James heard the scraping again, or at least he thought he did. It was no clearer than yesterday. His ear itched though and for a moment, he heard his father’s voice, from a long time ago, as he bent over a scratch in James’ arm, a scratch put there by his mother’s claws. James’ father had them too, usually on his face. He painted James with some sort of cold yellow ooze, cold that still managed to burn. “When it itches, Jimmy,” he said, “that means it’s healing. You can’t scratch it though. You’ll wreck the new cells. Just let it heal.” So maybe James’ ears were healing.
The doctor looked into the other ear. James touched his free ear and felt the coolness of his own skin. It was like his ear was dead. A dead part of his own body. So he asked the question that he didn’t want to ask.
“Doc, is it possible my hearing won’t ever come back?”
The otoscope stopped moving. James no longer felt Dr. Owen’s breath on his neck. And James knew the answer. Carefully, he shimmied his hand up between his face and the otoscope and eased the doctor away. “Okay,” James said. “Okay.”
Dr. Owen reached for the notebook. He seemed to spend a lot of time writing, looking up every now and then at James, and at the clocks, then at the floor. Finally, he handed the notebook over. James settled back for one of his medical lectures. The man had one for every malady, he even had them when patients were healthy, so broken ears wouldn’t be any different.
“James,” he wrote. “It’s very possible for you to regain your hearing completely. A week from now, you might not even remember that this happened. Or it might take longer. Your ears are still so red and swollen, I can’t get a good look at the eardrums, but I still believe that both burst. They may heal quickly or slowly. Then there’s all the tiny little hairs and bones and nerves in the ear that have to recover as well. Think of your ears as being in shock. I can’t say with absolute certainty that your hearing will come back. But I think it will. You had good hearing before, correct? I don’t remember any hearing aid.”
Here, James looked up and nodded. “My hearing was very sharp,” he said. “I could come into this room and tell in a second which clock was out of rhythm.”
Dr. Owens smiled, then pointed back at the notebook.
“There’s always the possibility this will be permanent. But I don’t think it’s likely. I called the specialist in Des Moines I told you about a couple days ago. He’s a friend of mine. He agrees with the regimen of rest, antibiotics and anti-inflammatories. He suggested, however, sending you to Chicago instead of to him. He said there’s a great hearing and ear injury clinic there. So we’ll think about that.”
James closed the notebook and nodded. Dr. Owen patted his shoulder and left. James kept sitting there, thinking about a possible trip to Chicago. He’d never been there, not to stay, but only passed through on his way to other things. St. Charles, to the Kane County flea market. And Rockford, to the Time Museum, the last place where he and Diana were really together. James wondered how far away Rockford was from Chicago. He wondered if the Gebhard World Clock was still there, if it still ran. For a moment, he let himself picture the clock, standing broad-shouldered in the middle of the room, and he saw Diana standing there, leaning over the old red crushed velvet barrier, and she didn’t look a day older than when she left. James let himself think she would smile when she saw him and he let himself think that he would smile back.
When Cooley entered the room, James didn’t even glance at her, just handed her the notebook and waited for her to give it back.
“I’m done,” she wrote. “Everyone is fine.”
James noted the “everyone” instead of “everything.” It made him hesitate for a moment, attempt to hold his tongue, but then he knew he couldn’t. The clocks were too important. He said, “Are you sure?”
She nodded.
James slapped the notebook. “Then you’re wrong. You never once came in this room, Cooley, not once. There are clocks that need winding in here.” He nodded at Diana’s clock. “That little one there, for instance.” It was one that had to be wound every day.
Cooley stared, then turned and ran from the room. James nearly got up to go after her, but then he stopped. He didn’t expect her to leave, he thought she’d get angry or maybe break down and cry in that way girls do, the way he remembered Diana doing whenever they argued. The clocks glared at him, they needed winding and he might have chased off the one that could do it, and he nearly started to go after her again, but then he met his clocks’ stares head on and told them he would manage. Women ran, they left. There was nothing he could do about it.
James puzzled over how he was going to do the winding. He realized Dr. Owen forgot to check his hands and feet.
