Red Clocks(61)

“Cool,” says Ash. “I’ve never seen a testimony before.”

When the Quarles family moved to Newville, Ash was the only person willing to hang out with the daughter. She warned her that Good Ship uses ghost pepper (which can numb your lips permanently) in its hot and sour soup. She took her to the lighthouse. She taught her to find creatures in the tide pools—ass-mouthed anemones, ribbed limpets whose shells fit into dents in the rock called home scars.

They drive north in slashing sleet. Order mochas at the drive-through espresso hut. Lick the quaking towers of whip.

“New scarf?”

“Christmas,” says the daughter.

“The purple one looked better.”

Yasmine wouldn’t like Ash much; but she is all the daughter has.

She lights a cigarette. Everything out the window is gray, the sky and the cliffs and the water, the cold curtains of rain. The cops at the hospital kept asking “How did she do it? What did she use?” and the daughter couldn’t answer.

“So, um, I have a question,” she says.

Ash holds out two fingers. The daughter puts her cigarette between them.

“Can you ask your sister for the number of a term house?”

Ash exhales, hands the cigarette back. “No way.”

“But the ones online, you can’t tell if they’re real or traps. Can’t you just ask?”

“Fuck no. Clementine wouldn’t tell me, anyhow.”

“She might, if she knew I didn’t—have much time left?”

“Yeah, but no. Too dangerous. Clem knows a girl who got such a bad infection at this place in Seattle she had to get emergency surgery and almost died.”

“Was she arrested?”

“Of course.” Ash reaches for the cigarette again. “But her dad hired this famous lawyer. The girl told my sister the term house was sickening. She saw a plastic bucket of another girl’s stuff just sitting there. A clear plastic bucket.”

Hot spike in the daughter’s ribs. Taste of pennies on her teeth.

Yasmine didn’t die either. But she lost so much blood she needed transfusions. All night the daughter and her parents waited at the ER with Mrs. Salter, who rocked back and forth in her pink ski jacket. The lights squeaked. The daughter had to pee horribly but wanted to be there when the doctor brought news.

Yasmine’s uterus was so badly damaged it had to be removed.

The cops came while she was still in the hospital.

The witch wears an orange prisoner suit, not the stitched sack, and her hair looks brushed, which in the forest cabin it did not. Good thing she can’t see Gin Percival’s face, in case the face looks scared. The daughter, scared all the time now, wants there to be people who aren’t.

Clementine is scheduled to testify as a character witness. The rest of Ash’s family thinks Gin Percival contaminated the waters. More fish are turning up dead in the nets, and the dead man’s fingers are messing up the hulls of boats.

“Please silence your electronic devices,” says the little judge.

At this moment Ro/Miss is taking attendance and doing the bit where she repeats the names of the missing (“Quarles …? Quarles …? Quarles …?”) in reference to an old movie the daughter hasn’t seen.

“Doctor,” says the lemon-mouthed prosecutor, “before we adjourned yesterday you said Dolores Fivey suffered a grade-three mild traumatic brain injury as the result of falling down a flight of stairs of twelve vertical feet, which—”

“Objection,” says Gin Percival’s lawyer, bald and round. “The doctor has already testified to these details; I can’t imagine why we need to hear them again.”

“Withdrawn. Can you please tell the court the results of a tox screen administered to Mrs. Fivey shortly after her arrival at Umpqua General Hospital?”

“Sure can,” says the doctor. “We found alcohol and colarozam in her system.”

“As you know, terminating a pregnancy is a felony.”

Her clothes are too tight. The room is too hot.

A plastic bucket of another girl’s stuff.

“Objection.”

“Can cause dizziness and falling.”

“When mixed with alcohol.”

“When mixed with lemon, lavender, fenugreek, and elderflower oil.”

“A felony.”

“Seeking a termination.”

“A felony.”

She needs to find a bathroom—

“Dizzy, disoriented, prone to stumbling.”

“When Dolores Fivey was admitted.”

“Standard procedure.”

Websites say nausea is only first trimester—

“And what were the results of.”

“Women of childbearing age.”

The daughter needs a bathroom. Can’t think. Too hot.

Colarozam.

A plastic bucket.

The shunning of a boar.

Claimed to believe.

When mixed with alcohol.

A boar shun.

So tight this hoodie this room too hot— Ash’s mocha breath on her cheek: “Girl, are you okay?”

“What.”

“You’re sweating like a freak. Let’s get some water.”

“Bathroom.”

“Hush,” says Ash, and shoves her down the slippery bench toward the door.