“Sienna’s father is also a doctor,” Deni said, gesturing to me.
“Really? Where is he sitting?” I noticed her brown wraparound skirt and her tailored white button-up shirt. She seemed very with it and organized.
I felt my face flush. “Actually, he’s not ...”
Deni jumped in. “He still has much work. He is meeting her later.” He raised his eyebrows at me. It wasn’t
entirely
untrue.
The woman reached out her hand. “I’m Amelia. This is my husband, Mac. Nice to meet you, Sienna.” I noticed the tiny jade stones in her earlobes shine.
“Eh, Deni, are you coming back to Aceh to stay, mate?” Mac asked, leaning forward.
“I hope to,” he said.
Amelia looked at me kindly but with questions in her eyes. “And you two are traveling alone?”
“We are not alone,” Deni said confidently. “We are with each other.”
Amelia’s brown eyes widened, but before she could ask more questions, the flight attendant’s heavy cart rolled down the aisle between us. I asked for a Sprite; Deni got a Coke.
“Thank you,” we said. I gulped down the Sprite. Free cold drinks. No more uncomfortable answers to tricky questions.
As the World Doctors continued chatting with Deni, I leaned back and tried to sleep.
Deni drummed his drink tray with his thumbs as he talked. “At my friends’ house we have certain customs. You know of them from your book?”
“Customs like what?” I asked with a yawn.
“Okay.” Deni stopped drumming. “You have not been to a dinner at a family home yet. Remember I told you about the tea?”
I nodded.
“We are staying with my friends’ family. There will be many formalities-they will offer to sit on the floor, and we will be served tea after much talk about life. They will ask you many questions. They speak some English. A couple things I tell you so you don’t offend. When they offer you tea, wait until they offer it to you twice before you take a drink. Or they will think you are dying of the thirst and keep pouring you more and more drinks. Also with the food ...”
“Wait until it’s been offered twice?”
“Clever girl.” Deni winked. “Yes. Otherwise ...”
I held my finger in the air. “They will think I am starving and will overfeed me?”
“You are too smart. This you already know.”
I nudged him with my elbow, wishing we were all by ourselves on this plane. “I’m just a quick learner.”
“And I am a great teacher,” he joked. “When you sit on the mat, sit cross-legged with your feet pointed into you. Never point your toes at another person. It will greatly offend.”
“At home pointing fingers is considered rude, but pointing toes? I didn’t even know pointing your toes at someone was something that could ever happen. Why?”
Deni shrugged. “I don’t remember. Just do not do it. Food is the same as at the
pesantren
except of course better. You eat the same. Ah, and the hot tea is very, very hot and very, very spicy.”
“How spicy? How hot?”
He ran his fingers through his thick hair and raised his eyebrows. “Very, very.”
“We’re almost to Aceh,” Mac said across the aisle.
Deni leaned over me and peered out the window. He looked nervous and sad and excited all at once. I couldn’t even imagine how he felt, the strange anticipation over seeing his home after being away for six months. I was nervous too, and also excited, and also sad. Maybe looking down at his home, he felt the way I did when I first looked at the ocean after hearing about Mom.
How could something I loved betray me like this?
But Deni didn’t want to look away. He leaned farther, trying to soak it all in.
We switched places so he could see better, and Deni pointed out a flat landmass. The morning sun highlighted a spot where the ocean met the shore.
“It looks so different from up here,” he said. “That was all a rain forest. That is where the tsunami ripped out all the trees and life. See? The white part between the ocean and land that is not jungle? Everything was torn out. Everything there is gone.”
From the air, the strip of land Deni was talking about looked like God painted a thick white stripe across the earth.
“I can’t believe the sea went three miles onto the shore,” I said quietly.
He tugged on his goatee, which was beginning to grow again. “The water rose across the whole of Aceh, it seemed.”
The air smelled thick as we walked down the metal stairway attached to the plane. Thick and sweet like perfumed mud. The airport was not much more than an airstrip in the middle of a field of rice paddies.
“Is that the airport?” I asked curiously, holding on to the rail. A small, open-air terminal was all there was.
