and slept somewhere. She used the toilet at convenience stores or squatted in the woods in the park, and she squeezed her milk out into unclean sinks or into the dirt, and when she couldn’t bear her thirst she drank from water fountains, but she did not eat anything and she was ready to die. She stank and being a vagrant made sense to her. She didn’t believe that her body was still alive now that their bodies weren’t alive. She thought of the way their room smelled in the middle of the night, sweet and sour. She walked in the dark and thought about her errors. She should have destroyed the Bible, and the other artifacts too, without ever showing them to anyone. She should have been more scared of the threats. She should have refused to give any tours. She should have kept her children safe in a beautiful locked attic somewhere. A sky painted on the ceiling. She walked along the highway softly screaming and eager to die.
After a few days, though, when her head was clear from the starvation, she got the idea. She pulled the keys out of her pocket because they were all she had, and the round key kindly reminded her that it could open the door of Norma’s house, and she went there and she cleaned herself and she ate mandarin oranges from a can and black beans from a can and she drank tea and she chose not to water Norma’s plants and she thought about the idea. She slept in a bed and she woke up and she pictured herself doing it, step by step by step by step by step. She became deliberate in her movements. She considered different ways of going about it. She remembered the deer head David had made for her. She did not think about him, about his devastation, back wherever he was. She went into the house when everyone was out and she took the things she needed. She spied and she eavesdropped. She saw the baby slide The Why Book under the couch. When he cried in the night she unlocked the back door and went to him. He was thirsty and sweaty so she nursed him and took off his pajamas and watched him fall back to sleep. When the mother went to sleep with the daughter in her little bed, she went to sleep in the big bed with the husband; not sex, just beside him in the bed, smelling his neck, stroking his face.
She was crouching in the evergreen on Sunday when the Buenos Aires call came through. She watched his face rise and fall and rise and fall as the conversation moved from enthusiasm to logistics. She envisioned exactly what she would have done if she had been home alone with the children when an intruder entered. She anticipated the woman’s every emotion, every action and reaction.
20
In the bedroom, Ben began to cry.
First just a whimper, and then the favorite syllable.
They both tensed. They knew how little time they had between his first sounds and his sister’s cranky awakening.
mamamamamamama
It was no surprise that he was stirring, hungry, thirsty, after his non-bedtime. They both had been half expecting it at every instant. They hovered together in the seconds passing too swiftly as the sound intensified, the escalating need, the milk heavy in them.
Molly remembered, kind of, snapping at the kids about the pots and pans a couple weeks back. Remembered purchasing a fruit leather for Viv. Blurs in the great blur.
“My turn,” Moll said.
Molly felt it like a solid thing, the awareness of her outrageous abundance in comparison to this woman, this refugee from a far crueler reality.
mamamamamamama
Molly was so tired, too tired. What she was thinking about was the night a few months earlier, when Viv had first asked about death. Can you please show me a picture of a dead person? Can you please draw me a picture of a dead person?
mamamamamamama
Molly’s nod was barely perceptible, a tiny giving up, yet that slight motion catapulted Moll out of her chair and down the hall toward the children’s room.
The siren song of her baby screaming was unbearable to Molly, she needed to be tied to a mast, beeswax thrust into her ears, so as not to rush down the hall behind Moll and shove her out of the way.
But then the crying ceased, replaced by the measured glide of the rocking chair, the damp animal noise.
A sound, Molly discovered,