Red Clocks (16 page)

On Parent Conference Day the
teacher said, “But where’s your mother?” and the mender said, “She took a ship.”

But really she left in a taxi, paid for with cash stolen from the till at Goody Hallett’s. And the mender, eight years old, waited by the hour. The day. The winter. Then Temple drove them to Salem and got legal guardianship.

Eight winters ago she found Temple’s body flopped at the base of a silver fir, and will
never be sure of the reason. Heart attack? Stroke? Out to gather miner’s lettuce, her aunt had been gone so long the mender started to worry. Went looking. There she was. Her skin was bluish, but otherwise she seemed asleep.

Goody Hallett’s was closed by then, because not enough tourists were buying candles and tarot packs. Temple had sold the building. They had moved from the apartment above
the shop to a cabin in the forest, and Temple had told the mender, who since leaving high school had kept to herself in the library and on the cliffs: “Time for you to get to work.”

The mender did not want anyone taking the body away. She couldn’t give her aunt to a funeral home to be gutted and waxed; and the ground was hard; and Temple had never liked fire. So the mender clipped off her nails
and her hair and her lashes, shaved the skin from each fingertip, and put her body in the chest freezer, under salmon and ice.

Last winter the mender turned thirty-two: two times sixteen (the age of the girl come February) and half of sixty-four. Sixty-four is the number of demons in the
Dictionnaire Infernal
. Of squares on a chessboard. Sixty-four is the square of eight, which is the number
of regeneration and resurrection: beginning again, again.

How can she sleep when she keeps seeing the girl’s face?

She used to go months, years, not thinking about it. Then something (the smell of cherries, the word “soon”) would remind her. Then she would forget again, let the little fish slip away. But after seeing that face outside the library, she couldn’t stop thinking. Wondering if she
really was.
Are you?

She is.

“Malky, come here.”

She cuts a piece from Cotter’s loaf, offers the first bite to the cat. She presses a drop of black spruce oil to the corner of the ball of her right foot.

And sleeps.

The wood is knocking, Malky’s hissing, and every chicken in the family is squawking its throat off. She stands, stuporish. Clears her throat. Farts.

Her door is knocking. Malky
goes from hiss to howl.

“Quiet, mo,” toeing him away from the threshold.

Men in blue uniforms. A black haired, a blond.

“What,” she says.

The black haired says, “I’m Officer Withers and this is Officer Smith. Are you Gin Percival?”

Did they see her watching? Will she be accused of stalking? Did the girl, on meeting her, remember seeing her in the trees by the school and tell her parents?

She only wanted to look at her face. Hear her voice. See how she turned out.

“Gin Percival,” says the black haired, “I’m placing you under arrest for medical malpractice.”

The mender gapes.

“Does she not speak English?” says the blond.

The black haired clears his throat. “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right
to speak to an attorney and to have an attorney present during questioning. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you. Do you understand these rights as they have been read to you?”

She waits on a bench near the desk of the blond policeman. They have given her a package of elf crackers, water in a wax cup.

Who will pour grain for Pinka and Hans? Carry the halt hen to shelter?
Set out fish for Malky? And what if they open—

“I want to call someone,” says the mender.

“You already had your call,” says the blond policeman.

“No, I didn’t.”

He yells over his shoulder, “Jack, did this one get a phone call?”

“I have no idea,” someone the mender can’t see yells back.

“Go ahead, I guess,” says the blond.

She stands at the desk with her fingers on the plastic receiver.

“Go ahead, ma’am.”

She hasn’t used a phone since Temple was alive.

“I forgot the number,” she says.

How many salmons has she thawed recently? How many are still in the freezer? How many bags of ice?

“All your contacts are on your cell, am I right?” says the policeman. “Common predicament.”

“I need the number for the P.O.”

“The one in Newville?”

She smiles, because a nod would shake the tears
out of her eyes and down her face.

Walks the children down Lupatia Street, killing time. The wind is fast and blue and sharp with late November.

In front of Cone Wolf, she thinks of Bryan’s dimple.

Bryan’s thighs.

The way he looked at her.

“Morning, Susan!” says the passing librarian.

“Morning.”

Goody Hallett’s is gone, Snippity Doo Dah is new, but otherwise the shops and pub and library and church have sat here,
in the salt wind, for decades.

Is the wife going to die in Newville?

As they cross Lupatia, a bicycle whips past so close her arm hairs crackle.

“Watch the fuck out!” yells the rider, slowing and turning to look at the wife. “It’s bad enough you chose to procreate on a dying planet.”

“Dick,” she calls after him.

Admittedly she was not in the crosswalk.

Admittedly she has added more people
to this steaming pile.

Warm, silky new smell of Bex’s neck.

Her rapturous mouth on the wife’s nipple to bring down the milk tingling in the ducts.

How John slept on her chest with measureless trust.

This planet may be choking to death, bleeding from every hole, but still she would choose them, every time.

“Momplee, is there school tomorrow?”

“Yes, sweetpea.” She signals, brakes, turns off
the paved road.

“Why?”

“Because tomorrow’s Monday.”

Up the hill beneath a waving roof of red alder and madrone.

You and I should have coffee sometime.

They could meet in Wenport. For coffee.

She used to pass through Wenport on those endless drives to get Bex to nap—infant Bex who never wanted to close her eyes—when Didier was teaching and the wife didn’t know how to make her baby fall asleep.

The air in Wenport stinks like eggs, from the pulp mill.

She and Bryan could have sex in the backseat of this car.