“Yes,” Deni said, behind me. “It is like a tiny version of Yogyakarta airport, no?”
At the bottom of the stairs drivers held up signs: Red Cross. Doctors Without Borders. World Health Organization. World Vision. World Doctors.
“That’s you guys, right?” I asked Amelia.
“Yep!” she said, waving enthusiastically to a young blond man holding their sign. “That’s Ethan. He’s an American fresh out of residency, volunteering in our health clinic for the summer.”
“Cool,” I said, smiling at the eager blue-eyed doctor waving the sign. Ethan reminded me of pictures of Dad taken while he was in the Peace Corps in Africa, before he met Mom, before they had me. Why did everyone keep reminding me of Dad? I swallowed away a twinge of guilt, knowing it was morning back at the
pesantren
too. He probably already knew I was gone, and if he didn’t yet, he would soon.
“You kids need a lift somewhere?” Mac said.
“Um. Maybe. Deni? Do we need a ride?”
Deni shook his head. “Thank you, but I will call my friends. They will come. Sienna? We go?”
Amelia stopped me. “Sienna, would you mind if I talked to you for a second?”
I glanced at Deni.
“I will meet you in the front, then. I will call my friends inside,” Deni said. “Nice to meet you.” He waved to Amelia and Mac.
“It was great meeting you too, Deni. Best of luck here.” Amelia lifted her tan leather purse higher on her shoulder. “Your friend seems very sweet,” she said once Deni was out of earshot.
“He is,” I said, watching him go.
“You met him at the orphanage?”
I nodded. “Yes.”
“He must have been through a lot.... It seems like you two are very close.”
I fidgeted with my backpack. “Well, you know how it is when you meet someone and it’s like you already know them? That’s how it was with me and Deni.” I shrugged as if that explained the rest.
“But you are going home soon? Back to America?” she prodded.
I wondered why she was being so nosy.
“Yes. But ...” I wasn’t thinking about that just yet.
To stop her from asking me anything else, I blurted out, “We’re going to be ... looking around the different NGOs.... Maybe we’ll run into you later?”
“That would be lovely. Where are you staying?”
“With Deni’s friends.”
“You know there’s not much here for ... tourists. Since the tsunami, things are better—they recently signed a peace treaty for the civil war, but there is still a lot of political unrest.”
I didn’t say anything.
Her eyes narrowed. “I know you are with your friend, but before your father joins you, if you run into trouble, come see us. We’re at the World Doctors headquarters in the tent in the old town center. Here’s my card.”
If we run into trouble
...
Amelia’s perceptive. She figured out right away that we didn’t know quite what we were doing. As we walked through the airport toward the street, I filled her in on what we’d been doing at the
pesantren.
Her eyes lit up when I mentioned my dad’s name.
“Your father is the trauma psychiatrist Andrew Jones? I so hope I get a chance to meet him! You probably already know this, but your dad’s globally renowned for his cross-cultural PTSD work. I can’t wait to read about the work he did at the orphanage.”
Wow, these doctors from Australia knew about Dad and Team Hope? I knew he did important work, but I had no idea he was actually
famous
in his field.
“Thanks,” I said proudly. “He’s a good guy.”
Her eyes crinkled, not unkindly, but loaded with suspicion. “I’m just surprised he let you come up here alone. Especially someone who is so aware of the environmental dangers of a disaster site like this.” Amelia tilted her head, waiting for my response.
“I’ll see my dad soon,” I said with more confidence than I felt. “And like Deni said, I’m not alone, we’re together.”
After promising again that I’d get in touch if I needed her and waving good-bye to Amelia and Mac, I spotted Deni standing at the curb, sort of bouncing on the balls of his feet like an excited kid. I jumped back as an old banged-up white Land Rover raced around the corner and screeched to a halt, shooting dirt clods into the humid air.
A boy about Deni’s age with a bright smile and longish hair jumped out of the driver’s seat and practically tackled Deni, talking a mile a minute in what I assumed was Acehnese. Then a girl, dressed in white pants and a pink silky
jilbab,
got out more slowly but took Deni’s other hand in her own just as eagerly. His friends made me think of Spider and Bev—the three of us together. And Deni looked so happy.
