“People follow him?”
“The heart wants what the heart wants.”
“What’s that?”
“There’s your real question. The heart wants someone to take away the fear. The heart wants answers even if they’re made up. So here comes Mardellion with a whole bunch of answers. You don’t even have to pay rent anymore with him. Mardellion will take care of you, love you always.” The woman pushes back in her chair. “Yes, people follow him.”
“How many?”
“Forty? Fifty? Something like that.”
“You’re an Etherist?”
The record drops again. She takes a peek. “‘Two Hour Honeymoon.’ Paul Hampton. I was an Etherist. It started with twelve of us, young people with energy, ready to work, happy to build something beautiful. I was gorgeous. You don’t believe me but I was. Tan and healthy, a real beauty. We all were. We pooled our money and efforts, so there was time to spend reading or making things, gardening, taking advantage of the free-love principles. We were hippies living in a commune run by a beneficent dictator. It wasn’t bad at the start. We’d eat meals together, snuggle, screw, hike in the woods. And Mardellion had a power. Knack, charisma. You know. He was all glue and charm. Slim and strong as an ox. We wanted to please him.” She smooths a blanket across her knees. “Then September 28, 1980, Cosmos, Carl Sagan’s TV program about the universe premiered. Mardellion knew nothing about outer space before that. All he knew was heaven. I don’t think he even knew they’d landed people on the moon. So Cosmos comes along and he’s hooked. He’s crazy about Sagan and the Voyager missions. It was everything he’d been missing. Sagan and Smith. That night, watching TV, it clicked. Outer space is Heaven.”
Ruth’s hanging on every word.
The woman looks toward the kitchen as if she’s got something cooking there. “The Challenger hadn’t exploded yet, and the US was deep in the Cold War. So if outer space belonged to us, it meant we were safe from nukes. We could find a new planet if we destroyed this one. And that idea of safety was Heaven.”
“How long did the Etherists last?”
“I was gone before the end. He started on worse delusions, drugs. He said the end was coming, but then it didn’t come and it didn’t come, and people, especially me, wondered why. So Mardellion decides the women are talking too much. He says women can only speak after the sun sets. I organized a coup against him. I stole what he’d stockpiled, what all his followers had given him, and I stashed it with the only person up there I could trust. But my coup failed, and Mardellion had me booted out in the dark of night. He put tape on my mouth and a trash bag over my head. I was blindfolded, spun ’round and ’round, and dropped off here.” She waits for the next record to start, holding us there, a little lost in the vinyl’s spin. “‘Last Kiss.’ The Cavaliers.”
“When did he die?” I ask.
“I don’t think he did, but you don't have to be dead to haunt. Parents, songs, exes.”
“Are you making this up?” Babies.
She moves even slower. “No.”
“It sounds crazy.”
She thumbs her chin. “Years later Mardellion got arrested, some underage mess. I went to the trial hoping to see my son.”
“You have a kid?”
Her voice loses its tinny ring. “He kicked me out and kept my boy.”
“What?”
“I’ve tried to find him, but I have no proof. I gave birth up on that mountain, so there’s no record. I don’t even know where the mountain is.”
“You don’t know where you lived?”
“We never took trips into town. Mardellion had a car, but the women were not allowed to use it.”
“You lost your son?”
“That’s the right word. Lost.”
Ruth goes to kneel in front of her, takes her hand.
“Aren’t you sweet.” The woman looks at Ruth. “You believe me?”
Ruth nods yes.
“So where’d you all find that book?”
“It’s hers.” I signal Ruth. “How’d you get it, Ruth?” We wait for a reply, but Ruth—quiet as the stars, sure as something—isn’t going to tell us.
MR. BELL DRIVES to a new colonial. He doesn’t have the keys and curses in a foreign language. “My friend forgot to leave them under the mat.” He boosts Ruth on his knee, hoists her through the bathroom window.
It seems unlikely that Mr. Bell has friends.
