And so you leave the root cellar behind, yet the root cellar never leaves you. Your collars and leashes stay in that damp dirt, the cage ajar, the belt coiled on its hook on the wall. You walk away one day and you don’t look back, yet you still feel the sting of leather on your neck, you still see the dark of closed doors even as you lift your face to the sun.
As you look around, you embrace clocks, but you imagine so much more as you listen to the steady ticking, revel in their song. The seduction of time holds you tightly, keeps you seeking in a hidden sort of way, yet it takes years, years of wondering, years of glimpses and glances and words never said, before you actually touch the softness of a woman. The softness and the curves and the smooth as silk skin and it is like nothing you ever imagined. The rhythm you make together, your hearts alternately racing and slowing down, your skin abrading and applauding, is uneven, yet the most beautiful thing you’ve ever heard. You wonder at its imbalance and at its perfection.
But every time she reaches out to you, you have to shut your eyes. You can’t watch her fingers coming, even though they are poised and tentative, not curled. You can’t believe that this doesn’t hurt, you can’t believe that this feels so good, you can’t believe the softness she returns. This softness for you. Just for you.
Imagine.
Yet you feel for its edges. You imagine all along that it will end. Even as you rejoice in the softness and the imbalance and the perfection, all with your eyes closed.
Imagine never believing in love. Imagine never having faith in softness and passion and curves and the silky skin of a woman, even as your body craves it all and cries out for more.
Fear bred from the rage forged in your parallel river keeps you from breathing deeply in your lover’s embrace. Instead, your breath catches and gasps and you bite the inside of your own mouth. Because you know, deep inside yourself, hidden beneath your skin, that secret river solidifies and forms an animal. And not just the sad little puppy left leashed in a root cellar.
You were born from an animal. You know that now, and you knew it then, though you could never have said it. And that animal’s cruel blood flowed through you even before you breached her body and saw the light of day, connected you to your mother in a way that not even death can sever. You imagine, you know, that her blood coils through you still, just under your surface.
You are your mother’s child.
Imagine.
James knew about hidden hardness. He’d seen sweetness turn to wretched steel. He knew that beauty, resting in a pool of sunshine, could raise itself up, tall, and taller, and then bear itself down into an ugliness that stole breath away. His breath, the breath of a child that didn’t come any easier with age.
James imagined that it would be impossible to keep the animal hidden forever. As he tended his clocks, he always listened to the ticking of his own heart. Wondering when he was going to explode. Wondering when his mother would awaken, encased as she was within his own skin.
He imagined that no softness could stop her.
Cooley 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.
The 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.
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.