Will She Still Come When the Year Is Over?

The baby slept through the opening of the workshop.

Nora was asleep in her mother's arms when the clock repairer knocked at the workshop door, carrying the last of the clocks he had cleaned for tonight, wrapped in a tea towel.

Our cousin, rocking slowly from one foot to the other beside the bench, lifted a finger to her lips. The repairer stopped in the doorway and smiled, and set the clock down on the bench as gently as if it, too, might wake.

It was the evening of the anniversary, one year since the night our grandmother died in the hospital, with the night nurse beside her. The spring had come back the way a ferry comes back to the same pier, a little late, low in the water, carrying almost the same things as before. Our cousin had come that afternoon on the coastal bus with the baby, a bag of nappies and a cake in a tin. Our mother had taken the early train. I had come home from my shift at noon with a bag of rolls still warm from the oven, slept for two hours, and woken to the sound of a baby crying downstairs. The old house seemed to listen to it with surprise, every floorboard holding still.

When the baby was born in the winter, our cousin had sent photos almost every day, but she had kept the name for this visit. She wanted to say it in the house. So, standing in the doorway of the kitchen with her coat still on, she told us: Nora.

Nora was our grandmother's name.

I have not written it anywhere in these pages until now. All year it stayed in a drawer in me, like the clock key under the timetables, and I did not want to take it out for a single night of the year. Then a person who weighed less than a bag of flour arrived wearing it, and it was suddenly easy to say. Our mother said it first, quietly, to the baby. Then my brother. Then me.

We wound the clocks one by one.

After supper my brother went to the drawer and took out the key on its loop of string. He did not say anything. He just held it up, and everyone followed him into the workshop.

For a year most of the clocks on the long wall had stood at the times they stopped, each one at a different hour, like the clocks in a station showing the time in faraway places. Only the little brass carriage clock on the shelf over the bench and the few the repairer had mended were going. Over the last weeks he had cleaned and oiled the rest, and tonight they were waiting.

We took turns. Our mother wound the tall clock by the window, slowly, counting the turns under her breath. The repairer wound the two with the stiff springs, because he knew their tempers. My brother wound the little brass carriage clock, the one from my dream, and set its hands with one finger. I wound the rest.

Then the repairer reached in, one clock after another, and gave each pendulum a small push. The ticking started at one end of the wall and spread along it, uneven at first, the way passengers on a platform start to move when the doors open. For a while the clocks argued with each other. Then two of them fell almost into step, and then a third.

Our cousin stood at the back with Nora on her shoulder. The baby did not wake. She frowned once in her sleep at the first chime, and then her face smoothed out again, as if the noise were something she had always known.

The band played one song in the garage before supper.

Earlier, before supper, while the light was still in the sky, my brother's band came round to practice in the garage, as they have done all year. They did not practice. They set up quickly, without the usual arguing about cables, and played one song.

It was a slow one that my brother had written in the winter and never let them play in public. There are no words. The guitar carries the tune, and the drums come in late and very softly, brushes instead of sticks, like rain beginning on the roof of a bus shelter. We stood in the garden and listened through the open door. The neighbor came out of her house and stood by her hives to hear it.

When it was over, nobody clapped at first. Then our cousin did, carefully, so as not to wake the baby, and everyone else joined in.

My brother's friend was packing her case afterwards when I brought out a plate of rolls. She told me, without my asking, that she had dreamed of her father the week before. He had been standing at the back of a concert hall again, she said, and this time he had clapped in the right places. "I think he's learning," she said, and laughed, and snapped the case shut.

I watched her cross the street to the bus stop with the case bumping against her leg. The evening bus came almost at once, and she climbed on without looking back, the way you do when you know the route by heart.

The neighbor told her bees about the baby.

At about nine there was a tap at the garden door. The neighbor who keeps bees was standing in the half-dark with a jar of honey in each hand. The bees had made their first spring flights that week, she said, and she had taken a small comb from the oldest hive.

She looked at Nora for a long time. Then she said she had already told the bees.

There is an old custom, in parts of Europe, of telling the bees the news of a household: a birth, a wedding, a death. People would knock on the hive and speak to it quietly, so that the bees would not feel left out and fly away. Our neighbor has done it all her life. A year ago, she said, she had gone out in the dark and told them about our grandmother. Tonight she had told them about the baby, and the name.

"They took it very calmly," she said. "Bees always do."

My brother has found a job for the summer.

Later, while the grown-ups talked in the kitchen, my brother told me his news. He was still seventeen, still taller than me by a head, still carrying his drumsticks in his back pocket as if he might need them at any moment.

The bicycle hire by the harbor had taken him on for the summer. He would start the day after his last exam. He would fix chains and brakes and punctures, adjust saddles for tourists, and close up the shed at the end of each day when the evening ferry blew its horn.

"I showed them I could true a wheel," he said. "The man watched me do it and just said, fine, start in July."

