I start to count on my fingers. “Paul, Matt, Logan, Sam and Pete, in order of age. Sam and Pete are twins, although Sam swears he’s eight minutes older.”
I walk over to where Granddad started on Daniel’s watch. “Is this yours?” I ask, as I pick up my glasses and sit down on the stool. I bend Granddad’s light toward the watch. I look into it, and, although I’ve never worked on one of these, I might be able to fix it.
“It was my grandfather’s.”
I look up at him. “What happened to it?”
He looks everywhere but at me. “There was an explosion. In Afghanistan.”
“Was that where you were injured?” I ask, but my mind is already on the inner workings of the clock.
“Yeah,” he says and he blows out a breath.
“So your watch hasn’t worked since the blast?” I ask. I’m trying to figure out what could be the matter. Because the gears turn when I manually work them.
“Nothing has worked for me since the blast,” he says. His voice is suddenly heavy and I look up.
“What do you mean?”
“The clock,” he goes on to clarify, but I’m pretty sure he just meant life. “It hasn’t worked since.”
“Mm hmm,” I hum. I start to remove the gears and pieces and lay them on the table in front of me.
“Are you sure you should be doing that?” he asks. He walks close to me and pulls up a stool. He’s fidgety, and he makes me a little nervous now that he’s close to me. But Granddad and Pete are right upstairs.
I look up at him. “You do want it fixed, right?” I ask.
He nods. “More than anything.” He heaves a sigh. “I feel like time stood still that day, and it never started back up.”
I nod. But I can’t look at him. He’s telling me more than he wants to, and I’m afraid he’ll stop if he realizes how closely I’m listening. “Did you lose any friends?” I keep working on the watch, removing the parts piece by piece.
“I lost all my men.” His voice gets thick and he coughs to clear his throat. “Everyone. I lost everyone and everything.”
“Where’s your family?” I ask.
I feel the warm breeze of his heavy exhale. “All gone.”
I finally look up. “I’m sorry.”
He nods. He gets up and starts to wander around the shop. An hour later, I’ve put his watch back together and I wind it up. It should work. But it just doesn’t. And I don’t know why. I heave a sigh.
“What’s wrong?” he asks from directly behind me. I feel the heat of his breath on the back of my neck, and the hair on my arms stands up.
“Nothing,” I say and I start to take it apart again. I look over my shoulder at him. “Are you in a hurry?”
He shrugs and settles down beside me. He picks up a pen and starts to spin it on the tabletop. I look over at him. “Sorry,” he says sheepishly, and he stops the pen from spinning with a slap of his hand. “So, you live here?” he asks. “In New York? All the time?”
I nod. And I keep disassembling his watch. Watches are made on a series of gears, even watches this old. I make sure each one works as I put it back in place. There are no snags. No broken gears. No missing parts. Nothing was jarred loose in the blast. “Yep,” I say quickly.
“Have you always lived here?” he asks.
“No,” I grunt. “I moved here when my grandmother got sick. Before that, I was in Florida.”
“Do you like it here?” he asks.
I shrug. “One place is as good as another.”
“Why aren’t you married?” he asks.
I look up. “What makes you think I’m not?”
He grins, but it doesn’t quite meet his eyes. “Because any man in his right mind wouldn’t let you out of his sight.”
I jerk my head up. He gets up and starts to wander around again, like he didn’t just say something profound. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I mumble.
He cups his hand around his ear and leans toward me. He grins. “What was that?” he asks.
“Never mind.” My gaze drops to his lips. He licks his full upper lip, and I have to force myself to look away.
“Something wrong?” he asks. His eyes drop to my mouth and he walks closer to me. Is he thinking about kissing me?
I look down at the watch. I shrug out of my sweater, because it’s suddenly hot in here. “No,” I say.
I look at the parts of his watch, which are scattered all over my table. The door to the upstairs opens and Pete walks down. Half way, he slows down, and looks from me to Daniel and back. “What did I miss?” He grins.
