Red Clocks (27 page)

Give it to me.

Air moves
lightly on her tongue and teeth. Dries her lips. “Mattie?”

“Yeah, miss?”

“I want to help you.”

“Then don’t tell anyone, okay? Not even Mr. Korsmo. I know you’re pals.”

She prepares to shape the words:
Pay for your vitamins. Drive you to every checkup. If you give it to me.

The girl coughs, swallows a curd of phlegm. “By the way, I made an appointment at a—a place in Portland. I need to do
it soon because I’m almost twenty-one weeks.”

Twenty-one weeks means nineteen left. Four and a half months.

Only four and a half months, Mattie!

“That far along,” says the biographer, “the procedure could be dangerous.” The glass splinter is choosing these words. “A lot of term houses have no idea what they’re doing. They just want to make money.”

“I don’t care,” says Mattie.

“I’ve heard
of—” The biographer’s whole self is a splinter. “Fatal errors.”

“I don’t care! Even if the place is foul and they have other girls’ stuff in the buckets, I don’t care, I want this to be
over
.” Hands in fists, she starts hitting herself on either side of the head, bam bam bam bam bam bam bam, until the biographer pulls her arms, gently, down.

“I’m just saying”—holding Mattie’s wrists—“you have
other choices.”

You can wait four and a half short months.

“Choices?” A new edge in her voice.

“Well, like adoption.”

“Don’t want to do that.” Mattie jerks out of her grasp, turns away.

“Why not?”
Give it to me.

“Just don’t.”

“But why?”
Give it to me. I’ve been waiting.

“You always tell us”—the girl’s voice flicks up into a whine—“that we make our own roads and we don’t have to justify
or explain them to anyone.”

“I do say that,” says the biographer.

Mattie glares.

“However, I’d like to make sure you’ve thought this through.”

The girl slumps down against a green filing cabinet. Holds her head in both hands, knees up to her chest, rocking a little. “I just want it out of my body. I want to stop being
infiltrated
. God, please get this out of my body. Make this stop.” Rocking,
rocking.

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
C
S!
) and claws it off the wall and rips it in half.

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.

When Mr. Fivey
found the scar oil in Lola’s purse, he pestered her until she admitted going to Ms. Percival about the burn. Hadn’t that been a better idea than going to Umpqua General, where they might ask questions? Mr. Fivey didn’t agree. He saw a bonkers witchy-woo too deranged to graduate from high school who had no business ministering to his wife.

Lola went to pack her suitcase. She planned to drive to
New Mexico (she has a friend there who makes piñon kokopellis) to think things over.

Mr. Fivey came into the bedroom with a glass of vodka and the bottle of scar oil. He had crushed up (she learned later) several tabs of colarozam and mixed them into the oil. He handed her the oil and said, “Drink.” When she said no, he slapped her. She drank. And chased the oil with the vodka. And got so wasted
that on her way to the kitchen, she fell down the stairs.

She was not—nor did she believe she was—pregnant when she consulted Ms. Percival. That was the last thing on her mind.

Has she ever been pregnant?

Once, thirteen years ago, before she met her husband. She would prefer not to talk about that.

Why is she recanting her previous testimony?

This question makes her quiet. The judge has to
remind her she is obliged to answer.

Finally Lola says, “Because I’m done doing his laundry.”

They wait in the transition room while the jury deliberates. The lawyer’s assistant brings in a box of chocolate-covered blueberries and says, “Fortitude?”

The mender tastes: delicious.

Lola didn’t say:
I’m recanting because it wouldn’t be fair to make Gin Percival spend seven years in prison.
Barely
mentioned Gin Percival at all.

The lawyer is scratching, as usual: wrists, ears, the back of his neck.

“Eczema?” says the mender.

“Bedbugs,” he says. “Courtesy of the Narwhal Inn. My apartment in Salem now has them too. I’m on my second fumigation.”

“I know some good banishments. If I get out—”

“When.”
He lifts his arms to air out the drenched pits.

“Where will Lola go?” she asks. “She can’t
stay at home.”

“Her attorney said she’s already moved to her parents’. The question remains, where will
Mr.
Fivey be staying?”

The mender eats the last blueberry. “You mean, which cell?”

When the jury foreman rises, she shuts her eyes.

“Ladiesanjinnelminnuv.”

“Haveyoureached.”

“Have yeronner.”

“Whatsayyou?”

Stop shaking. You’re a Percival.

“We find the defendant—”

Descended from a pirate.

“—not guilty on both counts.”

A whoop from the audience. She is shaking too hard to look, but it sounded like the voice of the pissed-off library lady.

She takes the lawyer’s damp hand.

Friday night she scours the Math Academy website, rereading the seminar descriptions and inserting her own face into photos of nerds laughing around tables. If she even gets in. The application was hard. All the nominees will have top grades and test scores, said Mr. Xiao: “You have to stand out. Make yourself come alive in the essay answers.”

How do you see mathematics figuring
into your future?

My future will include

Math will be important in my future because

In my future, I see

I notice there is a pun in this question

If she gets in, she plans to take the seminar on recursion. Self-similar structures. Variability through repetition. Fractals. Chaos theory.

Think about fractals, not about suction and sloshing tubes and the term-house door smashed open by a cop’s
battering ram.

She won’t be sixteen for almost a month; she wouldn’t be tried as an adult. But even non-adults can be sent away.

When Yasmine operated on her own clump, most termination houses didn’t exist yet. It was right after the federal ban had gone into effect. To help the ban take hold, the attorney general ordered district attorneys nationwide to go after the harshest possible sentences
for seekers. Send a message. Girls as young as thirteen were incarcerated for three to five years. Even the daughter of Erica Salter, member of the Oregon House of Representatives, was locked up in Bolt River Youth Correctional Facility. A message had to be sent.

A day before the self-operation, Yasmine said nobody could know she’d been pregnant, and if the daughter told anyone, she wouldn’t
speak to her ever again.

“I’m not giving them another reason to think I’m not smart.”

“Why would anyone think you’re not smart?”

“Is that a joke?”

“No,” said the daughter.

“You are a very ignorant white girl,” said Yasmine.

She counts every tile in the upstairs bathroom so she won’t think about it.

Saturday morning she reminds Mom that after the aquarium she’ll spend the night at Ash’s—see
you tomorrow. Yes, she packed her retainer.

When Ash delivers her to the church parking lot, it seems Ro/Miss is not in the greatest mood. Cold faced, quiet. The daughter offers money for gas and Ro/Miss rolls her eyes. How will they find topics for conversation? Thankfully Ro/Miss turns the radio on. The daughter sinks down in the seat as they drive through town: what would it look like, a student
in a teacher’s car? Think about Newville gossip, not about the procedure.

Passing a logged hillside, gashed and barren, the stumps like headstones, the daughter sees the shining fir floors in her house. Smells smoke on herself. Chimneylina. One day she’ll quit, after she’s gotten her marine-biology degree and is working in cetacean situations. Her future will include a study of whale-harming
toxins dumped by humans into the sea. A trip to the Faroe Islands to disrupt the slaughter of pilot whales, who are technically dolphins. A trip to a Japanese temple that sings requiems for the whales’ souls, gives names to the fetuses inside the captured mothers.