FOR THE FIRST time since Chris’s death, my physical weariness overtook my spiritual weariness. The aches in my back overtook the aches in my soul. And I was thankful for it. It was much easier to bear. I’d had to lose many hours of sleep to make the clocks in time, and during the day, I erased myself from the map of the island. Anything that didn’t have to do directly with Olivia, Ruby and, to a lesser extent, Pony, vanished for that month and a half. I arrived at the opening of the Cherry Blossom Art Fair with a total of seventy-two clocks, two of each type of the thirty-six models I had designed. Despite the exhaustion and the rings under my eyes, I was ecstatic. I had done it. Of course, that meant I’d had to leave some victims in my path.
“Why won’t you ever accept any help?” Miriam had asked me. She was very hurt by my absence. “I offer to lend you a hand with your clocks. You say no. Fine, I get it. It’s your thing, your art. I respect that. Then I offer my assistance setting up the stand. Nope. Then to help you get the public’s attention—that’s what I do, I sell things—that way you don’t have to be by yourself all day at the fair, or I say we can take turns, without a commission or anything, out of friendship, because I want to be with you, spend some time together and laugh. Nope, not that either. So I don’t know, it weirds me out, because I think, well, maybe you don’t want to be my friend. You make me feel like a nagging neighbor. And shit, it hurts my feelings. Because you mean a lot to me. I sold you the house for less than I could have gotten because I felt a connection with you from the day we met; you transmitted something really nice to me. I saw your strength and your vulnerability. And now, look at us, here we are, having our first spat, and that’s always an important step in any relationship, but this is the thing, I’m talking nonstop, and I don’t know what’s going through your head. Because you barely share anything with me.”
The next day, I went to her house with a clock—a spy clock, obviously—shaped like a crescent moon, smiling and surrounded by stars, each of which was a number.
“Happy first fight,” I said, timidly passing her the clock.
“You think you’re going to talk me off the ledge with a clock shaped like a moon because you know I’m a Cancer and I’m prone to lunacy?”
“Yeah, I do. Because today’s a full moon and you’re feeling more sensitive.”
“See?” she said, bursting into tears. “You know me really well. But do I know you?”
Pause. Then I started up. Following her lead.
“I don’t let you help me because, since my husband died, I don’t let anyone help me. And I really don’t let anyone into my life. You’re the person I’ve let get closest to me, without a doubt. And that might not mean much to you, because it isn’t much, I know. But for me, it’s a lot. It means a whole lot. And of course you’re my friend. Although, let’s be honest, you’re also a bit of a pain. But you know what? I’m glad you are, because knowing you’re there and that I can count on you helps me so much. And I also felt that connection when I met you. If you hadn’t given me that special price on that lovely house and you weren’t my dear neighbor, I probably wouldn’t have made such a radical decision in my life. And by the way, I’m a Pisces with Cancer rising and the full moon affects me a lot too. A lot,” I said, bursting into tears.
We hugged, crying together. Then she asked me, “Does this mean you’re going to let me help you set up your stall?”
“No.”
I sold most of the clocks during the first few days of the fair, and I got all kinds of praise and even an offer from a really fancy shop on Martha’s Vineyard where I could have made a juicy profit—I was selling them for between seventy and a hundred dollars. The good thing was lots of neighbors on the island I was interested in had already bought or ordered one. So my cameras were going to be adopted and my fishbowls would find lots of homes.
Julia and Mark were holding hands and walking among the different stands at the fair. But as they approached mine, Mark started to straggle, who knows whether because he wanted to avoid a three-way meeting or because he was looking at a cane two stands farther down.
“Hi, Alice.”
“Hi, Julia.”
“Did you do these yourself?” she asked, admiring the clocks.
“Yes.”
“They’re lovely. I’d take all of them.”
“Thanks.”
Why did the compliment mean more coming from her? I even turned red. Julia focused her attention on a clock shaped like an elephant’s face.
“This would look good in Oliver’s room.”
“If you take it, I’ll give you another one at half price. For your office.” Easy, you’re making it obvious. “Or for wherever.”
“The one made of the old book covers seems designed just for me.”
