Red Clocks(70)

She is terrified, realizes the biographer.

“And I don’t want to put someone on the planet,” whispers Mattie, “who I’ll always wonder about my whole life. Like where is the someone? Are they okay?”

“What if you knew who was raising them?” The biographer sees a vast, sunny cliff top, blue sky and blue ocean beyond; and Mattie in a flowered dress, shielding her eyes; and the biographer crouching beside the baby, saying, “There’s your Aunt Mattie!” and the baby toddling toward her.

“I just can’t,” rasps the girl. “I’m sorry.”

Horror thuds in the biographer’s chest: she has made her apologize for something that needs no apology.

Mattie is a kid, light boned and soft cheeked. She can’t even legally drive.

Four and a half months.

Of swelling and aching and burning and straining and worrying and waiting and feeling her body burst its banks. Of hiding from the stares in town, the questions at school. Of seeing the faces, each day, of her parents as they watch the grandchild who won’t be their grandchild be grown. Having to wonder, later on, where is the someone she grew.

The glass splinter says: Who gives a fuck?

Mattie says: “Would you go with me?”

To the checkups and the prenatal yoga.

To the store for dark leafy greens.

To the clean, comfortable birthing bed set up in the biographer’s apartment, when it’s time.

For a dazzling instant she has her baby, who will be tall and dark haired, good at soccer and math. She will take the baby on a rowboat to the lighthouse, on a train to Alaska, practice math problems with the baby on a soccer field. She will love the baby so much.

Except that’s not, of course, what Mattie means.

Down her spine, an itching wire.

If the biographer were to admit her own Torschlusspanik motives, clarify that the baby would be for her, Mattie might end up agreeing. She wants to please—to be pleasing. She wants to make her favorite teacher happy.

The biographer would be asking something of her that she doesn’t believe should be asked of anyone. Deepest convictions, trampled.

Yet here she is, about to tell a sniffly child to give her what she’s growing.

The glass splinter says: This is your last chance.

Plunge.

The biographer says: “Okay.”

Mattie looks up, green eyes red and spilling. “You’ll go with me?”

“I will.” She feels like vomiting.

“I’m sorry to—There’s nobody who—Ash won’t—”

“I get it, Mattie.”

“Thank you,” she says. Then: “Is there more than one girls’ juvenile correctional facility in Oregon, do you know?”

“Are you—” But of course she’s scared. The biographer pats, clumsily, the top of Mattie’s head. “We’ll be all right.”

We will? They could both get arrested. The biographer could become a headline. SHIFTY SCHOOLMARM IS ABORTER’S ACCOMPLICE. She feels a rush of raw love for those who are caught, and for those who know they could be.

The girl stands up, shoulders her satchel, adjusts her scarf. Won’t meet the biographer’s eye. “I’ll see you tomorrow?” And she is out the door.

Seed and soil. Egg and shell.

A plug of bile is bobbing at the foot of her throat.

“The key to happiness is hopelessness,” says the meditation teacher.

Like a shark: keep moving.

The biographer walks up to a poster for the music club (WHY ARE PIRATES SUCH GOOD SINGERS? THEY CAN HIT THE HIGH CS!) and claws it off the wall and rips it in half.





The explorer wrote to the tutor, Harry Rattray, who still worked for the shipyard director in Aberdeen:

After many weeks of reflection on my difficulties with the Royal Society I have taken the painful decision to request that you publish my findings under your own name. Otherwise the world will never know them.





THE MENDER


Cousin Bryan’s testimony, while damning of Mr. Fivey, only matters if Lola corroborates it. When the lawyer explains this to the mender, warning that it may have been a pointless detour, she smiles and says: “Not for Lola.”

“How do you mean?”

“Other people know now,” she says. “Outside her family. She’s free.”

The lawyer thoughtfully pets the clean pink skin over his skull. Murmurs, “There we go.”

Today Lola isn’t wearing as much eye makeup, so her face looks farther away.

“Mrs. Fivey,” says the lawyer, “thank you for coming back to the stand.”

“Well, I was subpoenaed.” But she’s looking at the lawyer. Last time she only looked at her hands.

“You heard the testimony of your cousin, Bryan Zakile. I want to ask you, Mrs. Fivey—”

“I prefer Lola?”

Yes, her family members have witnessed arguments between her and her husband. Yes, these arguments can get heated. No, her cousin was not wrong when he described an altercation on Thanksgiving that involved her husband clapping his hand across her mouth in an extremely forceful manner. He was not wrong when he testified that her mandible had been bruised by her husband. Or that, on another occasion, she confided to him that her phalanx had been snapped by her husband. And, yes, the scar on her right forearm was caused when her husband held a hot skillet against the skin. She did not report any of these incidents because it takes two to tango. She’s not perfect either. A few family members have expressed concern, yes, but as her mother says, you don’t go into other people’s marriages uninvited.