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.
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