The Home for Wayward Clocks (29 page)

Now, the pillow slips off my head as I prop my chin on my fists. “I should’ve known then,” I say. “I should’ve known then and I should’ve walked out that night.”

I let myself cry, just one more time. I think of my kids and I cry. Marie and Will. I remember Will learning to walk, careening into a wall and bloodying his nose. I held my handkerchief to it until it stopped bleeding and he stopped sobbing. I gave him a sip of my rum and coke to calm him down. I remember watching Marie leave on her first date, her walking down the sidewalk with her arm around that scrawny boy’s waist and I stood at the open door and glared them away before I set off for Benny’s.

And I think of Kat.

And I cry and I think the whole time, this is the last time. I’m done. It’s over. There’s no need to run up those steps again. There’s no one waiting at the top.

5:00. Acceptance

Swinging open the door, the sound and the smell hits me and I take the deepest breath of my day. My stool is there, waiting, and Benny smiles at me. “Hey, Zach,” he says. Before I’m even settled, he has my drink squarely in front of me.

“Rough day, Benny,” I say, using his name and thinking how comfortable it sounds. The barstool is molded to my ass and the drink fits neatly in the crook between my thumb and forefinger.

“Again?” Benny shakes his head. “Seems like you always have a rough day.”

“Same old, same old,” I say and swivel in my seat to check out the early crowd. Some are new, but others I recognize and they lift their drinks or smile in my direction. I repeat their gestures. I feel the tension drain from my shoulders and neck and the liquor warms my throat and stomach. When I hear the thunk and rustle behind me, I know Benny has set down a basket of my favorite party mix. He always gives me my own basket, though I share it when someone sits next to me.

The door opens and for a moment, I think it is Kat walking in. But then I see the younger body, the feet neatly encased in white sneakers, the low-riding jeans and belly top. The hair though, the hair could be Kat’s. It swings just the way hers does, barely touching her shoulders.

Stacy sits next to me and I offer her my basket. “Benny, this is Stacy,” I say. “Set her up with what she wants.”

Stacy brings her hands up beneath her chin as she orders and I hear chimes. On her forearm is a load of silver bracelets and they shiver together and sing and shine. I count them. Twelve.

“Of course,” I say out loud.

Stacy looks at me, raises her eyebrows.

“Your bracelets,” I say. “You’re wearing twelve.”

She shakes her arm, sending the silver sound into the air. “My favorites,” she says.

I nod toward the ugliest clock in the world. “See, it seems to me everything is centered around the number twelve,” I say. “Like that clock there. Or a dozen eggs. A baker’s dozen. Twelve blood-red roses.”

Benny rolls his eyes, but I smile at him as he turns away. Everything slips gently back into place, like pieces of a puzzle or disks and vertebra snapped softly in line. Raising my drink, my lips meet the glass’s edge exactly. I put my arm around Stacy’s waist and it’s like I find a groove and my arm rests against her skin like it’s rested there a very long time.

I laugh out loud and raise my glass in the universal signal for another.

A
nd so it ends, as you expected, this only soft relationship you’ve known. The only relationship that made you shudder with more than fear, but with love and ecstasy and passion. You never imagined it could really happen. Not to you, anyway.

Because of course you are scared. When it comes right down to it, you are scared of everything. Of everyone. Even of yourself.

Imagine waking up every morning and wondering if this will be the day. If this day will bring the moment that your mind goes around the bend, follows your mother’s lead. Imagine wondering every morning if by the time you return to your bed that night, you will be brandishing the other end of the belt. If you will shut the root cellar doors on brimming eyes and know that this time, it’s you that left someone down there in the dark. If as you draw the bolt, the sound of that life being locked away will fill you with a jolt of pleasure so deep, you have to sink to your knees in the sunlight.

Because that happens sometimes, in little spits and spurts. One day on your way home from school, a hard day because you’d returned from a week-long stay in the root cellar and found yourself hopelessly behind, again, you stopped to play with a stray cat. At first, the cat rubbed around your legs and you ran your fingers down its knobbed and matted back. The choked purr that came from its throat made you smile. But then you brushed its fur backwards, and backwards again, admiring the plethora of colors erupting from underneath. You didn’t know that cats don’t like this, and when you did it again, the cat grew angry and sparked its claws at you. Three deep lines of red appeared on your hand, the same hand that was just petting the cat, even though it was the wrong way. Just petting it. And so you took that same hand and molded your fingers in your mother’s way and pounded that cat full in the face and when it ran from you, you roared with a sound that came from the dark part of you that was just sick of being hurt. That was just sick of being puny.

