There were forty-one clocks in Walter Prewitt's house, and every single one of them said a different wrong time, because he had let all of them stop.
He had been a clock repairman for fifty-one years. People used to drive two counties over to bring him the ones nobody else would touch — the grandfather clocks with the broken escapements, the anniversary clocks under their glass domes, the little carriage clocks a soldier had carried home from a war and never gotten to run right again. Walter could take a dead thing full of gears and springs and make it keep time, make it chime, make it live. His hands had known the inside of a thousand mechanisms the way a surgeon knows the inside of a chest. For fifty-one years, in the front room of the narrow house on Delmore Street, time had been the one thing Walter Prewitt could always fix.
Then Eleanor died, and Walter stopped winding the clocks.
He did it on purpose the first week, though he never admitted that to himself. He simply did not go around with the key on Sunday evening the way he had every Sunday evening for forty-four years, and one by one, over the following days, the clocks ran down. The mantel clock stopped at 2:14. The kitchen clock stopped at 6:50. The tall walnut regulator in the hall, the one that had been his father's, wound down slow and stately and finally went silent at 11:05, and Walter stood in the hallway and listened to the house go quiet in a way it had not been quiet since before he was married, and something in him was grimly, terribly satisfied by it. If time was going to take Eleanor, then time could stop. He would not lift a finger to help it run.
That had been three years ago.
The house on Delmore Street had gone the way of the clocks. Walter was seventy-four and he had let the grass grow shaggy and the porch paint peel and the inside of himself go dark and still. He ate standing up over the sink. He did not answer the phone, which rang less and less until it mostly did not ring at all. He had a daughter, Kate, who lived three hours away, and he had not seen her in over two years, and that was a wound he had made himself and picked at until it would not heal, and we will come to it. Mostly Walter Prewitt sat in the front room among the forty-one stopped clocks, in a house where it was always some different wrong time, waiting for the only appointment he had left, which was the last one, and which he was not afraid of, and which he had begun, in the worst hours, to look forward to.
He was, by any fair accounting, a man who had already died and simply had not been informed.
And then, on a hot afternoon in the middle of that third silent year, somebody stole three apples off the tree in his back yard, and Walter Prewitt went to the window to yell, and the whole rest of his life started over.
* * *
The apple tree was Eleanor's. She had planted it as a stick their second year on Delmore Street and it had grown up crooked and generous, and it dropped more apples every fall than two people could ever eat, and Eleanor used to give them away by the bagful over the back fence to a rotation of neighborhood children whose names she knew and Walter never bothered to learn. After she died the apples fell and rotted in the grass, and Walter told himself he was glad, because the smell of them was the smell of her, and he could not stand it.
So when he saw the girl in the tree, his first feeling was a hot ugly flare of something like violation, that a stranger was up in Eleanor's tree taking Eleanor's apples as though the tree belonged to anyone now, as though anything did.
She was small, maybe eight, maybe nine, hard to tell because she was thin in the specific way that makes a child look both younger and older at once. She had stringy hair that needed washing and a T-shirt gone gray from too many washes in cheap soap and sneakers with the toe worn through on one side, and she was up in the crook of the tree cramming apples into the front of her shirt, using it as a basket, working fast, the way you work when you have learned that the world does not give you long to take what you need.
Walter shoved the window up and it shrieked in its old frame and he shouted, "Hey! You! Get down out of there!"
The girl did not scream or cry or run the way a normal child would have. That was the first thing that snagged on Walter, though he was too angry to notice it yet. She went absolutely still, the way an animal goes still, calculating, and she looked at him through the leaves with a flat wary steadiness that did not belong on a face that young, and then she climbed down — not scrambling, not panicked, just quickly and efficiently, keeping the apples in her shirt — and she stood in his yard and looked at him and did not run.
"You deaf?" Walter said. "Those aren't yours. Put 'em back."
"Can't put 'em back," the girl said. "They already fell off. Once they're off you can't glue 'em back on." She said it reasonably, like she was explaining something to a slow person. "So it doesn't matter now whether I have them or the grass has them."
