Authors: Leni Zumas
Red Clocks (24 page)
“Doctor,” says the lemon-mouthed prosecutor, “before we adjourned yesterday you said Dolores Fivey suffered a grade-three mild traumatic brain injury as the result of falling down a flight of stairs of twelve vertical feet, which—”
“Objection,” says Gin Percival’s lawyer, bald and round. “The doctor has already testified to these details;
I can’t imagine why we need to hear them again.”
“Withdrawn. Can you please tell the court the results of a tox screen administered to Mrs. Fivey shortly after her arrival at Umpqua General Hospital?”
“Sure can,” says the doctor. “We found alcohol and colarozam in her system.”
“As you know, terminating a pregnancy is a felony.”
Her clothes are too tight. The room is too hot.
A plastic bucket
of another girl’s stuff
.
“Objection.”
“Can cause dizziness and falling.”
“When mixed with alcohol.”
“When mixed with lemon, lavender, fenugreek, and elderflower oil.”
“A felony.”
“Seeking a termination.”
“A felony.”
She needs to find a bathroom—
“Dizzy, disoriented, prone to stumbling.”
“When Dolores Fivey was admitted.”
“Standard procedure.”
Websites say nausea is only first trimester—
“And what were the results of.”
“Women of childbearing age.”
The daughter needs a bathroom. Can’t think. Too hot.
Colarozam.
A plastic bucket.
The shunning of a boar.
Claimed to believe.
When mixed with alcohol.
A boar shun.
So tight this hoodie this room too hot—
Ash’s mocha breath on her cheek: “Girl, are you okay?”
“What.”
“You’re sweating like a freak. Let’s get some water.”
“Bathroom.”
“Hush,” says Ash, and shoves her down the slippery bench toward the door.
Mínervudottír saw a narwhal come to breathe at one of the holes cut in the ice near the ship, for quick water in case a fire broke out. He was soon joined by others, their helical tusks spearing the air. The sailors watched the fire holes too and would shout “Unicorn!” when a whale appeared.
From narwhals she moves to notes on the Greely Expedition. In August of 1881 the American explorer Adolphus Greely and his team of twenty-five men and forty-two dogs arrived at Lady Franklin Bay, west of Greenland. They were to gather astronomical and magnetic data from the Arctic Circle and to attain a new “Farthest North” record.
The second summer, the expedition waited on the
supply ship that was scheduled to bring food and letters. It never appeared. (
Neptune
had been blocked by ice.)
The third summer: no ship. (
Proteus
had been crushed by ice.)
Between 1882 and 1884, several vessels went in search of Greely and his crew—at first to restock them, then to save them.
Each time she types the word “ice,” the biographer thinks
trial
.
Boots. Parka. Gloves. Rain has
rinsed the frost from her windshield. Instead of driving down the hill toward school, she drives up: toward the cliff road and highway, the county seat. If Fivey tries to fire her, she’ll hire Edward to contest it.
She has been in a courtroom twice before, in Minnesota, for Archie’s possession charges. “How can you tell when a lawyer’s lying?” he turned to whisper. “When he opens his mouth,”
she said, dismayed by how obvious the joke was.
Fiveys at the front; Cotter from the P.O. behind them; Susan in a middle row; Mattie and Ash at the very back. Mattie looks haggard and dazed. Having never needed to terminate a pregnancy, the biographer doesn’t know how long it takes to recover. A hard little glass splinter in her hopes the girl is miserable.
The new laws turn the girl into a
criminal, Gin Percival into a criminal, the biographer herself—had she asked for Mattie’s baby, forged its birth certificate—into a criminal.
If not for her comparing mind and covetous heart, the biographer could feel compassion for her fellow criminals.
Instead she feels a splinter of glass.
In the witness box Gin Percival sits absolutely still. Expression flat as a knife.
P
ROSECUTOR:
Ms.
Percival, on Monday we heard sworn testimony from Dolores Fivey that you caused significant injuries to her. That you gave her a powerful drug that you claimed would terminate her pregnancy but which resulted in her falling down a flight of stairs and—
E
DWARD:
Objection. Is there a
question
hidden in there?
