The Home for Wayward Clocks (19 page)

And a reminder that it was all right. We were all being taken care of. It was the right thing.

I thought of my coveted three lives and looked at the clock and realized I already lived two and was now starting on the third. There was the life before Leatrice and the life with Leatrice. Now, it was time for the life despite Leatrice.

I touched the cat’s tail, set it to swinging, but the empty eye socket spooked me so much, I had to stop it. I thought about planning my day.

My day.

First, I would call Mary, make sure Leatrice was okay, and arrange my visit for two weeks from now. Then maybe I’d call Leonard. “Hello back,” I would say.

Or maybe I would call Christopher’s house and talk to Jimmy, hear his laughter sing over the phone line. Or I could call Annie and invite her for the weekend, a special mother and daughter time. We could snuggle together in my room and she could whisper secrets about John.

Or maybe I would take a walk around the duck pond at the park, Leatrice’s favorite place, then come back here and take a nap in the sunshine room. Just because I could.

It was all up to me.

A
nd so you grow. Outwardly. Your arms and legs shoot out at embarrassing lengths and hang from your pants and your sleeves. Pink skin, almost white, kept hidden from the sun except for brief glimpses during school recesses, should be a beacon of trouble to those around you. But you tug your sleeves down as best you can, sit with your legs crossed at the ankles, pull your socks up as high as they will go. From time to time, your mother blinks and awakes from whatever world she prowls in and goes out to the local thrift stores to buy you new clothes. Overnight, you go from jeans and shirts that are much too small to much too big, hanging in puddles over your shoes, rolling up in thick bracelets on your wrists. And the clothes are always old.

A few kids along the way try to befriend you. The girl in fourth grade, the one with the big teeth and bigger glasses, who asks you day after day to play ball on the playground as you sit huddled in a shadow of the building. You tell her no with a shake of your head, no and no and no, and she keeps saying why and you keep saying no without saying a word. After two weeks, she becomes angry and throws the ball at you repeatedly, bouncing it off your nose, your forehead, your chin. You nestle your head on your knees and then she bounces the ball off your skull, each time harder, each time accompanied by a louder shriek. Kids gather around and take turns. And then you go inside and sit down at your math lesson, trying to see with eyes blurred with tears of anger or sadness, you can’t tell which. After that, you sit alone.

Until the sixth grade and an albino boy sits next to you at lunch. Every day. He doesn’t say a word. He offers you cookies. On the fifth day, you accept one, homemade chocolate chip, and it is like gold in your mouth. Melting gold. He takes you behind the building at recess and shares a cigarette and you have to run to the bathroom and throw up. Soon after, you are down the root cellar for three days and a weekend, and when you return to school, the albino boy is gone. You never know where. You never know how to ask.

A girl in high school smiles at you. You turn away and don’t look back, but you hold that smile behind your closed eyes for days and nights. She begins keeping you company in the dark of the root cellar, her smile an imagined guidepost, and the ticking of the alarm clock becomes her heartbeat. You hold the clock against your chest so you can feel the rhythm as you think of what it would be like to touch her. What it would be like to be touched.

Imagine.

Because that’s all James could do. He felt that the walls of the root cellar followed him wherever he went, keeping him from reaching out, keeping others from reaching in. But keeping him safe too. Because if no one touched, then no one hurt.

J
ames opened his eyes and saw a face. It hovered above him and he saw long hair and brown eyes and he said, “Mama?” He felt his lips move together, touching gently twice for each M, but he heard no sound. The face shook side to side and James closed his eyes. Don’t be so stupid, he said to himself. Mama wouldn’t be here. And her eyes were blue.

When he opened his eyes again, the face wasn’t there. James moved his arms and legs, shifted his body, and he felt the comfort of his sheets and blanket. Then he looked up and the face was there again.

Of course it wasn’t Mama. It was too young. James saw the smile, the freckles on the nose, the upswept eyebrows and he gasped. “Diana?” He hadn’t spoken that name in years, yet it rolled off his tongue as if he said it every day. But he couldn’t hear it, couldn’t hear the three subtle syllables of the name that couldn’t be said aloud without making him ache. “Diana?”

She shook her head again and then James’ vision cleared. He saw the purple-red hair, the nose ring. It was Cooley.

