amniotic fluid. Whooshing out of her, the cleanest thing she had ever encountered. That otherworldly liquid in which their impeccable bodies had been suspended, safe.
They were already standing so close, but Moll took a step closer, matched her body up to Molly’s: thighs to thighs, torso to torso. The slow and hurting beating of her heart. Molly smelled the unwashed smell of herself, doubled, heady. Moll’s face drooped onto Molly’s neck.
Despite having conceived and borne and birthed and nursed children, this was the most intimate human sensation she had ever experienced: Moll’s warm tears moving across the skin of her collarbone.
It was the lightest touch imaginable, traveling downward toward the indentation between her breasts. She found herself opening to it, open to it, this subtlest interplay between two echoing forms.
But it was too much. She needed to step back.
Yet she could not. She was addicted to it, to the movement of the tears, the lack of gaps between them.
After a while Moll pulled her head up off Molly’s neck, revoking the tears, and Molly braced herself for further distancing. But Moll’s lips too were parted, and their lips matched themselves up, and their teeth.
12
Upstairs, Molly carried the sleeping children from their room into her bed. It was unwise, disruptive to their rest and to hers, but she needed to sleep, or half sleep, beside them. She needed to look at them and look at them again the whole night long.
She drowsed and woke and drowsed and woke, and, in the in-between states, forgot about Moll and Moll’s children—instead was struck, at the sight and sound and smell of her children, by an outlandish joy, its tinge of sorrow momentarily inexplicable to her, until she remembered.
When the sky lightened, she pulled herself away from the meadow of their sleep. She took a shower and dressed for work and pulled open the window beside the evergreen, and then carried her pajamas to the basement. Moll was asleep on the futon, which had been pressed down into its bed form at last, the sheets spread out properly.
Only when Molly saw Moll sleeping there did she realize how much she had been dreading the sight of her sitting stiffly on the worn-out spot, cross-legged and unrested.
Her body still felt to her like an echo of Moll’s and when she looked at Moll’s body it still felt like an echo of hers.
She perched on the edge of the futon and watched Moll as she had watched her children. This was no meadow. Asleep, Moll’s face was still and sad, the menace faded into mournfulness.
13
Ben was eating yogurt naked in his high chair. Viv was jumping naked from the coffee table to the couch. Moll, in Molly’s pajamas, moved through the space with the serenity that Molly longed for on these solo mornings of getting the kids ready when David was gone.
Molly watched from inside the evergreen, straining to catch each word through the window she had opened.
“Hey,” Viv said (clear, loud), “do you know why I have such a huge belly?”
“No,” Moll said, surprising Molly with the flatness of her voice.
“Well actually it’s because I’m going to have a baby.”
Moll wiped the trail of yogurt off Ben’s chin, neck, belly.
“And do you know who that baby is going to be?”
“No.” Moll held out a pair of underwear for Viv to step into.
“You. Baby Mommy.”
Why wasn’t Moll more amused, more vivacious?
“You smell funny,” Viv said to Moll. “Why do you smell that way?”
Moll pulled a shirt over Viv’s head and said something that Molly couldn’t hear.
“Can I lick your eye?” Viv smiled in anticipation of the refusal, the begging.
But Moll nodded and knelt.
“I can?” Viv said with awe.
Molly had to stretch, stand on tiptoe, to witness them together on the floor. Viv put her hands on Moll’s cheeks and pulled her close and licked her eye.
“You taste different,” Viv said.
“Different from what?” Moll said.
But Viv just laughed.
And then they all left the room, no longer visible from Molly’s vantage within the evergreen.
14
Molly pulled open the curtain of her cubicle to find Roz and Corey inside, waiting.
“Where is it?” Roz said.
“It’s okay, Molly,” Corey said. “Just give it all back.”
“Give what back?” she said.
“At least this time you relocked the cases.” Roz was at her flintiest.
Molly panicked, wondered: Moll? The bomber? Some other extremist?
It would have been her, had she gotten the opportunity; that was why she had come to work.
But it had not been her.
“Molly,” Corey said gently. “Where are they, dear?” Corey, who, on another