Alone on the hill, she shuddered.
The house fell dark. Then the porch light blinked on and the front door opened and she could see her husband, looking out, looking for her. She sat still in the moonlight, hiding in the gleam, knowing the silver light would mask her white-blonde hair, her pale skin.
“Helena!” he called. “Helena baby, come home! C’mon, darlin’! I’m sorry, I know you didn’t mean it! It was an accident!”
She sat still. Soon, he went inside. The porch light died.
Watching the moonlight, Helena waited until her eyes wanted to close and the grass grew wet against her thighs. Then she went down the hill and thought about hiding in the root cellar, hiding in the dark and the damp where nobody ever went. Never going inside her house again. Never touching that hot, clammy head again. Never hearing that voice. But her husband returned to the front door. “Helena baby,” he said. “It’s late, sweetheart. Come to bed.”
So she did. Their lovemaking was silent and tender, but she was braced, feeling the baby in the next room, knowing he was waiting, knowing he would bust in just when she was at fever pitch.
And he did, his voice ripping her husband away from her skin like a rent piece of cloth. He ran naked to the nursery and began to sing.
“Oh, baby love, my baby love...”
She crawled under the damp sheets and cried.
T
he next day was the same. And the next. The baby cried and she picked him up. He cried and she put him down. She left him in his room for hours and he keened while she sat on the floor in the corner of the kitchen. She rocked, banging the back of her head against the cabinet. She stopped eating and drinking and there was no sleep, even when her husband took over in the middle of the night. That voice ricocheted around the house and inside her head.
On a mid-morning when she stood in a nightshirt she’d worn for a week, never finding a moment to take it off, never finding a moment for a shower, the baby lifted his head from her neck and bellowed right in her ear. The sound severed her spine and she went limp, slumping to the floor. But her arms remained stiff. She held the baby straight out, he flailed between her fingers. And then she began to shake him.
She saw the top of his hair, the bottom of his chin, a flash of white forehead and throat. He kept crying, but the sound became rubbery, then flimsy, going faint and loud with each thrust forward, pull back. And then he stopped altogether.
She held him still and for a moment, they both trembled. Then he tucked his head, drew his legs up, and curled into a ball around her hands. She rolled him on the floor, then smacked her forehead against her knees and cried.
When she was spent, there was one solid minute of silence. She raised her head, basked in it, and felt her shoulders relax. She felt hungry, but she was too tired to get up.
Then the baby uncurled and began to scream. Stretching out his arm, he batted her leg, his fingers wide and extended. She covered her ears and ran out of the house. But his barrage followed her.
Helena had to do something. Outside, she tripped over the root cellar doors and while she rubbed her toes, she remembered wanting to hide down there, in the dark and the damp and the quiet.
The dark, the damp, the quiet.
The quiet.
She straightened. Returning to the house, she stepped lightly over the crying baby and went to rummage in the pantry. She found the cardboard box her husband brought home last week, filled with groceries from the store. Going to the nursery, she took the blanket from the cradle and tossed it into the box. In the kitchen, the baby’s sobs softened to a whimper and she stopped for a moment, trying to think what it reminded her of.
She snapped her fingers. A puppy. He sounded just like the puppy her little brother got when he was seven. And she remembered what her brother tried to keep the puppy quiet, to keep him company. It reminds him of his mother’s heartbeat, her brother said. It hadn’t worked, but maybe it would now. Maybe it would here.
She hated that puppy. It cried all night, keeping the whole family up. Her brother cried too, when it died. When she killed it. When she wrung its soft neck. She never told anybody, but she helped her brother bury it out behind the house, marking the grave with a lopsided cross he made himself out of wooden clothespins.
Going into the bedroom, she dug into the back of the closet until she found a wind-up alarm clock, a gift from her mother that she never used. It always ticked too loudly, shredding the blanket of dark silence that always lulled her to sleep.. She threw it in the box, then went out to the kitchen to collect the baby.
