She watched her own hands passing out cupcakes as though she were acting in a play in which a mother passes out cupcakes.
She was overseeing Ben’s dismemberment of his cupcake when Viv reappeared at her elbow, bearing on her flat palm that selfsame hand cast in plaster, a gift from their kindly dentist.
“Please,” Viv said, lifting the hand on her hand, “put this somewhere away from these noisy children.”
Erika took the hand and placed it atop the bookshelf with utmost care.
The hand was precious indeed, a darling souvenir, a sweet little preservation of time, Viv at age three and a half, yet the sight of it always chilled Molly. It looked like an object associated with a dead child. David agreed; between themselves they referred to it as Viv’s memento mori. Molly didn’t like having it on display, but Viv insisted.
When the first guests to leave opened the front door, a pair of the silver balloons somehow escaped the confines of the house. There was a light but adamant wind, and the balloons rose quickly, alarmingly so.
Viv knew, from The Why Book, what happens to balloons let loose in the sky. What they can do to sea creatures, and to birds.
“Call the 911!” she screamed. “Call the 911!”
The rest of the guests were escorted out to their cars by the mournful howls of the birthday girl. The fish held her as she cried.
16
Ben was asleep at the wrong time. He had crashed around 5:00 p.m., too late for a nap and too early for bed. Viv was sitting on the toilet watching The Nutcracker on the computer, as she had been for who knows how long. The exhausted aftermath of the party: Erika cleaning the kitchen (still in costume, to maintain the illusion for Viv), Molly bunching up wrapping paper and gathering snarls of ribbon and restoring the children’s room to order.
Molly fell into the hypnotic monotony of sorting intermingled puzzle pieces belonging to three different puzzles. Under other circumstances, she would have marveled, as she so often did when cleaning up toys, that this was how she was forced to spend her heartbeats; that this drudgery was part of love, part of the mission of mothering a human. Today, though, she appreciated the concreteness of the task, the mindlessness, the scattered evidence of the children’s vitality, the sound of Ben breathing in the crib.
On her way back out to the kitchen, she knelt in the hallway, endeavoring to peel off the floor a sparkly dolphin sticker that some kid had stomped onto the wood.
She looked up from her task, at the fish conquering the kitchen ten feet away from her, and then she knew.
The fish was attacking the kitchen just as Molly would have: first the countertop across from the sink, next the countertop to the left of the sink, next the countertop to the right of the sink. The empty beer bottles in a row on the windowsill, rinsed for recycling. A few squirts of the orange-clove spray on the countertops, an unnecessary flourish but somehow fortifying before confronting the hill of dishes in the sink.
“You can take the mask off now, don’t you think?” Molly said coldly.
The fish ignored the question.
Just then Viv emerged from the bathroom, and Molly was trapped: couldn’t snatch off the mask, couldn’t press Moll toward the door.
“I’m scared of the Sugar Plum Fairy,” Viv said. “I need warm milk to not be scared.”
Moll was already opening the fridge. She poured milk into a mug and zapped it in the microwave and stirred in vanilla extract and brought it to the table.
“Thanky, Fishy,” Viv said. But, putting the mug back down after her first sip, she missed the edge of the table.
Viv and Molly and the fish stared at the white explosion on the wooden floor, a many-pointed star sharp with ceramic shards.
It was the fish who shepherded Viv away from the mess. It was the fish who fetched the dustbin and the paper towels and the orange-clove spray.
Molly sat on the couch, holding Viv, who was still shaking from the shock of breaking something so completely. They watched the fish clean up the mess. She was methodical, meticulous, and it was mesmerizing. They observed how carefully she scanned the floorboards for splinters of ceramic, plucking each one up in a square of paper towel, like a person picking rare flowers.
“Mommy, are you hating me?” Viv said.
“There’s this phrase.” Molly squeezed Viv close. “Don’t cry over spilled milk.”
“What’s phrase?” Viv said. “Who cried?”
The