Red Clocks (18 page)

“Mmh. I don’t eat those.” He pulls out a bottle of hand sanitizer and squirts a palmful. “So
your friend Cotter’s been checking on the animals and says everyone is fine.”

“Did he make sure the goats aren’t going up to the trail?”

The lawyer nods. Scratches the back of his neck. “So I’m afraid I have some tough news.”

Mattie Matilda?

Went to a term house—
died?

“The prosecutor’s office has appended a charge,” says the lawyer.

“Appended?”

“Added. They’re bringing a new charge against
you.”

“What charge?”

“Conspiracy to commit murder.”

Silver cold burn in her belly.

“Because fertilized eggs are now classified as persons,” he says, “intentionally destroying an embryo or fetus constitutes second-degree murder. Or, if you’re in Oregon, ‘murder’ rather than ‘aggravated murder.’”

“What did the music teacher tell you?”

“Who?”

“The—”

“Stop talking,” he barks.

She looks at
him sidelong.

“Ms. Percival, it is much better if you don’t tell me whatever you were about to tell me. Understood? The charge is being added by Dolores Fivey’s attorney. Mrs. Fivey claims you consented to terminate a pregnancy of hers. Any truth to that?”

“No.”

“All right, good.” He fusses in his briefcase for a notepad and pen. “Did she ever mention being pregnant? Or that she was seeking
an abortion?”

That clock never had a kernel in it.

“Lola’s lying,” says the mender.

“Why would she lie?”

“Get a doctor to look at her. Womb’s been silent.”

The lawyer looks up from his pad. “Not a talkative womb?”

He is helping her when she has no money to pay him, so she fakes a laugh. “She was never pregnant.”

“Well, she can testify that she
believed
she was.” He reaches under his suit
sleeve to rub a forearm, then applies more hand sanitizer. “Per our last conversation, I haven’t been able to find any evidence that implicates Mr. Fivey in domestic violence. No hospital records, no police reports, no concerned friends or doctors. Zero.”

“But he snapped her finger bone,” she says, “and burned her arm and punched her in the jaw.”

“Without any corroborating evidence, we can’t
present this information in court.”

I am descended from a pirate. From a pirate. I am—

“Ms. Percival, I want you to understand that conspiracy to commit murder carries a mandatory minimum prison term of ninety months.”

Seven years, six months.

“And that’s the
minimum
. They could add more at sentencing.”

“But I didn’t,” she says.

“I believe you,” says the lawyer. “And I’m going to make the
jury believe you. But we need to go over every single detail of your acquaintance with Mrs. Fivey.”

He wants to know what Lola paid for the scar treatments. If the prosecution can prove that money or goods changed hands, then the jury might plausibly leap to believing that the money or goods were prepayment for a termination. By accepting the compensation, the mender conspired to commit murder.

“This is the narrative they’ll build for the jury,” says the lawyer. “We need to hack away at it. Anything that can throw this narrative into doubt, we’ll use.”

“I can’t remember,” says the mender. Telling about the sex would make it worse. The world’s oldest method of payment.

In seven years and six months the chickens and goats will be dead, Malky will have forgotten her, and the powderpost
beetles will have eaten the roof clean off.

The high school auditorium, muggy and tinseled.

“All of the other reindeer. Used to laugh and call him names.”

“Santa?” asks John.

“Soon.”

“Santa doesn’t
come
to holiday assembly,” corrects Bex, hell-bent on accuracy.

Didier, on the other side of John: “Pipe down,
chouchous
.”

The wife glances around for Bryan. Pauses at the silver-sequined breasts of Dolores Fivey, which seem smaller,
like the rest of her, shrunk down in those long weeks at the hospital. Not so sixy anymore. Penny, yawning. Pete, checking his phone. Ro, sagged down in her seat, looking enraged.

“As they shouted out with glee, ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, you’ll go down in history!’”

Applause, bowing, then Bryan strides onstage in a Grinch-green sports jacket. She can’t see his dimple from here.

