The Watchmaker's Layover

The van died four kilometers from the station, which sounds close until you are carrying two boxes of survey equipment through snow up to your knees. I was twenty-eight years old, a widow for a year, and I stood on that frozen road in northern Sweden swearing at a diesel engine that had every right to be tired. It was minus nineteen. My gloves were wet. The radio worked, which was the only good news of the afternoon.

"So you're the delivery," the voice on the radio said. "Hold tight, I'll bring the snowcat."

That was Haley Simms, the meteorologist. She'd been at the station twenty years and she talked on the radio like she was telling you about weather you could already see. The snowcat showed up fifteen minutes later, orange and loud, with a woman in a fur hat at the controls.

"You Rana?"

"Yeah."

"Haley. Get in, you look like a popsicle." She threw my boxes in the back without ceremony and drove us the last stretch while the wind pushed at the cab. "Roads get like this in January. Van will keep. Radio said the tow can't come until Friday anyway."

"Friday? Today's Monday."

"Yep. Welcome to the plateau." She grinned at me and I decided I liked her. "You'll have the spare bunk. We've got one other guest right now, a jeweler, here fixing the old chronometer for us. Fair warning, she's got a parrot."

"A parrot. Here?"

"Rescued. His name is Vagn and he hates my boots. Don't take it personal."

The station was smaller than I expected. One long building, low, half buried in snow, with a short tower out back. Inside it smelled like coffee and diesel heat, which was honestly the best thing I had smelled in a week. Haley showed me the bunk room, pointed out the bathroom rules, and told me dinner was at six sharp.

"Sharp," she said again, like she meant it.

"Got it. Six sharp."

"Good."

I dumped my gear, changed my socks, and lay on the bunk for a while staring at the ceiling. I kept thinking about the van, then about the tow, then about the fact that I had four days of nothing to do on a frozen plateau. Four days. I hadn't had four days of nothing since my husband died. It sat in my chest in a strange way, half heavy and half light.

Dinner was reindeer stew and I ate too much of it. Haley talked about wind speeds the whole time and I let her, because it was nice to listen to someone who loved their job. Afterward she went back to the instruments and I wandered into the common room.

That's where I found the parrot first.

"HELLO," Vagn screamed from his cage in the corner. "HELLO. BAD BOOTS."

"Okay," I said to him.

"HELLO."

The cage sat next to a workbench that had been squeezed against the far wall, and behind the bench sat a woman with dark hair pulled back and a jeweler's loupe pushed up on her forehead. She was holding a small brass gear up to a lamp and turning it with a pair of tweezers. She didn't look up right away.

"Sorry," I said. "I didn't mean to interrupt. I'm Rana, the stranded driver."

"Sera." She set the gear down in a tray with about two hundred other parts and finally looked at me. She was thirty-three, maybe, with a small scar through one eyebrow. "You're the one whose van died."

"That's me."

"BAD BOOTS," Vagn offered.

"Not you," Sera said, pointing at me. "The boots are a different grudge. Sit, if you want. The chairs are terrible but the heat is free."

I sat. The chair was, in fact, terrible. The room was warm though, and the lamp on her bench made a little island of light in the middle of all that white dark outside the windows.

"So you fix watches," I said. Brilliant opening. I'd been driving alone for six hours and my conversation skills had died with the engine.

"Chronometers, specifically, this week." She picked the gear back up. "The station's old one stopped keeping time right, and when you're timing weather balloons, seconds matter more than you'd think. Haley's boss tracked me down. I had a gap in my winter anyway."

"How long have you been here?"

"Nine days. I finish Friday or Saturday, depending on how this gear behaves." She squinted at it. "It's behaving. That's suspicious."

I laughed before I could stop myself. She glanced up and there was the smallest smile there.

"BAD BOOTS," Vagn screamed, with feeling.

"Where did a jeweler get a parrot?" I asked.

"Long story, short version, a client of mine died and left him to me. He was in bad shape. Feathers everywhere. He's better now." She put the gear down again and stretched her fingers. "He's also loud, as you've noticed."

"HELLO."

"He's very committed to that word," I said.

"He learned it from a dock worker in Gothenburg, allegedly. The rest of his vocabulary is worse."

"VAGN IS A GOOD BOY," the parrot announced, in case anyone had doubts.

Sera shrugged at me like, see. I leaned back in the terrible chair and we just talked. About nothing, mostly. She asked what a survey driver does and I told her about driving instruments and drill crews across the tundra and eating gas station food for weeks. She asked if I liked it and I said I liked the driving part and the quiet part. She said the quiet part made sense, given where she'd found herself.

"You don't seem like the plateau type," I said.

"What's the plateau type?"

"I don't know. Quieter. You wave your tweezers around when you talk."

"I do not," she said, and then looked down and saw she was doing exactly that, and put them on the bench like they'd betrayed her. Vagn made a sound that I swear was a laugh.

