Mr. Splitfoot

~ ~ ~

THE FOOD IN THE KITCHEN belongs to old people: saltines, sherbet, cling peaches. The chrome canisters for flour, sugar, and coffee are pocked by rust.

“Hello?”

Mr. Bell had asked them to meet here, had given them the address and apologized. “I’ve an appointment and won’t be able to fetch you.”

Ruth had spent the night wondering what sort of appointment Mr. Bell might have to keep. Who are his friends, his associates? What are they associating over? She’d thought Mr. Bell was theirs alone, that she and Nat had conjured him, had asked for him to appear one night in a dark basement. Now it seems that’s not true. Other girls can see Mr. Bell, talk to him, eat food with him, lie naked beside him in bed, say, should anyone want to do something like that.

Nat and Ruth set out after dinner. The Father has already disappeared behind his locked door. The air outside is perfectly cool. Some leaves have fallen. They walk to the address Mr. Bell provided, a small house in a solid block of other wooden homes, one in a line of aged identical sisters, each clothed in a different shade of chipped paint. Ruth knocks. There’s no answer. Muslin curtains obscure the first floor. She opens the door a sliver, letting it hang that way. “Hello?” She sends the question through the narrow opening. A car engine turns over across the street. She pushes the door open a bit more. “Mr. Bell? Are you here?” Nat steps inside.

From the foyer they see a living room wallpapered in gold. Two straight-backed yellow couches, a low table, two Windsor chairs, one empty bookshelf. The hallway, papered in red flowers above the wainscoting, leads to the kitchen behind the stairs.

“Mr. Bell?” Nat heads to the back of the house, leaving the second floor for Ruth to search. A painted glass pendulum lamp hangs overhead. “Mr. Bell?” She climbs three-quarters of the way up, her head above the second-story landing. She moves slowly. “Hello?” The railing, the floors, the dark wood trim work. Each of the four doors off the upstairs hall bears an etched brass door plate. Each door is closed. A framed print hangs in the hall, Irishmen and Africans building the Erie Canal. Someone’s once-tidy home.

“Mr. Bell.” She gains the landing. “Are you here?”

Ruth walks with hands in front of her body, palms turned sideways prepared to karate chop whatever may strike. She opens the first door. A plain bathroom. Small white hex tiles on the floor. A basin stained blue by the metallic drip. There’s a clawfoot tub with a white plastic curtain. Ruth backs out of the room.

She tries the next door, no longer calling for Mr. Bell. Her throat’s gone dry. The room is empty but for a set of mauve polyester curtains and a crank-operated hospital bed dressed in a filthy sheet. Ruth retreats swiftly, her breath coming faster.

The next room is slightly less empty. There’s a single bed with a painted pine headboard, no sheets, no blankets. There’s a night table, and on the table there’s a lamp whose stem is a ceramic ballerina in a blue tutu. The ballerina holds a bare bulb in her lifted hand. A large round mirror hangs on one wall, and on the floor below the mirror there’s a packed canvas army surplus duffle.

Ruth kneels to inspect the luggage. Her knees pop as she bends. The sound alarms her. She holds her breath and digs carefully, making as little noise as possible. A number of white tank-top undershirts. A wrinkled overcoat. She covers the trove with both hands. It’s Mr. Bell’s stuff. She’s found his lair. Ruth continues to dig. She unpacks a stack of three books, one mystery, one field guide to North American trees, and a novel, Delta of Venus. Ruth opens to a bookmarked page and begins to read. Two naked ladies and a horsewhip. It’s a dirty book. “They reached the full effulgence of their pleasure.” Even Mr. Bell’s pornography uses funny words. Ruth keeps digging, touching his things. Mr. Bell’s toiletry sack. A Bustelo coffee canister half filled with grounds and a red plastic scoop. Each thing she touches makes him more real. Ruth looks behind her. No one there.

She reaches deeper into the duffle, anticipating a cobra strike, a severed arm, Mr. Bell’s dark and throbbing soul. Instead she pulls out a broken watch and a jar of black nail polish. She pulls out a plastic yellow comb and a box of waterproof matches.

There’s a sigh from the house.

She looks behind her again. “Nat?” Nat does not answer.

She returns to the dark cavern of the duffle. The violation is as clear as if she were digging not through his luggage but into his mouth and throat, touching his lungs and liver. Ruth finds a tiny, precise, portable set of tools. The hammer is no bigger than her foot. She examines the screwdriver and wrench, handling each item carefully, delicately. There are undershorts. There are oxfords and socks. There is a spiral-bound sketchbook. The cover is worn, and there’s an old photo taped to its back side. An image of a woman, a hippie whose long brown, beaded hair obscures her face. Ruth opens the book. On the first page, there’s a pencil illustration. It’s a series of points linked by a network of lines. Same thing on the next page, delicate lines moving out from ten or twelve heavier nodes, like flight patterns out of twelve different cities, only there’s no map or picture to explain what connections are made between the dots. A chaotic spider web. Ruth flips through the book. The same illustration has been drawn on every single page.

“What’re you doing?”

The book falls to the floor with a brutal slap. “Jesus.” But it’s just Nat. “You scared me to death.”

“What are you doing?”

“Snooping through Mr. Bell’s stuff.”

“What’d you find?”

“Check this out.” She stoops to pick the sketchbook up again, opening it for Nat. “Same picture on every single page.”

