The Air We Breathe

by Christa Parrish

  She closed her eyes, let the Spirit consume her. What believer didn’t think—know—Jesus could heal? Molly had experienced healing on many levels, she thought, but now she inventoried those moments—when the broken became whole, when the fear receded and peace overtook, when for a never-long-enough time belief was total and unconditional—and knew all those moments had been surface moments. Only the first level. Only dealing with the immediate, like an argument with her mother or an odd person in the museum who made her nervous. It never went deeper, to the places she really needed it.

  She didn’t want it to.

  She was scared. Her healing would come with a probing, painful cutting away. She could picture it in her mind, hear Christ’s knife scraping the rot from the bone. Because that’s where it was, in her bones, all sunk in and deep in the marrow. She would have to allow God in there if healing was to come. She would have to listen to Him say the word, watch Him snip away the sutures with which she had hastily, tightly, bound up the past. She’d need to peer into each one of those gaping wounds, put her finger into them, confront them, and let them close up in the long, slow way these types of hurts close.

  And she would begin today.

  I’m ready, Lord. Say the word.

  Communion began, and people shuffled sideways from between the rows and into the aisle. Tobias’s family squeezed past them; he shifted his knees into hers to make room, and she swung her knees out of the way, too. They sat together for, well, not long, barely two lines of whatever song the organist sang, and there was a gap in the Communion line. Molly stood and slipped into it.

  “Where are you going?” Tobias whispered, coming up behind her. “You’re not Catholic.”

  “I know.”

  “Molly, you don’t even—”

  “I can see what to do.”

  And she could. Right hand under left. An amen and pop the wafer into the mouth. Just touch the wine to the lips and don’t take a huge gulp. She took the bread not from the priest but from a regular guy dressed in a wrinkly plaid shirt and navy jacket, gold buttons etched with anchors. No tie. She couldn’t bring herself to chew the white circle so plastered it to the roof of her mouth with her spit. It stuck there, a small amount flaking off when the woman with the cup tilted it up too far, flooding Molly’s mouth with wine. She swallowed, the wafer soggy but still stuck. She tried to keep her tongue away from it, but couldn’t help rubbing at it every so often, checking to make sure it was there, even though she could feel it.

  Tobias’s family knelt in their row, so Molly continued walking to the back of the church and went around, back to her seat on the outside. Tobias went in next to her, tugged the kneeler down and she followed. She didn’t know what she was supposed to be thinking or praying, so she concentrated on the wafer, on the disintegrating flecks falling into her mouth, which she swallowed.

  The mass ended with a blessing, and most people waited for the priest to pass. Tobias’s grandfather embraced him again and patted Molly’s cheek before making his way out to say good-bye to Father Gino. His mother made sure to remind him not to be too long. “I’ll just drop Molly home and be in to work,” he said.

  They shuffled out with everyone else, Molly still in Tobias’s oversized coat, but somewhere during the service she’d slipped her arms into it, the sleeves flapping like penguin flippers. Her hands covered, she didn’t reach for the holy water, probably wouldn’t have anyway, even if she could. Tobias held the door open for her, and the sunless light outside still made her squint; no blue or yellow broke up the sky, only a pale gray-white melting over everything. She crossed her arms over her midsection to keep the cold air out of the unzipped coat and walked, slightly behind Tobias, back to the car.

  She made sure not to close her skirt in the door again, crossed her legs and sat with her hands between them, shoulders folded forward. Her posture was bad all the time. When she stood straight and flat and open, it felt as if she were showing herself to the world, a billboard, easy to see and read. She tried not to look so slouchy when people were around, when she worked behind the counter, but softened back down when alone.

  Tobias said, “There should be heat soon. The car wasn’t off very long.”

  “Forty-three minutes,” Molly said.

  “Forty-one today.” He gathered his hair at the back of his neck with one hand. Released it. “Was the mass okay?”

  “Fine. I enjoyed it.”

  “I was really, uh, surprised about the Communion part.”

