Jakarta Missing (6 page)

“I'm okay,” she'd said because that was the sort of thing you said to Dad. But she wasn't okay. For months and months she'd felt frozen and sick every time the memory flew back into her mind: the elephant fanning its huge ears, staring straight at her, the trackers with rifles in the ready position, everyone walking carefully backward. At night, just before she fell asleep, she saw herself tripping, falling flat, those sharp tusks coming down.

“It was scary,” Dad said, “but when it was over, I could smell every leaf, see every blade of grass. I felt a oneness with the elephant, with everything.” He laughed. “I felt gloriously, impossibly alive.”

He loved it when things like that happened to him. Why didn't she?

“Well, maybe you'll actually get back to sleep more quickly if I leave.”

“No.” She grabbed his hand, filled with an immense fear of being alone, utterly alone, the Allalonestone kind of alone where everyone you know has forgotten you and no one will come when you cry or maybe they're even dead and can't come. Where were the words to say what she was feeling? What good was it to be a polyglot if you couldn't find any language to talk about this? “Why did you let me go to boarding school?” she asked because she didn't know what else to say and she didn't want him to go.

“But you wanted to go.” Dad's voice was full of surprise. “Mom was the one who kept saying it wasn't a good idea.”

Dakar tried to think about whether this was true. She
had
missed Jakarta. That was true.

“Let me rub your back for a minute,” Dad said. “We both need to get some sleep.”

His hands were strong, and after a few minutes she was drifting. “Did you miss your mom and dad when you were in boarding school?” she whispered.

“All the time,” he said. “I miss them now. Your grandparents were people of great faith. They had to be, didn't they? To leave their families, to take a baby halfway across the world and raise him in East Africa? I've often wished I had their faith.”

She wanted to say, “Why don't you?” but she didn't want to make him feel bad. Her tight muscles felt like sailor knots under Dad's fingers. He
seemed
to have a lot of faith. He could have been rich if he'd wanted to because when he was studying parasites in graduate school, his parents were killed by parasites, and their insurance company gave Dad money. Lots of money. A lawyer, Mom said, invested it, and Dad never touched it until he was working in Ethiopia and the Centers for Disease Control went through budget cuts. Then he was able to say
kwaheri
to working for institutions. He could go on doing the work that needed to be done. Wasn't that faith?

“I only know two things,” Dad said.

His fingers were making her sore muscles hurt, but it was a kind of pain Dakar liked. She also liked it when people put things in numbers that way. It made things easier to hang on to.

“The first thing,” he said, “is that I never had my parents' kind of faith. For me, Africa was home, so it never felt scary to choose to live there, even though I'd seen for myself that awful things could happen in a blink.”

Dakar shook her head. She wanted him to have faith. She wanted him to say that someone or something was watching over Jakarta. Mrs. Yoder would have said that. Even Melanie's aunt had faith. Oh, Jakarta, she thought suddenly. Are you lost? Please don't be one of the water babies. Please don't be.

“The hell of it,” Dad said thoughtfully, “is that even though I didn't inherit their faith, I did inherit a kind of fierce compassion they had. I've ended up with the same compulsion—to make a difference. To leave the world a better place than I found it.”

Without any warning he started to laugh. “I guess the one thing I can say for sure is that your mom and I promised each other not to say no to any adventure that came our way, and we're still keeping our promise.”

Wait. Was that two things or three? And what if
she
wanted to stop having adventures? Dakar couldn't remember a time when she hadn't been afraid for him. Listening as he told her about meeting the snarling cheetah at dusk. Watching him struggle to hold the grass roof on the clinic in a windstorm. Looking up as he dangled beside a waterfall high above her head. There had to be something better, something safer, than sliding through life like a water baby on a flimsy boat, never stopping anywhere for long.

She was trying to think what to say when she felt his hands pull away from her. She wanted to pull them back. But it was better not to get used to having anyone's hands in the night. Anyway, they all needed to get some sleep. She knew
that
from boarding school. You'd feel better if you could just get the night over with.

“I'll get you warm milk,” he whispered. “It will help you sleep.”

She would sleep, she thought as his footsteps died away. She would sleep—because it would be too awful to lie there awake. In boarding school she would sometimes say the books of the Bible. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Ruth … oops. She hadn't said them for a while, and now she was stuck. How about the former Russian czars, since she was reading about them in social studies? Alexander I, Alexander II, Alexander III, Boris Godunov. Wait. Boris was before the Alexanders. She could feel it all starting to jumble in her mind. Boris Godunov JoshuaJudgesRuth …

She woke up at least two more times that night. The first time she was pretty sure she heard Dad yelling something. But maybe she wasn't really awake because she could also clearly smell that huge permanent puddle of gray water and old motor oil, and that puddle covered the street outside their apartment in Egypt.

