“Are those the boxes from the basement?” Drake asked.
Gina nodded. “I told Daddy it was wrong to make you work down there like a mole, so we moved the boxes.”
He wondered if his handicap had spurred them to make the change. Embarrassing. An old man and a girl catering to his problem. What next? A ramp up the porch? “Did you and the professor carry them up?”
“No, silly,” she said. “We have a dumbwaiter in the hallway. We loaded the boxes and brought them up here.”
A dumbwaiter—a device once used in old houses to move goods and food between floors before elevators. It made sense, but he still felt inadequate. “I like this room better.”
“Me too.”
Dennison bustled into the room. “Good morning.”
“I like the move upstairs,” Drake said. “Thanks.”
Dennison waved him off. “Let’s get you started.”
Drake crossed to the table just as the clock in the hall chimed. He counted the gongs silently while listening to the professor’s instructions. He heard eight gongs. Impossible. He’d left his house at eight o’clock to drive here and yet now the clock was chiming eight. Yesterday it had been right on the money about hitting eleven, but now it was off by over an hour. It was the weirdest clock he’d ever been around.
“When you leave, no need to hunt for me—I’m often preoccupied in the afternoons.” He turned away. “Until tomorrow, then. Same time.”
Drake watched them both leave the room. He sighed and limped over to the pile of boxes, heaved one onto the table and set to work.
By noon, Drake had hardly made headway on the first box. Reading the old, brittle and faded labels attached to each artifact was difficult, and recording each on paper by hand was intense slow work. He didn’t want to make a mistake, so he checked and double-checked his spellings and descriptions before laying each piece aside. He missed his computer, where it was easy to correct errors.
He worked in silence, hearing the chime of the clock every hour. He decided that not having Gina around him while he worked was probably a good thing; her presence would have distracted him. He felt a powerful attraction to her. Usually he became invisible once girls saw his deformity—a pathetic truth he’d learned to face. Yet when he looked into Gina’s eyes, he felt whole. Stupid, he told himself. There were no jocks around to impress her. No other guys vying for her attention. Hadn’t she told him she and her father lived alone in the house?
When Drake’s stomach growled, he stretched, laid down his pencil and picked up his bag lunch. He decided to go outside because he wanted to check out the place—not because his mother had asked him to. He went around to the backyard and found a wooden bench in the middle of a path surrounded by colorful gardens. Roses scented the air and bees hummed around flower heads. Sunshine warmed his back.
“How do you like my gardens?”
He looked up to see Gina on the path, her hands full of gardening tools. The sun’s rays bounced off her dazzling white blond hair like dancing fireflies and made his heart skip.
“Beautiful,” he said, telling her two things at once.
She laughed and settled beside him on the bench. “Want some lemonade? I made it this morning. I can run up to the kitchen for it.”
“I’m good,” he said, not wanting her to leave, not even for a drink of something cool.
She dropped her tools and pulled off her gloves, smoothed her skirt.
“Are you in charge of these gardens?”
“I keep them up. I love flowers, don’t you?”
“Sure,” he said, watching her hands flutter like bird wings as she talked.
“How’s the work going?”
“Slow. Be better if I had a computer. Don’t you miss having one up here?”
She smiled politely but looked as if the words didn’t register for her.
“You do have a computer back home, don’t you?”
“Father’s not keen on some things.” She glanced away, turned back and changed the conversation with, “Tell me about yourself.”
“Not much to tell. I moved here at the end of May. Before that, we were in Ohio.”
“What about your family?”
“I live with my mother.” He didn’t want to confess that he’d never known a father because his mother had never married. She’d just gone her own way, having her baby and raising him by herself. He’d stopped asking questions about his father years before. “How about you? Where’s your mom?”
“She died giving birth to me.”
Gina sounded sad, making him wish he hadn’t asked. “Sorry.”
She shrugged, smiled. “Father’s done everything in the world to make me happy.”