When he saw her, he screamed, holding his hands out to her. She picked him up by the collar of his sleeper, dangling him like it was the scruff of his neck. She dropped him in the box, then carried everything outside.
By the root cellar double doors, she had to put it all down. The doors needed both hands for opening, tugging them up and then laying them to the side. The sunlight fell in on cement steps. Going down, she smelled the damp and felt the dark close in. Like a womb, she thought. He’ll be fine down here.
She set the box in a far corner, then arranged the baby on his back. His shriek went up to a strident pitch and his hands turned into little fists, beating at the air. She covered him with the blanket, then wound the alarm clock and placed it by his head. The ticking sounded loud and hollow and the baby paused for just a second, held his breath, looked at the clock, then began to cry again.
She shrugged, walking away and closing the double doors. It didn’t matter if the clock worked or not; she wouldn’t hear him anymore. She would sleep for a few hours, then go down to feed him. She slid a heavy branch through the door latches, telling herself it was to keep someone from breaking in, when she knew it was so he wouldn’t break out. He couldn’t, she knew that, not yet. But babies grow; she wasn’t sure how fast.
In the house, the sun suddenly seemed brighter. She made herself a ham and cheese sandwich and sat down at the table, eating with her eyes closed. She drank a whole glass of cold milk. Then she went into the living room where the sun flowed through a window, splashing a big square patch on the floor. She smiled and curled into the warmth like a cat. In a moment, she was asleep.
W
hen her husband came home, Helena met him at the door. Putting the bawling baby into his arms, she said, “Do something with him. I’m going out for a while.”
As she moved past, her husband touched her shoulder. “Are you okay?” he asked. “You didn’t call all day.”
“I’m fine,” she said. She flinched when the baby cried louder.
Her husband kissed the back of the baby’s neck. “I told you it would get better. I told you you could do it.”
Helena shrugged and smiled and her husband smiled back. She knew they could both be happy again. All afternoon, she planned as she sat in the sun and read, sat in the sun and ate, sat in the sun and let the blessed silence soak into her skin. The baby was locked up tight and he had his clock so she knew he was all right. When she went to feed him, she brought along a rolled-up newspaper. While it didn’t stop him from screaming, it made her feel better. Like she was doing something, teaching him something. Teaching him to obey. She would replace the newspaper tomorrow with a wooden brush. And then, as the baby grew, there could be a belt, a choke collar, a leash, a cage.
He would behave. He would be quiet. She looked at him now, crying in his father’s arms. He wouldn’t get away with that. Not tomorrow. The thought of another day in the silent sun made her smile.
Then she waved goodbye and slipped away, light as air, the baby’s cries hanging in a black cloud behind her.
A
nd so you are born and your mother treats you like a dog. A runt, a whelp, a cur. Imagine being two years old and the collar around your neck feels as natural as your diaper. More natural, in some ways, and in some ways, more comfortable. Your mother often forgets to change your diaper. The soft puppy collar around your neck doesn’t hurt until she hooks you to the leash, drags you down the cement steps to the root cellar. Then it does hurt. Even when you run, you can’t keep up with her, and the steps are still hard for you to navigate. But as the collar digs in and your breathing constricts, you know it will end as soon as she drops you in the box, locks you in the cage. Then you can lie in the dark and listen to the clock tick, play with the little bell on your collar. The soft sounds are as smooth and soothing as a mother’s voice is meant to be.
Imagine.
Imagine being five years old and sent off to school for the first time because, your mother tells you, she has no choice and so you must go. You climb onto the school bus that day and you don’t know what to do, and so the driver leads you to a seat and pushes you into it. Surrounded by all the noise of happy raucous children fresh from a summer of lake swimming and playing in the park, you look out the window, try to catch a last glimpse of your mother. But she is inside already, the door closed, and you know she’s found a favorite sunny patch and has curled up to sleep.
