And so you wade through the days, the river’s unpredictable flow always slipping within you. You hear its roar on a trip to the grocery store where a little boy an aisle over spends an entire half hour shrieking in a temper tantrum with no end. No and No and No and repeat and repeat and repeat, his octaves soaring higher and higher and laced with tears and screams and inhuman grunts and the blood begins to pound in your parallel veins. You try to distract yourself. You hum with the Muzak and you move impossibly fast, not even stopping your cart as you throw things in, cans and boxes flying and rolling like noodles caught in a colander.
Then you round a corner and there he is. You stare at the boy and his horrific mouth, his squeezed-shut eyes and angry skin, and as you listen to the jumble of sounds purged from his throat, you realize how badly you want to hurt him. You realize how good it would feel to bring both your fists, curved and knuckle-hard, against each of this boy’s cheekbones, how tremendous it would feel to rip him out of the cart, thrust him over your head, and then power him straight down to the concrete floor. And again. And again. Until the sound stops and nothing is left but the peaceful and predictable rhythm of grocery store music.
Imagine.
But he’s a boy.
Your entire body shakes with your desire and the boy’s howls until you leave the store and burst into the cool air of a beautiful fall afternoon. You breathe deep and wonder. Is this the day it happens? Is this the day your mother rises from inside and forces you out of control? Every day scares you, every day you wonder, but there is something about the vividness of this day, this right-now desire, that makes you feel you’re in danger.
Your mother’s voice in your ear makes you want to do things that you really don’t want to do. Things that you know are wrong. Things that will allow her to swallow you, that will make her leap from your veins into the world again and you so need to keep her buried.
Throughout the day, the river inside you rises and by evening, you are fighting a rapids. The image of that boy spread flat on the concrete grows and you tell yourself, remind yourself over and over, he is an innocent, he is a child, that’s all he is. Yet you see your mother’s stick-straight arm, her shaking finger, as she points the way to the root cellar when she declares that you walk too loud, sigh too loud, think too loud. That boy in the grocery store was loud, louder than you were ever allowed to be. Louder than you ever dared to be. How is that fair? You feel the rage roll through your body, and you don’t know who it’s for anymore, the boy who shrieked, your mother who punished, or yourself for so wanting to grab a child and thrust him to the ground. Is that really what you wanted? Are you sure?
Your mother’s face, the day you punched her, once and only once, bobs in the rapids and is gone.
Grabbing your jacket, you go outside, walk quickly down the sidewalk, and hope the action, the movement and the cooling air, will calm you.
But you find yourself at a park. A playground, and since it’s growing dark, there are only a few people. You hear a laugh and you see another woman, another young boy, and she pushes him on a swing. Carefully, you move closer. You sit on a bench and watch.
The boy’s curls spark gold in the falling sunlight and his shrieks, while sharp, signal joy. The mother sings softly a nonsense song, with each forward and back motion, she sings, “Swing, swing, swing, swing,” the same up and down tune over and over again and it’s soothing and monotonous and wonderful.
Desire sweeps down your parallel veins like a log in the river and you are saturated with warmth. In your mind, you swing alongside and the mother touches you in the gentlest of pushes and sings for you too. You hear her voice and her melody and you find yourself wanting to cry. When the mother swoops the child out of the swing and carries him piggyback toward home, you imagine you feel the lift and the gasp, the settle of your pudgy legs around strong, yet soft shoulders. The boy waves at you as they pass by.
Their shadows recede and you lean forward and vomit onto the paved playground surface. You gag and you vomit until you are empty.
So which do you want then? The power, the control, the ability to make the world silent around you when you wish it, to make voices stop, behaviors stop, the smallest of lives stop, just because you say so? Or do you want to be blanketed with a love so deep, so soft and warm, you want only to drape it over your shoulders, wrap it around your knees, and bask?
What will stop your trembling?
As the cold of an Iowa autumn night settles on your skin, you wish for spring. For the warmth of spring, when the deep white snows melt and flow over the ground and join the river, bringing cool crystalline waters to the banks. Cool and clear and pure, winter’s ice blending into the heat of a new season.