  Immediately her tongue went to the roof of her mouth. She had forgotten about the wafer; it still clung there, but when she touched it, the small bit of pulp fell to the back of her throat. She tried to quietly keep from swallowing it, but it slipped down to her stomach. She could feel it moving, tracked it all the way down until it disappeared somewhere behind her rib cage.

  “Only say the word . . .”

  “I just thought I’d go,” she said.

  “I’m not . . . It didn’t bother me or anything.”

  “. . . and I will be healed.”

  She used to have so many words—the ones in her pockets, the ones she spoke. As a young child she’d had too many. Her father would come home from the university and her mother would say, “You talk to her awhile. The kid never stops.” Then Susan would shut herself in the bathroom for an hour while Molly chatted about her preschool class and peanut butter and the commercials she saw on television. She talked in her sleep, too. Or used to. Not that she ever heard herself; both parents told her that. She had sometimes wandered into their bedroom at night and burrowed into the blankets between them, and when they all woke she’d asked if she had said anything during the night. Her mother and father looked at each other and started. “Oh, yes,” her mother said. “You told us your secret mud-pie recipe. The one you sell to the frogs each spring.”

  “And,” her father continued, “you let me know what you were making me for Christmas. And my birthday. And Hanukkah.”

  “We don’t celebrate Hanukkah,” Molly giggled.

  “Hmm. Then why are you making me a gift?”

  The words went first when she had been taken, and she hadn’t gotten them all back, even now. Some days she spoke to no one. Other days she wished she could speak to no one, all her words like rusty gates or slaughtered lambs. Her healing would come with them, though. Not one word. Words upon words. She imagined them growing out of the Communion wafer planted in her belly, the vines curling up, each leaf inscribed with a story. She needed to tell. It had started two days ago when she poured herself out to Claire in the car.

  It had to continue.

  Tobias slowed the car in front of the museum. The lights were on, the sign in the door read Open, and Louise passed in front of the window. He’d forgotten to pull up to the side door. The engine hummed, and Tobias hummed, under his breath. “Thanks for bringing me today,” Molly said.

  “Next Sunday we’ll go where you want.”

  “You have to go now?”

  “Deliveries are calling.”

  “I don’t want you to go.”

  “I have a few minutes. I could come in.”

  “No, here is fine.”

  “Uh, okay,” he said, drawing out the a sound. “What’s up?”

  “I want to tell you about my dad.”

  Shifting the car into park, Tobias turned in his seat to face her. “Sure, yeah.”

  “He’s dead.”

  “I’m sorry . . .”

  “He loved me. He loved my mom. And he loved insects. He was an entomologist at the university. Not around here. We would identify bugs together. It sounds creepy, but it wasn’t. After he died, everything changed. Mom was a wreck. I still don’t think she’s over it.”

  “Or you.”

  “I guess not.”

  “No wonder you know all that stuff about beetles and whatever.”

  “It kinda stuck with me.” The slush on the floor mat shimmered with streaks of color, muted rainbow tones. She’d stepped on s
ome leaked motor oil, she guessed, tracked it in on the bottom of her shoe. “And then there was the time after my father.”

  Tobias gripped the steering wheel with his left hand; Molly watched his knuckles whiten, the skin thinning, the veins pushing up to the surface.

  “Before you moved here.”

  She nodded, and Tobias’s hand released the wheel, limp, lifeless, like a bird being shot from its perch.

  “Say the word . . .”

  She was going to tell him.

  “My father was killed in a bank robbery. I was there. And they took me.”

  Tobias half slid, half hopped his hand toward her. One finger stroked the side of her thumb. She resisted the urge to bury her hands between her skirted thighs, to clamp them away from his touch, and when she didn’t move, Tobias looped his finger around hers. Squeezed.

  And so the story came. No details. Just in the plain language of the child she’d been back then. She’d stop every four or five sentences, and after the silence had thickened with too much time and condensation, Tobias would gently squeeze her finger until she spoke again, tugging it almost, milking it, drawing the words from her.