Nat fingers the pencil lines. “What is it?” He takes the book in hand, studies it. He looks up to Ruth with the skewed mouth of a stroke victim, looks back to the book, then up to Ruth’s face, eyes troubled on her.

“What?”

Nat turns her so that they are shoulder to shoulder in front of the large mirror. He holds the open sketchbook in front of his own face. Ruth meets her eyes in the mirror. Side by side with Mr. Bell’s drawing, the pattern locks into familiarity. Dots, lines, paths. Mr. Bell has obsessively replicated and drawn the explosions that scar Ruth’s face. She’s twinned with the illustration on the page.

A door slams shut downstairs. They move with the quiet swiftness of children trained in self-preservation. They collect the spilled items and jam them back into the duffle, threading the rivets, locking the clamp.

“Hello?” he calls from the staircase.

“Mr. Bell,” Ruth says flatly, no trace of her terror. “We were just looking for the bathroom. Hope that’s OK.” Nat and Ruth take up casual posts in the hallway outside his door.

“Of course.” He smiles to see them.

Ruth does not smile. “Whose house is this?” Her voice is flat.

“Yes. Umm. My mom’s?”

“So where’s the bathroom?”

Mr. Bell opens the last door. It’s a closet. Then the next. The hospital bed. Then the next. “Right here. Of course. Always has been.”

“Where’s your mom at?” Ruth asks.

He sticks a hip out, resting one hand on it. He thinks a long while. “Uh, Jersey. She retired to Jersey.” Big smile.

And left her sherbet behind.

Nat changes into an outfit selected by Mr. Bell. A pale blue button-up shirt with just a glimpse of a black lanyard cord showing around his neck. His pants are woven to a silver sheen. He wears his own work boots. Mr. Bell hadn’t thought to purchase shoes. Nat’s hair is brushed.

For Ruth, Mr. Bell selected a celery cover-up. The tag inside says MADE IN INDIA and another one GOODWILL STORE $4. Her bra shows through the fabric. The gown drags on the floor. It smells like wet wool. She sits next to Nat on the couch. They look like seven-year-olds impersonating Floridian retirees. Neither of them leans back. Even Mr. Bell is nervous; even he seems young. “I’ll wait in the foyer.”

Finally there’s a knock. “Please. Let me take your coats,” and then, “What a lovely kerchief. Welcome.” Mr. Bell leads an older married couple into the living room. Perhaps they’re here to contact someone before they themselves pass on. They sit opposite Nat and Ruth. The man rubs his palms on his thighs. It’s embarrassing to admit one believes the dead can speak. His wife twists his wrist like the accelerator on a motorcycle, and the whole premise suddenly strikes Ruth as bizarre. Why do the living assume the dead know better than we do? Like they gained some knowledge by dying, but why wouldn’t they just be the same confused people they were before they died?

Nat and Ruth quickly realize they should have waited in the kitchen until the audience was assembled. Next time.

Another knock. Two more couples, same as the first: white and nervous. No one speaks. The people steal glances at Nat and Ruth, glowing, toxic child brides. One of the couples seems to have arrived straight from a punk concert. Her skin is gray from cigarettes. His hairdo is as big as hers. In opposition, the next couple looks like health nuts, comfortable shoes, thin as marathoners, people who vote. Everyone has dead people.

Mr. Bell comes in last. His movements belong to a man who doesn’t need sleep. He takes a long time pulling the nylon curtain across a bay window. He then raises one brow, meaning, I have done my part to separate these people from their money. Now it is up to you, partner.

Nat looks like a fine blue thing. Ruth gets to work before thought can catch up. She raises her hands, holding the sun. “Great unseen force, remove all obstructions between this world and theirs. Lift the veil so that we might receive guidance and the gift of spirit here with us tonight.” She holds her pose for just a moment. Such antics come naturally after life with the Father. Mr. Bell nods. And she’s practiced. “Close your eyes.” Their movements are swift, each of the six obey her readily. She takes Nat’s hands. “Ready?” His chin is already lolling, saliva gathering between his lips. But what’s the point of Nat’s rabies routine if everyone’s eyes are closed? A misstep. “Open your eyes, please.” She focuses her gaze, pinning down the air between them, urging it to become charged. “Hello?” she asks gently, politely. She doesn’t name it Mr. Splitfoot in front of strangers who might imagine the devil. That’s not what Ruth thinks. For her, Mr. Splitfoot is a two that is sometimes a one, mothers and their children, Nat and Ruth, life and death. “Are you there?” Ruth thinks of El, like a photographer’s flash firing. There then gone. Again she whispers, “Hello?”

“Craw” is the first word from Nat as not-Nat. The rough voice. Eyes rolled back.

“Sorry? Crawl?”

“Crack.”

The marathoners sit upright.

“Crack?” Ruth asks to confirm.

“Crack. Crack. Who’s there?”

“Is there a name?”

Nat shakes his head as if water is lodged in one ear. “Car.”

The marathoner wife is perched on the edge of her chair, ready to pounce on a bingo.

“Car?” Ruth verifies the message.

“Kar?” the wife poses.

“Crack!” Nat repeats, a bullwhip. His hips begin to stir, winding up.

“That’s her.” The wife reaches out to touch whatever’s there. “Our daughter,” she explains to the others. “Karolina.”