Drake got it. He was feeling as if he’d do anything to make her happy too. “I should get back to work,” he said, wadding up his paper bag.
“And I have piano to practice,” she said.
“I can’t play anything except my iPod,” he said.
She again gave him a polite disconnected look.
“You don’t have an iPod,” he said, as if filling in the blank. “A TV?”
She shook her head and looked down at her hands, now stilled. “Just a piano.”
He went back inside the house wondering how anyone lived without computers, iPods or TVs. Strange, he thought. But he guessed it was what people got used to that defined their lives. He was glad he didn’t have to live without such things.
Drake spent the afternoon cataloging and listening to Gina’s piano music. The notes came down the stairs like strangers because the music she played wasn’t familiar to Drake at all. Classical, he guessed. Some of the music was fast and almost discordant. Some pieces sounded magnificent and bold, others soft and beguiling. He vowed to search iTunes that evening and become better acquainted with her musical tastes. No place for rock or rap or today’s latest bands in Gina’s world.
She was still playing when the clock in the hall struck four. Drake looked at the short stack of artifacts he’d recorded and wasn’t impressed. He had to work faster. He lingered for a few minutes, hoping Gina would descend the stairs and tell him goodbye. She didn’t. He sighed, gathered his sweatshirt and went into the hall. He started toward the door but turned back and hobbled over to the great clock.
The clock was much bigger than it had seemed yesterday, and very old, its wood dry and pockmarked. The face was marked with strange symbols and the hands were made of wood, not metal. Below the face was a boxy case fronted with wavy old glass, and inside was a copper pendulum that slid from side to side ever so slowly. Drake wondered if the clock needed winding. The tick-tock sound was mesmerizing, hypnotic. It seemed to him that time was leaking out of it.
He leaned closer, trying to decipher the symbols. He reached into his pocket and drew out his cell, flipped on the camera feature only to see that it wasn’t working either. He shook his head in disgust. It had been working just fine before he got to work.
“What are you doing?” Dennison’s voice thundered from behind him.
Drake’s bad leg almost buckled as he spun. “Nothing,” he said. “I—I mean, just looking at your clock.”
Dennison’s eyes were narrowed and his face looked angry. “Well, get away from it!”
Drake inched around the professor. “Sorry … it’s unique—”
“Don’t go near it, you hear? It’s ancient and most delicate. And never touch it.”
“Y-yes, sir.” Drake turned the front-door knob, stupefied by the depth of the man’s anger. He shut the door quickly while Dennison glared at him. His leg hurt like crazy, but he shuffled down the porch steps and out the gate as fast as he could, Gina’s music cascading wildly from the upstairs windows, chasing him.
4
Drake returned the next morning, fearful that Dennison would throw him out again, but the house was quiet and his workroom was just as he’d left it. Drake hurried inside and set to work just as the offending clock, the reason for Dennison’s explosion, struck eigh
t. “Wrong,” Drake muttered under his breath. He’d left home at eight.
For the next few days he worked silently, knocking off at four when the clock chimed. He didn’t see the professor, but he did see Gina in the halls. She was like a bright light floating between rooms. When he caught her eye, she smiled shyly but then slipped away. He ate in the garden every day for a week but didn’t encounter her again.
By the end of the second week, he hated the work. Without a computer it was painfully slow. The stack of various artifacts of arrowheads, clay pipes, beaded doeskin slippers and hunks of ancient feathers from long-dead Native American tribes of the Northeast and Midwest wasn’t dwindling. How many of these relics did the old man have squirreled away? An arrowhead stabbed his finger and he swore.
“Mind if I visit for a while?” Gina asked from the doorway.
Caught off guard, hoping she hadn’t heard his outburst, Drake fumbled the brittle arrowhead.
“I didn’t mean to startle you,” she said.
“Sure, come in. I love”—he stopped, rephrased—“enjoy your company.” He hoped he hadn’t sounded too enthusiastic, like the kind of dog that jumps up and down when it gets the least bit of attention.