In fact, she was right.
“They’re real antique book covers that I found at a flea market,” I said, acting like it was nothing.
“Well, to hell with it, I’ll take two.”
“No, no, wait!”
Olivia showed up, holding Oliver’s hand. Well, they weren’t exactly holding hands, more like Olivia was clutching his arm and dragging him along.
“Oliver gets the Puchi Puchi clock so he can have the same one as mine.”
A while back, Olivia had caught me making a clock shaped like a raccoon.
“That one’s for me, Mommy. Puchi Puchi is for my bedroom,” she’d said.
“No, honey, those are for the fair,” I’d told her. But then I thought: Wait, maybe it’s a good idea. Putting a camera in her room would let me observe her in private and get to know her obsessive-compulsive patterns better so I can help her. But no, how could I do that with my own daughter? How could I spy on her? No, I couldn’t do it. And what if she caught me? She would never forgive me. If I was incapable of respecting my daughter’s privacy, if I couldn’t manage to help her overcome her neuroses without needing to control every one of her movements, what kind of mother did that make me? No, I couldn’t put a camera in the Puchi Puchi clock. She was another victim, like me. So I finished the Puchi Puchi clock without a spy camera and took it up to her room.
“Where do you want me to put it, Oli?”
Olivia had looked around her bedroom, trying to find the right place. Without saying anything, she picked up one of her crayons. She got up on the bed and drew a tiny dot in what she swore was the exact center of the wall. I was even afraid to hammer in the nail because any tiny deviation could start a drama. Maybe my daughter was destined to be a great mathematician, or an astrophysicist like Stephen Hawking, with a vision of space that went beyond black holes. When I finished, I looked at Olivia’s disconcerted face.
“What is it?”
“It’s not right.”
“No, Oli, I nailed it in where you said to.”
“I mean the clock. It’s not right.”
“Why?”
“One needle is bigger than the other.”
“It has to be like that. The short one tells you the hour and the long one the minutes.” She didn’t look especially convinced. “Should I set it for you?”
“No. I always want one on top and one on bottom.”
“Don’t you want to always know what time it is? Don’t you want to hear the clock go tick-tock?”
“No. The big one on top and the little one on bottom.”
“You want it to always be six o’ clock?”
“Puchi Puchi time,” she said with remarkable firmness.
“All right, then. Puchi Puchi time it is. That’s how the clock will stay forever.”
And now Olivia wanted Oliver to have a replica of her clock—which had a spy camera inside—in his room. I absolutely did not want to sell a clock with a camera in it to any child. It didn’t seem . . . Were you going to say ethical? You really have nerve to use the word ethics. No, not ethical. It doesn’t seem decent to me. Right, because all this other stuff is decent.
“Isn’t it cool? Don’t you want to have the same Puchi Puchi clock as me? You want it, Oliver?”
Oliver shrugged, incapable of contradicting Olivia. Sucks to be you, kid.
Well, I could always keep the camera unactivated, but it irritated me having to waste one of my fishbowls.
Julia seemed to be enjoying the situation. Recently she seemed to be enjoying everything.
While I was wrapping the two clocks in bubble wrap, Mark showed up with his recently purchased cane in hand, destroying my theory that he wanted to avoid any possible uncomfortable situation for me or him.
“Look at this beautiful cane. It’s made of hundred-year-old walnut and has a hand-carved marble handle.” He did a few tricks, rolling it in his fingers like a majorette.
“Honey, what do you want a cane for?”
“It gives me an air of dignity, don’t you think?” he said, leaning on it like an English lord.
“Yeah, right, tons of dignity . . . I bought two clocks from Alice. You pay; I’m out of money.”
“That’s all you want me for, to get money out of me.”
“Honey, I make ten times what you do in a year,” she said, amused, yet not wishing to offend, before kissing him.
I wanted to vomit witnessing that everyday scene. I’d already heard much of the same in their private life through my snitches, but seeing them live and direct, acting silly and saying sweet nothings, was unpleasant and made me sad, because it reminded me of Chris and me. And now there was Mark, looking like a doting husband, amused and in love with his wife and his life, while he was carrying on an affair with me. Could Mark be a mirror image of Chris? Was he showing me his MO, the path to discover Chris’s double life?
