“Yeah, except it’s not pink and orange like at home; it’s brownish—Fudge Popsicle Haze.” I started laughing.
But Dad didn’t laugh. “You look so much like her now, you know....” His voice cracked, and the lines in his face deepened.
“Huh?”
“Like your mom. And here ... for some reason, you remind me of her so much. It’s hard to put a finger on exactly what it is ... but it’s something.”
He used to tell me that a lot when I was little:
You love-lies are two pearls cut from the same oyster,
he’d say with pride.
“Thanks,” I said.
Dad looked at me cautiously before he asked, “Is it ... hard for you to be here, knowing we are so close to where we lost her?”
The Indian Ocean.
“Yeah,” I admitted. “I know it sounds stupid, but I’m still always hoping she’ll turn up.”
Dad looked at me sadly and then gently spun his ring around and around his left finger.
“It’s been three years, sweetie. They combed the ocean, the land. I didn’t come home until they were sure ...”
“... But they never found the wreckage,” I said.
Dad sighed. “I know. But if she was ... if she were alive, sweetie, don’t you think she’d have come home? She loved us too.”
“Maybe. But maybe she ... I mean hypothetically, she ...” I let the words trail off.
I ran out of Maybes and Hypotheticals and Buts a long time ago.
Yet here I was trying the same exact thing again.
“Perhaps while we’re here,” Dad said, in a cautious voice, “I was thinking of maybe doing a little ceremony; we could drive out to the Indian Ocean, say a few words....”
My eyes stung with tears. “No.”
“Sienna, I think maybe it would be good ...”
“No. No way.”
I dug my fingernails into my palm.
“Just think about it?”
“NO.”
He breathed out a long, slow sigh as my heart raced in my chest.
“Okay.” Dad stared at his ring. Tapped on it. Pulled it halfway off, then stuck it back on.
I felt a little better.
He loved Mom and would never stop loving her. Just because he couldn’t see her didn’t mean she wasn’t there. Their marriage was a constant. Forever.
I swallowed away the painful moment and breathed.
Too bad Vera hadn’t heard our conversation, so she could give up hope that my mom’s husband would ever be her man.
“There’s nothing quite like being on the other side of the world,” he said.
Dad patted my knee, and together we watched the Fudge Popsicle Haze disappear into the horizon, sure we were both thinking about the same person.
CONNECTION
My favorite little girl didn’t walk; she bounced.
“Hello!” she said, skipping up to us, the last glow of sunset painting her white
jilbab
pink.
“Hello, Elli. This is my dad.”
“Nama saya
Andy,” he said, shaking Elli’s hand.
“Doctor Andy,” Elli said proudly.
“Yes,” I said. Then to Dad. “Shouldn’t it be almost her bedtime?” I asked.
Dad checked his watch. “It’s almost nine.”
The sky was getting dark, and I remembered I hadn’t gone to the bathroom or brushed my teeth since the airport. I confessed to Dad.
“Seriously?” He groaned. “Okay, let’s find the girls’
mandi
and then get you some more water.
Aku mau mandi?”
he asked Elli.
“Kamar kecil! Waay saay!”
She grabbed my hand and skipped down the path.
“Way say?” I asked.
“WC,” Dad said, walking fast to keep up with us. “Water closet, like they say in England.”
Dad followed us partway down the path and then stopped short as if a force field had stopped him in his tracks.
“What?” I asked.
“I can’t go any farther. This is the girls’ section, and men aren’t allowed.”
“But you’re my dad!”
“Doesn’t matter, kiddo. No boys in the girls’ area.”
Dad dug into his backpack and handed me two energy bars and two bottles of water. Then, almost as an afterthought, he handed me a package of baby wipes.
“What are these for?”
“The
mandi.
It’s sort of like camping. You’ll see.”
Oh yes, Tom’s
mandi
joke. I guessed I was about to find out the “fun way.”
“You need to use the bottled water to wash your face and brush your teeth. Remember when you wash your hair to spit the water out the whole time you’re pouring the bucket over your head. If you get even the slightest amount of water in your mouth, you could get sick from the microorganisms living in it.”