Walter opened his mouth and found, to his fury, that he did not have an immediate answer to this, because it was, in a certain irritating way, correct.
"They're going to rot anyway," the girl added. "You don't even pick them. I watched. They just rot. That's wasteful." And then, having apparently decided the conversation was over, she turned and walked to the gap in the back fence where a board was missing, and slid through it sideways with her shirtful of apples, and was gone into the yard of the sagging rental house next door before Walter had assembled a single thing to say.
He stood at the window a long time after she left. He was still angry. But underneath the anger, unwelcome, was the thing that had snagged on him and would not come loose: that a child that age had looked at a shouting old man in a window and not been afraid of him, and that this was not because she was brave.
It was because she had already met worse.
* * *
He learned her situation the way you learn things in a neighborhood you have stopped participating in, which is slowly and against your will.
The rental next door had turned over a dozen times in the years Walter had ignored it. The current occupants were a young woman named Crystal and the girl, and, on and off, a rotating series of men whose trucks appeared in the driveway for a few weeks and then did not. Crystal was maybe twenty-six and looked forty, and she worked, when she worked, at a distribution warehouse out by the interstate on a shift that had her leaving at nine at night and coming back after seven in the morning, and she was, Walter came to understand, not a monster. She was a drowning person. There is a difference, though it does not always matter to the child doing the drowning alongside her. He saw it plain one gray morning, when Crystal's car finally came back at dawn and he watched through the window as she came in off a fourteen-hour shift and did not make it past the kitchen table, only folded down onto her crossed arms in her warehouse vest and slept where she sat. And he watched the girl come down and find her there, and stop, and instead of anything else take the thin blanket off the back of the couch and lay it over her mother's shoulders, careful not to wake her, before letting herself out to walk to the bus alone. A child covering a parent. A woman who had worked all night and would still, somehow, fail. There was love in that house, Walter understood, real love, drowning right alongside everything else — and the love was not going to be enough, and both of those things were true at the same time, which is the cruelest arithmetic there is.
The girl's name was Nell.
Walter learned it because he started, against every intention he had, to watch. He would tell himself he was watching the fence line because kids these days had no respect for property, and then he would find that he had been standing at the kitchen window for twenty minutes tracking a small gray figure in the next yard. He saw things a person only sees if they are looking, and if they are looking they cannot fully un-see. He saw that the girl was often alone at hours when a nine-year-old should not be alone. He saw her let herself into the dark house with a key on a shoelace around her neck. He saw that the lights next door frequently did not come on at dinnertime, and that she sometimes sat on the back step in the dark eating something out of her hand, and that on the mornings her mother's car did not come back until late, the girl walked herself to the bus stop at the end of Delmore in clothes she had clearly slept in.
He saw her ration. That was the thing that got past his defenses, finally, the thing he could not lie his way around. She had a way of eating that Walter had only seen in men who had been hungry in a serious way, a way of making a small amount of food last, of eating half of something and carefully saving the other half in a pocket, of looking at food the way you look at money when you do not have enough of it. No nine-year-old should know how to do that. It is a skill you should not have to acquire until much later, if ever, and she had it down cold.
The apples, Walter understood, had not been mischief. They had been groceries.
He did not decide to do anything about it. Walter Prewitt was not, and knew he was not, a good man in the way Eleanor had been good; Eleanor was the one who had known the neighborhood children's names, Eleanor was the warmth, and Walter had spent his marriage standing in her warmth and taking credit for the temperature. He did not decide to help the girl. He simply found, the next Saturday, that he had picked the ripe apples off the low branches and put them in a paper sack and set the sack on his side of the missing fence board, and gone back inside before anyone could see him do it, and watched from the kitchen window until a small hand reached through the gap and took it.
That was all. That was the whole thing. He told himself it was about not wasting the apples.
The next week there were two sacks. He put a jar of peanut butter in one of them, and a sleeve of crackers, and told himself Eleanor would have wanted the tree used.
* * *
She caught him at it eventually, because he got careless, or because some part of him wanted to be caught. He was setting the sack down and she was just there, on the other side of the fence, watching him with those flat wary eyes.
