Samantha Hunt - Mr. Splitfoot

Ruth and Mr. Bell follow his gaze. Lots of frozen stars.

“You’re just going to dispose of the others?” Mr. Bell asks. “Blow ’em up?”

“You chose an unfortunate time to return. They’ll be here soon as this storm ends. And they’re ready to go. Trust me. They don’t even care that I’m not going with them. They want any excuse to get out of their miserable lives as soon as they can.”

Ruth lifts her hands to her eyes, presses hard. “You killed Ceph?” she asks.

“About that,” Zeke says. The gun barrel does a loop-de-loop, rolling, unraveling. “What can it mean? The whole thing based on a mistake? A mishearing or misunderstanding, right? He was trying to kill me. Really, he was trying to kill you, Carl. He just didn’t know it.” Zeke smiles. “You should be thanking me. I saved your life.”

So Ruth turns and starts across the ice again, away from both of them. “OK. Stop now,” Zeke says.

But she doesn’t stop.

“Ruth. Stop.” Zeke’s voice is sharp, as if she’s pulling blood from his body, tiny red threads dragged out of him across the white ice. The frozen lake crunches under her numb feet. She can’t feel them anymore. Zeke’s face goes blank. He points the gun and fires for the third time today, and even before the noise washes through Ruth’s ears, she’s turned back. Mr. Bell’s blood strikes a pattern on the ice behind him, that of an exploding firework. His body canters, falling centered on the spectacle of red, redder still for the purity of the snow.

Zeke holds the gun at the end of his extended arm, a weak branch, a heavy rotted fruit.

The lake is silent. Pluto continues to exist, and Mr. Bell absorbs all that quiet through his open wound.

NAT’S DRESSED ASthe guilty caretaker in a mystery for kids, the guy at the end who’s unmasked as the villain and you knew he was guilty the whole time. Then Nat moves and his body is golden wheat in a blue wind, disciplined and heroic as an oversaturated Western, an approximation of what America looked like when it was young. Not a villain at all.

The house is quiet, huge. There are dusty rugs, a chandelier of antlers and cobwebs overhead, throw blankets, and a case of books that’s sat untouched for so long, the covers have grown together. I’m nervous as a jackrabbit. “Ruth isn’t dead,” I tell him.

“How’d you get here?”

“We walked.”

“Who brought you? Who knew the way?”

To say it again is embarrassing. “Ruth brought me.”

He squints into my left temple. “Ruth isn’t dead?”

“No.”

“What the fuck?” He’s calm. “How?”

“How is she not dead?”

He fixes his gaze. “How’d you get here?”

“We walked from my mom’s.”

He points to my belly. “You walked?”

“Yeah.”

“So you’re not dead?” The absurdity of the question even makes Nat smile.

“What are you talking about?”

“Sorry.” He hides his hands in his pockets. “You grew up, Cora.”

I nod.

“You’re pregnant.”

“I am.”

“So she’s here and she’s not dead?” He sets his jaw with anger. “Where is she?” He slams into the kitchen, getting angrier each time he moves.

“She’s just out—”

“What did she tell you?” Nat turns back, postpones seeing her.

“—side. She didn’t tell me anything. She doesn’t talk. When was the last time you saw her?”

He thumbs his chin. “Last time I saw Ruth was here.” Nat grabs the back of his neck and ducks into it. “Right before she and her husband stole all our money and left me alone up here in the dead of winter.” Each of his words is hand-carved, sharp.

The muscles in my abdomen squeeze a moment before letting go. “She didn’t tell me that. She doesn’t talk.”

He leans on a windowsill, back to the water. He resets his face. “The morning we were supposed to leave, I woke up early because we had to shovel our way out of the snow. They were already gone.”

“Ruth has a husband?”

“Last time I saw her she did. I don’t know now. It’s been fourteen years.”

“Long time.”

“Yeah. A really long time. We’d taken care of each other since we were five years old, so I kept thinking she’ll come back. She has to come back, but she never did. Eventually I convinced myself that she must be dead.” Nat’s teeth are set like pointed sticks around a fort. Five thousand one hundred and seven days behind his molars. “Now you’re saying she’s not.”

“Well.” I’m getting less sure every minute. “Why else would she leave you here alone?”

Nat lowers his hand with a fast swat. Dust swims in sunlight. “Maybe she was mad. We used to play a game, talk to dead people. She found out I was faking it, and to her that meant everything was fake. There was no God, no magic, and we could have used some magic. Except we found a big box of money and that was magic. Everything hard about our childhood was about to quit. We were going to be OK. Then she and Mr. Bell disappeared with the money.”

“This money?” I jerk the cardboard box.

Nat looks from me to the box, from me to the box. He flips back the flaps and stares inside. Blocks of information get rearranged in his head until some of the blocks no longer fit. “Where’d you get this?” He drives his thumbs into his chin.

“In that old cottage. The one that’s falling down.” I point to the woods.

“Ruth’s. I never fixed it up because she never came back.”

“You never even looked for the money?”

“Why would I? If she wasn’t cutting me out of the cash, why else would she leave without me?”

Nat and I meet eyes. It doesn’t sound like something Ruth would do. Certain ideas creep in between us, a clock hand’s ticking forward. I interrupt the ideas by talking. “Well. She’s back now.”

“But how is she back?” Nat taps his forehead, banging an old engine to make it start.

I don’t have a good answer.

Nat sucks something, air, back into his mouth. “That first winter without her—” He’s not sure how to describe it. “It’s even lonely here when the trees have leaves and no snow blocks the road. Even with other people around.” He grabs his wrist. “She said we were sisters, even closer. So I waited a year. I waited the next year and the next.” He looks up. With his face like that, I can imagine the skull under his skin. “Eventually, I couldn’t be angry at her anymore. It was killing me. I came to think she was dead.”

“She’s not.” But the more times I tell him that, the less certain it seems. His logic follows better. He’s thought about it longer. “I mean, I think she’s not.”

“So she just left me?” He pushes his pointer and thumb through his eyebrows, ironing a wrinkled sheet.

“No.” I can’t believe that either. “Maybe she can explain.”

“I thought she didn’t talk.”

My body seizes again.

“Do you need anything? Some water? Tea?”

“That’d be good.”

“Come.” He pulls me off the couch with one hand. He smiles when he sees my belly upright. “Man,” he says. “Man, oh, man.”

The kitchen is enormous. Sliding brass cabinet latches, bead board, stained pine shelves. The kitchen’s a mess. There’s a heavy table covered with dishes and boxes of cold cereals. Juice containers, bean cans. Three sinks are filled with hardened dishes. Something’s happening inside my body.

Nat uses an arm to clear two spots at the table for us, sweeping silverware, an empty cracker box, and a round paper canister of salt aside.