The little girl runs up and takes her father’s hand. She begs yet again to go to the watchmaker’s shop. She is fascinated by clocks—grandfather, old wrist pieces, but most of all, the cuckoo.  With his free left hand, her father reaches into his pocket for a bar of Swiss chocolate. He breaks two squares, one for the little girl with the same swampy-green colored eyes as his wife, and one for him.
        They are in Lausanne, Switzerland, where the family has been living for the last five months. He is a scientist and he’s here on a rotation from New Jersey, where he works in the lab of a Swiss company. They have five and a half months to go before his rotation ends.
    
During the day while Jack works, his wife, Christine, takes Adelaide skiing on the bunny slope at the edge of the Alps. Adelaide loves to whish, whish down the mountain and, as Jack explains it, she does it without fear because she’s five; so when she falls, there’s a short distance between her and the ground. So the second she’s off down the hill, she points her skis straight ahead, refusing to mimic her parents’ long figure-eights on the mountain. Her parents speculate maybe she’ll be a race car driver, a pilot or an artist, occupations built for the few among us born without apprehension.
        
When not skiing, Adelaide could be found slurping hot chocolate in a chalet or dressing up her doll in his wool lederhosen that matches the jumper they bought her on a weekend trip into Germany. Christine can be found chasing after her daughter who has spotted a horse–clippity-clop–on the cobblestone. Clydesdales are her favorite. One day she even saw one with velvet bows.
    
For Christine and Jack, this will be the happiest time they will ever have. And strangely, they both seem to know it. Even in the moment, they know they’ll return to this time for the rest of their lives. They’re in their early thirties, she a year and a half older than him. She’s a painter, not the fearless kind she hopes her daughter will be, but rather the kind who goes into illustration, mostly scholarly texts and some nursery books. She feels she has yet to find her medium.
    
Adelaide is all pink cheeks and freckles today. She is marching through the snow a few feet from her father as they make their way to the clockmaker’s shop. Now she is squatting and stuffing baby pinecones into her pockets. As he looks at her, her father feels something like a small fissure or a tear in his heart, but then his wife’s hand appears gently on the small of his back. She leans in with her sweet licorice mouth—she can’t get enough of the fresh black licorice they make in town—and she whispers into his ear: “Not that…don’t go there.”
        Jack pulls himself back. “Adelaide!” he calls, and she comes galloping pony-style toward him. A small pine cone falls from her pocket.  Jack thinks about telling her, but she’s got a nice stride going and she has a tendency to trip sometimes when stopping short. Two clumsy parents. Who knew there was such a gene?
        A moment later they step into the clockmaker’s shop.  Jack holds open the massive oak door for his daughter, who is already racing toward the clockmaker—a young man wearing a huge peace-sign t-shirt.
        “Guten tag,” the young clockmaker shouts above the donging of the huge grandfather clock behind him.  Jack finds the young man’s demeanor incongruous with the quaint traditional surroundings, and, at that moment, from a door in the far corner, an old man enters the shop. He has a full white beard, a monocle and, what is that–Christine sniffs.  “A pipe?” she says, turning to Jack. “That’s a little cliché.” She raises her eyebrows.  “Can’t we just leave him as he is?  It was the Sixties for Christ sake, and that kid was just like that, way into Janice Joplin.”
        A small record player blares from behind the counter: “Take another little piece of my heart now, baby.”
        Jack glances up at the street-level window to see Adelaide outside chasing after a dragonfly.  He takes his wife’s hand and they exit the shop. But not before Christine stops to dip her hand into the crystal dish of mints next to the door; they taste a little like black licorice, or at least the sweet bit in the middle. She pops one into her mouth and decides they’ll have to make a stop before lunch at the confectioner for the black licorice with the sugary pink middle that goes so nicely with the salted outer bit, strong as Absinthe.
       
