“I don’t know, Molly. Pants and a shirt! Find anything?”
“What was I doing?”
“I don’t know. What were you doing?”
“What do you think I was doing?”
“A little early-morning precrowd excavation—right? Because you heard that Roz found another Fifi Flower specimen yesterday and you want to find one too?”
“But where was I exactly?” Molly persisted, barely hearing him.
“Molly.”
“You could see me. So I wasn’t in the Pit. I was near the Pit. But do you think I was going down or coming up?”
“Molly!” Corey laughed. “Seriously, though, we’re waiting on you. The Bible?”
“I feel like shit,” she said. The words fell so far short of the feeling.
“Yeah you’ve been kind of a mess this week. Why don’t you leave the Bible and friends with me and go home, rest up.”
“Okay,” Molly said, inching toward the doorway, past Corey, “I—”
And she exited her cubicle, and hurried down the hallway, and out the glass door, ignoring Corey’s voice repeating her name.
She wanted to run straight to her car, but she knew that first she had to force herself to go and look into the Pit.
This was the only reason she had come to work: to search for Moll.
What she saw when she envisioned the Pit was Moll, facedown, star-shaped in the mud.
She began the thirty-yard journey hesitantly, dreading the downward glance, the potential corpse, but by the end she was sprinting to reach the edge of the Pit.