Mr. Splitfoot Read online

  “Silence, please.” Mr. Bell sways on his feet in the doorway like a Secret Service agent. He has no idea who the Mother is.

  Any clarity or confidence Ruth felt is gone, sucked into the Mother. The people are waiting, eyebrows lifted in anticipation. Nat shrugs, So what. She’s nothing to us anymore but a paying customer. Get started.

  Ruth shuts her eyes. She changes her breath, and the people gathered know things have begun. She exhales forcibly three times before making her call. “Spirit?” she asks. “Spirit, are you here? Join with us tonight.” Her body arches as if electrocuted or possessed. “There’s an older gentleman here with me. Yes. I’m getting chills. Look. Yes. He’s here. The first thing he wants to say is that in life he would never be here. He’s not a believer.”

  The young college woman smiles before she cries.

  “You lost your father?” Ruth asks. It’s that easy. Why else would a college girl be here?

  She nods and tears are falling steadily now. The kind wife rushes a tissue to her friend. Mr. Bell is right. People who don’t believe in the dead are still affected by them.

  “Well, he’s here with us tonight. He’s always with you. Is there something you’d like to say to him?”

  She’s racked with sobs. It’s hard for her to speak. The Mother puts her hand on her shoulder. “I wish he knew so many things. He’s missed so much.”

  “He’s not missing it. He sees.” Ruth listens a moment. “And he wants you to know he forgives you and he loves you.”

  The woman stops crying and looks at Ruth. “Forgives me?”

  “Yes?” The question mark is a mistake. “Is there anything else you want to say to him?”

  The college girl is no longer crying but has hardened. “No, thank you.” Ruth went too far.

  Nat times his entrance perfectly. “I’m speaking with a girl named Patricia.”

  The Mother’s head cocks to the side, but the sign is not sure. Who is she here looking for?

  Ruth reminds the guests. “Consider your dead. This could be an ancestor. Great-great-grandparent. You might not recognize your dead.”

  Nat turns to look directly at the Mother. He speaks to her. “Patricia had long hair, braided. She wore emerald rings. Arthritis, maybe. She watches out for you and is taking care of you. Loving you and following your life. She says not to worry about that itchy rash?”

  The Mother nods.

  Nat bows his head.

  Ruth says, “There’s a woman standing near me. She says her name is Willie?”

  “Yes.” The hostess is astonished but really it had been easy for Ruth to look on the back of a black-and-white photo displayed on the bedroom vanity, a child in a christening gown. Wilhelmina, 1938. Once she has the name, anything’s possible. Ruth’s mind opens. “She’s saying she wants you to feed the birds.”

  “The birds?”

  “Yeah. Like outside. A feeder, you know?”

  “Sure.” The wife nods. “I’ll do it.”

  “She says she loves you and she misses you.”

  The wife begins to sob.

  “Is there anything you’d like to ask Wilhelmina? Or tell her? She’s here.”

  The hostess bites her lip. “Tell her we’ve had a child. We named the child after her.”

  Ruth looks down. She smiles without meaning it. “She already knows.” And then, because she’s feeling sheepish about the trouble with the milk, Ruth conjures a kitty cat dead since the ’90s. “Meow?” Ruth asks in her trance state.

  “Sheba?” a guest asks. “Is that you?”

  “Meow! Meow!”

  Ruth tries to escape down the hallway when it is over, but the Mother stops her. “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  “How’ve you been?”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I sell Mary Kay with the woman who lives here. She invited me.”

  “Oh.”

  “Ruth,” she says, and grabs Ruth’s hands, choking on a gurgle rising from her chest. “Please.” Some sort of flood.

  “What?” Ruth directs her into a bathroom that smells of damp towels. Maybe the Mother wants to apologize for not taking care of them.

  The Mother calms her voice. She breathes in and out through her nose like an actress. “I need you to talk to him for me.”

  “Arthur?”

  “No.”

  “Nat?”

  “No. My son.”

