Red Clocks

by Leni Zumas

  33. Didier in the teachers’ lounge

  34.

  But fuck this shitty list. She’s sick of being grateful. Why the fuck should she be grateful? She is angry—at the amendment laws, the agencies, Dr. Kalbfleisch, her ovaries, the married couples, the term-house procedures. At Mattie for getting pregnant at the drop of a trilby. At Archie for dying. At their mother for dying. At Roberta Louise Stephens for trying so hard.

  Rips the gratitude list out of her notebook, lights it in the sink with a match. She hasn’t yet fixed the smoke alarm.

  Mattie told her mother the conference was in Vancouver. She could have said Portland or Seattle.

  By now she will have reached the border. If she manages to get across, manages to find the clinic, manages to produce a convincing Canadian ID, the abortion will happen tomorrow.

  She might not get across, of course.

  She might be stopped.

  Don’t hope she’s stopped, you monstress.

  But she does.

  I have been lifted off the earth to sit on the ocean with men whose lives are nothing like mine yet whose waking dreams are identical: clumsy suits of caribou hide, our fingers numb, the flame-red gash of sunrise. If wrecked in this vessel, we wreck together.

  THE DAUGHTER

  Stares out a rain-lashed bus window at Washington State. Trees and trees and trees. A wet meadow or two. For the hundredth time she opens her passport. Date of expiration still valid. She is merely traveling, which is not a crime.

  According to the online forums, you should carry evidence of your purpose in Canada. She and Ash created an email account for Delphine Gray—a sweet person but not the best speller—and sent several messages to the daughter. Can’t wait to see u Mattie, girl your going to love Raincouver, we will check out all the sites!

  For the clinic, she has a British Columbia driver’s license bought from Clementine’s boyfriend. Ash is lucky to have an older sister to advise her, giant brothers to defend her. A big rowdy fish-scented gang.

  She keeps her bag on the aisle seat so that no friendly passenger can inquire about her destination. Rolls a licorice nib on her tongue. The sugar and chemicals ride her veins to the clump. Half Ephraim, half her.

  She went to Vancouver once with Yasmine’s family. Mrs. Salter, who represented Portland (District 43) in the Oregon State Legislature, was giving a speech on housing rights. The daughter remembers a city in a bowl of mountains and dark silver water. Bored at the hotel, she and Yas started their list of cardiac weights. The heart of a Canada goose weighs seven ounces. Of a caribou, seven pounds.

  The bus judders to a halt. The daughter opens her eyes. Dark-green forest, steel-colored sky, a chain of tollbooths crowned with red maple leaves.

  “Everyone off,” shouts the driver. “Take all belongings with you and remove your suitcases from the luggage compartment.”

  A woman calls, “Can I leave a sweater to save my seat?”

  “No, ma’am, you may not.”

  “What is this,” she says, “the Soviet Union?”

  The passengers are herded through the icy air into a low wooden building next to the tollbooths. Pale young men in olive-green uniforms sit behind the desks. A muscular dog led by an officer trots across the linoleum, nails clicking.

  Do they have pregnancy-sniffing dogs?

  Seekers are transported back in Canadian police cars, or buses—the daughter isn’t sure. When they arrive in their home states, they are charged with conspiracy to commit murder.

  An officer scans her passport. “What’s your destination in Canada?”

  “Vancouver.”

  “Reason for your trip?”

  “Visiting a friend.”

  “For what purpose?”

  “Vacation,” says the daughter.

  The officer looks at the passport again. Looks at her forehead, then at her chest. “You’re how old, miss?”

  “Almost sixteen. My birthday’s in February.”

  “And you’re traveling alone to Vancouver—for a vacation?”

  Her face is getting hot. “My friend lives there. She used to go to my school in Oregon but moved to Canada a few years ago and I’m visiting her.”

  Don’t offer too many details, say the forums.

  “What’s your friend’s name and address?”