  When she finished, she couldn’t bring herself to move, to look into his face and see . . . What? Pity. Disgust. She stared instead at his one finger curled around hers, twice the thickness of her own, with a heavy, dark nest of hair under the first knuckle. And his nail was long, a deep U, shiny like the inside of a seashell.

  She didn’t want to leave the car. The heat had made her lethargic, sleepy. She could have closed her eyes and dozed, listening to the air blowing around her. She loved to be warm; better too hot than too cold. She’d step from the shower with reddened skin and sleep with the electric heater in her room cranked up so high she would wake with her throat scratchy and dry, drink the lukewarm water she brought with her to bed the night before filled with ice.

  Most of all, she didn’t want to go back into the museum, didn’t want to see her mother. Louise wouldn’t say anything to her. But the looks would come, speaking more loudly than any argument. Things were so tense between them since Claire came. Since Molly went outside. She hated the discord but had no idea how to fix it.

  “Do you have to go to work now?” she asked him.

  Tobias said, “Look at me.”

  Without moving her head, her eyes shifted as far left as they went. She could only see him with her left eye; the bridge of her nose hid him from the right one’s view. Her eyeballs ached, a long, pulling pain like short muscles being stretched.

  “Look at me,” he repeated.

  “I am.”

  He moved his hand from the steering wheel to her chin, turned her face to him. Her eyes dropped back to their fingers. “Thank you. For telling me.”

  “You already knew.”

  “Some. That day, when that woman kept calling you Hanna, I went home and found some news articles online.”

  “Claire didn’t tell you?”

  “No. She wouldn’t.” Now he glanced at the museum windows. “I thought your mom was abusing you.”

  “My mother . . .” Molly hesitated. “No. My mother has given everything for me.”

  Tobias pinched the hair at his chin. “You could come. When I make the deliveries, I mean. If you want.”

  “I do.”

  So he let go of her hand and made a U-turn in the street.

  Tobias used his back to push open the restaurant door, three insulated bags in his arms. More people ordered pizzas on Sundays than Molly had expected. She opened the car door to get out and help him, but he shook his head. “Stay in, stay in,” he said, sliding the red bags onto the hood of his car and pulling open the back door. The pizzas went into the back seat.

  They were regular customers, most of them. Tobias knew the houses and the orders by memory, telling Molly a bit about each of them. “Mr. Burke—his wife left him last fall, and he doesn’t cook. Always gets the Hawaiian. He’s the reason it’s on the menu. Pops always said no self-respecting Italian would put pineapple and ham on a pizza. But Mr. Burke orders it at least three days a week.”

  “There are worse things to put on a pizza.”

  “Such as?”

  “Tuna fish,” Molly said. “It’s popular in Germany, I guess.”

  “That’s gross.”

  “I know.”

  Tobias eased into the driveway. “You can come with me.”

  “I don’t know,” Molly said, but she opened the door and followed him to the small shingled house, battered by sea air and time. It looked like a home that had been left, too, any woman’s warmth packed up and taken away.

  The man who answered the door had a clean, groomed look, with hair and mustache clipped short and sharp creases down the front of his navy blue trousers. “I wondered what took you so long,” he said, glancing at her. “Training someone?”

  “This is Molly,” Tobias told him.

  “Well, Molly, take my advice. Don’t make a customer wait forty-five minutes for a pizza or you won’t get a tip,” the man said. He took the box and shut the door.

  “Um. Wow,” Molly said.

  “No biggie there. That’s just Mr. Burke. He’s always spleeny and conjures up some reason not to give me a tip.”

  “Spleeny?”

  “You know. Cranky.”

  “I’ve never heard that one before.”

  “That’s because you’re a flatlander,” Tobias said, laughing. “We have our own language.”

  “Ayuh,” Molly said.

  Tobias laughed again. “Not bad.”

