Red Clocks

by Leni Zumas

  “I meant for grown-ups,” adds the wife. “Not for kids—it’s great for kids.”

  “Okay,” says Bex, wandering off.

  Two days and nights of solitude every week. The house to herself.

  But first you need to tell him.

  She’ll feel so much better from the solitude that she will teach John to like foods other than buttered spaghetti and chicken nuggets. She’ll bake those barley walnut muffins Bex eats at the Perfects’. She will start cleaning again, keep the rooms scrubbed and dusted, wipe the toilet rims weekly, buy a dehumidifier for the attic, make an appointment to test the kids’ bloodstreams for lead.

  Or she won’t be living in this house at all: she will rent an apartment that requires virtually no cleaning.

  Maybe the apartment will be in Salem.

  After you tell him.

  “Daddy’s here!” shrieks Bex, galloping onto the porch.

  “Daddy,” sniffles John.

  “Fee fi fo fon,” calls Didier.

  Children need two parents at home. Every child needs two.

  So say the legislators and the commercials and Bryan, the child-free boy whose aim in life is to win money at competitive mini golf.

  Jessica Perfect will have a field day. Oh my God, did you hear? The Korsmos are separating. I feel so bad for the kids—they’re the ones who really pay.

  The wife’s mother, never a Didier fan, is going to say: I saw this coming a mile away.

  She rummages in the kitchen drawer to see how many chocolate bars she has left.

  “Momplee?”

  Two.

  “Yeah?”

  “I lost my homework sheet.”

  “Look in your room.”

  “Incinerate! All homework sheets!” sings Didier.

  Last summer at the teachers’ picnic Ro asked her why she’d taken Korsmo, and the wife said, “Because I wanted us all to have the same last name.”

  “But why?”

  “Because.”

  “It’s the twenty-first century.”

  “I’m not going to sit here and justify my choices to you,” said the wife.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t need to.”

  Ro kept her teeth on the bone. “How come nobody’s allowed to criticize a woman’s decision to give up her name for a man’s name? Just because it’s her choice? I can think of some other bad choices that—”

  “Shut up, please,” said the wife, and that was the beginning of the end of her friendship with Ro.

  On the kitchen calendar, in Saturday’s square, she writes a T.

  Tell him.

  She can’t cheat her way out.

  She can’t wait her way out, head in the sand.

  She has to say it herself.

  “Momplee?”

  “Jesus, Bex—it must be in your room. Have you checked under the bed?”

  “Not about that,” says the girl.

  “Then what?” The wife stands holding the ballpoint pen with which she has just written herself a reminder to inform her husband she is leaving him. She wants to ram the pen into her own neck.

  “Am I fat?”

  “No!”

  Voice wobbly: “I weigh eight pounds more than Shell.”

  “Oh, sweetpea.” She kneels down on the kitchen floor, gathering Bex into her lap. “You’re exactly the right size for you. Who cares how much Shell weighs? You’re beautiful and perfect just the way you are.”

  The wife fails, as a parent, on so many fronts.

  “You’re my perfect darling gorgeous girl.”

  But she will do this one thing right.

  I hate the chewy lard meat called pemmican; and I admit to fearing the attack of a sea bear; and my fingers hurt all the time; but I prefer immurement in these spectral wastes to a seat at the warmest hearth.

  THE MENDER

  A witch who says no to her lover and no to the law must be suffocated in a cell of the hive. She who says no to her lover and no to the law shall bleed salt from the face. Two eyes of salt in the face of a witch who says no to her lover and no to the law shall be seen by policemen who come to the cabin. Faces of witches who say no do resemble those of owls tied by leashes to stakes. Venefica mellifera, Venefica diabolus. If a town be plagued by a witch who says No, I won’t stop mending and who says No, you can’t hide in my house, and the lover Lola does feel sorrow and shame, and the hard-fisted husband of Lola does discover the betrayal of his wife, and the lover Lola, to save her own life, tells a lie about the witch, the witch’s body shall be lashed to a stake. Her owl teeth shall catch flame first, sparks of blue at the white before the red tongue catches too. A witch’s body when burning does smell of blistered milk; the odor makes onlookers vomit, yet still they look on.