P
ROSECUTOR:
Withdrawn. Did you administer a mixture of colarozam, fenugreek, lavender,
lemon, and elderflower oil to Dolores Fivey?
G
IN:
No.
P
ROSECUTOR:
I’ll remind you that you are under oath, Ms. Percival. A bottle containing traces of those ingredients was found in Mrs. Fivey’s home, with your fingerprints all over it.
G
IN:
That was my bottle. Oil for scars. Only the last four things. Not the first thing.
P
ROSECUTOR:
Sorry, Ms. Percival, you’re not making much sense.
E
DWARD:
Objection.
J
UDGE:
Sustained.
P
ROSECUTOR:
Ms. Percival, tell me: are you a witch?
E
DWARD:
Objection!
P
ROSECUTOR:
It’s a reasonable question, Your Honor. Goes to the defendant’s proficiency with herbal medicines and to her state of mind. If she self-identifies, even if delusionally, as a health-care provider—
J
UDGE:
I will allow it.
P
ROSECUTOR:
Are you a witch?
G
IN:
[Silent]
P
ROSECUTOR:
How long have you identified as a witch?
G
IN:
[Silent]
J
UDGE:
The defendant will answer.
G
IN:
If you knew about the
real
powers, if you knew, you’d be—
E
DWARD:
Your Honor, I request a short recess.
P
ROSECUTOR:
Your Honor, I demand to finish my line of questioning.
J
UDGE:
“Demand”? You are in no position to demand anything here, Ms. Checkley. We will adjourn for thirty minutes.
Accused
witches in the seventeenth century were dunked in rivers or ponds. The innocent drowned. The guilty floated, surviving to be tortured or killed some other way.
This isn’t 1693!
the biographer wants to yell.
She shakes her head.
Don’t just shake your head.
While she hid out in Newville, they closed the clinics and defunded Planned Parenthood and amended the Constitution. She watched on her
computer screen.
Don’t just sit there watching.
While she hid out in her book, imagining the nineteenth-century deaths of Nordic pilot whales, twelve sperm whales perished, for reasons unknown, on the Oregon coast.
She looks for Mattie, but she and Ash and their coats are gone.
“Hey, Ro,” calls Susan from the aisle.
“Hi,” says the biographer, engrossed in her ancient flip phone, which can’t
even go online. She doesn’t want to talk to Susan the non-criminal, the good adult.
Out in the marble-floored hallway she sees Mattie come out of the women’s bathroom and head for the exit.
“Wait!” The biographer jogs after her.
Mattie doesn’t stop. “Ash is getting the car.”
Snow is flurrying down. On the courthouse steps they stand blinking at the little wet stars.
“How are you feeling?”
says the biographer. “How was the procedure?”
The girl pulls on blue mittens. “I have to go.”
“Wait, okay? I’m not going to tell anyone. Pretend I don’t work at school.”
“You do work at school.”
“Did you go to Vancouver?”
Mattie’s lips are purplish in the snow light. Her eyes are lake-green. “Didn’t happen.”
“Why not?”
“The Pink Wall.”
You mean
—The biographer gleams inside. “But why—did
they not arrest you?”
“One was going to. Then I thought another one was about to, like, sexually assault me in exchange for letting me go. But he actually just let me go.”
The baby is not gone?
The splinter is thrilled.
“Were you scared?”
Mattie wipes snow from her upper lip. “Yeah. But honestly?” Inhales a shredded breath. “I’m more scared now.”
I will take the baby on a train to Alaska.
Row a boat with the baby to the Gunakadeit Light.
Ask her.
“Did they notify your parents?”
“No.” A stricken look. “And you won’t either, right?”
“Scout’s honor.”
“I better go—there’s Ash.”
Ask her now.
But the biographer is halted, held mute.
She pats Mattie’s shoulder.
The baby will see the black ocean flecked with silver.
I will eat dinner with the baby every night.
FUCKING. ASK.
HER.
Her mouth can’t make those words.
“Well, if you need anything, let me know?”
