on the floor.
“I’m bad, I’m bad.” Viv was weeping. “I just threw up on our baby.”
Molly was too unsteady to speak but she sat on the bed and pulled Viv toward her. Ben slept on, splattered.
“Will he be okay?” Viv said.
Molly let go of Viv and ran back to the toilet. When she was done, she turned her head to see Viv in the doorway, freaking out.
“I’m okay,” Molly lied. “Don’t worry.”
“He’s awake now,” Viv cried. “He’s sick!”
There was no way she could handle this. It was impossible.
“Help me up,” Molly said.
Viv looked at her and cried harder. But she did move closer to offer a useless little hand. Bolstered by the gesture alone, Molly somehow made it to her feet.
On the bed, Ben was crawling around in vomit (apparently had just added to it himself), whimpering. She tried to pick him up but her arms were too wobbly. Instead, she sat them both on the edge of the bed and knelt down before them and laid her head half in his lap, half in her lap.
It was unclear whether this position indicated that she was reassuring them or that they were reassuring her. With extraordinary effort, she pulled her head up off their laps. They stared at her, their eyes moist.
Someone needed to do something.
She would call the doctor. That was something, a thing a person could do.
The pediatrician’s twenty-four-hour hotline put her on hold. The children continued to stare at her. She held the slim phone with her shoulder and cupped the children’s knees with her hands. After a while a young man told her, brightly, that she would receive a callback within forty-five minutes.
“Forty-five minutes?” She laughed. There was no way she would last that long.
“Erika?” Viv suggested as Molly hung up with a wrathful sob.
It was a brilliant idea. But Molly didn’t pause to applaud Viv before texting Erika: Can u come now? Emergency everyone throwing up.
Only after pressing send did she note that the time was 6:03 a.m. So Erika would be deep asleep, childless, in the apartment she shared with several attractive roommates, dreaming of her upcoming backpacking trip, her alarm not set to go off for another hour and a half yet.
But an instant later Molly’s phone buzzed with a text and she seized it.
Me 2! Erika replied. Bad bug got us all, I’m destroyed, literally can’t stand up, good luck lady! This sucks right
So what now?
Norma, with her walker and her medications?
Those four scared and trusting eyes.
She called David. His phone went to voice mail. She called him six more times. Voice mail every time. Predawn Sacramento. She thought hateful thoughts about him.
She was still always about to throw up.
Moll, she thought with an odd flash of longing. And instantly corrected herself: Moll would be more dangerous than ever now, at this moment of utter vulnerability. If she were Moll, she acknowledged darkly, she would, yes, use this opportunity to—
The doctor called. It had been far less than forty-five minutes. She wept with gratitude.
The doctor was not concerned. The doctor said, “Don’t give them any liquids for an hour after they vomit. Any liquid at all, including water, and they’ll vomit again.”
It was true that, all night long, worried about dehydration, she had given them sips of water after they threw up, and, yes, they had kept throwing up.
“What about dehydration?” she said.
“Liquids are acceptable and essential, after an hour.”
“What about breast milk?”
“After an hour.”
“I’m sick too. I’m throwing up too.”
“Oh,” the doctor said.
Oh? she wanted to repeat back nastily, mocking the indifferent tone of this person who had taken the Hippocratic oath.
But instead she said, “Thank you.”
Somehow the kids were in the bathtub. Somehow they had their bath toys. But the toys drifted, ignored, because what the children wanted was water to drink.
“Water, Mommy, please, water, please!” Viv entreated.
“Wawa,” Ben joined in, “wawa, wawa,” wailing.
“No,” Molly kept saying like a wicked stepmother. “No water for you.”
“Water, please! Just water!”
A woman denying her children water.
“Wawa, petah!” Rubbing his hand across his chest, the sign language for please that Erika had taught him, pleading with his words and his body, any way he knew how.
“I will,” she said feebly, “set a timer. You have to wait a while longer or you’ll throw up again. That’s what the doctor said. Do you want to throw up again?”
“I’m so thirsty, Mommy. It hurts, please.”
Being a mother: it was too much.
“If you don’t give me water then I’ll drink the yucky bathwater,” Viv threatened, changing tactics.
The