James wished for spring. He wished for clarity. He imagined a life where the great river flowed, then slowed, then trickled, then stopped, sinking memory deep into the mud. He imagined stepping onto the riverbed, baked into firm and rosy brown clay in the warmth of spring sunshine, and standing there. Rage gone. Fear gone.
His mother. Gone.
Nothing left but to move into the day and spread his arms and breathe. Breathe it all in.
Imagine.
Cooley was with James for three weeks when her father showed up. James was sitting in the control room, reading the paper and half-watching the monitor when a single man walked up the front steps. That was unusual. Most men came with families. If anyone came alone, it was women. For reasons James was never able to figure out, clocks drew more women than men. But this man walked up the steps slowly, looking around and over his shoulder. When he came in the front hallway, James saw Cooley look up from where she stood in front of the dwarf longcase, giving her her once-a-month wind. And Cooley stopped, her hands on the chains, forcing the clock to hold its breath.
James wasn’t sure which one he was thinking to save, Cooley or the dwarf longcase, but he was out of the room and down the stairs as fast as he could go. By the time he charged into the hallway, Cooley’s father had her by the arm and was dragging her toward the door. Cooley didn’t seem to be putting up much of a fight. She dug her heels in, but her mouth was tightly clamped shut and so were her eyes. She wasn’t yelling, wasn’t calling for James.
James yanked Cooley’s arm out of her father’s grasp. Putting himself between them, he yelled, “Leave her alone! She’s staying here now!”
Cooley’s father, like his daughter, didn’t put up much of a fight. James’ ears were registering more and more sounds, but not enough yet to put a whole sentence together. He heard, “…she…wife… never…home…now!” The “now” was the strongest spoken word, his voice raised, and he looked at James then. Only a fast glance, but enough for James to see the drawn-together eyebrows, the cheeks flushed red. Cooley’s father balled his hands into fists, but then he quickly stuck them in his pockets.
“Look,” James said. “Your wife hurt Cooley. You hurt Cooley too.” Her father looked up again, his mouth open, and shook his head vigorously. His breath was strong enough to strip the veneer off the clocks. “Even if you only stood by, you hurt her. She’s safe here.” James pulled Cooley forward. “She wants to stay here. If you or your wife make any attempt to see her, to get her to come back, I will take her right down to Social Services and report what was done. I had a doctor look at her, he’d report too. You’d be just as guilty as your wife.”
Cooley’s father turned away.
He was almost out the door when James heard the word, “Dad,” come out of Cooley’s mouth. It might have been Daddy, James’ ears might have cut out, but he wasn’t sure. The blank look was gone from her face and she stepped forward. When she did, her father opened his arms and they embraced.
James didn’t know what to do. He wanted to smack her away, to tell her she was being stupid, to ask her why she hugged this man who allowed her to be hurt. But James felt a pang when he looked at them and he had to turn away. He knew it too well, the ability to love the one that didn’t hurt, the one that stood by and watched. Or even left. There was just no way to turn the heart off, even if the mind said that this person was just as evil as the other.
So James left them there. He told himself that Cooley wouldn’t leave, but the whole time he was in the kitchen, warming coffee, gathering some of Ione’s latest baked cookies, his hands shook. When he finally turned to sit at the table, Cooley was there, leaning in the doorway. She said something and James caught the word, “gone.” He nodded.
She sat down and opened the notebook. “It’s OK,” she wrote. “My dad isn’t bad. But I’m not going back. I told him.”
James could see the sadness in her eyes, in the set of her shoulders. He looked away.
She tapped him on the shoulder. “Come…show…done,” he heard her say. She yanked at his arm, so James scooped up the cookies and coffee and followed her. They looked through the house as they went; they were alone. No tourists that afternoon.
Cooley sat in front of her computer. She pointed at the screen. James saw a graph in bright colors, showing the different months of the year. Cooley grabbed a piece of computer paper and wrote, “I’m keeping track of how many visitors we get. I checked thru the guestbook, but not every1 signs. This will help U 2 C what our busiest months R, and which 1s need help. C how the numbers jump once we reached May?” She pointed again at the screen.
Cooley was smart. James always kept track of this himself, by totaling the number in the guestbook at the end of each month. But he had to flip back and forth through the book to compare numbers. Now it was here in front of him, the whole year. “How did you do that?” he asked.