But then, Cooley came back, carrying the clipboard. She looked at it and frowned, her pencil stuttering in tiny movements that James figured must be checks. Then her shoulders sagged and she reached for the notebook.
James held onto it. “You don’t have to tell me,” he said. “You forgot the room.”
She nodded, then moved toward Diana’s clock.
But it wasn’t enough. There was too much at stake. “If you forgot an entire room, then who knows who else you forgot?” James looked at the clocks and wondered how she couldn’t have known. How could she not hear the hesitation in a tick, a pause in a chime? The gap in the sounds were even more obvious than the complete silence when a clock wound down entirely. That moment when there should be a tick, but there isn’t, followed by a quick catch-up tock. It was like listening to someone gasping for breath.
Cooley stood for a second in front of Diana’s clock and James watched for her to reach out and pick it up. To wind the winder too quickly, and have the little built-in key fall off in her hands. For the clock to slip free completely and then shatter on the floor. James felt the muscles in the back of his neck tighten and his own fingers twitched, needing to set that clock himself. Needing to make sure it was all right.
But then Cooley swung toward him and snatched the notebook off his lap. Her face was bright red. She scribbled furiously, her pointy elbow shooting into the air like a sword, and then she pitched the notebook at James and ran from the room. Across the entire page, she’d written, “I was only trying to HELP! Give me a fucking BREAK!”
James’ hands shook and he threw the notebook across the room while he struggled to his feet. “Cooley!” he yelled. “Get the hell back in here!”
He wasn’t even to the doorway when Ione appeared, grabbing James by the arm. He struggled, but he was no match for this large woman as she hauled James back to the recliner. To James’ horror, he realized she was wearing her fuzzy slippers and she had the lavender feather duster under her arm. “Dammit!” James bellowed. “This is not your namby pamby gift shop, Ione! Don’t dust my clocks with that feather-flayer! It’ll gum up the works worse than the dust!”
They were both panting when she strong-armed James into the chair. Her face went white and James saw her mouth moving, saying something, and it looked like it was a snarl. James closed his eyes and brought both hands up to his face, pressing his bandaged fingers into his eyes. “Get out!” he said. “Get the hell out!”
A moment later, his arms were yanked away from his face. Ione slapped the notebook into his lap. She’d turned the page and she’d written in some pretty big letters too. “Look what you’ve done!” she wrote, with about a thousand exclamation points. Spelled correctly. James figured she was the type to draw smiley faces in her o’s as well. He looked where she pointed.
Diana’s clock was on the floor. It was in pieces.
James tried to surge out of the chair, but Ione pushed him back in. “What did you do?” James asked, feeling the break in his own voice. He ransacked his recent memory, sure that Cooley hadn’t touched the clock before she left. But maybe she did, she was standing in front of it and he couldn’t see what she was doing, maybe she threw it before she grabbed the notebook and he just hadn’t noticed. “Or was it Cooley? Get Cooley back here!”
But Ione jabbed her finger again, at James, and then at the notebook. James looked, but there was nothing else written. “What?” he said and shrugged. “I read your note! I didn’t do anything but tell Cooley the truth!”
Ione grabbed the notebook. She pointed at James, then threw the notebook so that it landed next to the clock pieces. Then she speared the air in front of his face again and he breathed in the truth.
It was James. James broke the clock when he threw the notebook across the room. And it was his third mistake, the third time he let the clocks down, let them be hurt. The teenage boy who knocked over the waltzer. The little girl who grabbed Felix’s tail. Within his sight, when he was supposed to be there to protect them. And now it was worse, it was James himself. He couldn’t hear the clocks, he couldn’t wind them, and now he shattered them.
“Oh, no,” James said. He pushed out of the chair and Ione didn’t stop him this time. When he sank to his knees next to the pieces, she joined him and began to sweep them up into her large palms.
James could see there was no fixing it. The aged ceramic crumbled to dust. But the clock mechanism was still there and when Ione turned toward him, cradling the mess in her hands, James plucked it out. There was a chunk with the number six on it, or the number nine, James couldn’t tell, and there were the hands. He chose those as well. “I’m going to keep these, Ione,” he said.