"Why do you do that," Nell said. Not thank you. Why.
Walter straightened up with his back complaining. "Do what."
"The food. You leave food. Why." She narrowed her eyes. "Are you one of those guys? Because I know about those guys. My mom's boyfriend Dale told me about how some guys leave you stuff and then they want—"
"No," Walter said, with a violence that surprised them both. "God. No. I'm not—no." He was appalled, and then he was something worse than appalled, which was heartbroken, that a child had a filed-away category in her head for the kind of adult who gives you something in order to take something, and that she had checked him against it as a matter of routine. "I'm an old man," he said, more quietly, "and I have a tree that makes too many apples, and my wife used to give them to kids like you, and she's dead, and I don't like waste. That's all. That's the entire thing. You don't have to say thank you. You don't have to say anything. You don't even have to take them. But nobody is going to want anything from you. Not from me. Do you understand?"
Nell looked at him for a long moment, recalibrating, the way she had recalibrated in the tree that first day. Then she said, "Your wife's the one who planted the tree crooked?"
"It grew crooked on its own."
"It's a good tree," Nell said, which Walter would understand later was the highest thing she knew how to say about a person, transferred onto the tree because the person was dead. Then she took the sack and went through the fence, and this time, at the gap, she stopped and looked back.
"I'm Nell," she said.
"Walter," said Walter.
"I know," she said. "It's on your mailbox." And she was gone.
* * *
She started coming into the yard after that, and then, by a slow siege that Walter never formally surrendered to, into the house.
It happened over weeks. First she was just present at the fence in the late afternoons, appearing at the hour when her house was empty and Walter's was merely silent, sitting on his side of the gap and talking at him while he pretended to do yard work he had ignored for three years. She talked the way lonely children talk, in a flood, about everything, about the kids at school and the plot of a cartoon and the specific injustices of the fourth grade, and Walter grunted and did not encourage her and did not, he noticed, tell her to leave. Then it was raining one day and he found himself holding the back door open and jerking his head at the kitchen, and she came in and dripped on his floor and looked around at his stopped, silent, dust-furred house with open astonishment.
"Why are there so many clocks," Nell said, turning in a slow circle in the front room, where clocks covered every wall and every surface, mantel clocks and wall clocks and the tall regulator and a shelf of little carriage clocks, forty-one of them, all dead, all stopped at forty-one different wrong times. "Why do you have this many clocks? And why are they all—" She stopped. She was a sharp child; she saw it. "They're all stopped. Every single one. They're all saying different times." She looked at him. "That's creepy, Walter. No offense. That's really creepy."
"I fixed clocks," Walter said. "For a living. Fifty-one years."
"Then why are they all broken?"
"They're not broken."
"They're not running."
"That's not the same thing as broken," Walter said, and heard his own voice do something it had not done in three years, take on the shape of the thing he actually knew about, the one subject on which he had ever been wise. "A clock that's stopped isn't broken, most times. It's just run down. Nobody wound it. The mechanism's fine. It's all still in there, every gear, everything, just sitting still, waiting. You put the key in and give it back its tension and it'll run again like it never stopped. A stopped clock isn't a dead clock. It's a waiting clock. There's a difference."
Nell looked at him. She looked at the forty-one stopped clocks. She looked back at him, and she was nine, but she was not stupid, and Walter watched her put something together behind her eyes that he had not meant to hand her.
"So why don't you wind them," she said.
Walter did not answer that. He could not. It was the single most dangerous question anyone had asked him in three years, and it had been asked by a hungry child in a wet gray T-shirt standing in a puddle of her own making on his floor, and he turned away from it and put the kettle on and said gruffly that if she was going to drip on his floor she could at least drink something warm while she did it, and Nell, who understood retreat because she was an expert in it, let him have his.
* * *
It became, over the next weeks, a thing that neither of them named.
