Samantha Hunt - Mr. Splitfoot

He clears our plates and brings out two cups of tapioca pudding, one for him, one for me. “Your favorite, right?”

No, but he’s trying.

Lord feeds me the first bite. This is strange. “I can feed myself.” Tapioca is the unborn eggs of an alien fish species. Someone should design a video game called Tapioca Pudding. Still, he’s trying, so I eat some of this disgusting stuff.

He does the dishes, puts everything away, and pulls on his coat, ready to go. “You’re leaving?” I figured he was looking for some action. I figured that’s why he’d called since I know there’s no way Lord wants this baby. He couldn’t be a father and keep his drama intact.

“Yeah.”

“OK. Bye.”

“You mind if I come back to see you again, say, tomorrow or the next day? El will be at work?”

“She’s working every night this week.” I queer my eyes at him. “Sure, Lord. That’d be fine.” I have no idea what’s going on in his head, but I think, OK, maybe everything is OK. He wants me, he wants this baby to be fed nutritious food. His wife is locked up in a psycho ward. Good. We say good night, and I go to sleep.

Lord doesn’t come back the next night, and do I sit around waiting for him like an idiot? Yes, I do.

But the next, next night, he comes.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

He has me undressed in minutes flat. He lays me down on the couch and drops down onto his knees. His tongue is like an infant thing, innocent and damp. I look up when he stops. Lord pulls something out of his pocket, unwraps it. “You don’t need a condom. I can’t get pregnant twice.” He gives me a smile and pushes whatever it is inside me.

I sit up. “What are you doing?”

Lord leans back on his calves like a preschooler. He smiles, guffawing through bucked teeth.

“What’d you put inside me?” I reach down and stick one finger in. “What the fuck is that?” I pull out a slippery white bullet. “What is it, Lord?”

He starts to back away on his knees at first. Then up to his feet.

“Lord?”

He’s smiling, laughing into his neck. “It’s an abortion.”

“What?”

“You took the first part the other night. In the pudding. This is just a follow-up. Probably unnecessary.”

“You gave me an abortion?”

“Yeah,” he says, and laughs into his shoulder again. “That’s pretty fucked up, huh? Right?” he asks. “Right?”

The Internet tells me what’s supposed to happen — cramping then bleeding, then no more baby. So I wait, one day, two days, three days. I wait a week. No change. No cramp, no blood. I still feel pregnant. Maybe Lord mixed up the puddings and gave himself an abortion.

I tell the doctor everything. He confirms that I’m still pregnant but can’t say how far along. “Well,” he tells me slowly. “Your baby will either live or die.”

“Right.” But what a stupid thing to say. Everyone will either live or die.

“It’s wait-and-see or termination. If the fetus survives, there might be damage. The decision is yours.” He finishes his exam. “Give it some thought and come see us in a week.”

On the drive home, I check the back seat for bad guys so many times, I almost crash into an HVAC truck. I’m alone in the car, but this baby is so small, I cover it with my coat just in case. I wrap my arms around my middle before I dash from the car into our house.

El’s not home yet. Tonight I’m going to tell her, just going to say, “Mom, I’m pregnant and Lord’s a crazy M.F.” The only reason I haven’t told her yet is because I’m afraid she’ll say, “Get rid of it,” and even if that’s really good advice, her saying it will mean that all these years she’s been wishing she’d been able to get rid of me before it was too late. I don’t want to know that.

The house is dark. I try to quiet my mind. I comb my fingers through my hair. It’s nighttime in America. Here is a room, my room. There is a bed with a worn spread that has a small hole in it. I haven’t any idea what made the hole. A cigarette. An errant spring. A gunshot. There is a shallow closet in the room, a chest of drawers, and a desk lamp with a pale blue glass shade. A framed print of a hunting party hangs on the wall.

The house is still.

What is the scariest thing that can happen? A child can disappear without a trace. A man could follow you at night. Someone could hide behind your bedroom door. There is a small throw rug in the room. There is a wooden chair by the darkening window. There is someone hiding behind my bedroom door.

Anything solid in my neck snaps, and I’m screaming, looking into this hideous face, like some dark mold, a toxic messy thing. There is a person hiding behind my door. A monster. I cover the baby, backing myself away and into a corner, thinking, Please, Lord. No. I scream, but the monster doesn’t grab me. She lets me scream. She stares into the hole of my mouth, and it is a long howl, so much terror, before I recognize her, before I know she won’t eat my liver, drink my blood, kill my baby.

I haven’t seen my aunt Ruth since I was a kid, but I know it’s her because she’s got a nasty scar on her face, brown dots and bubbles. My scream turns into a whimper, winding down, shaking off the shock. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! You scared me.”

When Scout finds Boo Radley hiding behind her bedroom door, she says something that is scary because it is calm. Something like, “Why, there’s the man right there, Mr. Tate.” Or whatever his name is. Scout’s not surprised to find a hollow-eyed monster in the form of Robert Duvall behind her door. She opens a line into magic, possibility. Or mystery, that’s a better word than magic. Like an open hole in the ground no one noticed until Scout pointed it out, a place where men with dark secrets live behind every bedroom door. Scout’s calm voice says, “The rest of you are blind.”

Last time I saw Ruth she was seventeen. She was young then, and she seemed so powerful and tough because looking at her, I wondered how she’d survived her life. How was she there, hair glistening like it had been oiled with star shine, looking like she could box down a mountain?

Their car pulled into our driveway, and I stepped out to see who it was. Wintertime and awfully cold.

“Who are you?” she asked me. At my house. “El’s girl?”

“Yeah.”

“El had a baby.”

“I’m not a baby. I’m eleven. I’m Cora. Who are you?”

“Cora, I’m your aunt Ruth. He’s Nat.”

El hadn’t seen her sister in twelve years. That was a long time to grow apart, and the way my mom spoke of her sister, it was clear El still thought of Ruth as a little girl. I was surprised when she showed up a woman with a beautiful man, a man I couldn’t stop looking at.

El opened her arms. “Ruth? Ruth?” she kept saying, like it was impossible, like Ruth should be dead, not standing there looking like a teenage queen. Twelve years ago El left her sister behind in a group home. Ruth hugged El back. Ruth let a lot slide in that hug.

The first thing she did when she came inside was take off her coat and change the radio station in my mom’s kitchen. She wore a tight T-shirt and a pair of new jeans. “Happy New Year,” she said. She was amazing. It was January 1st. I remember that. Everything was new. Ruth asked me to dance, and her moves were as confident as a big American car. I was a kid. I flexed my knees to the beat. Ruth could really dance, not in a practiced way but as a person who genuinely felt the music and offered up her own interpretation. There was nothing fast in her actions, slow as a soul singer. She didn’t even have to keep time to the music. It stuck to her. I was no match.

Nat, the guy she’d brought, started dancing too, and I thought I’d stop breathing. I was in love with them both. These were human beings, fresh and new, seventeen years old and different than anything I’d ever known. Like I’d never seen color before and then, suddenly, there’s blue and green and purple standing in my kitchen on New Year’s Day.