So you live in silence then, silence while the rest of the world moves in full voice around you. Figures of perpetual motion swirl through a flat environment where nothing reverberates, nothing resounds, nothing echoes. Even your clocks speak and sing and share their heartbeats with the world, but you can’t hear a thing.
Yet how is this different, really? You’ve always lived in a world of silence. Imagine never being able to tell anyone where you came from, how you came to be. Imagine never telling anyone who you are, because to do so would be to let loose with a string of secrets, horrible secrets, that most people would never choose to believe. Secrets that only happen in nightmares or on the front pages of newspapers. Not to someone who lives across the street.
How to even work such a thing into a conversation? “Where do I come from? Well, a root cellar mostly.” Or, “Gosh, that’s a lovely collar your poodle has. I used to wear one just like it.”
To this day, you still wear high collars and long sleeves, even in hot Iowa summers. There are a few remaining marks on your skin, probably not something anyone would notice, but you need to make sure they never do. So even your body, you hide.
Your whole life is about silence and secrets and deeply hidden places.
And you saw what happened when you risked it all. When you showed your skin to a woman, let her touch it, let her love it, and you learned of the wonderful warmth of sleeping naked with another nude body pressed against yours. Skin to skin, thighs to thighs, arms wrapped and clasped around each other. She saw your body, made love to it. Made love to you.
And you even slipped and showed her the side of yourself that most scares you. When the rage comes, when it hurls out of you in a flare of shouted words and raised fists. She saw that, saw it only once, but she felt what it was like under your anger. Even though the anger wasn’t ever for her. And she said it was all right. That night, she curled against you and she wept, but she said it was all right and her skin was warm. You detected no change, no stiffness.
You never said the past out loud though. Nothing beyond a few general answers, brushed-off explanations. How could you tell her about your mother? How could you tell her about tethers and kennels and plastic food dishes and water tins? There was never anyone you could tell. Not the teachers or the other children or the doctors or grocery store clerks, bank tellers, or people who smiled at you on the street. Not even the friendly flea market folks. Not with anyone you’ve ever had contact with. Not with any of the people you’ve so wanted to care for. The past is silent. You are silent.
Yet somehow she still knew. She must have known. Through the faded marks on your skin, the raised voice, the single sharp blow, she must have figured it out, witnessed the unimaginable, and left. Face to face with the truth, the unspeakable, she left you all alone in the middle of the night. Left you in dark silence. Not a word between you. Not even goodbye.
Imagine.
James knew silence well. He lived side by side with silence, took it to bed with him at night, carried it on his tongue during the day, like a hard candy that was sour and never ever went away. Throughout his life, he made sure that people only knew him in the present, just in the moment, and nothing more. They didn’t know his past, they wouldn’t know his future. He was rather like a clock himself…ticking forward, moving ahead in time, but really only there in the everyday world when someone looked at him, nodded in his direction, then moved on.
Silence and loneliness are not easy company.
It was late when James checked into the Clock Tower Resort in Rockford. He told the desk clerk he would be staying a couple days, then he unloaded and set up the clocks and went to bed. He was tempted to sneak down into the belly of the resort and look in the closed doors of the Time Museum, but he knew it would be dark and he wouldn’t be able to see a thing. Still, James wanted the Gebhard Clock to know he was there. And in some odd and impossible way, he hoped he would run into Diana.
The only time James was here, Diana was with him. When she disappeared, she left behind a silk nightgown, purchased at this resort’s gift shop. It was covered with clocks. James unwrapped her that weekend like she was a present just for him. A special gift. Which she was. When she left, James slept with the nightgown for a couple months. He hoped she would come back. When she didn’t, he threw the nightgown away. James tried to throw her away, but he just couldn’t. He thought of her almost every day, especially when he wound her clock.
So James fell into the hotel bed and a heavy sleep, secure in the knowledge that a few floors below, clocks moved in subtle precision through the night. The Gebhard Clock, James knew, was silent. It was only allowed to run a few times during the day, the curators said to keep its maintenance to a minimum. James wished he owned the clock. He would give it a room of its own. It would take up the entire space. And James would let it run all the time, the way clocks were meant to, and each day, he would tend to it to make sure it was all right. He didn’t understand why the museum people thought shutting the clock down would keep it moving. Its joints would stiffen after so much stillness, like James’ knees and elbows when he got up in the morning.