“Drugs,” the father says. “But we hadn’t imagined crack. We don’t know anything.” He stares at the carpeting. He looks intelligent. Ruth wonders if he’ll suspect a con, but he lifts his gaze to the top of his wife’s head, so depleted by grief, he’s divorced from reality. “Karolina,” he calls out. “Sweetheart.”

“Karolina?” Ruth tries to confirm.

“Kar,” Nat says low, slow.

“Mommy and Daddy are here.” The mother’s eyes roam, tracing the air near the ceiling.

“Cree-ack,” Nat says.

“We have a contact.” Ruth, as some sort of ghost traffic controller, confirms. She adjusts her body on the brown plaid couch. “Would you like to deliver a message, Karolina?”

“DB-D-DD.” Nat dribbles like a baby, lurching over the low, pressed wood coffee table.

Ruth feels suddenly sick. Their dead child’s been reduced to grunts from a boy in slick polyester clothing.

A smile crosses Nat’s face. He speaks clearly, precisely, dramatically. “I’ll tell you a story. A lovely story. You must hear it. I shall tell it to you. There, now, you sit there.”

Mr. Bell smiles from up on tiptoes.

All six paying clients lean in. The marathoners are particularly eager — every ache they’ve felt since their girl’s been gone.

Nat’s eyes flutter, revealing a bit of white each time. His mouth resembles a sea creature’s. “On the dark nights, stormy nights, you can hear him, the wind, and the fluttering of his great cloak, beating wings. The thunder is loud and louder.” Nat raises his voice. His best Vincent Price. “At the midnight hour, he gallops. Always searching, always seeking. And if you stand on the bridge at the wrong hour, his great cloak sweeps around you, his cold arms clasp you to his bony chest, and forever you must ride and ride and ride.” Nat’s head tumbles to his chest, wasted after his performance.

“Oh,” the mother says.

“The very story of addiction.” Karolina’s father shakes his head. Tears are forming. He holds his daughter’s name in his mouth.

“Is there something you’d like to say to Karolina?” Ruth asks.

The mother turns to her husband, the destruction of the past years evident on her skin. “Mommy and Daddy are here,” the mother whispers. “Mommy and Daddy,” she begins again. Every failure she served her daughter ruffles her face. How she forgot to pack one hundred Cheerios on the one hundredth day of kindergarten. How she was late to high school graduation because the parking lot was congested. Nights that teeth went unflossed.

Nat moves. He braces his arms on his knees. He shakes a little bit from the shoulders, some sort of boogie-woogie. “Donald!” he calls out loud and sunny.

The marathoners twist their noses. They don’t know anyone named Donald.

“Donald and Karolina.” Nat finally says the dead girl’s name. “Together forever. And that’s a looooonngg time.” Nat giggles, does the Elvis shake again, then it’s over. He grabs the back of his neck, looks at those gathered, and disappears into the back of the house.

The father, having waited for a sign to break down, does, a whining moan. Tears shake his chest. He balls his hands in front of his eyes. But the mother’s sorrow is most sickening. “Karolina.” She stands. “Karolina.” She swings her hands through the air searching for her daughter’s body. “Karolina, don’t go.” But there’s nothing there.

Mr. Bell offers the mother a box of tissues. She holds on to the box with two hands, as if it’s someone’s head. She sobs. No one knows how to comfort her, so they don’t. They listen to her cry until eventually the punk guy interrupts. “Sorry, but that’s it? Where’s our dead person? Where’s theirs?” He points to the older couple.

Ruth collects her gown around her.

“Communication with the spirit world can be utterly exhausting for the medium,” Mr. Bell says. “I’ll remind you, there’s no guarantee with the dead. It’s not AT&T.”

“’Scuse me? The freaking kid tells one crazy-ass story? For a hundred bucks? You got to be freaking kidding me.” He throws his shoulders back, getting in Mr. Bell’s face. “My wife lost her dad last year, so you go get that little faggot back out here.”

“A hundred? We paid more than that,” the old guy says.

Mr. Bell sours. Things are about to go very badly, indeed. “Sir, please.”

“Bullshit!” Barrel Chest turns to the others.

Karolina’s mom huffs. “Just because your dead person didn’t show up doesn’t mean—”

“My dead person?” He’s shouting like a drunken uncle. Ruth pulls her legs onto the couch, under the cover of her gown. “You think your dead kid’s better than my father-in-law?” Black curls and a red face. He beats one hand into the other. “I bet you do. Think ’cause you paid more that your dead person’s going to show while we get nothing? Fuck you and fuck your dead kid!”

“Please. Please!” Mr. Bell moves between the two like a jumping spider.

“What did you say?” Karolina’s mother asks. “What did you say!” But it is Karolina’s father who responds. He’s still crying, but he uses all that grief to land a punch on Barrel Chest’s left ear. The guy ducks but not enough, and the punch throws him back into his chair.

“Please!” Mr. Bell shouts. “Please!”

“What the fuck?” Barrel Chest goes ape shit. “He punched me!” He tells his wife, “The freaking stiff punched me.” He flexes his arms, an overweight gorilla about to charge, when Ruth has a moment of inspiration.

She rolls her eyes back and, mustering a clear, crowd-dousing voice, asks, “Sweetheart?” loud enough to draw the heated room to immediate attention. “Peanut?” she continues. Everyone’s watching her now. “Sugar? Little girl? Baby doll? Princess?”

