had rehearsed it many times over.
How about you do none of it? Molly thought. How about let’s not and say we did?
It took her a second to understand that the source of the heat was blood.
Molly half nodded, a gesture that could perhaps be interpreted as compliance.
Still Moll hesitated.
“Go,” Molly said again. She thought of the children, alone at the table.
“I should have the phone,” Moll said.
She was right. She should have the phone. The ability to call 911 or anything else.
“And,” Moll added, “the wallet.”
The wallet, the phone—not your wallet, your phone.
Yet she was not wrong.
Molly handed her the phone, careful to avoid contact with her fingers. “The wallet’s in the bag,” she said. “Hanging on the bedroom doorknob.” Shaken, for she had done it too, unintentionally: the bag, not my bag. “And my keys—” she began, about to hand them over, before remembering that the one thing Moll had was the keys.
“Turn on a lamp,” Moll said. “It’ll be dark in here when I close the bulkhead.”
“She needs her prunes,” Molly said. “At least two. And he’ll need a nap at—”
“I know,” Moll said.
Molly’s face felt hot, stung.
Rather than waiting for Molly to follow her advice, Moll walked a few steps to turn on the standing lamp. Then she ran up the steep stairs.
The metal doors crashed together behind her.
Molly turned off the standing lamp.
The blackness of the basement was disrupted only by the faintest gray rectangle of outside light.
2
The metal doors were still reverberating against each other when Molly ran up the stairs and reopened them.
She would not.
She would not.
She would not rot in the basement.
She caught a glimpse of the edge of the blue robe as Moll stepped through the back door into the living room. So she was already inside. Out of reach, in the children’s domain. She could no longer be stopped, clawed, dragged to the ground.
“Twenty-three,” Molly heard Viv saying loudly before the door slammed shut.
She stood barefoot in the wet grass in her untended backyard, an intruder on her own property. She made her way into the evergreen bush. It must have rained in the night; each needle bore a droplet, and each droplet rolled down onto her, a private storm.
At the table, Viv stood on a chair, on tiptoes, conveying a single Cheerio toward Ben on her flat palm. When the Cheerio was almost close enough for him to touch it, she jerked her hand out of his reach, which was, to him, hilarious.
Moll, it seemed, had not yet spoken to them. She hung back, beside the door, watching them as Molly was watching them.
Molly’s heartbeat drew attention to itself.
Would they accept Moll, or would they deny her?
Molly didn’t know which possibility caused her greater dread.
Moll appeared unable to step forth into the room.
“Aren’t you so glad toothbrushes are alive?” Viv said, her uninhibited voice perfectly audible through the half-open window. “If they weren’t alive then we’d all have such brown teeth, right?”
Viv didn’t even glance over at Moll, who seemed to be relying on the wall to remain upright.
“Mommy?” Viv said. “Right?” Still she didn’t look at Moll; she was busy revoking a Cheerio from Ben.
Moll pressed herself off the wall and walked toward the table.
“Right,” she said to Viv, the word little more than a breath. “But actually toothbrushes aren’t alive,” Moll continued, her voice stronger with each syllable.
“Oh.” Viv looked at the bowl of fruit on the table. “Are those apples alive?”
“No. Well, yes. I don’t know. Kind of.”
Finally Viv, laughing, looked at Moll.
“Mama, don’t you know things?”
“Ba wa,” Ben demanded, antsy in his high chair.
Molly had the urge to run inside and translate Ben’s request for Moll, but Moll was already moving toward the kitchen to fill a bottle with water for him.
She caressed his shoulder as she passed him.
It was an injury, a sizzle on her own palm, the sight of Moll touching her son’s body.
Moll returned with the bottle; so eager was Ben that he grabbed the nipple with his teeth when it was still at a sharp angle, which forced him to strain upward like a gerbil as he drank.
“Hey gerbil,” Moll said.
“Why gerbil?” Viv said.
“Gerbils’ water bottles are mounted on the sides of their cages so they have to drink like this.”
“What’s a gerbil?”
“Come on, B, let go for a sec, then you can hold it yourself.” Moll wrenched the bottle out from between his teeth and handed it to him.
“What’s a gerbil?”
Moll twisted her body away from the table, away from Viv’s