Samantha Hunt - Mr. Splitfoot

“Yeah. We got hitched and tangled together.”

This never stops him from sleeping with me.

“Well,” I say. “I can’t wait to meet her!”

He keeps a hand on his mustache. “We’d been married a year when she started screaming about men from the K.C.G. controlling people with solar panels and jet trails.”

“What’s the K.C.G.?”

“Kancer Containment Guard. Usually they’re harmless old men, bumbling and sweet, but sometimes they’re evil. They fill juice boxes with strychnine.”

Lord looks at me, disappointed again. I put my clothes on. He makes me miss my faithful computer.

“I believed every word she said. I’d even make stuff up myself to confirm it for her. Wall vents, I’d tell her. Suspicious-looking cars. I created bullshit evidence. But then Janine told me my sister Emilia was the head of the K.C.G. and that we needed to kill her.” Lord looks at me sideways. “You know my sister?”

I’ve never met his family.

“Emilia has spina bifida. She was twelve when Janine said that.” Lord reaches for another branch for the fire. He pauses for drama. He does that a lot. “I kept Janine home until she brought scissors to bed and tried to use them on my neck. ‘I’m cutting your hair!’ That’s what she was screaming.” Lord wraps both hands around his neck, choking himself. “She’s in the mental ward of the VA. Take your pill, watch TV, and sometime this afternoon an orderly will change your diaper.”

No wonder the Internet doesn’t have much to say about her. She’s in the loony bin. Lord’s wife is locked up like all the wives in a public television British miniseries. No wonder he’s so in love with her.

Lord looks up into the dark trees. He’s learned a lot from the movies. “Love of my life.”

“Well,” I say. “That’s real nice you love someone, even if it’s not me.”

And he nods. Like I mean it. Like I actually mean it.

The next day Lord drops me off at the end of my driveway. “I’ve got to get to the hospital before visiting hours are over.” I head up the drive. Purple loosestrife is beginning to bloom.

Eleanor and I live in the caretaker’s house on a larger property. The cottage belonged to El’s mother. She’s dead now. I still live with El. I pay rent. I buy food. I went to college. I cook and clean. I have a job. El and I get along fine.

She’s always working, and work has made her large, strong. She gets mistaken for a dyke or a biker or a dyke biker. She never tells me that I am alive because of her, but I know I am and I’m grateful, since it turns out that getting born is the best thing that can happen for your life.

Sometimes my mom and I go to a bar together, and the man she has her eye on has his eye on me. Though this opens up an unnatural seam between us, El has never turned against me. She’s had a couple boyfriends. She lets men visit, but they don’t stay. She says, “I like men.” But then she’ll say, “I like dogs” or “I like toast.” The truth is El likes me and not much else.

When I was a girl, there was so little to do around here. We lived with my grandma, a nasty woman. I avoided her, so before I was old enough for school, I was alone much of the time. I’d walk to the end of our driveway, a place of great opportunity where you could go one way or the other. Our street was quiet. Nothing much happened that I remember. No accidents or incidents of road rage. With the noise of other people gone, the sky could open up. The air, the grass, the asters, the stones on the road would take what they wanted, a little blood or breath, some nightmare or earwax. I didn’t mind. Nature would nibble, thinning my body out like a piece of burnt film, light streaming through the holes of me. I was as much a part of the natural world as a shredded brown leaf gnawed on by a grub. I’d wait for El to get home from work. She’d join me out on the driveway. She didn’t like my grandma either. I’d sit on her lap, and she’d sit on the gravel. She’d pat the skin of my hands, my arms. I’d tell her what I was thinking about holes and nature, and she’d say, “I know just what you mean.”

On Monday I head back to Erie Indemnity. “Hello, computer.” It never answers me. A girl I know from high school has posted new photos of her husband, her kid. Pictures of her drinking from the lip of a champagne bottle. Headlines say: STOCKS ARE DOWN. GOLD NAIL POLISH IS BEING WORN BY WOMEN IN THE KNOW. A war is being fought. Another girl I know posted footage of her C-section. I watch the doctor slicing her abdomen open. Her fat looks like last month’s ricotta. A guy I knew in college posts a photo of his kid bent over the toilet, vomiting. #puke #sickkid #dayoffwork. Another guy I know posts: “Not much to report here.”

I call Lord from the stairwell. There’s an elevator in my office building so only total freaks use the stairwell. I leave a message on his cell. “I’m pregnant.”

I’ve known for three weeks, though I have no idea how far along I am. I wasn’t paying attention, and I’ve never had regular periods anyway. Two months? Three months? Maybe even four. I was stuck with some stupid idea that Lord being married to someone else would stop me from getting pregnant. “I’m going to keep it,” I tell his voicemail, and after I hang up, I sit alone in the stairwell. I put my hands on my stomach. Somewhere inside there is my baby. I don’t care about Lord at all. I don’t think I even like him, but this baby, even though it’s barely here — some half-dead, half-alive thing — I feel it, and it’s something big. To me at least, in all my smallness, this baby is really something very big.

A few days later, Lord calls me back at home. I can hear cars rushing by on his end of the line as if he’s standing beside a highway. “You know anything about Safe Haven laws?” he asks.

“Homeland Security?”

“No. You drop a baby off at a hospital or police station. No questions.”

“Oh,” I tell him. “I’ll be fine. I won’t need that.”

“You don’t understand what I’m saying. Anyone can drop the kid off. It doesn’t have to be you. You don’t need ID. The baby just gets lost, becomes a ward of the state. Say someone were to take your baby. There’d be no way for you to find it again. It disappears into the system because it doesn’t have a name. See what I’m saying?”

“You can’t stop me from having it.”

“And you can’t stop me from getting rid of it.”

Two weeks of nothing goes by. When Lord calls again, he says he wants to make me dinner.

“You kill something?” The only times he’s made me dinner before is after he killed it. Venison with cranberry sauce, roasted duck, squirrel soup.

“No.”

One good thing I can say about Lord — like if we were in couples counseling or something and I was required to provide one good quality about him — is that he isn’t marked by the fever for documenting each chicken he roasts. He’s old enough to have escaped social media. For people my age, including me, if we don’t post it, it never happened. People’s children will disappear if every ounce of magnificence is not made public and circulated widely. Lord’s not like that. He kisses me without considering if we’d look better under a Lo-Fi or Kelvin filter.

“I don’t know,” I say.

“I’ve done some thinking, Cora. I’ve had a change of mind. OK?”

He shows up with a bag of groceries and some wine. I tell him no thanks to the wine. “Right,” he says. “Right. You’re pregnant.” He goes back to the kitchen. He makes spaghetti and meatballs. It’s just fine. Store-bought meat. I ask about his sister, and he says, “You ever seen Rosemary’s Baby ? The movie?”

“No. Why?”

“It was on the other night. Good movie.”