A Sketchbook to Preserve Our Family in Peacetime

An excerpt from The Sunflower Boys by Sam Wachman

Tato’s package arrived yesterday. My birthday was two weeks ago, but it doesn’t matter. A banged-up cardboard box covered in American stamps always arrives at the post office a few weeks after my birthday, my little brother Yuri’s birthday, and Saint Mykolai. Yuri turned eight in April. Tato sent him a stuffed crocodile. The crocodile has big pointy teeth, so Yuri named it Arkady Petrenko, after our dentist. Arkady came with a postcard from Florida, where real crocodiles live, crocodiles without beady eyes and olive-green fuzz and tags that read “wash with like colors.”

I wonder if Arkady will be cold when winter comes here in Ukraine.

For my birthday, Tato sent art supplies. He sent colored and graphite pencils, pastels, conté sticks. They all came in their own wooden box with a latch that makes it look like something a pirate might bury on a desert island. He sent tortillons for blending and smudging lines, and sticks of charcoal made of the world’s blackest black.

Best of all, he sent a sketchbook. It’s leather-bound with a strap and a buckle and one hundred thick, deckle-edged pages. It’s heavy and feels ancient in my hands, like some sacred relic unearthed from the ruins of an ancient city. The cover is decorated with the silhouettes of skyscrapers, the skyline of the city where Tato lives. He inscribed the inside cover in his messy handwriting: Now you can draw here instead of your math homework. Don’t forget—I love you!

Nothing I can draw could possibly match the sketchbook’s grandeur. But I can’t just leave the pages blank either. So I decide to draw only the most important things in the sketchbook—one hundred important things.

Tato knows that I love to draw. I’m good at it, and I’m proud to be good at something. My art teacher, Lyudmila Mikhailivna, compliments me after every lesson. Art is the only class where I earn good grades—tens and elevens. My Ukrainian grades aren’t terrible, sixes and sevens, but I don’t care for anything we read, all the old dead poets, and when I don’t care for something I can’t pay attention. In history and geography, I’m always looking out the window or sketching something inside my textbooks. Our class teacher, Antonina Romanivna, scolds me, and I earn fives, fours, even threes.

I sit at the back of class 6B by the window and share a desk with my best friend, Viktor, whose grades are even worse than mine. We distract each other constantly, whispering until Antonina Romanivna shouts us back into silence. And when we have to keep our mouths shut, I draw—on the backs of corrected worksheets, on the desk and on my left arm. I bring my drawings home to Mama, and I slip at least one in every package we send to Tato in America.

Now, in our apartment, I stare down the sketchbook’s first blank page. Its perfect snowy whiteness challenges me, taunts me. While Mama is at work, there isn’t much in our apartment to draw—just our bedroom and our fat old calico cat, Monya, who spends her days in a pool of sunlight beneath the kitchen window, curled up in a lumpy ball of fur and flab. I’ve already drawn her over and over. So my brother Yuri and I go for a walk in search of something important to draw.

We pass Varvara Tykhonivna and Oksana Ivanivna, the two babusi who spend every day on the same bench in the courtyard—even hot August days like today, and even in the winter snow—gossiping about everything that goes on in our corner of Chernihiv.

“You could draw them,” Yuri suggests. I consider it for a moment, then shake my head. They would never pose for me. I don’t think they like me. I hang out with Viktor and I know they don’t like Viktor, because he’s a troublemaker, and everyone knows it.

We walk further down Nestayko Street. We live at number thirty-six and Viktor lives at number thirty-eight. Our apartment building is the one with the giant chestnut tree in front of it, and Viktor’s is across the courtyard from ours. Viktor and I once tried to hold a conversation by shouting to each other from our bedroom windows, and it worked until some killjoy opened his own window and yelled across the courtyard that it’s two in the morning, go the hell to sleep.

Yuri and I cut through the Chernihiv City Garden, past the Ferris wheel, the statues of dinosaurs and squirrels, the carnival games where you can win a stuffed animal if you shoot close enough to the target.

“I want to play,” he says.

“I don’t have any pocket money,” I tell him. “We’ll come back tomorrow.”

We turn left onto Shevchenko Street and cross the Red Bridge over the Stryzhen, the creek that slices the city of Chernihiv in two. When we were little, Mama used to bring us here to feed the ducks. We pass the sushi restaurant where we celebrate the last day of school every year. We walk along the ancient ramparts of the city.

