by Leni Zumas
Saltines and a peeled orange on the bedside table; but her mouth doesn’t want anything in it, not even a cigarette. She can’t decide what to call this feeling. It isn’t sadness. More like a wilting. A deflation. The skin of a balloon after all the air except a breath or two has seeped out.
Zero weeks, zero days.
A soft knock. Ro/Miss’s face in the door crack. “How’re you feeling?”
“Crampy.”
“Want more ibuprofen?”
“Sure you don’t mind me taking your bed?”
“My couch is so comfortable.” Ro/Miss shakes two caplets onto her palm; the daughter swallows them waterless. “You ready to sleep? It’s really late.”
“What do you call a time-traveling flower shop?”
Ro/Miss raises one eyebrow.
“Back to the Fuchsia,” says the daughter.
“Time to sleep?”
“I have an idea for an invention,” says the daughter. “Which might not work but would be so incredible if it did. Want to hear it?”
Ro/Miss folds her arms across her chest. “Sure.”
“Okay, so, you know how the world is going to run out of energy unless we stop burning oil and make more wind farms?”
“Well, among other things.”
“So my idea is to harness whales. You could make very light but strong harnesses, like out of steel thread, and hook them up to super-long steel reins. The reins would be attached to turbines, which would be on their own floating platforms, capturing the energy. There would also be generators on the platforms to convert the energy to electricity.”
“That’s… huh.”
The daughter winces at a pinch of dark heat above her pubic bone. “I haven’t worked out the details yet. The point is, the whales won’t be killed if they’re making energy. They’ll be treasured.”
“Not by Big Coal or Big Oil, but yeah—interesting.”
“You think it’s dumb.”
“Nope, I do not. I think you should probably go to sleep, my dear.”
She doesn’t want her to leave.
“Would you read to me first?”
Ro/Miss sighs. “What should I read?”
“Anything. Except not poetry or self-help.”
“I’ll have you know there is not a single self-help book in this house! Okay, that’s not true; there might be a few.” She tugs the blanket up higher, to the daughter’s shoulders. “Warm enough?”
She nods.
Ro/Miss goes out, comes back. Turns the overhead light off and bedside lamp on. “Close your eyes.”
All the News down in Newville sleep deep by the sea.
Your name for our files will be Ida.
Throat clearing. Paper rustling. “‘As a girl, I loved (but why?) to watch the grindadráp. It was a death dance. I couldn’t stop looking. To smell the bonfires lit on the cliffs calling men to the hunt. To see the boats herd the pod into the cove, the whales thrashing faster as they panic. Men and boys wade into the water with knives to cut their spinal cords. They touch the whale’s eye to make sure it is dead. And the water…’”
Who is this water—girl—Ida—knife—
“‘… foams up red.’”
She sleeps.
Off the coast of Greenland they saw the Crimson Cliffs: enormous shoulders of red-stained snow.
“God’s blood,” said the blacksmith.
“Algae,” corrected Mínervudottír.
THE WIFE
Early to the pub, she stands at the wall reading names of sunk ships. Antelope. Fearless. Phoebe Fay.
Please let her stop being a coward.
Pilots Bride. Gem. Perpetua.
Please let her children not be scarred.
Onward. Czarina. Chinook.
Didier arrives from school, believing their purpose is beer and fried-fish sandwiches. The wife suggests they wait for the after-work crowd to thin. In the little park behind the church, they walk between flower beds thrusting with young stems. Early buds in a warm February. The soil is black and soft from yesterday’s rain.
She is a selfish coward.
“Up for darts tonight?” says Didier. “You had an off night last time, true, but—”
“We need to talk about something.” She stops walking. Say it, Susan.
“Do you have cash for Costello?”
“I think—” Say it.
“Because I have none. We can stop on the way home.”
“I think we should take a break.”
“Huh?”
“From each other.”
He narrows his eyes.
“Like a separation,” she adds.
“Why?”
“Because it’s not”—no breath in her lungs—“good anymore.”
Too frightened to look at his face, she concentrates on the blue leather toes of her clogs.
“Susan, I’m looking for the joke with a microscope.”
She shakes her head.
“We have stuff that could improve, okay, but everyone does. We can work on it.”
“You didn’t want to work on it,” she says.
“You mean the therapy? But that’s—”
“It’s better this way, anyway.”
“Why?” he says softly.
“I’m sorry,” says the wife.
Didier’s face has gone rubbery. Eyes tight in their shadowed sockets. She sees how he will look as an old man.
He takes out his cigarettes.
“If you keep squinting like that,” says the wife, “your eyes might get stuck.”
“And if you keep eating like that, your ass might get stuck. In every door.”
“I’m going to my parents’ tomorrow,” she says. “You can stay in the house, for now.”
“Oh really? I can stay? In that broke-down bourgeois firetrap?”
But he will. That’s the thing. He will judge and dismiss, he will scorn and rage; yet out of sheer laziness, he will stay.
Sucking on his cigarette: “We don’t have to decide now.”
“Didier.”
“Let’s talk about it tomorrow, yeah?” On the last word his voice quavers.