Ruth moves quietly through the house. It’s chilly inside. She lets them in the front door. Mr. Bell cranks the thermostat up to seventy-five. He has a new dress for Ruth. Less Florida retiree, more Atlantic City palm reader. “Perfect,” he says. “Except, come here.” Ruth sits on the coffee table. Mr. Bell pulls the table closer to his perch on the couch. He takes her chin in his hand. He pulls a wand of mascara, a round of dark eye shadow, and a lipstick called Raisin Hell from a plastic zip bag.
“Where’d you get that?”
“Found it in the bathroom.”
“So your friend who lives here is a girl?”
He studies Ruth’s face. “I respect your intelligence too much to construct a narrative that might convince you of a reality far from the truth.” Mr. Bell applies makeup to Ruth’s lips and eyes, dusting her cheeks with fine glitter. “So.” With his work done, he asks, “You want to get married?”
She nods.
“And you want to marry me?”
She nods again.
“OK,” he says. “We’ll get married.”
“What about the birth certificate problem?”
“They’ll take a baptismal record plus a license. I checked.”
Ceph had been a waste. “You were baptized?”
“Two or three times to be sure.” He looks at her face from all angles, studying his work. “Get me some tissues, Nat.”
Nat does.
“So you and I can get married?”
“Yes.” Mr. Bell blots Ruth’s lips, rubbing a bit of the excess color onto her cheekbones, across her scar. “Perfect.”
She touches Mr. Bell’s knee. “Thank you.” She feels fire at the center of their triangle.
Mr. Bell shuts Nat and Ruth in the bedroom, whispering through the door, “Soon, lovelies.” They watch an episode of Hollywood Extra and the end of an old movie, The Swimmer. Burt Lancaster in square trunks. She simmers, set to boil. “We’re going to be free soon.”
Nat squeezes her hands. The doorbell rings. In the mirrored closet, they check their clothes, noses, and teeth. They hear voices from the living room. The buzzer buzzes again and again and once again. Mr. Bell says, “I’m sorry for your loss.” He makes the women blush, leaving his ringed hands on their waists a moment longer than a more timid person might. He has the confidence of youth. He touches their collarbones while removing their coats. The price goes up.
Finally he swings open the bedroom door. Ruth and Nat stand ready, charged to receive and inform. “Ladies!” Mr. Bell addresses those gathered, then whispers into the hollow between Nat’s right ear and Ruth’s left, “The one in the suit’s the fickin’ mayor’s brother.” His voice grows loud again. “And gentlemen! Your attention this minute, right here, forever.” Nat and Ruth, glorious blossoms, step into a room full of sad people.
At City Hall Ruth removes her winter parka quickly so it won’t spoil her outfit. Underneath she wears one of the gowns Mr. Bell bought her, sea-foam silk. Nat carries her bouquet and the signed forms from the Father. Nat takes her arm. Mr. Bell wears the same suit he wears every day, and when the clerk asks, “Do you, Carl Bell, take Ruth Sykes to be your lawfully wedded wife?” Ruth and Nat catch eyes, wondering why he never told them his name. Carl. It’s so normal. “I pronounce you man and wife. You may kiss your bride.” Mr. Bell, his pale skin against his dark hair, dark lips, kneels to kiss her hand, holding it as one would an injured moth.
“Thank you.”
“Thank you, my dear.” Mr. Bell might even be a gentleman.
Outside the leaves on the trees
are red and orange and gold. This is Ruth’s wedding day. They go to Hook’s to celebrate. Nat sits next to the bride. He toasts the newlyweds with a cup of coffee. “Your name is Carl?”
“Shhh.” Mr. Bell finds the sugar shaker empty and positions it at the edge of the table for a refill.
“What?” Nat looks behind him in the booth. “What’s wrong with Carl?”
“Carl Bell sounds like fast food. Plus, I’m trying to forget where I come from.”
“Where’s that?”
He scratches his chin. “Hmm. I already forgot.” Mr. Bell polishes off his coffee and smacks his lips. The three smile.
“Thank you,” Ruth says again.
“It was no trouble.”