“Thank
you, choir!” he booms. More applause. “And thanks to all of you for joining us at our, ah, seasonal celebration.”

Didier leans over John to whisper: “That man is dumb as a melon in a sock.”

“May everyone’s holidays be merry and bright,” says Bryan. Where will he be having Christmas dinner? He must eat like a shire horse, big as he is.

Outside the auditorium she stands with Didier and Pete,
postponing the moment when she must snap the kids into their seats, drive back up the hill, unbuckle them, rinse apples, spread almond butter onto whole-grain bread, pour cups of milk from cows who eat wild grasses only.

Pete: “That record didn’t come out until 1981.”

Didier: “Excuse me, but it was 1980, exactly two months after he hanged himself.”

Yet he can’t remember to give the kids their
fluoride supplement.

“And exactly a hundred years,” adds the wife, “after our house was built.”

“I bet Chinese laborers hammered every nail in it,” says Pete, “for criminally low wages. My people got
fucked
in Oregon. Railroad workers especially, but also the miners. Ever heard of the Hells Canyon Massacre?”

“No,” says the wife.

“Well, you should look it up.”

Pete’s scorn for her is always
just barely concealed. Pampered white lady who doesn’t have a job, lives on family property—what does she
do
all day? Whereas Didier regales him with stories of his trasherjack childhood in Montreal public housing and is revered.

Her phone vibrates: an unknown number. She prepares her telemarketer line:
Remove me from your call list immediately.

“Susan MacInnes?” The name she had for thirty
years. “It’s Edward Tilghman. From law school?”

“Of course, Edward—I remember.”

“Well, I should hope so.” He hasn’t lost his primness, or his nasal congestion. Book-smart and life-dumb Edward.

“How are you?”

“Tolerable,” says Edward. “But here’s the thing: I’m in your village.”

She looks around, as though he might be watching from the auditorium steps.

“I’m representing a client in the area,
and I wanted you to know I’m in town. It would be somewhat awkward if we just bumped into each other.”

“Do you have a place to stay?” she says.

Edward would be a clean houseguest but a finicky one; he’d want extra blankets and would remark on the drafts, the dripping taps.

“The Narwhal,” he says.

“Well, you’re more than welcome to—”

“Thank you. I’m already ensconced.”

She has followed his
career, a little. He was an excellent student, could have gotten hired in a minute at a white-shoe firm. But he works at the public defender’s office in Salem. Must earn practically nothing.

“You should come for dinner one of these nights.”

When he sees her he’ll think
She’s blown up a bit. Used to be a slender thing, and now—although it happens,
he’ll think,
after they reproduce
.
Fat hardens.

“Mmh. That’s a thought.” That was one of his trademarks, she recalls: soft grunting.

There have been reports of bedbugs at the Narwhal.

“So …?” but she realizes he has hung up.

Didier bumps his shoulder against hers. “Who that?”

“Guy from law school.”

“Not Chad the Impaler, I hope.”

“Just a nerd I worked on the law review with.”

True to form, her husband asks nothing further.

John whimpers,
yanking on her hand. She didn’t remember to bring the porcupine book or the bag of grapes. And there are streaks of her own feces in the upstairs toilet. She’s grown afraid of the toilet brush, damp and rusted in its cup.

Bryan is surrounded by eager, jostling boys; they must be his players. Isn’t the season over?—but of course they wouldn’t stop adoring him when the season ends.

Ro, too, is
thronged by students. She has wiped the rage off her face and is gesturing theatrically, making them laugh. They love her—and why not? She’s a good person. The wife would like to be a good person, a person who’ll be happy if Ro gets pregnant or adopts a baby, who will not hope that she doesn’t.

When Ro sees the wife’s children, is she jealous? What if she never conceives? Can’t adopt? What will
be her life’s pull light then? When the wife goes down a street, John in the stroller and Bex holding her hand, purpose is written all over them. These little animals were hatched by the wife, are being fed and cleaned and sheltered and loved by the wife, on their way to becoming persons in their own right. The wife
made persons
. No need to otherwise justify what she is doing on the planet.

