Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

The Tin Man-August 1920

The house is deliciously silent as the first rays of light work their way through the gap in her curtains. Clara tosses off her sheets and stretches, happy in the knowledge she's the first one awake. Staying with Margaret and the children has been quite a lot better than she thought it would be (thank god her exile from the Boardwalk occurred post-Lucy; she would have murdered her father's previous love if they had been forced to cohabitate).

She's never been so close to normal family life since she was a little girl. However, since age eight, home has been a floor of a hotel she's had mainly to herself. Spending almost all her time in a three-bedroom house with two children, another woman, often her father, and usually Richard takes some adjustment. She can't write all night or sleep until she has an engagement, because there are so many other people and their schedules going on around her. She has to eat meals when they are prepared, and not when she thinks to call down for something. It's never quiet. Some child is always making noise, her father is loudly playing happy families, or Margaret is cleaning.

She never knew how much she relished silence.

What's saving her from slowly losing her mind is having Richard around. He's as out of place in this happy tableau of her father's as she is. She's growing dependent, she knows, on being able to catch his eye or talk to him when she's overwhelmed. She sighs. Laying there, she considers taking a full inventory of her feelings (which are confused at best) but instead decides to slip downstairs before anyone else is up.

As she pulls her kimono over her new pajamas (so modern, Madame Jeunet told her when she picked them out), she hears little feet going down the stairs. At first, she doesn't think anything about it, and slowly exits her room on her way to the stairs.

Her foot is on the top stair when the screaming starts, giving her a birds-eye view of the catastrophe as it unfolds. Emily, Margaret's four-year-old, walks up to Richard, who is asleep on the sofa (and when Clara thinks about this later, she will always start by thinking about how adorable he looked sleeping, and she will judge herself harshly for how ridiculous she is). Richard wakes and instinctively reaches towards the screaming child to help her.

The moment when he realizes he's the thing Emily's screaming at is so horrifying that Clara will think of it for years.

"It's okay, Emily," Clara says as she all but leaps off the bottom stair into the living room, but steps around the child. Her father and Margaret are behind her on the stairs. She only has one play.

"It's okay," Clara keeps repeating in the most soothing voice she's capable of as she positions herself between Richard, who is desperately trying to put his mask on, and her father, whom she doesn't trust to be kind, and Margaret, who doesn't look at Richard even when he has the mask on.

"What the hell happened?" Nucky thunders from the foyer.

"It's my fault," Clara says. "I was moving around in my room. I must have woken Emily up, and when she came downstairs, she forgot Richard was here."

Nucky rolled his eyes." That's certainly one interpretation."

"It's not comfortable to sleep with the mask on," Richard says, but his voice is both softer and more gravelly than usual.

"Look, we're all on edge here," Nucky says as he and Margaret take the still screaming child back upstairs.

"I'm sorry," Richard says softly. Clara doesn't move until she hears her father shut the bedroom door.

Clara sits on the coffee table. Richard's hands are moving back and forth on his knees, and she places her hands on top of his. He doesn't look up at her.