Haley stuck her head in around nine to say lights out was whenever but the generator got cranky at ten, and then left, and Sera and I kept talking. I told her about the van, and the tow, and she told me about watch guys in Stockholm who all thought they were geniuses. It was easy. That was the part I noticed, sitting there. It was easy, and I couldn't remember the last time talking to a stranger had been easy.

Around ten I stood up to go to my bunk and my knees cracked like gunshots.

"Young and flexible, I see," Sera said.

"Twenty-eight and broken," I said.

"Thirty-three and also broken." She held up a hand, fingers spread. "Occupational. We can compare scars Friday."

"Is that an invitation?"

"BAD BOOTS," Vagn said.

"It's an observation," Sera said, and went back to her lamp.

I walked to my bunk room in the dark hallway and lay down and stared at the ceiling again. Four days. I turned that over. I hadn't been with anyone since before my husband got sick, over a year now, and the want had come back lately in a strange quiet form, mostly as a question I didn't say out loud. The question was about women. It had been about women since I was twenty-four and married and had filed it away in the drawer where you put things that don't fit your life.

Now my life had a four-day hole in it, on a plateau, next to a woman who waved her tweezers around.

"Absolutely not," I told the ceiling.

"HELLO," said Vagn, faintly, from the other end of the building. The walls were thin as paper.

I laughed into my pillow and went to sleep.

Tuesday the tow people called and said Friday, maybe Monday, and Haley repeated the news at breakfast like she was reading a nice forecast. I helped her haul ice off the steps in the morning, mostly to have something to do with my hands. In the afternoon I read three year-old magazines in the common room while Sera worked, and every so often she'd hold a part up to the light and mutter something, and Vagn would answer her, and I'd pretend to read.

"So," she said at one point, not looking up. "You're just going to sit there all week?"

"Apparently."

"Fine. But if you're going to sit there, you can hold the lamp steady. My hands shake after four hours."

I got up and held the lamp. Her hands did not shake, but she let me hold it anyway, and our shoulders were about a hand's width apart the whole afternoon, and I thought about that hand's width for the rest of the evening.

Wednesday morning Haley announced a storm front coming in from the coast, which meant the wind picked up all afternoon and the building hummed like a fridge. Sera had spread a cloth on the common room table and laid out her tools in rows, which apparently was what a jeweler did before a delicate job.

"Sit," she said, pointing at the chair across from her. "I need a second pair of hands and Haley has a weather balloon to murder."

"I thought I was holding a lamp."

"You've been promoted. I need you to hold a spring. The tiniest spring you have ever seen. If you sneeze, I lose a week."

"I don't sneeze," I said, and then spent the next hour terrified I would sneeze.

The job was soldering a pallet fork back onto the chronometer's escapement, and the spring was the size of an eyelash. She had me hold it with a pair of tweezers while she brought the soldering iron in from the side. My elbow was on the table and my wrist was locked and she kept saying things like "a millimeter left" and "good, hold, hold" in a voice she probably used with the parrot, and I held that spring so still I forgot to breathe for whole stretches.

"Perfect. You can breathe now."

I breathed. She took the spring out of the tweezers and her fingers brushed mine on the handoff, just the backs of two fingers across my knuckles, and something went up my arm like a wire had shorted. I don't think she noticed. I noticed. I noticed it for the rest of the night.

"HELLO," said Vagn, from his cage in the corner, watching us over the rim of his food dish.

"He does that," Sera said. "Says hello whenever the mood strikes."

"He's been saying it at me all day. I feel like I've made a friend."

"He likes you. He hated the last delivery driver. Bit her."

"Bad boots?"

"Worse. She honked the horn outside for ten minutes."

That night in my bunk I lay there and thought about two fingers across knuckles. It was ridiculous. I was twenty-eight years old and I was lying in a bunk bed in northern Sweden replaying an accidental hand brush like a note passed in class. But it hadn't felt accidental from my side, that was the truth. From my side it had felt like the first page of something.

Thursday evening, Sera asked me to help feed Vagn. This turned out to mean chopping apple and walnut while the parrot screamed at us from his cage, and then she let me put the dish through the little door myself, which I gather was an honor.

"He lets you do that," she said. "That took me three months."

"Maybe he likes me better."

"Impossible. But fine, possible." She leaned on the cage and Vagn climbed up her arm like a ladder and stood on her shoulder. "So, tomorrow's the day. The balance wheel comes back together and the chronometer either lives or dies."

"What's wrong with it, exactly? The balance wheel."

"It's cracked, and the hairspring was rusted into a pretzel. The balance wheel is the heart. It swings back and forth, back and forth, and that's what keeps the time. If the heart doesn't swing, the watch just sits there being a lump of brass." She held her hand flat and rocked it side to side. "I've been making him a new staff all week. Tiny little axle. If it's off by a hair, the whole thing wobbles and dies."

"You talk about it like a patient."

"It is a patient. Nineteen forty-something, built in Uppsala, been sitting in a cold tower for decades with nobody to love it." She glanced at me. "You'd know something about a stopped heart."