Their place mats have a map of New York State printed in pale red ink. Niagara, Finger Lakes, Lady Liberty, the High Peaks, the racetrack at Saratoga, the Erie Canal.
“Never knew we had a state insect.” The waitress appears. “Pancakes?” Mr. Bell asks them. “Belgian waffles?”
Ruth nods.
“Two orders of waffles, please. Whipped cream.”
“I’ll have an egg sandwich with cheese,” Nat says.
The waitress takes note, sees the empty sugar shaker, and, leaving her pencil behind, disappears to refill the shaker.
Mr. Bell smiles again at Ruth. He uses the waitress’s pencil to doodle on his place mat. Ruth half imagines he’ll write R.S. + C.B. in a heart, the way he keeps smiling at her. Outside someone has potted decorative kale heads in Italianate concrete planters. Cars come and go in the parking lot.
“What’s that about?” Nat asks.
On the map of New York State, Mr. Bell has reproduced the same pattern they found in his sketchbook, connected points.
“Old habit. Something I like to draw.”
“But what is it?”
Mr. Bell lifts his brows twice. “Well.” He spins the map right side up to Nat and Ruth. He circles each point as he names them. “Scriba. Cambria. South Byron. Schenectady. Seneca Falls, go, Suffragettes. Bethlehem. Burlington. Mount Morris. Yorktown. Peekskill. And closer to home, Tomhannock and Lasher Creek. Meteorite landings in our fair state.”
Ruth is slightly disappointed.
“What about the lines between?”
“Ley lines,” Mr. Bell says. “That’s me trying to make some sense.”
“Of what?”
“Patterns, predictions.”
“Predicting what?”
“Where my mom went.”
They look at the map. “Where’d your mom go?”
“I don’t know. I lost her.”
“Why would your mom follow meteorites?”
“They used to be of interest to her.”
Mr. Bell studies the lines, his face pinched with figuring. “But I checked all those places already and didn’t find her.” He exhales, shaking his head. “So what I once read as the handiwork of God, now looks like a random mess.”
“I think it looks like Ruth’s scar,” Nat says.
Mr. Bell studies Ruth’s face. “My, yes.” He nods, smiles again. “Yes. I guess I can see that. Hmm. That’s odd.”
“Maybe Ruth is God.”
Mr. Bell winks. “Wouldn’t surprise me one bit.”
The waitress appears. She deposits their food, dropping a plate of hot waffles on top of the map and meteorites, and when her hands are once again empty, she notices that Mr. Bell has her pencil. She scowls, underpaid, full of furor. She reappropriates her forgotten item with a humph.
A week after the wedding, Nat and Ruth find an apartment in Troy above a veterinary hospital. They pay cash for six months’ rent. The first night there, they sleep half awake under coats. They have no sheets yet, just the mattress the last tenant left behind. Matthew 6:26: The birds of the air neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, yet Heavenly Father feeds them.
Ruth curls her head into the crook of Nat’s arm as one who’s bloodthirsty, a truth of twisted love. Fangs, claws, a matted tail. “Son,” she says into his elbow, pulling a hot wire through their hearts, though there’s been no adoption. The Father let Nat go for five hundred dollars cash, saying he’d deal with the State. The Father is disgusted. He wouldn’t even look at them. He wouldn’t give them a lift to town. He was furious because he’d had to return the cash Zeke had given him for Ruth.
“What about ‘Be fruitful and multiply’?” Ruth asked before she left.
“What about ‘Honor your Father’? I gave my consent so you could marry an upstanding member of our community, and you sneak off and marry someone else?”
Ruth kept Mr. Bell’s secret identity from the Father and the other kids. She didn’t want her problems to become Mr. Bell’s.
“I can find out who he is, Ruth. It would take me two seconds.”
“I know.” But she hoped he didn’t really care where she’d gone as long as she was gone.
Mr. Bell honked the horn twice and helped load what they had into the trunk of his car. After seventeen years, what Nat and Ruth had turned out to be very little outside of three plastic bags full of cash. All the children except Ceph came out to tell them goodbye. Raffaella put her flipper on the hood of Mr. Bell’s car. “Is he your husband?” she asked Ruth.