At school, you touch the tender skin of your neck, free to the air, no collar there, it’s hanging on a hook in the root cellar, waiting for your return. You squint in the bright light of the kindergarten room and watch the children. Everything about them is foreign. They run from toy to toy, learning station to learning station, and you wonder what they are doing. There are blocks and magnetic letters and puzzles and big sheets of paper next to buckets of crayons. But you don’t know what any of these things are for. You head for the safety of a dim corner, out of the sun, and find a small clock toy, a toy that you can wind and it ticks and tocks and plays a little tune and it feels familiar, so you sit facing the corner, turn your back to all the others, to all the shrieks and laughter and rough and tumble, and you wind the clock, over and over, and rock to its rhythm.
Imagine not knowing how to play.
Imagine the release from a leather collar making it more difficult to breathe, rather than easier. Imagine not understanding, not recognizing, freedom. How could you recognize what you’d never known? It’s like trying to find a word in the dictionary when you don’t know how to spell it.
By the end of that first day of school, you know you are very, very different. And everyone else, the teacher, the children, seem to recognize that too, and they step carefully around you, and nobody asks you to play. You sit alone and you hold your clock and you watch the world go by. A world that seems more wonderful and vibrant by the minute. Yet you just don’t know how to join in. And nobody seems to know how to show you.
Imagine.
James didn’t have to imagine. He knew. At five years old, what was unimaginable to everyone else was commonplace to James. As common as making a peanut butter sandwich or flipping a pillow to the cool side in the middle of the night. And while James lived every day with the unimaginable, with root cellars and collars and tethers and belts, his own imagination began to stretch to impossible contortions. As he sat with his back to a world he longed to be in, he looked into a clock face and listened to the ticking with his whole heart. At home, down deep in the root cellar, he turned his face in the dark toward the alarm clock and the deep and sonorous tick told him stories and made him smile. He listened to the clocks and he believed they listened to him. He talked to them, telling them about his day, telling them about the strange world that he just didn’t understand, and they talked back and surrounded him with a worn and comfortable quilt of familiarity. At school, the toy clock’s tick was an invitation to play. At home, the alarm clock’s tock was his after school milk and cookies. To James, they were enough. Because he just didn’t know any better.
Imagine.
O
n this day, a mid-morning in mid-September, sixty-eight years after that first day of kindergarten, James knew immediately that he’d made a mistake. He always told himself to never turn his back, to never turn away from the security monitor when outsiders were in his house, but he did anyway, and as soon as he did, it proved fatal. There was a pile of keys that needed to be sorted by clock type and as he reached for them, just for a second, for barely a breath, a crash echoed throughout the house. He didn’t even have to look back at the monitor to see where it came from; he knew. As soon as the sound reached his ears, it slid straight down to his heart and he heard that clock calling. Crying for rescue.
James flew from his chair and down the hallway, up the stairs to the third floor, to the middle room on the right. The last place where he saw the tourists, a gray-haired man holding hands with his soft-spoken wife, both of them followed by their sullen teenage son. When James saw that boy, hunched behind his parents as they paid the admission, James knew he was trouble. Hair down to his shoulders, pockmarked face, jeans black and big enough to stuff dozens of clocks down the legs. James wondered if there was any way he could convince the husband and wife to leave the boy outside, that he’d be happier playing his Gameboy or GameCube or GameThis or GameThat, whatever it was that he held clenched in his dirty hands. Could James do that and still seem hospitable, still welcome this couple into his home and museum, the Home for Wayward Clocks? Still pay their admission and help him to support himself, support his clocks, support the whole town? The only way to keep those clocks ticking was money and the only way to make money was to keep those clocks ticking. In the end, James chose polite silence and watched this family walk to the first room, the living room, and then he hurried to the control center to study them on the security camera. He felt all the clocks stiffen in every room, on every floor. They sensed danger as well.
Closing his eyes, James silently apologized to the clocks and he promised to keep up a stern vigil. But when those keys were just out of his reach, he turned. And he heard every clock in that place that trusted him call his name just before the crash. The victim’s voice was the loudest of all.