“One, two, three, four . . .” Yuri counts aloud as we pass the twelve cannons, their shining black barrels pointed toward long-dead invaders. Mama once told me that when she was young, before she met and married Tato, she rejected men who asked her on dates by offering to meet them at the thirteenth cannon.

“You don’t want to draw any of this?” Yuri asks as we pass Saint Catherine’s Cathedral, its five golden cupolas shimmering in the summer sunlight.

I shake my head. It’s all beautiful, and it’s all home, but it doesn’t feel important enough to take up space in my new sketchbook. The sketchbook is now the most precious thing I own. It came from Tato. His handwriting is still warm.

Yuri rolls his eyes. “Are you sure you like to draw at all?”

---

For weeks, I leave the sketchbook blank. During our math lesson, I hand the sketchbook to Viktor, open to the first page.

“Just draw something,” I tell him. “I can’t take the pressure.”

“Artem, chel,” Viktor whispers, sliding the sketchbook back across our desk to me, “you know I can’t draw.”

“Vovchenko, Haidenko!” shouts our teacher, Antonina Romanivna. “No side conversations!”

“You should draw Antonina Romanivna,” Viktor whispers. “Make sure to get all her chin hairs.”

When we take a trip to the village, Vasyukivka, to visit our grandfather, Did Pasha, he suggests that I draw some of his animals. He has a sow named Manuna that screeches when you get too close to her pen, and a billy goat named Zhora who likes to be scratched between the stubs of his horns. When I open the sketchbook, Zhora pokes his snout over the fence and tries to eat the paper. I yank it away from his fuzzy lips and scold him, but he keeps on smiling.

The August heat sticks around late into September, and every window in Chernihiv gapes wide open, begging for a breeze. Mama takes me and Yuri for one last swim in the River Desna before the end of summer.

Yuri and I race each other up and down the path through the woods to Golden Bank Beach, our sandals slapping the soles of our feet. Mama lags behind and times us.

“Who won?” Yuri asks when we come panting back to her.

“Artem,” Mama says, “but just by a hair.”

I stick my tongue out at Yuri.

“Just by a hair,” Yuri reminds me.

At the beach, grandmas sell cups of fresh strawberries and raspberries. Men drink beer and bite off tough, salty chunks of dried fish. Mama finds a place to spread the blue blanket she always brings from home, the only one that’s allowed to get sandy. A place for us to eat sandwiches and dry in the sun when we’re done swimming. Yuri and I pinch our noses and squeeze our eyes shut as Mama sprays us with sunblock. We rub it into our chests and calves, the tips of our ears and the bridges of our noses.

Even in September, the River Desna still carries the memories of last winter. The chill of the river offers a sweet respite from the heat. Yuri and I wade up to our bathing suits, chests, shoulders, shrieking in delighted agony when the cold water laps up onto our hot skin. We snatch in vain at darting minnows. We sink down to the bottom of the river, kneel on its silty belly. Underwater, Yuri smiles at me, sticks out his tongue. I make a face like a monkey, and he laughs a cloud of bubbles around both of our faces. Down here, the whole world disappears. It’s only me and him. The sun filters through the surface of the water and paints us with spiderwebs of light.

And then it hits me. I know what Tato would want me to draw in his sketchbook. I know what’s important enough for the first page.

---

Just before bedtime, Yuri and I sit together on the windowsill in our bedroom. He sits still, and I stare at his face.

“Turn a little to the right,” I tell him.

He fidgets as he waits, bouncing his right leg. Only the scratch of my pencil breaks the silence; only the occasional scrub of the eraser, the brushing away of dust.

We used to fit together in this windowsill comfortably, but we’ve both grown, and now we have to fold ourselves up to make room for each other, our knees by our chins.

It’s raining, but we keep the window cracked open. Our apartment is always a little too warm, even in the winter. Whenever Mama notices that we’ve opened the window, she shuts it and tells us, “Better too warm than too cold.” She’s afraid that we’ll catch colds from the draft.

She likes to remind us that she grew up in the village, in Vasyukivka, in a house that Did Pasha warmed with a wood-fired furnace, and she didn’t know the sensation of warm toes until she was a grown-up living here in Chernihiv. I always tell her that she doesn’t have to sleep beside Yuri, whose body could heat the entire city through a blizzard. Sometimes when I wake up in the morning the sheets cling to my sweaty skin.

