COPYRIGHT

The Borough Press

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published by Lee Boudreaux Books 2018

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

Copyright © Leni Zumas 2018

Jacket design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018

Jacket design and illustration © Lauren Harms

Leni Zumas asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books

Source ISBN: 9780008209827

Ebook Edition © March 2018 ISBN: 9780008209858

Version: 2017-11-01

DEDICATION

for Luca and Nicholas

per sempre

EPIGRAPH

For nothing was simply one thing. The other

Lighthouse was true too.

Virginia Woolf

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

The Biographer

The Mender

The Daughter

The Wife

The Biographer

The Mender

The Daughter

The Wife

The Biographer

The Mender

The Daughter

The Wife

The Biographer

The Mender

The Daughter

The Wife

The Biographer

The Daughter

The Mender

The Wife

The Biographer

The Daughter

The Mender

The Wife

The Biographer

The Daughter

The Mender

The Wife

The Daughter

The Biographer

The Wife

The Mender

The Biographer

The Biographer

The Daughter

The Mender

The Wife

The Biographer

The Daughter

The Wife

The Mender

The Daughter

The Biographer

The Wife

The Mender

The Biographer

The Daughter

The Wife

The Mender

The Biographer

The Mender

The Daughter

The Biographer

The Daughter

The Wife

The Biographer

The Mender

The Daughter

The Biographer

Notes

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Leni Zumas

About the Publisher

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. In 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.

Waiting on the hard little plastic chair, under elevator music and fluorescent glare, the biographer takes out her notebook. Everything in this notebook must be in list form, and any list is eligible. Items for next food shop. Kalbfleisch’s necktie designs. Countries with most lighthouses per capita.

She starts a new one: Accusations from the world.

1. You’re too old.

2. If you can’t have a child the natural way, you shouldn’t have one at all.

3. Every child needs two parents.

4. Children raised by single mothers are more liable to rape/murder/drug-take/score low on standardized tests.

5. You’re too old.

6. You should’ve thought of this earlier.

7. You’re selfish.

8. You’re doing something unnatural.

9. How is that child going to feel when she finds out her father is an anonymous masturbator?

10. Your body is a grizzled husk.

11. You’re too old, sad spinster!

12. Are you only doing this because you’re lonely?

“Miss? Prescription’s ready.”

“Thank you.” She signs the screen on the counter. “How’s your day been?”

Lashes turns up his palms at the ceiling.

“If it makes you feel any better,” says the biographer, “this medication is going to make me have a foul-smelling vaginal discharge.”

“At least it’s for a good cause.”

She clears her throat.

“That’ll be one hundred fifty-seven dollars and sixty-three cents,” he adds.

“Pardon me?”

“I’m really sorry.”

“A hundred and fifty-seven dollars? For ten pills?”

“Your insurance doesn’t cover it.”

“Why the eff not?”

Lashes shakes his head. “I wish I could, like, slip it to you, but they’ve got cameras on every inch of this bitch.”

The polar explorer Eivør Mínervudottír spent many hours, as a child, in the sea-washed lighthouse whose keeper was her uncle.

She knew not to talk while he was making entries in the record book.

Never to strike a match unsupervised.

Red sky at night, sailor’s delight.

To keep her head low in the lantern room.

To pee in the pot and leave it, and if she did caca, to wrap it in fish paper for the garbage box.

THE MENDER

From the halt hen two eggs come down, one cracked, one sound. “Thank you,” the mender tells the hen, a Dark Brahma with a red wattle and brindled feathers. Because she limps badly—is not one of the winners—this hen is the mender’s favorite. A daily happiness to feed her, save her from foxes and rain.

Sound egg in her pocket, she pours the goats’ grain. Hans and Pinka are out rambling but will be home soon. They know she can’t protect them if they ramble too far. Three shingles have come off the goat-shed roof; she needs nails. Under the shed there used to sleep a varying hare. Brown in summer, white in winter. He hated carrots and loved apples, whose seeds, poisonous to rabbits, the mender made sure to remove. The hare was so cuddly she didn’t care that he stole alfalfa from the goats or strewed poo pellets on her bed when she let him inside. One morning she found his body ripped open, a sack of furry blood. Rage poured up her throat at the fox or coyote, the bobcat, you took him, but they were only feeding themselves, you shouldn’t have took him, prey is scarce in winter, but he was mine. She cried while digging. Laid the hare beside her aunt’s old cat, two small graves under the madrone.

In the cabin the mender stirs the egg with vinegar and shepherd’s purse for the client who’s coming later, an over-bleeder. The drink will staunch her clotty, aching flow. She’s got no job and no insurance. I can pay you with batteries, her note said. Vinegary egg screwed tight in a glass jar and tucked into the mini fridge, beside a foil-wrapped wedge of cheddar. The mender wants the cheese right now, this minute, but cheese is only for Fridays. Black licorice nibs are for Sundays.

She mostly eats from the forest. Watercress and bitter cress, dandelion, plantain. Glasswort and chickweed. Bear grass, delicious when grilled. Burdock root to mash and fry. Miner’s lettuce and stinging nettle and, in small quantities, ghost pipe. (She loves the white stalks boiled with lemon and salt, but too much ghost pipe can kill you.) And she gleans from orchards and fields: hazelnuts, apples, cranberries, pears. If she could live off the land alone, without person-made things, she would. She hasn’t figured out how yet, but that doesn’t mean she won’t. Show them how Percivals do.

Her mother was a Percival. Her aunt was a Percival. The mender has been a Percival since age six, when her mother left her father. Which was because her father went away most Friday afternoons and didn’t come back until Monday and never said why. “A woman wants to know why,” said the mender’s mother. “At least give me that, fuckermo. Names and places! Ages and occupations!” They drove west across Oregon’s high desert, over the Cascade Mountains, mother smoking and daughter spitting out the window, to the coast, where the mender’s aunt ran a shop that sold candles, runes, and tarot packs. On the first night, the mender asked what that noise was and learned it was the ocean. “But when does it stop?” “Never,” said her aunt. “It’s perpetual, though impermanent.” And the mender’s mother said, “Pretentious much?”

The mender would take pretentious any day over high.

She lies naked with the cat by the stove’s heat, hard steady rain on the roof and the woods black and the foxes quiet, owlets asleep in their nest box. Malky leaps from her lap, paws at the door. “You want to get soaked, little fuckermo?” Gold-splashed eyes watch her solemnly. Gray flanks tremble. “You have a girlfriend you need to meet?” She shakes off the blanket and opens the door, and he flashes out.

Whenever Lola came over, Malky hid; she thought the mender lived in the cabin alone. “Don’t you get frightened,” said Lola, “all the way up here in the middle of nothing?”

Silly bitch, trees are not nothing. Nor are cats, goats, chickens, owls, foxes, bobcats, black-tailed deer, long-eared bats, red-tailed hawks, dark-eyed juncos, bald-faced hornets, varying hares, mourning cloak butterflies, black vine weevils, and souls fled from their mortal casings.

Alone human-wise.

She hasn’t heard from Lola since that day of the shouting. No notes left in her mailbox at the P.O., no visits. It was more than shouting. A fight. Lola, in her adorable green dress, was fighting. The mender was not. The mender barely said a word.

Past noon, but the goats aren’t home yet. Cramp of worry. Last year they wrecked a campsite near the trail. Not their fault: some dumb tourist left food all over the woods. When the mender found them, the guy was pointing a rifle at Hans. “You better keep them on your property from here on out,” he said, “because I love goat stew.”

In Europe they once held trials for misbehaving animals. Wasn’t just the witches they hanged. A pig was sent to the gallows for eating a child’s face, a mule roasted alive for having been penetrated by its human master. For the unnatural act of laying an egg, a rooster was burned at the stake. Bees found guilty of stinging a man to death were suffocated in the hive, their honey destroyed, lest murder honey infect the mouths that ate it.

She with murder honey on her teeth shall bleed salt from where two curves of thigh skin meet. Tasting honey from the body of a bee with devil-face shall start this salty blood. Faces of bees who have done murder do resemble those of starving dogs, whose eyes grow more human looking as they starve. Apis mellifera, Apis diabolus. If a town be swarmed by bees with devil-face, and those bees do drip honey into open mouths, the body of a woman with honey tooth, bleeding thigh salt, shall be lashed to whatever stake will hold her. The bee swarm shall be gathered in a barrel and dumped upon the fire that eats her. The honey teeth do catch flame first, sparks of blue at the white before the red tongue catches too, and the lips. Bees’ bodies when burning do smell of hot marrow; the odor makes onlookers vomit, yet still they look on.

