Red Clocks

by Leni Zumas

  “Roberta.” Kalbfleisch leans forward and looks her, for once, in the eye. “There won’t be a next cycle.”

  “What?”

  “Given your age, your FSH levels, and now this diagnosis, the chance of conception via IUI is little to none.”

  “But if there’s a chance, at least—”

  “By ‘little to none,’ I mean more like ‘none.’”

  Taut pain at the back of her mouth. “Oh.”

  “I’m sorry. It wouldn’t be ethical for me to continue the inseminations when the statistics just don’t bear it out.”

  Do not cry in front of this man. Do not cry in front of this man.

  He adds, “But let’s, well, let’s keep our hopes up for this cycle, okay? You never know. I’ve seen miracles.”

  She doesn’t cry until the parking lot.

  On the dark highway, she works the calendar.

  She will take the pregnancy test, her last ever, on the first day of December.

  If positive—!

  If negative, she’ll have six and a half weeks before January fifteenth.

  Before January fifteenth, she could still be picked from the catalog, chosen by a biological mother, phoned by the caseworker: Ms. Stephens, I’ve got some good news!

  On January fifteenth, the Every Child Needs Two law will restore dignity, strength, and prosperity to American families.

  In the lobby of her apartment building, she checks the mailbox. A reminder card from the dentist; a catalog of long skirts and floaty tops for women of a certain age; and an envelope from Hawthorne Reproductive Medicine, which she rips open. THIS IS A BILL, it says, to the tune of $936.85.

  Very possible no egg will appear.

  In her kitchen, on a cookie sheet, she sets fire to the bill and watches the flames until the smoke alarm goes off. WANH! WANH! WANH! WANH!

  “Shut up, shut up—”

  WANH! WANH! WANH!

  Drags a chair toward the shrieks

  WANH! WANH!

  and climbs on

  WANH! WANH!

  and punches the alarm with her fist (“Shut the shit up”) until its plastic cover splits in two.

  I took my broken fisa to Aberdeen. Worked as a mangler in a shipyard laundry.

  THE DAUGHTER

  The three o’clock bell is still clanging when she heads up Lupatia Street toward the cliff path. In her pocket are directions to the witch’s house, which Ash managed to pry from her sister.

  The heart of a guinea pig weighs three ounces.

  Of a giraffe, twenty-six pounds.

  Yasmine, I’ve been adding to our list.

  Where is Yasmine, at this very moment?

  The daughter can hear the thumping of her own aorta as she crunches over needles and rocks and leaves, following what she prays is the right path. She left the road by the blue CAMPING 4 MI. sign, followed the hiking trail to the brown GUNAKADEIT STATE FOREST sign, then turned onto a smaller trail—but what if there’s more than one brown state forest sign?

  “You just drink some wild herbs,” explained Ash’s sister.

  Her body will be clean again.

  But it will be a crime.

  Half Ephraim, half her.

  Less of a crime than crossing into Canada for it.

  But they could still lock her up in Bolt River Youth Correctional Facility.

  And it might hurt.

  Less than it would hurt at a termination house, where they use rusty—

  The daughter walks faster. Her neck is sweating, thighs stinging, ribs loud with cramp.

  Ash refused to come with. If they were caught, the police might think she was seeking one too, and she’d be charged with conspiracy to commit murder, and she’s already sixteen, and at sixteen you can be prosecuted as an adult.

  The daughter gets it. But Yasmine would have come with.

  A cabin appears, a plain little log square, windows lit, smoke drifting from the chimney. Ash’s sister said to look for chickens and goats as proof it was the witch’s place and not a rapist’s. Although rapists could have goats and chickens. The daughter sees what might be a coop but no chickens around—are they sleeping?—and a shed, in which (she sidles up to check) are two little goats, one black, one gray. They watch her with robot eyes. “Shhh,” she says, though they haven’t made a sound. Chimney puffing, lights on, the witch is home; so why is the daughter dawdling by these goats? But what if the witch hates unannounced visitors, what if she has guns? It’s legal to shoot someone if you say they were invading.