“Microorganisms? Why didn’t you tell me this before? What bucket? There aren’t any showers? Dad, I haven’t showered since we left home. I need to clean up.”
“Honey. Calm down. Don’t forget to take your malaria pill tomorrow, and remember to wear flip-flops in the
mandi.
You don’t want to get a fungal infection.”
This was getting more fun by the second.
He looked at me wearily before he said, “Okay. Well, I guess I’ll see you at breakfast.”
Butterflies fluttered in my stomach. “Wait! Where is breakfast? How will I find you?”
No cell phones. No landlines. He wasn’t even allowed in my room! I didn’t even know my way around, and he was just ditching me?
He spoke to Elli in Indonesian. “Elli promises to take excellent care of you,” he said with a wink in her direction. Then his tone changed to more protective. “If you need anything, you can ask Vera. She’ll be bunking in the girls’ area too. I’m not sure which dorm, but you should be able to find her easily enough.”
No, thanks. I’d rather tough it out alone.
Dad kissed my cheek quickly. “You’ll be fine.
Sweet
dreams.” The way he said it wasn’t the same way most dads said it. I heard him loud and clear:
Think good thoughts; try not to have a nightmare. I can’t help you here.
“Okay.” My throat clogged with homesickness. “I’ll be fine.” I tried to convince myself.
You’re fifteen. You’re not a baby. Pull it together.
“I know you will,” he said, his face showing confidence that mine lacked.
And just like that he was gone.
MANDI
Pulling open the creaking door for me, Elli pointed inside.
“Mandi!”
In the middle of a wet, moldy floor was a hole cut into once-white tile. Next to the hole sat a dirty blue bucket, a metal pitcher, and a rusty drain in the ground. In the corner of the furry green floor was a squatting bug-eyed creature. I jumped back behind Elli. “Is that
a frog?”
Elli erupted into a fit of giggles when I shrieked. Then she skipped into the filthy room and scooped the frog into her hands, presenting the bumpy amphibian to me as if it were a rare gift.
“Kodak,”
she said.
“Kodak.”
When the frog croaked, I flinched and she collapsed into more giggles.
“Okay, here goes nothing.”
I closed the
mandi’s
rickety door after Elli stepped out. There was no clean place to set my backpack, so I balanced it on my lap, after pulling down my pants and squatting over the hole. Dad’s warnings haunted
me:fungal infections, microorganisms.
My scalp itched, and for a second I considered attempting to wash my hair but then gagged when I glanced down into the blue bucket, the one I was (per Dad’s instructions) supposed to pour over my now-greasy hair. There, in mucky water, bobbed two wiggling brown worms. You’ve got to be kidding.
I was going to
kill
Dad in the morning for leaving me here.
Then I noticed there was no toilet paper. Could it get any worse? Then I remembered the wipes! Careful not to fall on the slippery floor, I dug into my bag and grabbed a couple. But there was no trash can. Should I toss them in the hole? I didn’t think that looked right, so I opened one of the energy bars. I set the chocolate chip bar loose in my pack to salvage for later and stuck the used wipes into the wrapper.
And I thought barfing on the plane was bad.
Cursing under my breath, I got the hell out of there.
THE PICTURE
The first thing I noticed was that they weren’t wearing their head coverings anymore. Dressed in nightgowns, with long dark hair flowing down their backs, a crowd of little girls was gathered around something in the center of the room.
The second thing I noticed was that thing was my opened suitcase.
T-shirts, pants, bras, flip-flops, my digital camera, even my journal were strewn out all over the dirty floor. “Girls!” I called out. “That’s my stuff!”
I started shoving everything back into the suitcase; some of the girls helped, but most backed off nervously.
One girl, taller with a thinner face than Elli’s, was wearing my blue polo shirt backward; another kid was opening and shutting my compact powder case. Then I zoomed in on Elli, who had opened my journal and was flipping through the few pictures I had stuck inside before the trip.
“Hello!” she said to me. She waved around the one picture I had of me, Bev and Spider, taken when we were about twelve, laughing, and then she flung it into the air like a baton. Before she could launch it again, I snatched it out of her hands and the whole upper corner, half of Spider’s surfboard and part of his head, ripped off and fell onto the floor.