You needed a boat to reach the lighthouse, a quarter mile from shore, and if a storm hit, you slept overnight in a reindeer bag on the watch room’s slanted floor.

During storms the polar explorer stood on the lantern gallery, holding its rail as if her life depended on it, because her life did. She loved any circumstance in which survival was not assured. The threat of being swept over the rail woke her from the lethargy sluggery she felt at home chopping rhubarb, cracking puffin eggs, peeling the skin off dead sheep.

THE DAUGHTER

Grew up in a city born of the terror of the vastness of space, where the streets lie tight in a grid. The men who built Salem, Oregon, were white Methodist missionaries who followed white fur-trade trappers to the Pacific Northwest, and the missionaries were less excited than the trappers by the wildness foaming in every direction. They laid their town in a valley that had been fished, harvested, and winter-camped for centuries by the Kalapuya people, who, in the 1850s, were forced onto reservations by the U.S. government. In the stolen valley the whites huddled and crouched, made everything smaller. Downtown Salem is a box of streets Britishly named: Church and Cottage and Market, Summer and Winter and East.

The daughter knew every tidy inch of her city neighborhood. She is still learning the inches in Newville, where humans are less, nature is more.

She stands in the lantern room of the Gunakadeit Lighthouse, north of town, where she has come after school with the person she hopes to officially call her boyfriend. From here you can see massive cliffs soaring up from the ocean, rust veined, green mossed; giant pines gathering like soldiers along their rim; goblin trees jutting slant from the rock face. You can see silver-white lather smashing at the cliffs’ ankles. The harbor and its moored boats and the ocean beyond, a shirred blue prairie stretching to the horizon, cut by bars of green. Far from shore: a black fin.

“Boring up here,” says Ephraim.

Look at the black fin! she wants to say. The goblin trees!

She says, “Yeah,” and touches his jaw, specked with new beard. They kiss for a while. She loves it except for the tongue thrusts.

Does the fin belong to a shark? Could it belong to a whale?

She draws back from Ephraim to look at the sea.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Gone.

“Wanna bounce?” he says.

They race down the spiral staircase, boot soles ringing on the stone, and climb into the backseat of his car.

“I think I saw a gray whale. Did you—?”

“Nope,” says Ephraim. “But did you know blue whales have the biggest cocks of any animal? Eight to ten feet.”

“The dinosaurs’ were bigger than that.”

“Bullshit.”

“No, my dad’s got this book—” She stops: Ephraim has no father. The daughter’s father, though annoying, loves her more than all the world’s gold. “Anyway,” she says, “here’s one: A skeleton asks another skeleton, ‘Do you want to hear a joke?’ Second skeleton says, ‘Only if it’s humerus.’”

“Why is that funny?”

“Because—‘humerus’? The arm bone?”

“That’s a little-kid joke.”

Her mom’s favorite pun. It’s not her fault he didn’t know what a humerus was.

“No more talking.” He goes to kiss her but she dodges, bites his shoulder through the cotton long sleeve, trying to break the skin but also not to. He gets her underpants down so fast it feels professional. Her jeans are already flung to some corner of the car, maybe on the steering wheel, maybe under the front seat, his jeans too, his hat.

She reaches for his penis and circles her palm around the head, like she’s polishing.

“Not like that—” Ephraim moves her hand to grip the shaft. Up down up down up down. “Like that.”

He spits on his hand and wets his penis, guides it into her vagina. He shoves back and forth. It feels okay but not great, definitely not as great as they say it should feel, and it doesn’t help that the back of her head keeps slamming against the door handle, but the daughter has also read that it takes some time to get good at sex and to like it, especially for the girl. He has an orgasm with the same jittery moan she found weird at first but is getting used to, and she is relieved that her head has stopped being slammed against the door handle, so she smiles; and Ephraim smiles too; and she flinches at the sticky milk dribbling out of her.

The explorer went to the lighthouse whenever allowed, at first, and once she could handle the boat alone, even when forbidden. Her uncle Bjartur felt bad that her father was dead and so let her come, although she bothered him with her questions; he was a lighthouse keeper, God knows, because he preferred his own company, but this little one, this Eivør, youngest of his favorite sister, he could find it in his chewed heart to let her run up the spiral stairs and dig through his trunk of ships’ debris and on drenched tiptoes watch the weather.

THE WIFE

Between town and home is a long twist of road that hugs the cliffside, climbing and dipping and climbing again.

At the sharpest bend, whose guardrail is measly, the wife’s jaw tenses.

What if she took her hands off the wheel and let them go?

The car would jump along the top branches of the shore pines, tearing a fine green wake; flip once before building speed; fly past the rocks and into the water and down forever and—

After the bend, she unclenches.

Almost home.

Second time this week she has pictured it.

Soon as the groceries are in, she’ll give herself a few minutes upstairs. It won’t kill them to watch a screen.

Why did she buy the grass-fed beef? Six dollars more per pound.

Second time this week.

They say grass-fed has the best fats.

Which might be entirely common. Maybe everyone pictures it, maybe not as often as twice a week but—

A little animal is struggling across the road. Dark, about a foot long.

Possum? Porcupine? Trying to cross.

Maybe it’s even healthy to picture it.

Closer: burnt black, scorched to rubber.

Shivering.

Already dead, still trying.

What burned it? Or who?

“You’re making us crash!”—from the backseat.

“We’re not crashing,” says the wife. Her foot is capable and steadfast. They will never crash with her foot on the brake.

Who burned this animal?

Convulsing, trembling, already so dead. Fur singed off. Skin black rubber.

Who burned you?

Closer: it’s a black plastic bag.

But she can’t unsee the shivering thing, burnt and dead and trying.

At the house: unbuckle, untangle, lift, carry, set down.

Unpack, put away.

Peel string cheese.

Distribute string cheese.

Place Bex and John in front of approved cartoon.

Upstairs, the wife closes the sewing-room door. Sits cross-legged on the bed. Fixes her stare on the scuffed white wall.

They are yipping and pipping, her two. They are rolling and polling and slapping and papping, rompling with little fists and heels on the bald carpet.

They are hers, but she can’t get inside them.

They can’t get back inside her.

They are hurling their fists—Bex fistier, but John brave.

Why did they name him John? Not a family name and almost as dull as the wife’s own. Bex had said, “I’m going to call the baby Yarnjee.”

Is John brave, or foolish?—he squirms willingly while his sister punches. The wife doesn’t say No hitting because she doesn’t want them to stop, she wants them to get tired.

She remembers why John: because everyone can spell and say it. John because his father hates correcting butchered English pronunciations of his own name. The errors of clerks. John is sometimes Jean-voyage; and Ro calls him Pliny the Younger.

In the past hour, the kids have

Rolled and polled.

Eaten leftover popcorn stirred into lemon yogurt.

Asked the wife if they could watch more TV.

Been told no.

Slooped and chooped.

Tipped over the standing lamp.

Broken an eyelash.

Asked the wife why her anus is out in space when it should be in her butt.

Slapped and papped.

Asked the wife what’s for dinner.

Been told spaghetti.

Asked the wife what does she think is the best kind of sauce for butt pasta.

The grass-fed beef grows blood in a plastic bag. Does contact with the plastic cancel out its grass-fedness? She shouldn’t waste expensive meat in spaghetti sauce. Marinate it tonight? There’s a jar of store sauce in the—

“Take your finger out of his nose.”

“But he likes it,” says Bex.

And broccoli. Those par-baked dinner rolls are delicious, but she isn’t going to serve bread with pasta.

Sea-salt-almond chocolate bar stowed in the kitchen drawer, under the maps, please still be there, please still be there.

“Do you like having your sister’s finger stuck up your nose?”

John smiles, ducks, and nods.

“When the fuck is dinner?”

“What?”

Bex knows her crime; she eyes the wife with a cunning frown. “I mean when the gosh.”

“You said something else. Do you even know what it means?”

“It’s bad,” says Bex.

“Does Mattie ever say that word?”

“Um …”

Which way will her girl’s lie go: protect or incriminate?

“I think maybe yes,” says Bex dolefully.

Bex loves Mattie, who is the good babysitter, much preferred over Mrs. Costello, the mean. The girl when she lies looks a lot like her father. The hard-sunk eyes the wife once found beguiling are not eyes she would wish upon her daughter. Bex’s will have purplish circles before long.

But who cares what the girl looks like, if she is happy?

The world will care.

“To answer your question, dinner is whenever I want it to be.”

“When will you want it to be?”

“Don’t know,” says the wife. “Maybe we just won’t have dinner tonight.”

Sea-salt-almond. Chocolate. Bar.

Bex frowns again, not cunningly.

The wife kneels on the rug and pulls their bodies against her body, squeezes, nuzzles. “Oh, sprites, don’t worry, of course we’ll have dinner. I was joking.”

