I hid it under my bed. Can U fix it?”And 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.
James 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.
But Ione said that kids need encouragement. Incoragement, she spelled it, but James knew what she meant. She said that Cooley needed it especially.
Cooley looked at James, then at the clipboard. She nearly smiled, but he saw her face freeze as she stopped herself. James forced his rehearsed words past the lump in his throat to his mouth. “You’ve been doing a good job, Cooley.”
She turned the smile loose then and as always, her smile brought a change to that darkly made-up face. It was like for a moment, the makeup disappeared and James could see Cooley herself. It struck him this time that her eyes were blue. He wondered if her hair was black under the purple/red dye, or if under the ragged mop was really a blonde who would do those blue eyes justice.
Then she stopped smiling and dark Cooley returned. She shoved the box closer to James, leaned on it with the notebook to write. Then she set the notebook in his lap and started to open the box.
“I brt U something,” James read. “It was my gramma’s. It stopped working and my Mom pitched it. I hid it under my bed. Can U fix it?”
James set the notebook aside and looked at Cooley. She cradled a clock in her arms. As soon as he saw that distinctive shape, he knew what it was and his heart misfired. “Cooley,” he said and held out his hands. “Let me see.”
She hesitated for a second and her lips formed a word James recognized. Careful. James shook his head. “Who would be more careful with it than me, Cooley?” Her eyes widened and she said something else as she handed the clock over. James glanced at the notebook. “Use that,” he said. “I can’t hear you, remember?”
She wrote quickly. “Then how cum U knew I said careful????”
James wondered at a girl Cooley’s age using that misspelling, then shrugged it off. “I saw the word on your lips, I guess.” James looked down at the clock, ran his hands over its body.
It was an acorn clock, an American clock made exclusively by the Forestville Manufacturing Company from 1847 to 1850. This one was startlingly beautiful, its acorn-shaped case glowing in a soft rosewood. The two wooden rods that flanked the case on either side were still firmly attached, though one lacked its acorn finial. Looking at the painted tablet embedded in the front of the clock, James nodded. All acorn clocks displayed a scene from Bristol, Connecticut. This one showed what looked like a soft blue pond, complete with a little sailboat. A pale green weeping willow in full leaf hung over the water, and in the distance, a white clapboard house slept in the trees. The tablet was in perfect condition, no nicks or scratches marred the scene. The clock’s face was off-white, with solemn black roman numerals and wrought iron hands. It looked sad to James and he lifted it to his ear, trying to find a tick. Then he remembered and sighed. Placing his hands on the front and back of the face, James waited for any reverberation. There was none. This clock’s heart was definitely stopped.
He glanced at Cooley. She scribbled away again in the notebook. Opening the door that hid the pendulum, James checked inside. The pendulum was there and it swung easily. When set in motion, James could feel the clock’s tick, but it was off beat and irregular, lasting only for a minute and half. He gently turned the clock over. As expected, there was another small door at the back of the face. James opened it and looked inside at the clock’s mechanism. He carefully poked some of the gears and cogs. Everything seemed to be there. It was just very, very old and very, very dirty. Apparently, life under Cooley’s bed was suffocating it.
Still, it was better than being tossed out in the garbage. James shuddered, then carefully set the clock on a table. Pushing the hands just a bit, he felt their stiffness and then winced at his own. This clock needed to be completely taken apart, cleaned and oiled, then put back together. Not an inexpensive job. Not something a high school kid could afford.
“Cooley,” James said. “Didn’t your grandmother ever have this clock cleaned? Didn’t your parents?”
She looked up at him and her lips twisted to the side. She didn’t need to write her answer in the notebook; James knew. And he should have known before asking. Parents that let their daughter look like Cooley would hardly spend the time or money to clean an old clock.
She handed James the notebook, then put one hand at the base of the clock as if to steady it. James read her message.
“When it was at my gramma’s, I looked at it 4-ever. Then she died and it came to my house. Only good thing about her dying. I love the picture. I pretend I’m on that boat. Or sometimes I’m under the tree. And I always go home 2 that house. :-P Stoopid, I know.”
James shook his head. “It’s not stupid, Cooley. And it’s a great clock. Do you know there’s really only a few of these around? It’s called an acorn clock.”
She frowned, then pointed at the tablet.
“No, there’s no acorns in the picture. But look at the shape, especially around the clock face. It looks like an acorn.”
