fish perked up, looked up, as though she wanted to answer Viv’s questions, all three of them, but then, remembering herself, she looked back down, returned her attention to the floor.
17
For the second night in a row, Molly went through Viv’s bedtime routine dreading the thing that awaited her on the other side of the door. Once again, the dread cast the light of the sacred upon the mundane: the glow of the night-light rendered the toothbrush and the toothpaste and the pajamas and the blanket golden, as though everything Viv touched took on a mystical sheen. Midas? Molly had enough wits about her to remember the name, though she couldn’t recall the moral.
She lay down in the small bed beside Viv and whispered into her ear: “We can’t turn on the light to read books because it might wake B.”
But Viv, as it turned out, had already followed her brother into sleep; the background whisper of his baby dreams, his body slumbering aggressively in the crib, had entranced Viv out of the known world.
Molly wanted to sway to sleep in the hammock of her children’s breathing.
In her back pocket, her phone buzzed with a text. So how’d it go, Queen Fish? Costume fit OK? Still trying to recover from yr bait & switch ;) seriously tho no hard feelings LOL, I get it. Give the birthday girl six million kisses from me. And then a series of Erika-esque emoticons: a mermaid, a dolphin, a pair of hearts, a red balloon, a kiss.
18
Moll had removed the fish mask and set it on the table beside her. Her hair was moist and her face looked rubbery, waterlogged. The sight of it made Molly feel as though she too had just spent several hours inside a barely ventilated fish mask.
She wished she had the baseball bat in her hand. But going to get it seemed more dangerous than standing still. Not that she knew what she would do with the weapon if she did have it.
Molly watched herself, her body yet not her body, breathing, blinking, shifting in the chair, adorned with iridescent scales. Moll had done something (picked off her scabs? put makeup on her bruises?) so now her resemblance to Molly was impeccable. Her hands folded on the table before her; her nails tidy, clean. Molly could not look away, the way sometimes you cannot pull yourself away from your face in the mirror. She sank into the chair across from Moll. She couldn’t contain the twin sensations at war within her: one of utter familiarity, one of utter unfamiliarity.
“Share them with me,” Moll said.
“I can give you money,” Molly said. “I can give you my clothes. I can help you find a place to live.”
“I can give David the letter when he gets back next Saturday.”
“The letter?”
“Asking for a separation.”
“What?”
“I had forgotten about it too. But then I remembered. Last June. That rage. Sitting at the kitchen table at two in the morning. Insomnia between Ben’s night feedings.”
“I wrote that in a nightmare. It doesn’t even exist.”
“But it does. I have it. You—I—we saved it in the filing cabinet.”
The chair slunk out from under Molly. She slid to the floor. Pressed her back up against the wall. Covered her face with her hands. Considered the other secrets Moll possessed: the amount of stress she felt about how little money he made, the envy she occasionally felt toward unmarried, childless Roz, that night he thought she was happy when actually she was sad, the sexual positions that were more satisfying with her ex. The infinite blackmail material we all have on ourselves.
Eventually, the sound of a body standing and moving toward her and sitting next to her against the wall. A leg and hip and arm alongside her leg and hip and arm. A throbbing awareness, a sort of tingling heat, at each point where their bodies touched.
Molly scooted away. She did not want to be contaminated.
“You’re evil,” Molly said.
“Then you’re evil,” Moll said.
Moll’s hand was too fast, a snake around Molly’s wrist, tightening. She could tell that Moll was stronger, much stronger, than she had ever been. Two weeks leaner, two weeks fiercer, powered by grief. Moll’s other hand now gripping Molly’s hair, wrenching the roots. The tingling heat increasing to a boil.
I have suffered so much more than you, you woman of comfort and happiness, you unperturbed wife, you mother of two unbroken children, why do you keep forgetting that you would behave the exact same way if