“Sometimes you do such bad jokes.”

“It’s true. I’m sorry. I predict that dinner will happen at six fifteen p.m., Pacific standard time. I predict that it will consist of spaghetti with tomato sauce and broccoli. So what species of sprite are you today?”

John says, “Water.”

Bex says, “Wood.”

Today’s date is marked on the kitchen calendar with a small black A. Which stands for “ask.”

Ask him again.

From the bay window, whose frame flakes with old paint possibly brimming with lead—she keeps forgetting to arrange to have the kids tested—the wife watches her husband trudge up the drive on short legs in jeans that are too tight, too young for him. He has a horror of dad pants and insists on dressing as he did at nineteen. His messenger bag bangs against one skinny thigh.

“He’s home,” she calls.

The kids race to greet him. This is a moment she used to love to picture, man home from work and children welcoming him, a perfect moment because it has no past or future—does not care where the man came from or what will happen after he is greeted, cares only for the joyful collision, the Daddy you’re here.

“Fee fi fo fon, je sens le sang of two white middle-class Québécois-American children!” Her sprites scramble all over him. “A’right, a’right, settle down, eh,” but he is contented, with John flung over his shoulder and Bex pulling open the satchel to check for vending-machine snacks. She’s got his salt tooth. Did she get everything from him? What is in her of the wife?

The nose. She escaped Didier’s nose.

“Hi, meuf,” he says, squatting to set John on the floor.

“How was the day?”

“Usual hell. Actually, not usual. Music teacher got laid off.”

Good.

“Hello, hell!” says Bex.

“We don’t say ‘hell,’” says the wife.

I’m glad she’s gone.

“Daddy—”

“I meant ‘heifer,’” says Didier.

“Kids, I want those blocks off the floor. Somebody could trip. Now! But I thought everyone loved the music teacher.”

“Budget crisis.”

“You mean they’re not replacing her?”

He shrugs.

“So there won’t be any music classes at all?”

“I must pee.”

When he emerges from the bathroom, she is leaning on the banister, listening to Bex boss John into doing all the block gathering.

“We should get a cleaner,” says Didier, for the third time this month. “I just counted the number of pubic hairs on the toilet rim.”

And soap heel crusted to the sink.

Black dust on the baseboards.

Soft yellow hair balls in every corner.

Sea-salt-almond chocolate bar in the drawer.

“We can’t afford one,” she says, “unless we stop using Mrs. Costello, and I’m not giving up those eight hours.” She looks into his blue-gray eyes, level with hers. She has often wished that Didier were taller. Is her wishing the product of socialization or an evolutionary adaptation from the days when being able to reach more food on a tree was a life‑or‑death advantage?

“Well,” he says, “somebody needs to start doing some cleaning. It’s like a bus station in there.”

She won’t be asking him tonight.

She will write the A again, on a different day.

“There were twelve, by the way,” he says. “I know you have stuff to do, I’m not saying you don’t, but could you maybe wash the toilet once in a while? Twelve hairs.”

Red sky at morning, sailor take warning.

THE BIOGRAPHER

Can’t see the ocean from her apartment, but she can hear it. Most days between five and six thirty a.m. she sits in the kitchen listening to the waves and working on her study of Eivør Mínervudottír, a nineteenth-century polar hydrologist whose trailblazing research on pack ice was published under a male acquaintance’s name. There is no book on Mínervudottír, only passing mentions in other books. The biographer has a mass of notes by now, an outline, some paragraphs. A skein draft—more holes than words. On the kitchen wall she’s taped a photo of the shelf in the Salem bookstore where her book will live. The photo reminds her that she is going to finish it.

She opens Mínervudottír’s journal, translated from the Danish. I admit to fearing the attack of a sea bear; and my fingers hurt all the time. A woman long dead coming to life. But today, staring at the journal, the biographer can’t think. Her brain is soapy and throbbing from the new ovary medicine.

She sits in her car, radio on, throat shivering with hints of vomit, until she’s late enough for school not to care that her eye–foot–brake reaction time is slowed by the Ovutran. The roads have guardrails. Her forehead pulses hard. She sees a black lace throw itself across the windshield, and blinks it away.

Two years ago the United States Congress ratified the Personhood Amendment, which gives the constitutional right to life, liberty, and property to a fertilized egg at the moment of conception. Abortion is now illegal in all fifty states. Abortion providers can be charged with second-degree murder, abortion seekers with conspiracy to commit murder. In vitro fertilization, too, is federally banned, because the amendment outlaws the transfer of embryos from laboratory to uterus. (The embryos can’t give their consent to be moved.)

She was just quietly teaching history when it happened. Woke up one morning to a president-elect she hadn’t voted for. This man thought women who miscarried should pay for funerals for the fetal tissue and thought a lab technician who accidentally dropped an embryo during in vitro transfer was guilty of manslaughter. She had heard there was glee on the lawns of her father’s Orlando retirement village. Marching in the streets of Portland. In Newville: brackish calm.

Short of sex with some man she wouldn’t otherwise want to have sex with, Ovutran and lube-glopped vaginal wands and Dr. Kalbfleisch’s golden fingers is the only biological route left. Intrauterine insemination. At her age, not much better than a turkey baster.

She was placed on the adoption wait-list three years ago. In her parent profile she earnestly and meticulously described her job, her apartment, her favorite books, her parents, her brother (drug addiction omitted), and the fierce beauty of Newville. She uploaded a photograph that made her look friendly but responsible, fun loving but stable, easygoing but upper middle class. The coral-pink cardigan she bought to wear in this photo she later threw into the clothing donation bin outside the church.

She was warned, yes, at the outset: birth mothers tend to choose married straight couples, especially if the couple is white. But not all birth mothers choose this way. Anything could happen, she was told. The fact that she was willing to take an older child or a child who needed special care meant the odds were in her favor.

She assumed it would take a while but that it would, eventually, happen.

She thought a foster placement, at least, would come through; and if things went well, that could lead to adoption.

Then the new president moved into the White House.

The Personhood Amendment happened.

One of the ripples in its wake: Public Law 116‑72.

On January fifteenth—in less than three months—this law, also known as Every Child Needs Two, takes effect. Its mission: to restore dignity, strength, and prosperity to American families. Unmarried persons will be legally prohibited from adopting children. In addition to valid marriage licenses, all adoptions will require approval through a federally regulated agency, rendering private transactions criminal.

Woozy with Ovutran, inching up the steps of Central Coast Regional, the biographer recalls her high school career on the varsity track team. “Keep your legs, Stephens!” the coach would yell when her muscles were about to give out.

She informs the tenth-graders they must scrub their essay drafts clean of the phrase History tells us. “A stale rhetorical tic. Means nothing.”

“But it does,” says Mattie. “History is telling us not to repeat its mistakes.”

“We might reach that conclusion from studying the past, but history is a concept; it isn’t talking to us.”

Mattie’s cheeks—cold white, blue veined—go red. Not used to correction, she’s easily shamed.

Ash raises her hand. “What happened to your arm, miss?”

“What? Oh.” The biographer’s sleeve is pushed way up above the elbow. She yanks it down. “I gave blood.”

“It looks like you gave, like, gallons.” Ash rubs her piglet nose. “You should sue the blood bank for defamation.”

“Disfigurement,” says Mattie.

“You got straight disfigured, miss.”

By noon the cloudy throb behind her eyebrows has dialed itself back. In the teachers’ lounge she eats maize puffs and watches the French teacher fork pink thumbs out of a Good Ship Chinese takeout box.

“Certain kinds of shrimp produce light,” she tells him. “They’re like torches bobbing in the water.”

How can you raise a child alone when all you’re having for lunch is vending-machine maize puffs?

He grunts and chews. “Not these shrimp.”

Didier has no particular interest in French but can speak it, the tongue of his Montreal childhood, in his sleep. Like being a teacher of walking or sitting. For this predicament he blames his wife. During his first conversation with the biographer, years ago, over crackers and tube cheese in the lounge, he explained: “She says to me, ‘Aside from cooking you have no skills, but at least you can do this, can’t you?’—so ici. Je. Suis.” The biographer then imagined Susan Korsmo as a huge white crow, shading Didier’s life with her great wing.

“Shrimp are sky-high in cholesterol,” says Penny, the head English teacher, deseeding grapes at the table.

“This room is where my joy dies,” says Didier.

“Boo hoo. Ro, you need nourishment. Here’s a banana.”

“That’s Mr. Fivey’s,” says the biographer.

“How can anyone be sure?”

“He wrote his name on it.”

“Fivey will survive the loss of one fruit,” says Penny.

“Ooosh.” The biographer holds her temples.

