He imagined that no softness could stop her.
C
ooley got all the clocks wound by late morning, and when she was done, James was exhausted. It surprised him, but he didn’t say so. He didn’t want Cooley to know he was tired. Sitting down in the chair in his office, James looked quickly at all the security monitors. Things were fine. There were no tourists, of course, and all the clocks were running. Thinking of his mother’s clock, James reminded himself again that as soon as Cooley cleared out of there, he would head down to the workshop to find a replacement dome.
“We’re done, Cooley,” he said, knowing she stood behind him. “You can head on home now.” He thought that would be enough to send her off and he watched the screen, keeping his eye on the front door so he could see her go. When she touched his shoulder, James jumped.
She handed him the notebook. “Do U want me 2 come back 2morrow?” she wrote.
There was no way around it. James didn’t know if Ione would be back and Cooley really had the right touch for the clocks. Ione’s fingers were lumpy, they would be graceless on a key or curled around a chain. “Yes, come back tomorrow.”
She scribbled some more. “OK. I like being w/the clocks. That’s Y I like Ione’s shop 2. But URS are better.” There was something else written too, but scratched out, so James couldn’t read it. He thought he saw the word clock though and he pointed to it. She just shook her head. James thought maybe she’d written a thank-you note for fixing her Baby Ben.
She left. When she appeared on the screen, just before the front door, she turned and waved.
James sat for a moment and wondered what he was going to do. There were too many people coming and going in the Home. And he didn’t know how to get rid of them. He didn’t know how to get rid of his need for them. The only way was to get better, and what was the way to get better, other than this interminable waiting?
Leaving the office, James headed toward the basement door. But then he stopped and looked down. He couldn’t work in his pajamas. He could hardly believe he was still in them. James glanced over at the closest clock. A quarter past eleven. Plenty of time left in the day to justify putting on fresh clothes.
Getting dressed was more complicated than James expected. With his hands bandaged, zippers and buttons were next to impossible. He finally managed to get his jeans closed, but the tiny buttons on his shirt left him sweating. Giving up, he found a pullover sweater and wore that instead. Shoes were out of the question…they pressed too hard on his bandaged feet. So he settled for socks, black ones, that at least looked a little like shoes. There were no tourists coming anyway, James reminded himself. It was okay to look sloppy, just for a few days.
James glanced at his mother’s anniversary clock. The dancers still moved, but it looked like they were spinning more slowly. And there was a catch, James thought, in the movement of their feet. Too much dust, too much air, and the dome was no longer around to protect them. He hurried down the steps to the workshop.
In the storeroom, James looked through all the glass domes for anniversary clocks, and other types of clocks as well. But as he picked them up, hefted their weight, he knew they were all wrong. His mother’s clock was much larger than the typical anniversary clock, and while these domes might fit over the little dancers, their feet would bang against the sides, bringing the whole mechanism to a halt.
James worried about this clock, worried about the possibility that he wouldn’t be able to find a replacement dome, worried that the clock would die because of his own clumsy hand. And he worried that his mother would kill him. A thought that was so common, it continued to plague him long after her hands, her voice, her body became even more silent and still.
She’s already dead, he reminded himself. She can’t hurt me anymore. But still, there was a grip around his throat, like the collar being yanked up a notch. He would have to special-order the dome. In the meantime, he would clean the dancers and all the clock parts every day, making sure that they stayed alive.
As James climbed the steps, he felt fatigue run through his hips to his knees and ankles. He really needed some sleep, but he never slept in the middle of the day. His mother took naps all the time, putting James down in the root cellar first so he couldn’t, wouldn’t disturb her. James remembered standing at the foot of the cellar steps, stretching as far as the tether would let him go, and looking up at the slot of sunlight coming in between the doors. He wanted so much to be near her, to be in the house, watching her sleep while he quietly got things done for her, things that would make her smile, and he always promised himself that when he was a grown-up, he wouldn’t waste a minute sleeping. Though she was so beautiful in sleep.
And now, James’ feet dragged on the stairs.