“Shut up,” I grumble.
“Oh,” he breathes. He nods his head and punches my shoulder as he walks by me. I growl at him and he laughs.
“How’s Nan?” I ask. “Still upset?”
“Only that you were worked up over it,” he says. He ruffles my hair with his big bear paw. “Don’t be so hard on yourself,” he says quietly. “Could have happened to anyone.”
I nod, biting my lower lip to keep from sobbing. Nan has gone downhill so fast. She keeps having these mini-strokes that make her weaker and weaker. There’s not much else we can do for her, except wait and make sure she’s comfortable.
“She was talking about some old clock,” Pete says. He picks up a bag of chips I was eating earlier and helps himself.
I smile. Granddad bought her a funny little clock made in Germany when they first got married. But they sold it when times were lean, about thirty years ago. Granddad has been scouring the internet to find another one. “He’ll never find another clock like that, not one that he can afford. They make crappy knock offs, but he doesn’t want crap. He wants the real thing for her. Or nothing.”
“What kind of clock?” Daniel asks.
“It was a German clock, made with a Black Forest design, and when the hour chimed, dancers came out of the clock and slid back and forth along the front.” I shrug my shoulders. “That’s all I remember about it.”
“Is it rare?” Pete asks.
I nod. “And too expensive for Granddad to buy another.” I would buy one today, if I could find one and had enough money. “Nan used to make up love stories about what the people did when they went into the house.” I lift my brows at the men. “Apparently, there was a lot of kissing that went on inside that Black Forest house.”
Nan and Granddad have always had this crazy kind of passion and I sometimes wonder if I’ll ever have that again. Maybe I’m waiting for a love like theirs. I don’t know. I don’t need to elaborate, because Pete’s already grinning.
“Henry was a horn dog,” he sings playfully.
I shake my head, but I secretly don’t want to scold him. “She started to mention it again a few weeks ago. I know he wants to give her one, but it’s just not going to happen.”
Pete’s phone chirps from his pocket and he grins and types something really quickly. He looks up. “Reagan’s going to lock me out if I don’t get home soon.”
I laugh. “You better hurry.”
“She loves me,” he says. And he gets this happy look in his eye. Pete’s settled and happy, and I couldn’t be happier for him. He looks at me. “How much are we talking about with this clock?” he asks.
“Like more than a car,” I say. “Even for a broken one.”
He grimaces.
“Yeah, I know. I thought about buying one too.”
Daniel sticks out his hand. “Thanks for the help finding the shop,” he says to Pete.
“Hey, do you want to come over tomorrow night? You could go to the fireworks with us.”
Daniel shakes his head. “I have somewhere to be at midnight,” he says. “But thank you.”
Pete claps him on the shoulder, and then he hugs me way too tightly and leaves. I can hear him whistling as he goes up the sidewalk.
I snap the back onto Daniel’s watch and look up at him. “It still doesn’t work.”
His mouth flattens into a straight line. “I hoped someone could fix i
t before it’s too late.”
“Too late for what?” I ask.
“For me,” he says.
“It’s never too late for you, silly,” I tell him.
Daniel
A kernel of hope blooms within my chest. I haven’t felt hopeful in a really long time. I rub absently at the ache, because my heartbeat quickens. I’ve been dead inside for a really long time, ever since I woke up in the hospital without my leg, without my friends, and without a future. But suddenly, I feel like I’m going to pass out.
“Are you all right?” Faith asks. She gets up and comes toward me, and she reaches out one tentative hand to touch the side of my face. She looks into my eyes, and I want to fall into her and tell her all my problems.
“I’m fine,” I murmur, but I’m not. I’m not at all. “I have PTSD,” I say. “Really bad PTSD.”
“From the accident?” she asks. Her voice is soft, and I press my face into the palm of her hand. I nuzzle it like a kitten, and she smiles and lets me.
“From patrols. From killing people. From seeing dead people. From what my life turned into.”