She smiled brightly. “I enjoy your company too.”
His black mood lifted instantly. She was holding a small basket in her hands. “Work project?” he asked, pointing at the basket.
“My embroidery basket. Want to see what I’m doing?”
Of course he did. She pulled a chair over to a large bay window and Drake eased next to her. She lifted a small hoop and a mound of colorful thread from the basket. “I’m embroidering a lady’s hanky. Here in this corner, I’m creating a nosegay of purple lilacs. Do you know the Victorian language of flowers?”
He had no clue. He didn’t even know what a nosegay was, but he saw that the linen cloth was stretched across the hoop and a cluster of flowers in subtle shades of purple and lavender was taking shape with thread. “Flower language isn’t in my dictionary, but the lilacs you’re sewing look pretty cool.”
Gina smiled shyly. “Every flower, every color has a special meaning. It’s how men and women communicated their feelings in Victorian times.”
“Like texting? You know, making a few letters or numbers tell somebody something you want to say?”
Gina laughed. “I don’t speak texting. Embroidery passes the time for me, and I create something lovely. I never think of it as work.”
Living without a TV, computer or iPod, she had to do something in her spare time, Drake supposed.
She began her sewing, and Drake returned to his cataloging tasks, but every few minutes, he’d steal a look at her in the straight-backed chair. Her hair was like spun silver, so white blond that it sparkled. Her face was a study in concentration. Her presence wasn’t one bit distracting, as he’d thought it would be.
He said, “I liked the music you were playing yesterday.”
“Really?” Her eyes lit up.
“So are you going after a music career?”
Gina laughed. “Goodness no. I’m not good enough.”
“I think you are.”
“You’re kind.” She nodded gratefully in his direction.
“So what do you want to do? You know, when you finish school.”
“I would love to be a dancer, a ballerina.”
“You dance too?” His mother watched some show featuring dancers, and they made it look so easy and fluid. For normal people, dancing might be easy. It was something he could never do.
“I have a studio on the third floor, in the attic,” she said, pointing up. “Father built it for me, one giant room with a mirrored wall and a practice barre. It’s very nice.”
“Will you be a dancer, then?”
“Not likely. I’ll probably be a schoolteacher. Like Father, except I’ll teach young children. How about you?” she asked. “What are your dreams?”
To have a girl in my life like you, he thought. “Architect,” he said.
“Like Frank Lloyd Wright?”
“That is a dream.” He grinned.
“I have an idea,” Gina said as the clock in the hall chimed noon. “It looks cloudy outside. We’ll have a picnic in my dance studio.”
His smile froze. Lunch with her would be awesome, but climbing to the attic level would be difficult for him. He didn’t want her to see him struggle.
She jammed her needlework into her basket and stood. “I’ll get some sandwiches and fruit together. You can go up and wait for me. Tip-top room.” She hurried away.
He silently blessed her. She had given him time to climb the stairs at his own awkward pace. He went into the hall, past the old clock, its hands pointing to high noon, and started up the three flights of stairs.
The attic was huge, with wide-plank oak flooring, a floor-to-ceiling mirror along one wall, windows along another and a small sofa and table tucked in a corner of the room—where Gina could rest, he figured. The table was really a boxy piece of furniture with a lid and a small brass plate that read VICTOR THE TALKING MACHINE. He lifted the lid, saw that it held a turntable and a shiny black disc. A record? He’d seen DJs on MTV playing vinyl in hip-hop contests, but this disc didn’t look quite like those records. There was a windup arm on the machine, so he turned it, set the small metal arm on the record and heard music. The sound was awful, tinny and quivery. Primitive. Why was her father so old-fashioned? Geez, why didn’t he give Gina a decent machine for her music?
Drake was still fiddling with the machine when Gina popped into the room carrying a tray. “Lunch!” She glided across the floor and placed the tray on the floor in front of the sofa.
