Molly Falls to Earth

by Maria Mutch

  She liked living near mountains in a town of only two thousand in the off-season, but she didn’t dress or speak or act like someone who was comfortable in trees and dirt. When she hiked, which she did just to stare out at the local lakes and ponds, she wore her big boots, regardless of weather. She was not prepared for anything except finding her way back to her car. She was not the chopper and keeper of wood for the stove—she left that to Ellena. She did once climb the ladder leaned up against the house so she could pull fistfuls of wet leaves from the gutters, but she had done so wearing her long black coat. She ripped the lining of it on the way down but never bothered to fix it, so a frayed bit of dark silk was still visible. She did not possess power generators and puffer jackets and skis and kayaks. There was no roof rack on her car, which was small and tended to slip and grind uselessly in snow. She was unadaptable to seasons, and disinclined to acknowledge transitional rhythms as they are known in rural areas. The locals looked at her with curiosity, maybe contempt. Yet she was unbothered by this, as it was the others who saw her as resistant and a misfit. She herself was simply along for the ride of things, wherever she was. To her way of thinking, the whole world, just about, was interesting. She would have said that the viewpoint of the outsider was the key to comprehension generally.

  She had to confess, however, that she did not always comprehend her brother. His apartment, too, was mysterious. Years ago he had embarked on a sudden passion for the outdoors, for forests distant from the city, mountains, deserts, and oceans, and any reason at all to be in them. His apartment had turned into a container of the gear that went with his pursuits, all the devices and gizmos that were bright yellow, red, orange, collapsed into themselves or folded in ingenious ways, an origami of tents, camping chairs, even a kayak that when not in use was a small cube in the bottom of a closet. He cultivated lightness in travel and carefully weighed his backpack, extracting items until what remained had transformative qualities or nested perfectly inside something else. He had organized some of his gear—ropes and carabiners and tools—carefully on pegs on his living room wall. Another wall held maps with pins of the places he had been and still wanted to explore. Otherwise, he was not prone to neatness, left the dirt on his boots, his clothes in a heap, and his hair wild. Molly had, many years ago, called the look in his eyes chaos. Sabine knew well the aspect she meant—the unsettled, shifting one was ever present. The one he assuaged with expeditions and alcohol, sometimes drugs, sometimes sex. He was always in the process of leaving the city, would return to it only to get out again, but he could not seem to make the move permanently. She herself had no problem with abandoning the city. The place seemed to be synonymous with self-loathing, unsettledness, eclipses of reason and sanity. She had left it, good riddance.

  * * *

  Yet, here she was.

  * * *

  And here she is.

  * * *

  “Ma’am? Ma’am? Jesus.”

  “I think you’re supposed to check her mouth or something.”

  “Her belt—and her shirt—are they tight?”

  “No belt. Ma’am?”

  “I think she’s wet.”

  “Wet? Really? It’s cold to be wet.”

  “Well, she is!”

  “Her face.”

  “She needs—”

  “Here—put it under her head. She needs something under her head.”

  “Are they coming?”

  “Was she with somebody?”

  “Wouldn’t they be here if she was?”

  “I dunno! I’ve never done this before. Why you asking me?”

  “Be fucking quiet, you know?”

  “…”

  “Jesus.”

  Sabine

  Sabine sat on one of the armchairs in the living room of her brother’s apartment. The cup of coffee with cream from her last stay was still on the little table between the chairs. A spectacular mould floated on the surface with a deceased cockroach on top. She imagined the roach to have ended in a fungal bliss, but she made a vow to take better care. A stack of notebooks sat beside the cup. Most of them were hers, but on the bottom of the pile was one that belonged to Seth. She had scoured it already for information, or insight, or signs of life, but all he had written in the first pages were a few lists of supplies. The remaining pages were blank, and their emptiness, the naked and pale blue lines with no words between them, seemed especially delicate and cruel. She thought he should have left signposts and signals. Things that said. She almost took it personally, his lack of consideration in leaving behind so little to go on. And so little about his mental state. She did not understand the lists, which seemed to be cryptically abbreviated. She had shown the notebook to a police officer, who expressed exactly zero interest in it and waved his hand at her as if she had interrupted his flow of thought. He had stood in the doorway to the apartment before turning on his heel. Then thought, perhaps, he’d been too abrupt and turned back to smile at her.

  “Sometimes people do it on purpose,” he had said. “Especially men. Especially grown ones.”

  “It?”

  “Leave. It’s a thing,” he said.

  Or perhaps she was making that up. She had been in the way, it seemed, and the officer hadn’t liked the look of her. He had asked for her name three different times, though she had been to the station already, and on the phone, and everyone knew who she was, and he himself had already written it down. Tight block letters on his pad. Smiled. Gone, too. Perhaps he had memory issues, or perhaps he had been expecting someone else. Perhaps she was really asleep in bed with Ellena beside her, with the dogs wedged in between, and the officer was merely a smoke of neurons. He was a composite, an inexplicably glistening face, a slight smell. He stirred the dream air when he left. Poof.