The punk wife grips her husband’s flexed arm. “Holy shit, Mike. It’s him.”

“Princess.” Ruth repeats the key word.

“Daddy?” The woman draws one whiny breath before cracking into sobs. She collapses into a chair, hauling up sorrow like a sloppy, wet bucket. She lifts her eyes, face already running with boogers and black mascara. “Why, Daddy?”

“Forgive me, Princess.” Ruth keeps her voice low, her eyes twitching. She shakes her arms and shoulders. “I’m so sorry.” She flutters her lashes. The woman is bent forward, convulsing with coughs, some thick stream is working its way out her mouth.

“Know that I love you. That I’d be with you if I could.” Ruth breathes through her mouth.

“Daddy?”

Ruth hesitates only a minute. “Maybe I cheated.” She pulls bits of a stranger’s imagined life together. “Yeah, I, uh, cheated.” The room is silent. Ruth makes sure to twitch and convulse.

“Daddy?”

“It wasn’t true.”

“OK. We forgive you. Whatever it was.”

“Thanks,” Ruth says, a terrible, terrible impersonation. It doesn’t matter. Then one last time, “Princess.” Keep it rare. The woman sobs, and suddenly Ruth doesn’t feel bad anymore. She feels like a bitter orphan taking aim at a town filled with parents, dead and alive. Ruth opens her eyes in time to see Mr. Bell’s surprise melt into smiling conspiracy. She’s been accepted into his con man’s union. He nods with a tiny tick in his cheek, a meter counting the dollars they’re going to earn.

Nat and Ruth buy a box of Frosted Mini-Wheats and two pairs of jeans for her, the first pants she’s ever owned. She hides them in her closet. They buy a used Ping-Pong table for the kids at the home. The Father doesn’t like that. He smolders. He doesn’t know how to play Ping-Pong. He doesn’t know how they got the money, but he knows it’s sinful. “God placed the law in men and you shall yield!” He locks Ruth in the downstairs bathroom. He goes at Nat’s backside with a length of plastic tubing right outside the bathroom door. Ruth sings any song she can think of, something for Nat to hold on to, “Here You Come Again,” “Old Dan Tucker” loud as she can.

Eventually Ruth falls asleep on the tile floor. When the Father unlocks the bathroom, he hits her in the head with the door. “Forgive me,” the Father says. He’s weepy. She passes him by. She does not offer forgiveness. Upstairs she applies a beeswax salve to the welts on Nat’s back.

The Father damns the Ping-Pong table. He packs it up and sells it for twenty-five dollars at a flea market held in town on Saturdays. He uses the money to purchase flannel sheets for his bed in order to purify the funds.

But still there is no yielding. Ruth tries on her new jeans when they are alone in their room. She bends over, strokes her thighs. No wonder the Father never lets her have them.

“How do you feel?” Nat asks.

She squats, stretching the fabric. “In these pants, I could do things I’ve never done before.”

“How do you feel about those drawings we saw in Mr. Bell’s stuff?”

She straightens up. “It’s not my scar. The drawings were old. He didn’t even know me yet.”

“Then let’s ask him what they are.”

“It’s none of our business. We were digging through his bag.” Ruth changes back into her dress before going downstairs. “Don’t scare him off. Please.”

At breakfast the Father calls her name. He’s leaning against the countertop in a bright white T-shirt with a red cross, like a lifeguard, except it’s a crucifix and the shirt says MY LIFEGUARD WALKS ON WATER. Maybe that’s why the Father never taught them to swim.

Nat looks up at her name.

“You know a man named Zeke?” the Father asks her.

“Not really.”

“Owns that self-storage down by the river?”

“I guess so.”

“Well, he knows you. Come on.” He pulls out her chair. “We need to talk.”

Ruth follows the Father up to his room. She hasn’t been inside in years. The Mother’s stretched out on the bed reading a book called Dawn of Dementia. She looks up. “Ruth. How’ve you been, honey?”

On TV the news anchor helps some Chinese lady demonstrate a recipe for pickling cabbage. The newscaster wrinkles his nose. “Woo!” He shakes his telegenic hands. “That’s a spicy meata-ball!”

There’s lots Ruth would like to tell the Mother, but she’s distracted by the room: laundry both ways; a pink starter kit from Mary Kay cosmetics, including twelve shades of lipstick, skin regimens for oily, normal, and dry, and seven eye shadows. None of it yet sold. On top of the kit there are several afghans, a few issues of More magazine, and two two-liter bottles filled with ocher pee. There’s a stack of word puzzle magazines, a box of Almond Roca, two artificial flowers, a fringed leather jacket hanging below a poster of Stevie Nicks. The Mother’s built a fortress from things purchased at the 24-hour pharmacy. An Easter basket with plastic green grass, a white teddy bear holding a red embroidered heart, a pillow with electronic massaging balls. Four pairs of Isotoner slippers. Padded envelopes. Acrylic yarn. Three jumbo boxes of Special K with freeze-dried strawberries. “I’m fine.”

“So Zeke,” the Father says. “Seems you’ve caught his eye. And we’re proud of you, Ruth. Mother and I wish you the best. We hope your marriage will be a fruitful one.”

The Mother belches loudly. “Pardon. IBS,” she explains.

Ruth has no idea. IRS? “Marriage?”