“Sienna!” He waved me over. “Come! I want you to meet my friends. This is the American girl. This is Sienna.”
The boy, wearing a San Diego Chargers jersey, shook my hand enthusiastically, and I couldn’t help but crack up when he flashed me the hang-loose sign.
“Nice to meet you,” I said, returning his surf gesture.
He laughed loudly and clapped. “You know them?” He puffed his navy blue shirt out. “Chargers?”
“I do.” I nodded. “They’re an American football team from California. Like me.”
He smiled wider and slapped Deni’s back like,
Way to go, buddy.
“Sienna, this is Azmi. He’s my friend from since we were little boys. This is Siti.”
“Hello,” said Siti, who was shorter than the boy but looked more mature. “Nice to meet you.” Siti lowered her long eyelashes. Her brown skin was flawless against her pastel scarf
I checked to see if Deni noticed how beautiful she was, but he was still smiling at me.
After we piled into the car, Azmi insisted on showing me around Aceh before we went to his parents’ house. And it was a darn good thing that beast had four-wheel drive, because the road from the airport into Aceh was not in the best shape. The road was paved but also covered in mud. I wasn’t sure if it was because of the tsunami or recent rainstorms and I didn’t want to sound stupid by asking, so I didn’t.
The countryside was gorgeous, though. Emerald green and lush and, like the drive to the temple, farmers wearing cone-shaped hats bent over fields of rice paddies. Everything seemed light, breezy and fine. So fine that I wondered how far away we were from the tsunami damage we saw from the plane. I was sure I’d find out soon enough.
Deni and his pals chatted away while Azmi drove and Siti rode shotgun. Deni and I were sitting together in back, but he leaned forward as far as he could to be near his friends.
We bumped along for a while, bouncing to some kind of Indonesian dance mix on the radio.
Then we arrived at the beginning.
“Oh my God,
what happened here?”
On both sides of the muddy road the gutters were lined with parked vehicles.
Not cars, but completely mangled, crash-test-derby, utterly destroyed things that might at one time have been cars. They were rusted and twisted, and I couldn’t tell headlight from taillight. They lined up one after the other and seemed to snake on forever.
“They ran out of space for the broken autos,” Deni explained. “The line goes all the way to the ocean.”
“Wow. How far are we from the ocean?”
“Still far.”
As he drove, Azmi shot me the hang-loose sign in the rearview mirror, which seemed so weird now that we were in the midst of all this devastation. But they lived here. They saw this every day. It was me who wasn’t used to it.
Deni leaned back in his seat and told me the story. “They had no tractors, so they brought trained elephants down from the mountain. What a sight it was watching the men ride the beasts and watching the animals’ strong backs pulling the cars out of the water one by one.”
“How did they do that? Were they attached to a harness or something?”
“Yes, they pulled the cars with ropes and nets, pulled them from the sea that was now our town. It was a big job. A job I wish I would have had.” Deni stopped talking and looked out the window.
A few minutes later I pointed out a mound of mud and dirt on the right-hand side of the road. A sign with the numbers
26/12/04
was written in black marker. It was nailed to a piece of wood.
“That’s the date of the tsunami,” I said. “What is that pile of dirt?”
Deni’s face hardened. “It is where the dead lie,” he said, his voice heavy.
Oh my God, it was a mass grave.
“Are there more?” I asked.
Deni nodded solemnly. “Yes. That is why they call this the City of Ghosts.”
Azmi turned the music up even louder as if to drown out our conversation. Deni and his friends were quiet, moving their heads to the beat.
The hot air hitting my face had an electric buzz to it. Everything was so intense. I felt like I was riding through some other dimension. The music helped.
We bounced along on the semi-paved road until it became so rocky and bumpy that it was nearly unmanageable. Azmi, however, was loving the stick shift and laughed as he cranked the engine up and down the steep ravines.
“The wave did all this damage?” I asked over the music.