  Going up the cabin steps, the daughter takes long breaths like Mom taught her to do at gymnastics meets, when she was still short enough for gymnastics.

  Mom would understand this whole situation better than Dad would.

  Not that the daughter is ever going to tell her.

  Knock, knock.

  The person who opens the door isn’t old. Is even almost pretty. Big green eyes, dark hair in coils around pale cheeks. Her outfit—velvet choker and coarse sack dress—is Victorian prostitute meets Cro-Magnon. Is this even the witch?

  The person frowns and stares.

  “Hello,” says the daughter.

  Is it the witch’s servant, or the witch’s younger sister?

  “You.” The person crosses her arms over her chest, begins to scratch her sack-covered shoulders. The fingernails make a whispering sound.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you, but I’m looking for… I don’t know if you’re… Gin Percival?”

  “Why?” She stares sideways at the daughter. More like an animal than a human.

  “I need some gynecological help?”

  “How did you come here?”

  “I heard about you from Clementine?”

  “Clementine.” Still frowning, but now smiling too: a face pulled two ways.

  “She said to tell you the, um, wart is gone?”

  “Okay.” The person stands back. The daughter steps in. The room is warm and smells of wood; its rafters are strung with tiny white lights, shelves packed with jars and bottles and books. There is an old-fashioned stove. No cauldron.

  “I’m Mattie—Matilda.”

  “My name is Gin Percival.”

  “Nice to meet you.”

  The witch’s throat makes a long, low gurgle. Her big eyebrows are twitching. It might be true that she’s crazy.

  “Sit.”

  “Thank you.” The daughter takes a chair.

  “What kind of help?”

  “I need the termination herbs.”

  “You’re pregnant and don’t want to be?”

  She nods.

  Gin Percival stretches a hand across her forehead, as though shielding her eyes. Gives a hard, short laugh.

  “I’m not here undercover,” adds Mattie. “And nobody followed me.” That she knows of.

  “How old are you?”

  “Almost sixteen.”

  “When’s your birthday?”

  “February.”

  “When in February?”

  “The fifteenth. I’m an Aquarius.”

  Gin paces around the small room, fingers interlaced on top of her head. “Oh-two-one-five. You’ll be sixteen.”

  “Do you not—” The daughter coughs, to bury her nervousness. “Is the jail sentence worse if the seeker is a minor?”

  She stops pacing. Lowers her hands to her sack-smocked sides. “That has nothing to do with anything. Want some water?”

  “No thanks. I’m sorry I didn’t make an appointment.”

  “How many weeks are you?”

  “I’m not totally sure but I think eleven or twelve? My period was supposed to come midway through September. Ish.”

  “Then you’re around fourteen. End of first trimester. You have to include the two weeks before conception.”

  “But I still have time, right?”

  Those eyebrows. Frantic brown caterpillars. Maybe because she lives by herself she has no idea how her eyebrows behave? No mirrors in the cabin that the daughter can see.
>
  “For the kind of treatments I do? Barely. But yes. You sure you want to?”

  What if your bio mother had chosen to terminate?

  “Will it—” The daughter looks at the bare planks under her feet. “Hurt a lot?”

  “Not a lot. You’ll drink a bad-tasting tea, then later you’ll bleed. You’ll have to stay home for a day at least. Better two. Do your, uh, parents know?”

  Think of me and your mom, how long we waited.

  The daughter shakes her head. “But I can go to my friend’s—Whoa! Hello!” A gray thing has leapt into her lap, a purring accordion.

  “That’s Malky.”

  “Hi, Malky.” She sort of hates cats, but she wants this cat to like her and for the witch to notice that he likes her. “Friendly little guy,” she adds.

  “He’s not friendly,” says Gin. “Get on the bed. I need to look at you. Jeans and underpants off.” She goes to the sink to wash.

  The daughter undresses. Gin has put nothing over the bed she presumably sleeps in, no fresh towel or sheet. Cat hairs all over the brown blanket.

