She touched the number six, or nine, tracing its circle. She adjusted it, making it firmly a six. Then she reached across for the notebook, putting her arm between James and the mechanism. He smacked her wrist. “The 6 looks familiar,” she wrote.
James glanced at her. He didn’t think it was possible that she could start recognizing all the clocks already. “It shouldn’t,” he said. “It’s from one of the clocks you forgot to wind.”
She stepped away. Then she turned her back, looking out the windows into the back yard.
James examined a gear wheel, making sure that each of the teeth was straight. If not, it wouldn’t grab on to its sister cog and pull her through. “When you threw the notebook at me, I threw it across the room,” he said. “It hit the clock and broke it.” James quickly bit his tongue. Ione’s word Incoragement forced him to cut off his own words. He was about to tell Cooley it was her fault. But he felt again the weight of the notebook, just before it sailed from his hand. Moments after it sailed from hers. James decided to stay quiet. He knew Ione expected him to tell Cooley it wasn’t her fault. But it was. And James’ too. They shared in the death.
She looked at James and nodded, then turned away again. He saw in the lowering of her eyebrows and in the stooped set of her shoulders that it wasn’t a reassured nod. His shoulders were stooped too, with the weight of the words he didn’t say. He knew then that they thought alike. Minds worked that way sometimes. They both wanted to blame each other. And themselves.
“Cooley,” James said slowly. “Are you going to help me with this clock or what?”
She shrugged and returned to her stool. She wrote in the notebook for a second, then set it next to his elbow. “Wz it important?”
James thought of Diana, the way she held the clock cupped in both her palms. The way she wound it, with a touch just right, never pushing it past its limit. “All clocks are important,” he said.
Cooley nodded. “So what R U going 2 do 2 it?”
James really didn’t know. The pieces Ione threw in the trash were already saved and wrapped in their royal blue velvet and buried under the deep purple lilacs in the moon-glazed back yard. But James kept those remaining pieces, the hands, the number six, the mechanism, on his table. He knew they should be with the rest, the clock was dead. Keeping these parts out was like mounting the head of a deer after devouring the rest of the body. Those glass-eyed deer staring out from walls and over doors always unnerved James. It was like the head longed to be with the rest of its body. With its soul. As the clock’s soul surely was in the movement.
James glanced at Cooley. He wasn’t sure what to say, how to justify not throwing these pieces away with the rest of the clock which she probably figured was in the trash bin upstairs. So James just made some sort of noise. A grunt, he thought.
Cooley wrote again. “Can U put that in another clock?”
James paused, then blinked. For a second, he imagined he felt a beat from Diana’s clock’s heart, lying cold there on the table. He hadn’t even put it on a towel. Then he just shrugged. “One clock at a time, Cooley,” he said. But the thought was there now and when he quickly placed a soft towel under the movement and the number six and the golden hands, they all gleamed together. He covered them as if they were napping.
The Home was full of clocks with other clocks’ parts stuck in them. But he never transplanted an entire movement before. He never moved one soul to another body.
Cooley’s question kept pulling him back to the notebook.
T
hat night, after the house was finally still, James couldn’t get to sleep. He told himself to turn off the lights, but he couldn’t. Whenever he was in the dark and his sight joined his closed-down hearing, his mother appeared. He knew it was impossible, he knew it couldn’t be her. But she was there and he was back in the cold and damp of the root cellar. He hadn’t worn a collar since he was seventeen, but whenever that newly silent, familiar darkness covered his face, he felt the leather and the studs again. Or sometimes the cold metal links of the choker. Tightening. Constricting. His throat closed up in the dark, as solidly as the silence blocking his ears.
James couldn’t sleep with the lights on and he couldn’t sleep because he was thinking about Chicago and what he would find out there, and Cooley winding the clocks without him close by, and what Cooley said about putting Diana’s clock’s mechanism into another body. And James couldn’t sleep because he kept thinking about how close Rockford was to Chicago and how he could maybe take a side trip to the Time Museum and see all those wondrous clocks again, especially the Gebhard World Clock. Maybe, in Chicago, they could fix his ears and then, in Rockford, he could hear those clocks go off. And if his ears weren’t fixed, he could watch and if no one was looking, maybe lay his face against a few of them. The caretakers wouldn’t mind. They understood clocks there.