James vowed to talk to them about the clock’s maintenance the next day. He pictured them suddenly giving the clock to him, sending it to the Home for purely humane reasons, and then that big old clock would hunker down in its private room and run and run and run. James fell asleep, thinking about its new and multi-faceted voice blended in among all the others.
Perhaps it was the clock’s proximity that made James dream of it that night. He saw all of its faces and globes, its dials and instruments. He went from one to the other and told himself the time over and over again. He saw where the earth was on its axis, where the stars were in the night sky, saw the position of six different planets around the sun. James saw a child grow old and then die, hidden within the folds of a hooded figure’s cloak. And the twelve disciples bowed to Jesus, all except Judas, who looked directly at James. When the raven opened his mouth to crow, James didn’t hear a thing. The raven became angry and crowed louder, shutting his eyes and straining so hard, he fell off his perch. He broke into pieces on the floor and Jesus wept and while the bugler blew taps, James wondered where he would ever find a cuckoo bird big enough to fit in that clock.
James woke in a tangle of strange sheets and a too-thin blanket. Sitting up, he grabbed the miniature mantel clock and held it while he looked around the room at all the others. Their pendulums moved steadily and James slowed his breathing and relaxed. It was four in the morning, but he knew he wouldn’t get any more sleep. He had to see the Gebhard Astronomical and World Clock.
Pulling on his robe and slippers, James pocketed the room key. In the hallway, he carefully held the door as it closed, so its echo wouldn’t disturb any of the other guests. Then he started making his way toward the museum.
James hadn’t been there in over forty years, but he still remembered the twisted path. Taking the elevator to the first floor, James went down the hallway past the swimming pool. It was empty, but the water still shivered as if someone was there. Turning a corner, James went past the darkened restaurant, then down a ramp, then a circular flight of stairs. At the base, he stopped.
There was no Time Museum. Just a big room set up like a banquet hall, filled with white-clothed tables and deep blue chairs.
James must have made a wrong turn. He reasoned that a big place like this one probably had dozens of identical passageways. Quickly, he retraced his steps back to the elevator. Setting out again, he walked past the pool. There was only one pool in the resort, so up until there, the path had to be right. Then, instead of going by the restaurant, James went the opposite way down the hall.
Another ramp, another circular staircase. And the same banquet hall. James could see the first staircase on the opposite side. But this time, a man stood on the bottom step, looking at James. “Shit,” James said, he hoped softly, and watched as the man approached.
He said something and James shook his head. “I’m sorry,” James said, “but I can’t hear. I had an accident a while ago and it took my hearing. It’s probably coming back.” He felt like the more he said this, the more likely it was.
The man stood for a moment and James read the name badge pinned crookedly to his left lapel. Philip. Philip laced James’ arm through his and led him away. They went up the second spiral staircase and eventually came out at the front desk. Philip rummaged around and produced hotel stationary and a white pen with “The Clock Tower Resort” printed on it in big black letters. All of the O’s looked like clock faces. “Were you looking for something?” Philip wrote. “Can I help you?”
“Yes,” James said. “I know it’s late, but I wanted to check out the hours of the Time Museum. I wanted to be there at opening in the morning.”
Philip shook his head and James’ heart hesitated. He watched while Philip wrote another note.
“The museum hasn’t been here for years. The owner auctioned off a lot of the clocks and the rest were sent for exhibit at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry.” He handed a brochure over with the note.
“Years?” James’ hand shook as he took the brochure. He couldn’t imagine it. This was the museum’s home. This was where the clocks lived. James remembered the employees, bustling around, winding and checking to make sure everything was fine. Where did they go? What parts of the world were the clocks in now?
James fumbled with the brochure, trying to open it. “The Gebhard Clock?” he asked. “The Gebhard Astronomical and World Clock?”