She came most afternoons now, at the hour her house emptied out, and Walter stopped pretending he was doing yard work and started, without ever announcing it, cooking. He was not a cook. Eleanor had cooked. But a man can learn to make eggs and toast and a pot of the thick beef soup his mother had made in the Depression, and Walter made these things and set two plates on the kitchen table and said nothing about it, and Nell ate at that table the way she rationed everywhere else, half now and half saved, until one evening she seemed to understand, all at once, that there would be more tomorrow, that the plate was not a one-time accident of luck, and she ate a whole meal in front of him without hiding any of it, and Walter had to get up and stand at the sink with his back to her for a minute, pretending to look for something, because the sight of a child finally trusting that she would be fed again was more than he had bargained for when he picked a few apples off a low branch.
He showed her a clock, finally. Not Eleanor's. A plain schoolhouse wall clock, dead like the rest, and he took the back off it at the kitchen table and let her look inside at the still gears, and he named the parts for her — the mainspring, the wheels, the escapement that lets the power out one tick at a time so it doesn't all rush free at once — and Nell, who was sharp as a tack and starved for someone to pour knowledge into her, drank it down. He put the key in and wound it while she watched, and gave it a nudge, and the dead clock in her hands began to tick, and she looked up at him with her whole face open for the first time since he'd known her, the wariness gone clean off it, and she laughed, a real child's laugh, delighted, and said, "You made it come alive," and Walter said, "It was always alive. It was just waiting," and did not realize he was smiling until his face ached from the unfamiliar shape of it.
She asked about Eleanor, once, carefully, the way you touch a bruise on someone else. What she was like. Walter surprised himself by answering. He told her Eleanor knew every kid's name on the street and he had never learned a single one. He told her she planted the tree. He told her she thought his clocks were the most beautiful thing in the world and used to say the house sounded like a heartbeat, forty-one of them, and that after she was gone he couldn't stand the heartbeat so he'd stopped it. Nell listened to all of it with the grave attention of a child who has learned that grown-up sadness is real and dangerous, and at the end she said only, "She sounds like a good tree," which Walter now understood to be the highest words she had, and he had to look away again, and it occurred to him, standing in his kitchen with a strange hungry child and a ticking schoolhouse clock, that he had not been this close to happy in three years, and the thought frightened him, because Walter Prewitt had learned to distrust the moment right before the fall.
* * *
The one he did not tell her about, in all of it, was the carriage clock on the mantel.
It was small, brass, with a handle on top and a face the color of old cream, and it had a chime, a soft two-note chime on the hour that Eleanor had loved above every other sound in the house. Walter had made it for her, or rebuilt it, really, from a wreck a man had brought him in a shoebox forty years ago and never come back to claim, and Walter had spent a winter of evenings bringing it back to life and had given it to Eleanor for their twentieth anniversary, and it had sat on the mantel and chimed the hours of their whole life together. It was the last clock he had let stop. He had kept it going three weeks longer than the others, winding only it, in secret, unable to make himself silence the one sound that was most hers, until one Sunday he had held the key in his hand in front of it and understood that he could not keep the whole house alive for one clock, that grief does not permit that kind of exception, and he had set the key down and let Eleanor's clock wind down too. It had chimed its last soft two notes on a Tuesday afternoon and then gone silent, and Walter had gone out to the garage and sat in the dark for a long time.
He did not tell Nell about the carriage clock. But she found it anyway, because children find the thing you are protecting, and one afternoon he came in from the yard and she was up on the hearth stool with Eleanor's clock in her two hands, turning it over, looking for the keyhole, and Walter Prewitt came apart.
"Put that down." His voice was not loud. It was worse than loud. It was the voice he had used on Kate, years ago, the cold flat voice that could take the skin off a person, the voice that was the real Walter, the one Eleanor had spent forty-four years covering for. "Put it down right now. Don't you touch that. Don't you ever touch that. Who told you that you could come in here and put your hands on—" and Nell, startled, turned too fast on the stool, and the clock slipped.
It did not shatter. It was brass; it did not shatter. But it hit the hearthstone with a sound like a small bell being murdered, a discordant clang of springs and a snapped-off piece of the handle skittering across the floor, and it lay there on its side on the stone, and the silence afterward was the loudest thing in the house of forty-one stopped clocks.