“Yes. I didn’t even know you two were friendly.”

“We aren’t.”

“There’s so much about your life these days I don’t know,” the Father says. “And I figure if you’re already grown and gone, you might as well actually go.” The Father waves something out of the air, enjoying his moment of cruelty less than he’d hoped. “You’ll need our consent, seeing as you’re only seventeen. But we’re happy to give it.”

“Consent to—”

“Get married.”

Ruth’s head tilts hard to the left. “You want me to marry a stranger?”

“Heavenly Father has led me to believe that this is exactly what you were made for. That’s why your appendix ruptured. Now I understand why my prayers couldn’t heal you that night.” He moves slowly, taking her shoulders in his hands, squeezing hard enough to grind her bones. “Happy for you,” he says. “I worked this out special. Zeke’ll take care of you.”

“How old is he?”

The Father shrugs. “My age?”

“Old.”

“Not that old and, you know, there’s never charges when you’re married.”

“Charges?”

“Rape.”

The Mother experiences a further wave of cramps.

“If I get married, I’m allowed to move out of the home?”

“Of course.”

Ruth focuses on the Father’s fly. “What about Nat?”

“Once you’re married to Zeke, you could probably start adoption proceedings. The state is more or less giving away dysfunctional seventeen-year-olds.”

“Make me Nat’s mother?”

“If your husband approves. Everybody wins. Most importantly”—and the Father, his chest puffed up, points an index finger up to the sky before deflating, acknowledging that not everything in his plan is lovely. “What am I supposed to do, Ruth? Turn you out on the street?”

She shakes her head no. “I won’t end up on the streets. I’ll find a job.”

“I know it’s scary, but it’s less scary than aging out with nowhere to go and no one to take care of you.”

“Nat’ll take care of me.”

“Nat can’t take care of his shoelaces.”

“That’s not true. I’ll take care of me. I always have.” This pisses off the Father.

“You want to give me some more lip?” he asks.

“No.”

“Now we need to discuss some things about your wedding night.”

The Mother’s sick gut pinches her mouth into a turnip. “Happy for you, honey, but I need to visit the commode.” She takes that cue, exiting the bedroom quickly before more poison leaks out.

“You want me to get married?” Ruth asks.

The Father doesn’t answer that question. “Let’s see.” Chin in his hand. “So. You’ve seen the rabbits, when they’re in a fever?”

“Sick?”

“No, dear. When they cleave to one another. Inserted, bred—”

He’s talking about fucking. “Yes.”

“Well, it’s nearly the same with humans, but I’d like to explain a few things. There is a loving way a husband treats his wife. Caresses and movements privy only to those wed in God’s eyes. Certain actions and membranes.”

“Pardon?”

“You don’t know this yet, Ruth, but your body conceals private chambers open only to your husband’s probing key.” He lifts his hands, fingers splayed like a shining sun. “Secret cavities that belong to him alone.”

Ruth feels sick. Is he kidding?

“And in the moment a husband and his wife’s flesh are bonded as one, certain fluids will be exchanged. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“I don’t want to, Father Arthur. Please don’t kick me out.”

The Father shuts his eyes. He remembers El and the day she had to go. He’d heard she’d found nothing but trouble down in Troy. “You’re scared, girl,” the Father says, “and I understand, but a woman can’t bow her knee to God until she bows her knee to her husband. Find Christ and lose your fear.” He smiles. He takes her hand. “A blushing bride, my, you’ve grown. We’ll work it out for you, dear. Happy for you.”

Ruth looks up at the Stevie Nicks poster, meditating on this beautiful woman. Marriage would mean no more state. A kitchen, a refrigerator of her own. Zeke humping up on her front and back each night until she’s eighteen, but if Nat could come with her, she’d be OK. I’ll go see the man, she thinks. See what sort he is. What’s coarse in her life will lift her up, carry her down past the industrial park and the anonymous block of buildings whose sign reads TOOL AND DIE. All the way to the self-storage office. Her fingertips will buzz, freedom in there, for Nat and her, lovely as the sun through a bottle of old pee.

Each séance takes place in a different home. “My cousin’s boss is out of town.” Mr. Bell picks Ruth and Nat up at the appointed time and takes them to a new address. The car windows are rolled down even though it’s cold. The outside air smells of balsam and rain. In the back seat Ruth fingers a realty sign that’d been yanked from the ground. She watches Mr. Bell drive. He’s a creature who makes his own tools. She admires that.

“What did Father Arthur want?”

“Some loose ends from the hospital.”

Nat nods. Mr. Bell parks.

Some of the houses have books. Some have TVs that cover entire walls. One has a room given over to a collection of dull-looking rocks. One has no furniture in it at all. “My uncle’s condo,” Mr. Bell explains.

Nat and Ruth dress in clothes provided by Mr. Bell. He tells them that their clothes, the stuff from the Father, scare people. “Children of the Corn,” he says.

“What’s that? Like we’re farmers?”

“No. Sociopaths.” He gives her a wink.

Nat and Ruth wait in the bedroom until he comes to fetch them. She sits in a windowsill. “You know I’m making my bit up?” she tells Nat.

“I’m fine with that.”

“But you’re really talking to dead people, right?”

“How many times are you going to ask me that?”

“Can you just tell me the truth?”

“I talk to dead people. Yes, yes, yes, I do.” To the tune of “Skip to My Lou.”

