“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.”
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 cou
ld 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.
Ruth didn’t want to dance with Nat. She shoved him when he got close, playing with him. She pulled me onto her lap and took cover behind my body when he tried to partner up with her. I was getting squished in between them and I loved it. Ruth was only six years older than me, but those six years were the difference between eleven and seventeen, a continent’s worth of distance. Ruth knew stuff.
El watched from the kitchen table, nodding like the mother of us all, pretending she didn’t feel bad doing nothing to look out for her little sister for twelve years. Nat danced and finally Ruth joined him on the linoleum. They started to move like this was the moment they’d practiced for since the dawn of time. I almost had to look away, look away or be ruined, wrecked, unsatisfied forever.
Nat cleaned out my mother’s gutters even though it was freezing. I watched him do the whole thing. Ruth and my mom were in the hall. “It’s not like that, El. It’s not like that between us. He’s my sister,” Ruth said, which must have hurt El, even if she deserved it.
I went through the things in Ruth’s bag, touching holy relics. Soft shirts and pajamas. I held them to my face. A silk purse with cheap gold jewelry inside and all of it brand-new. I stared at her comb, and my heart got seared by what she was. Her toothbrush and a small blue jar of hydrogen peroxide. I swallowed just the tiniest sip. It burned badly, but I knew I’d have her inside me now forever. Ruth was not my mother. I liked my mother fine, but Ruth was like being close to thunder. And then Nat. Lightning.
El cooked hamburgers that night as if we were a family. Things would be different with Ruth around. She’d be my auntie, and my life would be improved by her attentions. She would teach me how to do things El knew nothing about, enjoy music, attract boys. At dinner Ruth said, “So, El,” and she giggled. “I got myself emancipated.” Leaving unsaid that El never took custody of Ruth.
“How? You marry this guy?”—pointing to Nat.
“No. Nat’s too young. Someone else.”
El nodded, had a bite.
Ruth changed the subject. “I’ll tell you something else funny.”
“What?”
“Nat can talk to dead people.”
I started to think maybe Ruth was on drugs. Maybe that was what made her shine.
“What?” El looked at Ruth.
“Just like I said. Nat talks to dead people.”
El scowled. “How do you manage that?”
He smiled at me. Ruth buried her head in her arm on the table, lifting her eyes to El like she was flirting. El raised her burger to her mouth. “You talk to dead people? I’ve got an oceanfront lot in Missouri.”
“I could probably sell it for you.” Nat winked.
“Have you got any dead folks you want him to get in touch with?”
El pushed back from the table. “Sure. Sure.” She wiped her lips with a cloth. “You ever try to talk to our mom?”
Ruth sobered, all the light extinguished. “Our mom?”
“Yeah.”
“No.” Ruth wrinkled. “She’s dead?”
“She passed over a year back. I thought they would have told you.”
“Nope.”
“This is her house. Was her house.”
Ruth thumbed her lips. “Is that right? You inherit it?” Ruth looked around with new eyes. “You saw her after you got out?”
El nodded yes, slowly. “I lived with her. Here.”
“Then why’d she give us up in the first place?”
El dropped both her feet to the floor, exhaling hard. She shifted forward to stare at the ground. “She didn’t give us up, honey. We got taken away.” El raised her fingers to her lips as if she held a cigarette there.
“Why?”
Night chirped. Bodies digested.
“You weren’t, uh”—she made twinkling fingers around Ruth’s face—“born like that. Our mom did that to you.”
“My face?”
El nodded. “She splashed you with bleach, then left you there for a couple hours. You were a baby, and she was a bad drunk. I called the ambulance, they called the cops, and the cops called the State.”
Ruth lifted both hands to her face. “She gave me that?”
El nodded. “Barely missed your eyes.”
“Why?”
El shakes her head. “I don’t know.”
“Come on,” Nat says. “That’s not true. Your mom was CIA, FBI, KGB.”
But Ruth knows the truth when she finally hears it. “And you went back to her when you got out? You went to live with her? Guess that’s why you never came for me.”
El nods. “Where else was I supposed to go? I was eighteen and pregnant.”
“Yeah, I guess you were,” Ruth says. “But you haven’t been eighteen for a long time now.”
I crept downstairs that night to watch them sleep, hiding in the dark with the devotion of a zealot. They weren’t asleep. Nat took a cigarette lighter and kept it burning for a long time. It made their skin glow gold. The flame went out, and he touched the metal part of the lighter to Ruth’s back and arms. Her body tensed and shivered. She slurped as though drooling. He asked, “Is that better, Ru?”
“I feel it.”
When he was done, she thanked him. The room smelled like barbeque, like they had a secret way inside each other down a path no one else would ever know.
Ruth and Nat were gone in the morning, and it took me a long time, a week or two, to get back into my dull life. Took me a month to forgive El for scaring off Ruth.
But now Ruth is here again, fourteen years later, and she’s different. No Nat. No beauty. No power. No shine. Skinny as death and even older. Thirty-one years old around here usually means a mom with a dirty minivan and a bad job. Ruth’s nowhere near that. She’s hollowed out. Miles and miles of hard road. Someone sucked the life from her face and neck. It takes a minute to get my breath and understand that my aunt is back. “Ruth?”
She nods.
“God, you scared me.” I put a hand on my heart to show her. “How’ve you been?” I’ve only met her once, but I’ve wondered where she is so often, picturing her on a map of America in Delaware, Texas, Cali
fornia, Alaska. Here she is. I step forward to hug her, and she hugs me back like she’s forgotten how to and she’s following an instruction manual: open arms, wrap arms around other person, squeeze.
Something I’ve noticed about being pregnant is that scents land differently. Everything smells like old meat or vinegar or blood. But Ruth hugs me and my face is so close to her, resting on her shoulder, in her hair, and immediately I notice it. Ruth has no scent at all. That’s nice.
“El’s going to be happy to see you. I’m so glad you came back. Last time,” I start to explain. “I’m sorry. I know El has a lot of regrets, and I was so sad when you left. But here you are, and it’ll be better this time.” I smile.
She smiles back.
“El’s really going to be happy,” I say again.
But Ruth grabs my arm. She shakes her head no.
“Huh?”
She shakes her head no again.
“You don’t want to see her?”
More nos.
“Why’d you come?”
She points at me, right at my sternum.
“For me?”
Nods of yes.
“What’s going on?”
She points outside. She points to me. She points to her. She points outside. And it dawns on me that there’s something wrong with my aunt Ruth.
“Can’t you talk?”
No. Folds of skin around her eyes tighten like a person in pain, in labor.
“What happened to your voice?”
Ruth looks right at me, and there it is, the solid fact of silence.
She points outside again.
“You want us to leave?”
Yes.
“Where are we going?”
This time she points straight up.
I look up to the ceiling. “Up?”
No.
“North?”
Yes.
“Why?”
Ruth stares at me again because anything that cannot be explained with a pointing finger or a yes, no, will remain a mystery.
“I have a job.”
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