“Nothing will be different tomorrow.”
She has no plan.
For telling the kids, for making a custody schedule, for finding a job.
Her mother said on the phone this morning, “You’ve at least opened your own bank account, I hope?” and the wife had to lie.
The only idea in her sore, stalled brain has been: Tell him.
He stamps out the cigarette on the gravel path. “You know what I won’t miss?”
Me.
“Your shitty cooking.”
“And I won’t miss having three children,” says the wife.
“Fuck you, Susan.”
The wife kneels on the path.
Rent a car. Open a bank account. Bring yourself to care.
She reaches for the black earth.
Her body yearns, inexplicably, to taste it.
Brings a handful to her lips. The minerals sizzle on her tongue, rich with the gists of flower and bone.
“Hell are you doing?” says Didier.
Bright minerals. Powdered feathers. Ancient shells.
“Jesus, stop that!”
She keeps tasting. The soil is bark and needle and flecks of brain, little animal burnt and dead.
Goodbye, shipwrecks.
Goodbye, house.
Goodbye, wife.
Greely’s men shot the rest of the sled dogs. They had kept alive their favorites as long as they could; but there was no food. The starving animals had already eaten their leather harnesses. They killed first the one called King, a rascal and a gentleman. His brothers waiting in the dogloo knew they, too, would be killed. Badger, Scruffles, Cricket, Howler, Odysseus, Samson—a bullet for each. The youngest sailor cried, and by the time they reached his meager beard, the tears were buttons of ice. When the Greely expedition was rescued, in June of 1884, this youngest sailor would be dead of
Knocks cup and cup tips and coffee runs across table onto floor.
When the youngest sailor died, of starvation and exposure, his shipmates probably ate him. She can only speculate. I am inserting the speculum into your vagina; you will feel a slight pressure. After the return to civilization of its six survivors, rumors arose that the Greely expedition had practiced cannibalism. The coffin of one of its dead, a Frederick Kislingbury, was exhumed. The body had no skin on it; the arms and legs were attached by ligaments alone. Greely claimed they had carved up Kislingbury for bait in shrimp and fish traps, not for themselves.
She paper-towels her brown spill.
Susan once told her she shouldn’t be so quick to claim that Mínervudottír’s life was more meaningful for having left the Faroe Islands. “That’s the predictable narrative,” said Susan. “But couldn’t she have had an equally meaningful life if she’d stayed?”
“Depends what you mean by ‘meaningful,’” said the biographer. “I don’t see how gutting fish and washing six kids’ underwear by hand is equal to doing research in the Arctic Circle.”
“Why not?”
“One is repetitive and mindless, and the other is thrilling, courageous, and beneficial to the lives of many people.”
“If she’d raised six kids,” said Susan, “she would’ve been beneficial to their lives.”
Mínervudottír had no wool-capped, lamb-fed children to grow.
And Susan has no book. No law career. No job, in fact, at all.
The biographer, strictly speaking, has no book either. Her kitchen table is loaded with overdue library loans about whale hunts and ice—she has read the translation of Mínervudottír’s journals a dozen times—yet her manuscript has more holes than words. She wants to tell the story of a woman the world should have known about long before this; so why can’t she get done telling it?
The biographer eats the dry rim off a blueberry muffin she found at the back of the teachers’ lounge fridge. Forces herself to say: “We haven’t talked about your good news.”
Penny beams. “Ms. Tristan Auerbach wants the privilege of selling Rapture on Black Sand to the highest bidder.”
She could be a published author before her seventieth birthday. And if this manuscript sells, the other eight she’s written could follow.
“I’m happy for you.”
“Listen, honey, you should send Tristan your book. I’ll recommend you personally.”
She should have congratulated Penny sooner—it’s been weeks. Mired in her own sludge, she’s been avoiding the lounge, begging off Masterpiece mystery nights. Had the biographer found an agent for Mínervudottír: A Life, Penny would have baked her a cake the same day.
“I’m not sure a romance agent would be interested in a book with no romance.”
“The romance of crushed ships!” says Penny. “The romance of gangrene.”
Penny loved her now-dead husband. Loves her little house. Loves writing her entertainments. Didn’t have kids because she never felt like it. When the biographer compares such fulfillment with her own sticky craving, it is tempting to despair.
“I apologize, Pen.”
“What for?”
“Being a bad friend.”
Penny nods. “You’ve had better years.”
“I’m really sorry.”
She starts buttoning her turquoise cardigan. “I forgive you. But you better not miss my book party.”
“Won’t, swear.”
“And I think you should apply for Fivey’s job.”
“Hardy har.”
“I do not happen to be joking. You’re a good candidate.”
The biographer laughs anyway, spewing blue bits of muffin across the lounge.
Climbs to the top of the east stairwell. Sits down against a wall.
The excitement she once felt about a nineteen-year-old biology major’s sperm, her willingness to drink a foul but magical tea, her wild hope on that run to Mattie’s house—
Gone.
She picks at the laces of her sneakers.
All the doors have closed.