She shrugged. “Show U L8R,” she wrote. Then she pointed to the screen again. Another window popped up, this time showing the amount of money taken in each month. She clicked again and it broke it down to each week, then to each day. James thought of the piles of ledgers he kept in the office. Cooley smiled. “I’ll show U how 2 do it,” she wrote. “But if U want, I can maintain it 4 U.”
James nodded, then handed her a cookie. She laughed. They both went downstairs to finish their snack.
James wasn’t sure how he felt about her tackling the business this way. The Home for Wayward Clocks was his and his alone, only he knew the numbers, knew how to juggle them to make things balance, to make his life work. After their snack, James told Cooley to do her homework and then he went through the house, visiting, touching the clocks, making sure that all was well. Some clocks he could hear, others still withheld their voices, making him lean against the wall to feel their vibration. James told himself the numbers didn’t matter. The clocks mattered. They were still running, still alive. Cooley was just adding her own touches, helping to make things run smoother. But James was still the only one who knew how to repair a clock’s broken heart, how to warm its hands and then set it on its path again. Even with Cooley learning from him, she would never know as much as he did. Her heart belonged to one clock. James’ went out to many.
The clocks knew this. He could feel it, see it in their faces.
Later that night, after supper, James was downstairs, working on Diana’s new body. It was tricky business, getting this movement from a ceramic clock to go inside a wooden one. It was glued before, its smooth side plastered and thick so it would stick to the inside curves and bumps of the flowerbasket, but James didn’t want to glue it to the wood. That wasn’t proper, it wasn’t the way it was done. So he carefully attached little brackets to the movement, making sure they fit the right measurements for the existing screw holes in the miniature mantel clock. He didn’t want to create new holes in the clock, causing more stress to the wood. It was painstaking work and a couple of times, James knocked things loose in the movement and had to stop to fix it. He was sweating like a surgeon when Cooley appeared at his elbow. She stood so close, he couldn’t move his arms right, so he finally set the clock down and turned to her. “What is it?” he asked.
She opened the notebook. “I want 2 fix it,” she wrote.
James shook his head. “Not this clock, Cooley,” he said. “I told you, this one’s special.”
James saw her sigh and he heard, “ALL…special.”
She was right. But this was Diana. “Look, just not this clock, okay, Cooley? You’re not ready for this yet.”
She turned and walked away, going to stare out the door into the back yard. He tried to ignore her, but her neck was strung tight and from time to time, she gave a shudder. Finally, James put the clock down again. “Wait here,” he said.
Going through the house, James reached the room just past the living room. It was small, a sitting room of sorts, but he used it simply for displaying clocks. Shelves were the only furniture. In the furthest corner, on the lowest shelf, sat a beat-up odd-shaped mantel clock.
James picked it up. Instead of having the smooth camel’s hump, it had a square frame encasing the face. Hidden behind the decorative scroll on the base was a line of electric plugs, like a power strip. It was a handmade job from a high school’s shop class. James bought it from an old woman at a rummage sale a couple towns over. She said her son made it, but he moved away and didn’t want it anymore. The clock was ugly, but James wondered how her son could give up someone he made with his own hands. At the rummage sale, James held the clock under a maple tree and stroked its rough corners. “Did it ever run?” he asked.
She nodded. “Oh, yes. It ran very well.” She sat heavily on her front step. “He just stopped taking care of it.” She shook her head. “You know kids.”
James didn’t, but he handed over two bucks and brought it home. James tried fixing it, but the boy did things to it that he couldn’t quite imagine. What were the electric sockets for? There were four knobs placed around the clock face, at each of the quarter hours. They turned, but James had no idea why. Nothing happened when he turned them. There were misplaced parts throughout the whole movement. James just wasn’t sure what the boy intended the clock to do. Not wanting to disturb the boy’s original vision, not because it was good, but because it was now the clock’s soul, James left it alone.
But it would be a good clock for Cooley to tinker with. She was young too. Maybe she could figure out the way that boy’s mind worked and restore the clock to what it once was. James patted the clock, then tucked it under his arm for the trip downstairs.