And there was the boy in ninth grade who made a comment about the length of your dick when you were in the shower after gym, and you didn’t even stop to turn off the water, to rinse the soap from your hair. You pounced on that boy, your skin and his slippery wet, and you rammed him against the wall, brought your knee up against his own diminutive dick. When he folded in half, you unfolded him and repeatedly snapped his head against the streaming white tiles beneath the shower head. The teacher pulled you off, dragged you from the shower and threw you against your locker. The clang of your body against metal crumpled you into an immediate cower, and then the teacher just stood there, watching you, arresting you, as you climbed wet into your clothes. He led you on the long trek to the principal’s office, where you were suspended for three days. Your mother never knew. You just slunk into the woods each morning, climbed a tree, and watched the colors of the sky change. It was the most peaceful three days you’ve ever known. Except you were so alone and you wondered what you were missing.

And then Diana. The one time you raised your hand to Diana, and the look on her face let you know that the animal was there. Your mother stood erect in your skin and she looked out of your eyes and said words you knew so well, but you would never have said yourself. And then your hand connected to Diana’s face and you felt the piercing pleasure of attack, the pleasure you only imagined, but were always afraid you’d experience. The unimaginable pleasure of hitting someone you love.

And it happened with your mother too. On the last day you saw her, the day you finally walked away. Your anger met hers and you won. The thrill you felt was palpable as you stood over her, her hand cupped over her nose and mouth, against the sting you put there, and the fear in her eyes made you want to roar again, to watch her run off into the woods like a stray cat.

Imagine being on the other side of the pain for a change. Imagine the unimaginable pleasure of being all-powerful. And imagine never wanting to feel that powerful again.

James didn’t have to imagine. He apologized to Diana that night, apologized over and over even after the red mark disappeared from her face, and he never ever forgave himself. Instead, he choked himself down, choked down his mother, and fell into a reserve that remained until Diana left. And it remained still, that distance. The distance between him and anyone who truly breathed in and out and whose tick came from vessels and arteries and aortas, all working together, not unlike a clock mechanism, but not a clock mechanism at all.

A distance that James imagined was absolutely necessary.

J
ames was on the porch the next day when Cooley came back. The house had been quiet for a couple hours, quiet in the sense that nothing moved, besides James and the clocks. Molly delivered breakfast and lunch. Ione stayed until one, then left. The doctor showed up mid-morning and finally removed the bandages on James’ hands and feet. James thought the fresh air would feel good on them, but it felt cold, almost like he was being burned with ice. Both his hands and feet looked terrible, with long running gashes that were still inflamed and swollen. Dr. Owen said they were actually a lot better than they looked.

When Cooley walked up the steps, she didn’t look at James. She held a box and she kept her eyes firmly fixed on it. When she got to the top step, she sat down and turned away. She placed the box gently by James’ feet. He noticed the way she slid her hands out from beneath, one at a time, supporting the box so that it didn’t drop. James and Cooley stayed there like that for quite some time. Cooley’s shoulders were raised and she sat straight instead of slouched, though from time to time, she rocked left to right, as if an internal breeze set her into motion. James didn’t feel any air at all and in fact, it felt like Cooley sucked all the oxygen out of the afternoon. He couldn’t tell if she was talking. She could have been saying anything, from apologizing to cussing James out.

“Did you say something?” he finally asked.

She shook her head. Then she reached up and patted her ears.

“Notebook’s in the house,” he said. “On the kitchen table.”

She shrugged and went inside. James immediately bent forward to look at the box, but the flaps were folded. He looked over his shoulder, then touched one of the flaps, intending to sneak a peek. But when he couldn’t hear the scraping sound of cardboard against cardboard, he realized he also wouldn’t hear when Cooley came back. And he didn’t want to get caught. Not by her. James knew better than to be caught doing something by a woman that would be interpreted as wrong.