“Him?” Ruth acted shocked. “That would be weird.” Which wasn’t a lie.
Ruth slipped each child eighty dollars like a visiting grandma paying them off, expunging her guilt only slightly, the oldest girl walking away from the littler ones, as if being born a girl makes her responsible for everyone alive.
Nat and Ruth select new blankets and towels from the discount store. They shop as if they are the married couple. They even fill out a pharmacy-bought Last Will and Testament, leaving each other everything they own including a couple of shirts and a brand-new cheese grater. They buy groceries. It takes two hours to fill their cart the first time because so few things in the grocery store look like food. Ruth picks up a package of Twizzlers. “What is it?” she asks Nat. He shakes his head.
They tell people, “She is my sister, he is my brother,” because if they told people they were sisters, Nat would probably get beaten up. Nights when they are not working, they go downtown to be among other people. Ruth wears her new jeans. They find a restaurant or a park bench. Ruth sits on Nat’s lap, leaning into his chest, his hand between her thighs as a word wedged into the white space. Hard to read and not at all like a brother.
The other kids become phantoms. Love of Christ! is a bad dream Ruth had. Though at quiet times she misses things she’d never thought she’d miss: dipping candles, laundry, singing together, having something to do each day, Ceph, even Ceph.
Mr. Bell picks them up for work. He smiles at Ruth a bit longer, sometimes dazed as if watching fairies dance on a lily leaf. Ruth, his wife, is something he can’t believe.
“He won’t stop smiling at me,” she tells Nat.
“Yeah. What a jerk.” But he doesn’t mean it. They study Mr. Bell’s boots, his chin, his hair, as if these totems might explain where he came from, how he found them, and who he is.
The sun sets early now. Ruth does not enroll in public school as she was instructed to do. Instead she buys the newspaper every morning. She bakes a lot. Nat sometimes says, “I wish I were a poet,” but a week passes and the urge does too. Ruth builds new bird feeders.
Life in the apartment is quiet after the home. They buy a used couch, a Chesterfield according to the man at the Salvation Army. At night, after the doctors and techs have gone home, the dogs downstairs howl at being left alone.
In the day Nat and Ruth find people on their doorstep, most often a mother without her kids. The mothers sit on the curb, slumped over a pile of matted fur: an overweight German shepherd, a cat who’s lost its teeth, a mangy Newfoundland with flaking bald spots, a poodle with pus for eyes. The animals move in slow motion, looking off at something shiny beyond their owners’ shoulders, unaware. The mothers say goodbye. The mothers sob, stroking their pitiful creatures. “I’m so sorry,
baby. I’m so sorry,” or “Mamma loves you. You know that, right?”
Nat and Ruth toast the recently departed. “To Nellie.”
“To Blue. To Boo.”
A song from the ’80s comes on the radio and they dance. They think it is a new song, because to them it is.
It’s hard to find homemade goat’s milk yogurt in downtown Troy.
The landlord turns on the heat. That’s never happened before either. They live on the top floor. They are unaccustomed to warmth. Nat’s skin feels damp as if he’s melting.
“It is hot as hell.” Ruth opens a window and sticks her head outside. A man disappears into the dark on the sidewalk.
“Truly.” Nat joins her.
“We need some food.”
“Seven-Eleven?”
“Ten-four.” They try their best to be disciples of Mr. Bell.
By the convenience store beer coolers, there are a few soldiers from the Forty-Second Infantry and an old man wearing a party sombrero. He’s deposited an assortment of stuffed plastic bags by his side.
“Bud? Miller? Schlitz?” the soldiers want to know.
“Where’s the goddamn antiperspirant?” the sombrero asked. “How much are the bananas?”
Nat buys a bag of pretzels, thin mints, a Fresca, and a six-pack of beer. The cashier asks to see ID. “Sure,” Nat says, “sure,” and passes him his ID that clearly states he’s only seventeen years old. The cashier looks at it, hands it back, and sells Nat the beer anyway.
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