She sat back, squinted, tilted her head and the line between her eyebrows grew deeper. Then she tilted her head the other way and James saw her eyes move around the periphery of the clock’s face. He wondered how many times she actually looked away from the tablet, let herself see the clock above, the time, the handsome numbers and hands. Then she smiled and nodded and traced her finger around the acorn shape.
“Right! That’s where it is! These clocks were all made at one factory, owned by the man who created this style. All the clocks show pictures of where he lived.”
She said something, but James couldn’t catch it. He handed her the notebook. “A real place?” she wrote.
“Yes, Bristol, Connecticut.”
She nodded, then wrote again. “I want 2 go there NOW!!! ”
“Well, anyway, I think I can fix it. Everything seems to be here, but it’s old and dirty and dried out. I have to give it an overhaul.”
For a second, her fingers tightened on the clock and it inched a little bit closer to her.
“It’s okay. That just means I take the parts out, clean everything, then put it back together again. It should run.”
She nodded, ran her finger down one of the wooden rods, then pushed the clock to James. On the notebook, she drew a dollar sign and a question mark.
James attempted to drum his fingers on his knee. It hurt, but he kept it up while he thought. Normally, these overhauls cost about two and a quarter. But James knew Cooley didn’t have that kind of money and he was sure her parents would die laughing before they paid that much to fix a clock they thought was in the garbage. Normally, if someone didn’t want to pay for a repair, James offered to buy the clock at a dirt-cheap price. But he didn’t think Cooley would sell. And in this case, the clock was loved. It didn’t deserve to be taken from its home. Even if its home was under a bed.
James considered doing the repair for free. He’d never worked on an acorn clock before and his stiff fingers itched as he thought about diving into those parts. Maybe working on this clock would be the healing his fingers needed. They would loosen up, smooth out, as they attempted to bring life to this clock once again.
But then James glanced at Cooley, sitting quietly by his knees. Diana’s shards pierced him. Why should Cooley get anything for free? She was getting away with breaking Diana’s clock. With making James break Diana’s clock, which meant she broke it too. Why should she get a fixed and valuable clock out of all this?
James looked at the clipboard, at the list of clocks waiting inside. He knew they wondered if they were going to be allowed to stutter, to gasp and then to die. Diana’s clock was broken, Cooley’s wasn’t breathing, and there were lots of other clocks whose lives were hanging on someone’s fingers, someone who had the ability to wind them.
“Cooley,” James said slowly. “It costs a lot of money to fix a clock like this. Over two-hundred dollars.” She turned red and made a grab for the clock, but he put his hand over hers, keeping the clock firmly on the table. “You’ve been working a lot around here, and I’m going to need more help for a while, I guess. Doc says I probably have to go to Chicago, to get my ears looked at. Someone has to keep the clocks running while I’m gone. And I’d like to reopen again too, at least on the weekends when you’re not in school.” James cringed at that, at people walking through the Home without his overseeing. But the longer the Home stayed closed, the longer James was without revenue, and since the Home was what tourists came to see, the rest of the town suffered too. “Maybe you could just work off the repair?”
Cooley’s shoulders relaxed and she sat back down on the step. And she nodded. Then she picked up the clipboard and made a motion toward the house.
“Yes, you’d better get started.” James stood and picked up the clock. “I’ll take this down to my workshop.” She rose too, grabbing the notebook.
Cooley turned toward the living room as James headed for the basement stairs. “Oh,” he said, remembering yesterday. He turned back. “Cooley?”
She looked over her shoulder.
“No more outbursts like yesterday’s, understand? You work here now. You need to behave yourself.”
Cooley opened the notebook and James braced himself as she wrote in huge, swirling movements. But then she turned the notebook to him. “U 2!” blared across the page. She thrust it at James twice, scowled, then turned and stamped away. James couldn’t hear the sound of her feet smacking the floor, but the vibrations ran up his legs.
James went downstairs. Setting the acorn clock on the worktable, he prepared to take it apart. Pulling a big fluffy towel out from a drawer, James nested the clock face down on it. The tablet and the glass over the clock face needed protecting, plus James always thought a clock should be as comfortable as possible while he worked on its insides. Finding a small screwdriver, James opened the little door again and set to undoing the screws that held the clock’s heart in place.
His fingers complained, they didn’t want to move, to make the little fine twisting motions that the clock needed. James swore, and felt himself swear, his body tensing under the words, sweat slipping from his temples. In the time it normally took to remove an entire mechanism, James got one screw out.
