Red Clocks(25)

“I won’t leave my animals.”

Clumsily stroking the mender’s biceps: “Maybe I could stay with you, then?”

Jab of heat in her throat. “You can’t stay.”

“Why not?” Lola stepped back, frowning. “I thought you liked me, Gin.”

Humans always want more.

“I like you,” said the mender.

“But—” A panicky smile. “Hold on, are you …?”

“It’s just,” began the mender.

Devil flowers danced on the couch, jumping, blurring.

“What? What?”

But some feelings aren’t fastened to words.

“It—isn’t—I don’t—” The mender’s tongue was an oily toe.

“Can’t you talk? Can’t you even say a sentence?” Lola slid her hands up and down her thighs, bunching the green dress, smoothing it, bunching again. “You know everyone thinks you’re crazy, right?”

“I’m not crazy.”

“You’re batshit,” hissed Lola.

The mender took the scar oil from her sack and set it on the coffee table. “You can keep the whole bottle. No charge.”

Lola said, “Get the fuck out of my house.”

She couldn’t understand—and the mender wasn’t good at helping her understand—how much the mender likes to be alone. Human-wise.





Sea-washed lighthouse built with:



Aberdeen granite

salt-tolerant poplar

hydraulic lime



Bells and sledgehammer = fog signal





THE DAUGHTER


Please be bloody. Please be a gush of dark mucus, black-strung red.

Pulls down her underwear.

White as cake.

“Where’s the goddamn table leaf?” shouts her dad, stomping downstairs.

The Salem cousins come for dinner in an hour.

She fishes under the sink for the box of tampons and tugs out what’s hidden under the Regulars and Super Pluses.

“Shut up,” she tells the shiny blond infant on the box.

Thighs planted on the toilet, she tears the plastic sheath off the pee stick.

There is a loving home out there for every baby who comes into the world.

She doesn’t weep or hyperventilate or text Ash a photo of the plus sign blazing on the stick. She wraps the test box and its contents in a brown paper bag, which she tucks into a rain boot at the back of her closet. She gets dressed.

The witch has a treatment, if it’s early enough. And she doesn’t charge money. Ash’s sister’s friend, who got an abortion from the witch last year, said it only works before a certain week in the pregnancy. The witch uses wild herbs that won’t incriminate you if you’re caught with them, because the police can’t tell what they are. And the daughter doesn’t plan to be caught.

Yasmine could have gone to Canada for an abortion, because the Pink Wall didn’t exist yet. Or she could have given the baby to someone else.

Yasmine asked what it felt like to be adopted.

The daughter said, “Normal.”

Which was true and not true.

Yasmine knew the daughter was curious about her bio mother.

Maybe she

Was too young.

Was too old—didn’t have the energy.

Already had six kids.

Knew she was about to die of cancer.

Was a tweaker.

Just didn’t feel like dealing.

It was a closed adoption. There is no way to find her, aside from a private detective the daughter can’t afford yet.

So she dreams.

About her bio mother getting famous for developing a cure for paralysis and being on the cover of a magazine in the checkout line, where the daughter instantly recognizes her face.

About her bio mother finding her. The daughter comes down the school steps, the three o’clock bell is ringing, and a woman in sunglasses rushes up, shouting, “Are you mine?”

About her bio grandmother, who maybe loved to bake. She sees the ramekins her bio grandmother used for custard. A set of six, white-rimmed blue, one chipped. Her bio mother maybe always chose to eat from the chipped one.

The ramekins are smashed at the bottom of a well in the yard of the house where they all died, grandmother and grandfather and cousins and her bio mother, who was still weak from giving birth, overwhelmed with sadness, resolved to go the next day to the agency and get her baby back—she had a forty-eight-hour window; it had only been thirty hours; she would go the next day; now she just needed a little rest, but what was that smell? It was smoke, because fire, because malfunctioning space heater, but nobody was paying attention because drunk, and her bio mother, though not drunk, was too exhausted from the pain of labor to call out a warning; so they died.

An aunt, arriving later to pick through the rubble, threw all non-valuables into the well. If this well existed—if the daughter could find it—she’d climb down a rope and save the pieces of white ramekin, the spoons and knives, tin canisters of love notes, steel lockets packed with hair. That hair would have the DNA of her bio mother, sealed safe from fire and from damp.

Sixteen years ago abortion was legal in every state.

Why did she spend nine months growing the daughter if she was just going to give her up?