The Time Keepers

Chapter 18

CHAPTER 18

K ATIE G OLDEN HAD GROWN WEARY OF HER BEDROOM. T HE COTTON candy–pink walls, the canopied bed with its calico-flowered bedspread and matching rosebud curtains, all of it felt oppressively cloying to her in recent weeks. Now, with her second year of high school behind her, Katie found herself impatient for something more sophisticated. Her friend Abigail had recently convinced her mother to repaint her room a wisteria purple, and Katie kept dreaming of how much better her bedroom would be if hers was also updated. It just seemed so painfully childish now.

It wasn’t just her bedroom that she imagined reinvented, it was herself as well. She had promised herself that big changes were coming this summer. She already had enough foresight to go down to the beach club and apply for a lifeguard position. For as long as she could remember, she’d been obsessed with the older girls at the club who were lifeguards. Dressed in their fire engine–red swimsuits, they sat high on the wooden watchtower of the main pool with a whistle around their necks and an enviable pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses. How many times had she jealously watched those girls descend from their towers during their lunch break into the waiting arms of one of their male counterparts, the tan, shirtless boys who always seemed eager to offer an extra application of Bain de Soleil on their backs or bring them an icy Coke from the canteen. Popularity seemed suddenly within reach, and Katie couldn’t help but feel giddy with anticipation.

She just had to make sure her mother’s latest pity project didn’t cramp her carefully planned social ascent this summer.

For certain, Katie had grown tired of her parents’ incessant need to prove how good and selfless they were. Her mother had just found a Vietnamese orphan on the street, and within seconds of seeing the lost boy in the kitchen, Katie could sense her mother’s inclination to take the poor, wounded bird under her wing. It was all part of an annoying pattern. How many times had she heard her mother tell the story of seeing her dad with his bad leg at the Irish dance and falling in love with him despite their different backgrounds? What miracle would her mother try for next? Was she going to ask the nuns if she could bring B?o home and live with them? Didn’t her mother realize her father had already taken the prize when he found a wounded Vietnam vet missing nearly half his face at the veterans home where Grandpa Harry spent his last days?

It had taken Katie five years, two of which were in the hardest years of middle school, to get over being ridiculed at school for her father’s association with “the one-eyed monster,” as so many of her classmates liked to call Jack.

Jack hardly ever left the seclusion of his apartment or the safety of the store, and when he did venture outside, he always wore a large, hooded sweatshirt to shield his disfigured face from view. Shoulders slumped, the tips of his work boots protruding from frayed jeans, he shuffled along the pavement with his dog always by his side. He had been known to pick up a slice of pizza at Nino’s (Scottie Demarco reported to the cafeteria lunch table that the one-eyed monster liked root beer with his pizza) or at Kepler’s for his groceries (according to Daisy Ludlum, the one-eyed monster liked Ritz crackers, Welch’s grape jelly, and Kraft macaroni and cheese). The Gallo twins, whose parents owned the local laundromat, shared with great relish, as if they had the juiciest tidbits of information, that Jack came with his sack of laundry every other Sunday, and always two hours before it closed. It was also noted, by Lucy Crowley, the school’s token know-it-all, that Jack never lingered while his wash was in the machine or when it was in the dryer. Like clockwork, he arrived just as the buzzer went off.

And so it was established from the very beginning, when Jack first came to live above Katie’s father’s shop, that his movements around town were contained yet predictable. Still, he would come to have an almost-mythical aura with the children of Bellegrove. His dog, too, would come to be part of the myth. For the part Katie did not share with anyone at the cafeteria table was that she knew Jack walked Hendrix late each night, sometimes so late, it was almost morning. After he was done with all the repairs, he’d clip Hendrix’s leash onto his red leather collar and take the dog for a long walk, not through the empty streets of the town, but rather through the serpentine paths that bordered it. She had learned that small fact over dinner one night, and it was the image she held on to about Jack. Her private piece of the puzzle that she would never share with anyone, even if it would make her seem cool.

Once a month, since her father first brought him to Bellegrove, her mom invited Jack to Sunday dinner. Jack always brought Hendrix with him. The dog, at least, was a welcome distraction, as it had been hard at first not to stare at Jack’s scars during the meal. She had been envious of how her little sister did not seem at all disturbed by the man’s wounds. Molly continued to chatter as if there were nothing unusual about Jack’s face. They had learned from her father that Jack had worked as a night janitor at an elementary school in Foxton, two towns over, after he had recovered from several painful surgeries and skin grafts to repair his face, and Molly couldn’t stop asking him questions about what was the grossest thing he ever cleaned up at school.

Molly had peppered the conversation with such verbal gems like: “You didn’t get grossed out mopping up kids’ messes, like puke and stuff?”

Jack, who had hardly said a word when he sat down for dinner, clearly uneasy about being in such an intimate family setting, found Molly’s questions amusing, much to everyone’s relief at the table.

As he laughed, Katie had noticed how half his face softened in its expression, while the other half always remained taut and incapable of movement. She knew she wasn’t supposed to stare, but she found herself stealing the chance to look at his face whenever she saw he was busy eating.

It wasn’t until nearly a year later, after Jack was settled into his routine in Bellegrove, that the subject of his nightly walks come up.

“Do you like Bellegrove?” Molly had asked as she forked a spoonful of peas into her mouth. “I mean … do you like it more than where you grew up?”

Jack grew pensive. “Well, it’s different.… Of course, I wasn’t the same person back home.”

Grace glanced over at Molly and gave her a firm eye, as if willing her not to ask any more questions. But Jack seemed to take the little girl’s curiosity to heart.

“The best thing about Bellegrove is something I bet you don’t even know, Molly.”

“What’s that?” Molly asked.

“Well, first of all, it’s most beautiful past midnight, when the moon lights up the whole sky. I like the sounds of night, and so does Hendrix.” He reached down and gave the dog a little pat.

“It’s so quiet, you can hear the wind rustle through the trees, and there’s this little path behind the shopping center’s parking lot that takes you all the way up to the town’s reservoir. I go there with Hendrix, and we watch the reflection on the water, and sometimes the moon looks like it’s sitting right there on top of its surface. The ripples and stuff … it’s so pretty and peaceful.”

It was a strange thing to hear him speak like that. Even though Katie was barely eleven years old at the time, it had left an impression on her. It was the first time she realized that sometimes when people spoke, they had the power to make everything else disappear.

At that moment, she no longer saw the wounds on Jack’s face. She only heard his words.

When he went to say goodbye to them that night, Katie felt that he had gifted them all a secret. It was something she sensed was sacred. She would never share it with anyone, not even in order to sit closer to the popular girls at lunch.

Jack was now an established extension of her family. The other kids talked less about Jack once they reached high school, but his shadowy figure remained in their imagination.

But with the latest development of her mother meeting B?o on the street, Katie began to fear that both her parents were heading to become the adopt-the-freaks couple of the neighborhood.

She had no idea why they couldn’t be like everyone else’s parents in Bellegrove. Everyone went to church. Everyone gave generously to the poor box and the needy. But why did only her parents feel the need to bring every stray home? With Molly and all her stuffed animals and Barbie dolls, and her father with all the clocks he brought back from the store, wasn’t the house already crowded enough?