  My fingers hurt so much I am always humming.

  Boatswain says he will punch my mouth if I don’t stop.

  THE BIOGRAPHER

  The adoption caseworker’s cubicle is festooned with evergreen boughs and reindeer cards on a string. She wears peppermint barrettes in her hair. “How was your Yuletide?”

  “Fine,” says the biographer. “I made this appointment because—Sorry, how was your Yuletide?”

  “Super fun. We went up to my sister’s in Scapoose. I drank way too much spiked nog, of course, but when in Rome!”

  This caseworker is the biographer’s fourth; turnover is high at the agency. She is straight out of college and has a tiny attention span and thinks “Fer sher” is an appropriate response to an emotionally charged disclosure. But she’s better than the one who asked the biographer if she knew that a child is not a replacement for a romantic partner.

  “Next week is January fifteenth. I am here to quite literally beg you to get me matched before then.”

  It takes the caseworker a few frowning seconds to grasp the date’s significance. “I understand your concern,” she says. “Let’s see what’s been happening in your file.” She types, waits, stares. The screen is hidden from the biographer. “Okay. Since you last updated your profile, on September second, your landing page has received six views and zero Tell Me More clicks.”

  “Six? Jesus.”

  “It’s difficult for some birth mothers to get past the age. You’re older than some of their own parents, which—”

  “Okay, yeah, thanks, I know. But you guys said if I played up my teaching career, and the fact that I’m about to finish a book, I’d have more hits?”

  “I thought it would help, fer sher. We notice, though, that status and income associated with occupation can make a difference, which for you would not necessarily be great? Compounded with the singleness.”

  “What if you only showed them one profile?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The next birth mother. You could show her my profile and no one else’s. Those married people on the wait-list, they’ve got plenty of time ahead of them, but I only have a week left.”

  The caseworker smiles. “What you’re suggesting is unethical.”

  “It’s very ethical, actually. You’d be bending the rules in a minor, temporary way to create an opportunity for someone who is worthy but otherwise wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance. You’d be making a moral choice. Think of all the change makers throughout history who—”

  “I’m not one of your students, Ms. Stephens.”

  “What? Sorry. I wasn’t trying to lecture you.”

  “Well, you kind of were.”

  “I apologize. It would just be such a microscopic drop in the—”

  “A drop I could lose my job over.”

  “What if…” The biographer has no idea how to phrase this, so she grabs language from the movies. “What if I made it worth your while?”

  “What does that mean?”

  “If I offered you an incentive to take the risk.”

  “Sorry, what?”

  “As in, a financial incentive.”

  Light of no understanding on the caseworker’s face.

&
nbsp; “What if I gave you, personally, a thousand dollars,” whispers the biographer, naming a sum she could realistically borrow. Her father, Penny, Didier—

  “Oh my God, are you bribing me? This is my first bribe! I’m the only person in the office who hasn’t been offered one. Until today.”

  Heartened by the lack of outrage, the biographer says, “Congratulations?”

  “That’s wild. I mean, of course I can’t take it, but thank you.”

  “Why not? Nobody would find out. I give you cash, you show my profile to a birth mother before the fifteenth, I get matched with a baby, you get on with your life.”

  “Ms. Stephens, I totally sympathize with your situation, but I can’t take part in an illegal transaction.”

  “You can, you just don’t want to.” The biographer is trying to breathe normally, but her lungs feel damp and fibrous, like rained-on wood. “Please? It would—it would change my life. I would never tell anyone. I’d lie on the stand if it went to court.” Wrong thing to say: the caseworker’s eyes crinkle up. “Which it wouldn’t, of course, it never would, nobody will find out, I don’t know why I said that but I guess it was to emphasize how much this would mean to me, and to the baby, who would have a good home with me, a really good home.”