“Will we see each other later?” Mark asked me.
It took me a moment to respond. I was alarmed, as if I had forgotten that Julia had just left to look at scarves and Olivia had gone off to play.
“You’ve really left me hanging lately,” he insisted. “Are you avoiding me?”
“I’m not avoiding you. I’ve been really busy.”
Since I’d gone back to making the clocks and had promised myself not to sleep with him again, I had only given in once. It was the day of my thirty-fourth birthday. February 21. Of course, I didn’t tell him it was my birthday; I didn’t want him to feel important. But I needed to celebrate. Because even if I’d spent the morning with Olivia and Ruby taking Panda out for a ride at Horse Rush Farms and then making a special meal that Miriam and Chloe came over to share with us, I felt a knot that I thought Mark would be able to untie. The worst thing is that he did. I felt good during the hour we spent together late that night on the boat. And I didn’t like that. I only wanted him to fuck me and get it over with. Throw off the baggage and tension. But it gave me—or made me feel—something that up until then I’d only gotten from Chris: protected. I needed my corner, my shell, my place in the world. Everything ordered. I needed to curl up once in a while and embrace someone I loved, and for that someone to embrace me and love me. All that had happened, maybe just for a few brief seconds, but it was enough to trip all the alarms, make me get up and dash out of there with a flimsy excuse—I have to stop in at the pharmacy before they close blah, blah, blah . . . Was I falling in love? It frightened me so much I cut off any possibility of another encounter.
“Did I do something wrong?”
“No, you didn’t do anything wrong; it’s the opposite; you’re doing everything right. One look at you both and I can see that.”
I couldn’t help that little note of spite. He must have realized it, because he smiled at me softly, relieved. As if in reality, he had only been worried about my possibly losing interest and not so much about the fact that we hadn’t slept together in three weeks. He clearly loved seeing me jealous.
“They’re a hundred and fifty dollars,” I said. If Julia had paid, I’d have let her have them for $120.
In the middle of the flurry of activity before the fair, as if I didn’t have enough fish to fry with the scrambling, the stress, the excitement, the long hours, the clocks and the fishbowls, one of the snitches wanted to reassert itself before being forgotten and succumbing to the attraction and the power of images, and captured the following conversation in Summer’s bedroom:
SUMMER (crying hysterically): Fuck, what is this? It’s disgusting! Aunt Jenny! What’s happening to me?!
JENNIFER: Relax, Summer. Your water broke. Everything is fine. I’m going to call Ben to get the ambulance boat ready.
SUMMER: It’s so gross! It’s worse than in the movies.
JENNIFER: Summer, come on, now, breathe, everything that’s happening is totally normal. Your due date was more than two weeks ago. The gynecologist saw you the day before yesterday and said you had already begun dilating a bit. Come on, let’s go to the car, can you walk?
SUMMER: No, dammit, we’re not going to make it to the hospital! It’s falling out of me; I can feel it!
JENNIFER: The contractions are still spaced out. There’s plenty of time to get to the hospital.
SUMMER (breathing haltingly): Slap me. Slap me, Aunt Jenny; I’m hysterical; my nerves are taking over; give me one of those slaps of yours, please.
Pause. Slap.
SUMMER (sobbing more calmly): Thanks.
Four days later, Summer and Jennifer were back with the baby. During a pause at lunch, I closed the stand and went with Miriam and the girls to visit them, with a spy clock as a gift, naturally.
OLIVIA (giving Summer the clock): It’s a whale clock, and it’s from me and Miriam and Chloe and Ruby and Mama.
SUMMER (absently): Thanks.
Jennifer can barely conceal the strain on her face. It feels more like a funeral than a birth.
MIRIAM: (whispers to Jennifer): I think she’s starting to be aware of how unaware she was.
JENNIFER (doesn’t like the comment): She’s tired, that’s all. It was a very long labor.
The baby starts crying. She’s hungry. We leave.
When they’re alone:
JENNIFER: You need to feed the baby.
SUMMER: No, it’s going to mess up my boobs. I read it on the internet.