“You okay?”

Thudding back down into the chair: “I just got up too fast.”

The PA system sizzles to life, coughs twice. “Attention students and teachers. Attention. This is an emergency announcement.”

“Please be a fire drill,” says Didier.

“Let us all keep Principal Fivey in our thoughts today. His wife has been admitted to the hospital in critical condition. Principal Fivey will be away from campus until further notice.”

“Should she be telling everyone this?” says the biographer.

“I repeat,” says the office manager, “Mrs. Fivey is in critical condition at Umpqua General.”

“Room number?” yells Didier at the wall-mounted speaker.

The principal’s wife always comes to Christmas assembly in skintight cocktail dresses. And every Christmas Didier says: “Mrs. Fivey’s gittin sixy.”

The biographer drives home to lie on the floor in her underwear.

Her father is calling again. It has been days—weeks?—since she answered.

“How’s Florida?”

“I am curious to know your plans for Christmas.”

“Months away, Dad.”

“But you’ll want to book the flight soon. Fares are going to explode. When does school let out?”

“I don’t know, the twenty-third?”

“That close to Christmas? Jesus.”

“I’ll let you know, okay?”

“Any plans for the weekend?”

“Susan and Didier invited me to dinner. You?”

“Might drop by the community center to watch the human rutabagas gum their feed. Unless my back flares up.”

“What did the acupuncturist say?”

“That was a mistake I won’t make twice.”

“It works for a lot of people, Dad.”

“It’s goddamn voodoo. Will you be bringing a date to your friends’ dinner?”

“Nope,” says the biographer, steeling herself for his next sentence, her face stiff with sadness that he can’t help himself.

“About time you found someone, don’t you think?”

“I’m fine, Dad.”

“Well, I worry, kiddo. Don’t like the idea of you being all alone.”

She could trot out the usual list (“I’ve got friends, neighbors, colleagues, people from meditation group”), but her okayness with being by herself—ordinary, unheroic okayness—does not need to justify itself to her father. The feeling is hers. She can simply feel okay and not explain it, or apologize for it, or concoct arguments against the argument that she doesn’t truly feel content and is deluding herself in self-protection.

“Well, Dad,” she says, “you’re alone too.”

Any reference to her mother’s death can be relied on to shut him up.

There was Usman for six months in college. Victor for a year in Minneapolis. Liaisons now and again. She is not a long-term person. She likes her own company. Nevertheless, before her first insemination, the biographer forced herself to consult online dating sites. She browsed and bared her teeth. She browsed and felt chest-flatteningly depressed. One night she really did try. Picked the least Christian site and started typing.

What are your three best qualities?

1 Independence

2 Punctuality

3 

Best book you recently read?

Proceedings of the “Proteus” Court of Inquiry on the Greely Relief Expedition of 1883

What fascinates you?

1 How cold stops water

2 Patterns ice makes on the fur of a dead sled dog

3 The fact that Eivør Mínervudottír lost two of her fingers to frostbite

But the biographer didn’t feel like telling anyone that. Delete, delete, delete. She could say, at least, she had tried. The next day she called for an appointment at a reproductive-medicine clinic in Salem.

Her therapist thought she was moving fast. “You only recently decided to do this,” he said, “and already you’ve chosen a donor?”

Oh, therapist, if only you knew how quickly a donor can be chosen! You turn on your computer. You click boxes for race, eye color, education, height. A list appears. You read some profiles. You hit PURCHASE.

A woman on the Choosing Single Motherhood discussion board wrote, I spent more time dead-heading my roses than picking a donor.

But, as the biographer explained to her therapist, she did not choose quickly. She pored. She strained. She sat for hours at her kitchen table, staring at profiles. These men had written essays. Named personal strengths. Recalled moments of childhood jubilance and described favorite traits of grandparents. (For one hundred dollars per ejaculation, they were happy to discuss their grandparents.)

She took notes on dozens and dozens—

Pros:

1 Calls himself “avid reader”

2 “Great cheekbones” (staff)

3 Enjoys “mental challenges and riddles”

4 To future child: “I look forward to hearing from you in eighteen years”

Cons:

1 Handwriting very bad

2 Commercial real-estate appraiser

3 Of own personality: “I’m not too complicated”

—then narrowed it to two. Donor 5546 was a fitness trainer described by sperm-bank staff as “handsome and captivating.” Donor 3811 was a biology major with well-written essay answers; the affectionate way he described his aunts made the biographer like him; but what if he wasn’t as handsome as the first? Both of their health histories were perfect, or so they claimed. Was the biographer so shallow as to be swayed by handsomeness? But who wants an ugly donor? But 3811 was not necessarily ugly. But was ugly even a problem? What she wanted was good health and a good brain. Donor 5546 claimed to be bursting with health, but she wasn’t sure about his brain.

So she bought vials of both. She wouldn’t stumble upon 9072, the just-right third, for another couple of months.

“Do you feel undeserving of a romantic partner?” asked the therapist.

“No,” said the biographer.

“Are you pessimistic about finding a partner?”

“I don’t necessarily want a partner.”

“Might that attitude be a form of self-protection?”

“You mean am I deluding myself?”

“That’s another way to put it.”

“If I say yes, then I’m not deluded. And if I say no, it’s further evidence of delusion.”

“We need to end there,” said the therapist.

The polar explorer liked to stand on the turf roof of the two-room cottage and think of her feet being precisely above the head of her mother, who was stirring or cutting or pounding; and how many inches of grass and soil lay between them; and how she was above, her mother below, reversing the order, flipping the world, with nobody able to tell her it couldn’t be flipped.

Then she would be called in to help boil the puffin.

THE MENDER

Walks home from the library the long way, past the school. The three o’clock bell is big over the harbor, flakes of bronze dropping slow to the water, bell in her mouth, bell in her scabbard. The blue school doors open: boots and scarves and shouts. Part-hid behind a bitter cherry, the mender waits. A string of Aristotle’s lanterns—the spiky teeth of sea urchins—hangs on her neck as protection. Last week she stood here an hour until the last child came out and the doors stopped; but the girl she was waiting for did not appear.

The mender herself performed quite poorly at Central Coast Regional, which she left, fifteen years ago, without a diploma. Fails to meet minimum standards. Acts deliberately uninterested in what goes on in class. Oh bitches, it was no act. Her brain wasn’t even in the room. In class the mender made sure never to talk except to fled souls or a bulb moon blown down into the stomach of the ocean. Her brain cells thrumming in their helmet went off to the forest road, where lay mole mother torn open by owl, her spent babies like red seeds; or to frondlets of sea lawn dragged into mazes by crabs. Her body stayed in the room, but her brain didn’t.

They come through the blue doors, little and big, bundled for weather: fishermen’s children, shopkeepers’ children, waitresses’ children. Girls with white cheek paint and black eyelids and crimson lips who are not the girl she is waiting for. The girl she is waiting for doesn’t wear makeup, at least not that the mender can tell. She smells smoke. Her aunt Temple’s brand. Is Temple close? Has Temple come—? Stupid, stupid, they don’t come back. It’s the blond weasel, who teaches at the school. His hair and his teeth go in all directions. She has seen him with his daughter and son on the cliff path, pointing at the water.

“Looking for someone?” he says.

She gives him the side-eye.

The blond weasel sucks and blows. “Seems like you are.”

“No,” she says, and goes.

She shouldn’t be seen trying to see the girl. People already think she’s unhinged, a forest weirdo, a witch. She is younger than the broomy witches people know from TV, but that doesn’t stop them whispering.

Up the cobbly lane to the cliff path. Then back and back into the trees. A Douglas-fir was felled on a hillside, sawn into logs, truck-hauled to a mill. Boards were cut and trimmed, planed true. A man bought the boards and notched them together to make a cabin. Two rooms and a toilet closet. Wood stove. Double sink. A cupboard north and a cupboard south. The lamps and mini fridge run on batteries. Showerhead outside, nailed up. Wintertime she sponge bathes or stinks. The goat shed and chicken coop sit behind the cabin on either side of a dead black hawthorn, lightning split. In its cleft the mender has built nest boxes for the owls, swallows, marbled murrelets, golden-crowned kinglets.

She ought to be more careful. Can’t let people see her watching. The yellow-haired, tumble-toothed weasel looked suspicious. It is no crime to watch someone, but humans like to name these things normal and those things peculiar.

Clementine comes to the mender’s door with a picnic cooler and a pain. Her last complaint was vicious burning when she peed; today’s pain is new. “Pants off and lie down,” says the mender, and Clementine unzips herself, kicks away the jeans. Her thighs are white and very soft, underwear the size of a shoelace. She plumps back on the mender’s bed and opens her knees.