“Looks great,” he said, eying the thick meat sandwiches. His stomach growled and they laughed in unison.
He sat beside her, picked up a sandwich and nodded toward the machine. “Where did you get that antique?”
“Daddy borrowed it from a friend. For me. So I can have music when I dance.”
The music warbled as the windup slowed. “They make better machines, you know.”
“No electricity up here,” she said. “See? Candles.”
Sure enough, at the base of the walls along the floor were rows of candles, most partly burned. Antiques could be valuable, and Gina didn’t seem to care if the music machine was ancient. Dennison liked old things, so who was Drake to bad-mouth Dennison’s old stuff?
“Food’s good,” he said, getting off the music topic. She smiled, making his heart trip into double time. How could she do that with just a smile?
Her gaze drifted to the windows and her smile faded. “A storm’s coming,” she said, putting down her food and standing. “I hate storms.”
He followed her gaze, saw black clouds filling the sky. He boosted himself up. “It’s just rain.”
She shook her head and looked nervous. “Thunder and lightning scare me. Always.”
He saw that she was serious. Just then loud thunder broke the silence. She clapped her hands over her ears and ducked against his chest. Instinctively his arm went around her. “It can’t hurt you in here.” Her body felt warm and soft.
Another roll of thunder made her cower, and he hugged her more tightly. He was thanking the heavens for the storm, for allowing him to hold her, when Dennison’s voice roared, “Gina! Where are you?”
She broke away and rushed to the door. “In the studio. Drake’s with me.”
Drake closed his eyes, certain that the professor would fire him for sure. He was way out of his work zone, alone with Gina, and all without her dad’s knowledge. He was dead meat.
Gina grabbed his hand. “Come downstairs.” Her eyes were wide with fright.
He had no choice, so he hobbled along behind her, holding the banister and moving as quickly as his leg would allow him. Dennison took Gina into his arms at the bottom of the stairs. The clock chimed five. Drake glared at it. No way they could have been upstairs for five hours!
Dennison looked at him. “You’d better leav
e,” he said.
Drake figured he was being fired. “I—I didn’t mean to take so long—”
Dennison waved him off. “Just go while you can. The road will be dangerous.”
Drake nodded, weak with relief. He wasn’t being fired. “I—I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Once outside, he turned to look at the house through the curtain of water. An undulating wave seemed to make the grand house quiver from top to bottom, as if the stones were shifting and the image was moving. Impossible. He blinked hard, wiped the rain from his face, certain his eyes were playing tricks on him. In seconds the illusion ceased and the image held firm. Soaked to the skin, Drake hurried to his car, where he sat dripping on the upholstery and wondering what in the world he’d just seen.
5
“Thank heaven you’re home,” Drake’s mom said when he came in the door. “I was worried about you driving in the storm.”
He came into the kitchen only to see her sitting at the counter with a woman he’d never met. The other woman was as round as a muffin.
“This is Lois. We work together.”
Drake nodded and Lois began to explain. “Power went out at the office around noon, and after an hour in the dark with computers down, the boss told us to go home. When I tried to start my car, the battery was dead, so Connie brought me home with her.” Lois grinned gratefully at Drake’s mother. “My hubby will come get me when the rain lets up.”
“Want some coffee?” his mother asked. “Fresh pot.”
“Sure.” He limped to the counter, certain that Lois was watching him, maybe feeling pity for him. As he poured his coffee, he caught sight of the time on the coffee machine. Three-thirty. How could that be? He’d left the Dennison’s place after five. The clock at the old house was nutso. Right sometimes, wrong sometimes.
Lois said, “Connie tells me you’re working for a Harvard professor who lives up on Sandstone.”
“That’s right.”
“I keep trying to visualize the house, but I can’t. Harold and I used to drive all around up there looking at the fine homes. The houses are like palaces, just gorgeous. I can’t quite get a bead on the place where you’re working.”