Then suddenly, Cooley was by his side. She touched James’ trembling hands, then held out the notebook. “Can I watch?” she wrote. “I want 2 know how.”
James started to shake his head, but then looked at her hands again. The fingers were supple and smooth, and despite the black nail polish, delicate. They were slimmer than James’ and didn’t seem to show much strength. But he thought again of the warmth, of the softness and the cushion of those palms. She would be gentle with the clocks, with all of them, but especially with her own.
“Go finish the winding, Cooley,” James said. “Those clocks that are still living and breathing have to come first. Make sure you get them all. Then come back here. I’m not going very fast anyway, you won’t miss much.”
She frowned, looked like she was going to argue, but then seemed to think better of it. She patted her clock again and James felt it relax under his hands. The screw he was working on suddenly loosened. Then Cooley headed back up the stairs.
James waited until he thought she was halfway up. “Double and triple check that list, Cooley,” he yelled. “No more mistakes.” Then he smiled and leaned back over the clock. He could imagine her expression. Her red face alone would keep the clocks warm.
The work on Cooley’s clock went well. Cooley did some of the work herself, but mostly, she just watched. As James carefully removed all the individual pieces from the mechanism, he explained what they were, then handed them over for her to look at, to study. From there, she slipped them into a shallow pan, filled with a cleansing fluid.
“Looks like mechanic’s soup,” she wrote in the notebook and James told her to concentrate and keep working.
Once, she slipped off her high stool and came around to James’ other side. She looked at the leftover pieces from Diana’s clock. When she picked them up, James flinched, and she quickly put them back down. Then she pointed at them and frowned.
James focused in hard on a stuck gear. “They’re from a clock that broke upstairs.”
She touched the number six, or nine, tracing its circle. She adjusted it, making it firmly a six. Then she reached across for the notebook, putting her arm between James and the mechanism. He smacked her wrist. “The 6 looks familiar,” she wrote.
James glanced at her. He didn’t think it was possible that she could start recognizing all the clocks already. “It shouldn’t,” he said. “It’s from one of the clocks you forgot to wind.”
She stepped away. Then she turned her back, looking out the windows into the back yard.
James examined a gear wheel, making sure that each of the teeth was straight. If not, it wouldn’t grab on to its sister cog and pull her through. “When you threw the notebook at me, I threw it across the room,” he said. “It hit the clock and broke it.” James quickly bit his tongue. Ione’s word Incoragement forced him to cut off his own words. He was about to tell Cooley it was her fault. But he felt again the weight of the notebook, just before it sailed from his hand. Moments after it sailed from hers. James decided to stay quiet. He knew Ione expected him to tell Cooley it wasn’t her fault. But it was. And James’ too. They shared in the death.
She looked at James and nodded, then turned away again. He saw in the lowering of her eyebrows and in the stooped set of her shoulders that it wasn’t a reassured nod. His shoulders were stooped too, with the weight of the words he didn’t say. He knew then that they thought alike. Minds worked that way sometimes. They both wanted to blame each other. And themselves.
“Cooley,” James said slowly. “Are you going to help me with this clock or what?”
She shrugged and returned to her stool. She wrote in the notebook for a second, then set it next to his elbow. “Wz it important?”
James thought of Diana, the way she held the clock cupped in both her palms. The way she wound it, with a touch just right, never pushing it past its limit. “All clocks are important,” he said.
Cooley nodded. “So what R U going 2 do 2 it?”
James really didn’t know. The pieces Ione threw in the trash were already saved and wrapped in their royal blue velvet and buried under the deep purple lilacs in the moon-glazed back yard. But James kept those remaining pieces, the hands, the number six, the mechanism, on his table. He knew they should be with the rest, the clock was dead. Keeping these parts out was like mounting the head of a deer after devouring the rest of the body. Those glass-eyed deer staring out from walls and over doors always unnerved James. It was like the head longed to be with the rest of its body. With its soul. As the clock’s soul surely was in the movement.
James glanced at Cooley. He wasn’t sure what to say, how to justify not throwing these pieces away with the rest of the clock which she probably figured was in the trash bin upstairs. So James just made some sort of noise. A grunt, he thought.
Cooley wrote again. “Can U put that in another clock?”
James paused, then blinked. For a second, he imagined he felt a beat from Diana’s clock’s heart, lying cold there on the table. He hadn’t even put it on a towel. Then he just shrugged. “One clock at a time, Cooley,” he said. But the thought was there now and when he quickly placed a soft towel under the movement and the number six and the golden hands, they all gleamed together. He covered them as if they were napping.