Out of his peripheral vision, James saw Philip’s fingers flicker and wave. He was talking again, the idiot. Then one finger flipped a page of the brochure and pointed. There was a picture of the Gebhard Clock. It was surrounded by neon and chrome.
It was in Chicago. James just came from Chicago and he didn’t even know it was there. He didn’t hear it. It didn’t reach out to him.
But how could it? James was deaf.
He thought of all the clocks in the Home, even the ones in his hotel room, still touching him although he couldn’t hear. Briefly, James touched his chest, feeling for his heart.
But that Gebhard Clock, it stayed away. All these years, James thought of it, pictured it, dreamed that he had a connection with it. Against his cheek, James could still feel the pulse of its pendulum when he leaned his face against its immense wooden body. The pulse and the warmth, the steady rhythm of the huge heart of that clock, allowed to beat only so long each day.
But it never even let James know that it moved. It didn’t even let James know when he was within a few miles of it. Imagine.
James thought again of his clocks at home and suddenly, he wondered if they even knew he was gone. If they knew he left one day, left in the sun of mid-morning so they could see him, so they could see he didn’t disappear into a fog. Because of them, James would never let the fog take him.
Choking out a thank you, James shoved the brochure into his robe pocket and went back to his room. He locked the door and stumbled to the bed. It was after five now and still dark. Pulling the blanket up to his chin, James shivered, and he held the miniature mantel against his chest. He watched the skeleton clock, seeing each gear move, each cog slip into place, the pendulum moving at an even back-and-forth.
James remembered that weekend with Diana and with the Gebhard Clock. Diana watched as he begged the employee and then slid with his permission up against the clock’s solid wall. James’ hand touched the wood and it was warm, as warm as living human skin. When he pressed his cheek against it and felt that pulse, something resonated and he closed his eyes and fell into a darkness that wasn’t cold and silent, but full of sounds. The beat of a heart. The rushing of blood. The whisper of skin against skin, the touch separate from James but still there, going over his head, his shoulders, his hips. His legs threatened to buckle, but James stood there and listened and felt that warmth and knew he was where he always wanted to be.
James felt something from that clock. He felt something from every clock, but that particular one, in its immense size, brought the feeling all around him. It loved James and he could hear it with every beat of its heart.
That’s what James had thought. But now, he didn’t seem to matter.
James clutched the miniature mantel and even though it didn’t have a pendulum, it didn’t have a heart, he still felt its warmth spread to him. All the clocks in the room seemed to close in on James, a soft protective circle. They were there, it wasn’t his imagination, and he felt grateful.
James needed to get home to his clocks. To all of them. He needed their embrace.
But there was more.
When he thought of his clocks now, James saw Cooley’s thin back, her bright purple hair shimmering with her body’s effort to wind a clock. He saw her long fingers, wrapped around a key or a chain, and he saw those same fingers guided by his as she helped him insert a piece into her acorn clock. He saw Ione, her lavender feather duster in a back pocket, busily polishing clocks in the living room, the den, the dining room and bedrooms. He felt her arms around him again, pressing James to her chest as he shook in fear and frustration. He saw Gene at the diner, cooking his dinner, and Molly delivering it, complete with two slices of pie, one cherry, one apple. Neal looking in the back door. Doc taking his pulse, patting his shoulder.
And everywhere, everywhere in his mind was Diana. James felt her lips again, her arms, and the most secret parts of her body. He saw her smile, her frown, felt her come up behind him and wrap her arms around his shoulders as she whispered outrageous things in his ear. Outrageous things that made his heart beat in a new rhythm. And as much as James felt her, the texture of her absence was ten times greater. The more he felt her, remembered her, the more he realized she was gone. He let her go.
At the resort that last weekend, James felt her behind him as he stepped up to the Gebhard Clock and he felt his connection with Diana break as he closed his eyes and allowed himself to fall into that dark place. His heart changed pace again and this time, it echoed that clock, shuddered, then beat evenly within its broad shoulders, and Diana, their rhythm severed, spun away.
James wished he asked her to stand next to him that day. He wanted her cheek near his as they both listened to the great clock’s heart. He wished he had that clock nightgown to hold, along with this little clock in his arms. He wished her body was still in that nightgown, her breast under his hand. The nightgown would be old, she would be old, but it just wouldn’t matter.