Even later she vaguely thought she heard a phone ringing. “Yes?” Was that her father shouting, or was it in her dream? “Yes?” A few minutes later he was at her door. “Are you awake? It's okay. I got in touch with an old friend in Frankfurt who happened to be in e-mail contact with someone in the Sudan who had a shortwave radio contact in Nairobi. That person let the school know to put Jakarta on the next plane. It'll still be a few days, but the school said she's fine.”

What about the quest? Dakar thought sleepily. She hadn't even had a chance to save Jakarta. Suddenly she was wide awake and feeling foolish. Then it struck her. Maybe she
had
gone on a quest without even knowing it. Was it possible the banister was the first brave thing and the high school door was the second and the cook was the third? And what about the candle smoke or making a true friend? Maybe she'd heard Jakarta's voice because she'd made some kind of eerie connection. Wouldn't that be weird? She'd have to ask Jakarta when she got home.

She reached out for the glass by her bedside table. Ugh. The milk was cold. She could warm it up if she could figure out how to work the microwave. Instead, she snuggled under the blanket, hugging her pillow. She stared into the darkness, trying to connect her mind to Jakarta's. As she finally drifted off, two thoughts blazed through her mind, one right after the other.

The first was, Jakarta is coming home.

The second was, Now everything will be perfect.

FROM DAKAR'S BOOK OF LISTS AND THOUGHTS

True stories of mysterious and unexplained things I know about personally

1. Mom heard Grandma's voice after Grandma was dead.

2. After being this incredibly important thing to the children of Israel, the Ark of the Covenant suddenly disappears from the Bible. Where did it go? Is it hidden somewhere in Ethiopia? A lot of Ethiopians believe it is. I know King Solomon's Ethiopian son couldn't really have flown through the air when he was stealing the Ark, the way the story says. But Dad says the legends could have sprung out of real true facts.

3. In a museum in Cairo there is something made out of sycamore wood that looks totally like a glider. Where would the ancient Egyptians have seen something like that? Also, I've seen some ancient Egyptian carvings on the temple wall at Abydos, and I can tell you they look like airplanes and helicopters.

4. Even scientists can't figure out how the pyramids were really made. Or the giant obelisks that are a thousand years old that we saw at Axum in Ethiopia. Or how those huge churches at Lalibela could have been carved out of stone—inside and out—in the eleventh or twelfth century. The Ethiopians say that angels helped. Did they?

5. When we were camping at Lake Naivasha, Dad told us scary stories by Edgar Allan Poe. One was “The Tell-Tale Heart” and the other was “The Pit and the Pendulum.” Then he said, I'll tell you a true story. Poe wrote a story about some shipwrecked sailors who killed and ate a cabin boy named Richard Parker. Fifty years later some real shipwrecked sailors killed and ate a man named Richard Parker. Dad said that's called synchronicity. He said some people think stuff like that is an incredible coincidence, but the guy named Jung who made up the word thought the universe was made up of patterns too complicated for humans to understand and everything is all linked together in mysterious ways.

6. Mom has had synchronicity happen to her. When she had just graduated from college, she was reading a
National Geographic
about Indonesia and decided that was where she wanted to go more than anyplace in the world. That afternoon she was at her job as a waitress in Nowhere, North Dakota, and she started talking with an interesting-looking stranger who ordered ham and eggs in the middle of the afternoon. It turned out he had gotten lost on his way to a place where he was supposed to interview teachers for a school in Indonesia.

7. The quest I went on in Maji with Jakarta. Did we really rescue Mom from the hoodies and the Allalonestone?

T
he best thing about the next morning was Mom pushing the hair out of Dakar's eyes and looking right at her with astonishingly blue eyes. Mom saying, “Dakar! You need to eat breakfast before you go to school.”

“I love it when you boss me around,” Dakar said, truly happy. “Will you fix me pancakes? Please please please?”

There were soft shadows under Mom's eyes, but otherwise she looked strong. The Allalonestone hoodies—
if
they'd even really had hold of Mom again—had definitely let go. They weren't going to pull Mom under this time. “Maybe Saturday for pancakes,” she said. “Or how about the first morning Jakarta is back? Remember when I used to make you birthday pancakes? When Jakarta comes home, it'll be as good as a birthday, won't it?”

“Better.” Dakar hugged Mom, remembering those birthday mornings, the candles melting on top of a stack of whole wheat pancakes. She and Jakarta had gotten the idea from a book. What book? Jakarta would know.

Unfortunately birthday mornings came in boarding school, too. At the end of the month everyone got to sit at a birthday table and have everyone sing, but it wasn't the same. Jakarta always pulled her aside, though, between the dorm and school and slipped a candy bar into her hand, something special saved from store night two weeks before.

Mom touched Dakar's forehead again, almost shyly. “When did you start to wear your hair that way? It makes you look more like Jakarta, except hers isn't red, of course.”

“I know.” Dakar flexed one of her skinny arms and made a muscle. “I'm getting buff like her, too.”
Buff
was a great new word she got from Melanie. “But I wish you would call my hair auburn.”

Mom laughed. “Okay. Not as red as your dad's. Though I've always thought you looked like him.”