  “You have a son?”

  “Or daughter. I don’t know.” The Mother studies the tiling. Ruth sits on the rim of an enormous tub. The Mother kneels knee bones to tile. She lifts her hands to Ruth’s thighs, like she’s a beggar. “Please.”

  “How come you never told anyone you have a kid?”

  The Mother claws Ruth’s skin through the purple gown. “I had a miscarriage.” The Mother grips. “That’s why I need you to help me. No one’s helping me.” The Mother’s thick foundation makes her look like a zombie. There are tear streaks through the face pancake, riverbeds revealing red skin below.

  “There’s nothing I can do.” Ruth’s dry, getting drier.

  The Mother drops a cheek to Ruth’s legs. She squeezes, claws. Her mouth is wide open with no sounds coming out. Ruth sees her scalp. The brown and silver, wires on a bomb. Ruth imagines a story she could tell, about how the child was reincarnated into a pony on a farm where they help war veterans. But she doesn’t do it. The Mother doesn’t deserve it. Ruth keeps her mouth closed. All these parents who want their children. A freaking miscarriage. Who cares? She didn’t even know the kid. The Mother smells of oil. With her hands on either side of the Mother’s face, Ruth prepares to toss her skull off her lap like a head of turned lettuce. “It’s fake,” Ruth says finally. “I make it up.”

  The Mother holds still in Ruth’s lap for one moment.

  “It’s a lie,” Ruth says again. “I’ll give you your money back.”

  The Mother’s face peels into disgust. “You make it up?”

  “The dead are dead are dead. They don’t talk to me.”

  “You’re a liar?” The Mother sharpens.

  “Yes.”

  The Mother wipes eyeliner expertly, using the edge of one finger as swab. “That’s got nothing to do with my child. You’re a cheat. That doesn’t mean there’s not a world greater than this. Just means you’ll never see that world. You’re not the gatekeeper, Ruth. You’re not even invited.”

  Ruth nods. “I know.”

  The Mother has a miserly thin mouth. She picks dried spit from her lip like a boll of cotton. “Good luck. You’ve got nothing else.” She arranges her clothing in the vanity’s mirror, looking extraordinarily human, plain, and broken. The Mother sleepwalks from the room. Her grease and grief linger.

  Ruth spends a few minutes counting the tiles in front of her eyes, each one lined up next to its neighbor, each identical. A freaking miscarriage. Why did Ruth’s mother never look for her? Where did her sister go?

  She swings her shod feet into the tub. Ruth closes the bath’s drain and turns the hot water tap on high. Beside the tub there’s a cylinder of Comet bleach scrub. Ruth shakes a generous quantity of the bluish powder into the water.

  It’s time to find her sister El, to find their mother. Ruth needs to get out of here too. She climbs into the tub, into the Comet, as if it is her space pod. She rings in the new year, making herself clean and ready for a new life. The water scalds and purple dye leaks from her dress, brightly colored as any suicide.

  HIGHWAYS ARE BAD PLACES TO HIDE, but I didn’t know we were hiding until Ruth started running. “Who is he?” Like a kind of torture, I keep asking her the same question. Ruth readjusts her headphones. I would think a person who doesn’t know what’s she’s running from can’t really be on the run, but that’s not true. Here I am.

  A cop car coasts to a stop a few feet behind us. We keep walking. They turn on their lights so we stop. They sit in their car. We wait for them to get out, but the cops don’t get out, so I tell Ruth, “Fuck it
. Let’s keep walking.” Then they hit us with the siren, which, that close, is a bolt of electricity from below, spine-clearing. It exits through my brain. They use their bullhorn. “Hold your position.”

  When I worked in an office, it was the same thing, people using phrases that made no sense. “Action item,” they’d say, because our job was so dull we used mysterious phrases to make it seem more exciting, as if we were spies dealing with top-secret, pass-coded information. Only there was no way to break the code because none of the phrases meant anything: Bring it to the table. Deliverables. Go live. Leverage. With that said. Moving forward. Offline. Branded brain dump.

