scene made her aware of the weight of her own milk. Her need for relief. He was hungry, urgent, embracing the other woman with every part of his body. They sat as one in the sun: the extreme heat of the mother, the extreme heat of the nursing baby, the furnace of the universe.
Molly peeked around the tree, her face wet. She knew she ought to be more careful, keep herself better hidden, shield herself from Moll’s rage, protect her children from the sight of two mothers.
Eventually Ben fell away from the breast and Moll refastened herself. But their intimacy did not end there. He was holding his squeaky giraffe and it seemed that he wished for Moll to bite it. Molly would have refused to let him put it in her mouth, but Moll accepted the giraffe’s head and bit until it squeaked. Ben had never seen anything so amusing. He bit and squeaked the legs of the giraffe. She bit and squeaked the giraffe’s head. He bit, she bit, on and on, excruciating.
Viv was nowhere to be seen. She was not on the slide. She was not climbing the ladder. She was not reaching for the monkey bars.
She was weaving among the trees, picking things up off the ground, getting closer and closer to Molly. Molly inched around the tree trunk, out of view.
“Mommy?” Viv said, sounding just slightly lost. “Mom?”
Molly waited for Moll to say something, to call out to Viv, “Over here!”
But she didn’t.
And Molly was suddenly appalled at herself: she had handed her children over to a woman mangled by grief. There was no way such a mother could do all that needed to be done.
“I got treasures,” Viv said, veering back toward the playground.
“Oh, show me!” Moll cried out then from the bench.
As Moll examined the bits of glittering litter in Viv’s hands, Molly left them. She would go home and shut herself up in the basement until nightfall. She would prepare the right words to cast Moll out of her life forever.
Yet approaching the perimeter of the park, she found herself unable to exit. She sprinted back to the playground.
They were gone. Afternoon was shading into night. Maybe they had gone home along a different path. But then she heard the distant insistent tinkle and clang.
Moll stood out from afar, wearing her favorite sweatshirt, encircling her son with both arms, stationed between the pair of unreal-colored horses that carried her children into the falling darkness. Each time they went around it seemed that they were riding off into the shadows, but of course they kept circling back, again and again, protected always by the rows of merry lights. The children’s faces were wondrous, ecstatic, but Moll looked solemn, straight-necked, almost ceremonial, as though she bore the world atop her orbiting body.
6
Often there were spiders in the metal sink in the half bath in the basement. Her unneeded milk hissed against the metal and rivuleted down the sides toward the black hole of the drain. Her wrists ached.
It was getting harder by the minute, each second a wound.
Her body could not contain this longing.
Maybe if she sat. Maybe if she just sat silently on the rug, waiting. Cross-legged.
Time would pass over and around her.
Time would, eventually, deliver them to her.
Would deliver her to the moment in which she articulated her refusal.
Unless—unless— (the possibility of which she declined to contemplate.)
Only after a while did it dawn on her that she was sitting on the rug in the exact same location and position as Moll had been when she came down to the basement this morning.
Yet she did not move. She sat.
A few decades of silence.
Then, that scrape of steel on brick.
Moll came down the steep stairs. Her body rigid, her expression cold.
Molly felt feverish, spastic, in comparison.
“Don’t ever follow me again,” Moll said, “or I will kill you.”
There was a glint in her eye—sarcasm or menace? The hint of a more direct reckoning, a convenient disappearance (the outskirts of town, those sparse desolate groves) followed by the seamless insertion of herself into Molly’s life?
Molly’s struggle to decipher Moll’s tone caused her own anguish to lose its focus. She imagined what she herself would be capable of, if; the thought shook her and she had to shake it off.
“Are they asleep?” Molly said.
Moll nodded.
“We shouldn’t be down here,” Molly said. Viv often woke in the early hours of the night, thirsty and scared, needing a mother.
Moll nodded again.
Molly led the way up the stairs and out