A vesicle on Clementine’s south lip, the inner fold, white-red in the browny pink: how much does it hurt?

“Oh God, a lot. Sometimes at work I’m like ‘Eeesh!’ and they think I’m—Anyway, do I have syphilis?”

“No. Plain old cunt wart.”

“My vadge isn’t having a good year.”

The ointment: emulsion of purslane, bishopswort, and devil’s claw in sesame oil. She dabs a few drops on the wart, recaps the vial, hands it to Clementine. “Put this on it twice a day.” More warts are likely to join it, possibly a lot more, but she doesn’t see cause to say this.

After Clementine leaves, the mender misses her, wants back the soft white thighs. She likes her ladies big-sirenic, mermaids of land, pressing and twisting in fleshful bodies.

Out in the shed she pours a scoop of grain and waits for Pinka and Hans to come galloping. Hans nuzzles the mender’s crotch, and Pinka lifts a front hoof to be shaken. Hello, beautifuls. Their tongues are hard and clean. First time she saw a goat’s pupil—rectangular, not round—she felt a stab of recognition. I know you, strangeness. They will never be taken from her. They know to behave, now, after that mischief near the trail.

Clementine brought black rockfish as payment. Her brothers are fishermen. The mender lifts it from the cooler, plops it into a bowl, picks up the little knife. She feeds the flesh to Malky and crunches the bones in her own mouth. The eyes she throws into the woods. Malky needs protein for all the hunting he does. Gone for days and comes back thin. Fish bones shouldn’t be feared; you just have to chew them right so they won’t pierce your throat walls or stomach lining.

“Your science teacher will tell you,” said Temple, “fish bones are pure calcium and can’t be digested by the human body, but let me assure you, that’s not the whole story.” One of the things the mender loved best about her aunt was “let me assure you.” That and she cooked regular meals. Not once while living with Temple did the mender have to eat sautéed condiments for dinner. Temple became her guardian after the mender’s mother left a note saying Your better off with auntie don’t worry I will send letters! The mender was eight years old and herself not the best speller, but she noticed that the first word of the note was wrong.

Temple said the things she sold in her shop, Goody Hallett’s, were props for tourists; but if her niece happened to be interested in the true properties of alchemy, she could teach her. Magic was of two kinds: natural and artificial. Natural magic was no more than a precise knowledge of the secrets of nature. Armed with such knowledge, you could effect marvels that to the ignorant seemed miracles or illusions. A man once cured his father’s blindness with the gall bladder of a dragonet fish; the beat of a drum stretched with the skin of a wolf would shatter a drum stretched with the skin of a lamb.

The mender bottled her first tincture soon after her mother left. Per Temple’s instructions, she gathered dozens of stalks of flowering mullein, yellow and shaped cheerfully. She picked the flowers and laid them to dry on a towel. Scooped them into a glass jar with chips of garlic, filled the jar with almond oil, left the jar on the sill for a month. Then she strained the oil into six small brown bottles, which she lined up on the kitchen counter—she was already tall enough—and brought Temple to see. Her aunt stood over her, aswirl with red hair, all that long, ropy, sparkling hair, and said, “Well done!” and it was the first time in her life the mender could remember being praised for doing something instead of for not doing it. (Not talking, not crying, not complaining when her mother took six hours to come back from the store.) “Next time your ear hurts,” said Temple, “this is what you’ll use.” The promise of fixing and curing sent hot waves through the mender’s belly. Show them how Percivals do.

When she wakes, the cabin is so dark from the rain and the trees, she doesn’t know it is morning. But it is, and Malky is scratching, and the door is knocking.

She drinks a tea of horse-flavored ashwagandha. Eats brown bread. The new client wants nothing but water. Her name is Ro Stephens. Face dry and worried, hair dry and dull (feeble blood?), body thin (not perilously). She has lost people, the mender senses. A tiny smell, like a spoonful of smoke.

“I’ve been trying for a long time with Dr. Kalbfleisch at Hawthorne Reproductive Medicine.”

The mender has heard of Kalbfleisch from other clients. One described him as a NILF: Nazi I’d Like to Fuck.

“So you’ve been taking their medications.”

“A shit ton, yes.”

“How’s your cervical mucus?”

“Fine, I guess?”

“Does it resemble egg whites, near ovulation?”

“For a day or two. But my period’s not—that regular. With the medications it gets better, but still it’s not, like, clockwork.”

She is so worried. And trying to hide the worry. Her face keeps twitching out of its behaving lines, cracking with What if? What then? then smoothing, obeying again. Deep down she doesn’t believe the mender can help, no matter how much she wants to believe it. This is a person unaccustomed to being helped.

“Let’s see your tongue.”

White scum over the pink.

“You need to stop drinking milk.”

“But I don’t—”

“Cream in coffee? Cheese? Yogurt?”

Ro nods.

“Stop all of that.”

“I will.” But Ro looks like she’s thinking I didn’t come here for nutrition tips.

Eat warm and warming foods. Yams, kidney beans, black beans, bone broth. More red meat: the clock walls need building. Less dairy: the tongue is damp. More green tea: the walls are weakish still. All in the elementals, bitches. Everyone wants charms, but thirty-two years on earth have convinced the mender charms are purely for show. When the body is slow to do something, or galloping too fast toward death, people want wands waved. Broth? That’s it? The mender teaches them to boil meat bones for days. To simmer seed and stem and dried wrack, strain it, drink it. Womb tea makes a cruel stench.

She pulls down the tea jar from the north cupboard. Shakes some into a brown bag, tapes it closed, hands it to Ro. “Heat this up in a big pot of water. After it boils, turn the heat down and simmer for three hours. Drink a cup every morning and every night. You won’t like the taste.”

“What’s in it?”

“Nothing harmful. Roots and herbs. They’ll make your lining lusher and your ovaries stronger.”

“Which roots and herbs, exactly?”

She’s one of those people who think they will understand something if they hear its name, when really they will only hear its name.

“Dried fleeceflower, Himalayan teasel root, wolfberry, shiny bugleweed, Chinese dodder seed, motherwort, dong quai, red peony root, and nut grass rhizome.”

The tea tastes (the mender has tried it) like water buried underground for months in a bowl of rotted wood, swum through by worms, spat into by a burrowing vole.

The hair on Ro’s upper lip. The irregular bleeding. The scummy tongue. The dryness.

“Has Dr. Kalbfleisch checked you for PCOS?”

“No—what’s that?”

“Polycystic ovary syndrome. It affects ovulation, so it could be contributing.” Seeing Ro flash with fear, she adds: “A lot of women have it.”

“Wouldn’t he have mentioned it, though? I’ve been seeing him for over a year.”

“Ask for a test.”

Ro has a gentle face—freckled, laugh lined, sad in the mouth corners. But her eyes are angry.

How to make boiled puffin (mjólkursoðinn lundi):

1 Skin puffin; rinse.

2 Remove feet and wings; discard.

3 Remove internal organs; set aside for lamb mash.

4 Stuff puffin with raisins and cake dough.

5 Boil in milk and water one hour, or until juices run clear.

THE DAUGHTER

Is seven weeks late, approximately, more or less.

She stares at the classroom floor, arranging linoleum tiles into groups of seven. One seven. Two seven.

But she doesn’t feel pregnant.

Three seven. Four seven.

She would be feeling something by now, five seven, if she was.

Ash passes a note: Who finer, Xiao or Zakile?

The daughter writes back: Ephraim.

Not on list, dumblerina.

“So what are we talking about here?” goes Mr. Zakile. “We’ve got whiteness. The white whale. How come it’s white?”

Ash goes, “God made it white?”

Six seven.

“Well, okay, that wasn’t really what I was …” Mr. Zakile paws through his notes, likely ripped whole from online, searching in those cut-and-pasted sentences for the brain he wasn’t born with.

Of all divers, said Captain Ahab, thou hast dived the deepest.

Has moved amid this world’s foundations.

The daughter wants to float down into the murderous hold of this frigate Earth.

Hast seen enough to split the planets.

Seven seven.

And not one syllable is thine.

She’s been late before. Everyone has. The anorexics, for instance, miss periods constantly, as starving shuts down the blood; or if you haven’t been eating enough iron; or if you’re smoking too much. The daughter smoked three-quarters of a pack yesterday. Ash’s sister, Clementine, says tweaker girls have sex fearlessly because meth prevents conception.

Last year one of the seniors threw herself down the gym stairs, but even after she broke a rib she was still pregnant, and Ro/Miss said in class she hoped they understood who was to blame for this rib: the monsters in Congress who passed the Personhood Amendment and the walking lobotomies on the Supreme Court who reversed Roe v. Wade. “Two short years ago,” she said—or, actually, shouted—“abortion was legal in this country, but now we have to resort to throwing ourselves down the stairs.”