In the morning, Christine hears the gong and hoot of the cuckoo clock. As the bell sounds, the little deer jump up and down, one after the other, followed by music that reminds Christine of childhood jewelry boxes that you opened and the little ballerina spun round and round. It takes her a minute to register that what she’s hearing is indeed that old cuckoo clock, with its little dancers spinning around in time with the music. It’s not the Zen alarm clock she ordered from the catalogue that she found in the changing room of her yoga studio. Its chime rings out like a soft gong at the end of a meditation session.  Christine’s eyes flutter open. The bright light streams through the window, and Adelaide’s face is right next to hers at the side of the bed.
        “I been waiting for you to get up,” Adelaide says. “Like ‘em?”  She points to her pigtails that she’s done up all by herself. Though the left blue satin ribbon is significantly higher than the right, Christine says nothing and Adelaide flashes a huge grin, with a gap where her two front teeth were until about a week ago. Her dad likes to kid her that if she eats more than a square a day of the dark bitter chocolate they both love, then the rest of her teeth will fall out, too, and she’ll only be able to eat the squishy pink bit in the middle of her mom’s licorice. Not one for sugary sweets, Adelaide replies with a throaty “Bleh…”   
        “They’re kinda crooked,” Adelaide states matter-of-factly, pointing to her ponytails.
        “You did a great job,” her mom says as Adelaide begins pulling at the fluffy goose down comforter.
        “Come on…” says Adelaide. “Get up…”  The comforter slips to the floor.  “Can we go to the zoo?”
     
Christine closes her eyes for a moment. It’s this day. At the zoo, Adelaide will see her first white tiger. This will spark a fetish that will replace baby dolls of all types, only to be rivaled by that Clydesdale, the one with the velvet bows, never to be seen again. White tigers, the sign at the zoo will explain, come along quite infrequently in the Bengal tiger population. Their coloring comes from a mutation: a recessive gene. Christine will often think of this day and what she read about the rare, white Bengal tiger. Two orange-striped tigers could have a litter of cubs, with only one being white. You never know what’s lying dormant in your genes when you step up to the craps table of mating.
    
Adelaide will return home with a stuffed white tiger and a belly full of Raclette, warm cheese- covered potatoes served with small gherkins or cornichon; she likes the French word for the little pickles that make her mouth pucker every time she says the word.
        “Cornichon,” she runs around repeating.  She’s learned quite a bit of French as well as German, with which she surprises her parents by announcing the names of things as they struggle at the grocery store or while studying the menu.
        Adelaide will go on to have an ear for language. At her parents’ suggestion, she will minor in both French and German, although she will find both a colossal waste of time; for by the end of their nine-month stint in Switzerland, she will converse fluidly in both. Her parents will cultivate this when they return east by choosing L’Académie Française for middle school till graduation. There will also be a series of tutors who will come for a year or so and then move on, marry, or just lose interest in tutoring the children of wealthy parents who, never having made it to an Ivy League themselves, would do anything or rather pay anything to give their offspring an advantage.
        Not that Jack and Christine were particularly
    
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 wealthy, but they were pragmatic, choosing to have only one child to whom they would give every opportunity they could afford. They liked to think of themselves as having picked up some of the Swiss sensibility, their resources going to education and travel—the two luxuries they deemed worthy of spending on.  So they drove old Volvos, but were proud that their ten-year old daughter had seen the pyramids, most of the capitals of Western Europe, and had been on a low-budget safari in Africa where, although there weren’t any tigers, there were plenty of baby elephants to keep her attention.
    
It was good that they went when they did, Jack and Christine often said.  Adelaide was then still interested in being seen with her parents. In fact, one day in Paris she spent a good half day in the Louvre wandering around with her mom. And when she’d disappeared, after their lunch in the fancy café with the white table cloths, where her mom had poured her a demitasse of crisp Sancerre, Christine finally found her sitting cross-legged in front of the La Lorraine pirate seascape paintings.  Adelaide couldn’t explain later at dinner when her father asked her why she liked them so much. She just did.  Something about the ship sailing off toward the tangerine-streaked sunset, sailing toward adventure. She never wanted to be like the women in the painting, who stood wrapped up in tasseled shawls in which they waited on the shore. She wanted to be the pirate sailing off to foreign seas, to sun-scorched lands.
        So it wasn’t a surprise that she ended up being an art-history major and fulfilling her parents’ dream when she was accepted for early admittance to Dartmouth.
    
The Zen alarm clock chimes out one soft gong and Christine squeezes her eyes tight for one more minute, although she knows she has five more, the grace period before the next gong goes off. She rolls over. Jack is already awake and staring at her.
        He smiles. “I can almost taste the chocolate. How come they can never make it as bitter in this country?”
        Christine yawns and stretches her right arm up into mid air. Jack stretches his up alongside and intertwines his fingers with hers. She reaches over and jiggles the skin that hangs loosely from her upper arm. “Like chicken fat,” she says.
        “Oh, will you stop.” Jack pushes himself up to sitting. “You look great.”
        “How do you know? You can’t see anything.” She reaches over and grabs his eyeglasses from her nightstand where she’d set them after watching him fall asleep.
    