The ones, at least, she tried to open.
How much of her ferocious longing is cellular instinct, and how much is socially installed? Whose urges is she listening to?
Her life, like anyone’s, could go a way she never wanted, never planned, and turn out marvelous.
Fingering her shoelaces, she hears the first bell.
Thinks of her brother getting accepted into his first-choice college and gloating, “I’m set.”
WE NEED COP WATCHERS! said the flyer at the Polyphonte Collective.
The second bell.
By walking, she tells her students, is how you make the road.
The morning after Portland, Mattie pointed to the photo on her dresser. “He’s cute. Who is he?”
“My favorite and only brother,” she said.
He wore that skull T-shirt for years, she told Mattie. It was the shirt of a band he loved; she forgets which one. The biographer never had a head for band names or song titles or the music itself, which worried her when she was younger—was she missing something crucial?
She did not tell Mattie that even though Archie graduated with honors from his first-choice college, he was not set.
She did not tell Mattie about finding him, eight years ago, in the kitchen of his apartment. He wore black jeans and no shirt. Lips blue, cheeks flat and white. On the counter was a half-eaten bowl of cereal, bearful of honey, burnt spoon, lighter, glassine packet. The needle lay on the floor beside him.
“Hey, kiddo,” says her father. “To what do I owe?”
“Spring break is soon,” she says, “and I was thinking of visiting.”
“Visiting whom?”
“You, genius.”
“The Duke of Denturetown? The King of Hemorrhoidia?”
“Can’t you just say ‘Daughter, I’d love to see you’?”
“I’d love to see you. But bear in mind that spring break in Orlando is a hellscape.”
“I’ll bear it,” she says.
Ice too heavy to proceed. Crew hammering at the pack to save the lead. We are more than a hundred kilometers from Fort Conger, where Greely’s expedition is believed to be.
Lead gone. Food and gear dragged onto a floe, tents pitched by the sledges. Cook fills mugs with pea soup and boiled bacon.
We woke to the floes rafting up around the ship. Massive blue-white shelves, thrust vertical by wind and tide, jumped roaring out of the water and smashed at the keel. To my hoard of knowledge I may now add the sound ice makes when it destroys a ship. Booming gun cracks, then a smaller yelping; and from the vibration the ship’s bells began ghoulishly to ring. Within hours, says the captain, Khione will be sunk.
THE MENDER
After her motionless weeks in jail, the walk to town feels awful. Her knees are buckling by the time she reaches the Acme.
She keeps her head down against the lights, the stares. One box of licorice nibs. One bottle of sesame oil. Is she inventing the stares? Maybe her mind is buckling too. She hasn’t been sleeping well; the memory of bleach keeps waking her.
When they released her, the lawyer was there to take her home. “Hold on to my arm, okay?” he said. “Don’t let go.” They came out of County Corrections into a chattering snarl of cameras and microphones, and all the microphones were being pushed into her face. Some of them hit her face.
“How’s it feel to be free, Ms. Percival?”
“Are you angry at your accusers?”
The lawyer put his mouth on her ear: “Don’t say a word.”
“Do you plan to sue Dolores Fivey?”
Clicks and flashes.
“What’s the next step for you?”
“Any opinion on the local seaweed infestation and the economic losses it’s caused?”
“Have you ever provided an abortion?”
Click flash click flash click flash.
“At your accuse
rs?”
“To be free?”
Click. Flash.
“Hello? Gin?” A bright voice behind her.
The mender stops in the aisle. Canned tomatoes make loud red suns across her vision.
“It’s me—Mattie.”
She turns and blinks at the girl, who is steering a shopping cart; and her mother, who has long gray hair, big teeth when she smiles. The mender has watched them together on Lupatia Street.
“Mom, this is Gin. Gin, this is my mom.”
“Pleased to meet you,” says the astonished mother. She holds out her hand and the mender shakes it; the skin is dry. “How do you two…?”
“We met at the library,” says Mattie Matilda.
“Oh.” The mother’s eyes relax a little. Kind brown eyes. She has kept the girl safe and well.
“Hello,” says the mender stiffly.
She glances at the girl’s midsection: flat in a close-fitting sweater. Her hair: less lustrous. Her skin: no darkening patches. How and where did she take care of it? She managed not to get caught. She went a different path. She won’t be wondering and forgetting, forgetting and wondering again. Or she will wonder—but not the same way the mender did.
“I’m so glad about your verdict,” says Mattie Matilda.
The green of her irises is not the same green as the mender’s.
Mine and not mine.
“What a terrible thing to go through,” says the mother.
The mender nods.
“They fired Principal Fivey,” says Mattie Matilda.
The mender nods.
“We should be on our way,” says the mother, “but it was nice to meet you, Ms. Percival.” Her cart starts rolling.
“Bye!” The girl waves.
The mender waves back.
Soon it will be February fifteenth: the Roman festival of Lupercalia. And the girl’s birthday.
She and Cotter started the girl. The mender, with her body, continued the girl. For a time her clock was full of water and blood and a kicking fish. Which is both important and not important.