been a force for droll jollity herself. Now she was fighting the urge to remind them that their children could die any day in any number of ways. Then perhaps they would not find it so amusing to gripe about the rotten pancake discovered at the bottom of the toy chest, about the inexplicable refusal to eat this or that vegetable that had heretofore been a reliable staple.
“Where’s David?” everyone kept asking her, and she kept explaining. Aside from that she hardly spoke, four or five words here and there. The phrase the tsunami of the party was running through her head, and whenever she spoke, it was an effort to make sure those words didn’t emerge from her mouth.
The children, caught up in their private momentum, grew bolder and more obnoxious by the minute. While the parents commiserated about parenthood, the children built and destroyed many towers. Molly gave herself over to the bustle of refilling bowls of chips, distributing juice boxes, snatching choking hazards away from Ben. She made herself dizzy from it, and when she took a second to look up at all the people idling around her overheated overcrowded home she could have sworn she was moving through a fever dream, a bright chaos to which she had no access whatsoever.
Dorothy’s mother, with Dorothy’s newborn sister strapped to her chest, asked Molly a question. It was a question about breastfeeding, about whether Viv had initially been jealous when Molly nursed Ben. Dorothy’s mother was a good-hearted woman who had incredible patience for in-depth conversations about sleeping schedules and teething troubles.
“Well,” Molly began (of course Viv had been jealous, she was human, wasn’t she?), “the thing, in my, in our, experience, about the postmortem period with the second kid is that—”
Dorothy’s mother looked stricken. “You mean,” she corrected, “postpartum.”
“Yes,” Molly said, “yes, postpartum.”
If Erika hadn’t been there, she would have been unable to endure it—but Erika was there, locating the bottle opener, catching the cup an instant before it tipped off the table, reaching under the couch to retrieve Ben’s ball. And the children were enamored of the fish, their mad dashes through the rooms always lurching back around to her. They wanted to stroke her fins and scales. Molly didn’t blame them.
A bunch of the children, Viv included, had crawled under the gray quilt of the big bed, pretending it was a cave. Erika yanked the quilt off them, exposing them to the light and triggering a spurt of screams, but their indignation was replaced almost immediately by delight, for the fish had a long blue rope, and it was clear that they were now supposed to take hold of this rope and follow the fish to the ends of the earth. Erika led them through the rooms, collecting more children as she went, until the blue rope was a twisting eel of small humans. The fish cleared the living room rug of adults with a few insistent arm gestures. Molly hurried to her phone to cue David’s whale-sounds mix on the speakers. The human eel encircled the fish, and the performance began.
It was not much. Erika juggled three scarves. She gave each child a length of turquoise ribbon taped to a pencil. She had a bubble blower that produced twenty-plus bubbles with each breath. It was not much, yet the children were entranced, swirling around the room amid the bubbles, waving their turquoise ribbons, spinning to the sounds of the whales.
Soon after the fish show, the party fell apart. Viv lost interest in her peers and instead shadowed her mother, following her into the bathroom, where she intently watched her pee. As Molly pulled up her underwear and jeans, Viv said, “Phew, now I don’t have to look at your skeleton anymore.”
When they returned to the party, Viv wouldn’t stop muttering, “IloveyouMommyIloveyouMommy,” a mutter verging on a whine, leaving Molly equal parts touched and annoyed. Viv clung so hard to Molly’s leg as she searched for the misplaced birthday candles that eventually she had to shake her off.
Viv wept as everyone sang “Happy Birthday” (Erika bearing the platter of ocean-colored cupcakes she had baked yesterday with the kids), but refused to explain why. So absorbed was Molly in trying to ascertain the source of Viv’s angst that she didn’t notice Ben, straining to reach the lighter on the table, the beautiful green toy of it. It was Erika who scooped him up and away.
Molly lost track of Viv in the pandemonium of the cupcake distribution.