  “Delphine Gray. She’s picking me up from the bus station.”

  “You don’t know her address?”

  “Sorry, yes, I do. Four-six-one-eight Laburnum Street, Vancouver.”

  “Phone number?”

  “We always talk online, so I don’t—I don’t need her number. It’s so much cheaper to talk online. But I have an email from her printed out, if you want to see it?”

  “Why did you print out her email?”

  “It has her address on it.”

  “You said she was picking you up from the bus station.”

  “I know, but just in case? Like if I need to take a cab.”

  “Wait here, okay?” says the officer.

  You can’t say it was rape or incest—nobody cares how it got into you.

  The daughter watches the Soviet sweater woman and her husband pass their check. A middle-aged white couple breezes through after them. Older Asian woman: breeze. Younger black guy: less of a breeze. They ask him extra questions, which he answers in a flat, irritated voice. But he, too, finally heads back outside.

  “Matilda Quarles?” says an officer with frizzy blond curls. “Would you come with me?”

  “Where?”

  “Just come with me, please.”

  “My bus is leaving in a minute.”

  “I understand that. You need to come with me.”

  “But what if I miss my bus?”

  The officer crosses her big arms. “Do we have a problem here?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  Meant to be slitting lambs and hanging them to drain over washtubs.

  Instead: riding a ship to gather facts in the boreal wilderness.

  THE MENDER

  Was disappointed to learn the girl’s name—such a well-behaved name. The mender’s own is no better. People have asked, over the years, Is it actually Virginia? Jennifer? No, just Gin. Are you named for a relative? No, for the alcohol. Oh, how funny, but really, where does it come from? But really it came from the alcohol, her mother’s preferred.

  The mender would have named the girl Temple Jr.

  She doesn’t remember the pain but knows there was pain; and Temple saying “Over soon, over soon” while she rocked the mender; and eating cherries Temple had dug the pits out of; and her stomach feeling spongy and collapsed. She doesn’t remember the baby. They kept it elsewhere in the hospital. Every two hours the nurses brought in a manual pump to express colostrum, then milk, from her engorged breasts. The agency woman came with papers to sign.

  People used to believe that new roses were born from the cinders of burnt roses, new frogs from rotting dead ones. Which is no stranger than believing the mender gave Lola a potion that made her fall down the stairs, or that the mender’s mother is out there, somewhere, alive.

  When the mender was a baby, her mother stayed clean. “She never used drugs while she was breastfeeding,” said Temple. “Which doesn’t exactly warrant a medal, but—you were important to her. Don’t forget that, okay?”

  A bad mother who was sometimes not bad. Who could still be out there, living off flowers in a tower, yarn in a barn.

  Mother and mender and girl: descended from Goody Hallett of Eastham, Massachusetts, who tied lanterns to the flukes of whales.

  A “lead” is the finger of open water between floes of sea ice. I have a theory: the shape and texture of a lead can foretell its behavior. How likely it is to freeze shut or open wider.

  THE WIFE

  On her way to meet Bryan, the tsunami siren goes off. She pulls over on the cliff road. The wail, forlorn and animal, lifts and crests, swings down and up and over again. A haunted wolf. Once a month it goes for three minutes,
followed by chimes (all clear) or a piercing blast (evacuate). If an earthquake blows up the sea, a sucking wall of water will come at them, and minutes will matter.

  The sprites are on the hill, higher than any wave could reach, playing camping with their father.

  The ocean is a green pane. Pillars of rock shaped like chimneys, seals, and haystacks rise from the water.

  She hears the chimes. Safe, sound.

  She could be caught: a text sent to the wrong phone.

  Or she could confess. Watch her husband’s face when she says I slept with Bryan.

  She keeps the house and he gets an apartment in town, carpools to school with Ro. The apartment will have a second bedroom for the sprites, who’ll stay with him on weekends. During the week things won’t be much different, no help with bath and bedtime as usual; same with the mornings, when she alone handles the boiling of oatmeal and dressing of bodies and brushing of teeth. But the weekends—the wife will have those to herself.