  * * *

  She wanted to smoke, so she opened the sliding door to the little balcony and stepped outside. She put a cigarette to her lips and felt inside her coat pocket for her lighter, finding instead the stone that Seth had pulled from a mountain stream and given to her. She didn’t know the type of stone and didn’t look it up. She preferred the simple idea of it, something that pointed to the volcanic and prehistoric. But the stone was really a placeholder or pin. On her last visit, she had found an open tourist map in a nearby deli and took out her pen to mark a black dot in the approximate location of his apartment. Point last seen.

  She found her lighter in the other pocket and was relieved to smoke where the air was already compromised; in the bracing atmosphere of the mountains, she felt the violations of her habit. The railing, decorated with guano, was losing its paint. Beyond the railing, there was the icy freefall of space between the buildings, the windows and naked rooftops across the street, the miniatures of people on the sidewalks below. She watched the buildings, what she felt was their rigid masculinity. The lines and grids were placed on the back of what had been a keenly feminine wilderness. She was held in a trick of bricks and steel, the layers containing people, animals, the ten thousand things, but only the echo of her brother. He was a kind of erasure, but still tangible, and together they floated aboveground, stacked up, seemingly alone.

  Rafael

  Rafael considered his painting, the indigo lines on a white background, one of forty-four similar iterations. The exact shade of white had been painstakingly obtained and the exact shade of indigo, too, to say nothing of the precision in the grid. Everything deeply contemplated, meditated on, reapproached. He worked most often in acrylic, but some of the smaller pieces were in oil. His studio was a mess in places, in spite of shelving systems and tables, and jars and boxes in which to house everything from the brushes to finishing nails.

  Almost the entire locus of order was held in this particular series of paintings and stood in contrast to his usual mode of work, which had tended to the flamboyant, the big and wild gesture. The disarray of his canvases led somehow to an innate sense of order in chaos. It was his particular talent, the thing he was known for. A mysterious energy was a
t work between his mind and the chance organization of paint laid down in mad, vigorous rushes. He was celebrated.

  But the turn of late in his work toward a leaner presentation flummoxed some, including himself. He knew only that it was a tack he had to follow. He had the windows flung open to expel the smell of the paint and because he had a tendency to run hot. He had another studio in a warehouse in Queens where he could deploy his more massive works. His home studio was originally the apartment beside the one he and Molly lived in. They had bought it when the twins were toddlers and torn down the walls to create his space and an office for Molly, though she tended to be elsewhere.

  The problem of this day was that his attention was drifting to the scarf, carefully folded and rolled as small as possible, that he had placed in his leather knapsack. Claire had left it behind when she was last in his studio and Molly had not been home. It was the sort of forgetful gesture—though his own actions were rife with exactly this same insouciance—that he abhorred in others, particularly younger women. Particularly younger women in whom he had placed his faith, his attention, his sexual curiosity. The code was one that did not allow for the accidental—or purposeful—dispersal of items of jewelry or clothing, tangible expressions of affection, such as photographs, or even a long strand of hair that could not possibly have come from the head of Molly or the twins. In other words, nothing that would tell. That Claire had forgotten the scarf, and possibly shed it with something else in mind, rattled him. He did not love her, not in the particular egoic sense of passionate affairs, though he loved, he supposed, her humanity, that she lived and breathed. He simply was less interested in her, much less, than he once was, which had seemed to result in her sudden appearance of forgetfulness. She had been an excellent, and quiet, co-conspirator, a mutedly buzzing secret, until she started texting him at the wrong times and shedding pieces of herself as if she were leaving bread crumbs.

  He frowned at the canvas in front of him. She wanted, it occurred to him, for them to be found out. He had not explained to her Molly’s particular feelings in this regard—that she would likely be undisturbed by this development. He could have enlightened Claire, told her that if Molly had found the scarf, she might have picked it up between her index finger and thumb as if it were a dead mouse, or a hair clog from a drain. Or, conversely, being a lover of scarves, maybe she would have admired it, slung it around her own neck, and sat down on the sofa to read the Sunday Times, waiting for him to walk in and see what he would surely recognize as belonging to his lover. And that she would be smiling. Possibly demonically, but smiling, and it would be at least partially meant. But there was something deflating in the thought of telling Claire this. The fun was supposed to reside, dear Claire, in secrecy, an abundance of it, a duplicity sanctioned by the heft of its obscurity.

  “You are nothing,” he said out loud, and involuntarily. He was surprised at the uncharacteristic darkness of his thought, its annihilation. He stood with his hands on his hips, regarding the floor.

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” Molly said, and he turned around abruptly. She laughed. “So sorry! Didn’t mean to scare you.”

  She almost never entered his studio without knocking. He knew, however, that she wouldn’t say another word about overhearing him. She grinned, and he was disarmed.

  “My love, I have a question. I need advice.”

  He rubbed his hands in mock recognition that he loved to give advice and she, never needing it, rarely took it. “Indeed. Have at it.”

  She was holding a small white paper bag and went to sit on the worn-out sofa that he had for thinking naps. “I have treats, by the way. Ill-gotten gains. Entirely bad for you, but then it’s no secret that I’m trying to kill you.”

  He shrugged. “I’ve never wanted to be too old.”