The Home was full of clocks with other clocks’ parts stuck in them. But he never transplanted an entire movement before. He never moved one soul to another body.
Cooley’s question kept pulling him back to the notebook.
That night, after the house was finally still, James couldn’t get to sleep. He told himself to turn off the lights, but he couldn’t. Whenever he was in the dark and his sight joined his closed-down hearing, his mother appeared. He knew it was impossible, he knew it couldn’t be her. But she was there and he was back in the cold and damp of the root cellar. He hadn’t worn a collar since he was seventeen, but whenever that newly silent, familiar darkness covered his face, he felt the leather and the studs again. Or sometimes the cold metal links of the choker. Tightening. Constricting. His throat closed up in the dark, as solidly as the silence blocking his ears.
James couldn’t sleep with the lights on and he couldn’t sleep because he was thinking about Chicago and what he would find out there, and Cooley winding the clocks without him close by, and what Cooley said about putting Diana’s clock’s mechanism into another body. And James couldn’t sleep because he kept thinking about how close Rockford was to Chicago and how he could maybe take a side trip to the Time Museum and see all those wondrous clocks again, especially the Gebhard World Clock. Maybe, in Chicago, they could fix his ears and then, in Rockford, he could hear those clocks go off. And if his ears weren’t fixed, he could watch and if no one was looking, maybe lay his face against a few of them. The caretakers wouldn’t mind. They understood clocks there.
And James thought about how the Time Museum was the last place he saw Diana. He couldn’t count that real last time, that night when she climbed into bed and turned her back. James realized now, from the way she turned away, the way she curled her arms around her pillow and her hair fell over her cheek and the way her shoulders moved as she sighed, she was already gone that night. Even though he kept talking. Talking, he thought, to her, but talking to nobody but himself.
James got out of bed, wrapped his robe around his shoulders and headed for the basement. He made sure to turn on the light before descending the stairs, flooding even the darkest corners with brightness. Then he sat at the workbench, held the number six in the palm of his hand, the hand that remembered striking a cat, a boy, his mother, and Diana. Four times total. But four times too many. James looked at Diana’s heart.
He thought of all the clocks in the Home. Whose insides could he take out, to tuck this one back to life in a different body? But that would be like killing one for another. What would he do with the heart he removed? And what about the clocks that didn’t work, that were only shells with their insides buried out in the graveyard? James always hoped he would find the right parts to fix them. But wouldn’t a clock rather tick with someone else’s heart than just sit there, waiting to be raised from the silent dead?
James looked at Diana’s heart, lying there. It seemed sad. But the thought of it ticking away in someone else’s body, in a body that wasn’t created for it, fully intended for it, seemed wrong. It wasn’t fitting. Not for her. She deserved only the best.
James dug around until he found a small box and he lined it with some lamb’s wool. Then he put the little number six and the hands and the mechanism inside. Carefully folding the box shut, he made sure there was a small gap to allow some light in. Then he placed Diana on the shelf.
Cooley’s clock parts were still soaking in their fluid. They were each going to need individual scrubbing with a new toothbrush, so since sleep seemed far away, James settled down for some work. He decided the acorn clock needed a blue toothbrush, blue for serenity and peace and a long life, as long as the ocean, which is what he wanted to give to this clock, trapped for too long under a teenager’s bed. But as he dug through his collection of cellophane-covered toothbrushes, he found his old drawing pad. James remembered placing it there as a lift for the toothbrushes, bringing them closer to the top of the drawer so he wouldn’t have to dig so deep. James pulled the pad out, then selected a blue toothbrush and set it next to the pan holding the clock parts.
Only one page of the drawing pad was used and that was to sketch the clock James wanted to create, so long ago. The statue clock, the mother looking at her watch while teaching her little boy how to tell time. James looked at it now, saw the way the mother bent smoothly at the waist, saw her soft skin as she smiled at the boy, and saw the firm concentration on the boy’s face as he leaned over his own watch. In the way they touched, in the way she smiled, in the way they both held their watches on slim delicate wrists, there was a connection. It was one James wanted to feel, one he wanted to show the world, but at the time he sketched it, he didn’t know enough about clocks to make this statue work.