“Thanks, miss.”
The girl descends the steps, blue scarf rippling behind; and the biographer sees blue-swaddled babies shot from cannons across the Canadian border, then tossed back, still wrapped and cooing, onto American soil.
The significance of Eivør Mínervudottír’s research was
Mínervudottír was important because
Was she important?
From the Latin: to be of consequence; weigh. To carry in, to bring in.
She brought in:
- Refusal to submit to cottage life
- Measurements of ice chlorides and Arctic sea temperatures
- Metric analyses of ice responses to wind speed and tide speed
- A theory of refreezing predictors
in sea-ice leads, invaluable for navigating ice-choked waters
And thus helped to bring in:
- Shipping and trade through the Northeast Passage, once considered impenetrable
- More ways for white pirates to steal from the not-white, the not-rich, or the not-human
- Oil, gas, and mineral drilling in the Arctic
- The shrinking of the ice
Mínervudottír may have felt free; but she was a cog in a land-snatching,
resource-sucking, climate-fucking imperialist machine.
Wasn’t she?
Was she?
I DON’T KNOW
WHAT I AM
EVEN SAYING
ABOUT THIS PERSON THERE IS NOT
A SINGLE KNOWN PHOTOGRAPH OF
or why I couldn’t bring myself to ask for
my lips aren’t working
Labiaplasty surgeons earn up to $250,000 per month.
A little animal—possum? porcupine?—tries to cross the cliff road.
Sooty, burnt, charred to rubber.
Shivering, trying to cross.
Already so dead.
After federal and state taxes, social security, retirement, and health insurance, Didier brings home $2,573 per month. They don’t have rent or mortgage payments, but it’s still not enough.
Clap, clap,
say the labia.
If the wife were a better budgeter, it would be enough. If she were more organized.
The wife has been letting the house “go.”
And letting herself “go.”
We’ll go if you let us.
Wife and house run away together, hand in door. Hand in dormer window.
I’d take lonely over beaten to a paste.
She pictures Bryan’s cousin, whoever she is, in a shack in the woods, hurled
against a moldy particleboard wall. The husband is long bearded, wild haired. He rarely comes out of the woods or lets his wife come out. They drive to town once a month for supplies. On these trips Bryan’s cousin wears sunglasses and a wide-brimmed hat.
Why does Bryan stand by and let it happen? Shouldn’t he run into those woods and find the shack and put a stop to the beatings? Shouldn’t he
and the mother he visits in La Jolla, if they care so much, call the police?
Can’t think of Bryan without broiling with shame.
“Mommy.”
“Yes, sprite?”
“Cold,” he says, her dear boy who isn’t interested in saying much, who is so different from his chattery sister.
“Let’s go put on a sweater,” hoisting him onto her hip.
After they separate, will Didier buy pot gumdrops and leave them out on
the coffee table for the children to find?
You need to tell him.
Upstairs, she finds a blue wool pullover.
Can pot be overdosed on?
“No!” shouts John.
“I forgot, you hate this one—sorry.” She pulls off the blue wool and picks a red cotton, less itchy, from the drawer.
Will he remember to give them their vitamin D?
Tell him.
Downstairs the wife sits at the dining room table with her eyes
closed.
“Momplee!”
“Don’t yell, Bex.”
“Then pay attention.”
“What?”
“I
said,
what will you get Daddy for Valentine’s Day?”
“That’s over a month away.”
“I know but I already know which cards I’m giving to people. The turtle ones, remember, that we saw?”
“Well, I’m not going to get Daddy anything.”
“Why?”
“It’s not a holiday we celebrate.”
“But it’s the day of love.”
“Not for us,” says
the wife.
“Do you love Daddy?”
“Of course I do, Bex.”
“Then why don’t you celebrate it?”
“Because it’s silly.”
“Oh.” The girl looks at her interlaced fingers and is thinking of the turtle cards, signed and sealed in small white envelopes, one for each classmate.
“I meant for grown-ups,” adds the wife. “Not for kids—it’s great for kids.”
“Okay,” says Bex, wandering off.
