Molly Falls to Earth

by Maria Mutch

  * * *

  But I know. That’s my employment, my personal project, to tend to the vestiges. The buildings have the secrets. The people just walk on by, not knowing.

  * * *

  Maybe they look for me, maybe they don’t. You make a mistake and it’s undoable. Her name was Giddy. Not her real name, of course, but what she was called by my two older children. She was small, and not a talker, barely a word, and always smiling. I hadn’t counted on her presence. You can tell a child is different when they have a particular grace that stops folks in their tracks. People were always commenting on her look, how her face seemed to hold an old expression and a young one in the same spot. Her grandmother said she might end up being a preacher, if she should become a talker, and that was the sort of power she had, in her small body, her eyes. She was a collisional animal, something you would find in a forest, or a meadow, and carry home. She was maybe not intended for this world. She was light as a feather and slipped through. I was reading, entangled in an idea, I think, and I couldn’t drop the page or what it was saying. I didn’t know where she was. I had set my watch for a certain amount of time and didn’t want the children prominent in my thought process at that particular moment.

  * * *

  So I said, Wait Wait. I should have said it three times, as that’s where the energy is. After my husband had sold the patent, and then another one, we moved into a house that was three storeys high. We called it the Big House, and it did have a quality of a prison, or at least that’s what I thought. But I kept it to myself and marked out my reading time not to be bothered. The space of the house and its solidity were at odds and she was on the third floor, perched in the window. Behind glass, like a specimen, and wanting to explore that outside air, the potentiality called descent. That invisible border again, you see? The window was easy to open and it didn’t have a screen. Was a fast fall, I’m told, a blink. And that’s how one crosses over in the end, I’ve seen it.

  * * *

  You don’t know a thing until you know it. Visage yourself in the mirror and wonder who you might be, underneath there. Subdural. And out there. Out in the world, authentic. If you take comfort in words, wear them in your clothes, I figure. But be careful of the turning ones. Hew—that’s one right there. It talks of cleaving or cutting or chopping, but it also means adhere. You have to watch for those things, the potentialities. Even as he—and by he I mean Heidegger—even as he had some true ideas, it turns out he had nefarious thinking, too. So you wonder who is good and who is bad. He could chop and cleave and adhere all at once. You think he’s on to something and then …

  * * *

  You have to hew lightly the monstrous. What you yourself might have done.

  Molly

  Daniel’s last known location: a chair beside the living room window of the apartment. His hair was mostly gone and what remained was fine and luminous, showing the majesty of the skull, the curve at the back down toward the neck. Occipital lobe, cerebellum. His skin translucent and dry. He was ninety-five.

  Not long before he died, he watched the umbrellas on the street below. “You always think the buildings will protect you,” he said. “Doesn’t matter how many years, decades even, you still think the illogical thought that somehow they’ll stop the rain. But there it is. You get soaked anyway.” No bitterness in his voice, but wonder.

  * * *

  I wasn’t there for his exit, either. Another convenient placing of the body in some other, more tenable location.

  Emmitt called me at 3:00 a.m. two days after I last saw them both. “I was going to wait until morning to call you, but I knew that you’d want to know.” The sacred cracking of the voice.

  I sat in my bed with Raf beside me; he woke to my hushed voice and placed his hand on my back. The phone glowed in the dark. I had imagined when I practiced Daniel’s death, when I imagined him gone in order to puzzle it out, be ready in some sense, that my earlier experiences would make me eloquent, that I would know what to say to Stella and Augustin, only three at the time, to Emmitt, to myself. After all, I held the fragments of my parents’ cataclysm like shrapnel underneath my skin, there was a roar embedded in my viscera. There was nothing in my mouth, though, except some quiet words responding to times and a call for an ambulance that had been too late and that he had died, Emmitt said, “magnificently.”

  Daniel had been sitting up in his chair by the window where he had insisted on staying. Emmitt had slept on the sofa to be near him and opened his eyes, for a reason he didn’t understand at first, to see the outline of Daniel’s shape in moonlight, recognizable and not.

  “It was the silence,” Emmitt finally said. “I’ve never known anything like it.”

  The Family

  “Do you feel that?” Stella said.

  Augustin walked a few steps behind her. They had been playing a spy game as they followed Molly and Raf along the sidewalk. It was a clear Sunday morning in the middle of January, and the four were going to get pastries at the twins’ favourite coffee shop, Mack’s. Stella had been watching her parents walking with linked arms, Molly seeming more relaxed than usual and leaning into Raf’s shoulder as they laughed about something. Raf had on a hat and scarf, but only a rumpled linen blazer for a jacket and, because they were merely a few blocks from home, he still wore his slippers, which had made Stella giggle. Molly pointed out something in the distance, and they leaned into each other again. Perhaps they were even joking about the twins, as Molly at one point glanced over her shoulder at them, smiling, before saying something into Raf’s ear. More chortling. Which had been fine with Stella, as she felt the happiest and most settled when her parents employed their own secret codes and conspiracies, and their laughter took on the lower, huskier tone that said that they were getting along.