Elli looked mortified as she picked up the ripped piece and handed it to me.
She didn’t know. She was just a kid.
I glanced up. A ceiling fan sat broken and still; two of the four blades had been snapped in half, leaving splintered edges.
I retrieved my journal from Elli, my camera from another girl, and set them up on my bed.
“Go ahead and play with the rest. I don’t care,” I said, swallowing away a gnawing feeling of regret for the greater good of keeping the peace.
The kids looked up at me expectantly, not understanding my words, so I gestured with my hands and forced a grin. “It’s okay! You can look!”
Elli spoke to them in Indonesian and then went back to giggling and digging through the only things that reminded me of home. I knelt down next to them, showing them my stuff. When they started yawning, I knew that no grown-up was coming to tuck them in. There were a few other staff, the teachers, Dad said, but they slept in their own rooms at night. The kids were without evening supervision, which was part of the problem. I said, “Time for bed, girls,” and pointed to their bunks. Elli reached out cautiously, threw her arms around my neck and gave me a squeeze. I hugged her back and tucked her into her bed.
Then I pulled the lightbulb string and veiled the room in darkness.
When I hopped onto my top bunk, I felt the rock of motion, which reminded me of the plane, which reminded me of my night terrors.
“Oh no,” I said out loud. I forgot to ask Dad for a sleeping pill! How would I fall asleep? My body clock was upside down and backward.
But if I didn’t fall asleep, I wouldn’t have the nightmare.
Maybe I’d just stay up all night and think about stuff
Once the room was filled with the gentle breaths of sleeping girls, I sat up cross-legged, mindful not to hit my head on the water-damaged ceiling, and opened my journal, slipping out the other pictures from home.
I saw Spider in the slit of moonlight coming through my window, leaning against his surfboard, a lopsided smile on his sunburned lips.
Oma leaning over her flower garden, digging in the fresh earth with a wooden spoon instead of a real tool, with her gray hair pulled up into a loose bun. She was dressed in her favorite butterfly-patched jeans and white beaded tunic. She was frowning at the camera. She didn’t like to be photographed, and Dad caught her off guard.
My picture of Bev is from the school debates last year. Wearing a brown suit with a white button-down shirt not unlike the shirts the kids wore here, her mouth was open; she was talking when I took the picture for the yearbook, her eyes fierce with passion. She looked like a young Hillary Clinton.
But the best picture of all was of Mom. She was grinning at the camera, holding the dimpled hand of a fluffy-haired baby wrapped to her chest in a red sling. Dad said she used to call me dandelion girl because of all that blond fluff. The picture was slightly out of focus because Dad said Mom was laughing when he snapped the photo.
It was my favorite picture of the two of us. Mom’s crinkly, blue-eyed smile was what home really meant. Before. Now. Still.
I shut the book and leaned over my bunk to check on the little girl sleeping beneath me, her eyes shut tightly. She looked so tiny and alone, I had to resist the urge to curl up next to her like my mom used to do with me. But because I wasn’t her mom, because I wasn’t even her sister, I whispered instead, “Good night, Elli.”
’Cause I was the only one there to say it.
DAY TWO
DENI
I’m on the plane nosediving toward the sea. A boy, tall and shirtless, limps down the cabin aisle. I follow him. Stumbling. Clutching on to blue headrests so I don’t fall. The other seats are empty. We are alone on the plane. I run after him, yelling, “Wait! Wait for me!” But he doesn’t turn around. Instead he flings open the cockpit door. No one. The steering wheel rotates by itself as if the plunging plane is being flown by a ghost. The boy sits down in the captain’s seat. I rest a hand on his shoulder, and his skin is like quicksand sucking me inside him all the way to his chalk white bones. He spins around, startled, haunted eyes digging into mine—telling me a horror he thinks I’ll understand. And then, as quickly as the wound opened, his shoulder heals around my hand.
Screaming, I jerked upright, smacking my head on the corner of something hard.
Cursing under my breath, I blinked.
Someone was there.