Now, maybe he did. Maybe James could create a clock. Something just for Diana’s heart, so that when it ticked, it knew it was in a special place, where it should be, in a home for nobody else. The clock mechanism was still working, it was all in one piece, so he really only needed to create a new body. A new body for Diana’s heart.
For Diana.
But then James flipped to a new page. It wouldn’t be the statue clock. The mother/son body didn’t fit. Diana’s clock wasn’t about that. Diana wasn’t a mother. At least, not when she was with James, though they talked about it.
James sat and thought. Diana’s flower basket clock was ceramic and he had no idea how to make that. But he knew wood and maybe something could come of that. James never carved anything before, but if he could draw the picture, maybe he could find someone else to cut the wood. Neal, maybe, or Gene.
James tried drawing a few things, silly things, like a Valentine heart, a flower, held hands. Then he quickly gave up. His fingers were just too tired and stiff and he needed time to think and consider, to find a perfect form to hold Diana’s heart. It helped though to have this idea, to think that the clock’s life wasn’t completely gone. He could do a transplant.
James went upstairs and turned off the basement light, waiting until his eyes adjusted and he could see the soft glow of the nightlight by the bench. None of his clocks were ever in complete darkness. Then he went upstairs, bringing the drawing pad along. He left it on the bedside table, near his mother’s anniversary clock. Touching the pad, James felt the promise of its many blank pages, and then he decided to turn off the light. There was another nightlight in the bathroom and the rosy glow fell into the room, softening the shadows. James decided he would sleep.
And he did fall asleep, but it didn’t take long for his mother to find him. He was nine years old again, crouched in a cardboard box in the cellar, when she threw open the doors and came down. “Time to get up, James, naptime is over,” she said and James jumped out of the box and trotted over to her, lifting his chin so she could take off the tether and collar.
Then she discovered the mess in the corner. James hoped it was dark enough, that corner, the only one he could really reach on the tether. He thought the dark would hide his secret, but he’d forgotten her sense of smell and her cat’s eyes found the source easily.
“James! What did you do?”
James hung his head. “I’m sorry, Mom. I tried to wait, I did, but I really had to go and I called for you, but you didn’t hear—”
“You called for me? You know you’re supposed to be silent down here! You’re supposed to be napping!” Her hand came down, smacking James against his ear and he fell back onto his haunches.
“I know, but I had to go—”
“Come on. Bad boy.” She yanked the chain and the choke collar clenched around James’ neck. He tried to keep up, but she dragged him over to the corner. Then she caught on to his hair on the back of his head and thrust his face into the pile. “Bad boy!” she yelled. “Bad boy!” She pushed James a few more times, his nose sinking in until it scraped the coldness of the dirt beneath. Opening his mouth to cry, he tasted his own foul mistake. He gagged and choked. When she pulled James over to the belt, it was almost a relief because he knew what to do. Lowering his pants, he watched through his tears as she doubled the belt in her fist.
Eventually, James just didn’t feel it anymore. That was always the good part, when his entire body went numb.
When she was through, James started to pull up his pants, but before he had a chance, she grabbed the tether and began dragging him toward the stairs. He tripped behind her, finally losing his pants completely, and emerged half-naked into the bright sunlight. “Mom!” he said, trying not to yell; she hated yelling. “Mom, my pants!”
She swung the tether in a wide arc and James went flying. She stopped when she ran him into a tree. “This is where you do your business, here!” she cried. She came at James, put her hands on his bare skin, pushed him into a squat on the grass. “Here! Do it here!”
“But Mom—”
“Do it now!”
James didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know where to run. He was bound to her and there was nowhere else to go. There was only her and she seemed to be growing bigger by the second.
So James did the only thing he could do. He peed as hard as he could. He peed out of fear and fury and an overwhelming sense that if he didn’t, he’d be killed. She’d pull up on that tether and dangle him by the choke collar and all the air would rush out of his lungs.
Gasping, James woke up, sitting in his bed, his pajamas and sheets drenched, and he knew it was more than sweat. He knew, because this wasn’t the first time. It hadn’t been the first time in a long time. Waiting a moment, panting, James’ eyes desperately tried to adjust to the darkness, drinking in the sparse light from the bathroom. Then he reached over and switched on the bedside lamp.
After cleaning up, after a shower and fresh sheets and pajamas, James settled back down again. But he left the light on. And until he fell asleep again, until his eyes dropped of their own accord and he wasn’t even aware of it, James watched the walls, watched all the pendulums moving, back and forth, so slow and steady, and he breathed quietly along with them.