In the kitchen, he punched in the number to his favorite clock shop in Des Moines. He knew he’d be able to get the dome through them, in probably a matter of days. But it wasn’t until he kept standing there, waiting to hear the soft burr of a ringing phone miles away that he realized he’d never know when the clerk answered on the other end.
James slammed the phone down and a jolt of pain traveled from his fingers to his elbow. Swearing at the bandages on his hands, at the wounds that brought them there, at his ears and the town’s clock tower, he turned and found myself a few feet away from Gene’s wife, Molly. She stood in the kitchen doorway, holding a tray. When she smiled, James didn’t know what to do, so he let his hands dangle and he stared.
Molly set the tray down on the table and looked around. Then she motioned, moving one hand like she was writing and her other hand was the pad of paper. James nodded and retrieved the notebook from the office.
“Here’s your lunch,” she wrote.
James wondered why she felt the need to write the obvious, why Gene wasn’t here, why he had to send his wife, another woman James barely knew, except for her pie crusts. “Thanks,” he said.
She nodded and busied herself with the tray. She pulled off napkins and unrolled silverware and even held up a tiny set of salt and pepper shakers.
“I have my own things,” James said.
She took up the notebook. “Now you won’t have to wash them. Just leave them on the tray.” She shook her head. “Your poor hands,” she wrote. “Your poor ears.”
James didn’t know what to say, so he sat down. Molly began to look through the cupboards and he wanted to moan at yet another violation of what was his. When she glanced over her shoulder, James realized the moan must have materialized from his mind and his heart out his throat. So he shrugged and looked away. When she came across a glass, she held it up. “Milk,” James said. Then he added, “Please.”
Molly crossed to the refrigerator and got out the carton. But when she opened it, she wrinkled her nose. It must have gone bad again. “Then just water,” James said. “And I’ll have some more coffee later.”
She brought the water and sat down. James didn’t want to be watched while he ate, so he waited. She grabbed the notebook again. “It’s today’s special,” she wrote. “Good, spicy chunky tomato soup. Grilled cheese sandwich, three different cheeses, and tomato and bacon too.” She probably wrote the same thing on the big chalkboard at the front door of the diner.
“I can see,” James said and she blinked. Then she nodded, patted his hand, and left. James called out a thank you, but it was probably too late. He wasn’t sure if she heard.
It wasn’t easy, but he ate. And Molly was right, the food was good. But James’ stomach turned at the thought of rounding another corner and seeing Ione. Or going to a different room and finding Cooley. Seeing Molly heading up the stairs, or Gene and Neal wandering around the workshop. The doctor poking at James’ hands, his feet, his ears, just stopping everything up with bandages and more bandages.
James dropped his spoon. He couldn’t eat, couldn’t breathe, the choke around his neck grew tighter. Shoving the tray away, he placed his face flat on the table and slapped his bandaged hands around his damaged ears. He willed them to hear, willed them to listen, but he couldn’t hear his own pummeling as he smacked himself upside the head. In that old familiar way, the way that used to bring stars and colors bright as the sun shining through the slats in the root cellar door. Now, the soft bandages barely cuffed his ears and they refused to open. James gave up, then gave in to sleep, wrapping his hands like root cellar doors around his head to block out the light.
T
he next day, James sat stiffly in the recliner. Somewhere in the house, he knew Cooley was winding clocks. In the kitchen, Ione was doing dishes. She showed up that morning on Cooley’s heels, and when James couldn’t stop a smile of relief from creasing his face, Ione nodded, accepting his silent apology. Molly was already by with breakfast. The doctor was due to show up at any minute and so Ione insisted that James stay in one place. “I don’t want Dr. Owen too have too serch four you,” she wrote. “It’s not like we can holler four you. Amy Sue can handel it.”
And so James sat there, hoping Cooley would need him. Hoping she would find him. And hoping his ears would suddenly pop like a big bubblegum balloon and he’d be able to hear himself yell at them all to get the hell out of his house.
Women were everywhere. And with them there, the women in hiding, the women James tucked away, suddenly came back. In his head, he could hear his mother. He found himself ducking and darting around every corner, in case she was there, her hand raised high, ready to come after him for whatever he did or didn’t do. He slept last night with the light on, suddenly afraid of the dark again.
