legs to steady himself. Moll reached down and patted his head.
When Moll touched him, Molly experienced the sensation on her own hand.
That feeling of his hair. Outrageously soft.
She extricated herself from the bush. She went to the basement to grieve.
11
In the basement there was a three-foot piece of old metal piping leaned up against the concrete wall behind the guitar stands. It had not been there before. Probably it had been in the basement, somewhere amid the chaos of boxes and junk on the far side. But it had not been on display. Now, it served as proof that Moll did not simply sit all day; that she moved around the cellar, simmering with plans; that she had located at least one weapon.
And, another change from before: in the middle of the futon, awaiting Molly almost like a gift, the spare unit for the baby monitor.
So Moll had been eavesdropping far more profoundly than permitted by the bush. Into the children’s bedroom. Why hadn’t Molly thought to do the same?
The worn-out spot on the rug pulled her to it. She settled herself there, cross-legged, bereft, enraged, the metal pipe heavy across her thighs, the baby monitor light in her hand. She turned the dial:
“—made of plastic?” Viv was saying. Ben was crying.
“Ceramic,” Moll said.
“Wood?” Viv persisted.
Moll soothed Ben.
“Well, wood?”
Ben allowed himself to be soothed.
“Plastic?”
Molly turned off the monitor.
Scornfully she considered herself, her former attitudes and actions. How often had she, naive with privilege, threatened David: If those kids don’t learn to sleep through the night I’m seriously going to move to the basement.
Time passed the way it passed in the basement: not measureable.
Was this now her life: inside the cellar, outside of time?
Like Moll.
Eons later, Moll opened the metal doors and came down the stairs with a cardboard box.
The basement was dark. Moll turned on a lamp. She did not react when she saw the metal pipe lying across Molly’s lap.
Nor did Molly pick it up and use it as she had intended.
When she saw Moll in the lamplight what she saw in the lamplight was herself.
Moll removed things from the box and placed them on the futon: the gray scarf, the blue hoodie, the white T-shirt, the fleece socks. Not even David was aware of her fondness for that particular T-shirt, those particular socks. The most private and mundane of preferences. Known only to her. And to the person who had once owned them, too, elsewhere—the secret softness inside the pockets of the blue hoodie.
“Settling in,” Molly observed, trying to sound cold, but her vocal cords were disobedient, her voice the croak of a creature accustomed to darkness.
“Your turn,” Moll said.
“Turn,” Molly scoffed. Then, “Asleep?”
Moll nodded.
Molly felt depleted, as though it would require superhuman effort to restore herself to sufficient buoyancy to go up the stairs.
She rolled the metal pipe off her legs and stood, with effort.
“Do you feel like you’re losing your children?” Moll said.
The audacity of the question.
Molly hissed her response.
“Good!” Moll said, spitting the word out of her mouth like a curse. “Good! Because that’s what happened to me.”
They were too close to each other, same face to same face, like raging at yourself in the mirror. Molly recalled watching herself cry or laugh in the mirror as a child: observing her face distorted in despair or mirth made her cry or laugh all the harder.
“But your children,” Moll said, “are alive and well. Your grief is the tiniest fraction of mine.”
Molly envisioned them, smooth, asleep, just a few feet above their heads. She needed to be upstairs, near them, in case.
“You should go upstairs,” Moll said.
“We have to find her.”
“Her?”
“The bomber. She’s dead in your world but not— She was driving a black rental car, I saw it.”
“What can we do?” Moll’s voice was hollow. “Some woman in a black rental car two weeks ago? There’s nothing we can do.”
“She could still—” Molly said. “I tried to hide the Bible and the other artifacts but Roz and Corey—”
“Maybe someone killed her children,” Moll said.
“What do you mean?” Panic surged through Molly.
“Maybe,” Moll said, staring at the cement floor, “when your children are killed, you kill in turn.”
Frightened, Molly waited for Moll to say something else.
But Moll was quiet.
“I’m going upstairs,” Molly announced, but she did not move toward the stairs.
“When I’m with them,” Moll said, “I feel like I never lost them. And I feel like I’m losing them every second.”
Molly froze at this confession; found herself, for some reason, remembering the freshness of the