Yuri stays still for me. I reach past him and switch on our table lamp. The light illuminates his stack of comics and books about Greek myths. It illuminates the row of toys that he has accumulated over the years, the toys the cashiers hand out at Silpo with every ninety-nine hryvnia you spend on groceries. Beside the toys, there’s a Zhivchik soda bottle filled with coins we’ve picked up from the sidewalk, and there’s Yuri’s geode—another souvenir Tato sent from America. A dun and dusty rock, split in half to reveal a secret, gleaming crystal heart.

I make gentle, noncommittal strokes with my pencil, waiting for my brother to burst into clarity on the paper.

With the lamp on, I can see Yuri’s face properly. The side of my left hand is gray-black now, my fingers smeared with graphite. I make gentle, noncommittal strokes with my pencil, waiting for my brother to burst into clarity on the paper. His fidgeting right foot jostles my sketchbook, and the line I’m drawing veers off to the left.

“Oi, lokh.” I seize his ankle and hold his foot in place like an animal I’ve trapped. “Hold still.”

He wiggles his toes, trying to escape. I grab his foot with both of my hands.

“I’m working on your nose right now,” I tell him. “Want an elephant trunk instead?”

He sighs, rolls his eyes. “Fine.”

Rain falls, and the chestnut tree outside our window rustles in the wind. That tree is older than we are, older than Mama, older than the apartment blocks that surround it. Yuri and Viktor and I once climbed it to see if we could reach our bedroom window from the courtyard. Viktor and I were too heavy for the weaker branches, but Yuri was small and fearless. He almost made it all the way to the top; he only came down when Mama noticed and yelled at all three of us. She yelled at him for climbing too high, and she yelled at me and Viktor for letting him.

---

Beside the chestnut tree stands a telephone pole, and atop the telephone pole sits a stork nest, two meters tall and shaped like an old chimney. When we were little, Mama told us that our people had always loved storks, and storks had always loved us back. She told us that, in the winter, the storks and all the other birds and insects fly south to Vyriy, the land of eternal summer and giant ferns and warm wells that bubble with healing water. She always watches for the return of those white feathers and sharp orange beaks, legs as thin and gangly as the twigs from which they build their nests.

When I finish, I turn my sketchbook around to show Yuri. He takes it and examines it closely, his brow furrowed. The top half of his face was the easy half. The dark and unruly locks of hair that cover his forehead, his eyes that disappear into his smile, his ears that tend to stick out of winter hats.

“It’s good,” he says. “But my mouth isn’t right.”

“Because you’re always talking,” I tell him, turning the sketchbook back around. “Or eating.”

I know he’s right. The bottom half of his face is still under construction, covered in the faint ghosts of lines that I drew, thought better of, and erased. Yuri has buck teeth that Mama calls “charming” and Arkady Petrenko—the dentist, not the crocodile—calls a “severe overbite.” I can’t draw his mouth right, not without making him look ridiculous, like a caricature of himself. Someday, maybe soon, Yuri will need braces. I can’t imagine him with neat, orderly teeth. Braces would change his entire face.

There’s a knock on our bedroom door. Mama steps in without waiting for an answer.

“Bedtime, boys,” she says. Her hair—wavy and so black it shimmers blue in the sun, just like Yuri’s, just like mine—is tied up in preparation for sleep. “Yuri, go brush your teeth.”

“Five more minutes?” Yuri asks, which never works.

“It’s late,” Mama says. “Go. Quick like a bunny.”

Yuri rolls his eyes. From our bedroom, I hear the familiar, irritating noises of Yuri getting ready for bed—spitting his toothpaste theatrically into the sink, the clink-clank of the toilet lid and seat hitting the tank, pee hitting toilet water, the sounds that accompany the funny faces he makes in the mirror.

Mama sits down next to me on the windowsill. “What did you finally decide to draw?”

I show her my sketchbook. She leans in close. On her breath, I can smell the lemon tea she drinks throughout the day.

“It’s not done yet,” I tell her when she doesn’t say anything.

“You’re headed in the right direction,” she says. “Work on that shadow there, next to his nose.”

Mama has always been the best artist in the family. When I was little and I wanted to learn to draw real people, not just stick figures, she taught me how to make heads look more like heads and less like eggs with ears. When I mastered that, she showed me how to shade with the side of my pencil, to crosshatch, to convey light on a page. The shapes and shadows all come to her effortlessly. They arrive in her head prearranged into pencil strokes. She knows exactly which line should go where, how hard she should bear down on the pencil. I used to beg her to erase the bad parts of my drawings and redraw them herself, but she always refused. She says that she would never erase my work, that I just have to keep drawing until I am even better than her. As if that’s inevitable.

