“I’m Wonder Woman—well, not really, but I’m dressed like her.…” She knelt down in the water and gave one of the little kids a splash. The water was tepid, far warmer than the big pool. She wondered if they were actually standing in pee.
“You want to get something to eat? I’m hungry.”
B?o nodded.
When they went to the lounge chairs, she noticed that B?o didn’t wrap the towel around his waist. Instead, he wore it like it was a cape. He, too, fashioned himself like a superhero and walked next to her, smiling.
Anh sat quietly with the tall glass of lemonade under the umbrella. Grace had found a spot in the corner of the club for them, away from the crowded tables nearer to the two pools.
“I thought it would be nice for you and B?o to come here … to get a little change of scenery.”
Anh smiled. Every day the world seemed to grow larger for her. She thought about how previously she had foolishly thought that America was just another body of land, only a short distance from Vietnam, one they could float toward in a few short hours. She had no idea that it was on the other side of the world and the hardship they’d have to endure just to make it here. The first tragedy had been the loss of B?o’s parents, but the suffering would continue long after.
They would soon run out of fuel, the captain also guilty of failing to anticipate the correct length of the journey. Soon their supplies would be depleted. They would eventually find themselves adrift, floating for days without food and having to ration out a few spoonfuls of water between them. They shared a single lemon, biting the sour fruit and sucking the juice between them each day. She had tried to forgo her share of what remained and give it to B?o, who had fallen in and out of consciousness for most of the trip. When the French tanker finally found them, they had been on the brink of death, all of them dehydrated and starving. After nearly ten days, the ship sprang out of the waters like a mirage, and when they lifted B?o’s body onto the lifeboat that hoisted them aboard, his sunburned skin was covered in sores.
The little boy walking with the makeshift cape floats past Anh. He does not blend in with the sea of white bodies in their Technicolor bathing suits and their plastic flip-flops that snap against the wet concrete floor. But the girl with the Wonder Woman one-piece, the thick glasses, and the ropes of wet brown hair does not either. Together they walk toward the canteen. And Anh sees B?o smile—bright and uninhibited—not the kind he does to just signal to her he’s okay, butone that comes from true joy. She takes a long sip of lemonade from the straw, and when Grace asks her if she needs anything else, she thinks hard and long about what the right answer should be in English. Then she answers politely, “No, miss. But thank you.”
CHAPTER 44
B?O DOES NOT HAVE THE WORDS YET INENGLISH TO TELL THEgirl 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.
CHAPTER 45
IT’S 2:00 A.M., ANDJACK PLACES A RECORD ONTO THE TURNTABLEas music fills the air. He does the same night after night, after he has walked Hendrix through the reservoir, left his muddy boots by the door, showered, and changed out of his clothes. Yet despite all these rituals, his mind is still desperate for peace.
He looks at his bed—not as an invitation for sleep, but rather a place where his ghosts come to visit each night. Part of him doesn’t want to see the faces from his past, but he doesn’t want to forget them, either. So he lets the song on the player lift off the vinyl and ease his transition into the world of dreams. And then, as his eyes close, he is instantly there again, suffocating in the hot, humid air with his buddies hovering around him.
They are so young and impossibly immortal in the haze of sunlight. Flannery’s dog tags glimmer in the heat, his chest wet with perspiration, a cigarette dangling from his lips. Flannery is cleaning his gun, and Doc is carefully checking his medical bag. Stanley is gone but remains an angel even to the nonbelievers.
In his mind’s eye, Jack can see Chief, strong and tall as a redwood, telling him over breakfast, “The blackbird visited me last night.” Chief’s massive hands clasp a cup of watered-downed coffee, warmed by a burning heating tablet that fills the air with an acrid smoke.
Jack and the whole platoon knew that Chief was sensitive to bad omens, dreams, and visions of all kinds, but a blackbird could be a helicopter, couldn’t it?
“Maybe you’re just dreaming of Huey’s, Chief,” Flannery joked with him. He flung his cigarette to the ground. “Hey, the sky here is always full of blackbirds.…”
Chief’s face is eerily placid; his dark eyes glassy with a wisdom so ancient that it transcends words.
He returns Flannery’s gaze with silence, and Jack finds himself unnerved. He doesn’t believe in prophecies or bad luck, does he? Every day they’re in danger, so what difference does a dream about a blackbird mean to any of them? He wants to believe he doesn’t believe in good luck or bad luck, yet he’s still full of his own superstitions. All of them are.
He still keeps a letter from Becky in the lining of his helmet. His perspiration has long since caused the black ink to run, and the neatly folded paper is now so worn and delicate that when he unfolds it, it nearly falls apart in his hands. The others tease him for holding on to a letter that he can no longer read, but he carries it anyway, as a talisman, and the words are already memorized in his heart and mind.
During a briefing that morning, after Lieutenant Bates announces he’s taking a reinforced squad of sixteen men to do a recon patrol on one of the nearby mountains, he, too, tries to shrug off the dark bird in Chief’s dream.
Lieutenant Bates doesn’t tell the men that battalion intelligence suspects there might be North Vietnamese Army up on that mountain or hidden arsenals buried in the bush. Jack learned months ago, even before Stanley’s death, that he will never be told anything more than he needs to know.
