Red Clocks Read online

  Copyright

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2018 by Leni Zumas

  Cover design and illustration by Lauren Harms

  Author photograph by Sophia Shalmiyev

  Cover copyright © 2018 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

  1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104

  littlebrown.com

  twitter.com/littlebrown

  facebook.com/littlebrownandcompany

  First ebook edition: January 2018

  Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  The Hachette Speakers Bureau provides a wide range of authors for speaking events. To find out more, go to hachettespeakersbureau.com or call (866) 376-6591.

  ISBN 978-0-316-43480-5

  E3-20171031-JV-PC

  Contents

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  1.

  2. THE BIOGRAPHER

  3.

  4. THE MENDER

  5.

  6. THE DAUGHTER

  7.

  8. THE WIFE

  9.

  10. THE BIOGRAPHER

  11.

  12. THE MENDER

  13.

  14. THE DAUGHTER

  15.

  16. THE WIFE

  17.

  18. THE BIOGRAPHER

  19.

  20. THE MENDER

  21.

  22. THE DAUGHTER

  23.

  24. THE WIFE

  25.

  26. THE BIOGRAPHER

  27.

  28. THE MENDER

  29.

  30. THE DAUGHTER

  31.

  32. THE WIFE

  33.

  34. THE BIOGRAPHER

  35.

  36. THE DAUGHTER

  37.

  38. THE MENDER

  39.

  40. THE WIFE

  41.

  42. THE BIOGRAPHER

  43.

  44. THE DAUGHTER

  45.

  46. THE MENDER

  47.

  48. THE WIFE

  49.

  50. THE BIOGRAPHER

  51.

  52. THE DAUGHTER

  53.

  54. THE MENDER

  55.

  56. THE WIFE

  57.

  58. THE DAUGHTER

  59.

  60. THE BIOGRAPHER

  61.

  62. THE WIFE

  63.

  64. THE MENDER

  65.

  66. THE BIOGRAPHER

  67.

  68. THE BIOGRAPHER

  69.

  70. THE DAUGHTER

  71.

  72. THE MENDER

  73.

  74. THE WIFE

  75.

  76. THE BIOGRAPHER

  77.

  78. THE DAUGHTER

  79.

  80. THE WIFE

  81.

  82. THE MENDER

  83.

  84. THE DAUGHTER

  85.

  86. THE BIOGRAPHER

  87.

  88. THE WIFE

  89.

  90. THE MENDER

  91.

  92. THE BIOGRAPHER

  93.

  94. THE DAUGHTER

  95.

  96. THE WIFE

  97.

  98. THE MENDER

  99.

  100. THE BIOGRAPHER

  101.

  102. THE MENDER

  103.

  104. THE DAUGHTER

  105.

  106. THE BIOGRAPHER

  107.

  108. THE DAUGHTER

  109.

  110. THE WIFE

  111.

  112. THE BIOGRAPHER

  113.

  114. THE MENDER

  115.

  116. THE DAUGHTER

  117.

  118. THE BIOGRAPHER

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY LENI ZUMAS

  NOTES

  NEWSLETTERS

  for Luca and Nicholas

  per sempre

  For nothing was simply one thing. The other Lighthouse was true too.

  Virginia Woolf

  Born in 1841 on a Faroese sheep farm,

  The polar explorer was raised on a farm near

  In the North Atlantic Ocean, between Scotland and Iceland, on an island with more sheep than people, a shepherd’s wife gave birth to a child who would grow up to study ice.

  Pack ice once posed such a danger to ships that any researcher who knew the personality of this ice could predict its behavior was valuable to the companies and governments that funded polar expeditions.

  In 1841, on the Faroe Islands, in a turf-roofed cottage, in a bed that smelled of whale fat, of a mother who had delivered nine children and buried four, the polar explorer Eivør Mínervudottír was born.

  THE BIOGRAPHER

  In a room for women whose bodies are broken, Eivør Mínervudottír’s biographer waits her turn. She wears sweatpants, is white skinned and freckle cheeked, not young, not old. Before she is called to climb into stirrups and feel her vagina prodded with a wand that makes black pictures, on a screen, of her ovaries and uterus, the biographer sees every wedding ring in the room. Serious rocks, fat bands of glitter. They live on the fingers of women who have leather sofas and solvent husbands but whose cells and tubes and bloods are failing at their animal destiny. This, anyway, is the story the biographer likes. It is a simple, easy story that allows her not to think about what’s happening in the women’s heads, or in the heads of the husbands who sometimes accompany them.

  Nurse Crabby wears a neon-pink wig and a plastic-strap contraption that exposes nearly all of her torso, including a good deal of breast. “Happy Halloween,” she explains.

  “And to you,” says the biographer.

  “Let’s go suck out some lineage.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Anagram for blood.”

  “Hmm,” says the biographer politely.

  Crabby doesn’t find the vein straight off. Has to dig, and it hurts. “Where are you, mister?” she asks the vein. Months of needlework have streaked and darkened the insides of the biographer’s elbows. Luckily long sleeves are common in this part of the world.