---

Yuri returns to our bedroom at a sprint in his underwear and belly-flops onto our bed. I undress and brush my teeth. I hate sharing a bedtime with Yuri. Viktor is an only child and gets to stay up two hours later than I do. Sometimes he sends me texts late at night and I don’t find them until morning.

Mama kisses Yuri’s forehead, then mine.

“Good night,” she tells each of us. “I love you.” And we answer: “I love you.” She turns the lights out, and our door creaks shut. The day is over. Our bedroom is dark except for a thin sliver of light from the hallway. I pull the comforter up to my shoulders, shut my eyes, and lie on my side facing away from Yuri. We always fall asleep like this, with me on the left edge of the bed and Yuri at the right, separated by a warm neutral zone of mattress and duvet. But usually I wake up in the morning with Yuri close to me, his arm draped across my chest.

“Tyoma,” he whispers, a nickname only he’s allowed to use. He bumps my leg with his foot. His toes are cold on the skin of my calf. I give up and roll over to face him. When he breathes, I smell the blue mint of his toothpaste. He’s holding Arkady the crocodile against his chest. “Tell me a story.”

“Not now. It’s late.”

“I’m not tired.” He bumps me with his foot again. I know I’m not going to win this argument. So I tell him the story Tato always tells. I stop the story halfway through, when I’m sure he’s asleep. I know when he’s pretending and when he’s really asleep because he always jerks once as he drifts off, as if he’s driving in his dream and he just hit a speed bump. Then his whole body flares with heat.

Sometimes Yuri is still small, and an eternity lies in the three years that separate us. Still the squirmy bundle Tato introduced me to at the very beginning of my life, the first pinprick of light in the murkiest depths of my memory. I remember Mama lying in the hospital bed with messy hair and a shiny face, Tato holding Yuri to his bare chest. Tato beamed at me, said: “Look—your little brother.” I watched Yuri wriggle and cry and thought: this thing cannot possibly grow into a person.

“He only gets one big brother,” Tato told me that day, “so you have to promise to be the best big brother you can. Promise to love him and keep him safe.” And I did. I promised.

When Yuri was tiny and fat-cheeked, everyone fawned on him, even strangers. Mama and Did Pasha would spend hours discussing who Yuri resembled, attributing his facial features and the expressions he made when he needed to burp to various family members whom I had never met. I found myself vying for attention with someone who could not speak. A cow-eyed, drippy creature, fragile despite all his padding. Mama would praise my drawings briefly and then cast them aside. Sometimes I loved him only because I promised Tato.

It became easier as he got older. One day at Golden Bank Beach I taught him to stand on his head. The River Desna was still dripping from our bathing suits. He toppled over every time. On his fifth try, I watched him teeter, his bare feet skyward. Just before he fell, I grabbed him by his ankles. He laughed, screamed and squirmed, begged me—Let go! Let me fall! But I held on.

Now, Yuri is old enough for Mama to slip twenty-five hryvnia in his pocket and send him to the market on his own to buy her an onion. We used to read picture books together and I would help Yuri sound out words. Now, Yuri helps me with my math homework, which I’ll never admit to anybody, not even Viktor.

Yuri is growing, and so am I. Sometimes we grow so quickly that we don’t know how to adjust to each other. A few weeks ago I swung open the kitchen cabinet and the knob hit Yuri in the face. “Sorry,” I told him. “Your head didn’t used to be that high.”

I turn on the bedside lamp, open my sketchbook and erase the night’s sketch. It’s all wrong. I look at Yuri, and a weight settles in my chest.

Someday, without knowing it, we will sit together in our windowsill for the last time.

We’ll keep growing and growing. Someday, without knowing it, we will sit together in our windowsill for the last time. We will grow up, and we will grow old. We will sleep in separate beds, separate bedrooms. Maybe separate cities. We’ll live with the families we created, not the one we were born into. I always knew this, in one way or another, but tonight I know it differently than I’ve ever known it before, as if it’s just around the corner. Even though we still have years.

I set down my sketchbook and turn the light off. The weight in my chest doesn’t lift until the birds chirp and the edges of the curtains glow.

---

Every evening for years, Mama has handed me and Yuri her phone. She whispers: “Tato.” On the screen, the flesh-colored pixels of our tato shuffle around, attempting to arrange themselves into facial features. Our internet connection is slow, and the picture is never clear enough to make out the specific details of him—just the vague shape of his face widening into a smile.