Nell stared at it. Then she looked at Walter's face, and whatever she saw there was the confirmation of every hard thing she had ever learned about adults, the proof that even the ones who leave you apples will turn on you in the end, that there is no safe person, that she had been a fool to come inside where it was warm. Her own face closed like a door. She got off the stool and she did not cry and she did not apologize; she walked past him, fast, out the back, through the yard, through the gap in the fence, and the last Walter saw of her was a small gray figure disappearing into the dark empty house next door where no lights would come on that night either.
And Walter Prewitt stood alone in his front room among all his stopped clocks with his dead wife's broken clock at his feet, and he had, in the space of thirty seconds, done the thing he was best at, the thing he had done to his own daughter, the thing that was the truest fact about him: he had taken the one person foolish enough to come close, and he had made sure they would never do it again.
* * *
Here is the part about Kate, because you cannot understand what Walter did next without it.
Kate was Walter and Eleanor's only child, and she was fifty now, or near it, and she lived three hours north with a husband Walter had been cold to and two children Walter had met exactly four times. Kate had grown up in the warmth of Eleanor and the frost of Walter, and she had spent her childhood the way children of such marriages do, trying and trying to earn a degree of approval from her father that he did not have it in him to give, not because she failed to deserve it but because Walter had never learned how to hand the warmth over directly; he could only stand near Eleanor's and let it reflect. He had been hard on Kate. He had been hard about her grades and hard about her friends and hard about the man she married, and he had said a thing to her once, at her own wedding, a cold cutting thing about the marriage not lasting, that he had meant as a kind of gruff honesty and that had landed in Kate like a blade and stayed there.
And when Eleanor got sick, Kate had come, and Kate had done everything, had driven the three hours every week and then every few days and then had more or less moved into the front room to nurse her mother while Walter, useless with feeling, retreated further and further into the garage and the clocks. And on one of the last nights, Kate had tried, over the wreck of her mother, to reach her father, to say some true soft thing to him in the shared catastrophe of losing the woman they both loved, and Walter had turned that cold flat voice on his grieving daughter and told her to stop being hysterical and let him think, and Kate had gone very still, and something between them that had been fraying for fifty years had finally, quietly, parted.
She had come to the funeral. She had stood on the far side of the grave. And then she had gone home, and she had stopped calling, and Walter had told himself it was better, that he was poison, that he had always been poison and Eleanor had been the antidote and now the antidote was gone and the only decent thing left for him to do was keep his poison to himself in a silent house until it finished the job. He had let his daughter go the way he had let the clocks stop: on purpose, and calling it something else.
Now he stood in his front room with a broken carriage clock at his feet and a nine-year-old fleeing into the dark, and Walter Prewitt understood, with the awful clarity that comes to a man perhaps twice in his life, that he had just done it again. That he was going to do it forever, to everyone, until he died. That there was a thing broken in him worse than anything that had ever come into his shop in a shoebox, and that he had spent three years telling himself it could not be fixed because that was easier than the work of fixing it.
He got down on his knees on the hearth, which at seventy-four was its own small ordeal, and he picked up Eleanor's clock.
* * *
He worked on it for three days.
He had not been at the bench in three years and his hands had forgotten nothing, which surprised him, and did not surprise him. The handle was snapped and the impact had sprung the chime train and knocked the balance out of true, and it was, in the vocabulary of his trade, a mess, but it was not a hopeless mess, it was only a great deal of patient careful work, and Walter Prewitt had a great deal of patient careful work in him that he had been refusing to spend. He cleaned every part. He re-pivoted the wheel that had bent. He straightened the hairspring with a touch he had thought he'd lost. He fitted a new handle turned from brass stock on the little lathe under six years of dust. And on the evening of the third day he wound Eleanor's clock, and held his breath, and set it on the bench, and it began to tick.
It ticked. After three years of silence, in that dead house, one small clock began to keep time, and on the hour it lifted its little hammer and struck the soft two-note chime that Eleanor had loved, and Walter Prewitt sat at his bench and wept the way he had not let himself weep at the grave, wept for his wife and for his daughter and for the cold ruined thing he had made of his life, and for a hungry child he had driven into the dark, and when he was done weeping he wiped his face and he did the thing that the whole three days of work had really been for.