She nodded and stood up, transferring the pieces into one hand. She offered her free hand to James. He hesitated, then accepted her help as he lurched to his feet. Ione picked her feather duster back up and the notebook too, and they left the room.
In the kitchen, James watched as she deposited the last of Diana into the trash can. He thought about stopping her, about telling her to get out the blue velvet, the golden leather, but he didn’t. It was too much to explain. He whispered to the remains in his hands, told them that he would do right by them, that there would be a burial in the back yard with Diana’s clock properly put to rest in a soft pouch that would cradle her parts, in the royal blue she deserved. It would just have to wait until Ione went home.
Then she sat down at the table with the notebook and began to write.
“That clock was Diana’s,” James said slowly, trying to taste her name in the air. He wondered how it sounded, if it was as soft and smooth as his voice used to make it.
Ione glanced up. James couldn’t remember if she and Neal ever met Diana. Everyone was so busy then, with the town’s resurrection, changing it over to thriving clock-themed businesses. “She was a girl,” James said. “A girl who lived here. With me.”
Ione’s eyebrows went up and she nodded. Then she handed James the notebook.
“You have too let people help you now,” he read. “While you heel. You have too. Amy Sue did a pretty good job, four her second day. And her first day without you folowing her. Breathing down her neck.”
James nodded. He thought of how Cooley called the dwarf tall clock by its proper name, how she said “everyone” was okay.
But even so, if he hadn’t said anything, those clocks would have died that night. Would still die, since Cooley ran out before she wound them. They’d stay dead unless James figured out some way to use his fingers again. Or they’d stay dead until the bandages came off. By then, their gears and cogs would be stiff and brittle.
“I’m going downstairs for a bit,” James said. “Can you call me for lunch?” He started to leave, then stopped. “Please?”
Ione smiled. She set her feather duster on the notebook and nodded.
James looked at the feather duster. Then he looked at Ione’s fingers. They were thick, but they weren’t as thick as his bandages. There was no way around it. James reminded himself that the clocks had to come first. “Ione,” he said, “would you look at the checklist and wind the clocks in the living room that need it? That Cooley didn’t—” He stopped when a frown crossed Ione’s face. Rearranging his thoughts, he tried again. “That Cooley forgot. It was just a mistake.”
Ione nodded again.
James waited until he was halfway down the stairs before he called again. “And if you see Cooley,” he said, “would you ask her to come again tomorrow? Please?” He’d said that word twice now and it still felt like a foreign language. But one he had to learn, while he lived in this strange country for a couple of days. A couple of days only, he reminded himself. He’d made three mistakes. He wouldn’t let himself make anymore. He’d force himself to heal.
Then James descended to the workroom, to hover over the heart of Diana’s clock and wait to bury the rest.
I
t’s the ugliest clock in the world that reminds me and I say to my bartender, “It seems to me that everything is centered around twelve.” The clock’s twelve numbers sneer at me in a golden shimmer. “At the store, we buy a dozen eggs. At the bakery, a dozen doughnuts. A dozen long-stemmed blood-red roses at the florist’s.” I almost drain my drink, almost, because it’s just about one o’clock in the morning and at one, he’s going to pull the plug and we’ll all have to leave. But he can’t kick me out as long as there’s a drop left in my glass. I’m a paying customer, after all. “And clocks too,” I say, nodding at the ugly clock. “Twelve numbers on the face. Why not ten? Why not fifteen?”
“Could be because there’s twenty-four hours in a day, Zach,” the bartender says. He glances at the clock and I can see the hour hand sneaking toward the number one.
“Then there should be twenty-four numbers,” I say. “Thirteen o’clock, fourteen o’clock, all the way up to twenty-four o’clock. But no, we do a repeat. We stop at twelve and start over, even though it’s not a new day.”
“Time!” he yells and I tell myself it’s in reaction to my argument, but he picks up the clock and waves it over his head. “Time to go home! Work day tomorrow!”
I hate Sundays when the bar closes at one instead of two. The bartender says he does it for our own good, so we can get up in the morning to go to work after a long weekend. Or look for work, in my case. I say he does it because Sunday nights are the nights he puts it to the wife. I’ve seen her picture…it would take me an extra hour to get it up for that.