“Good because otherwise it would be stealing. I don’t want to steal from people who are already so sad.”

When Nat and Ruth are led into the living room, the guests are sitting cross-legged on the floor as if telling ghost stories around a campfire. Ruth and Nat join them there.

“But they’re children.” One man wrenches his spine to complain to Mr. Bell.

“Precisely.” Mr. Bell pats the man’s shoulder, a familiar gesture. The man smiles as if the teacher just praised his correct answer. “Children have not yet hardened the divide between life and realms of the undead. In India”—Mr. Bell lifts a curled finger to his temple—“the most attuned mediums are always children. India,” he repeats, “and Brazil. And”—feeling inspired—“Morocco, of course.”

“Brrrriiinnnng!” Nat’s off. He twists his hands, tuning in. “I’m speaking with a man named Lester. Yes. Anyone have a Lester? Sorry Leroy. No Leonard.”

“Yes!”

“Brrrinnnggg! Yes, sorry. Leonard. Now Leonard was your—”

“Grandfather.”

“I was about to say that. Brrrrriiiinng! Served in World War II, yes?”

“How did you know?”

“He told me.” Nat had practiced too.

“Grandpa.”

“You’re a hick, and nobody ever helped a hick but a hick himself!”

“Pardon?” the man asks.

“I’m standin’ here on my hind legs. Even a dog can do that. Are you standin’ on your hind legs?”

The man looks around himself. He remains sitting.

Nat foams, spits, rails, swinging his arms. “Here it is, ya hicks! Nail up anybody who stands in your way! Give me the hammer and I’ll do it myself!”

Mr. Bell rubs his hands together. He’s really not that much older than Ruth, but he works it with confidence, with his suit, and people believe it.

“Grandpa Leo?”

Later Ruth hits on a vein. “I see a toddler in a costume,” she whispers in her trance. “Dressed as a lion.” She pauses. “No, it’s a bear. A dog.”

One of the mothers explodes, grief on the walls of this foreclosed home. “That was her second Halloween. She was a poodle.”

“Yes,” Ruth says. “I see jack-o’-lanterns. Candy corn.”

The mother rolls with sorrow, as if there is a button inside her Ruth can just keep pushing, flooding fresh tears from a never-empty well. At least the mother will sleep tonight.

Afterward, over chicken with cashew nuts, they count the money. Ruth gets quiet. “Sweetheart, sweetheart.” Mr. Bell touches her hand. “It’s not as if you’re pretending the dead are alive. People want to be told what they already know — the dead were once here and they loved us. You should be happy to tell people that.”

Ruth nods.

“Why do we split it three ways?” Nat wants to know.

Mr. Bell pushes his Adam’s apple left then right in a samba beat. “Because there’s no end to my generosity.” He exhales with an open mouth, blowing breath and insult Nat’s way. Mr. Bell looks to Ruth again. “Buck up, little flower.”

She and Nat keep their money stuffed up the hollow leg of their metal bed frame. Eventually the bed can hold no more. Nat slices open the lining of his winter coat and fills it, like a transfusion refluffing the flat garment with cash. It’s so much money, Nat doesn’t bring up the three-way split ever again.

Word spreads. People line up to talk to the dead. Parents who have lost their children. Children who’ve lost their parents. A young woman who survived, in utero, the car crash that killed her mother sits beside the father of a boy who’d mixed a potion of Drano and grapefruit juice for his girlfriend and himself. The town alderman misses his mother. A high school history teacher whose nephew was caught in an undertow. Mr. Bell collects them. It’s not hard. Dead people are everywhere.

Sometimes the same people return, though Ruth, in the spirit of egalitarianism, has each new person receive word from their dead before issuing repeat performances.

Mr. Bell counsels a skeptic in the hallway. “Sometimes it’s two or three generations removed. You might not recognize a great-great-aunt. Don’t worry. She knows you.” He squeezes the man’s arm. “Please leave your coats in here,” Mr. Bell requests. “We’ve found it best to be unencumbered by material possessions when spirit is present.”

And Ruth is quite like a spirit. “Mary?” her voice crackles, the warm static of an old radio. “Is someone here looking for Mary?” Silence. “I’m sorry. The name is Larry. Larry?”

And a woman whose cardigan is pulled tight as a tourniquet round her middle sucks in her breath. “Harry is my husband. Harry.” Her cheeks spot with blood.

“Of course. Harry.” Ruth walks like a ballet dancer on her toes. She touches the living, placing hands on their shoulders to calm them. Ruth laughs. “Harry just made a joke. He was quite funny, wasn’t he?”

Afterward, over souvlaki this time, Mr. Bell asks, “What have you two been learning in school?”

“We don’t go to regular school. The Father instructs us.”

“What’s he teaching you?”

“Sine. Cosine. Jesus,” Ruth says.

Mr. Bell mulls it over. “Can’t say I remember that.” He looks above their heads. “How about Sherman’s charge on Atlanta? Did you cover that yet?”

“We’re still working on Herod’s expansion of the Second Temple.”

The storage center’s sign is big as a billboard. OUTER SPACE. The plastic veneer paneling of the trailer is made to resemble wood. A sign is taped to the wall. RENT DO ON FIRST OF MONTH. Someone had crossed out the misspelling. Zeke’s alone in the office, smiling like there’s no one he’d rather see.