And, of course: Yasmine.

The self-scraper. The mutilator.

Yasmine, who was the first person the daughter became blood sisters with (second grade).

Yasmine, who was the first person the daughter ever kissed (fourth grade).

Yasmine, who made him use a condom but got pregnant anyway.

The daughter wishes she could talk to her mom about it. Get told “Seven weeks late is nothing, pigeon!”

In most areas, her mom is sensible and knowledgeable—

“My poo is furry!”

“Don’t worry. It’s from that green cleanse you did. It’s mucoid plaque sloughing off the intestinal walls.”

—but not in all areas.

Can you tell me what color eyes my grandmother had?

What color hair my grandfather had?

Were my great-aunts all deaf?

My great-great-uncles all lunatics?

Do I come from a long line of mathematicians?

Were their teeth as crooked as my teeth?

No, you can’t tell me, and neither can Dad, and neither can the agency.

It was a closed adoption. Zero trace.

Are you mine?

Ephraim doesn’t have an orgasm, he stops after a couple of minutes, says he isn’t feeling it. Shifts his weight off her. The first thing she feels is relief. The second is fear. No male teenager ever passes up the chance for intercourse, according to her mom, who last year gave her A Talk that included, thank God, no anatomical details but did feature warnings about the sex-enslaved minds of boys. Yet here is Ephraim, sixteen going on seventeen, passing up a chance. Or stopping mid-chance.

“Did I, like, do something wrong?” she says quietly.

“Unh-unh. I’m just way tired.” He yawns, as though to prove it. Pushes back his blond-streaked hair. “We’re doing two‑a‑days for soccer. Hand me my hat?”

She loves this hat, which makes him look like a gorgeous detective.

But her own clothes: Black wool leggings. Red tube skirt. White glitter-paste long sleeve. Purple loop scarf. A pathetic outfit; no wonder he stopped.

“Want me to drop you at Ash’s?”

“Yeah, thanks.” She waits for him to say something about the next time, make a plan, allude to their future together, even just You coming to our game Friday? They get to Ash’s and he hasn’t. She says, “So …”

“See you, September girl,” he says, and kisses, more like bites, her mouth.

In Ash’s bathroom she drops the purple scarf in the trash and covers it with a handful of smushed toilet paper.

Eivør Mínervudottír’s family lived on fish, potatoes, fermented mutton, milk-boiled puffin, and pilot whale. Her favorite food was the fastelavnsbolle, a sweet Shrovetide bun. In 1771 the Swedish king ate fourteen fastelavnsboller with lobster and champagne, then promptly died of indigestion.

THE WIFE

Bex won’t wear a raincoat. They will be in the car mostly and she doesn’t care if her hair gets wet between the car and the store and she hates how the plastic feels on her neck.

“Fine, get wet” is Didier’s answer, but the wife isn’t having it. It’s pouring. Bex will wear a raincoat. “Put. It. On,” she bellows.

“No!” screams the girl.

“Yes.”

“No!”

“Bex, nobody is getting in the car until you put it on.”

“Daddy said I don’t have to.”

“Do you see how hard it’s raining out there?”

“Rain is good for my skin.”

“No, it’s not,” says the wife.

“Jesus, let’s go,” says Didier.

“Please back me up on this.”

“I would if I agreed with you, but we’ve been standing here for ten goddamn minutes. It’s ridiculous.”

“Enforcing rules is ridiculous?”

“I didn’t know we had a rule about—”

“Well, we do,” says the wife. “Bex? Do you want to keep holding everyone up, or are you ready to act like a six-year-old and wear your raincoat?”

“I’m not a six-year-old,” she says, arms crossed. “I’m a little babykins. I need my diaper changed.”

The wife slaps the raincoat across Bex’s shoulders, yanks the hood into place, and ties the strings under her chin. Lifts up the girl’s rigid body and carries her out to the car.

Her husband’s hands sit on the wheel at ten and two, a habit that in their courting days shocked the wife: he had played in bands, done drugs, punched his father in the face at age fourteen. Yet he steered—steers—like a grandma.

She is glad not to be driving. No decisions to be made at the bend in the road.

Little animal black and twitching, burnt to death but not quite dead.

A scrap of tire struggling its way across.

Little animal, plastic bag.

But maybe it wasn’t a plastic bag.

Maybe her first sight was correct.

Somebody lit it on fire, some bad kid, bad adult. Newville is not lacking in badness—

but it’s beautiful here and your family’s been coming here for generations and the sea air’s full of negative ions. They boost the mood, remember?

Bex is chattering again by the time they reach the store.

Where’s the doll section.

John’s so lazy.

Somebody’s mom came to class who’s a dental hygienist and said even the nub of an adult tooth growing in still needs to be brushed.

“Perfects at two o’clock,” hisses Didier, elbowing the wife’s elbow.

Not them. Not today.

“Shell!” squeals Bex. “Oh my God, Shelly!”

The girls embrace dramatically, as though bumping into each other in the town where they both live were the most amazing surprise.

Bex: “Your dress is so pretty.”

Shell: “Thanks. My mom made it.”

“Hey, friends!” chirps Jessica Perfect. “Good to see you!”

“You too.” The wife leans in for an air-kiss. “Brought the whole crew, huh?”

Shell’s tanned, slender siblings stand in a row behind their tanned, slender parents.

“Yep, it’s one of those days.”

Those days at the Perfects’ are probably a little different from those days on the hill.

On top of making dresses, Jessica knits sweaters out of local Shetland wool for all four children.

Cans jam from the wild berries they pick.

Home-cooks their wheat-free, dairy-free meals.

Chicken nuggets and string cheese never cross her threshold.

Her husband is a nutritionist who once lectured Didier on the importance of soaking nuts overnight.

“Blake.” Didier nods.

“How’s it hangin, buddy?”

“Long and strong,” says her husband, with only a flicker of a smile.

“Look at this guy! He’s getting so big! How old are you now?” Blake leans down toward John, who squirms in the shopping cart, shoving his face into Didier’s stomach.

“Three and a half,” says the wife.

“Wow. Time just passes, doesn’t it?”

“I know,” says Jessica, “and it’s been forever since we had you over! We need to do that. It’s hard to find a good night with the kids so busy after school. We’ve got soccer, cross-country, violin—gosh, what am I missing?”

The oldest child says, “My gifted-and-talented class?”

“That’s right, my love. This one”—she nuzzles the boy’s head—“tested off the charts last year, so he qualifies for an accelerated math and language-arts program. You guys aren’t vegetarian, are you? We’ve been getting the most heavenly beef from our friends down the road. Their cows are grass-fed, no antibiotics whatsoever, just pure happy beef.”

“You mean happy before they’re slaughtered,” says Didier, “or once they turn into food?”

She doesn’t bat an eye. “So when you guys come over, I’ll make steaks, and the chard will be ready soon. Gosh, we’ve got acres of it this year. Fortunately the kids love chard.”

Still raining hard on the way home. Wipers furious.

“Shooting?” says Didier.

“Too quick,” says the wife. “What’s a very slow poison?”

“Hemlock, I think,” he says, taking a hand off the wheel to caress the back of her neck. “No, wait—starvation! Hoist them on their own, like, whatevers.”

“Petards,” she says.

“What is a petard, anyway?”

“Can’t remember. But I vote for starvation.”

“‘I notice you’ve got some unsoaked nuts on the premises, and I’m a little concerned. Frankly I wouldn’t dream of feeding my children an unsoaked nut.’”

“What are you guys talking about?” says Bex.

“A TV show we saw,” says Didier, “called The World’s Smallest Petard. You would like it, Bexy. There’s an episode where every time a person farts, you can actually see the fart—there’s these little brown clouds trailing behind the characters.”

Bex giggles.

The wife moves his hand from her neck down to her thigh and closes her eyes, smiling. He squeezes her jeaned flesh.

She remembers what she loves.

Not the fart jokes, but the sweetness. The solidarity against the Perfects of this world.

She will ask him tomorrow.

In the car-window fog she draws an A.

It was bad, yes, the last time he refused. She promised herself she wouldn’t ask again.

But the kids adore him.

And he really is sweet sometimes.

I got the name of a person in Salem, she will say, who’s supposed to be fantastic, not that expensive, does late appointments. We can get Mattie to sit—

And she has seen herself driving off the cliff road with the kids in the car.

When the polar explorer turned six, she was shown the best way to hold the knife and how to make a slice across the lamb’s throat—just one, they don’t feel it, do it hard, watch your brother. But when she had the knife, and her mother was squatting beside her with the little wriggler, she didn’t want to. Eivør was ordered twice to cut it and twice she said “Nei, Mamma.”