But James could hear her voice, whether it was light or dark. Now that he couldn’t hear the clocks, her voice came at him from all the different recesses of his brain.
“Get the hell out of here, James!”
“Don’t let me see your ugly face, James!”
“Bend over! Bend over!”
“Play dead. Play dead for real, James. You’re dead.”
And so many times, down there in the root cellar, James thought he was. Dead. And then he thought if he could just be better. If he could just be good. If he was quiet, she’d never notice him. But he wanted her to notice him. He wanted her to open her eyes wide and see him and nobody else. James never stopped hoping for that. Not even as the door to the kennel clanged shut or she yanked on the leash, burying the choke collar deeper into his skin.
Now James opened his own eyes wide, looked around the room, letting his gaze touch each and every one of his clocks. James knew if he could connect with them, he’d be okay again. If he could just hear that rhythm again. That rhythm. That rhythm you hear when you press your ear against warm skin and arms circle around you and hold you as if you are the most precious thing on earth.
And Diana was back again too, tiptoeing behind his mother, now that the clocks were silent. And she was right there in the living room when he looked at a tiny ceramic clock on an end table. It was a simple clock, an old winder whose paint was chipped. It was a little flower basket and the face of the clock was surrounded by faded green vines and still-deep purple flowers. James gave that clock to Diana years ago. She didn’t take it when she left.
James remembered waking up that morning. He and Diana had been away for the weekend, driving down to Illinois to the Clock Tower Resort in Rockford. The resort was owned by a rich old man who collected clocks and offered them up in the middle of the complex as a tiny, free museum called the Time Museum. James fell in love with the place and he and Diana spent hours there, going from clock to clock. Diana was very quiet on the drive back, but James couldn’t stop talking, about one clock in particular, the Gebhard World Clock, a tremendous thing that took over thirty years to build in the late 1800’s. James couldn’t say enough, and later, he realized Diana couldn’t say anything at all.
When James got up on the morning she left, their bed was empty. It was cold, as cold as the root cellar, there wasn’t a bit of heat left from her body. James looked around the house, but it was like she never lived there. He checked her closet and everything was gone. He kept at it, trying to find something of hers, a toothbrush in the bathroom, a mug in the kitchen sink, one of her old artsy novels cracked open and turned upside down over the arm of a chair. Her chair, as James thought of it, a recliner just like his. A recliner that now appeared nearly new next to the one he sat in. He thought of her there, almost every night, her legs slung over the side rather than stretched to the footrest, her head tilted back, her voice soft as she talked to James and then guided him to bed.
All she left behind was this little clock. James leaned forward now and took it into his lap. He remembered her finding it at a side-of-the-road flea market. She picked it up and held it out as if she’d just found a secret treasure. In terms of value, it wasn’t a great clock, James told her, but she clasped it to her chest and said she loved it and he loved her and so he bought it. He thought she liked the flowers and later, he bought her a big purple bouquet. She placed them in a vase, but then she sat on his lap and showed him the little clock.
“Look at its face, James,” she said. “It’s the face that’s so extraordinary. Distinctive. Like yours. Just look at it.”
And James did. Hidden among all that foliage was the prettiest set of gold filigree numbers he’d ever seen on a clock. They twirled on the face and blinked and lit up and sparkled. The hands too curved and caressed, gliding over each number as if it was a child’s cheek. The way a child’s cheek should be touched. The way Diana touched James.
Now he held his own bandaged hand to his face.
But Diana left the clock behind. James sighed and lifted it to his ear, hoping a whisper would get through.
Someone tapped James’ shoulder and he looked up. It was Dr. Owen, who waved and smiled. James replaced the clock on the table. “I still can’t hear a damn thing, Doc,” James said.
The doctor nodded and picked up the notebook. “That’s to be expected,” he wrote. “Your ears have suffered through trauma. It may take a while for them to return to normal. You need to be patient.” He set the notebook aside and pulled up the small stepstool. Sitting on it, he rummaged through his bag and pulled out his otoscope. He brandished it, then got to work.