“It’s really not that important,” I muttered to Molly.
“It’s show-and-tell,” she muttered back.
Linda came back sooner than I had expected. I was amazed she could locate anything with speed in a house that was an oozing, seething snake nest of chaos. She put a gobstopper-sized marble on Molly’s palm. The sun glanced off its surface. All the colors in the world.
“Would your class like to see that, do you think?” she asked. She didn’t look at me. Molly passed it from one hand to the other.
“Is it just a marble?” she asked.
“It’s a very special marble,” said Linda.
“Why?”
“Because it used to be your mammy’s.”
“Does it do anything special?”
“Well. No. But it’s very pretty.”
“Have you got anything else?”
“I didn’t think you’d keep that,” I said to Linda.
“Of course I did,” she said. She looked at the marble balanced on Molly’s palm, then dropped her gaze to the ground. “It was my bit of you, wasn’t it? It helped. Helped when I was missing you.”
I felt a tug in the tie that had held us together for the past seventeen years. I stepped forward and I hugged her. She was warm and broad, and she held me so tight I felt we would turn into one woman. When she let go I walked down the garden path and through the gate. She stood in the doorway, and Mikey came and hung on her leg, and she looked tall and strong, like a lighthouse. I didn’t know why that was what came to me, but it did come, strongly. A lighthouse.
• • •
On the train Molly ate a sandwich the length of her arm, then fell asleep with her head on the wrapper. I couldn’t see her face, only her dark hair. I felt tired to the gossamer veins at the ends of my fingers, but I couldn’t sleep, and traveling backward made me feel sick, but I didn’t move seats. Sitting next to Molly would mean feeling the warmth coming off her body, feeling fused. It would make it more painful to be wrenched apart. By the end of the week, she would be with an infertile couple in a three-bedroom house, earning stars on a chart for eating vegetables and doing homework. I thought I might write a letter to her new parents: tell them about her reading books, what television programs she liked to watch, how much she wanted a party dress. They could take her to the department store. They could take pictures of her standing on their doorstep, trussed in satin and frills. You could do those things when you didn’t have to remember pale, still legs stretching out of a red-and-white-checked skirt.
My future was decided too. I would be arrested for breaching the court order, and if I didn’t go to prison I would kill myself. It was another foregone conclusion: without her, there would be no alternative. I would do it before I had time to be scared, before I had time to go back to the flat. Those rooms were impregnated with Molly: her height marks on the doorframe, her smell on the bedsheets. I couldn’t walk through them by myself. I would walk into the sea instead.
I rolled the marble in small circles on the train table. My thoughts spooled around, liquid and slippy. When I stopped trying to contain them, they went back to Linda. I imagined her in her matchbox house with her French windows open, kids spilling from drawers and from beneath the floorboards, grubby, semi-naked. I imagined Kit coming home for tea, putting his arms around her from behind, leaning round to kiss her cheek. I thought of her new baby, growing inside. She hadn’t seemed embarrassed about the glut of kids she had produced. When I’d had to tell Jan I was pregnant with Molly, my skin had crawled with sicky shame. We had been in her office at the police station, sitting across the desk from one another. She had taken a slow breath through her nose and moved her face around until she stopped looking exasperated.
“Have you thought about what to do?” she asked. She eyed my belly to decide how cross to be, and took another slow nose breath. Very cross.
“Not really,” I said, because I hadn’t.
“Well, do you want to keep it?” she asked.
I thought of the clump of new cells anchored inside me, like bubbles or frog spawn, something I had swallowed by accident. Jan knew who I was. She knew what I had done. I felt Steven and Ruthie between us, their small cold bodies laid flat on the desk.
“I can’t kill anything else,” I whispered.
“What?” said Jan.
“I’m keeping it,” I said. “It’s mine.”
Jan came to see us while we were in hospital. Molly was clean and dressed in a tiny white babygrow. I told Jan she weighed eight pounds, and Jan said that was big, and I almost laughed. Molly was the smallest person I had ever seen. When we had been sitting quietly for a few minutes, Jan straightened in her seat.
“You know I have to ask,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Your feelings might have changed,” she said. “There’s no shame in that. It would be a lot for anyone to cope with.”
Molly was sucking at me lazily, eyes half closed. It was a mean trick, I thought, to have slammed her onto my breast the moment she left my body, to have knotted us together with iron rope before I had even agreed to be tied.
Stay with us, Chrissie. What can you see?
Bed. Blankets. Molly.
“She’d be hungry without me,” I said.
“She’d take a bottle,” said Jan.
“She wouldn’t like it.”
“She’d get used to it.”
“She’d be hungry before she got used to it.”
“Maybe.”
Molly’s mouth came away from my nipple and she started awake. I put my hand on the back of her head and she fastened around me again. One of her hands clutched a fold of my skin.
“She likes me,” I said. “She really acts like she likes
