Mr. Splitfoot

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IT’S A SHORT SONG. Chuck Berry finishes and the contraction releases me.

“Time to go,” Nat says.

“Where?”

“Whatever you want, Cora. A movie? A baby?” Nat helps me move slowly down the attic stairs, down the main stairs. He speaks softly in my ear. “It’s going to be fine. A healthy, beautiful baby.”

Nat is the first person to tell me that. He holds my hand. He grabs the box of money and car keys. He carries the box with us as if it were the suitcase he and I had carefully packed and planned for over nine months, nine years, ninety decades, and life, happy, happy life, is about to begin for us here on Earth.

Upstairs the golden record is still spinning, sending messages off to Mars, to M82, M87, and the Magellanic Bridge.

I readjust my grip on Nat, braiding our fingers. “Ready?” he asks again.

“Yeah.”

We step outside and there she is. Standing by the edge of the lake, Ruth looks out across the water, her long dark hair.

“Ruth,” he calls, and she turns. Nat sees her again, his sister. All the years he thought Ruth was dead. Now he knows she is because she lifts one hand to us, a wave hello, goodbye, gentle, like a window thrown open onto everything kind and good that Ruth always was.

Her other hand holds a box, the same box Nat is holding, weathered old cardboard. Her box is a twin, a sister, only hers is empty now. She smiles, so pleased to see Nat and me together at the end. She lifts the sun off the water, all of it. She gives Nat the things they once had to share, breath, life. She doesn’t need those things anymore.

“Ruth,” I call, as if I could stop her now, keep her here for myself. She smiles and her raised hand strikes a blinding flash, a brilliant light, bright enough to fool us into thinking it’s a trick of the sun off the water. In that flash we lose sight of her for a moment, and when we see her again, Ruth is walking into the lake, returning to the water forever this time. She starts death again at the place where she died, this highest lake that runs down so many mountains into so many streams and rivers and seas, the great network, the water that brings her back to us. The box Ruth holds fills with the deepest lake in the Adirondacks.

“Ruth,” Nat says again, but the flash clears and Ruth is gone back to Bell and the lovely depths, delighted by every star twinkling around her. Ruth was living. Ruth was gone. Ruth came back because she loved us. We make our way down to the shoreline. The hoodie Ruth borrowed from me so long ago, a world away, is on the sand of the bank, half buried, half in the water, because every story is a ghost story, even mine. Tiny waves rock the shore. We stare out at the place where Ruth disappeared, and in the lake I see the underwater path, the barely road of stones and bones the dead sometimes follow.

Something is happening inside. I kneel in the shallow water, splashing Ruth onto this child as if I might collect all of her, a book of everything. Twenty-six letters, twenty-three pairs of chromosomes, one hundred eighteen elements so far. I splash the water onto my baby. I collect this world. “Hello,” the record says upstairs. “Hello from the children of planet Earth. Hello. Hello?” The beats and static, the clicks and clacks of a woman thinking hard about falling in love across space and time, across death. The way a mother whispers to her child. The way an old man sings, a record of lives lived. Nat holds on to me, kneels beside me. The Earth moves a thousand, a million miles per hour through space. “Cora,” he says my name. We look out at the deep lake long enough for me to see what it took a journey to see. Ruth came back because the living need the dead. My belly squeezes. Nat tightens his fingers in mine, and for now I sweat human things, mysterious human things I don’t understand. I feel her go. I feel what I don’t even believe in: astonishing eyeballs, fearful symmetries, fingernails, ghosts, babies. I feel this life about to begin, this little girl, this little boy. Hello. Hello. Hello.