Red Clocks

by Leni Zumas

  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.

  The ice that would chase me is called by the Inupiat ivu and by the Europeans “ice shove,” and it never gives warning. It gallops to shore from the outer sea, a heave of water caught and stropped into an iron tidal wave. But I would be faster than ivu. I would change into a snow deer and outrun it.

  THE WIFE

  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 th
e 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?

  First a mangler in the shipyard laundry, then a maid in the house of the shipyard director. Brewed tea for the butler and cook, learned English, overheard the lessons given to the director’s oldest son. Jars of creatures to pin and dissect. A volcano built of papier-mâché. Maritime navigation demonstrated with an astrolabe.

  The polar explorer asked to sit in the schoolroom with them.

  The young tutor agreed and wanted nothing in return.

  The young tutor agreed but wanted half her monthly pay in return.

  The young tutor agreed but wanted sex in return.

  The young tutor, Harry Rattray, agreed if she promised to walk with him on Sundays through the purple crocus in Aberdeen’s newly opened Victoria Park.

  THE BIOGRAPHER

  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?

  Also possible: she spent her whole life (apart from or including the eighteen-month marriage) without sex. Out of necessity. Out of choice.

  But how many people have sailed to the Arctic Circle, slept in tents bolted to ice floes, watched a man’s skin peel off from eating the toxic liver of a polar bear?

  In the clinic waiting room, under the vexing tinkle of the adult-contemporary station, the biographer does a pump of hand sanitizer. The news murmurs on a wall-mounted flat-screen and a few faces watch it and nobody talks.

  “What are you in for today?”

  She looks up: a blond-pigtailed woman is smiling from the chair opposite. “A pregnancy test.”

  “Wow! So this could be it!”

  “Unlikely,” says the biographer. But, yes, in fact, it could be. If this cycle works, the eleventh-hour victory will be a story to tell the baby. You showed up just in time. She notes that the woman wears a simple band, no rocky engagement ring. “What about you?”

  “Day nine check,” says the woman. “This is my second cycle. My hubby says we should adopt, but I—I don’t know. It’s—” Eyes fill, shimmer.

  The word “hubby” cancels out the lack of a diamond.

  “At least you can adopt,” says the biographer, louder than she meant to.

  The woman nods, unperturbed. Maybe she’s never heard of Every Child Needs Two; or forgot about it promptly after hearing it, because the law did not apply to her.

  Compare and despair.

  The biographer unbuttons her sleeve, hoists it, makes a fist. Nurse Crabby swabs the bruised skin. Archie was proud of his track marks and would neglect on purpose to wear long sleeves.

  The nurse has trouble, as usual, finding a vein. “They’re way buried.”

  “The one closer to the elbow usually works better—?”

  “First let’s see what we can get over here.”

  The biographer’s car crests the cliff and the ocean spreads below. Vast dark luminous perilous sea, floors white with sailors’ bones, tides stronger than any human effort. Sea stacks sleep like tiny mountains in the waves. She loves the sheer fact of how many millions of creatures the water holds—microscopic and gargantuan, alive and long dead.

  In eyeshot of such a sea, one can pretend things are fine. Notice only the cares within reach. Coyotes on Lupatia Street. Fund-raising for lighthouse repairs. It’s why the biographer liked this country of pointed firs, at first: how easily here she could forget the hurtling world. She could almost stop seeing the blue lips of her brother, the gray jaw of her mother in the hospital bed.

  While the biographer was hiding out in a rainy Arcadia, they closed the women’s health clinics that couldn’t afford mandated renovations.

  They prohibited second-trimester abortions.

  They required women to wait ten days before the procedure and to complete a lengthy online tutorial on fetal pain thresholds and celebrities whose mothers had planned to abort them.

  They started talking about this thing called the Personhood Amendment, which for years had been a fringe idea, a farce.

  At her kitchen table she eats a bowl of pineapple chunks.

  Sips water.

  Waits for the call.

  When Congress proposed the Twenty-Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and it was sent to the states for a vote, the biographer wrote emails to her representatives. Marched in protests in Salem and Portland. Donated to Planned Parenthood. But she wasn’t all that worried. It had to be political theater, she thought, a flexing of muscle by the conservative-controlled House and Senate in league with a fetus-loving new president.

  Thirty-nine states voted to ratify. A three-quarters majority. The biographer watched the computer screen splashed with this news, thought of the signs at the rallies (KEEP YOUR ROSARIES OFF MY OVARIES! THINK OUTSIDE MY BOX!) and the online petitions, the celebrity op-eds. She couldn’t believe the Personhood Amendment had become real with all these citizens so against it.

  Which (the disbelief) was stupid. She knew—it was her job as a teacher of history to know—how many horrors are legitimated in public daylight, against the will of most of the people.

  With abortion illegal, said the congressmen, more babies would be available to adopt. It wasn’t hurting anyone, they said, to ban IVF, because the people with faulty uteri and busted sperm could simply adopt all those extra babies.

  Which isn’t the way it turned out.

  She finishes the pineapple.

  Swallows the rest of the water.
>
  Tells her ovaries: For your patience, for your eggs, I thank you.

  Tells her uterus: May you be happy.

  Her blood: May you be safe.

  Her brain: May you be free from suffering.

  Her phone rings.

  “Hello, Roberta.” Kalbfleisch himself is calling. Usually a nurse does.

  “Hello, Doctor.”

  Is he calling himself because the news is different this time?

  She stands with her back pressed against the refrigerator. Please please please please please please please.

  Firs shake and shiver on the hill.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, “but your test came back negative.”

  “Oh,” she says.

  “I know this is disappointing.”

  “Yeah,” she says.

  “The odds just weren’t, you know, in our favor.” The doctor clears his golden throat. “I’m curious whether—Well, have you—Let me put it this way: do you travel much?”

  “Florida sometimes, to see my dad.”

  “International travel.”

  Take a vacation to console herself?

  Screw. You.

  Wait.

  No.

  He’s saying something else.

  “So you recommend,” she says haltingly, “in light of my—difficulties, that I should go—somewhere where IVF is legal?”

  “I am not recommending that,” he says.

  “But you just said—”

  “I am not giving you any advice that is against the law and for which I could lose my medical license.”

  Has she, without realizing it, been talking to a human being?

  “Do you understand me, Roberta?”

  “I think so.”

  “Okay then.”

  “Thank you for—”

  “Happy holidays.”

  “You too.” She presses END.

  Fingers the tea towel draped on the oven handle.

  Watches the fir-fledged hill, the deep green waving.

  Maybe he genuinely, sincerely believes she has the money for “international travel.”

  Get in the shower, she tells herself.