There are a number of file cabinets, a gun locker, a plastic lunch box, and, behind the desk, a poster of the solar system with all the planets, including Pluto.

Zeke wears a country-western shirt with pointed pockets unsnapped to his sternum. He looks different today, sweatier, skinnier, more scruff on his chin. His eyes are red.

I can get divorced in ten months, Ruth thinks.

“You need some storage?” Zeke teases her, friendly as a man with something to sell.

She should’ve worn her new jeans. She feels like a child in her old dress and apron. “What kind of stuff do you store here?”

He leans into her. “All manner of celestial wonders.”

“Pardon?”

He huffs his shoulders in a fake chuckle. “Just getting started so at the moment I’m primarily storing space.”

There’s a newspaper on his desk, today’s paper. Upside down Ruth makes out a story about bodies in the Middle East and another piece speculating which movie will earn the biggest box office receipts this weekend. She’s been to a movie theater twice in her life. “Father Arthur told me you talked with him,” she says.

“Some big stuff is about to happen here. We need you. I do. I want to take care of you.”

“What sort of big stuff?”

“The cosmos aligning for the righteous.”

“Me?”

“Comets, collisions. One space rock is all it would take to send the whole of us into orbit.”

“You’re an astronaut?”

“No.” On Zeke’s desk there are a number of different rock specimens and a tiny souvenir, fake ruins molded out of plastic. He leans forward. “Have you ever been taken care of by a man?”

Ruth imagines the factory where they specialize in fabricating plastic ruins. “Nat,” she says. “The Father.”

“That’s not what I mean. I’m asking are you intact?”

Zeke reaches for her wrist. He bows into her open hand so she sees the back of his head, the gold in each greasy brown strand. She feels a wet warmth. Zeke separates her fingers. Every filthy word she knows comes into her head. “Intact” seems the filthiest. Moving from thumb to pinkie, Zeke takes each digit in his mouth, licking her clean. She’s unsteady. She’s damp. She couldn’t be intact. Each breath is a labor he can hear.

When Zeke finishes licking her fingers, he rolls back, dries his meaty lips on the side of his hand, done with his meal. Ruth canters forward.

“I need—” His voice is loud. Zeke stumbles for the right word.

“A wife,” she gives him, still reading the upside-down paper. The Pope is angry at some nuns.

Zeke smiles. “Yes.” He opens his top drawer. “But not just any wife. I need you.” He passes Ruth a foam squeezie toy cratered to look like the moon. The number of the self-storage is printed on it. “I want you to think, Ruth. I want it to be right. Are you ready to go with me? I want you to cogitate and give me a call. Will you do that?”

“Cogitate.”

“Come to me when you hear an answer.”

Ruth squeezes the moon, letting it absorb the sticky saliva Zeke left behind on her fingers.

When she gets back to the Father’s house, Mr. Bell and Nat are waiting. While it was a short walk home, she’s long done cogitating.

“Ready to go, love?” Mr. Bell asks.

“Yup.” She climbs in back next to Nat. Mr. Bell adjusts his seat and the radio station before putting the car in drive. Ruth stares at his head. “Are you married, Mr. Bell?”

“Married? My. No.”

“Want to marry me?”

His accent goes British. “What a deep honor.”

Nat cuffs his fingernails in the palms of his hands.

“You and I get married, then we adopt Nat. No more foster home. No more Father Arthur.”

“That”—Mr. Bell turns in his seat, twisting a bit of his hair—“is a good one, Ruth.” He laughs but stops when he’s laughing alone.

“You wouldn’t, you know, really be my husband or anything. Nat and I would get an apartment by ourselves since we have enough money now. You wouldn’t have to take care of us. We’re fine on our own.”

“A genuine proposal. My goodness.”

“It’s easy, half an hour at town hall. Soon as I’m eighteen, we can get a divorce.”

“Ah, a romantic.”

“Mr. Bell,” Ruth says. “Please.”

“My,” he says. “Well.” He thinks. “Does marriage require a birth certificate?”

“Weren’t you ever born?” Nat asks.

Mr. Bell looks at him in the rearview. “I’ve been born again and again. They just keep forgetting to give me a certificate.”

When Mr. Bell drops them off that night, the Father’s outside on a metal folding chair. The chair leans to the left on buckling legs. The Father raises his hand to his brow, blocking the headlights’ glare. He’s been drinking. Nat and Ruth climb out of Mr. Bell’s car. Their breath is visible. The Father snickers, imagining bestial actions.

Nat has eleven ten-dollar bills neatly folded in his front pocket. They raise opposite arms, a Rorschach blot saying goodbye to Mr. Bell. The car pulls away.

“Shackles!” the Father calls out, as if landing the answer to a crossword clue.

Nat and Ruth stick to the dark, creeping their way past him.

The Father allows the broken chair to dump him on the ground. Nat passes by, but Ruth hesitates. The Father’s lying on his side, one cheek in the dirt. “Commit thy works unto the Lord, and thy thoughts shall be established. God’s Grace. God’s Grace.”

Ruth goes to him. “Here.” She gives him her hand to pull him up.

“I don’t want your help.”

“What’s wrong?”

From the ground, drunk and spitting, he says, “No matter how much I pray for you Ruth, you’re going to die.”

She crouches beside him. “That’s OK.”