Huge brown eyes, sunlit hair, perfect little chins.
All small children are cute. You know that, right?
—D.’s reliable smashing of her happiness. Okay, yes, kids are built adorable so they won’t be abandoned to die before they can survive on their own; but it is also true that some kids are more adorable than others.
Jambon sur les yeux,
Didier likes to say. You’ve got ham over your eyes.

Lifting,
settling, buckling.

Specks of rain on the windshield.

Soon, the sea.

“Starving!” calls Bex.

“Almost home,” says the wife.

Almost to the sharpest bend, whose guardrail is measly. Hands off the wheel. They would plow through the branches, fly past the rocks, tear open the water.

The newspapers tomorrow:
MOTHER AND CHILDREN PERISH IN CLIFF TRAGEDY
.

“Momplee,” says Bex, “do reindeer sleep?”

As they approach the bend, she eases her foot off the accelerator.

Didier was once jealous of Chad, the third-year student she’d gone out with a few times before meeting her husband.

If she were ever to tell him
I slept with Bryan,
would he spring into action, agree to counseling, fight to get her back? Or would he say, without looking up from the screen,
Congratulations
?

She is too chickenshit
to leave her marriage.

She wants Didier to leave it first.

Behind the Dumpsters she lights her first cigarette of the day, which is normally the best one but they haven’t been tasting right lately. Soft chemical bloom on the roof of her mouth.

Why do some walruses in Washington, DC, who’ve never met the daughter care what she does with the clump? They don’t seem bothered that baby wolves are shot to death from helicopters. Those babies were
already breathing on their own, running and sleeping and eating on their own, whereas the clump is not even a baby yet. Couldn’t survive two seconds outside the daughter.

The walruses are to blame for Yasmine.

Who sang at church.

Whose church was African Methodist Episcopal. Whenever the daughter went to services with the Salters after sleepovers, she felt strange.

Yasmine said: “Well, Matts,
I feel strange all the time.”

Ignorant white girl.

It starts to rain. The daughter lights a second cigarette and decides to skip math, even if it means annoying Mr. Xiao, whom she does not want to annoy and who’ll say, next time he sees her,
What the hell, Quarles?
Nouri Withers will be in math, and who needs a glimpse of that mess. She closes her eyes, sucking, rain pittering on her lashes.

“Trying to get cancer?” Ro/Miss is standing right in front of her.

“No.” The daughter grinds the cigarette under her boot.

“Pick that up, please.”

The daughter tucks it into her peacoat pocket to avoid the inelegance of walking over to the Dumpster and struggling to lift its crusty lid. Her peacoat is going to reek of dead cigarette.

“Tell me what’s going on, Mattie.”

“Nothing.”

“You’ve never
gotten a B minus on a quiz before.”

“I studied the wrong chapter.”

“Are you still upset about the whales?”

The daughter spits out a laugh. Looks across the soccer field at the jagged evergreens, the sky darkening behind them.

“You can talk to me, you know. I’ll help if I can.”

“You can’t,” says the daughter.

“Try me,” says Ro/Miss.

I’m too scared to go to Canada because of the Pink Wall
but the witch went to jail and I need a plan and I don’t have a plan and what would you do if you were me?

But what if it’s in her teaching contract—mandatory reporting of child abuse and, in her case, child murder?

The daughter is not a murderer.

They’re only cells, multiplying.

No face yet. No dreams or opinions.

You didn’t have a face once either.

Ro/Miss reports her, and Principal Fivey
kicks her out of Central Coast Regional.

Math Academy not thrilled about that.

Colleges not thrilled about that.

Mom and Dad least thrilled of all.

“I have class in a minute,” she says, “and Mr. Xiao said he’s going to rip the next person who’s late a new turd cutter.”