knew she would be in the evergreen bush, watching, starving, envious, agonized.
It was where she would have been, wasn’t it? So where was the other, if not there?
“Who is Ben’s mommy?”
“Stop it,” Viv was saying to her mother.
“Who is Ben’s mommy?”
“I said stop,” Viv said. “Stop saying that. We’re done. We’re done now.”
10
Molly could always tell exactly when Ben fell asleep because his body took on a sort of god-weight, a sudden and exceptional heaviness that pressed her into the rocking chair, a reverberation of the god-weight she had first experienced during pregnancy, that superhuman bulk manifesting within her own body.
From the beginning she had felt that her primary responsibility to them was to their bodies. Enabling each to grow from two cells into trillions of cells, into a body, and then ensuring that the body kept growing and growing. Come on, go ahead, take the milk from me, take it that your body may become far bigger than it is today.
But now, in the drowsy bedroom, Ben’s mouth separated from her nipple. His sleep lulled her to sleep. As she rocked him she kept losing herself for a few seconds. Each time she awoke she panicked, sensing an intruder in the home, forgetting and then remembering that Viv was in the hallway right outside the bedroom door, lining up fifty-two playing cards side by side. Viv loved the queen of clubs best.
“Viv?” she whispered, for the fourth or seventh or thirteenth time.
“Yessa?” Viv said, exasperated, her voice at the doorway.
“You still there?”
“Of course.”
She needed to stand up, put him in the crib, talk Viv into napping before the party. But she was having trouble moving. If she could just stay here floating forever then everything would be so much easier. Her right foot had fallen asleep, as had a muscle on the left side of her torso. Sleeplessness was a drug, but so was sleep. A doorway to another world. She let herself go through, fine, fine, it was okay to go, the queen of clubs was babysitting Viv, there was this long gray hallway to walk down, a place that was not too hot and not too cold but just right, a place that was not too bright and not too dark but just right, and at the end of the hallway something was happening, something luminous, she hurried to see, she felt herself smiling, anticipating, but the luminous thing was an explosion, not a cocktail party.
She woke with a start, a jerk, looked down at Ben; he wasn’t breathing, had her negligence in falling asleep caused him to stop breathing?—it had, it had!—but then, mercifully, he breathed, he was fine, he was not purple, he was the normal butterscotch color of himself.
She managed to rise from the rocking chair. With superfluous caution, she placed his body in the crib. She found a trail of playing cards leading down the hallway. She followed the trail out to the living room. The cards stopped at the couch, and there was Viv: asleep, hugging the queen of clubs to her chest.
The house had slipped into its alternate state of being, the sublime calm that envelops a space when its undomesticated residents are, at last, at rest. It was as though the house, too, slept, as though the walls themselves breathed, matching the pace of their breathing to the extra slow in and out of children sleeping, the lungs of the universe.
It was not right, she thought uneasily, not right at all; the ostentatious peace of her home, this deceitful normalcy, the rhombus of sunlight on the wooden floor.
11
She was slicing through the tape of the box of party decorations she had ordered online, extricating plastic fishes from among Styrofoam peanuts, when David called, the known ringtone.
Tears in her eyes at the sound of it.
Yet when she saw that he was requesting a video chat, she very nearly pressed the red Decline option, an instinct more than an intention.
She was scared of scaring him with her face.
He would see things there; he always did.
The reception, however, was terrible. His face pixelated and his voice monstrous. The room behind him looked dark and full of candles. His shadowy head moved glacially back and forth across the small screen. She placed the phone on the counter.
“. . . it there?”
“One o’clock,” she said.
“. . . knew”—his voice, abruptly, clear—“two-hour time difference. So you—”
But then he was saying something else and she had no idea, the reception again fragile, his words a blurred roar.
It