Father Time

My father used to work in the clock tower at the train station. Once a minute, he would erase the clock’s hand and redraw it one position to the right with a dry-erase marker. It took him almost half a minute to draw--the line was always straight as a bone. Once an hour, he would do so with the shorter hour hand, taking the full minute to make it perfect, knowing he’d have to stare at the flaws for the hour if he didn’t take his time. I can almost still hear the squeak of the marker against the face of the clock and smell the ink’s peculiar and pungent smell. I can almost see him smiling through the glass at me when my mom and I came to pick him up. He was always just finishing drawing the hand pointing to the heavens. “12 o’clock means time to go,” I’d say and he’d chuckle. No matter how tired he might’ve been, no matter how long the day (although all the days were exactly the same time in actuality, of course), he never failed to chuckle. “There’s my baby girl,” he would say and give me a hug. And it was true. I was a baby then. That was a long time ago. 

“Ok, time’s up. Pencil’s down. That concludes section one,” the test proctor’s snapped me back to the present. He was your standard gym teacher. Scruff, dad-bod, athletic clothes, coach voice--It’s his voice that had put me in my trance in the first place. He had said “5 minutes to go” and those four words were more than enough to trigger the memories that were always so forefront in my brain. Those four words were more than enough to rub salt in the wound and remind me that my dad was gone. 

I put my pencil down and followed the proctor’s other instructions mindlessly (“once you're finished, close your test booklet, place your answer booklet on top of your test booklet and take a 5 minutes break yada yada yada…” his voice morphed into that of an adult in Charlie Brown) knowing I hadn’t gotten a satisfactory score. How could I when I hadn’t answered any of the questions besides my name. And even that was too much. I had registered for SAT months before today and weeks before my dad’s disappearance. We don’t know where he went. We didn’t know he was going. The police are in no rush to do their job… they're actually being suspiciously slow. Almost like they were instructed not to solve the case. I suspect foul play… maybe a government cover-up? I wanted to present this theory to my mom but I knew it would only make her upset. 

Time stopped for my mom since he left. He was the time keeper. Without him, time simply didn’t go on. My mom wore the same clothes each day, layed in the same bed and pick at the same meal from her night stand drawer (a box of Ritz crackers, which I replenished every few days along with an assortment of other foods, some of nutritional value, none of which were ever touched except the Ritz and the occasional vitamin water). In the beginning, I let her lay, let her grieve. I sat next to her, and tried to comfort her out of her vacant stare. Then a week passed. “It’s time to get up, Momma.” But she didn’t do more than turn her head in my direction. Even then her eyes didn’t look at me but through me like I was a ghost. I gave her one more day. “Momma! I know you're worried, I’m worried, too. Right now the police need you. I need you.” And when that didn’t work: “Dad needs you. Dad needs you to find him.” But she stayed in bed with her vacant stare and her crackers and her dry, cracked lips stayed silent. 

I raised my hand when the proctor asked who needed to use the bathroom before the next section. I walked with a small limp, my right Converse slapping the tiled hallway a little heavier than the left. My parents noticed my slow development from a young age. The doctor said I was fine and sent me home telling my parents to simply “keep an eye on it.” Well, they did and their eyes watched my second birthday come and go without even a crawl. My parents were satisfied the second time leaving with leg braces and the recommendation of a physical therapist. “We told him so,” they gloated to each other. “He [the doctor] really doubted our own evaluation of our own child? It’s parent intuition!” they exclaimed. I was able to walk unassisted by age ten and started to sport a back brace. My scoliosis had caused my legs to be different lengths, but even once my spine was aligned and my feet touched the ground evenly, my knee caps were uneven, the right higher than left hence the limp. 

The rhythm my limp created, the uneven beat of my right foot on the floor was a wonderful foundation for the song of my thoughts. In theater class, we learned about tactics: a verb that describes the delivery of the line and why. We play this improv game in class called “Park Bench” where a student sits on the bench and another student has to approach the bench and use different tactics to try to get the sitter to leave. If they succeed, they in turn become the sitter and a third student comes to try to persuade them to leave the bench. To disgust, to scare, to anger, to distract. I tried to think of which tactic I could try later today to get my mom out of bed. 

I had reached the bathroom and splashed my face with water, letting it drip down my chin while I peered in the mirror at my reflection. I pulled at my skin, wishing I had put on even a little concealer just to lessen the deep purple bags that had formed under my eyes. While my mother couldn’t get out of bed, I wouldn’t get into mine. It was always the same dream. It was the squeak of a marker on glass but on full volume, defining and on an indefinite loop, the soundtrack for a still image of the hour hand pointed to 12 o’clock, pointed to the heavens. I shuddered to think of the possible symbolism of my dream. Perhaps my subconscious had begun to accept the very real possibility that my dad was dead. 

I shook the water from my hands and ripped a paper towel from the roll balancing on the sink’s edge. That’s when I noticed something small engraved into the bottom of the mirror. It read “C is always correct.” I’ve heard that saying before and the science behind it, how statistically, the probability of the answer being C is actually higher than any other letter just because of human error and humans’ attraction to 3’s. I sighed. If I wasn’t going to try, I might as well try a little harder in my not-trying. Instead of leaving the test blank, I vowed to answer c for each answer in the next section. At least a 30% was higher than a 0. 

Back in the testing room, I couldn’t shake this eerie feeling recalling my nightmare had brought me. Also, the engraving in the mirror… It's not that it was an unusual phrase, but it was unusual for me not to have seen it before. I was taking the SAT at my own high school and the bathroom I used was a bathroom I used almost daily on my way from English to lunch. I always stood at that sink and stared at my reflection too long before I pulled myself together enough to face the cafeteria. I was sure that I wouldn’t have missed it. Someone one must’ve engraved it between lunch yesterday and today’s test. I thought of the lettering, trying to compare it to the handwriting of people I know to nail down the culprit. The lettering was very clear, more like a print or a stamp than an engraving. It was too deep to have been engraved with an unwound paper clip like students often used to carve words into the plastic stall doors. It must have been done with a real chisel and hammer… with such force and precision… How did the mirror not shatter from the impact? How did the vandalist do it without drawing attention to themselves? The more my thoughts spiraled, the more the phrase seemed like a command… a warning even. 

“You have 35 minutes on the clock for section two. You may begin now. Good luck!” I ripped open my test booklet with a certain urgency to comply with the cryptic instructions. The second section of the test was grammar. Each question asked which word or phrase would best complete the sentence to increase the flow or main idea of the passage using proper convention. I read number 1. (a) He was (b) They are (c) It is (d) They were. Although the passage was in the past tense with a singular subject so (a) was the correct answer, I knew (c) was the answer I was interested in. I started to write out the words in choice c for each question in order on the top of my page. My hand shook more with each word or phrase I added to my message. Three things happened at once. 1) I finished the message 2) My shaking hands dropped my pencil 3) The fire alarm sounded and the sprinklers started to pour down on us. 

Someone had watched me go to that same bathroom and look in the same mirror everyday knowing I’d see the engraving. That someone now pulled the fire alarm for me knowing I finished decoding the message. The fire drill would explain my hysteria and allow me to run out of the building. 

I didn’t look back, not even to reread the message scrolled across my now soden paper pulp of a test. I smiled that someone had thought to set off the sprinklers, too, to destroy the message from any misintended eyes. A message meant only for my eyes. A message that read “It is not safe. Meet me at the clock tower at twelve. It’s time for us to go.”