Cooley sat hunched at the workbench, her hand twirling a tiny screwdriver at a frantic speed. Diana’s movement, which was two screws away from being firmly attached to the miniature mantel when James went upstairs, now lay in pieces on the bench. James’ eyes tunnel-visioned, swooping down onto the movement, the parts, the clock on its side. Anger seared his skin, he felt the heat of the river flooding his body. “What did you do?” he yelled, loud enough that he heard every word.
“Tried…help…just…” James heard faintly. But he didn’t look at Cooley. He couldn’t see anything but Diana, in pieces again on the table. Shoving Cooley aside, he was conscious of the weight of her as her body flew away. But it was the noise that made him look down.
He’d knocked over the stool that she was sitting on. She was sprawled on the floor, her head against the concrete, looking up at James with an open mouth. The screwdriver was still clenched in her hand.
Something in James recoiled at her wide-mouthed expression. Something in him knew the sound she was making, remembered it, could feel it as it echoed in his own lungs and throat, even if he didn’t hear it. But there was Diana. There was the clock in pieces that he would have to once again put back together. Another delay before Diana’s heart beat once again.
James bent down and twisted the screwdriver from Cooley’s hand. “Get out!” he yelled. “Get out of here!” Again, each word came through, James felt them falling against his eardrums. His ears rang with the force.
James didn’t know how long he worked on the movement before his back began to ache. He didn’t know when Cooley left. But when he turned to pick up the stool so he could sit while he worked, she was gone. James glanced at the skeleton clock on the workbench and noted that it was ten o’clock. Cooley was probably in her room, getting ready for bed. James thought for a moment about going up to her, but Diana’s clock was insistent so he went back to work.
It was after midnight when James was done. The movement was in one piece again. He only needed to attach it to the clock. But his eyes were so tired and his fingers so shaky, he didn’t trust himself to do it right. Diana’s heart would have to do without a body until the next day.
James turned out the lights and locked the doors as he went upstairs. Cooley’s room was dark, but he looked inside. The first thing he noticed was the acorn clock missing from its place on the mantel. And then he saw the empty bed.
It didn’t take long to figure out where she must have gone. There was only one other place she ever called home. James got in his car and drove across town.
Cooley’s house was dark. He thought about checking the doors, seeing if they were locked, if he could get inside and climb quietly to her room. But then her parents could call the cops and he didn’t want to have that happen. Cautiously, he walked to the back of the house.
The moonlight shone down on a ragtag yard. What was once a garden was now a clumped mass of weeds, though James could see a few daffodils and tulips poking up. A rotting wooden sandbox, filled with more mud than sand, squatted in a corner. There was a rusty swingset. And Cooley sat in the passenger swing, the acorn clock on the seat across from her. James couldn’t see her face. He wondered if she was bruised, then he saw again her expression as she lay on the basement floor. Her face was turned toward him; it was the back of her head that hit. But there could be a lump. A bruise well-hidden beneath the purple hair.
James wondered what to say. His mother never said anything. And he knew now that there was never anything she could say to make it right. But James didn’t know it then. He remembered wanting her to say something whenever she opened the root cellar doors, whenever she released him from his chain. Something that sounded like a mother. A mother who knew she’d done wrong and was sorry. But James’ mother was always silent.
James didn’t know how to sound like a father. He wasn’t a father. But he had to say something.
When James picked up the acorn clock to sit down, Cooley lurched forward and snatched it from him. Even James could hear the squeak of the swing and he glanced toward the house, to see if any lights came on. “Shhh,” he said. Then he sat. “I wasn’t going to take the clock, Cooley. I came here to get you.”
She wouldn’t look at him.
“Look, I’m sorry. I lost my temper, I know I did. I shouldn’t have shoved you, I didn’t mean to. But I told you that clock was special and I told you to leave it alone. You didn’t listen.”
Her arms tightened on the acorn clock. James worried that if she squeezed it too tightly, he’d have to repair it again. Reaching out, he touched her hands, hoping she would let go. But she only clutched tighter.
“Cooley,” he said. “Cooley, from living here…don’t you ever find yourself wanting to hurt someone? Like it’s there, under your skin, and it would feel so good to let it out through your fists?”
Cooley’s eyes flickered up.
