a scribble of blood on the sheet, identical to the scribble of blood where a mouse thrashed its way out of the trap on the concrete floor of the basement of her childhood home.
She reached to turn off the lamp. In the dark, a woman walked past the futon. And then another. And another. And another. One after the other after the other after the other after the other.
4
When she again woke, there was once more the jitter of feet near the hall closet, the front door opening, as though no time had passed; as though she had, for hours now, remained stuck in the same instant.
But when she located the alarm clock in the mess of David’s stuff beneath the futon and the flashing red numerals yielded the time (3:37), she understood that Ben had recently woken from his nap, that they were now headed out for the requisite second outing of Sunday.
The front door slammed; she pictured Viv pulling it shut with all her might.
She ran up the basement stairs, pressed through the metal doors (not padlocked from the outside), emerged unsteady into the luminous afternoon. She tried opening the back door. It was negligent of Moll to have forgotten to lock it, but she was glad to save the seconds it would have taken her to use the key.
She slipped into her home (just as messy as it would have been under her watch at this hour on a Sunday; dishes on the table, toys everywhere). In the bedroom she opened her closet. She didn’t have time to change out of the sweatpants and T-shirt into more reasonable clothing. She shoved her feet into sneakers and ran out the front door.
They were not visible from the front steps. They had made good time, already turning left or right at the sidewalk and then left or right at the corner. Sometimes it took ten minutes just to get from the front steps to the stop sign. She guessed that they had turned left and left again, on their way to the playground and the old carousel, which was open only on Sundays. At least, that’s what she would have done with them today, which either did or did not mean that Moll would do the same. She ran. Left, and left again.
There they were. Their three bodies of such different sizes, moving slowly down the sidewalk together. So this was what she and her children looked like from behind.
Perhaps they had made good time for the first block and a half, but no longer. Viv wanted to push the stroller rather than ride in it; she kept steering it off the sidewalk, veering onto people’s front yards. Ben was walking, dawdling, gripping Moll’s finger. Molly never would have permitted him to walk at this juncture; far too far to go. She knew he must have squirmed so much in the baby carrier that Moll, tenderer than she, had released him from his entrapment.
Molly considered the other baby carrier, the matching carrier in Moll’s world. The same tan color, the same watermelon stain.
The thought caused her to hang back like a guest at a funeral. She kept a safe distance, moving from tree to tree, relieved at the abandoned quality of these particular blocks on Sunday afternoon.
“Is that cat dead?” she was close enough to hear Viv say when they passed the veterinarian’s office.
“No,” Moll said, lifting a surprisingly compliant Ben and inserting him into the carrier with practiced grace.
“Excuse me,” Viv said to the fire hydrant into which she rammed the stroller.
Instants later, Molly too passed the window where the calico cat slept a deathlike sleep on the desk.
5
“Seven,” Moll and Viv shouted together. “Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Twelve.”
At each odd number, Moll pushed Viv’s swing with her right hand. At each even number, she pushed Ben’s swing with her left hand. This method Molly had developed for pushing both at once had always felt to her like a literalization of the phrase she’s got her hands full.
Molly sat with her back up against a tree, facing away from the playground that was uninhabited aside from them, listening to herself and her daughter count to one hundred.
Fifty-three (Viv), fifty-four (Ben), fifty-five (Viv), fifty-six (Ben), fifty-seven (Viv), fifty-eight (Ben), fifty-nine (Viv), sixty (Ben) . . .
For Moll, though, the numbers were not a slog. There was joy in her voice.
Later Viv was going down the slide and Moll was nursing Ben on a sun-soaked bench. Molly’s glimpse of the