  “Do you feel that?” she said again, and Augustin nodded.

  Except that what he felt was only regret that he hadn’t worn his favourite sneakers, Molly having talked him into a pair of boots. Lately, he had found that his powerful connection to Stella had been loosened and she was prone to picking up on things that were mysterious enough to him to be almost nonexistent. Then she had been entirely keen on the idea of the missing man, before suddenly not wanting to discuss it. So he nodded, longing for the old Stella whose thoughts had been so seemingly one with his, and tried to make himself feel the pulse of whatever she was sensing.

  “A sound?” he offered.

  “No, dummy.” She stopped and put her hands briefly on her hips. He noticed that she had her goggles around her neck, hidden partly underneath her scarf. “That follow-y feeling. Don’t you feel it?” She placed her fingers on her stomach, as if to say the sensation resided there.

  “Oh, that,” he said, and continued walking.

  She followed behind him darkly, and he hoped she would cheer up by the time they reached Mack’s. It had always been their favourite spot in part because of its absurd size. Perhaps it was the same width as their small bedrooms, and not much longer. It appealed deeply to their love of the miniature, and the shiny black paint of the facade made the light within seem particularly golden. There was only room inside for four tiny tables, arranged closely together, and a tiny bar went along one wall, so that if you sat on a stool, you were practically at the tables. The place for getting the coffee and pastries fit somehow just beyond the seats, with a sliver of space in which to stand and wait for an order, during which time the twins always looked at the pictures that covered the walls, right up to the high ceiling. The size, however, meant that they likely wouldn’t be able to sit, the trick being entirely in the timing which had to coincide exactly with people rising up from their coveted spots like kings and slouching on their jackets. When this fortunate event did happen, Stella and Augustin would end up sitting partly on Molly’s and Raf’s laps, even though they were really much too big, but which arrangement and its chance to seem small again delighted Augustin. The whole process never got old.

  Before they reached the co
rner of the block where the shop was, however, they saw a stout, bald man suddenly bolt across the street and into the path of Molly and Raf. He was shrieking and hitting out in all directions. The twins could see Raf step between Molly and the man while shouting back and preventing him from reaching her. Molly turned and headed for the children with her arms out to corral them and move them back down the sidewalk.

  Suddenly the screaming stopped and the man ran in the opposite direction, disappeared. Three people had emerged from the café to see what was happening, and others had stopped along the street, before everything slowly settled and returned to normal. The twins put their arms around Molly’s waist and peered around her to see that Raf was fine. He was brushing off the sleeves of his jacket and muttering, but seemed otherwise okay.

  “What was that?” Stella said, breathing into Molly’s side.

  “That was just something that happens,” Molly said, stroking both of the heads that were pressed against her. “It’s okay now. He went away.” She straightened and turned, attempting to move them with her, but they were rooted to the sidewalk.

  Augustin said, “Aren’t we going home?”

  “Of course not,” Molly said, and laughed. “Why would we do that?” She still had her arms around their shoulders and she nudged them again. “C’mon, you two. Don’t let it get to you. We have breakfast cookies to get. And, wow, I’m getting an enormous coffee.”

  “Exactly,” said Raf, who was still seeming to shake something off, but he smiled. “Exactly.”

  The four of them entered the café and stood in line to place their order, and the room was crowded and warm and buzzing, and it was a relief to be held in that space.

  Stella put her arms around Augustin and hugged him.

  “See? I told you so,” she hissed.

  Aftermath

  Raf lay on the bed with his shirt open, exposing his soft stomach and furred chest, upon which Molly had placed her head. After returning from the café, Stella and Augustin had decided to watch a movie, while Molly and Raf gravitated back to bed with the paper, but then didn’t look at it. They lay down together instead, Molly practically wanting to crawl inside of Raf as she breathed in his smell.

  “I’m amazed you didn’t let me know this was going on,” he said. He kissed the top of her head and pressed his arm more firmly around her. “We can let the police know about the threats. In fact, we have to. And I’ll call Stefan tomorrow,” he said, referring to their friend who was an attorney. “Who knows what the hell that will do, but it does sound good, doesn’t it?” He laughed.

  Molly didn’t say anything, or mention the symptoms that had been dogging her, how ink stains and flashes in her vision and a fluttering in her stomach came and went. How she feared the electrical cataclysm of a seizure more than any human attack, and at the same time she wished for the portal of ecstasy that had once opened and been hers, if only briefly. She felt a rush of love and gratitude for Raf that caused her to bury her face in his chest. He thought for just a moment that perhaps she was weeping or about to, and it relieved him. When he kissed her, he found her cheeks were dry, but no matter—the effect was there, the discernible softness and receptivity that had been lately absent. He turned, pushed her legs apart with his thigh and kissed her deeply, smoothing the hair from her forehead. She loved nothing better than talk of work, so he said, “Did you name your new piece yet?”

  She smiled. “Indeed. The Erotics of Departure.”

  He stroked her cheek. “How goes the progress?”

  She kissed him.

  “Set design next week. We’ve been going back and forth—lots still to do. I’ll go into the studio later.” She smiled. “And I was thinking …”

  “Of? You have a mischievous look.”