  They spent the afternoon driving between deliveries and the pizzeria, making light conversation or listening to the radio. Molly didn’t mind the silence with Tobias, though he never really was silent. He hummed with the music or drummed on the steering wheel or twisted his wrists until they popped. He sucked his drink through a straw until only ice remained and then sucked some more, the air rattling around the frozen cubes. Or he pointed out things in town and told amusing stories about them.

  She found herself falling in love with him—the real Tobias, not the one she imagined while reading the romance novels.

  “I should get back,” she finally said.

  “Okay. One more house, then I’ll drop you off when I go back for the next bunch of pizzas.”

  “I suppose you’ll be glad to be off to school and done with this soon.”

  “You know, Moll, I think God puts us where we’re supposed to be, when we’re supposed to be there. If I’d gone away to college after high school, you and I . . . well, we wouldn’t have become friends. And, yeah, being a pizza delivery guy isn’t saving lives, but God still uses me through it. It might seem dumb, but I pray for the people I bring food to. Maybe it does some good, you know? Maybe it doesn’t. But I do it because that’s what being faithful means, using each situation in a way that’s pleasing to Him.”

  She’d never thought about praying for the tourists who came through the museum. She didn’t pray much at all anymore. Why had she stopped?

  Because I used up my prayer quota.

  They stopped in front of a bungalow with heart cutouts in the wood shutters and window boxes painted to match, not filled with flowers now but with evergreen branches left over from Christmastime, faded red bows tied in the middle of each bundle. Molly carried the insulated pizza bag, and Tobias held her elbow, ringing the glowing orange doorbell button after they climbed two concrete steps to the front door.

  “’Bias, bro, how are you?” the man who answered the door said. He looked not much older than Tobias, with the same cool, slouchy jeans, the same style of striped thermal shirt. He held an older infant in a long-sleeved Onesie, unbuttoned at the crotch, diaper saggy between the legs.

  “Dillon, doing good.” Tobias shook his hand. “Haven’t been here in a while.”

  “Yeah, man, Kat and I have been gone, down to Hartford with her mom. You heard what happened?”

  Tobias nodded. “Frank told me. I’m sorry.” />
  “Well, you know. This crud happens and you gotta roll with it, know what I mean? Kat’s okay, she’s dealing. And now we got Dakota.” Dillon nodded toward a little girl, maybe nine years old, staring at the television in the other room. She sat on the floor, chubby shoulders rounded, arms strapped across her shins, feet bare. Her long straw-colored hair nearly touched the carpet, her face a mask of freckles and loss. “Linda helps as much as she can, but she couldn’t keep up with a kid, not with her Parkinson’s.”

  “What happened to the dad?” Tobias asked.

  “Didn’t want her. No surprise there. Liz tried for years to get anything from him. Time. Money. Man, a phone call now and then would have made Dakota happy.” Dillon snorted, shook his head. “Nothing.”

  “That’s hard.”

  “Tell me about it. I’ve barely gotten used to this one,” the guy said, bouncing his baby on his hip. “How the heck am I gonna take care of a nine-year-old whose life has been torn apart?”

  Tobias stuck out his hand, and Dillon shook it. “I don’t know, Dill. But you call if you need anything. I’ll help if I can.”

  “Thanks. Tell Frank I said hey.”

  “Will do.”

  Dillon took the pizza from Molly and shut the door. Back in the car, Tobias exhaled deeply. “You okay?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?” she asked, shaking from within. She’d been that little girl, was still that little girl.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  Tobias dropped her off at the side entrance, his upbeat mood all but evaporated, his dark eyes flat. “Hey, Moll . . . ?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Nothing. Never mind. I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”

  She nodded, unsure of where the two of them stood. She slipped into the apartment, changing from the skirt to a pair of clean jeans she had left folded on the washing machine before making her way into the kitchen area. Mick and her mother were eating at the table, jotting notes on identical turquoise Post-it pads. Louise was laughing. Laughing. Molly half smiled at the sound while bracing herself for her return to bring a scolding and the end of the happy atmosphere. But it didn’t. When Mick saw her, he said, “Miss Molly Macaroni, how was church?”