She came back and sat on the step again, this time facing James. She set the notebook beside her on the porch and then displayed the clipboard. James nodded. “Yes, Cooley,” he said. “There are clocks to be wound.” He held out his hands. “The doc took my bandages off, see?”

Her mouth opened and James knew she must have cried out. She got up on her knees and took his hands in hers. Her skin was warm and smooth, her palms felt like cushions. As she bent over the cuts and slices and abrasions, for a moment, James thought they might stop burning.

But nothing would make them stop burning. Nothing but time and healing. James pulled away. “Anyway. Even with my bandages off, I’m still having trouble doing the winding. The skin is stiff, see, and it hurts to move my fingers too much. Doc said I should do some things, to work the skin back to flexibility, so I wound the weight-driven clocks due for it. But the ones that need key-winding, I left. All that turning hurts and Doc said I could split the skin open.”

That morning, James thought his heart would burst when he reached out to wind a clock, the first one in almost a week. He walked the doctor out the door and then peeked in on Ione in the kitchen. She was busy, so James slipped by and went to the office to get the clipboard. Then he set off for an upstairs back bedroom, where he could wind in peace, without anyone watching.

The clock he chose was a cuckoo clock of sorts. It ran like a cuckoo, but in the door where a bird normally popped out was a circle of children. They twirled when the clock chimed and then played a tinny version of Ring Around The Rosie. James’ favorite part, though, was the pendulum. It was a girl on a swing, who sat facing out into the room. Instead of swinging left and right, like most pendulums, this one went forward and back, setting the girl on a forever ride in the sky. It took a special place to hang her, a place where there was room for her forward and back movement. The west bedroom had a niche in one wall. It used to hold an ornate sconce, an elaborate light that just didn’t fit with James or the Home. So he removed it and hung this clock at the top of the arch. The little girl in the swing flew backwards into the niche, then out into the room. James kept a tumbling philodendron there as well so it looked like the little girl played over a lush green park. The curved wall was painted blue, giving her a sky.

James watched her, swinging, and he wished he could hear her. He always thought of giggling when he looked at this clock, giggling that was high-pitched, feminine, sweet. The little girl had a smile on her face and James knew she never, not for a moment, missed being a part of the dancing circle of children above, at the top of the clock.

The weights were just above the floorboard, indicating the clock was ready to be wound. James started to reach for the chains, but then stopped, leaned against the wall, and put his ear against the side of the clock. He thought that maybe with the bandages coming off his hands and feet, maybe his ears would magically clear as well. Maybe they stayed deaf this long out of sympathy.

But there was nothing, no sound. James thought he detected the wood scraping against his skin, but he couldn’t be sure. The rhythm was there, that vibration, and for a moment, he closed his eyes and leaned into it, tapping his fingers on the wall to keep the beat.

While James couldn’t hear the ticking, nor the chiming nor singing nor time-telling, he could still feel the clocks’ hearts beating. He pictured himself going around the Home, laying his head aside every clock in the place. His fingers curled into a stiff and painful clench.

It would do, for now. But it wouldn’t be enough for long.

Now Cooley nodded and sat back down on the porch. She looked at the clipboard, then wrote in the notebook. “Could U mark which 1s U wound?” it said in her strange alien code.

“Why do you write like that?” James asked. She cocked her head. “I mean, with U’s and 1’s and things like that, instead of just writing the words?”

She blinked for a moment, then smiled. “I guess I just do it w/o thinking,” she wrote. “I’m on the computer a lot. That’s how U talk on the internet.”

The internet. James shook his head; he’d never been. “Well, I think you can figure out which clocks to wind on your own. If it has weights, I did it. If it has a key, you should do it.” He thought of the words he rehearsed all morning, the words he promised Ione he was going to say to Cooley when she came. Now, he wondered if it would be enough just to tell her that he thought she could do it. The other words were stuck somewhere between his stomach and his throat. He kept seeing Diana’s clock in pieces on the floor. Maybe he did break it; James knew he did. But he wouldn’t have if Cooley hadn’t messed up. If she hadn’t thrown the notebook at him. If she’d just wound the clocks right in the first place.