Cooley was in his bedroom.

He thrashed, trying to untuck the blankets, get out of bed, get her the hell out of his house. He was electrified with the need to tally, make sure everyone was there, that she hadn’t touched or taken anything. But then there were arms, more arms than Cooley’s, pushing him back into the bed. He looked around, saw Ione holding down one of his arms, Neal the other. Ione pursed her lips and shook her head, like she was shushing James, and Neal patted his shoulder.

“What’s going on!” James yelled and he could feel the force of his words leaving his throat, flying into the room. But he couldn’t hear them. It was like he hadn’t said a thing.

Cooley reappeared, holding a notebook and a pen. She held them up in the air, displaying them, and then she began to write. Eventually, she handed James the notebook.

“James,” the note said. “U had an accident. The clock went off while U were up there. U were 2 close 2 the sound and UR ears R hurt. U can’t hear right now.”

James remembered. He remembered the chime blending into just one enormous sound and he remembered the dead baby birds and all that pressure, pressure on his ears, pushing him into the scaffolding. But not hear?

He struggled again. He managed to get past Ione and Neal and staggered around, staring at the clocks, seeing the pendulums sway. But there was nothing, he couldn’t hear a single tick. He looked at the clocks’ hands and they were all on the quarter hour, but there were no chimes. Touching a clock, an old cathedral clock, he felt the vibration. The clock was talking, and James couldn’t hear it.

No ticking. No ticking. A searing pain choked his chest and he clasped both hands over his heart, trying to find the rhythm. It was there, steady, but fast. James looked at the clock, watched the pendulum, tried to even out his beat.

Someone touched his arm and James turned and saw Ione. She patted him and smiled, then slowly formed her lips. Oh-kay, he was able to make out. Everything will be okay. James shook his head and looked back at the clock, then he let himself be led to bed.

James looked down as he was tucked in. He was in pajamas. Grabbing the blanket, he pulled it up to his neck. Neal smiled and reached for the notebook.

“It’s OK,” his note read. “Dr. Owen was here. It was he and I that got you undressed and into bed.”

James sighed and tried to relax. He started to write his own note, but then stopped. His voice worked, he reasoned, only his ears didn’t. “Is this permanent?” he asked. “Do my sounds make sense? I can’t hear myself speak!”

Neal nodded. Then he wrote, “We don’t know. Dr. said to wait a few days and if it’s not better, there’s a specialist in Des Moines. You’re loud.”

Cooley came back into the room, carrying Felix the Cat. “Be careful!” James shouted and he knew he must have made sense, because her fingers tightened.

She brought the clock to the bedside and James took it quickly, balancing it gently in the nest of his lap. He worked so hard to fix that clock; he didn’t need her undoing everything. He checked it over as she scribbled in the notebook. Don’t worry, James told the clock, I won’t let any more girls touch you. He checked the pendulum, the glued spots. The clock was fine.

When James looked up, they all stared at him, Cooley over the top of the notebook. James realized he must have spoken aloud. He looked away.

Cooley handed over her note. “I found it on UR workbench,” she said. “I can hang it back up 4 U. Same room as the dwarf tall clock?”

James wanted to yell at her, to tell her to stop writing in strange codes. He wanted to tell her to go away, for them all to go away, to just leave him alone. He snatched the pen from her hand. In big letters, he wrote, “STAY OUT OF MY WORKROOM! STAY OUT OF ALL MY ROOMS!” Then he wrote and underlined, “
GET OUT!
”

She must have been reading over the top of the notebook because before he was done with the exclamation point, she was gone. James put the notebook aside and then carefully lay the cat clock on the bedside table. He would hang it himself, as soon as he and the clocks were alone.

Ione came over and took the notebook. James watched her, amazed. This woman never said anything and here she scribbled away like Shakespeare. She handed him the page.

“You shouldn’t of yelled at Amy Sue,” she said. “She was only trying two help. She’s been hear the hole time.”

An illiterate Shakespeare. The woman couldn’t spell. James looked at her note again, read it through while substituting corrections. Have, to, here, whole. The whole time. He glanced at the clocks again. It was ten-forty, over four hours since he went up that clock tower. Four hours since he’d heard anything. He listened carefully as he sucked air deep into his lungs, then let it out in what he knew should be a whoosh. But he couldn’t even hear himself breathe. Sighing, James wrote, “I’d like to go to sleep now. Thank you.”