  Or Didier could stay in the house, for now. The drafts and dripping taps and ugly wallpaper. The house has been in her family for generations; she read her first chapter book in its dining room, got her first period in its bathroom, watched Bex take her first steps on its porch. But for a while now she’s been letting it go.

  Too chickenshit to leave first, she will blow up her life instead.

  Wenport is a dreary townlet adjacent to a pulp mill, and no one from Newville goes there except to buy drugs. Sometimes the wife asks herself which of her children is more likely to buy drugs one day, and the answer is always: Didier.

  She parks right in front of the coffee shop. It wouldn’t be Didier himself spotting the car, of course—he is crouched in a tent of blankets in the living room, being fed marshmallows fakely cooked on a fake fire—but Ro? Pete Xiao? Mrs. Costello?

  I thought I saw Susan’s car the other day…

  Was Susan in Wenport with Bryan Zakile?

  The coffee shop is too warm. The wife slips off her jacket and sweat darts to her cheeks. It is three minutes after two. The only other customers are two trench-coated boys playing cards.

  “Can I getcha?” says the barista.

  Almond pastries glisten under the glass.

  “Tall skim latte, please,” says the wife.

  “For your info, ma’am, we are an independent business with no ties to multinational corporations. I.e., a mermaid-free zone.”

  “What?” The wife has one eye on the door, one eye on the boys. They could be Didier’s students. Or Bryan’s.

  “You need to order a small,” says the barista.

  “Then can I have a small skim latte. And a water.”

  “Water is self-serve.”

  She settles at the table farthest from the boys, facing the door. Ten minutes after two.

  One boy cries, “Your griffin spell doesn’t frighten me, sir!”

  Seventeen minutes after. No texts or missed calls.

  At twenty after, she will leave.

  At twenty after, she finishes all the water in her cup.

  She will leave in one minute.

  At 2:24, Bryan appears. Not in a hurry at all. “Well, hi there,” he says. “How’s your day going?”

  “Great, yours?”

  While he’s at the counter, the wife, facing the door, hears him ask the barista if she knows where the word “cappuccino” comes from; and she hears the barista giggle and say, “Um, Italy?” and Bryan say, “Well, for starters.”

  When he sits down across from her, she remembers that his face is not beautiful, despite the dimple. A fair to middling face. But the body that follows—

  “Your hair looks awesome,” he says.

  “Oh—thanks!”

  Slurping milk foam: “Get it cut?”

  “Ah, no, actually. So how were your holidays?”

  “Good, good. Went to see my folks in La Jolla. Nice to be in civilization again.”

  “Do you find this area uncivilized?”

  He shrugs. Napkins the foam off his lip.

  “Or too remote?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, in terms of, I don’t know—”

  Bryan smiles. “Do you mean is it hard to meet women?”

  “Or whatever. Yes.”

  “Not to sound conceited?—but that’s never been a problem of mine.”

  “I’m sure it hasn’t.”

  He pushes one fist slowly down the length of his thigh. “Are you?”

  “What?”

  “Sure. That it hasn’t.”

  A clod of dried mascara falls off the lashes of her right eye, landing on her forearm.

  “Look,” says Bryan, “the way I see it, the scarcity model is a bunch of crap. When people are worried about not finding anyone, they pick the first person who comes along.”

  She flicks the mascara away. Her mouth is so dry.

  “That’s what happened to one of my cousins,” he continues. “Married a total dick because she didn’t think she could do better. And maybe she couldn’t have, but, hey, I’d take lonely over beaten to a paste.”

  “Beaten?”

  “Like I said, he’s a dick.”

  “But that’s—?”

  “We all wish she would leave him. They don’t have any kids.”

  “Even if they did.”

  “Well, maybe. Although children really need both parents at home.”

  The wife can see and hear and feel but is no longer thinking.