Our conversation usually goes something like this: I would say “Hi, Tato.” And he would say “Hi, zaichik.” Little hare. His voice would sound distant and tinny. “Is your brother there?” he would ask. I would turn the phone camera around, and Yuri would look up from his book—something like The Legends and Myths of Heracles—and wave. “Hi, kotik,” Tato would say. Little kitty. “Good. Both of my boys are there. How are you guys? What are you doing right now?”

Tato would always ask us that question. What are you doing right now? He once explained that he wanted to paint an image of our lives in his mind, that it was as important to know our day-to-day as it was to know our big days, our birthdays, and first days of school.

So I would set the scene. “We’re sitting on the windowsill,” I would say. “I’m drawing. Yuri’s reading one of his Greek books.” I would stand up and swivel the phone camera around to show our room, my sketchbook splayed out on the windowsill where we sit, open to a work in progress. “We were listening to music,” I would say. I would hold our earbuds up to the camera. Yuri and I share a pair; I take the left earbud, and Yuri takes the right. Then Yuri would stick out his tongue, go cross-eyed. Tato would laugh, and his laughter would come through the phone just a moment late. Something like that.

As I got older, I began to notice the desperation that churned beneath the surface of Tato’s voice. At first, when Tato was working seventy hours a week on construction sites, we never heard from him. He called Mama late at night, long after we had fallen asleep, because of work, because of time zones. Yuri and I had more conversations with Tato through postcards than over the phone.

When he found a job that let him work fewer hours for more money, we started talking on the phone every evening. At some point, Tato decided that we should switch to video chatting instead. It didn’t bring him any closer. We can see his face now, and he can see ours, but that doesn’t mean he can live our lives with us. Sometimes it feels like a chore to call him and tell him about our day. I feel guilty admitting it. There are basic facts of our lives he doesn’t understand because, as much as he wants to be, he isn’t here for the little moments. We’ve grown in his absence, thought up inside jokes, forged traditions. He left a four-year-old and a toddler in Ukraine, but they are gone. When he left, Yuri was just starting to crawl; now, Yuri can ice-skate for hours and never fall down.

Sometimes Tato tells us a bedtime story. He never reads us bedtime stories from books. He tells his own stories, stories he makes up as he goes along. His stories always start like this: “Long, long ago, in the deep, dark woods . . .” And then his stories always end: “. . . and they lived happily ever after, for as long as the mist lived in the mountains and the stars lived in the night sky.”

His stories take place in the Carpathians, in the west of Ukraine, where he grew up. In his stories, Yuri and I aren’t people but animals. Sometimes we’re storks who live in a cozy nest atop a telephone pole, where no evil spirits can find us. Sometimes we’re beavers who huddle together in the warm darkness of a dam.

His stories involve spirits from folktales. Our favorite is the Chugaister. The Chugaister is the protector of the forest, a man who stands five meters tall with a beard made of moss and a body made of wind. He lures those who threaten the forest into the shadows and kills them with their own chainsaws.

“Is the Chugaister real?” Yuri asked one day.

“Of course,” Tato said.

“Real like the Ancient Greeks thought Zeus and Poseidon were real?” Yuri asked. “Or real-real, like you and I are real?”

“I’ve shaken his giant hand,” Tato said. “I felt the hair on his knuckles.”

Sometimes we don’t know what to talk about; we only understand that we need to keep talking, that we need to keep the sounds of our voices in each other’s ears.

“Isn’t it after midnight for you?” I might ask.

“So what? I can’t call my boys any time of day I want?”

“No, you can’t.” I would smile. “It’s illegal. You’re going to jail.”

“Well, I hope you come and visit me in my cell,” he would say. “Bring me some of your mama’s cherry varenyky.”

“Come get them yourself,” I would say. “When are you going to come back to visit?”

Then Tato would pause. His image would stay still on Mama’s phone screen. I might hear him take a breath. “Maybe not for a while, zaichik.”

He would explain what he had already explained to me so many times before: That he couldn’t leave America until he got his green card, that he’s filled out the paperwork over and over but it never seems to make it from one end of the system to the other. That the system was slow in the first place, but the pandemic has made it ten times slower. That if he could choose anywhere in the world to live, it would be in Chernihiv with his boys.

And our conversation would go on like that until we had to go to school, or until Tato had to go to work in America, or until Mama needed her phone back to call Titka Natasha and gossip about the Honchar lady in apartment twenty-seven, who was clearly up to something.