James had to get home. He had to put Diana’s heart into this little clock and feel its beat again. And he had to see them all, touch them all, even if he couldn’t hear them.
All of them. Not just the clocks. James needed the flesh and blood warmth of everyone. They couldn’t spin away.
James left the next morning, even though he had no sleep. Philip was off duty so he explained to the daytime folks at the front desk that since the Time Museum was no longer there, he had no reason to stay in Rockford. They didn’t make James pay for an extra day. He loaded the car and headed toward home.
He thought he could make it the whole way, but around noon, his eyes kept threatening to close. Finally, he pulled over at a fast food joint, had lunch, then curled up in the back seat of his car. Exhaustion crept over James like a blanket, a full thick blanket, not the too-thin one at the resort, and his bones sunk into the seat and he fell asleep.
When James woke up, it was still light, but it took him a few minutes to get oriented. Eventually, he sat up, let himself out and walked slowly into the restaurant to use the restroom. He bought a cup of coffee and a hot apple pie for the road. It was only four o’clock…it would be six by the time he got home.
Despite the sleep and the coffee, James still struggled. There was nothing more boring than driving through Iowa. But partway through, he began to notice something odd. A whang sound, something electrical, that blipped in and out of his consciousness like a mosquito. James kept questioning if he heard anything or if it was just the messed-up jumble in his head. It kept popping in and out at uneven intervals and finally, James pulled over at a wayside to listen.
Turning his head in every direction, James tried to hone in on the sound. He needed to know if it was there at all. Maybe it was a phantom sound, like the phantom pains people have when they lose a limb. But then James began to capture it. It was low and he kept bending to hear it, and it was to his right, so he tilted and tilted, until he was face level with the car’s stereo system. And that’s when he saw it: the bright green numbers of a radio station. The car stereo was on.
Quickly, James pressed his left ear against it. There was something, but it was soft and it seemed to stay just out of his reach. Then he twisted himself into a pretzel and put his right ear against the radio. And the sound burst through. Electric guitar, James thought, and a drum. It zinged around inside his head and he tried to clear it, to make the sound louder and constant, but it faded and shot back like a ping-pong ball. James listened for a while, closing his eyes and hearing the sound as the color blue, dancing back and forth across his eyelids.
It was all coming back. There was no probably about it.
Then he took off again. If James’ hearing was coming back, he wanted to hear his clocks. He had to hurry now, but he could still be there before the six-o’clock chime.
When James drove in, only a few lit windows welcomed him home. But when he stepped out of the car, Cooley threw open the front door. She ran down the path and before James knew it, she had her arms wrapped around his waist. He hesitated a moment, then hugged her back. She was so thin, he could feel every bone.
It felt odd holding her. James touched the backs of ribs and shoulder blades, sticking out sharp from her skin to his, but he felt something else too. Warmth. She sent out a heat that was foreign to James. She wasn’t like Diana or his mother, or even Ione. The heat wasn’t the roll of passion or the sear of hatred or even the snugged-up feel of comfort. It was something else. Something new and young and vibrant. There was a throbbing in her too, a steady bump that resounded from her chest to James and there was an echo where her wrists pressed into his back. Her heartbeat.
James held her just a bit longer, to feel that young life which he never felt within his own skin, thrumming through his own veins, and then he stepped back. She smiled at James and looked quickly away.
Ione and Neal came around the back, Ione pulling on her coat, apparently getting ready to leave. Then they caught sight of James and hurried over to the car. All their mouths were moving, but nothing got through. James wished they sounded like electric guitars.
“Wait!” he said and held up his hand. “I still can’t hear, although I’m going to. Let’s get inside and get the notebook out. Everyone grab a box.”
With all those hands, it didn’t take long to unload the car. Cooley was the first to find the notebook and she started scribbling in it. Then she handed it to James.
“Y R U home????? U said U’d be gone 4 a couple days!”
James explained about the Time Museum while Ione grabbed the notebook and then Cooley grabbed it from her. Eventually, it returned to James.
“So you’re hearing is going too be ok?”
