The Need - Helen Phillips Page 0,4

their blood on the gray quilt, their eyes four huge hurting questions. How could she be so stupid, she’d done the idiotic horror-movie thing, leaving the vulnerable flank unguarded while bumbling about in search of the threat.

But in the bedroom there was no blood.

There was just a baby sleeping on the bed and a kid jumping up and down beside him, grabbing her crotch and anxiously apologizing: “I’m sorry I peed on your bed!”

Usually she would have chided Viv for jumping so close to the baby, for ignoring her fifteen minutes earlier when Molly had asked if she needed to pee, for the unnecessarily alarming scream. Instead, she seized her, airlifted her to the bathroom, used the situation as an excuse to hold her daughter closer than close. She grabbed the potty insert and plopped Viv down on the toilet and yanked off her urine-soaked pants and undies.

“Why are you crying?” Viv said.

In the bedroom, Ben began to cry.

6

Never mind Corey’s touching touches (the potpourri, the lemon soap, the wrought-iron tissue box): a convenience store bathroom is a convenience store bathroom. It was one of those faucets that would run for only ten seconds before turning itself off. She did the best she could, then held the pump parts beneath the hand dryer mounted to the wall. She returned to her office, pulled closed the curtain that served as a door, unbuttoned her shirt, unfastened the cups of her nursing bra, inserted the tubes into the shields, hooked herself up to the machine, turned the dial to its highest setting.

Viv had covered her face in horror the first time she witnessed her mother pumping milk for her brother. “What it doing to you?” she said, staring at the machine through her fingers, at her mother’s nipples extending and retracting, misshapen by the plastic funnels.

But Viv had since grown accustomed to it, its distinctive wheeze, and came to consider it a sort of pet. She would sit beside her mother on the couch, matching her breathing to the breathing of the pump, hyperventilating along with it, stroking the pump with one hand as though her presence was somehow facilitating the process.

Here, now, in Molly’s office, the milk was not coming, not quickly enough. A drop from the right, two drops from the left. She needed at least three ounces from each. And after that, she needed to deliver the milk to the minifridge and transform from one kind of person into another, pull herself back together before the tour—which, if the past two and a half weeks were any indication, would be larger than the previous day’s.

She thought, with longing, of the time—it already seemed so distant—when the daily tour consisted of just a handful of paleobotany amateurs or foreign tourists. On the fateful day, less than a month ago, when she had brought the Bible out from her office at the end of the tour to show it off, there were just three people in her tour group, a kindly Brazilian couple and an elderly paleo enthusiast. Perhaps it was a slight act of defiance, after Shaina’s and Roz’s and Corey’s overall dismissive attitudes toward her nonfossil finds (“Molly’s little litter,” Corey dubbed it; “H-O-A-X,” Roz spelled dryly). Or perhaps it was just that they had somehow clicked, their tiny tour group; the Q and A had gone on for forty-five minutes longer than usual, and when the wife asked if they’d ever found anything in the Pit aside from plant fossils, Molly had felt safe, open, eager to share this incredible thing.

Molly assumed it was the elderly paleo enthusiast who had called the local paper; anyway, there was a reporter on the tour the next day.

Still the milk would not come. Every time she pumped she felt sorry for cows. When she poured cow’s milk for Viv she experienced a flash of mother-to-mother gratitude: Thank you, Ma Cow, for letting me steal your milk for my own offspring.

She looked up at the drop ceiling with its uneven tiles, marveled yet again that the Phillips 66 retained its gas-station smell even now, that eternal mix of Jolly Rancher and beef jerky, the scent of quarry dust just a thin overlay. She waited impatiently for the milk to flow. But the more impatient you were, the more the milk resisted the pump.

She thought again of the twin pennies. Stalwart, insignificant.

The milk gushed into the bottles.

7

She ran into the bedroom, where Ben—crying—had flipped himself over and crawled toward the bottom of the