And James thought about how the Time Museum was the last place he saw Diana. He couldn’t count that real last time, that night when she climbed into bed and turned her back. James realized now, from the way she turned away, the way she curled her arms around her pillow and her hair fell over her cheek and the way her shoulders moved as she sighed, she was already gone that night. Even though he kept talking. Talking, he thought, to her, but talking to nobody but himself.
James got out of bed, wrapped his robe around his shoulders and headed for the basement. He made sure to turn on the light before descending the stairs, flooding even the darkest corners with brightness. Then he sat at the workbench, held the number six in the palm of his hand, the hand that remembered striking a cat, a boy, his mother, and Diana. Four times total. But four times too many. James looked at Diana’s heart.
He thought of all the clocks in the Home. Whose insides could he take out, to tuck this one back to life in a different body? But that would be like killing one for another. What would he do with the heart he removed? And what about the clocks that didn’t work, that were only shells with their insides buried out in the graveyard? James always hoped he would find the right parts to fix them. But wouldn’t a clock rather tick with someone else’s heart than just sit there, waiting to be raised from the silent dead?
James looked at Diana’s heart, lying there. It seemed sad. But the thought of it ticking away in someone else’s body, in a body that wasn’t created for it, fully intended for it, seemed wrong. It wasn’t fitting. Not for her. She deserved only the best.
James dug around until he found a small box and he lined it with some lamb’s wool. Then he put the little number six and the hands and the mechanism inside. Carefully folding the box shut, he made sure there was a small gap to allow some light in. Then he placed Diana on the shelf.
Cooley’s clock parts were still soaking in their fluid. They were each going to need individual scrubbing with a new toothbrush, so since sleep seemed far away, James settled down for some work. He decided the acorn clock needed a blue toothbrush, blue for serenity and peace and a long life, as long as the ocean, which is what he wanted to give to this clock, trapped for too long under a teenager’s bed. But as he dug through his collection of cellophane-covered toothbrushes, he found his old drawing pad. James remembered placing it there as a lift for the toothbrushes, bringing them closer to the top of the drawer so he wouldn’t have to dig so deep. James pulled the pad out, then selected a blue toothbrush and set it next to the pan holding the clock parts.
Only one page of the drawing pad was used and that was to sketch the clock James wanted to create, so long ago. The statue clock, the mother looking at her watch while teaching her little boy how to tell time. James looked at it now, saw the way the mother bent smoothly at the waist, saw her soft skin as she smiled at the boy, and saw the firm concentration on the boy’s face as he leaned over his own watch. In the way they touched, in the way she smiled, in the way they both held their watches on slim delicate wrists, there was a connection. It was one James wanted to feel, one he wanted to show the world, but at the time he sketched it, he didn’t know enough about clocks to make this statue work.
Now, maybe he did. Maybe James could create a clock. Something just for Diana’s heart, so that when it ticked, it knew it was in a special place, where it should be, in a home for nobody else. The clock mechanism was still working, it was all in one piece, so he really only needed to create a new body. A new body for Diana’s heart.
For Diana.
But then James flipped to a new page. It wouldn’t be the statue clock. The mother/son body didn’t fit. Diana’s clock wasn’t about that. Diana wasn’t a mother. At least, not when she was with James, though they talked about it.
James sat and thought. Diana’s flower basket clock was ceramic and he had no idea how to make that. But he knew wood and maybe something could come of that. James never carved anything before, but if he could draw the picture, maybe he could find someone else to cut the wood. Neal, maybe, or Gene.
James tried drawing a few things, silly things, like a Valentine heart, a flower, held hands. Then he quickly gave up. His fingers were just too tired and stiff and he needed time to think and consider, to find a perfect form to hold Diana’s heart. It helped though to have this idea, to think that the clock’s life wasn’t completely gone. He could do a transplant.