It was just habit by now, this watching him fall asleep. She needed to watch to make sure when the time was right. Usually right after the twitching began.  Apparently his whole family did it—as their bodies relaxed—muscles shooting off like little firing squads. It looked like small random currents of electricity sparked through his body, making a leg jump, his lips purse, a wrist jerk to the right, or fingers fluttering in mid-air for a moment.
        The ability began early in their marriage, with a dream. Both found themselves in a bad section of some nameless city. She was trapped in a subway, unable to locate the train to bring her home. He was wandering around crime-filled streets, where he’d happened upon a body with a knife in his chest. Soon their dreams were in sync, to the point that they could recount exactly, talking over the other one (well, usually Christine talking over Jack), as she finished the dream he was describing.
        It was a slow progression. It didn’t happen at once. Then one day, she found herself in his dream and yet awake inside of it. However, it wasn’t evident at first when she saw Jack bounding toward her, his feet crunching the frozen rain that had pounded the wooden shutters of their little Swiss apartment the night before. He was wearing the thick, sheepskin coat that she’d bought him in a flea market in Manhattan before they’d left for Switzerland. “I need the thickest piece of animal skin you got,” she’d told the vendor and, from the back of his van, he’d pulled this cream coat that was so heavy that the little man had trouble wielding it. She didn’t realize, until she saw Adelaide, who appeared suddenly on his shoulders. She was younger, maybe three, and still had the dimpled hands Jack loved to kiss. The Adelaide of Christine’s dreams was the lopsided ponytail-wearing five-year old, with ears perked for her favorite sound: Clippity-clop on cobblestone.
        When they reached her, he leaned in to give Christine a kiss and, for some reason that she couldn’t really explain, Christine didn’t want Adelaide to hear and so she’d whispered: “This is your dream.” She was so close that she could feel the cold radiating from his exposed ears. “I’m here in your dream.”
   
And so it went on, not frequently but every so often. In fact, it had been quite some time before that night in November. For a long time, they hadn’t shared a dream because Christine figured they were probably too mentally exhausted.  Adelaide, always a moody child as a teenager, had been diagnosed with schizophrenia.
        “No, I don’t want to,” Adelaide had said when they’d driven up in Jack’s Volvo station wagon, cleaned out and ready to load her up and bring her home. “But I have my friends.  Just let me finish this term and then…okay….”
        It was the second semester of her sophomore year and, even though there were bouts of missing classes, she’d managed somehow to keep her grades up, and made the Dean’s List. A fact that her Italian Renaissance art professor would later say was nothing short of the testimony of her will. That she got from her father, Christine would think. But, as for the other thing, the gene that had been lying dormant, for that Adelaide could thank her mother’s family. It had been another reason, albeit a secret one, for her wanting only one child. She had figured that at the craps table, the fewer times you throw the dice, the less you could strike out.
    
It had been a while since they’d both awakened consciously to a shared dream, until that night in November, the eighteenth. It was a Tuesday when they received a phone call from the emergency room doctor in Hanover.  Adelaide had jumped from the top floor of the library. The death was instant and without suffering.
        What was lovely about the dream is that in it they never aged. They made love as passionate thirty-year olds, and it didn’t much matter that they awakened into sagging skin. Christine laughed at her wrinkles because her husband made love to her next to fires in Swiss chalets, kissed her on the tops of ski lifts and rowed her across Lake Maggiore, with a bottle of Brandy to keep them warm and little sandwiches that they ate by moonlight, and pretended they were characters in a Hemingway novel. “This is what heaven on Earth must be,” Christine often said.  
        “Or hell,” countered Jack. “Depends on how you look at. No matter where I go, a few days away on business, I’m never apart from you…at least in the night.”  
       
Then there was Adelaide: At the zoo, Adelaide listening intensely as her mother read the placard next to the tigers; Adelaide with her first camera, snapping pictures of baby elephants; and always the worst part, Adelaide walking away from them into a snow-filled forest. Adelaide dragging that raggedy tiger—the white one—caused by a rare but beautiful mutation.
        And then there was Adelaide lifting a dimpled hand, waving goodbye.
    
    
                       About the Author
     
        Alisha Davlin received her M.F.A. in creative writing from New York University.  Her poetry has been published in Ginosko.  She is working on a humorous autobiographical novel about growing up in Louisiana.  She teaches at a private high school in New Jersey where she lives with her fiancé and her dog Lulu.