Free The Air We Breathe by Christa Parrish Page B

butt out of here. Whichever comes first.”
    Molly sighed. “Fine.”
    He held the curtain open for her, and she slipped through, him following close enough she smelled him. Not cologne. Laundry soap. And his hat—sweaty, unwashed wool. A gray smell, sort of dark, earthy, like decomposing logs in the woods. She remembered that smell from the times her father took her exploring when they went camping, turning over dead stumps or peeling the bark off to find the insects there—beetles and centipedes and ants and grubs. He had been an entomologist at the New York state university, his office filled with dead insects under glass, encased in resin, floating in jars of fluid. He’d taught Molly the scientific names, pointing them out, asking her to repeat them. She did, and unlike history the insects stayed with her, and she couldn’t think about bugs without his face appearing.
    After her father died, Louise had boxed up all the insects he had at the house and dropped them off at the school. Molly wished she could have kept just one collection, her favorite, a display of twenty-six butterflies and moths, the colors and patterns of each lepidopteron forming a letter of the alphabet. Molly knew her mother sent them awaybecause she loved him. The reminders hurt more than being without his presence.
    That’s the other thing she remembered about her father, and her mother, too. They’d been in love, went everywhere together when they could. Sometimes they brought Molly; often they didn’t. She didn’t mind, not so much, because when her parents got dolled up to go out on the town—the sparkly dresses, the handsome black suits, the jewelry, the slick hair and red lips—they had a way of looking at each other that Molly loved to see. She would sit on the toilet and watch her mother apply her mascara in the bathroom mirror, darker than workdays, thicker, adding eyeliner and shadow well up to her brow.
    When the doorbell rang, her mother would say, “Run down and let the baby-sitter in,” and Molly would, hoping either Francine or April would be standing on the other side of the door—not Stephanie; all she did was watch MTV and talk on the phone for hours—because they were the nice ones, the ones who played games with her and sometimes let her braid their hair. And then Molly would watch her mother walk down the stairs, her father waiting at the bottom for her, and they would tell Molly not to eat too much junk and not to give April a hard time. And then they’d go, and she wouldn’t miss them, not until bedtime, when she longed for her father’s bearded kiss on her cheek.
    Would Tobias feel that way about her, with a kind of love that glittered on date nights?
    They went through the classic-movie room, the TV-show room, the hall of historical figures. Molly pointed out some of the statues, telling Tobias how she had repaired the lips on this one or had sewn a new skirt for that one. Or that GeorgeWashington had once been on display at Madame Tussauds, or Shirley Temple’s pet dog in Bright Eyes also played Toto in The Wizard of Oz .
    “You do like Wiki.”
    “No. I read that on the sign in front of the display.”
    Tobias laughed. “Man, you must think I’m numb as a stump. I can read, you know. Promise.”
    Molly shook her head, stared a little too long at him, and he at her. He leaned forward, his face coming a little closer to hers. She turned away. “The Chamber of Horrors is next.”
    “What about the museum’s secrets?”
    “What about them?”
    “There must be some.”
    “You should ask Mick the next time he’s here. I don’t know any.”
    And then they stood there, in the Chamber of Horrors, staring at the Frankenstein monster’s grotesque form on a table, curly wires coming out of his head, his chest. A light bulb blinked as the mad scientist, posed over a large switch, prepared to pump electricity through the stitched-together body. It was Molly’s favorite scene, the creator giving life to his