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 hip
s 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 t
o 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!”
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