James thought again of the moment he shoved her. Of the anger moving so swiftly through his bloodstream, it washed him away down the river. James thought of that contact, the moment of pushing against her, feeling her body react, feeling her fly through the air, and for just that second, the incredible rightness of the way it felt. That feeling of punishing somebody for doing something wrong. The same way it felt when he hit the cat that scratched him. The boy that taunted him. Diana, once. His mother. Once.
The way his mother probably felt when she hit him.
“The difference is,” James said slowly, then stopped to try and find the words. “The difference is that I should know better. And you too, you’ll learn to know better too. Because we know how it feels. We know, don’t we.”
She kept looking at James, but he didn’t know what else to say. He didn’t want to give her the details, load her down with another painful life. It wasn’t time for that. She was supposed to be healing. “Listen,” James said. “I do know. Just differently.”
He thought they’d have to sit there until morning before she nodded, but she finally did. She loosened her grip on the clock too, just a little, just enough to yank on her sleeves, making sure they were firmly down around her wrists.
“I guess I have to get used to you, Cooley,” James said. “I’m not really used to living with someone. It’s going to take me some time, okay? That clock…well, it’s special, like I said. It belonged to the last person I lived with.”
So he told her about Diana. It wasn’t any easier to find those words. In a way, it helped that he could only hear a few of them. He had to feel the words, rather than hear them. And by the end, Cooley looked fully at him, her grandmother’s clock sitting beside her.
James stood up carefully, making sure the swing didn’t rock too much. “I’ve put clocks first for a long time,” he said. “It’s a tough habit to break. But I think you should come first now, Cooley.”
Her eyes glistened in the moonlight, but then she looked away. She shrugged.
“Let’s go home,” he said and started to walk away. It felt like a miracle when she fell in beside him.
At home, James waited for a while, giving her time to scrub up, to brush her teeth and change into her pajamas. While he waited, he went downstairs to retrieve the shop clock. It was on the floor, underneath a chair. James must have dropped it in the middle of his anger. He picked the shop clock up, relieved that it seemed to still be all together. It wasn’t working in the first place, of course, but he felt like he must have hurt it somehow, just dropping it like the trash. He wiped it off with a damp cloth before bringing it upstairs to Cooley.
She was in bed, but sitting up. The acorn clock was back in its place. James set the shop clock on her lap.
“This is for you. See what you can do with it.”
She held it carefully, a frown puckering the skin above her nose. James knew what she was thinking. The same thing he thought when he first saw it. What the hell is it? “I bought it at a rummage sale,” he said. “I’ve never been able to make it work. The lady told me her son made it in shop class at school. You’re probably the same age he was when he made it. So I thought you might be able to figure it out.”
She smiled.
“I’ll set up some kind of table in the workshop for you tomorrow. You can use all my tools and parts, as long as you always put things away and keep things clean.”
Cooley got up and set the shop clock next to the acorn. She stood there a minute, the firelight casting a glow on her face. She turned to James and said something so softly, he couldn’t catch any of the words. He told her he wasn’t able to hear it.
She crossed over to her desk and wrote on some computer paper. “I want 2 stay here 4-ever,” she said. “I want 2 take care of the clocks. All of them, but these 2 are mine.”
James swallowed and held the paper as she went back to stand in front of her clocks. It was what James wanted too, so many years ago, when he began bringing the clocks into the Home, filling it, the clocks’ souls singing and chiming in every room, keeping him company, keeping him from being alone. And now he had someone who could take over for him, when he died, someone who loved the clocks as much as he did. Or almost as much; James didn’t think anyone could love them as much as he did.
He didn’t think anyone else should.
James blinked and looked at Cooley standing in front of her fireplace. Her lips were moving, but he knew she wasn’t talking to him. She was talking to the clocks. It was like he wasn’t even in the room anymore. He started to leave, but then stopped and studied her again. He tried to picture her ten years from now, twenty, fifty years. Standing here, in this place, talking with these two clocks. After a day of talking to all the others, scattered around the house. Clocks James brought home. Clocks she brought home. He saw her spending just a little extra time with his mother’s anniversary clock. Because he was no longer there.