“U shud have checked B4 U left! I cud have looked on the internet!”
“My hearing is going to be fine,” James said. “The doctor said just what Doc has been saying here. He said sounds would come back to me gradually.” James started opening boxes. “On the way home, I began to hear bits and pieces. Mostly with my right ear.”
They pressed toward him, all talking at once, and suddenly, while James was happy to see them, he also wanted to be alone. Even in his silence, this was still too much commotion for him to handle. He just wanted to tinker with the clocks, eat some supper, and go to bed.
“Hey,” he said and patted everyone’s shoulder. He left his hand on Cooley, drawing her a little bit closer. “If it’s all right with you, I just want to unpack and go to bed. I’m really tired. Would it be okay if we all just talked tomorrow?”
Cooley and Neal nodded and Ione wrote in the notebook. “Of course you should rest,” she said. “Their’s leftover stew in the crockpot.” Then Neal and Ione headed for the front door.
“Cooley,” James asked, “are all the clocks wound? Do I need to know anything?”
She shook her head and gave the A-okay sign with her fingers. Then she hugged James again and for a moment, he relished it. Her head fit neatly under his chin and he felt her relax against him. James patted her back. Then she smiled and left.
Moving through his house, James began to find new homes for the clocks from Abandoned Here. He made notes on the clipboard so that he could add them to the daily schedule. He wound each one and felt the cases for the steady vibration as they resumed their work.
After a bit, James only had the miniature mantel and the skeleton clock left. He knew the mantel was going down in the workshop for now, it had to be fixed, but what about the skeleton? He set it in several places, including next to his mother’s anniversary clock on his bedside table, but nothing seemed to work. The skeleton didn’t feel settled. Eventually, James brought both clocks down to the workshop and placed them on his bench.
Cooley’s acorn clock rested on its towel, almost completely put back together. James would finish that first, then start on Diana’s clock. He pulled out her remains, the movement and the gold six and the hands, and brought them to the mantel. It would work, he could see it. The movement could be mounted inside the mantel. Some soldering and connecting, and both clocks would live again. He thought about that, Diana’s movement in a foreign body, the mantel clock accepting a foreign heart and both of them working together. He touched the mantel’s case and it sent its warmth through his fingers. The desire to run was there. It would work. And somehow, James would incorporate the number six and the hands. Even if they just nestled inside the clock’s case.
But what about the skeleton? James sat down at his workbench and watched it, its artful precision open for all to view. It was like seeing a person made of transparent skin, exposing all the bloodwork and muscles and organs within. The clock was constant motion, the teeth of various wheels fitting into each other, the cogs moving ever forward, pushing the pendulum, the pendulum pushing the hands. This clock was an open diagram on how time passed.
James blinked. Then he looked around.
Other than clocks in various states of repair, this room had no timepiece. James always used his watch down here. Yet in front of him, there was now a working model of what he strived for: a cleanly performing clock. No hesitation, no skips or jumps ahead. Just time moving solidly before his eyes.
What better place for this clock than in the workshop?
Carefully, James constructed a worthy pedestal. Setting an old but sturdy wooden box upside down on the lefthand corner of the workbench, James covered it with some black crushed velvet so that no sign of the knotted wood peeked out. Digging around in another drawer, he found a lace doily, probably picked up at some estate sale or another, and draped it over the velvet. Then the skeleton clock settled down on its perch. It was an odd slice of elegance on an old workbench, but it worked. The skeleton clock would help him to resurrect more and more of its extended family, starting with the acorn clock and the miniature mantel.
Satisfied, James went upstairs to unpack. When he put the suitcase away on the top shelf of his bedroom closet, he truly felt like he was at home.
Before shutting off the light in final preparation for sleep, James reached inside the bedside table for his drawing pad. He needed to say goodbye to the clock he knew he would never build. Flipping to the correct page, James looked at the picture of a young boy learning to tell time at his mother’s knee. James held it for a bit and his hands began to shake.
