Red Clocks(55)

“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.