  “Lie back,” says Gin, kneeling. She smells a little like sour milk. She places both hands on the daughter’s belly and starts a gentle pressure. The hands move methodically, rubbing, pushing. Above her pubic bone they pause for a while. As if listening.

  Then she unscrews a jar and thumbs out a scoop of clear jelly. “I’m going to put two of my fingers into your vagina. Okay with you?”

  “Yeah.” The daughter shuts her eyes, concentrates on the goal of her visit.

  The fingers aren’t in there more than a few seconds, and it doesn’t hurt. Still—

  Gin washes her hands again, returns to sit on the edge of the bed. Stares at the daughter. “Your teeth are very straight,” she says.

  “Braces,” says the daughter, not sure why Gin feels the need to point this out. “I still wear a retainer.”

  “You grew up in Newville?”

  “Salem.”

  “Moved here when?”

  “Last year.”

  Gin touches the skin above the daughter’s right hip. “How’d this scar happen?”

  “Fell off my bike.”

  “And this mole?”—pressing the apple-shaped one on her left thigh. “When did it appear?”

  “I had it when I was born, I think.”

  Gin’s finger circles the mole. Her eyebrows have quit moving, but the eyes themselves, staring moleward, are shining with tears.

  It’s weird that she is feeling the mole for this long.

  The daughter says, loudly, “Does it look cancerous or something?”

  “Nope,” says Gin, getting to her feet. “You can put your clothes on.” She takes something down from a shelf. The termination herbs?

  Offering the jar: “Horehound candy.”

  “Uh, sure.” The brown nub, minty and licoricey, sticks to the daughter’s molars. “By the way, my gums have been bleeding when I brush my teeth. Could I have scurvy?”

  “Scurvy is only on boats. Your body’s making more blood now—that’s why.” Gin frowns, taps her cheek with one finger. “I can end the pregnancy, but not today. I need to restock some supplies.”

  “So, like, tomorrow?”

  “Longer. I’ll leave a note at the P.O.”

  Longer? Spasm of fear in her ribs.

  “But I don’t have a box at the P.O.”

  “Cotter will know about it. Ask him in two, three days.”

  “The guy with the acne?”

  “Yes. And the tea will taste terrible.”

  The damn cat is back on her lap. She pets it. “Like kombucha?”

  “A different bad. A stronger.” Gin Percival smiles. Her teeth are yellow and not very straight. She isn’t pretty, the daughter decides, but she is bold looking. A person uninterested in being pleasing to other persons. In this way she reminds the daughter of Ro/Miss. “Better leave now—dark’s coming. You know how to go?”

  Follow the track to the hiking trail, then to the cliff path, then down to Lupatia, where she will call Dad to pick her up from studying at the library. Returning home clumped as ever. She isn’t stupid, but she has been stupid. Why did she think it would get taken care of today?

  “I better show you.” Gin is pulling on a dirt-colored sweater. The cat springs off the daughter’s lap.

  “You don’t have to.”

  “Easy to get lost. I’ll take you as far as the trail.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure, Mattie Matilda.”

  Among the different names for polar ice, the name I like best is “pack.”

  It reminds of dogs and wolves. Things that hunt.

  To be chased by ice, and torn apart.

  THE MENDER

  The mender lied. She is well stocked with fleabane and pennyroyal, has plenty of coltsfoot. But she wanted time to think. Time, at least, to abide with the idea of reaching into a body she made to unmake a future body.

  When she saw the girl outside the library, months ago, it was like looking in a mirror, not at herself but at her whole family shoved together in one face. The agency had guaranteed that the baby would be placed at least seventy-five miles away, yet here she was, dancing out of the Newville library, face full of the mender’s mother and aunt.

  The girl is a mirror, repeating, folding time in half. When the mender had the same problem, she didn’t solve it how Temple told her to. Terminations were lawful then, but the mender wanted to know how it felt to grow a human, with her own blood and minerals, in her own red clock.

  Grow, but not keep.