He didn’t learn how to tell time at his mother’s knee. It’s hard to tell time in the underground darkness of a root cellar. It was James’ third grade teacher who discovered he didn’t know how to tell time when she incorporated time-telling into math word problems. James stared at his math sheet that day, reading the words that told him to give the number of minutes passing between 2:10 and 2:35, 5:30 and 7:10 and he had no idea what the answers could be. He heard people refer to the time, but he didn’t know how that connected to the numbers on a face of a clock. Going around the room, calling on students, Mrs. Bernicky finally came to James. “James,” she said, “read problem number twelve.”
Carefully, James said, “Grace leaves for the store at 10:20. She gets back at 11:10. How long was Grace gone?”
The class waited for the answer. The silence pushed against his chest and he had difficulty breathing. He tried to figure it out. If he did it like a regular math problem, 1110 minus 1020, he got ninety. “Ninety minutes?” James whispered.
The look on her face and the suppressed snickers of his classmates told James how wrong he was. Mrs. Bernicky made him stay after school that day, which terrified James because he knew he’d miss the bus. If he wasn’t off that bus and down in the cellar in his cage when his mother woke up from her nap, James would be in huge trouble.
But the stuff Mrs. Bernicky showed James fascinated him. She brought out a big red molded plastic clock with bright blue hands. The numbers were blue caps that lifted off the clock, showing the number of minutes underneath, so under the one was a five, under the two was a ten, and so on. She explained the difference between the hour and minute hands. Although the plastic clock didn’t have one, she told James about the sweeping second hand too. “Over the next few days,” she said, “I’ll show you when to say how many minutes it is before the hour, or when it is a quarter past or half past or quarter to.” That sounded wonderful to James and he loved the way the clock hands neatly sliced the day into manageable pieces. If he could just get through his day, five minutes at a time, he would make it.
“We’ll do this again tomorrow, James, okay?” she said and James followed her gaze to the big flat-faced clock at the back of the classroom. Its solid ticking accompanied his thoughts throughout the day and now he knew what to call those sounds…seconds. He could count them and follow them into minutes and minutes into hours. James looked at the clock and figured out the time. 3:25.
“Mrs. Bernicky, what time does school get out?” he asked.
“Two-thirty-five,” she said. “How many minutes ago was that, James?”
She smiled, but James’ heart froze. He knew now that fifty minutes had passed. He would have to walk home from school and it would take forever to get there. He tried to answer, but he couldn’t. Instead, his eyes filled up with tears. James hated crying, but it seemed to sometimes come over him as a force he couldn’t control.
“What’s wrong?” She looked at the clock again. “James, do you take the bus or are you a walker?”
“I take the bus,” he whispered.
“Oh, and I’ve made you miss it!” She quickly got up and threw some things into a big leather bag with a buckle that she brought with her every day. “Come on, I’ll take you home. Can you show me the way?”
James nodded and tried to swallow his tears. All he could hope for was that his mother was still napping and he could slip into the root cellar and she’d never know that he was late. He was buttoning up his jacket when Mrs. Bernicky handed him the toy clock. “You take this with you,” she said. “You can practice with it tonight.”
It felt like the most precious gift in the world, even though James knew he couldn’t keep it. All the way home, he balanced that plastic clock on his knees, moving its arms, pulling out the numbers and seeing the time passing underneath. When they got within sight of his house, James slid the toy under his jacket. He knew he had to hide it from his mother.
As Mrs. Bernicky pulled up to the front door, James’ heart fell beneath the car’s tires. His mother was standing on the front step.
After getting out of the car, James stood behind Mrs. Bernicky. “Hi, Mom,” he said because he knew Mrs. Bernicky expected him to say something. His mother didn’t say a word.
“I’m sorry James is late, I hope we didn’t worry you,” Mrs. Bernicky said. “He was having a little trouble in math and I kept him after to work with him on it. I didn’t realize he was a bus student.”
James peeked around his teacher’s coat. His mother wasn’t looking at him, she was staring at the ground.
“Did you know James couldn’t tell time?”
His mother shook her head without raising it. “I guess I never thought about it,” she mumbled.
“Well, I’d like to work with him to help him catch up, if that’s okay. Could I keep him after school for the rest of the week? I think that’s all it will take.” Mrs. Bernicky hesitated, then stepped a little closer. James shadowed her. “He’s really very bright, you know.”
