These Dreams of You

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It may be that Zan has made an aesthetic out of coincidence, but he would find Molly’s appearance more reassuring if it somehow were more explicable. He would feel more reassured if Zan had mentioned in the email to Viv the need for a nanny before the afternoon they saw Molly outside the pub. In that case Zan can imagine scenarios, slightly far-flung though all of them are, by which a young London woman — alerted to the situation of a white foreigner in town with two kids, one a young black girl — would happen to pass by the pub and take notice. But in any case, wouldn’t Viv have written something? Maybe, as Molly indicated, Viv said something to someone in Ethiopia, who then said, Oh I know a woman in London, and then Viv forgot in the midst of everything going on. As Zan too often reminds her, sometimes she thinks of telling him something and then later remembers doing it though she hasn’t.

Zan would find Molly’s mysteriousness, and all the mysteries that her mysteriousness engenders, more purely irritating if it weren’t for the sense he has — which has grown as surely as the transmissions from Molly’s and Sheba’s bodies together — that the woman is haunted. Or she is more than haunted, she’s branded by a secret, and all that lies between her and her secret is everything about her that’s so indefinite. There’s no way for him to know if Molly has come to Sheba to try and live down this secret or to try and draw closer to a resolution; but this is the one thing about her that Zan knows is no accident, even among all his other conjectures, the most prominent of which is whether, for all concerned, hers is a secret to either be unlocked, or locked away for good.