she tried to resettle her body, Molly heard, in the far distance, Ben wailing in his sleep. But it was just an ambulance on the thoroughfare. Sirens (she realized only after becoming a mother) resemble the sound of a baby crying; surely no accident.
“Ben,” Moll said.
It made Molly uneasy, the ease with which the woman said her son’s name.
“You can read my mind?” Molly said.
“It’s my mind.”
“Where did you come from?”
At first it seemed that Moll was going to ignore the question. She sat with her hands clasped together on the tabletop. Her cuticles, Molly saw, were bloody, the nails ravaged by teeth.
Then, after a moment, Moll retrieved the twin key chain from the pocket of the jeans and placed it on the table between them.
“You know,” Moll said.
“I know?”
“Yes.”
“Where you came from?”
“The seam.”
“The what?”
“The seam.”
“The seam?”
“The Pit.”
“The Pit is a seam.” Molly intended it as a question, but it came out sounding like an assertion.
“Between possibilities,” Moll continued. “Between different possible worlds.”
“You came through the Pit?” Molly said, a dizzying dread rising in her.
Moll stood and ran to the stove, as though in response to the whistle, but the kettle had yet to reach full boil. She tapped the kettle, the hot part, with the palm of her right hand.
When the kettle screamed, Moll put tea bags in mugs and poured steaming water and poured milk. She carried both mugs over to the table. Only one of the mugs had milk in it. She placed the milky one in front of Molly and kept the black one for herself.
“You don’t take milk in your tea?” Molly said.
“No.”
“Then we aren’t the same,” she said. “I wouldn’t drink this without milk.”
“I used to be that way,” Moll said.
“We aren’t the same,” Molly repeated.
“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