would be a relief to tell him. It would mitigate this dread. It would mean reassurance, assistance, a path out of the labyrinth.
Though perhaps he couldn’t hear her any more than she could hear him. Perhaps her voice too was an indecipherable growl.
Perhaps it wouldn’t be a relief; his incredulity, the weight of his confusion and concern. And his inability to alter any of the facts.
Then it was all there: the video, the sound, David in the room with her.
“—fast?” he was saying. “For the next seven seconds.”
She noticed a bruise on her lower arm, a bruise whose presence she couldn’t peg to any particular moment, surely just another tiny injury procured in the distracted rush of caring for the kids, yet it disconcerted her.
“—probably costing a thousand dollars a minute. Can I see them? Birthday kid?”
“Both napping.”
“Lucky you.”
She picked up the phone and flipped the screen and panned over Viv, asleep on the couch, still embracing the queen of clubs. He made a sound of love.
“Lucky kind of.” It was easiest, she discovered, to fall into their regular patter. “If you consider sorting through a bunch of fish crap for party bags restful.”
“So,” he said, “what’s going on?”
They had always prided themselves on their mutual brutal honesty: Your breath stinks, You messed it up, You’ve got lint in your belly button.
There’s another version of me: Why not say it right now, swiftly, courageously?
But she could already tell it would feel wrong to say it, to bestow upon the situation the words that would give it shape. Her panic flared and her courage evaporated.
“It’s getting fuzzy again,” she lied.
“Can I see your face?” he said.
“What?” she feigned.
“Your face.”
She zoomed the phone in front of her, giving him the briefest glimpse before putting it back on the counter. It wasn’t candles behind him, it was three bare bulbs jutting out of an unfinished wall.
“Coy,” he accused.
“Tired,” she rejoined. “Fatigued. Circles under my eyes. You really want to see the evidence of how exhausting it is for you to be gone?”
“Seriously.” His voice was curt with worry. “What happened?”
“Well,” she said. “I broke two mercury light bulbs and she had a tantrum in the grocery store. What’s it like there?” She couldn’t even imagine it, some wondrous place on some other continent where he played music in the middle of the night.
“Lots of plazas and churches and the coffee’s superstrong, okay? So tell me.”
“I’ve got to wash a million strawberries before the party. I still have to fill and hang the piñata.”
“You’re breaking up,” he said. “Piña colada for a four-year-old’s birthday party?”
She was relieved to be breaking up.
“Okay, okay, okay, you win, Moll, fine, go,” he said. “I can tell you’re not in the mood.”
Moll. He had called her that only a handful of times in the past twelve years.
Stunned, she held the phone up in front of her. His face was pixelated again. The little window for her face had gone dark.
12
She knew from The Why Book that Earth was rotating at a speed of one thousand miles per hour while simultaneously orbiting the sun at a speed of sixty-seven thousand miles per hour, and after he hung up she felt these two speeds in her body at once, and had to crouch down on the kitchen floor.
Perhaps those twin velocities, she hypothesized, explained the occasional dizziness that had haunted her ever since she became a mother, as though bearing children had somehow made her body excruciatingly attuned to Earth’s double revolutions.
But it had never been this bad, a woman trapped on her kitchen floor, the tiles tilting beneath her, a kaleidoscope of trillions of Mollies, a Molly singing with perfect pitch, a Molly smoking a cigarette, a Molly tending a vegetable garden, a Molly in the middle of a car crash, a Molly failing to catch her baby as he falls off the bed, a Molly running shrieking into the ocean as her daughter gets pulled out by the undertow.
She forced herself to imagine a hand on her shoulder, a still and solid presence, and the vision of that hand enabled her to at last open her eyes.
But it was not a vision. It was the hand of Viv.
“Mother?” Viv said, which she never said.
13
It was Viv’s job to remove the strawberries from the colander after Molly rinsed them in the sink. It was Viv’s job to arrange them in a bowl. Viv wanted many bowls of strawberries, very many bowls, too many. She positioned three strawberries in one