  “What’d they say?” I ask Ruth. We lean against the guardrail and wait.

  The cops finally climb out of their patrol car.

  “Your car break down?” he asks me, as if Ruth’s become invisible. That’s fucked up but that’s what happens to women. We grow up into ghosts. No one wants to screw Ruth anymore so she’s invisible.

  “Yeah. Her car.”

  “Whose?”

  “My aunt Ruth’s.”

  “ID, please.”

  “You want to see our driver’s licenses?”

  “Correct.”

  “But we’re not driving.”

  “You’re trespassing. There’s no walking allowed on the highway.”

  I look at them blankly. “Walking is against the law?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  The cops give us a lift to the next exit, another town where the houses have lights in each window. Homesickness raises questions like, Why don’t I live in a house? Why am I punishing El? I don’t know the answers, but walking can untangle knots, spread things out, so at least I can see the strands: walking, mothering.

  We pass Walmart, Walgreens, Starbucks. Everything is new in this town, even the trash barrels. A man mowing his lawn watches us as if he’s on patrol. The town playground has forts, tunnels, platforms, and a padded surface. A father and daughter are heading home for supper. The sun is sinking behind the trees. Three teenagers, a girl and two boys, are on the swings, pivoting on pointed toes. Each of them wears headphones. Each of their faces is illuminated by the glow of a smartphone.

  El told me that she worries about kids today, about me. She said we’re screwed because we’ve never known life without the Internet. And then she told me a story about the first time she heard Linda Thompson sing, “I hand you my ball and chain.” “You know Linda Thompson?” she asked me. “Of course,” I said, because I know everything now, that’s my job, to know one drop of shallow information about every single thing. El told me how she was driving home from work years ago, before the Internet, and how the radio station broadcast that Linda Thompson song and, like a tractor beam, it took her over, prickled her skin, lifted her up. Her body felt every signal the Earth was issuing, every twitch of spring coming in the winter air was palpable on her forearms because that song’s so good and it spoke to her. And Thompson’s voice. El pulled over just to listen. She waited through three more songs, frozen with a shred of paper she’d picked up off the floor, the receipt from an oil change. She waited with a pen in hand, like her life was depending on hearing that fast moment when the DJ would rattle off the name of the lady who sang that song. Hear it now or lose that beauty forever. The DJ said the name. El wrote it down. She drove twenty miles to a record store, ordered a CD the guy working there had never heard of, waited two weeks for that guy to call, drove twenty minutes back to the store, and left with Richard and Linda Thompson’s CD in her hands, holding it above her head like some Jesus cross umbrella, a relic of protection against death because she had found it and it had found her, and the chances of that encounter were so very slim.

  El said that kids today never sit still long enough to see how the river changes. What, she wondered, was going to happen to people who think they know everything? What’s going to happen without chance? Good question.

  My back aches. I’d like to stretch out on my side on the bench, but a janitor is securing a padlock on the trash dumpster out back. They lock their garbage here. Even the teenagers eye us suspiciously. We stay upright until the janitor and the teenagers are gone. Ruth and I climb to the highest platform on the “Play Structure.” We’re hidden. Ruth takes everything out of our bags. She even pulls out my broken phone. I look at its dead screen but not for long. It’s not like it’s going to come back to life again. She distributes blankets and extra clothes around my body, tucking them behind my back, between my knees as needed. Ruth knows how to make a bed. She takes nothing soft for herself but lies flat on her back looking up at the sky. She rests one light hand on the baby.

  I’ve come to think of Ruth as the father of my kid. She takes care of us in a way I’d hope a father would. Ruth will smile the day this child is born. No one will smile more because the baby is hers too now.

  “You remember your mom, Ruth?”

  She shakes her head no.

  “I do.”

  She stares at me, wanting to hear more, but it takes a moment to think of anything nice about her mother. It’s actually hard to come up with even one good thing. Finally I get, “She had long, pretty hair like yours.”