She lived there alone. There was no one else in the house. Just the way James had for all those years before Diana and then after she left. He remembered again the warmth of Diana in his bed, the sight of her, still sleepy, as they had coffee in the morning, the way she would hand him keys as he wound different clocks.
All those years of a cold bed. And only a newspaper to share breakfast with. Cooley wasn’t alone now, James was there, but in a few years, that could all change.
“No,” he said and Cooley turned sharply, her hands wrapping around her own shoulders. Protectively. Keeping the world and James at bay. “Cooley,” he said, and he heard his own voice break. “Sit down.”
She went to the bed and pulled up her blankets. James sat at the foot. “You can live here forever,” he said and he watched as she smiled, the bright smile that he knew held Amy Sue Dander, the real child, blonde hair a halo, blue eyes shining. The child she should have been all along. “But you’ve got to do other things too.”
The smile dimmed and Cooley came back. “What things?” she said.
“I want you to go to college, maybe study art, if that’s what you really want to do. Or study something else,” James motioned toward her computer, “like business or computers. Whatever it is you want to do. When that’s done, then you can come back here to live.” James nodded. “Forever, if you want. But bring others too.” He thought of Diana, laughing up at him as she bent over a box of clocks from a flea market. “Bring a husband. Have children.”
There was a blush, a quiet pinking of her cheeks, a lowering of her eyelashes.
But then the blush went deeper, turning into a deep scarlet flush and James heard every word that Cooley shouted. “I don’t want to get married! I don’t want any man! I just want to be here with the clocks!”
James sat back. Cooley turned away, curled up by her pillow, hid her face. James thought all girls liked boys. He thought they all wanted to get married and settle down to a life with a husband and children. He knew Diana did. Before she left, they talked about getting married several times. James thought that was where they were headed, until she disappeared.
They were going to have four children. Two boys and two girls. James remembered thinking about that, about holding an infant in his arms, other children playing at his feet. Diana talked about having to raise all the clocks on high, to keep the children from playing with the small parts and pieces. She talked about keeping the children safe, but all James could think about was keeping his clocks safe. He wondered if the children could stay in just one room, a playroom, with their beds and all their things, leaving the rest of the house in peace. Picturing this infant and children, he tried to summon a sense of warmth, of love and fulfillment, but none came. James suggested the children’s room to Diana. She turned away and they never talked about it again.
Thinking of that now, with the silent Cooley on her bed, James wondered which room would have been the children’s room. And then he thought of the root cellar, the only place besides his bedroom and the bathroom where he was allowed in his own home. His mother’s home. But this wasn’t like that; the children’s room would have had windows and toys and noise and fun. It wouldn’t be dark all the time and silent, except for the tick of a Mickey Mouse watch and a Big Ben alarm clock and his own voice, humming quietly to keep himself company. The jingle of a collar.
But as he thought of the children’s room, sequestered away in a back corner of the house, he shuddered.
James’ mother didn’t seem to want a husband and children either. He looked at Cooley, lying perfectly still, and he wondered if his mother ever shouted those words the way Cooley did, ever lay stiffly across her childhood bed like this. James wondered if anybody listened. “Cooley?” he said. He reached out and touched her shoulder.
And it was like she erupted. She swung at James then, talking in a shriek that broke through any remaining swelling in his ears. It was like she had the flu and she was throwing up all over him, retching out the words, and he was frozen, unable to move, unable to do anything but sit there and let her bury him.
She shook and shuddered as she told James about a boy she met on the internet. A boy who wrote her love poetry and who told her he loved her. And he began telling her what he wanted to do to her if they ever met and she listened to him, listened hard. She closed her eyes when she said this, coiled her fingers into fists, and then she stopped shaking and she rose up on her knees, her body as straight and stiff as a stopped pendulum. The rest of her words were aimed at the ceiling, her neck tense and locked, forcing her face up, yet still everything she said fell down on James. He raised his hands as if to ward off her words, but they wouldn’t stop coming. So he closed his eyes too and let her story fall.
The boy came to meet her and he turned out to be a man. A large man who took her to a shed in the park and did all those things he said he would do. Even though she was only fourteen years old. Even though she said no. Even though she screamed it until she had no voice.
And like then, she fell silent and the silence tumbled over James like a blanket. A wool blanket, heavy and scratchy and not comfortable at all.