He had already ridden the old bicycle down to the harbor twice to look at the shed. He described it to me as carefully as a timetable: the rack of rental bikes along the sea wall, the workbench under a tin roof, the box of spare chains, the view of the ferry turning in the harbor mouth. He would be able to watch it come in every evening while he worked.

I thought of his dream in the snow, our grandmother spinning a bicycle wheel at the window and handing it to him. I did not say anything about it. He did not need me to.

A year ago tonight, I remembered, the night nurse had been folding a blanket at the foot of our grandmother's bed when she turned to us and told us to go home and try to sleep. She said it kindly, as if it were part of the care. We did not sleep much that night. But I have thought of her words on many nights since, and tonight I thought of them again, with the clocks going in the next room and a baby asleep upstairs.

Something to Try Tonight

This is for an anniversary, or for any evening when you want to keep someone close for a moment.

Switch on one small lamp and turn off the others. Sit somewhere comfortable, and say the person's name aloud once, in an ordinary voice, the way you would say it if they had just come into the room.

Then tell one memory of them in three sentences: where they were, what they were doing with their hands, and one thing they said. Say it to someone beside you, or only to the lamp.

Breathe in slowly, breathe out a little longer, and turn the lamp off when you are ready.

My brother asked whether she would still come.

By eleven our cousin had gone up to the spare room with Nora, and our mother had fallen asleep in the armchair with her shoes still on. The repairer had gone home across the road. His lamp was out for once.

My brother and I sat at the kitchen table, where we had sat on so many of these nights. Through the open workshop door we could hear the clocks, fifteen or more of them, each with its own small voice.

"Now that it's been a year," he said, "will she stop coming? In dreams, I mean. Is there a rule about it?"

I told him there is no rule. Grief does not run on a fixed timetable with a last stop at the end of the first year. Many people go on dreaming of someone they lost for years, sometimes often and sometimes hardly at all, and most describe those dreams as a comfort. The dreams change, the way his friend's dreams of her father changed as she grew. Some come less. Some come at strange moments, on a long bus ride or the night before something new.

"Like the night before my first day at the bike shed," he said.

"Maybe," I said. "Or maybe on some ordinary Tuesday, for no reason at all."

He thought about that. Then he asked me for a story, the way he had on the first night, sitting on the stairs a year ago. He said I had told him old stories from every corner of the world, and he wanted one more. But he wanted mine this time.

Tonight's Story

So I told him a story that I had been making up, piece by piece, on my walks to the bakery all through the winter.

Once there was a woman who kept the timetable for the night buses. Not the buses you ride in the daytime, but the ones that run only while people are asleep. She worked in a small office above a depot, with a window looking out over the parked buses, and every evening she wrote the timetable for that night by hand.

The night buses did not carry passengers in the usual way. They carried memories. Each bus set off from the depot with a few things on board: a voice, a coat, a way of laughing, a particular cup of tea. Then it drove through the sleeping town and stopped at houses where someone had been missing someone. At each stop it let off one small thing, very quietly, and drove on.

The woman never chose what went on the buses. That came from the sleepers themselves. All she did was keep the timetable in order, oil the doors, check the tires, and make sure no bus left without its lights on.

She did this work for many years, and she was very good at it. Then, one spring, she grew too old to climb the stairs to the office. She did not mind. She had always wanted to ride the night buses herself, instead of only writing down when they ran.

So she went down to the depot for the last time and gave the timetable to a girl who had been sweeping the yard, and to the girl's younger brother, who had been taking a bus engine apart without permission. "You'll need to keep it now," she said. "It isn't hard. You only have to remember the routes."

Then she climbed onto the last bus of the night, sat by the window, and rode out through the sleeping streets.

And the two of them kept the timetable. Some nights they wrote very little. Some nights the page was full. At first they got the routes wrong and sent two buses down the same narrow street. Slowly they learned which roads flooded in autumn, which bridges were closed for repairs, and which corners the old drivers liked to take slowly. They never knew for certain which houses the buses stopped at, or what was left on each doorstep. But every night they switched on the lights in the little office, and every night, somewhere in the town, a bus went by with its windows glowing, and the woman inside it was looking out.

The clocks kept ticking after everyone was asleep.

My brother did not say anything for a while when I finished. He turned the clock key over on the table, the string wound around his fingers.

Then he stood up, put the key back in the drawer under the timetables, and went to the workshop door. He stood there in the half-light, listening.

I went to stand beside him. In the workshop the streetlamp threw the shadow of the window frame across the wall of clocks, and every pendulum moved through it, left and right, like the wipers of a long-distance coach driving on through the night with all its passengers asleep. The little brass clock on the shelf was the loudest, a bright small voice under all the others.

Upstairs, Nora gave one small cry and was quiet again. Across the road a single night bus came down the hill, almost empty, and slowed at our stop, and the driver looked out at the dark shelter for a moment before he drove on.

"They're nearly all in step now," my brother said.