  “Aunt Flo visited again, did she?” says Crabby.

  “Vengefully.”

  “Well, Roberta, the body’s a riddle. Here we go—got you.” Blood swooshes into the chamber. It will tell them how much follicle-stimulating hormone and estradiol and progesterone the biographer’s body is making. There are good numbers and there are bad. Crabby drops the tube into a rack alongside other little bullets of blood.

  Half an hour later, a knock on the exam-room door—a warning, not a request for permission. I
n comes a man wearing leather trousers, aviator sunglasses, a curly black wig under a porkpie hat.

  “I’m the guy from that band,” says Dr. Kalbfleisch.

  “Wow,” says the biographer, bothered by how sexy he’s become.

  “Shall we take a look?” He settles his leather on a stool in front of her open legs, says “Oops!” and removes the sunglasses. Kalbfleisch played football at an East Coast university and still has the face of a frat boy. He is golden skinned, a poor listener. He smiles while citing bleak statistics. The nurse holds the biographer’s file and a pen to write measurements. The doctor will call out how thick the lining, how large the follicles, how many the follicles. Add these numbers to the biographer’s age (42) and her level of follicle-stimulating hormone (14.3) and the temperature outside (56) and the number of ants in the square foot of soil directly beneath them (87), and you get the odds. The chance of a child.

  Snapping on latex gloves: “Okay, Roberta, let’s see what’s what.”

  On a scale of one to ten, with ten being the shrill funk of an elderly cheese and one being no odor at all, how would he rank the smell of the biographer’s vagina? How does it compare with the other vaginas barreling through this exam room, day in, day out, years of vaginas, a crowd of vulvic ghosts? Plenty of women don’t shower beforehand, or are battling a yeast, or just happen naturally to stink in the nethers. Kalbfleisch has sniffed some ripe tangs in his time.

  He slides in the ultrasound wand, dabbed with its neon-blue jelly, and presses it up against her cervix. “Your lining’s nice and thin,” he says. “Four point five. Right where we want it.” On the monitor, the lining of the biographer’s uterus is a dash of white chalk in a black swell, hardly enough of a thing, it seems, to measure, but Kalbfleisch is a trained professional in whose expertise she is putting her trust. And her money—so much money that the numbers seem virtual, mythical, details from a story about money rather than money anyone actually has. The biographer, for example, does not have it. She’s using credit cards.

  The doctor moves to the ovaries, shoving and tilting the wand until he gets an angle he likes. “Here’s the right side. Nice bunch of follicles…” The eggs themselves are too small to be seen, even with magnification, but their sacs—black holes on the grayish screen—can be counted.

  “Keep our fingers crossed,” says Kalbfleisch, easing the wand back out.

  Doctor, is my bunch actually nice?

  He rolls away from her crotch and pulls off his gloves. “For the past several cycles”—looking at her chart, not at her—“you’ve been taking Clomid to support ovulation.”

  This she does not need to be told.

  “Unfortunately Clomid also causes the uterine lining to shrink, so we advise patients not to take it for long stretches of time. You’ve already done a long stretch.”

  Wait, what?

  She should have looked it up herself.

  “So for this round we need to try a different protocol. Another medication that’s been known to improve the odds in some elderly pregravid cases.”

  “Elderly?”

  “Just a clinical term.” He doesn’t glance up from the prescription he’s writing. “She’ll explain the medication and we’ll see you back here on day nine.” He hands the file to the nurse, stands, and makes an adjustment to his leather crotch before striding out.

  Asshole, in Faroese: reyvarhol.

  Crabby says, “So you need to fill this today and start taking it tomorrow morning, on an empty stomach. Every morning for ten days. While you’re on it, you might notice a foul odor from the discharge from your vagina.”

  “Great,” says the biographer.

  “Some women say the smell is quite, um, surprising,” she goes on. “Even actually disturbing. But whatever you do, don’t douche. That’ll introduce chemicals into the canal that if they make their way through the cervix can, you know, compromise the pH of the uterine cavity.”

  The biographer has never douched in her life, nor does she know anyone who has.

  “Questions?” says the nurse.

  “What does”—she squints at the prescription—“Ovutran do?”

  “It supports ovulation.”

  “How, though?”

  “You’d have to ask the doctor.”

  She is submitting her area to all kinds of invasion without understanding a fraction of what’s being done to it. This seems, suddenly, terrible. How can you raise a child alone if you don’t even find out what they’re doing to your area?

  “I’d like to ask him now,” she says.

  “He’s already with another patient. Best thing to do is call the office.”

  “But I’m here in the office. Can’t he—or is there someone else who—”

  “Sorry, it’s an extra-busy day. Halloween and all.”

  “Why does Halloween make it busier?”

  “It’s a holiday.”

  “Not a national holiday. Banks are open and the mail is delivered.”

  “You will need,” says Crabby slowly, carefully, “to call the office.”