He held still for a moment, then opened his eyes. Cooley stared back at him. She was shaking again and she sank back down onto her heels. She wrapped her arms around herself and James thought about hugging her, about securing her in an embrace other than her own, but he didn’t know if it was the right thing to do. So he let his hands hold each other, gripping the fingers until his knuckles popped.
“Cooley,” James said and heard his voice break. He cleared his throat. “Cooley, all men aren’t like that. They aren’t. And…it just never should have happened.” James shook his head and when he felt the tears build behind his eyes, he tried to get angry and will them away. But they wouldn’t go. “It never should have happened. Not to you.” James tried closing his eyes again, so she wouldn’t see him cry, but he felt his chin tremble and knew his own body was betraying him. “Not to you, Cooley. Not to anybody.”
James felt her hands on his and he looked at her. She was still shaking, a little, and she was crying too. In a soft voice, he heard her say, “You’re not like that.”
James could hear her and with that, it was all over. The sounds were fully back. He tilted his head and said, “Say that again.”
She blinked. “You’re not like that,” she said.
“Whisper it.”
She began to smile. She leaned forward, but he pulled away, wanting to keep the distance, wanting to see if he could still hear, without her being close. “You’re not like that,” she whispered. Then she said, “You’re hearing me, aren’t you?”
James nodded and began to shake some himself. “I hear you,” he said. He reached out, carefully, not quite knowing what to do, and touched her purple hair. “I’m not like that,” he said, trying the words out for himself, and he felt their truth. He tried to picture his mother, sitting at the foot of his bed like this, talking softly to him and touching his hair. He failed. Yet he sat there, in a way his mother never did. “I’m not like that,” he said again. “You’re right. But I’m not the only one.”
She looked away then.
“Just…give it a shot, Cooley,” James said. “Go to college.”
She shrugged. “I have to pass high school first.”
He stood up. “There’s no question about that.” She smirked. “Cooley, there is no question,” he said, trying to sound firm. “You’re living here now, under my roof. You will graduate. You will study and get good grades.” She shrugged again, but smiled this time.
James stood there a moment longer, even though he felt it was time to go, time to leave Cooley to her own thoughts and return to his own. But he couldn’t get the picture of Cooley with that man out of his mind. Cooley with that man and then…what? “Cooley,” he said, “did you ever tell anyone this before? Did you tell your mom?” James knew the answer to that before he even got the words out. Cooley lowered her head and that confirmed it. “The police?”
“No. No one.”
“So he’s still out there.” James looked at her computer, feeling watched suddenly, as if that man was on the other side of the gray monitor, his hands braced on the edges, preparing to climb out.
“I haven’t seen him since,” she said. She got off the bed and moved over to the computer. A touch of her finger and the screen bloomed to life. “I’ve blocked all his emails, his IMs. I changed my email address.” She shrugged. “There’s nothing else I can do.” She glanced at James. “I’m always afraid he might come back. But he wouldn’t know to look for me here.”
James nodded. He thought how his home was suddenly not just a safe haven for broken clocks. Then Cooley faced her computer. “James, what about Diana? How long since you’ve seen her?”
James stopped and leaned against the doorframe, looking out into the hallway. “Forty years or so, I guess.”
Cooley looked at him like that was a lifetime. “What was her whole name? Do you remember?”
As if it was possible to forget. “McFarren,” James said. “Diana Joyce McFarren.”
“Sit down,” she said. Her fingers flew over the keyboard and he wondered how she ever learned to find her way through this internet thing. Ebay alone was overwhelming, but Cooley jumped from website to website like a frog on lilypads. He watched Diana’s name get entered, over and over again. Different women came up, but their ages were always wrong.
But then Cooley hesitated and James read the newly opened window and he knew it was right. Cooley moved the mouse, preparing to delete the screen, but he put his hand over hers. He needed to read the whole thing. He needed to be sure.
It was an obituary from a Wisconsin newspaper. The Waukesha County Freeman. It was a back issue, from five years ago.
NELSON, DIANA J.