“No. It’s not OK to die until you’ve been forgiven.”

“For what?” She catches up with Nat. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

The Father’s laugh is scary, and when they reach the front door, they understand why. Nat tries the handle but the door is locked.

“Animals,” Father Arthur tells them, “sleep in the animal barn.”

Nat climbs into the boxwood hedge to bang on the living room window. Raffaella and Vladimir are watching TV. Raffaella shakes her head no. Vladimir switches off the set, and they disappear into the back of the house, scared sheep.

“Fuck,” Nat says. “Come on.” He takes Ruth’s hand.

“You’re really going to lock us out of the house, Father? It’s freezing.”

“Rejoice inasmuch as you participate in the sufferings of Christ so that you may be overjoyed when his glory is revealed.”

Nat grabs Ruth. “Come on.” The mud of the yard is crusted with ice. He leads her into the barn, a small improvement. Nat collects a burlap sheet and a saddle blanket. He pitches fresh hay into the largest of the stalls, leading all four of the goats into the pen. Ruth constructs pillows. “Wish we could call Mr. Bell.”

“We’re going to be fine. Same as always.” Nat spreads the burlap then the blanket. He lifts one corner. “Come on,” he says. “Get close.” The goats sniff and nibble the new hay. Nat leans back, opening his arm so she can find a warm place beside him. Her breath is still visible, and the tops of her ears sting with blood, but in a few minutes beside him, she sees he is right. Ruth is warm enough. They are going to be OK.

Nat rests his chin on the top of her head. “Mrs. Bell.”

“You’re jealous.”

“Yes.” The stall smells of goat urine. “I don’t like people besides you.”

“And you don’t even like me. I mean in that way. The marrying way.”

His eyes are gray and shining, light leaking in from the flood. “No, I don’t.” Nat’s voice is a low whisper. “Nothing’s grown back since my mom.” He puts a hand over his throat. “I don’t feel anything. I love you, but I don’t feel anything.”

“Nothing?”

“No.”

Ruth lifts her chin, looking up to the rafters. “I’m going to get us out of here.”

“But Mr. Bell doesn’t have a birth certificate.”

“There are others.”

“Other people who’ll marry you? Who?”

“Is that so unbelievable? That a person would want to marry me?”

Nat shrugs. “Yeah. To me it is.”

At breakfast the next morning, one of the kids asks, “Do you know how to multiply a fraction?”

After chores Ruth returns to their room alone. The door is already open. Ceph, in a sweatsuit, sits on their bed. He broke in during their exile. He’s found some of the money and has it spread out on their blanket. “This you?”

Ruth nods. She approaches the bed and puts her hand on the crumpled bills.

“I need it,” he says.

“For what?”

“I’m getting extradited.”

“Emancipated?”

“Fuck.”

“How?”

“I’m turning eighteen.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

“It’s almost winter.”

“I know. I need money.”

She thinks a moment. “You’ll be eighteen. What about a wife?”

“What about it?”

“You could take me with you. We could get married.”

“You?”

“I need to get out of here. Then you won’t be alone.”

Ceph looks at the bills, considers his options. “You know how to do it?”

“Leave the Father?”

“No. Fuck.”

She thinks of the question about fractions. She thinks about intact. “No.”

Ceph winces. “Pay me, let me do it with you, and maybe I’ll take you when I go.”

She doesn’t think long. It doesn’t mean anything to her. It’s her body and she’ll use it. She grabs some of the money and puts it in Ceph’s hand. “Fine.” She shuts the door, trying to think of Ceph as an opportunity, like government-provided job training.

“Take off your panties,” Ceph tells her.

She moves slowly, folding her underwear before depositing them in a laundry bag hung on the back of her door. Ruth keeps her dress on. Ceph lifts it up, uses it to cover her scar. He tucks his head into her neck, carefully opening her left leg and then her right. “Hold steady,” as if he is performing a precise surgical maneuver.

With Ceph moving on top of her, one thought fully jams her mind. “This is it?” It’s nothing. It’s nothing. It’s nothing, she says to herself, and moments later it’s over. She can’t reconstruct how it felt or what happened or what the big deal is. Words from the Father present themselves as still unsolved mysteries: membranes, fluids, cavities. “Can you do it again?” she asks, still under cover.

“Hold on.” He kneads her boobs for a minute or two.

The gray world. From under her dress, Ceph could be almost anyone.

“OK.”

This time Ruth pays attention. She peeks, watching Ceph’s chest and hips. She sees the shadow of someone’s feet arrive just outside the door, a person listening from the hall. She presses her lips to Ceph’s ear. She lets her breath come heavy, and Ceph responds in kind, grunting loudly.

When Ceph’s done, he sees three drops of blood on the blanket. He looks from the door to the blood, from the door to the blood. All the years Nat and Ruth slept in this bed not doing anything. Ceph feels strong as a criminal. “You’re mine.”

She tilts her head quickly, once. “You’re eighteen soon?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m yours if you get Nat and me out of here.”

Ruth sits on the edge of the bed, her legs still open to the room. Ceph slides the lock back, opens the door. “Mine,” Ceph says, marking his claim in front of Nat.

Nat looks in, past Ruth’s dark hair.

This is a test. She keeps her legs open, asking, Do you really feel nothing?

No.

Thought so.

“Get your coat on,” Nat tells her. “Mr. Bell’s here.”