They May Not Mean To, But They Do

42

Molly had often wondered, too often to tell anyone, even Freddie, what it would feel like to jump off a building, what your thoughts would be. Would your thoughts be narrowed to a simple unthinking scream? Would you think of all those you would miss? Would you wonder if they would miss you? Would you think, What in the world am I doing, falling, falling, no way to stop, no way to go back? Would you think, Why did I do this? Or would you think, Why didn’t I do this long ago? That, all of that, was what she felt her mother must be feeling. Her mother was falling through the air of her life. Molly had tried hard to ignore it, but she could hear it in her mother’s voice.

And Molly was doing nothing to help her. Nothing.

She sat in the dappled shade of a small garden, admiring a spider’s web that ran from the tea tree branch up to the trunk of the apricot tree, a marvel of fantasy engineering, beautiful in the soft afternoon light, ugly as a weapon, a large beetle imprisoned in its lace. She was sitting, staring at a cruel bit of silver embroidery while her mother floated helplessly in her loneliness, stunned and airborne, not even caught in her fall like the beetle. Molly was watching a hummingbird, listening to the whir of its movement, catching the colors of its throat as they changed, and they were dazzling, and the sound of a finch was musical and a flock of noisy parrots flew high above. The flowers of the succulents were blooming, minuscule, stunted, almost invisible. Everything was soft and green and serene. Molly was comfortable and the neighbor’s cat stretched beyond the fence, a calico cat, and — she couldn’t help herself — she was filled with joy and a sense of wonder. Her happiness made her sad, because it wasn’t fair, it couldn’t be fair to be happy when her mother was falling from a building toward the cold gray sidewalk.