The Time Keepers

Chapter 44

CHAPTER 44

B ?O DOES NOT HAVE THE WORDS YET IN E NGLISH TO TELL THE girl in the red-and-blue bathing suit with its gold belt of stars that the one thing about America that he knows to be good and reaffirming is the magic wooden box in the living room at the motherhouse. He counts the minutes each day until four o’clock, when the Sisters break from their English lessons with the others and they let him turn the switch on the television and settle into the large, roomy chair. Then all the animated figures spring to life.

So his face automatically ignited in a smile when she, too, knew the words “Wonder Twin powers, activate.” Perhaps she knows Jayna and Zan. He recalls the last time they had appeared, when Jayna transformed from a girl into a dolphin and Zan from a man into a bucket of water. If one of them can become water and the other can travel into its depths, couldn’t they find his parents on the bottom of the sea?

But despite the obstacle of not yet sharing a language, Molly’s gestures serve as another form of communication. He follows her toward the canteen, his wet feet leaving dark footprints on the concrete. She orders two sandwiches on spongy white bread for them, one made with fish, the other egg, and no money passes between her and the teenage boy behind the counter. He has hair the color of sun-bleached wheat and a milky-white face.

He doesn’t even look in Molly’s direction as he writes down her family name on the chit. The boy with the black eyes and hair is merely an invisible shadow to him.

“Do you want to go sit over there?” Molly points to a white plastic table with a large yellow umbrella rising from its center. “It will be cooler, I think.”

B?o sits down, peering at the white bread sandwich she’s placed in front of him. He picks it up, takes a bite of the tuna salad, and sinks down in the chair.

Around them, children squeal, the diving board bounces up and down, and the girls do twirls and backflips off its edge, their mothers reminding them to be careful. The smell of chlorine in the water is thick in the air. He eyes one of Katie’s friends taking lemon wedges from her mother’s drink and squeezing them over her scalp and blond locks.

He is puzzled by the ritual of the lemon juice being applied to the already golden hair. The sight of the lemons triggers something in his memory, the face of a woman leaning over him, a small wedge of lemon between her fingers, her voice soft, asking him to open his mouth. And the juice, only a few droplets, sliding down his throat as their crowded wooden boat drifts aimlessly in the sea.