  Her eyes open wider, so ready for information her mouth gapes. Ruth is one big ear.

  “I lived with her when I was a kid. It was a bad idea. Your mom was nasty. She’d tell El, ‘You’re fat. You’re lazy. Should’ve burned your face instead. Would have improved your chances for finding a man.’” I’m giving shape to a dark room in Ruth’s head. “Your mom was a drunk but we stayed. A house, a yard. I went to a good school, ate good clean food. El never left me alone with her, not when I was young.”

  Ruth plies a bit of hair from the corner of her mouth.

  “Your mom seemed to think that being cruel to El equaled being nice to you. She was twisted by guilt, and I’m sorry she was your mom, but I’m glad you exist, Ruth. I’m glad she had you.”

  Ruth turns to keep me from saying anything too nice to her. But fuck it. I can be as nice as I want to Ruth. Why shouldn’t I? Someone ought to. I can even say I love her if I want. What’s she going to do? Tell me to shut up? “I love you, Ruth.” I hope El gets the message too somehow. “Thanks for coming to get me. Whatever this turns out to be.”

  Night comes down and her breath deepens. Millions of stars overhead make the violence of the Big Bang clear. So much force that matter is still sprinting away from the center. I feel the velocity of space pinning me to this platform. I’m tiny but I’m going to be someone’s mom, someone’s everything. I touch the baby. None of this is easy to believe. The stars leave streaks, we’re moving so fast. Ruth breathes heavily. One small scintillation above—a gossamer thread of light—gathers oceans, every word ever spoken on the radio, each calorie of sunlight ever captured and stored in a kernel of corn. You know. Things like that. And the star beside it: the tongues of every lizard, spider, leopard. If spiders have tongues. One day the sun will suck us in. I’m not too angry about that. Lying in these stars, despite them, somehow I can imagine my child seat-belted in a minivan while I stress the importance of sharing chocolate Easter eggs or stuffed toy pandas or bags of corn chips with the other children. And I’ll mean that being alive matters, even being alive in the smallest, smallest way. And aren’t you lucky to be here.

  We’ve been walking forever. The weather is growing colder. The leaves are turning. Some ancient program is switching on in my hormonal body saying winter is nearer than it was yesterday. Take shelter. Wolves, coyotes, and bears will become hungry, and a child, to them, will taste so sweet.

  Ruth could tell me so much. When we sleep like this, I imagine all she knows, flowing into me, into the baby, a transfusion of history, stories, and maybe even some simple sketch, a rough outline, of what the hell is going on.

  THEY STOP UNDER AN OVERPASS. Mr. Bell does Ruth’s makeup in the headlights of passing cars. “Short vacation?”

  Things had not gone well at El’s house. Ruth doesn’t want to ta
lk about it.

  “I’m glad you’re home.” Mr. Bell pulls one side of Ruth’s hair back and pins it there with a purple orchid as if he’s escorting her to prom. Mr. Bell’s breath is close. He paints her lips to match the flower. He touches them with a tissue.

  “You stole that makeup from the other house.”

  “You make me sound like a thief.”

  “Thank you,” she says when he’s done.

  He starts the car again. “What sort of job is this?”

  Nat had arranged everything except transportation. “I don’t know. They got in touch with me.”

  “Who are they?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Mr. Bell alters the angle of the rearview.

  “They have a question for us,” Nat says.

  “What question?”

  “Hold on. I love this song.” Nat leans into the front, putting his arm in between them. He turns up the radio, hums along a little.

  “Where’d you meet them?” Ruth asks.

  Nat draws one hand up to his ear. “I didn’t.”

  “You don’t know them? Did you check them out at all?”

  “They called me,” Nat says again.

  Mr. Bell looks put out. “Is this the place?”

  Nat checks the address. “Yeah.”

  The house is a low ranch, lit, warm, glowing as if it’s still Christmas. All three bend their necks to check it out from the safety of the car.