  She curled her legs beneath her. “You kind of are.” She laughed. On the floor there was a Kashan rug, mostly devoid of paint, with a pattern of hand-knotted predators and prey. “The lions look a little human, don’t they? And a little sad.” Possibly sorry for the teeth and claws that weren’t depicted but implied. She handed him the croissant and kept the scone for herself. He took a bottle of whiskey from his table, poured two glasses, handed one to her knowing she would drink very little of it. They clinked glasses and he stood, leaning against the table, waiting.

  “My brain,” she said. She picked a corner off the scone and ate it.

  He smiled. “Okay. I’ll bite. What’s it telling you? New piece?” He loved the energy in the apartment when they were both producing, though he sometimes felt competitive, even ferociously, which was a feeling he felt no need to reject. Competition was a facet of aliveness, of vibrancy, of sex, and made people awake. It made them want to fuck and eat and produce things. It made the world spin.

  She took a drink of the whiskey. Then another, then drained it. He raised his eyebrows. She rarely drank, exactly on account of her brain. He watched her as she sat, staring into the empty glass. She wore a black T-shirt without a bra and a pair of track pants that she managed to make elegant, simply through the articulation of her body.

  She noticed his look, and her expression darkened. “I need to talk to you. Seriously.”

  He said nothing.

  She rubbed her face. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s happening again. They’re back. And I don’t want to take the medication. Not yet. And I want you to know that. I want a clear mind, such as it is. I want to make some new work. This piece, especially. I’ve been waiting for it.”

  He nodded. “You don’t need my permission. You’re a free agent. We do what we like.” He said this pointedly and was ashamed. He cleared his throat. “Do you remember the first time I saw one of your seizures? One of the little ones?”

  She smiled whenever he referred to one of her complex partial seizures as “little.” “Maybe. Dinner, I think … Spanish restaurant. You had the mussels and scallops and clams. I remember thinking, Here is a man who loves the sea.”

  “You had been telling me a story about your grandfather, and then you just stopped. Midsentence. You were looking at me, but then you were looking somewhere else. … You unmoored and floated off. You moved your hand, like you were releasing a bubble or a bird.” At the time he felt it was eerie or primordial or mythological, or even beyond language. “I loved you right then, that you could do such a thing.”

  He sat down beside her on the sofa and picked up her hand, kissed her fingers while watching her face. “I know you hate them,” he said. “It won’t help you to stress about it. Create your piece.”

  “I don’t hate them. Not always,” she said, and shrugged. “Other people do.”

  He kissed her face, her mouth. She touched his face, then stood up, putting the remainder of her scone in the paper bag, and left the studio. He watched her go before eating his croissant in three bites. Then he went back to stand in front of his painting with his whiskey. He rubbed his chin and contemplated the forgetfulness of Claire.

  Sabine

  She did not avoid the puddles as she walked. She couldn’t storm along as she used to, when she owned the place. She had forgotten how to enter and exit a confluence of people. She preferred to be unaware of her body when possible, slightly removed from it. She preferred to be cloaked. As she walked ineptly along the sidewalk, she was pushed into a derided shape, hissed at. This particular January was less cold than usual, and damp. The sky was grey behind grey buildings. But at street level there was the tumult of desire and rejection, the things to eat, the things for sale, the things discarded. An unceasing, living capriciousness with just enough forethought to seem on purpose. She didn’t notice what she once thought was beautiful and vital.

  In her coat pocket, along with the stone, was a piece of paper with Molly’s address scratched onto it, almost illegibly, as if in code. She didn’t know why she wrote it that way, only that she did, but she had the location committed to memory anyway. She had finally called someone who used to work with Molly and was willing t
o help. Oh for sure I’ll give you her address lemme look just a sec. But what she found on writing it down was a kind of disappointment, how the search was ostensibly over. She felt a curious sensation, the urgency detached and gone. Taken away on a current, now a speck.

  She was only a block and a half from Molly’s apartment building. A person got into a cab, leaving a glove behind in an icy puddle. A cyclist covered half his face with a scarf and also departed. The street was the kind that, despite its restaurants and markets, briefly emptied before filling again. She regarded the pause as eerie, and stood on the sidewalk, willing the gap to fill again with people. A kind of knowledge developed within her on a mossy, visceral level; however unlikely it was, she would see Molly before Molly saw her.

  Only moments later, as cars materialized again and doors opened and closed, she saw Molly take shape across the street. Sabine watched her enter a café, two children trailing behind, a boy and a girl. Unmistakably her. A swatch of white-blond, an elegant scarf, a T-shirt as if the month were May. The children, bundled, were perhaps eight years old, or maybe they were ten, or even twelve. Which couldn’t be true, they couldn’t be ten or twelve, as she last saw Molly a decade ago—unless the children didn’t belong to her, which was certainly possible, or they were adopted. Anything could be true. Sabine stood under the awning of a pizza place and felt a large drip fall to her scalp and slide icily down the side of her head. Yet she remained perfectly still and people walked around her as the café door swung open. Molly and the children waited for customers to exit before they went in. Once they were inside, Sabine walked down the block to cross at the lights. She walked slowly, and no one jostled her.