The clock is as big as she is. If she stands facing the kitchen window with her arms by her side and bends forward into a ninety-degree angle, she equals the clock’s quarter-past-six. The clock hands are wrong, but she records their time in her bones and muscles. A grounding exercise.
It’s not that the clock lags by an hour or so. That would be forgivable for such an old lady. It’s that every time she looks at it, the time is different. Five hours ahead or 12 minutes behind. When she boiled the water, it was 4:05. When she looks at the clock face again, with the coffee still draining, it is 12:43.
The clock belongs to the clapboard house she moved into a week ago. She rented the place unfurnished. But the round old station clock was a non-negotiable fixture.
Clovis is due to pick her up at 10. It will be their second date, following the time exactly a year ago they were both living in Los Angeles—he with his parents, she in the cheap motel—and after first checking each other out in the Safeway cake aisle and discovering they share a birthday, they decided to go to the zoo together. That day they regressed three decades and acted like children, eating cotton candy and making monkey sounds as the penned guerillas stared at them. When they parted, they didn’t kiss. They wrote their phone numbers on each other’s hands and then saluted.
The clock says it is 3:14 and she can’t find her phone (again). Since breakfast with a book usually takes her an hour, she guesstimates it is 8. But when she comes out of the shower in a towel, she hears the doorbell booming and then spots Clovis already outside, peering in her window with a worried expression. A quick glance at the clock shows 10 exactly. Could it be telling the truth for once?
After hastily dressing, she opens the door and is rewarded with his wide smile. “Welcome to the mad house,” she says, her own smile faltering.
He has changed. She has changed. Yet what hasn’t is the air between them, an uncanny mix of ease and tension, as though they’re old friends and eager teens at once.
She points out the time on the kitchen clock before and after she shows him her bedroom, the unmade double bed. For the clock, four hours have passed. Now she has a witness.
“Why not cover it with a curtain if it bothers you so much?” Clovis asks.
Because that would be like turning your back on an enemy. She has grown wise from her mother’s denial. Brushing things under the carpet and letting them grow into monsters in the dark will doom her. She must look challenges in the eye.
“Where are we going?” she asks once she buckles herself into his Prius.
He steers into the flow of traffic. “You already forgot?”
Her thoughts race like the cars coming from where they’re headed. Maybe the clock is normal and she has slid into a time warp again.
“Sorry.” He laughs. “Bad joke. I kept it a surprise.”
They rent row boats to cross a murky lake to a Chinese restaurant where she struggles to feed herself spicy glass noodles. She lacks basic human skills, cannot handle chopsticks or long-term bonds of love.
“Let’s pretend it’s spaghetti!” Clovis says and asks for two forks.
He is funny. He doesn’t teach or preach. Not even when she confesses that she’s accepted another job as a personal assistant for lack of better ideas. With him she is not a woman out of time, someone lost and looking for her place in the world. He makes her feel moored, like their little boat they return to and row back across the lake.
“The last time you just disappeared,” he says. “What happened to you? I was surprised to hear from you again.”
He avoids her eyes, frowning down at his hands as he methodically rows through the cloudy water.
“I had to go away for a while,” she says. “But I thought of you often.”
She is remembering the treatments. White sheets, glasses of water, and a winter garden. Her only visitor was her father, or her poor father, as she thinks of him. Twice cursed, he’d kept her illness a secret, as he had with Mother’s episodes.
Clovis has stopped rowing and is watching her closely, trying to read her face.
She forces what she imagines is a happy expression. The day is passing too quickly. “Let’s go to my place.”
In the yard, they pick limes to make cocktails and place chairs in the last patch of sun. From the way they move around each other, she can tell they could become a couple, perhaps as early as tonight. But for how long?
The clock says it’s 5:45 when they fix their second drink, 3:03 when they start on dinner.
“My boss gave me tickets to a show,” he says, and holds the next day up to her like a gift.
But she cannot yet leap forward. After they wash the dishes, after they make out on the couch, she tells him about the white sheets, the glasses of water, the winter garden. “I want you to know what you’re getting yourself into,” she says.
He touches her lips. “Appreciated. But nobody can know that.”Does he mean no one can know where a love affair will go? Or is he saying nobody but her can understand what it’s like when she’s ill, watching her mind lag while the rest of her tries moving forward?
Inside the house, the clock announces 12—the time that manages to be both a beginning and an ending all at once.
With gratitude to Ken and Lori whose haunted clock inspired this story.