  The black silver, flecked with ocean.

  On a train to the Gunakadeit Light.

  “Please?” she says. “Please?”

  Breathe, Stephens.

  “My supervisor’s out today,” says the caseworker, slowly, carefully, “but would you like me to have her call you?”

  “Can she give me an extension on the deadline?”

  “Every Child Needs Two is a federal law. Even if we made exceptions for unmarried applicants, the adoptions wouldn’t be valid. Which would create more misery for all involved.” She adds, “But you can stay on the fostering wait-list, fer sher.”

  The biographer’s sodden lungs fight to take a full breath.

  She drives back to Newville, gasping.

  On the beach the wind drives hair into her eyes. She hurls a sneaker at a low-flying gull. Curses her aim. Retrieves her shoe. Jumps on an old log. The beach is a good place for rage: the sky and sea can take it. Her screams are absorbed by the booming waves, the heaped fields of oyster cloud. Because this is Oregon in January, nobody human is around to hear.

  Doctor reported his medicine chest stolen. It was found in the snow a few yards from the tents, missing its morphine and opium pills. An able seaman was blamed for the theft, and shot dead.

  THE DAUGHTER

  “The jury’s going to convict,” says Dad.

  “Are you now a fortune-teller?” says the daughter.

  “She completely lost it on the stand, I hear. Looks as if she’ll go to prison for a good little bit.”

  “Why are you cheerful about it?” She is extra seasick tonight.

  “It’s only fair she pay her debt.”

  Sipping water to mute the queasiness: “What if she didn’t do what they said she did? What if—”

  “More rice, Mattie?”

  “It’s like you’re accepting whatever the news says. You weren’t even at the trial.”

  “Your mother asked if you would like more rice.”

  “No thank you.”

  Mom, still holding the bowl: “You sure, pigeon?”

  “Has Miss Stephens been telling you this woman is innocent? It’s not her place to bring politics into the classroom, and if she is, then—”

  “I can think of my own ideas. Miss Stephens didn’t say shit.”

  “Language?” says Mom.

  “Tons of injustices happen in broad daylight,” adds the daughter, “when ordinary citizens are aware but do nothing.”

  “For instance,” says Dad.

  “The bystander effect. Nobody helping a crime victim when other people are around because everyone thinks someone else is going to do it.”

  “Fair enough. What else?”

  Her father has trained her to give more than one example in any debate; and that numbers not ending in zero are more convincing in a negotiation, because they sound less arbitrary.

  “For instance,” she says, “the whole world knows about the pilot-whale slaughter in the Faroe Islands, but nobody’s been able to—”

  “People have every right to practice their own cultural rituals.” He saws at his little pink pork chop. “The Faroese have been hunting whales that way for centuries.”

  “Pilot whales are technically dolphins. Oceanic dolphins.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “Well, Dad, I do, and they are.”

  “Point is, they eat what they kill, and they only kill as much as they can eat. The haul is shared out fairly among the community.”

  “Good for them,” mutters the daughter.

  “Are you coming down with something?” says Mom. “You look—”

  “I’m fine.”

  “I don’t want you stressing out about the Math Academy,” she says. “If you get in, you get in. If not, you try again next year.”

  “No reason she shouldn’t get in this year,” says Dad.

  “May I be excused,” says the daughter.

  She has to get her body clean. Stop being seasick. Stop the blue veins from branching across her tightening breasts. Don’t be the free milk.

  Terribly she misses Yasmine.

  Bolt River Youth Correctional Facility is a medium-security state prison for females twelve to twenty years old.

  Number of letters, cards, and care packages the daughter mailed to Bolt River the first year Yasmine was inside: sixty-four.

  Number of words she heard back from Yasmine: zero.

  Whenever she phoned the front office, she was told, “The offender is refusing your call.”