He got up, and he took Eleanor's clock in both hands, and he carried it next door.
It was full dark and there were no lights on in the rental and Crystal's car was gone, which by now Walter understood the meaning of, and he stood on the sagging back step and knocked, and after a long time the door opened the width of the chain and one wary eye looked out at him at knee height, because she had not turned on the porch light, because she knew better than to make herself visible in the dark.
"I brought you something," Walter said. "And I came to say I'm sorry, which is a thing I have not said to another living person in longer than you have been alive, so you'll have to forgive me if I do it badly." He held up the clock. In the dark she could not have seen it well. "I fixed it. You didn't break it, Nell. It was already broken. I broke it, three years ago, and then I let it sit broken because I was too much of a coward to fix the things I break. You just—you were just the one who finally knocked it off the shelf so I had to look at it." His voice was not steady. "I fixed it. And I want you to have it. Not to borrow. To have. Because it has the best sound in the world in it, and there ought to be one good sound in your house, and there is never anybody home to make one."
The chain came off. The door opened. Nell stood in the dark doorway in the same gray T-shirt, and she looked at the little brass clock in the old man's hands, and she did not take it.
"My mom didn't come home," she said instead, in a small flat voice, the wary voice cracking down the middle, and Walter understood that they had arrived, the two of them, at the real thing, the thing under all the other things. "It's been two days. She said one day. Dale came and got her and she said one day and it's been two and I ran out of the food and I don't—" and the flat voice broke all the way open, and the tough self-sufficient child who had not cried when he yelled at her, who had not cried at anything, began to cry, standing in a dark doorway of an empty house, "—I don't know what to do. I didn't tell the school because if I tell they take you away, everybody knows if you tell they take you away and you never come back, so I didn't tell, but I ran out of food and I don't know what to do and I'm not supposed to tell anybody but you already know, you already know she's not here—"
Walter Prewitt set his dead wife's clock down on the step. And he did the thing that Eleanor would have done in the first five minutes, the warmth he had watched her give away for forty-four years and never once managed himself, and it turned out it had been in him the whole time, every gear of it, just run down, just waiting.
He opened his arms, and the child walked into them, and he held her on the dark step while she came apart, and he said, "All right. All right. You told the right person. You hear me? You didn't do anything wrong and you told the right person and I've got you now. Come on. Come next door where the lights work and there's food and there's a clock that chimes, and we'll figure the rest out in the morning. I've got you, Nell. Nobody's taking you anywhere tonight."
* * *
The rest of it was hard, and Walter did not do it alone, and that was the second thing that saved him.
Because in the morning, with Nell asleep on his couch under Eleanor's good quilt and Eleanor's clock ticking on the mantel for the first time in three years, Walter Prewitt had to face the fact that he was a seventy-four-year-old man with no legal relationship to a child who was, as of that night, effectively abandoned, and that the machine which existed to handle such things was not built for old men who had decided too late to start caring. Crystal was gone — she surfaced eventually, three counties away, in trouble that was hers to climb out of and would take her a long time. She came to the hearing, though. Walter never forgot that. She came thin and shaking and ashamed, in a borrowed cardigan, and she did not fight them for Nell, and it was not because she did not want her daughter. It was the opposite. In the one clear-eyed hour of a life she had spent underwater, Crystal looked at the old man and his daughter and the fed, safe, wanted future they were offering her child, and she understood that she could not give Nell any of it, and that loving the girl and keeping the girl had become two different things that could no longer be held in the same hand. So she signed the papers with a hand that would not stay still, and she asked for exactly one thing in return, which she asked of Walter directly, leaning across the table with her whole ruined heart in her face. "Don't ever let her think I didn't want her," Crystal said. "That's the only lie I can't have her believe. I wanted her. I just couldn't — " and she could not finish it, and she did not have to. She went away to try to get well, slowly, the way it happens when it happens at all, and she wrote Nell letters that Walter kept in a box for the day the girl would be ready to read them, because a stopped thing is not always a dead thing, and that was true of people too, even the ones who could not be saved in time to matter.