James saw his mother’s mouth twist. Mrs. Bernicky stepped backwards and bumped into James and he knew she saw it too.
“You can have him,” his mother said.
Mrs. Bernicky nodded and then turned. “See you tomorrow, James,” she said. She bent down so she was face to face with him and she smiled. He smelled mint and something flowery. “Remember to practice.”
Then she left and James was out of her shadow, standing in the sun, but he felt like all the warmth was sucked out of the air. He stood there, listening to the car get further and further away. Then he looked at his mother.
She met James’ eyes. And she pointed toward the root cellar. So he went. But even in the dark, that little plastic clock kept him company. He could feel its hands and he moved them forward. Like a blind boy, he lifted the caps, then felt the numbers underneath. Five minutes. Ten. Fifteen. Time was always moving forward to where he could escape.
James still had that toy clock, he never could bring himself to throw it out, even when he grew too old for toys. Setting the drawing pad aside, James got out of bed and went to the closet. He kept the clock in there, in a box on the floor, away and out of view. For a while, he even hung it on the wall of his bedroom, but when Diana started staying over, he took it down. It was too embarrassing to have a toy on the wall, plus he didn’t want her to ask any questions. She always did anyway and James didn’t need something to start a conversation about his past, about his childhood. Diana wanted children. James could never tell her. He could never let her know about his mother, about the parts of his mother that flowed through his own body, his own blood.
Now James unearthed the clock and brought it back to bed. Mrs. Bernicky never asked him to give it back. He felt like he stole that clock, and that bothered him because he liked Mrs. Bernicky so much. But that clock kept him such good company, James couldn’t return it.
In bed now, he moved its hands, watched time going by. The little number caps still lifted out easily and he looked at the minutes preserved below. His mother gave him a watch for Christmas that year, a Mickey Mouse watch, which surprised and delighted James. She never gave him anything, but that year, when he woke up in the morning, it was there in a little box on his dresser. No ribbon or paper, but it was there. James looked at it for a while, wondering if it somehow came from his father, and for a few seconds, as James set the hands and pushed in the stem that set the watch forward, he let himself believe it. James knew better than to say anything, so he just carefully strapped the watch onto his wrist and wore it to breakfast. Mickey told time by moving his arms and pointing at the numbers and James laughed at all the uncomfortable positions he got into. His mother never said a word.
With that watch, James discovered another wonderful way that time could help him. When he went out to the root cellar that Christmas day, it was cold and the coldness made it seem even darker. As he curled up in his cage, trying to stay warm under his jacket and a thin baby blanket, James heard the sound of a new ticking, harmonizing with the Big Ben alarm clock at his side. The lighter than air tick came from his watch and it filled up his ear and a part of his heart and suddenly, he wasn’t so alone. There was more sound.
James wished he could hear that sound now. He still had that watch too, tucked away in one of the dresser drawers. It still ran. But a grown man doesn’t wear a Mickey Mouse watch, even if it did come from his mother, even such a mother as she was.
Now, James set aside the toy clock and looked again at his sketch. He noticed some odd shadings and markings and he rubbed at them and then realized they came from a drawing on the next page.
But James’ drawing was the only one in the book.
Slowly, he turned the page. It was a penciled picture, beautiful, with lots of fine detail. A little girl stood before James, wearing ripped-knee jeans and a t-shirt with a star on the front. Her face was downcast and she studied a little watch on her left wrist, held up to her chin. Next to her stood a grandfather clock. The picture was so clear, James could see that the time on the clock matched the watch.
He ran his fingers carefully down the page, not wanting to smudge it, but wanting to figure out who drew it. As if his fingers could detect who held the pencil.
At the bottom left, on the sole of the little girl’s untied sneaker, James found it. Three initials. ASD. He went through each of the people who’d been in his house while he was gone, and none of their names matched up. But when James ran through them again, thinking of each person, he heard Ione’s voice. She turned to James and said, “You shouldn’t have yelled at Amy Sue,” and “Amy Sue needs encouragement.” Amy Sue Dander.
Cooley.