Her mother put a hand over hers and drew the knife under the lamb’s face; its face fell off; Eivør fell with it, screaming; and her mother hoisted the animal above a washtub to bleed.

Eivør was beaten on her thighs with a leather strap used for hanging slit lambs in the drying shed. And she ate no ræst kjøt that Christmas or skerpikjøt that spring, apart from the occasional secret bite her brother Gunni saved in his shoe.

THE BIOGRAPHER

Doesn’t know for a fact that Gunni saved pieces of fermented lamb in his shoe when Eivør wasn’t allowed to have any, but she writes it in her book, because her own brother used to hide cookies in his napkin when their mother told the biographer she didn’t need more dessert unless she wanted to get chubby. Archie would leave the cookies in his drawer for her to retrieve. Each time she opened the drawer and saw the grease-darkened napkin tucked among socks, a flame of happiness lit in her throat.

She wrote the first sentences of Mínervudottír: A Life ten years ago, when she was working at a café in Minneapolis and trying to help Archie get clean. When she wasn’t driving him to meetings or outpatient appointments, she was dropping leafy greens into smoothies he didn’t drink. She was checking his pupils for pinnedness, his drawers for needles, her own wallet for missing cash. Sometimes he would ask to read the manuscript. He liked the part where the polar explorer watches men drive whales to their deaths in a shallow cove.

As a hater of tradition, Archie would have applauded her solo pregnancy efforts. Would have tried to get his friends to supply sperm for free. (One dose of semen from Athena Cryobank costs eight hundred dollars.)

She has not told her father about the efforts.

She closes her computer and sets Mínervudottír’s journal on a pile of books about nineteenth-century Arctic expeditions. Rolls her head toward one shoulder, then the other. Is a stiff neck another sign of polycystic ovary syndrome? She has researched PCOS online, a little, as much as she can stand. The pregnancy statistics aren’t good.

But Gin Percival might not know what she’s talking about. She didn’t even graduate from high school, according to Penny, who was already teaching at Central Coast when Gin dropped out. The visit to her did not go badly, or particularly well. She liked Gin Percival fine. She came away with a bag of gruesome tea.

Speaking of: the biographer gets out the saucepan. While the tea heats, she braces for the flavor of a human mouth unbrushed for many moons and debates whether to change for dinner. It’s only Didier and Susan and the kids; but these sweatpants, truth be told, have not been washed in a while.

Her white mug is streaked tan inside. Are her teeth this stained? Probably almost. Years of frequent coffee. Long hiatuses from dentistry. Could poor mouth hygiene be a cause of PCOS? Inflammation leaking from the gums into the bloodstream, a slow poison, her hormones dizzy and ineffectual?

If she does have PCOS, maybe Gin Percival can give her another concoction—to lower her testosterone levels, repair her blood. Her cells will jump to work, plumping and fluffing and densing, her FSH numbers will drop into the single digits, Nurse Crabby will call with her bloodwork results and say, “Wow! Just, wow!” and even Fleischy will give a golden nod of amazement. They’ll shoot in the sperm of the rock climber or the personal trainer or the biology student or Kalbfleisch himself, and the biographer, at last, will conceive.

It’s got to be mostly hokum, of course. Tree bark and frog’s spit and spells. Mash up a few berries and seeds and call it a solution.

But what if it works? Thousands of years in the making, fine-tuned by women in the dark creases of history, helping each other.

And at this point, what else can she do?

You could stop trying so hard.

You could love your life as it is.

The Korsmos’ place, horror-movie handsome on its hill, would make the biographer jealous if she were a house wanter, which she is not, as houses make her think of being stuck neck-deep in a mortgage; but she admires its lead-glazed panes and the ocellated trim work vining its porch. It was built by Susan’s great-grandfather as a summer place. In winter they duct-tape the windows and stuff sweaters under the doors.

Didier smokes on the porch steps, yellow hair poking like hay from under his beanie. He is sunk-eyed and snaggletoothed yet manages somehow—the biographer can’t figure out how—to be fetching. Beau-laid. He raises one beautiful-ugly palm in greeting.

“ROOOOOO!” yells Bex, running at the biographer across the lawn.

“Pipe the fuck down,” says her father. He squashes the cigarette on his bootheel, tosses it into a large brown bush, and ambles over to lift the girl into the air. “Bexy, remember that ‘fuck’ goes in the special box. You hungry, Robitussin? Also, we invited Pete.”

“I’m elated. What’s the special box?”

“The box of words we never say to Mommy,” says Bex.

“Or even near Mommy.” Didier sets the girl down, and she scurries back toward the house. “I see you didn’t bring anything, which is awesome.”

“What?”

“My wife adheres to the twentieth-century belief that civilized people arrive with small gifts or contributions to an invited meal. And once again this proves her wrong because you’re civilized but, as usual, you brought zilch.”

The biographer foresees the wince, the disapproval filed away. Susan keeps track to the grave.

Pliny the Younger stomps behind while Bex gives the biographer yet another tour of her room. She is very proud of her room. The purple walls are thick with fairies, leopards, alphabets, and Pinocchio noses. When her brother dares to move a rabbit from the bed, Bex slaps his hand; he yowls; the biographer says, “I don’t think you’re supposed to do that.”

“It was only a soft hit,” says the girl. “See, I have one shelf for the monster and one shelf for the fish. Here’s a squirrel mummy.”

The biographer peers. “Is that a real squirrel?”

“Yeah, but it died. Which is, like, when …” Bex sighs, twists her hands together, and looks up at the biographer. “What is death?”

“Oh, you know,” says the biographer.

Blond-brown, endearing, demanding, sometimes quite irritating—how eerily they resemble Susan and Didier. It’s much more than the coloring: they are shaped like their parents, Bex with Didier’s shadowy eye sockets, John with Susan’s elfin chin—small faces imprinted by two traceable lineages. They are the products of desire: sexual, yes, but more importantly (in the age of contraception, at least) they come from the desire to recur. Give me the chance to repeat myself. Give me a life lived again, and bigger. Give me a self to take care of, and better. Again, please, again! We’re wired, it’s said, to want repeating. To want seed and soil, egg and shell, or so it’s said. Give me a bucket and give me a bell. Give me a cow with her udders a‑swell. Give me the calf—long eyes, long tongue—who clamps the teat and sucks.

Downstairs she trips on a plastic truck and slams elbow first into a side table. The floor is choked with toys. She kicks a blue train against the wall.

“They live in squalor,” says Pete Xiao.

“I may have sprained my elbow.”

“That aside, how are you?” Pete came to Central Coast Regional two years ago, to teach math, and announced he’d only be here for one year because he wasn’t built for a hinterland. This year, too, is meant to be his last; and next year will undoubtedly be his last.

“Swell,” she says. Swollen. The Ovutran bloats.

They gather in the dining room, which Susan’s forebears rigged up in style: fat oak ceiling beams, hand-carved wall panels, built‑in credenza. The little black roast is sliced and served. Munchings and slurpings.

“This year’s parents,” says Pete, “are even more racist than last year’s. One guy goes, ‘I’m glad my child is finally studying math with someone of your persuasion.’”

“Calm your yard, Pete-moss,” says Didier.

“I have a yard?”

“It’s in your pants, nestled like a teeny mouse.”

“How very white of you to change the subject away from model-minority stereotypes.”

“Hey, Roosevelt, are you using only white sperm donors out of racism?”

“Didier, God,” says Susan.

“White is the state color of Oregon,” says Pete.

“The kid is already going to feel weird about his paternity situation,” says the biographer, “and I don’t want to add to the confusion.”

“Once you have that kid, you won’t be able to take a dump by yourself. And you’ll become even less cool than you are now. As they say, ‘Heroin never hurt my music collection, but parenthood sure has!’”

“No one says that,” says Susan, reaching for another roll.

“I once did a research paper,” says Didier, “on the history of words for penis, and ‘yard’ was a preferred term until a couple of centuries ago.”

“Was that considered a research topic at your wattle-and-daub college?” says Pete.

“Not wattle and daub,” says Susan, “so much as frosted glass block and drive-through window.”

“What’s wattle and daub?” says Bex.

Didier scratches his neck. “Even if it had been a community college, which it was not, so what? I mean, literally, meuf, why would it matter?”

Pete shouts, “Why does everyone say ‘literally’ so much these days?”

“‘When I lay with my bouncing Nell,’” recites Didier, “‘I gave her an inch, but she took an Ell: But … it was damnable hard, When I gave her an inch, she’d want more than a Yard.’ Ell meant the minge, by the way.”