Neal and Ione said something to each other. Then Neal took over the pen. “Why are you writing everything? You can talk. Do you want anything? Are you hungry?”

James shook his head and then wrote, “It’s just easier this way. It’s too hard to talk when I can’t hear my own voice.” Neal and Ione fussed around the room a little bit, then walked away, turning out the light as they went. James waited for a few minutes, until he was sure they were out the door, and then he got up and put the light back on. He went downstairs, wanting to make sure the doors were locked.

The Home was completely silent and James was chilled without the cloak of ticks and chimes to cover him. He touched clocks as he went by, but he couldn’t hear their soft hellos. “Damn!” he yelled. “Damn!” But there was nothing. Again, he clutched his chest, felt his heart, and then sank down onto the bottom step.

Closing his eyes, feeling that beating beneath his skin, he brought his lips together in rhythm with it. “Bum-bum,” he said. “Bum-bum. Bum-bum.” James tried to hear it, somewhere deep inside of himself, but it just wasn’t there. Trembling, he went back upstairs to his room and picked up Felix. Then he went down the hall to the back east bedroom. Cooley was wrong. Felix didn’t belong in the same room as the dwarf tall clock.

The spot on the wall looked empty without Felix. James set him down on a chair and went in search of a hammer. When he came back, he stood on the footstool and raised Felix’s nail by a good foot. No child would be able to reach him here. No girl would ever touch him again.

Hanging him securely, James set the tail to wagging and watched the eyes start moving left and right, left and right. There was no sound, but the cat grinned with the same familiar smile James returned for years.

He remembered when the cat clock first arrived. It was in the middle of a summer day, a Saturday filled with tourists. James stood by the front door, getting a breather from answering questions, when a young man approached. He held the cat clock.

“Excuse me,” he said. “Would you like this? I’ve looked throughout your home and I don’t see another one like it.”

James took the cat and looked it over. The face was missing a few numbers and its eyepiece was broken in half. Only one eye looked out through the sockets. “It’s in pretty sad shape,” James said.

“Oh, I know.” The man reached out as if to stroke one of the cat’s ears, but then he stopped and put his hand in his pocket. “Anyway, I know they can be quite valuable. I thought this might be a good place for it.”

James looked at him quickly. Someone who knew the monetary value of a clock could be hard to bargain with. “How much do you want for it? It would need a lot of work.”

“I don’t want anything.” The man rubbed his hair, making it stand up like a rooster’s comb. “My mother died recently. This was hers and I…well, I just couldn’t throw it out.” He did touch the clock then, with one finger, right on the tip of its nose.

The clock suddenly felt cold in James’ hands. The remaining eye looked up and despite the smile, the cat looked sad.

“Well, thank you for offering it to me.” James shook the man’s hand. “I’ll take really good care of it.”

“You think you can fix it?” he asked.

In James’ mind, he was already fixing the clock, using a set of eyes he had down in the skeleton boxes. Once, when an old clock shop in Cedar Rapids closed, he picked up some Felix parts. He didn’t own a Felix clock, not until this man arrived, but it never hurt to be ready. “Oh, yes,” James said. “I’m sure I can.”

This sparked a sudden smile and then the man ran down the stairs to his car.

Now James watched the clock with two good eyes run smoothly, but without a sound. “I wish I could hear you,” he said to Felix. “I wish I could hear you tick, so I could know that I fixed you up just fine.” The tail continued to wag steadily, so James figured everything must be in place again.

He left the room and went back downstairs. Without sound, he felt like he was in a new house, following a new path. He had to look at the clocks to recognize the room, to orient himself in the Home. He stopped by the dwarf tall clock. Her hands were just before eleven o’clock and her presence was warm and solid. Carefully, James knelt down and placed his cheek against her longcase. He waited and soon he felt it, that vibration that shook through the clock’s body as she sang. Pressing in closer, James tried to pull that vibration into his head, through the passages to his eardrum. But nothing broke through. The clock sang just for him and he couldn’t hear a single note.