  Yasmine’s mother said, “I’ve got no idea, Matts. I simply don’t.”

  After a year, the daughter stopped trying.

  The frostbitten skin, which at first itched intolerably, has gone waxen and lifeless. Black-purple blisters seep rank-smelling pus. The doctor offered to cut the fingers off, but without morphine or opium, he said, it will be the worst pain I’ve ever known. I declined the offer.

  THE WIFE

  Puts away clean clothes while the girls play Amelia Earhart on Bex’s bed. Didier is at the pub with Pete, home by dinnertime. Dinner will be taco casserole, and Shell is going to ask whether the beans were home soaked or from a can.

  “What’s that sound!”

  “Oh no, the plane’s running out of gas!”

  “My only choice is to fall into the sea!”

  “I’m falling! Flump.”

  “Flump.”

  In a non-game voice Shell says, “Gross, why is there dust all over your floor?”

  Bex looks at the floor, then up at the wife.

  “My mom says,” adds Shell, “that a clean house is the only house worth living in.”

  That’s enough, Perfect. That is enough.

  “I guess your mom doesn’t know much about dust,” says the wife. “Because if she did, then she’d know that dust has pollen fibers, which are very good for you.”

  Bex smiles.

  “How are they good for you?” says Shell.

  This wallpaper is horrendous. Dark purple flowers on a brown ground. It shouldn’t be the first thing her girl sees every morning.

  “When you breathe them in, they create more white blood cells in your body, which keep you from getting sick. Dust is extremely nutritious.”

  By dinnertime her husband hasn’t appeared, so she serves the kids their casserole, slides the dish back into a two-hundred-degree oven, hustles Shell out to Blake Perfect’s car, gives Bex and John a bath, tries to recall when Didier last gave them a bath. While she’s reading about the little fur family (Warm as toast, smaller than most) the front door slams and voices thud in the hall.

  “Will Daddy come say good night?”

  “I don’t know. That’s up to him.”

  “Well,
can you tell him to?”

  Downstairs she sees he has managed to find the casserole, which is piled, all of it, onto his and Pete’s plates. “This is hella good,” says Pete by way of greeting, slurping a forkful.

  “Yeah it is,” says Didier. “Did you use more salsa than usual?”

  “So there’s none left? I didn’t have any.”

  “I figured you ate with the kids.”

  “I waited for you.”

  Didier looks down at his plate. “Want the rest of mine?”

  “I’ll make a sandwich.”

  She slathers cream cheese on whole wheat, adds cucumber slices and salt. A virtuous sandwich. A sandwich that might need to be supplemented, later on, by soft-batch chocolate-chip cookies.

  Soft-batch—scenic overlook—Bryan Zakile—

  Something nips at the edge of her mind.

  She looks over at the ficus, which, though brittle, is still alive (didn’t she water it yesterday?), and the Medusa’s head plant, always chancy in winter, snaky green arms quick to rot without enough sun.

  Something Bryan told her.

  “I’m literally stunned,” Pete is saying, probably about a school matter the wife can’t be part of.

  “I thought you hated it,” she says, “when people say ‘literally.’”

  Shark-eyed glare. “I was referring to people’s misuse and overuse of the term. In this case, I am literally stunned.”

  “By what?”

  “The news of my colleague acquiring a literary agent for her flaming piece of hogswaddle.”

  The wife’s face aches. “Ro got an agent?” She will sell the story of the polar explorer, be paid, be reviewed, maybe even become—

  “No, Penny Dreadful.”

  “Good for her,” says the relieved, disgusting wife.

  “And bad for literature,” says Pete.

  Something is chewing now on her brain. Some hook, some link, two things she is meant to connect.

  Bryan—the cookies—the Medusa’s head—

  “I need to go smoke.”

  “Sorry if I’m boring you, Didier,” says Pete, “but I happen to think it’s important to critique the hegemony of commercial publishing. Otherwise, they’ve got us where they want us.”