JENNIFER (with great patience): Summer, it’s healthier for her. It helps her build her own natural defenses.
SUMMER: Defenses against who? Against you? Then I’ll take some too.
JENNIFER (with zero patience): Feed her! Now!
The constant arguments were interspersed with brief truces when they had some visitor, and it was all smiles as they kept up appearances. Well, more or less, because Summer didn’t bother to fake too much.
Visit from Alex and Amanda, who is now visibly pregnant, which corroborates the theory that they moved the wedding up for that reason.
AMANDA: Oh, I’m so ready to have mine.
SUMMER: Take mine, that way you can have some practice.
Visit from Karen.
KAREN (drunk): She’s just precious . . . Has her father come to see her?
SUMMER: Yeah, he’s coming now; he’s right around the corner. Wait and I’ll introduce you to him.
Jennifer’s face rebukes her.
SUMMER: No, I’m just kidding. Her father’s dead.
Dead? Did she say dead? I hit Pause and rewound the video.
SUMMER: Her father’s dead.
Again.
SUMMER: Her father’s dead.
Again.
SUMMER: Dead.
I grabbed the calendar. Summer gave birth two weeks late, which meant she was supposed to give birth in February. So she could have gotten pregnant around Day 0 AD, coinciding with Chris’s last journey. Did I really consider it a possibility? Sure, why not, it could have happened. Why wouldn’t Chris sleep with an eighteen-year-old beauty with a slim, well-proportioned, voluptuous body; blond hair; and emerald eyes? The Chris I thought I knew would never have. Never. But now that person was very far away. Lost. Dissolved.
To round off the week of the fair, as if the birthing season was being officially inaugurated, Barbara called us to tell us that Snow White, the pony, was about to foal and we could come there if we liked.
I thought the delivery would take place in the stables, in a closed room, but no. It was in the middle of a field. Where the mama pony chooses, Barbara told me.
“Come on, Olivia, come over here. Don’t be afraid. We’re going to help Snow White,” Barbara said to Olivia. She took her hand and guided her very attentively through the process, making her feel she was the one who was doing all the work. “See how it’s already starting to come out? Grab here; grab the baby pony’s legs. Hard. Now pull; pull and don’t be afraid.”
Rarely have I seen Olivia so happy and excited as when she pulled the pony from its mother’s body with her own hands. Seeing its little head peep out still wrapped in the amniotic sac filled me with warmth as I remembered how Barbara helped me give birth to Ruby. Closing the circle.
“Is it a boy or a girl?” Olivia asked while she walked around the pony, counting its legs. Yes, four, not one was missing.
“Girl,” Barbara answered. “Yours is a girls’ family.”
“Girl! Great!”
When the foal was on its feet, Olivia celebrated by giving it a hug, not worried about dirtying herself with the viscous mix of fluid and blood. A good step toward getting rid of her cleanliness compulsion.
“Can I ride her now, Barbara? Can I?”
“No, not yet. You have to wait a little bit, but you can give her a name in the meantime.”
Olivia started jumping around nervously, as if she needed to pee, while she spouted off one name after another and rejected them all for various reasons. It’s too bad she can’t be Puchi Puchi because there already is a Puchi Puchi, but she’s like a Puchi Puchi too! It wasn’t at all difficult for her to name things. In fact, it was one of her pastimes/obsessions. But this time, she was more serious. It was her pony. It was going to be hers for all its life. She couldn’t just choose a name at random. It had to be something special, something unique, something . . .
Suddenly, Oli stopped, as if her battery had run out, without warning.
“Sunset,” she said. “Her name’s going to be Sunset.”
I don’t know if she was conscious that just then the sun was falling behind the mill, as though embracing it; that when she said it, it was almost six in the evening, the hour she chose to have on her clock forever; that the pony was the same coppery color—except for the mane and the legs, which were white—as the clouds framing the event. A moment I would never have experienced if her father hadn’t died and we hadn’t ended up on the island. A moment neither she nor I would ever forget. It made me feel light and satisfied as I rarely had been, as if everything fit together and made sense, and it made that new world we both needed to hold on to finally come together.