“Yet he can’t remember the name of the kids’ pediatrician,” says Susan.

Didier gives his wife a long look, rises from the table, heads for the kitchen.

He returns with a butter dish.

“We don’t need butter,” says Susan. “Why did you get out the butter?”

“Because,” he says, “I want to put some butter on my potatoes. They happen to be a little dry.”

“Daddy,” says Bex, “your face just looked like a butt.” Giggles. “Don’t be a buttinski, you buttinski!”

“Use your NPR voice, chouchou,” says Didier.

“I hate NPR!”

“What Daddy means is you need to speak more quietly, or you’re leaving the table.”

Bex whispers something to her brother, then counts to three. “AAAAAAHHHHHH!” they roar.

“That’s it,” snaps Susan. “You’re done. Leave the table.”

“But John’s not done! If you don’t feed us it’s, um, it’s child abuse.”

“Where did you hear that term?”

“Jesus,” says Didier, “she prolly got it from TV. Relax.”

Susan closes her eyes. For a few seconds, nothing moves. Then her eyes open and her voice comes out placid: “Let’s go, sprites, time for bath. Say good night!”

Pete and Didier keep opening beers and ignoring the biographer. Their conversation topics include European soccer, artisanal whiskey, famous drug overdoses, and a multiplayer video game whose name sounds like “They Mask Us.” Then Didier, suddenly remembering her, says: “Instead of driving a million miles to Salem, why don’t you just go to the witch? I saw her the other day, waiting outside the school. At least I think it was her, although she looks less witchy than most of the girls at Central Coast.”

“She’s not a witch. She’s—” Tall, pale, heavy browed. Eyes wide and pond-green. Black cloth pinned around her neck. “Unusual.”

“Still,” says Didier, “worth a try?”

“Nah. She’d give me a bowl of tree bark. And I’m already in massive debt.” The biographer isn’t sure why she’s lying. She’s not ashamed of her visit to Gin Percival.

“All the more reason to avoid single motherhood,” says Didier.

Is she ashamed?

“So only couples in massive debt”—she raises her voice—“should have kids?”

“No, I just mean you have no idea how hard it’s going to be.”

“Actually I do,” she says.

“You very much don’t. Look, I’m the product of a single mother.”

“Exactly.”

“What?”

“You turned out fine,” says the biographer.

“You’re human evidence,” adds Pete.

“Wait’ll it’s four a.m.,” says Didier, “and the kid’s puking and shitting and screaming and you can’t decide if you should take him to the emergency room and there’s no one to help you decide.”

“Why would I need someone to help me decide?”

“Okay, what about when the kid has a guitar performance in assembly and you can’t be there because of work and everyone laughs at him for crying?”

The biographer does the tiny violin.

Didier pats his shirt pocket. “Hell are my smokes? Pete, do you—?”

“I got you, brah.” They head out together.

She thinks to start clearing the table—this would be a good thing to do, a courteous and helpful thing—but stays in her chair.

Susan, in the doorway: “They’re finally down.” Her narrow face, edged by blond waves, pulses with anger. At her kids for not settling faster? At her husband for doing nothing? She goes to hover behind a chair, surveying the mess of the table. Even angry she is shining, every piece of dining-room light caught and smeared across her cheeks.

The males clomp back in, smelling of smoke and cold, Didier laughing, “Which is what I told the ninth-graders!”

“Classic,” says Pete.

Susan reaches for plates. The biographer gets up and hefts the roast pan.

“Thanks,” says Susan, to the pan.

“I’ll wash.”

“No, it’s fine. Can you get the strawberries out of the fridge? And the cream.”

The biographer rinses, pats, and de‑tops.

“I bought those specially for you,” says Susan.

“In case I need some folic acid?”

“Are you—?”

“Another insemination next week.”

“Well, distract yourself if you can. Go to the movies.”

“The movies,” repeats the biographer. Susan has a knack for commiserating with suffering she hasn’t suffered. Which doesn’t feel like compassion or empathy, but why not? Here is a friend trying to connect over a trouble. But the effort itself is insulting, the biographer decides. The first time Susan got pregnant, it wasn’t planned. The second time (she told the biographer) they’d only just started trying again; she must be one of those Fertile Myrtles; she’d expected it to take longer, but lo and behold. If she told Susan about seeing the witch, Susan would act supportive and serious, then laugh about it behind the biographer’s back. With Didier. Oh, poor Ro—first she’s buying sperm online, now she’s tramping into the forest to consult a homeless woman. Oh, poor Ro—why does she keep trying? She has no idea how hard it’s going to be.

On her teacher’s salary she will die holding notices from credit-card agencies, whereas Susan and Didier, who also live on a teacher’s salary, are debt-free, as far as she knows, and pay no rent. Bex and John no doubt have trust funds set up by Susan’s parents, fattening and fattening.

“The comparing mind is a despairing mind,” says the meditation teacher.

Well, the biographer will figure out how to send her baby who does not exist yet to college. If the baby chooses to go to college, that is. She won’t push the baby. The biographer herself liked college, but who’s to say what the baby will like? Might decide to be a fisherperson and stay right here on the coast and eat dinner with the biographer every night, not out of obligation but out of wanting to. They will linger at the table and tell each other how the day went. The biographer won’t be teaching by that point, only writing, having published Mínervudottír: A Life to critical acclaim and now working on a comprehensive history of female Arctic explorers; and the baby, tired from hours on the fishing boat but still paying attention, will ask the biographer intelligent questions about menstruating at eighty degrees below zero.

As a girl, I loved (but why?) to watch the grindadráp. It was a death dance. I couldn’t stop looking. To smell the bonfires lit on the cliffs, calling men to the hunt. To see the boats herd the pod into the cove, the whales thrashing faster as they panic. Men and boys wade into the water with knives to cut their spinal cords. They touch the whale’s eye to make sure it is dead. And the water foams up red.

THE MENDER

Malky’s been gone three days. Long for him—she doesn’t like it. The sun is dropping. Killers in the woods. Malky is a killer himself but no match for coyotes and foxes and red-tailed hawks. Every creature, prey to someone. The girl rides away from school in the car of a boy in an old-fashioned hat. (Does he believe the hat looks good?) Hat boy walks hips first, boom swagger swagger, pirate-like.

Not that the mender can warn her. She has been keeping away from town for fear the girl will catch her watching.

She wipes down the sink, the oak countertop. Tidies the seed drawer. Sets clean jars by a basket of eyeless onions.

Boom swagger boom.

A pirate slept off his dreadful deeds at a tavern on Cape Cod. He met the local beauty, not yet sixteen. Maria Hallett fell hard for this bandit. Then Black Sam Bellamy sailed away. She was packed with child. Child died the same night born—hid in a barn, choked on a piece of straw.

Or so went the story. Little did they know. The farmer’s wife who raised the child told no one but her diary.

Goody Hallett was imprisoned. Or banned from the village. Became a recluse. Lived in a shack by a poverty grass. Waited on the cliffs for Black Sam Bellamy in her best red shoes. Rode the backs of whales, tied lanterns to their flukes, lured ships to crash on the shoals. Got a reputation: witch.

Black Sam was the Robin Hood of pirates. They rob the poor under the cover of law, he said, and we plunder the rich under the protection of our own courage. In 1717, after some Caribbean plundering, Captain Bellamy rode back up the Atlantic with his gang of buccaneers. Their stolen ship, Whydah, sailed into the worst nor’easter in Cape Cod history. Ship went to pieces. Dead pirates all over the beach. Black Sam’s body was never recovered.

In 1984 the remains of Whydah were found off the coast of Wellfleet, Massachusetts. That same year Temple Percival bought a foreclosed tackle shop in Newville, Oregon, and arranged on the shelves some spooky trinkets and called it Goody Hallett’s.

Now Temple’s fingernails live in a jar on the cabin shelf. Lashes in a glassine packet. Head hair and pubic hair in separate paper cartons—both almost gone. The rest of her body in the chest freezer behind the feed trough in the goat shed.

Scratching on the doorstep. Malky slinks in without greeting or apology. She tries to sound stern: “Don’t ever stay out that long again, fuckermo.” He purrs tetchily, demanding supper. She gets a plate of salmon from the mini fridge. It is happiness to see his pink tongue lapping. Merry, merry king of the woods is he.

Two short knocks. Stop. Two more. Stop. One. Malky, who knows this knock, goes on eating.

“Is it you?”

“It’s me.”

She opens the door but stays on the threshold. Cotter is her only human friend, the kindest person she knows; doesn’t mean she wants him in the cabin.

“New client,” he says, holding up a white envelope. His poor pimpled cheeks are worse than usual. Toxins trying to exit. They should be leaving through the liver but are leaving through the skin.

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