  “It’s time, don’t you think, for us to collaborate. We’ve talked about it for years. Maybe this is the piece.”

  “At last!” He laughed. “I thought you might be gearing up to ask me.”

  “And?”

  “Shall I come to the studio with you, then?”

  “Indeed!” She kissed him again.

  “We are the lucky ones, yes?” he said. “Such problems to work on.” She wasn’t certain if he was being ironic or not, given the incident of the morning, but he was always one to have a short memory for the negative, a quality she often saw as one of his finest. She nodded.

  They kissed again, and this time he felt that her face was damp. He pulled back to see better, almost wishing he had his glasses, and saw tears sliding away from her eyes. She stroked his cheek with her fingertips. “You’re always running away from me,” he said, chuckling. “But I have you now.”

  “You have me now,” she said, and wrapped her legs around him.

  Spine

  Stella had been building a mobile with various moving parts held in a careful balance and which her father had helped suspend from her bedroom ceiling. It was large enough to nearly reach the floor, with space for her and Augustin to lie down underneath it. Pieces of metal and wire that she had formed into spirals and other shapes, along with paper cranes in bright colours, hung from threads and rotated via a small motor from one of her robot kits. The entire works spun lazily over her head as she lay on the floor. She felt it needed a light show of some kind. She got up to look for her mother and found her in her bedroom, rooting in the bottom drawer of a dresser.

  “Mama,” she said, and Molly turned her head and smiled.

  “Hey, beautiful peanut. Nice goggles.”

  Stella had the goggles pushed back on her forehead like a mad scientist, or an explorer. She wore purple tights and an old red dress of Molly’s, cut along the bottom and belted twice at the waist.

  “How’s your project? Did you get the cranes to balance?”

  “Yeah, they’re good now.” Stella was sidetracked from her search for lights. She squinted at Molly. “What are you looking for?”

  Molly sat back on her heels with her hands on her thighs, staring into the drawer. “Oh, just … I’ll find it eventually.”

  Stella watched her root in the drawer again and become more absorbed until her mother seemed to forget that her daughter was behind her. Molly’s body, hunched at her task, shifted in some way, an arriving transmission. Stella frowned, suddenly worried, as she felt that something was about to happen, but moments went by and nothing did. She finally walked up behind Molly and bent a little to rest her body along her mother’s back in a manner she had seen the dancers do many times, one body bearing the weight of another. She felt the spine, the ribs, and muscles holding her up, and a presence she couldn’t know with her thoughts. The content was possibly beautiful, possibly monstrous. “Are you there, Mama?” she said.

  Molly said, “I don’t rightly know.”

  In the Dream

  Sabine and I are driving to the house by the sea. The house is suddenly there, weathered and grey with peeling yellow trim, and sits across an area of beach grasses and scrub roses. She and Seth were from a family with not just one home, the one in Lenox Hill, but two others besides. I wonder how they keep up the properties but then the question vanishes. Beyond the house lies a wide bar of sand and the ocean, deep blue and choppy. I open the car door and stand on the gravel. Sabine is already approaching the house along a stone pathway, to the front door, which stands open. She dissolves into the dark of the foyer, vanishes. I can see straight through to windows on the other side of the house where a piece of the white-capped sea shows against the dark interior.

  Inside the house, sunbeams full of dust shoot through shadows and grey shapes, and I find her again, in the living room. She pulls large sheets from the furniture, balling them and tossing them in a corner. The old furniture’s fuchsia-and-peach upholstery is suddenly there and still bright. Then she is in the kitchen, slamming white cupboard doors and scraping back metal-legged chairs that are incongruous and maybe Eames, and I can feel the house waking. It is discovering itself occupied, and I feel a chill.

  When I go to
stand near the corner where Sabine tossed the sheets, I can see it on the wall: a large black-and-white photograph of the mother and father on the beach, circa late seventies. The mother has her arm draped over her husband’s shoulder. A thin scarf snaps out from her neck in the breeze, and makes me think of Isadora Duncan, who was killed by her own scarf. Both the mother and the father are grinning so authentically, so without reservation, that I can see they are in love. Also completely blind to their end. Their unguarded expressions are marked with their ignorance. I have the thought, If you want to know what haunts me, Doctor, it is that blindness. They were people who went with their whims, to their peril. I picture them sailing, skiing, flying in small planes from one day to another, before slamming one into the side of a mountain. I imagine the father conducting business on various hotel telephones while taking a cocktail from the offered drink tray or tipping his cigarette ash into a planter. The mother painting her toenails on the edge of a settee, a hibiscus tucked behind her ear. She would have smelled like suntan oil and rum, maybe. She would have laughed heartily and placed her manicured foot on her husband’s shoulder as he crawled up her body with his hands sliding up under her shorts.

  Sabine stands beside me, watching me. She’s holding two babies in her arms, but they become a bottle of wine and two glasses. I turn back to her parents and observe them, how their merriment stays here, which isn’t a solace at all, but another indicator of the lack of deferments.