  The girl’s parents have kept her well. Her breath smells sweet, and her hair is lustrous, her tongue salmon-pink, her eyeballs moist. The moon-colored skin she comes by naturally, and, of course, the height.

  At the hiking trail they say goodbye. She waits until Mattie Matilda has disappeared down the trail, one minute, in the purpling air, two minutes, below the blatting owls, three minutes, upon the frost-veined ground—then follows: she’ll make sure no demons touch this girl. She steps like a cat, unheard, on soil alive with blind hexapods, who ingest fungi and roots. Malky recognized the girl from her oils; he went right into her lap because underneath the lip gloss and deodorant he smelled the oils of a Percival.

  From the fir shadows the mender watches her reach the cliff path and go left, in the direction of town and people. The mender goes right, toward the sea, night seeping through holes in her sweater. Closer and closer to the cliff’s edge. The shark field is resting. Stripe of moon on the flat water. Out by the horizon, a black fin. And the lighthouse. House has light so ship won’t crash. Light has beam so sea won’t swallow. Ship has watchers, wary squinters, men in raincoats scared of dying. Light will tell them Don’t come here; light will steer them other ways on water black and full of bones these men don’t want their bones to meet. Bad luck on ships to mention lawyers, rabbits, pigs, and churches. Don’t say “drown” on ships; say “spoil.”

  On Parent Conference Day the teacher said, “But where’s your mother?” and the mender said, “She took a ship.”

  But really she left in a taxi, paid for with cash stolen from the till at Goody Hallett’s. And the mender, eight years old, waited by the hour. The day. The winter. Then Temple drove them to Salem and got legal guardianship.

  Eight winters ago she found Temple’s body flopped at the base of a silver fir, and will never be sure of the reason. Heart attack? Stroke? Out to gather miner’s lettuce, her aunt had been gone so long the mender started to worry. Went looking. There she was. Her skin was bluish, but otherwise she seemed asleep.

  Goody Hallett’s was closed by then, because not enough tourists were buying candles and tarot packs. Temple had sold the building. They had moved from the apartment above the shop to a cabin in the forest, and Temple had told the mender, who since leaving high school had kept to herself in the library and on the cliffs: “Time for you to get to work.”

  The mender did not want anyone takin
g the body away. She couldn’t give her aunt to a funeral home to be gutted and waxed; and the ground was hard; and Temple had never liked fire. So the mender clipped off her nails and her hair and her lashes, shaved the skin from each fingertip, and put her body in the chest freezer, under salmon and ice.

  Last winter the mender turned thirty-two: two times sixteen (the age of the girl come February) and half of sixty-four. Sixty-four is the number of demons in the Dictionnaire Infernal. Of squares on a chessboard. Sixty-four is the square of eight, which is the number of regeneration and resurrection: beginning again, again.

  How can she sleep when she keeps seeing the girl’s face?

  She used to go months, years, not thinking about it. Then something (the smell of cherries, the word “soon”) would remind her. Then she would forget again, let the little fish slip away. But after seeing that face outside the library, she couldn’t stop thinking. Wondering if she really was. Are you?

  She is.

  “Malky, come here.”

  She cuts a piece from Cotter’s loaf, offers the first bite to the cat. She presses a drop of black spruce oil to the corner of the ball of her right foot.

  And sleeps.

  The wood is knocking, Malky’s hissing, and every chicken in the family is squawking its throat off. She stands, stuporish. Clears her throat. Farts.

  Her door is knocking. Malky goes from hiss to howl.

  “Quiet, mo,” toeing him away from the threshold.

  Men in blue uniforms. A black haired, a blond.

  “What,” she says.

  The black haired says, “I’m Officer Withers and this is Officer Smith. Are you Gin Percival?”

  Did they see her watching? Will she be accused of stalking? Did the girl, on meeting her, remember seeing her in the trees by the school and tell her parents?

  She only wanted to look at her face. Hear her voice. See how she turned out.

  “Gin Percival,” says the black haired, “I’m placing you under arrest for medical malpractice.”