She motions toward a sofa on the other side of the room, and I sit down on one end. She sits on the other, lifting her legs so that her feet are in the middle, and she pulls an afghan from the back of the couch to cover herself up. She tosses it over my lap too. My chest aches again, and I rub at the pain.
“What hurts?” she asks.
“Everything,” I say quietly. I never ever talk about this shit. Ever. But she’s asking me questions, and she’s not my commanding officer or that fucking shrink who wanted to medicate me until I didn’t feel anything. Until I forgot the things I saw. But I don’t want to forget them. I need to remember, because if I don’t remember their lives, who will? “Time stopped for me on that day,” I say. I drop my head into my hands and concentrate on breathing.
“Do you need a paper bag to breathe into?” she asks.
I chuckle. “Maybe in a minute.”
“Tell me about that day,” she says.
I shake my head. “I can’t talk about it.”
“Why not?” she whispers.
“Because it hurts to go back there,” I admit. I’d rather stay numb.
“They all died?” she asks softly.
I nod.
“How many were there?” She adjusts the blanket so that it touches more of me, and I feel her feet slide beneath my thigh. I smile. I like that. I like it way more than I should.
“There were ten of us,” I say.
“What were their names?”
My chest aches like a bitch now, and my throat hurts because I have a lump in it that I can’t swallow past. When I look over at her, her eyes shimmer with unshed tears. Fuck. I made her sad. “I’m so sorry,” I say. “I shouldn’t burden you with this.”
“Burden me,” she says, laughing lightly. It’s a tinkling noise, pleasant like wind chimes on a windy day on my grandma’s porch. “It’s not like I have anywhere else to be.”
I think back. I can still see their faces. I can see what they looked like before and after the explosion. And that’s what haunts me. “There was Jimmy. He was nineteen and he liked to play poker. That boy beat me every time we played.”
She lays the side of her face on the back of the couch and snuggles into the cushions. She yawns. “Who else?” she asks.
“Ron and Bobby and David and John and Bubbah. They were all from Tennessee and they met in Basic.”
“Bubbah?” She snorts.
“He had flaming red hair and his real name was Seamus O’Malley.”
“Bubbah sounds so much better.” She grins, and my chest aches some more.
“Alex was a pain in the ass. He would steal my shower shoes and hide them. He didn’t want to wear them. He just didn’t want me to be able to wear them, either.” I miss his pranks. “Jeff was my brother from another mother. I knew him the longest.”
“Two more?” she asks, holding up two fingers.
I nod. “Rex and Rick. They were like twins. They went everywhere together.”
She nods, her cheek rubbing the couch, and I wish her head were on my chest so I could feel it. I want the feel of her breath on me. Fuck.
“Rick survived the blast with me,” I blurt out.
She picks her head up. “I thought you said everyone died.”
“He was burned, a lot like me, but he picked me up when he realized my leg had been blown off and he carried me over his shoulder.” My gut’s churning and I think I might have to stop to go and throw up. But then she scoots closer to me, and lays her head on my shoulder. She has to pull her feet from under my thigh when she scoots close, so I lift them into my lap, and then I cover her up with the afghan. She settles against me. I can feel her heart beating through the side of her breast, which is pressed against my arm.
“What happened?” she whispers.
My voice cracks, and I struggle to continue. “He got us to safety, but just as we cleared the crossing, he was hit by sniper fire. He fell, and I tried to pick him up and drag him with me, but the medics ran over, and pulled me away. He died, they told me later.” He saved me and then he fucking died. He could have left me lying there. But he didn’t.
I feel wetness on my cheeks and I fucking hate it. Faith doesn’t look up at me. She just lies there and I feel her tears against my shoulder. “Fuck, I didn’t mean to make you cry,” I say. I tip her face up to mine and she looks into my eyes.
“What makes you keep going?” she asks. Her mouth is so close to mine that I can smell the chips she was eating earlier. I lick my lips. I want to kiss her. But I can’t start anything. My days are numbered after all.
