Red Clocks(78)

“If not, we’ll whistle for you,” said the boatswain, to groggy laughter.

She hadn’t been walking long when the fog flew in.

There are many names for fog. Pogonip. Brume. Ground clouds. Gloom. Mínervudottír had written every name in her brown leather notebook. She stood now in a dense, creamy mist, the worst ice fog she’d ever known.

Was her compass damaged? Had she forgotten to bring it?

Bells and sledgehammer = fog signal She shouted “Help” in three languages.

When her legs were too numb and trembling to lift themselves, she sat down.

No reindeer bag to crawl into.

She thought she heard the ship’s bells, but couldn’t place their direction.

She drank ten sips of tea.

It was like sitting in a cloud.

Brother, where are the bells?

Eiv?r tried walking again but could see nothing in front of her except whiteness. She was afraid of stepping in a crack in the ice and dropping into the sea.

She sat down again.

Slit lambs hung in the shed, throats red.

I know which hillside.

She had no reindeer bag.

This lamb fed from.

Survival was not assured. Her eyes were closing. She lay down and slept until. She tasted milk-boiled puffin—she was chewing her own cheeks.

Brother Gunni, bells are the where?

If she didn’t move, her blood would stop.

Persist, Eiv?r told herself.

She stood and staggered on.





THE DAUGHTER


Dearest Yasmine, I’m writing this letter from the Math Academy. It’s not as amazing as we envisioned, but it’s good.

I miss you. Always wondering how you are. What kind of school situation do they have there? Do you still want to do pre-med? My plan is marine biology. I touched a whale’s eye on the beach.

Please believe me, Yas: I didn’t want to tell anyone. I thought you were going to die so I called them. That was the only reason.

Also: I had a procedure something happen. Three months ago.

When you get out of Bolt River, can we be friends again?

Love,

MATTS





Mínervudottír was found under a pane of ice. They saw her face first, as if pressed up to glass, one cheek flat and white. The blacksmith wrote later, to his wife: I have never seen an eye opened wider. She had removed her coat to free herself to fight the current and break the ice. Her fingernails, from scratching, were almost gone.

The search party did not chop open the water to claim the explorer’s corpse. They may have crossed themselves, or said prayers, or simply been relieved that one less mouth was alive to feed. It is odious to lose a woman’s body to this wilderness, wrote the blacksmith to his wife, but we hadn’t the strength to retrieve it.





THE BIOGRAPHER


Where does the book end?

It has to stop somewhere.

She has to step out of it.

Mínervudottír: A Hole.

Most whales, when they die, don’t wash up on beaches. Their carcasses fall to the ocean floor, where they are consumed over time by foragers big and small. A deep-sea whale fall can feed scavengers for fifty years or more.

Osedax, types the biographer into her computer, is a bone-eating worm.

She peers through the slatted blinds at the heat-slicked lawns and palmettos and fire bush. The air-conditioning is jacked so high she shivers. Dad’s condo is a stucco box fastened to a row of other boxes, each with a tiny lanai overlooking the community center. It’s not all bad, he says. The community center has a barbershop and shows movies. Every Fourth of July, they serve a decent whiskey punch.

Archie never set foot in Florida. The idea of a retirement village appalled him, and Ambrosia Ridge sounded like a porn name. One of their last arguments was about his refusal to visit. The biographer didn’t love retirement villages either, but Dad was here now. Archie called her a pious bureaucrat and hung up.

She calls toward the bedroom: “I’m turning down the AC, okay?”

“Be out in a sec.” His bedsprings jounce.

“Don’t rush. Breakfast is still in progress.”

It will take him time to emerge. When he walks, his pain is conspicuous—the hunched-over shuffling, the pausing every few feet. He waves off the biographer’s questions about treatment options. She needs to call his doctor herself.

Once her father has shambled in, she explains the Faroese meal laid out on the coral-laminate countertop: boiled puffin eggs (chicken eggs), wind-dried whale blubber (pork bacon), and Shrovetide buns (canned-dough biscuits).

“My doctor says I can’t have bacon”—he crams a strip into his mouth—“but blubber is allowed.”

“Why can’t you?”

“When you’re old, they like to prohibit things. How else are they going to fill up those twelve-minute appointments? No bacon, no sugar. And no amorous exertion.”

“Dad.”

“Oh, relax.”

The biographer chews and stares out at the man-made pond. Like many things at Ambrosia Ridge, the pond is depressing and soothing in equal measure. The aerator generates a round-the-clock fountain, proof of fraudulence; yet the little fountain, throwing beads of green sunlight, is actually kind of pretty.

“Let’s toast to your mother.”