James went upstairs and turned off the basement light, waiting until his eyes adjusted and he could see the soft glow of the nightlight by the bench. None of his clocks were ever in complete darkness. Then he went upstairs, bringing the drawing pad along. He left it on the bedside table, near his mother’s anniversary clock. Touching the pad, James felt the promise of its many blank pages, and then he decided to turn off the light. There was another nightlight in the bathroom and the rosy glow fell into the room, softening the shadows. James decided he would sleep.
And he did fall asleep, but it didn’t take long for his mother to find him. He was nine years old again, crouched in a cardboard box in the cellar, when she threw open the doors and came down. “Time to get up, James, naptime is over,” she said and James jumped out of the box and trotted over to her, lifting his chin so she could take off the tether and collar.
Then she discovered the mess in the corner. James hoped it was dark enough, that corner, the only one he could really reach on the tether. He thought the dark would hide his secret, but he’d forgotten her sense of smell and her cat’s eyes found the source easily.
“James! What did you do?”
James hung his head. “I’m sorry, Mom. I tried to wait, I did, but I really had to go and I called for you, but you didn’t hear—”
“You called for me? You know you’re supposed to be silent down here! You’re supposed to be napping!” Her hand came down, smacking James against his ear and he fell back onto his haunches.
“I know, but I had to go—”
“Come on. Bad boy.” She yanked the chain and the choke collar clenched around James’ neck. He tried to keep up, but she dragged him over to the corner. Then she caught on to his hair on the back of his head and thrust his face into the pile. “Bad boy!” she yelled. “Bad boy!” She pushed James a few more times, his nose sinking in until it scraped the coldness of the dirt beneath. Opening his mouth to cry, he tasted his own foul mistake. He gagged and choked. When she pulled James over to the belt, it was almost a relief because he knew what to do. Lowering his pants, he watched through his tears as she doubled the belt in her fist.
Eventually, James just didn’t feel it anymore. That was always the good part, when his entire body went numb.
When she was through, James started to pull up his pants, but before he had a chance, she grabbed the tether and began dragging him toward the stairs. He tripped behind her, finally losing his pants completely, and emerged half-naked into the bright sunlight. “Mom!” he said, trying not to yell; she hated yelling. “Mom, my pants!”
She swung the tether in a wide arc and James went flying. She stopped when she ran him into a tree. “This is where you do your business, here!” she cried. She came at James, put her hands on his bare skin, pushed him into a squat on the grass. “Here! Do it here!”
“But Mom—”
“Do it now!”
James didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know where to run. He was bound to her and there was nowhere else to go. There was only her and she seemed to be growing bigger by the second.
So James did the only thing he could do. He peed as hard as he could. He peed out of fear and fury and an overwhelming sense that if he didn’t, he’d be killed. She’d pull up on that tether and dangle him by the choke collar and all the air would rush out of his lungs.
Gasping, James woke up, sitting in his bed, his pajamas and sheets drenched, and he knew it was more than sweat. He knew, because this wasn’t the first time. It hadn’t been the first time in a long time. Waiting a moment, panting, James’ eyes desperately tried to adjust to the darkness, drinking in the sparse light from the bathroom. Then he reached over and switched on the bedside lamp.
After cleaning up, after a shower and fresh sheets and pajamas, James settled back down again. But he left the light on. And until he fell asleep again, until his eyes dropped of their own accord and he wasn’t even aware of it, James watched the walls, watched all the pendulums moving, back and forth, so slow and steady, and he breathed quietly along with them.
T
he picture in my grandmother’s clock always calls and so I slip in and tell myself the tale that is mine, an epic that just grows inside me until I have to say the words out loud to move my own story, my own life, forward. It’s my voice that makes it real, just for a little while. “Your face slices into the open air,” I say, “the water crashing like a mirror with splinters of bright glass flying everywhere, sounding and flashing like crystal, and the air is cold enough to make you gasp. You tread water and wipe your eyes and then you see the warm little white house and you decide it’s time to go home—”