  The biographer cried the first time it failed. She was waiting in line to buy floss, having pledged to improve her dental hygiene now that she was going to be a parent, and her phone rang: one of the nurses, “I’m sorry, sweetie, but your test was negative,” the biographer saying thank you, okay, thank you and hitting END before the tears started. Despite the statistics and Kalbfleisch’s “This doesn’t work for everyone,” the biographer had thought it would be easy. Squirt in millions of sperm from a nineteen-year-old biology major, precisely timed to be there waiting when the egg flies out; sperm and egg collide in the warm tunnel—how could fertilization not happen? Don’t be stupid anymore, she wrote in her notebook, under Immediate action required.

  She drives west on Highway 22 into dark hills dense with hemlock, fir, and spruce. Oregon has the best trees in America, soaring and shaggy winged, alpine sinister. Her tree gratitude mutes her doctor resentment. Two hours from his office, her car crests the cliff road and the church steeple juts into view. The rest of town follows, hunched in rucked hills sloping to the water. Smoke coils from the pub chimney. Fishing nets pile on the shore. In Newville you can watch the sea eat the ground, over and over, unstopping. Millions of abyssal thalassic acres. The sea does not ask permission or wait for instruction. It doesn’t suffer from not knowing what on earth, exactly, it is meant to do. Today its walls are high, white lather torn, crashing hard at the sea stacks. “Angry sea,” people say, but to the biographer the ascribing of human feeling to a body so inhumanly itself is wrong. The water heaves up for reasons they don’t have names for.

  Central Coast Regional H.S. seeks history teacher (U.S./World). Bachelor’s degree required. Location: Newville, Oregon, fishing village on quiet ocean harbor, migrating whales. Ivy League–educated principal is committed to creating dynamic, innovative learning environment.

  The biographer applied because of quiet ocean harbor and no mention of teaching experience. Her brief interview consisted of the principal, Mr. Fivey, plot-summarizing his favorite seafaring novels and mentioning twice the name of the college he had gone to. He said she could do the teacher-certification course over two summers. For seven years she has lived in the lee of fog-smoked evergreen mountains, thousand-foot cliffs plunging straight down to the sea. It rains and rains and rains. Log trucks stall traffic on the cliff road, locals catch fish or make things for tourists, the pub hangs a list of old shipwrecks, the tsunami siren is tested monthly, and students learn to say “miss” as if they were servants.

  She starts class by following her daily plan, but when she sees chins mashing into fists, she decides to abandon it. Tenth-grade global history, the world in forty weeks, with a foolish textbook she is contractually obliged to use, can’t be stood without detours. These kids, after all, have not been lost yet. Staring up at her, jaws rimmed with baby fat, they are perched on the brink of not giving a shit. They still give a shit, but not, most of them, for long.
She instructs them to close their books, which they are happy to do. They watch her with a new stillness. They will be told a story, can be children again, of whom nothing is asked.

  “Boadicea was queen of a Celtic tribe called the Iceni in what is now Norfolk, England. The Romans had invaded a while back and were ruling the land. Her husband died and left his fortune to her and their daughters, but the Romans ignored his will, took the fortune, flogged Boadicea, and raped the daughters.”

  One kid: “What’s ‘flog’?”

  Another: “Beat the frock out of.”

  “The Romans had screwed her royally”—somebody laughs softly at this, for which the biographer is grateful—“and in 61 CE she led her people in rebellion. The Iceni fought hard. They forced the Romans all the way back to London. But bear in mind that the Roman soldiers had lots of incentive to win, because if they didn’t, they could expect to be cooked on skewers and/or boiled to death, after seeing their own intestines being pulled out of their bodies.”

  “That rules,” says a boy.

  “Eventually the Roman forces were too much for the Iceni. Boadicea either poisoned herself to avoid capture or got sick; either way, she died. The win column isn’t the point. The point is…” She stops, aware of twenty-four little gazes.

  Into the silence the soft laugher ventures: “Don’t frock with a woman?”

  They like this. They like slogans.

  “Well,” the biographer says, “sort of. But more than that. We also have to consider—”

  The bell.

  A burst of scraping and sliding, bodies glad to go. “Bye, miss!” “Have a good day, miss.”

  The soft laugher, Mattie Quarles, idles near the biographer’s desk. “So is that where the word ‘bodacious’ comes from?”

  “I wish I could say yes,” says the biographer, “but ‘bodacious’ originated in the nineteenth century, I think. Mix of ‘bold’ and ‘audacious.’ Good instinct, though!”

  “Thanks, miss.”

  “You really don’t need to call me that,” says the biographer for the seven thousandth time.

  After school she stops at the Acme, grocery and hardware and drugstore combined. The pharmacist’s assistant is a boy—now a young man—she taught in her first year at Central Coast, and she hates the moment each month when he hands her the white bag with the little orange bottle. I know what this is for, his eyes say. Even if his eyes don’t actually say that, it’s hard to look at him. She brings other items to the counter (unsalted peanuts, Q-tips) as if somehow to disguise the fertility medication. The biographer can’t recall his name but remembers admiring, in class, seven years ago, his long black lashes—they always looked a little wet.