  She wants to feel the thigh sitting two inches from her knee. Feel the fingers resting on the thigh.

  Long, hard fingers.

  Long, hard thigh.

  “What about you, Susan? Do you find Newville remote?”

  “I find it…” She twists her mouth to one side, which Didier used to say was sexy. “Boring.”

  “I wonder what we could do to make it less boring.”

  “I wonder.”

  “I can think of a few things.”

  “Can you?” Wet flare in her pit.

  “I can.”

  “For instance?”

  “Well…” Bryan leans forward, elbows on table, and holds his face in his palms. The wife leans in too, but the angle is awkward with her legs crossed. He stares at her. She stares back. Something is about to happen. He is going to kiss her right here, amid griffins and steam, twelve miles away from the house on the hill. She is going to blow up her life.

  “Mini-golf team!” he says, grinning so wide she can see the black fillings in his teeth.

  “What?”

  “It’s a thing now, competitive mini golf. There’s a place right off 22. They run teams of four. I’m thinking you, me, Didier, and Xiao. You can actually win decent money.”

  As though a giant hand had released its grip, the wife sags in her chair. “I suck at golf,” she says.

  “Come now!”

  “Get Ro to be on your team.”

  “The grammar police? No gracias.”

  He does not want her.

  Why did she think he wanted her?

  “Hey,” says Bryan, “let’s share an original sin amen bun. They’re fantastic here.”

  Black fillings all over his mouth.

  “Why the hell not,” says the wife.

  In November of 1875, in the Arctic Ocean north of Siberia, pack ice started closing in on Oreius. The belts of open water grew farther apart; the leads shrank to black ribbons. Mínervudottír saw that the straighter leads seemed to stay open longer than the wavy, eel-shaped ones: was there something about the irregular margins that sped the knitting of the ice?

  She suggested as much to the captain, who said, “And will you be pointing out the snow fairies too?”

  THE BIOGRAPHER

  Notices today how large Mr. Fivey’s desk is. He grips its burnished surface with his hands wide apart, as a mogul might. Hanging behind him are the Ivy League diploma and several photos of Mrs. Fivey, which prompt the biographer to say: “I’m glad your wife is doing so much better.�
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  “That’s nice, Ro. But let’s get down to the marrow. Since the school year began, you have been late no less than fourteen times.”

  No fewer.

  “And absent five times.”

  “Four, actually.”

  “Tomato, tomahto—it’s become a problem. These kids aren’t going to teach themselves. Instead of learning history they’re memorizing the anti-meth posters in study hall. I’d like to know how you intend to solve this problem.”

  “Well,” says the biographer.

  “Unless you’d prefer not to teach here at all?”

  She uncrosses and recrosses her legs. “I do want to teach here. Very much. The thing is, I’ve been having some health issues, which—”

  “Whatever it is, Ro, it can’t go on. Either take a medical leave, quit, or get to work on time.” His saliva lands on her face.

  Has he gotten more dickish because his wife was in a coma? Or because Gin Percival’s trial starts soon? Fivey will have to sit in the courtroom and hear how his wife allegedly sought an abortion from the witch, though she wasn’t allegedly pregnant in the first place. And how his wife allegedly had an affair with Cotter at the P.O. And how her breasts are allegedly real. Even the biographer, whose finger is not on the pulse, has heard these rumors.

  “I won’t be late again,” she says.

  “No, you won’t, because I’m giving you an official warning. One more violation and you’ll need to call your union rep.”

  “We don’t have a union.”

  “It’s an expression. I don’t mean to be a hard-ass,” he adds. “You’re good at your job, when you’re around.”

  Fivey is a bush-league fish in a bush-league pond.

  And these kids are going to teach themselves.

  She’s only here to give them some nudges and clues. She is here to tell them they don’t have to get married or buy a house or read the list of shipwrecks at the pub every Saturday night.

  Ten days until Every Child Needs Two comes true.