Samantha Hunt - Mr. Splitfoot

I touch a stack of the bills. The money is soggy and limp, having given up any hope of being palmed into the hands of Mafioso bouncers at a discothèque. It’s grown complacent, moldering in an abandoned house on a mountaintop.

Three windows look down to the lake. I don’t see her outside, but I hear someone close the front door. A few blue jays screech. “Ruth?”

El keeps a photo from that New Year’s Day so many years ago when Nat and Ruth came to visit. In the picture the four of us make a scraggly bunch, blurrier than memory. My mom has her arms around my neck. Ruth’s head is turned to look at Nat. Nat stares into the camera.

For years I studied this photo, and my eye always went to him like mica. His hair. His muscle T-shirt, jeans, and a bandanna around his forehead. He looked kind in a spare, genuine way. He looked small but, even in the photo, mighty.

Ruth didn’t come back for the money.

Nat squints as if I’ll make more sense that way. I grip my belly and a sound like a snarl, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, comes from his throat. His hands are rough. His stubble is flecked with silver. “They said someone had come.” He blinks, smiles. “You’re Eleanor’s daughter.” His words land like pebbles on a pond, a satisfying sound to my unused eardrums. “Cora.” He finds my name. “What are you doing here?”

“Ruth brought me.”

“Ruth?” Then he says it again louder. “Ruth? She couldn’t have.” He shakes his head.

“Why not?”

His smile leaves. “Because Ruth is dead.”

THE BOX IS NOT TOO HEAVY.Ruth carries it into the woods. Each branch of every tree is coated with snow. The sky is the same color white as the fathomless mountain below her. She stops halfway between Earth and the edge of the solar system, cold and warm, her mother and the end. Voyager 1 ? Check. Voyager 2? Voyager 2 ? Who is Voyager 2 ?

Ruth hides the money in a place no living soul would ever find it, and when she returns to the house, her toes have frozen to a pale larvae color. No one’s in the living room. She drops the needle on Percy Sledge so that Mr. Bell, warming up a cup of tea, hears “Out of Left Field.” He finds her. Her husband, legally, illegally.

“Mr. Bell,” Ruth says, forgetting to leave off the Mr. And the formality of that name mixed with the informality of what she’s imagining slows her breath.

“That didn’t take you long,” he says.

“No.”

“Where’s Nat?”

“He went out to start shoveling.”

“But it’s still snowing.”

“I tried to tell him that.” Mr. Bell takes her hand. “Are you busy, dear?” She follows him upstairs. The hallway’s tall windows look down to the lake. Up here, far from the furnace, the rooms are chilly. Mr. Bell opens the door on another bedroom.

“It’s freezing.”

“All part of my plan.”

There is a twin bed, a bureau, a window with a pink silk curtain.

What makes a home?

Take your hands in his. This plus this.

What makes the unsaid audible?

The distance between us.

Mr. Bell has power in his arms. Angles and tattoos she’s never seen. He touches her face, the mess of it. He lifts her up. He lays her down, adoring her. Mr. Bell smells like the edge of a stream, and there, alone in a storm on a mountaintop, Ruth and Mr. Bell commit astonishing, if tiny, acts of gravity and attraction. They rest. They return to their fever. They rest and are troughed together in the sinkhole of the bed, swarmed by blankets, warmed by skin and how many long years it was before they knew each other, before it didn’t have to hurt.

Ruth studies the bristles of his face and grows old with him, old as wood. Quiet and happy. On the ceiling above the bed, a leak has left behind a ripple of brown circles moving out from the center. His halo or the universe saying, I give this man just to you. I give you him wondrously, imperfectly made. Thunder and a night or a life by a fire with him in a warm home. The skin of his wrist. The leak’s discoloration throbs and grows above them. Ruth considers her scar, her heart. He’ll be inside her now forever. She counts the rings of the leak. Does each signify a year? A storm? And she’s inside him. How long before love splits into two, cells dividing? Voyager 1. Voyager 2. Under the stain, Ruth holds tight to his back. The blob could beam them up to a waiting meteor. Her neck dips, infrared, ultraviolet, and when she rights her head, lifts this fog of love, The Book of Ether is sitting on top of the bureau no more than two feet away.

Ruth reaches for it. Her bare skin bristles outside the blankets.

Mr. Bell tucks his hair behind his ears. She brings the book back to the warm bed, legs in a diamond. The book opens in a bloom.

348

Dark unto you.

Dark over them.

Dark, dark, dark house where no one dares to go.

He hath set me in dark places, as they that be dead.

Ruth and Mr. Bell plow through bowls of ramen noodles in the kitchen. They speak in a hush. Nat still has not returned. “It has a strange way of making sense,” Ruth whispers.

Mr. Bell nods. “The mis-arrangement of words suggests reincarnation. It suggests multiple, endless readings.” He takes a bite, noodles dangling down his chin. “Not that I believe in that.” He points to the last entry on the last page.

599

Shall

Shall I

Shall I come

Shall I come back

Shall I come back again?

“Elvis,” he says. “We danced to it. Mardellion’s forty-five had a skip that he interpreted as proof of his immortality.”

“What do you think?”

“No way. Dirt to dirt. One Life to Live. ”

Ruth winces.

“Why? What’s wrong with that?” he asks. “Microbes. Bacteria. Worms underground that mingle our parts with everything. It’s generous.” He locks his fingers in hers. “And infinite.” Mr. Bell squares his face to hers. “If you can get over the dreaded finite.”

“Where’s Nat?” she asks for the fifth time in one half-hour. “Is he clearing the whole road?” She pushes the remains of her meal across the table. “Maybe we’ll be able to leave tonight. That would be good. Maybe we should go help him.”

Mr. Bell checks the window again. Snow. Nothing else. “Yes, let’s go help. Let’s get out of here tonight if we can.” Ruth carries her dish to the sink, and finally they hear footsteps in the living room. Ruth’s so relieved. She lets out a long breath. “There he is.” The kitchen door opens with certainty, pushed by a hand that knows it. “Nat,” Ruth says, but she’s wrong.

“No, dear. It’s me.” Holes far darker than a mountain lake. Ruth falls in. He opens his arms to her. “Welcome to my home,” Zeke says. So Ruth knows for sure that there’s nothing scary about dead people. It is the living who terrify.

Mr. Bell crumbles. “Mardellion.” He names Zeke “Mardellion,” which really somewhere some part of her brain already knew. “How did you get here?”

Zeke rubs his hands together. “That’s a good story. A really good story. Care to hear it?”

They don’t answer.

Zeke grabs the back of a chair but doesn’t sit. He squeezes its top rung so tightly. He tells them anyway. “I met a friend of Ruth’s down in Minerva. Ceph? He’d followed me all that way because he had it in his head, some crossed wire, that I was Ruth’s husband and wouldn’t believe me when I told him he had the wrong man.” Zeke takes a seat, feeling very much at home. “Said he was coming to rescue Ruth. Take her away, take care of her. Poor guy.”