Maybe not in the backseat; Bryan’s too big.

A motel. Pay in cash.

The trees give way to an open slope, patchy with salt grass and lavender. The dirt driveway. The house.

“We’re home, baby bones!” Bex tells John, who will be scarred for life because the wife told him to shut the
fuck up. John, whom she’d give her own life not to scar.

Unbuckle, untangle, lift, set down.

She drops the car keys on the hall table. Her husband is prostrate on the living-room couch.

“Your shift now,” she says. “I’m going for a walk.”

“What about lunch?”

“I ate with the kids in town.”

“But I haven’t eaten.”

“So—eat.”

“I was waiting for you,” he says. “There’s nothing in the house.”

“Untrue.”

“What am I supposed to have, then?”

The wife starts for the kitchen, then stops. “Actually, it’s not my job to figure out what you’re having for lunch.”

“Could you at least make a suggestion? There’s like absolutely
rien
in the fridge.”

“I suggest you put the kids back in the car, drive somewhere, and buy something.”

“I’m exhausted,” he says.

The wife kicks off her flats and puts
on sneakers, yanks the laces. The clock has started on her alone time.

“Daddy, I’ll cook you a cake if you want.”

“I’d love a
space
cake.”

“What are the ingredients of that?” says Bex.

Didier throws the wife the look, polished by years of use, that casts her as a prudish shrew and him as a guilty but unrepentant fourteen-year-old. “On second thought, Bex, would you fix me a sammie? Butter
and brown sugar?”

“One sammie, upcoming!” The girl hops away.

“See you in an hour and fifty-seven minutes,” says the wife.

Walks down the hill into the hushed green gloom.

Warmer in the woods than in the house. If Didier made more money, they could afford to renovate the drafty mess, but he never will, so they won’t.

Why don’t
you
make some money, then?
screams Ro.

Why don’t you go back
to law school?
screams the wife’s younger self.

She shouldn’t have dropped out.

Of course she should have.

What if she hadn’t?

Her program wasn’t top tier, but it was respectable. Two years in, she went drinking with a friend from her cohort. At last call the friend said she knew an all-night doughnut shop.

If the friend had not known the doughnut shop, or if the friend had been tired, or
if the friend had never existed, the wife would have finished the program and sat for the bar and been hired by a firm and maybe, yes, still have had time to make children.

But maybe not. And anyway, those children, if she’d had time to make them, would not be Bex and John.

This fact outlasts all other facts.

The wife steps on a hand, soft and rubbery.

A dead hand on the floor of the woods.

A hand torn from its owner, left loose.

A dead hand is also a mushroom.

A black plastic bag is also an animal.

You can’t believe your eyes.

She convinced herself at the time it was a bag because she didn’t want it to be a writhing animal.

I wanted to help it, but it was already dead.

How do you help a cinder, half-alive?

Run over it fast to stop the burning.

She could stop being married
to Didier.

Put John in daycare and finish the law degree.

With what money?

Put John in daycare and get a job at Cone Wolf.

Or at Central Coast Regional, where someone with a BA and no experience can teach history, and someone with a glorified-community-college degree and no experience can teach French.

She could stop being Didier’s wife.

In therapy the kids will blame her for their broken
childhoods and the maladaptive coping mechanisms that have ruined their adulthoods.

Their therapists will say,
Do you think you can ever forgive her?

Drives for two hours to give the clinic her blood. They will measure its HCG levels and call with the results. She did not test at home beforehand, as she typically does. She wants to make everything about this last-ever pregnancy test different, so that its result can be different too.

If this cycle fails, she isn’t having a biological child.

To adopt from China, your body-mass
index must be under 35, your annual household income over eighty thousand. Dollars.

To adopt from Russia, your annual household income must be at least a hundred thousand. Dollars.

To adopt from the United States—as of January 15—you must be married.

Are you married, miss?

When her first caseworker at the adoption agency said “You do realize, I hope, that a child is not a replacement for a
romantic partner?” the biographer almost walked out of the interview. She did not walk out, because she wanted to get onto their wait-list. That night she threw a potted cactus against her refrigerator.

The last time she had sex was almost two years ago, with Jupiter from meditation group. “Your cunt smells yummy,” he said, extending the first syllable of “yummy” into a ghastly warble. Wiped
semen from the dark swirls of his belly hair and said, “You sure you’re not getting attached?”

“Scout’s honor,” said the biographer.

“Not that attachment is always a bad thing,” said Jupiter, “but I don’t really see us having that. I think we connect well sexually and intellectually, but not emotionally or spiritually.”

“I’m getting a Klondike bar,” said the biographer, rolling off the bed.
“Want one?”

“Unless you’re secretly using me for
this
.” He held up five glistening fingers. “Are you having a
Torschlusspanik
moment?”

“I do not speak German.”

“‘Gate-closing panic.’ The fear of diminishing opportunities as one ages. Like when women worry about getting too old to—”

“Do you want a Klondike bar or not?”

“Not,” said Jupiter, and she could feel him wondering,
now that he thought
about it,
if it might be true. Afraid of withering on her own vine, had she decided to steal his vegan cum?

She bit hard into the frozen chocolate, which sparkled along her tooth nerves, and he said: “Those things are so bad for you.”

Though she mentions no sex in her notebooks, it’s possible that Eivør Mínervudottír slept with lots of men. Lots of women. Who can say what she got up to with
the other maids in Aberdeen, or with her shipmates on ocean voyages?