I barely remember the years when Tato lived with us. Our family long ago ossified around his empty space. Yuri and I are far from the only boys at school whose tatos live abroad; Nazar Lutsenko’s tato works in Germany, Lev Demchenko’s in Poland, Daniil Marchuk’s in Norway. Yet occasionally there is something amiss without our tato. His absence sits on our living room couch wide enough for four and sleeps in the unoccupied half of Mama’s bed. It speaks in the silent moments at the dinner table conversations, when the three of us have nothing to say and our conversation gives way to the scrape of silverware on dishes.

He sends dozens of postcards over the years—vast expanses of desert, snow-capped mountains, the shimmering skylines of faraway cities. We keep his postcards pinned to the wall next to our bed. And he sends birthday gifts, Saint Mykolai gifts. Most kids find gifts under their pillows in the morning on Saint Mykolai, but ours come a few weeks late, and they arrive in cardboard boxes at the Nova Poshta office ten minutes away. The day after Saint Mykolai, when my classmates brag about the gifts their parents gave them, I have to concoct stories of fake, lavish gifts like giant gaming computers whose existence I don’t have to prove because they’re too big to bring to school. And Viktor knows the truth, so he stares at me while I lie and he tries not to laugh.

I wonder whether I or Yuri resemble Tato more now. I know what his face looks like—I see it on the phone screen every day—but I know that family resemblance shows up in the way you hold yourself, the gestures you don’t realize you make until somebody else points it out. The phone screen can’t capture that.

---

One day, Tato calls Mama while we stand in line at the grocery store, Silpo. Mama drags me and Yuri there every few days. We wait around as she examines and palpates each apple and pear. In the summer, she buys fruits and vegetables from the outdoor market, beautiful fruits and vegetables borne of rich black Ukrainian soil—but in the winter, she buys wan carrots and mealy apples shipped from faraway lands where it’s never winter. Sometimes when we’re at Silpo she sends me and Yuri to find something, and we always come back with the wrong brand of it, or not enough, or too many. Worst of all, she likes to leave us and the shopping cart in the checkout line while she grabs one more thing she “almost forgot.” When the line moves, I pray for her to get back quickly because she has all the money and the babusi behind us already look angry.

With every ninety-nine hryvnia you spend at Silpo, the cashier gives you a toy called Stikeez. Somehow, Yuri has become obsessed with collecting them all. The toys are figurines of different characters, each with their own names—a frog named Zhabbo, a giraffe named Zhorik, a weird monster named Benya who looks like a lime-green, floating eyeball with cat ears. They’re all sticky on the bottom, and Yuri sticks them onto our bed’s headboard—a platoon of tiny soldiers keeping guard, watching over us as we sleep.

We’re in the checkout line when Mama’s phone rings. Instead of just vibrating, it plays a jazz tune, which means it’s Tato calling.

She picks up. “Hello?”

I hear Tato’s voice over the supermarket music, but I can’t decipher any of the words. Mama breaks out into a smile. She turns the shopping cart around and walks out of the line.

“Mama?” Yuri chases after her, and I follow. “Where are we going?”

“Watch where you’re going!” scolds the babusya behind us.

Mama sits down beside a display of watermelons stacked on top of each other in a pyramid. Yuri and I sit down on either side of her. Mama turns on speakerphone.

“Seryozha,” she says. “Say that again so the boys can hear.”

The Americans are finally giving him his green card. That means that he’ll be allowed to come back and visit, once he has all his paperwork in order and the last coronavirus restrictions are lifted and the border opens. He’s buying plane tickets now, he says. He’ll come next summer. We cheer. Yuri and I stand up and knock the watermelons over. They topple one by one and roll across the floor.

That night, Yuri and I look up how long we have to wait until Tato’s arrival at eleven o’clock on the first of next July.

“Two hundred and eighty days!” I read aloud to Yuri.

He peers over my shoulder. “And thirteen hours, twenty-five minutes, and thirty-nine seconds. Thirty-eight, thirty-seven . . .”

I stare at the timer on my phone in frustration. Why are the borders still closed? Why does paperwork take so long? Why must I wait so long?

Mama comes into our room and tells me to put away my phone, because it’s almost time for bed. I retrieve my sketchbook and pencils from my backpack. I draw Tato’s arrival—the four of us, together at last. As I fall asleep, I imagine myself with a time machine, turning the days to hours, the hours to seconds, bringing Tato closer and closer until I’m at the airport, running toward him.