They came for Nell on a Thursday.
Walter had done the right thing, the only thing, the thing that terrified her most — he had made the call himself, because a child could not go on living on soup next door to a legal stranger, because it had to be made real and safe and aboveboard, and because he had promised her, holding her on the dark step, that he would not let anybody take her anywhere without a fight, and he intended the call to be the first blow of that fight and not a surrender. He had explained it to her as best he could. She had not entirely believed him, because the last adult who told her a hard thing was for her own good had been wrong, and the whole architecture of her young life was built on the knowledge that when they come, you do not come back.
A kind, tired woman with a lanyard and a folder came, and she was gentle, and it did not matter that she was gentle. When she understood what was happening, Nell looked at Walter across his own kitchen with a face he would see for the rest of his life, a face that said you too, of course you too, I knew better than to come inside where it was warm — the same face from the day the clock fell, except that this time Walter did not go cold, this time Walter got down on his bad knees on the linoleum and took the child by both shoulders and said, "Listen to me. Listen. This is not them taking you away and you not coming back. I know that's the only kind you've ever seen. This is a different kind. I am going to be right here. I am not going anywhere. I am going to fight for you every single day that you are gone, and I am going to win, because I have got nothing left in this world to do but win this, and you are going to come back to this street. You hear me? You are coming back. I have never in my life made a promise I kept, not one, I'm a coward and I break things and everyone who knows me will tell you so — but I am going to keep this one if it's the last working part left in me. Now go with the nice lady, and be brave the way you already know how, and count the days, because I'll be counting them too."
And Nell went, because children have to go, and Walter Prewitt stood on his ruined front porch and watched a county car carry her away down Delmore Street, and he did not go inside and he did not go cold and he did not sit down in the dark. He stood there until the car was gone, and then he went in and wound every clock in the house so it would be loud when she came back, and he began.
Because Nell had gone, at first, where the machine puts children, into an emergency placement with strangers across town, and Walter, who was nobody to her on paper, was told the things that people like Walter are always told: that he was not family, that he was elderly, that he lived alone, that these things took time, that he should not get his hopes up, that the system had a process and the process did not much care what a lonely old widower wanted.
And Walter Prewitt, who three months earlier had been waiting in a silent house for his own death, discovered that he was not, it turned out, finished, because a finished man does not fight, and Walter fought.
He wound all forty-one clocks. He did it the morning after Nell was taken to the placement across town, going around the house with the key the way he had every Sunday for forty-four years, giving each dead clock back its tension, and the house came alive around him in a rising tide of ticking, forty-one clocks and forty-one slightly different rhythms, the sound of his whole marriage, the sound of a house that has people in it, or is getting ready to. He cleaned the place. He painted the porch. He made it, in the words of the eventual home study, "a suitable environment," which was a phrase that made him bark out a laugh, because Eleanor would have had opinions about a stranger walking through her house deciding whether it was suitable, and for the first time in three years thinking of Eleanor's opinions made him smile instead of bleed.
And he called Kate.
That was the hardest clock of all, the one that had been stopped the longest and was wound the tightest with old pain, and Walter sat with the phone in his hand for a long time the way he had once watched a child sit with a phone that had nothing on it. Then he dialed the number he had never deleted, and his daughter answered, guarded, because a call from her father at this point in both their lives could only be bad news, and Walter Prewitt said the thing he should have said at a graveside three years before and at a wedding twenty years before that.
"Katie," he said. "It's your dad. I have been a hard man and a coward and I was cold to you your whole life and I was cruel to you the night your mother was dying, and I have spent three years letting you go because I told myself you were better off without my poison, and that was one more cowardly thing on a whole life's pile of them. I'm not calling to ask you to forgive me. I don't expect that and I didn't earn it. I'm calling because there's a little girl who needs a family, and I am trying to be one for her, and it turns out I don't know how to do it alone, and I never learned how to do it at all, and the only person who could maybe teach me is the daughter I threw away. And I'm too old to keep being too proud to say I need you. So. That's the call. I understand if you hang up."