(Nee McFarren) Found peace on April 30, 2000. Age 63. Preceded in death by her husband, Frank and her beloved grandson, Paul. Dearly loved mother of Grace Thomas (Nicholas). Adored grandmother of Mary Elizabeth Thomas and Jeffrey John Thomas. A longtime Waukesha resident, Diana moved here from Dubuque, Iowa in 1960 upon her marriage to Frank McFarren. The family wishes to thank the staffs of Waukesha Memorial Hospital and Faithful Hospice for their loving care in Diana’s final days. Visitation Friday at Anderson & Miller Funeral Home from 4:00—8:00 p.m. Funeral service at First Baptist Church on Saturday at 10:00 a.m. Burial following at Prairie Home Cemetery. In lieu of flowers, memorials to the American Cancer Society are appreciated.
James sat back and didn’t stop Cooley from deleting the screen. Diana was dead. Presumably from cancer, given the wishes for donations. He pictured her, her young body next to his, always laughing, always moving. Diana was a whirlwind. Even in sleep, she tossed. Her constant movement left him without the blankets on most nights. Yet the cancer would surely have wasted her away, slowed her down.
James was glad he didn’t see it. But he wished he’d been there in between.
“I’m sorry, James,” Cooley said. She began shutting the computer down. James watched her work, each click bringing the computer closer to that darkened screen, the static hush as the light died from the monitor.
“It’s okay,” James said slowly. “She’s been gone a long time anyway.” He patted Cooley on the back and told her to get to bed. Then he went off to his own room.
He was exhausted. But after an hour of staring at the ceiling, he knew he wouldn’t sleep. Quietly, so he wouldn’t wake Cooley, James headed downstairs to the workshop. He had to finish Diana’s clock. It was even more important now to make sure that some part of her was still alive.
James knew from the obituary that Diana had a daughter and grandchildren. Her blood flowed through them in their own internal rivers, and possibly her laugh and her quick movements and long dark hair too. But that Diana wasn’t the one James knew. That Diana grew into a wife who loved another man, someone named Frank, and she became a mother who loved a little girl named Grace. She had grandchildren. James pictured her for a moment, gray-haired, lightly wrinkled, still beautiful as she stood between her husband and daughter and watched the grandchildren tumbling through fall leaves on a Wisconsin lawn. He wondered if she owned clocks. The Diana James knew picked out that ugly flower basket clock at a dusty beside-the-road flea market. She lay nude beside him and he still thought of her every night, leaving room for her in his bed. The soul of that quick and bright Diana was in the movement of the ceramic clock and he had to get it resurrected again.
James stopped at the head of the basement stairs, surprised to find the light on. He knew he turned it off, he always turned it off. Carefully, he crept down the stairs and peered over the banister.
Cooley looked up from the bench. She was working on the shop class clock, its parts already spread out in a systematic mess. A mess James recognized; she learned it from him.
He didn’t say anything, but settled down to work next to her.
It only took an hour or so and then James closed the little door on the back of the miniature mantel clock. Resting his hand on its smooth upward curve, he felt the steady ticking. The beat of Diana’s heart.
James held his hand there for a minute and closed his eyes. He remembered the moments after lovemaking, the only time he could get Diana to hold still. She folded herself against him, her back to his chest, and he threw his arm over her and cupped her breast. He felt the life thrumming in her then and he felt her now. Warm. And alive. And right here beside him.
Tears threatened again, so James cleared his throat and looked over at Cooley. She sat quietly, her chin propped in her hand, as she studied all the parts in front of her. James felt sorry for the shop class clock, sitting there, gutted. “Rest the clock on some lamb’s wool,” he said. “Give it a safe place to be while you work on its insides.”
Cooley rolled her eyes, but she got out a lamb’s wool cloth and carefully settled the clock in it. James cradled the miniature mantel in his hand and started for the stairs. “I’m going to bed,” he said. “Get there soon yourself.”
She didn’t say anything, but James knew she nodded. For the first time, he left the light on in the workroom when he went upstairs to bed. It felt odd, knowing someone was down there working, someone else besides him.
But it felt good too.
James set Diana’s clock on his bedside table, in front of his mother’s anniversary clock. After he turned out the light, he reached out and cupped the clock, feeling again the warmth of Diana’s breast, the rhythm of her heart. It didn’t take long to fall asleep.