Red Clocks by Leni Zumas Read Free Book Online Page B

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, asmuch 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 biographergets 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, NurseCrabby 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 seedsand 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 snaggletoothedyet 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 inthe 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 smallgifts or contributions to an invited meal. And once again this proves her wrong because you’re civilized but, as usual,