There was a long silence on the line, three years and fifty years of silence.
And then his daughter, crying, said, "Tell me about the little girl, Dad."
* * *
Kate came down that weekend, and her husband, whom Walter shook hands with and looked in the eye and thanked, which undid the man entirely, and their two teenagers, Walter's grandchildren, who wandered his house of ticking clocks in amazement. And a family that had been stopped for three years, wound down and silent and keeping forty-one different wrong times, began, part by careful part, to run again.
It did not happen fast, and it should not have. Kate did not melt at one phone call; there were hard conversations on the porch that Walter made himself sit all the way through without going cold, without fleeing to the garage, learning at seventy-four to stay inside a difficult thing instead of running from it. But Kate was Eleanor's daughter, with her mother's enormous heart, and when she sat down on the floor across from the wary, magnificent child her father had somehow been saved by, something that had been shut against him for fifty years came open. Because she saw it. She saw her cold father made warm too late and yet, somehow, not too late — and she understood that the man she had given up on had been, like everything else in that house, not broken. Only stopped. Only waiting for someone to wind him.
They fought for Nell together — Kate and her husband the family with room and years the machine wanted to see, Walter the thing no home study can measure, that the child had already chosen him, had come through a gap in a fence into his ruined life and picked him, and would not be pried loose without damage. It took the better part of a year, and it held, because for once Walter Prewitt did not run down. He stayed wound. He showed up every day.
Nell moved in with Kate's family up north — a real bedroom, a lamp, a refrigerator she was allowed to open any time, which made her cry the first week for reasons she couldn't name. And every other weekend and every summer she came back to Delmore Street, to the rental Walter bought so no stranger could ever have it, and he taught her clocks: to hear when a mechanism is fighting itself, to never force a thing that's stuck but find out why. And without ever once saying it was about anything but clocks, he taught her the first true thing he had ever told her — that a stopped thing is not a dead thing, and the whole entire art of it is the patience to put the key in and let it learn to keep time again.
* * *
Eleanor's carriage clock sits on the mantel next door now, in the house that used to be the sad rental, in Nell's room, and it keeps perfect time, and on the hour it chimes its soft two notes.
Walter is very old now, and slow, and he sleeps in the front room downstairs where forty-one clocks tick him to sleep and tick him awake, a house so full of the sound of time you could forget it was ever silent. Kate calls every day. Nell is twenty-two, and better at the trade than Walter ever was, which he tells anyone who will listen with a pride so unguarded that people who knew the old Walter Prewitt do not believe it is the same man. And they are right. It is not the same man. A wary, hungry child up a crooked apple tree took a run-down ruin off the shelf where it had put itself to stop, and knocked it to the floor, and made it run again.
Last spring, on a warm afternoon, a young woman came up the front walk of the narrow house on Delmore Street, a woman in her twenties with clear steady eyes and a canvas roll of clockmaker's tools under her arm, and she let herself in without knocking because it was as much her house as anyone's, and she found the old man dozing in his chair among all the ticking clocks, in the sun.
There was a neighbor there, a new one, young, who had come to bring over a dead mantel clock she'd found at an estate sale, having heard there was an old repairman on Delmore who could fix anything, and the neighbor looked at the young woman with the tools and the easy way she moved through the house of clocks and the way she stopped to rest one hand on the sleeping old man's shoulder as she passed, gentle, checking without waking him that his chest still rose and fell.
"Is that your grandfather?" the neighbor asked.
Nell looked at Walter Prewitt asleep in the sun in the house that had taught her that nothing worth keeping is ever really broken, only waiting. On the mantel, Eleanor's clock lifted its little hammer, and struck the hour, two soft notes, and the old man stirred at the sound the way he always did, the way he had for a lifetime, and did not quite wake.
"No," Nell said.
She set down her tools and went to put the kettle on, the way she had a thousand times, in the only home that had ever kept her.
"He's mine," she said.
The end.