“I don’t know that I can keep going,” I admit. “Some days are really hard.”
“How long did it take to learn to use that leg?” she asks. Her hand touches my thigh, and I tighten the muscle.
“A long time.”
She wipes her face on my sleeve and heaves a sigh. I know she saw my wet cheeks, and I don’t care. I don’t know why I don’t. I should. Because men don’t cry, right?
“Men do cry,” she whispers.
Shit. Did I say that out loud?
“If you say so,” I toss out flippantly. I wipe my face.
“Do you ever wonder why you survived?” she asks.
“Only every fucking day,” I grunt. I wasn’t worthy. I wasn’t good enough. It should have been someone else. I didn’t have a mother or a wife or even a girlfriend at home. I was alone, except for them.
“Do you believe in faith?” she asks.
I look down at her. “You mean like in God?”
She shakes her head. “Faith in the knowledge that there’s something bigger than you.” She holds up a finger to stop me when I blow out a breath. I don’t believe in faith or God or predestination or any of that bullshit. Not anymore. “I don’t mean faith that there’s some entity that’s in charge of your life. I mean faith that you are intrinsically connected to other people. That you are never alone, even on your most lonely day.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Imagine it like invisible threads. They connect you to people. Just like you were connected to your parents, until you didn’t have them any more. Then, when you disconnected from them, you still connected with others, like the men on your team. Your threads don’t get broken when you lose someone. You’re connected to that person and the memory of that person forever. But your strings multiply. You add to them, and the new connections become a part of you.”
She’s quiet for a second, and I don’t know what to say because I can see the picture she’s painting in my head, and it’s fucking beautiful. But it’s not real. My strings were cut, and they can’t connect with anyone. Not anymore. I’m so fucking tired of being alone. “Sorry, Faith, but I think that’s bullshit.”
She sits up and takes my face in her hands. “It’s not bullshit,” she says. “So shut the fuck up and connect with me, damn it.”
I shak
e my head and pull her hands from my face. “I don’t want any connections.”
“Yes, you do. Everyone longs for connections. Why do you think people have sex? One nighters? Because it’s a connection.” She snorts, and my God, it’s the prettiest noise I have ever heard. “Not that I want to have sex with you or anything,” she clarifies, but she’s smiling.
“You want to have sex with me,” I tease, because teasing is easier than forcing myself to feel something real.
“I don’t want anything with you unless you’re able to make a connection.” She sits up and tosses the blanket to the side. “You’re not broken, Daniel. You’re just healing. Once you’re healed, your strings will automatically search for connections again.” She stands up and puts her hands on her hips. “We crave connections, and when you give up on those connections, you may as well be dead.”
I am dead inside.
“You’re so fucking sad that I want to grab on to you and force you to come back to life, but you’re the only one who can do that, Daniel.” She gets up and steps away from me.
“Where are you going?” I ask. I want to catch her hand, thread my fingers through hers, and pull her into my lap so I can hold her. I want to breathe her in. I want to… I can’t. I just can’t.
“To work on your watch,” she says on a heavy sigh. I push to get up, but she shoves my shoulder. “Stay,” she says. “Take a break.” She covers me with the blanket, tucking it around me, taking more care than anyone has with me in a really long time.
“I just need for you to fix my watch, Faith,” I say.
She bites her lips together. “That’s not all you need, Daniel,” she says softly. She presses her lips to my forehead, her breath lingering there, and I feel a fucking sob building inside me. I push her back before it can come out.
“That’s enough,” I grunt.
“I know,” she says. “Thanks for telling me your story,” she says quietly. “I’m very sorry you survived.”
I know what she means. “So am I,” I say.
Faith
I watch him from where I’m sitting across the room, and he’s tormented by his own thoughts and reactions. I want to comfort him, but I don’t think there’s anything I can do for him right now. He settles into the sofa, and he looks so conflicted that I want to crawl in his lap and soften him. But I can’t. He wouldn’t accept it if I tried.