by Karen Rispin
"Whyhaven't we heard about this before?" Mr. Barnes asked, looking at Daddy.
"Well, Mbaika did come to you and ask for the job," he said. "We thought we should leave the choice up to you. No man should do what is against his conscience."
"Honey, we can talk about this another time," said Mrs. Barnes. "Right now we had better get looking for our daughter."
I got up to go with them and Daddy said, "I want you to come right back as soon as you've shown them which way you went. You, Sandy, Mom, and I have to have a talk."
I figured it must be about something important. Daddy doesn't call family conferences very often. We usually just talk at family devotions and stuff. Then I had an awful thought: maybe it was bad news about Daddy's hepatitis or something.
When I got back, Traci was sitting out front reading. "They're in your mom and dad's room, waiting for you," she said without even looking up.
Daddy made us all sit down on the bed.
"First of all, I'd like to say I'm sorry," he said. "I've been thinking a lot about what you said last night, Sandy, and I've decided you're right."
"Whatdid she say?" I whispered to Mom.
Sandy heard me. "I guess he means what I said in the car. Right, Daddy?"
"Yes. Sandy said I was being selfish by refusing to stop working. At least, that's how I took it—"
"Oh, Daddy," she interrupted, "I was just upset."
"But you were right," he answered. "I'd been thinking that my main responsibility is to do God's work. Last night I realized my family is God's work, too. I mean, I knew that. Your mother and I have talked about it many times. But I guess it never really sank in before."
It felt strange hearing Daddy talk like that, so I ducked my head. Some of the stitches were coming out of the quilt on Mom and Dad's bed. I tried to get my fingernail under one. Daddy kept talking.
"God's given me the job of being husband and father, and to do that job I need to stay alive. I can't completely exhaust myself for mission work. So I want you to know that I'll be trying to discipline myself to rest. That's not easy for me, so I'd appreciate your prayers."
There was a little silence, then Mom said, "Let's pray together about it." And we did.
Now that I was through with bugging the Barneses, it was nice not to feel bad when I tried to pray. I even prayed for Lisa. But mostly we all prayed for Daddy to get better and rest.
With all of us praying, what else can he do? I thought. I forgot that God sometimes answers no to our prayers. Anyway, all of us were smiling when we finished praying. Then I remembered how worried Mr. and Mrs. Barnes were.
"How come Mr. Barnes is so worried about Lisa? Should we look for her or something?" I asked.
"Well, I'm not worried yet," Daddy answered. "She has probably just gone on a walk. It will just make things worse for her if we all get ourselves into a stew. Let's give her a little time."
"And let's do all we can to make her feel welcome here," said Mom, looking at me really hard.
I almost told her what I'd decided last night, but just then Alex and David came tearing into the house.
"Uncle Kevin, Uncle Kevin," David yelled as they ran in the door, "Ali said we could go with him octopus hunting. Can we? Can we?"
"Please?" added Alex.
That sounded interesting. I guess Sandy thought so, too, because she said, "Can Traci and I go, too?"
Daddy said, "If you want to have Ali come and talk to me about it, we'll see. I'll be out front in the shade resting."
It was sort of funny how he announced he'd be resting. I couldn't remember him ever doing that before. I smiled.
The sun was so bright when I went out that it made everything look all bleached out for a second. David and Alex ran off to get Ali, and he came lumbering around the house to talk to Daddy. Ali must have been part Arab, because he had sort of taffy-colored skin and curly hair on his chest. He looked solid and strong and sort of fat. He always wore a cloth around his middle that looked like a narrow-striped wrap-around skirt. It was called a kikoi, and many of the Africans at the coast wear them.
"Jambo, Bwana," he said.
"Jambo, Ali. Habari ya usiku leo?" Daddy answered. When they'd finally finished saying "Hello, How is the day? How is your family?" and so on (you always have to be superpolite in Swahili), they got down to the octopus hunting. Ali said we could come.
"When will you be returning?" Daddy asked.
Ali said the tide would be full out at ten so he would be back "at the fifth hour." That meant eleven o'clock, since the Swahilis count the hours of the day from when the sun comes up which makes seven in the morning one o'clock. Actually, that has always made more sense to me than starting at midnight, like we do.
Daddy said we could go, so I took off looking for my reefing shoes, a stick, and some sunscreen.
Traci didn't want to go, and she managed to talk Sandy into staying with her. So Alex, David, and I followed Ali down to the beach and out onto the reef.
Ali was in a hurry, so we didn't have time to poke around in the sandy, seaweedy tide pools close to shore. Just like always, sand got into my old tennies and felt all scratchy around my ankles. I kept curling my toes up and swishing my feet around in the water to try to get the sand out. It was great to be going out on the reef again.
Ali had to wait for us on the way out to the main reef. Most places the water was above his knees, but it was up to Alex's and David's waists. You have to watch where you step, too, because it's not flat.
I saw one really nice little live coral bommie—a sort of six-foot-tall cauliflower of coral—and promised myself I'd come back to it and snorkel. There's always loads of fish around the bommies.
The main reef was a tan shelf of coral about a hundred feet wide and one hundred miles long. When we got there, Ali started walking very slowly and peering into the tide pools on the inside edge. He looked like a fat heron, poking along and staring into the water.
He motioned us back, so I started poking around some other pools. The whole shelf of the reef is full of holes. Some are shallow, but others are five or six feet deep and almost that wide. All of them are full of creatures.
I squatted down beside one and held still. Everything is either hidden or looks like something other than what it really is, so you have to sit still and wait to see anything. The wind rumpled the water so it was hard to see in. Then the wind hushed.
After a second, a little seashell by the edge got up on tiny orange legs and fell into the pool. That's just a hermit crab, I thought. Then I focused on a lump on the coral side of the pool that didn't look quite right. I poked it gently with my stick, and it let loose. A little creature that looked like an oval saucer with bright blue and yellow stripes fluttered down across the pool. I didn't know what it really was—I called them sea butterflies.
"Hey, look at this!" It was Alex. He was holding up one of those black sea slugs. It started squirting out white stuff, and he dropped it.
"Alex, don't pick stuff up," I said standing up. The back of my knees felt cool all of a sudden. They'd gotten sweaty when I was squatting by the pool.
"Yes," said David. "Lotsof stuff is poisonous."
"You're just trying to scare me," he said and grinned at us.
"Alex, I'm not, really," I said. On the reef, picking things up in your hand is idiotic. Besides, I didn't want to be blamed for him getting stung or whatever. "Ask Ali if you don't believe us."
"You'd just tell me he agreed with you no matter what he said," Alex answered still grinning. "I don't know Swahili, remember?"
"OK, then ask Daddy, but don't touch—"
A big splash from Ali's direction interrupted us. He was leaning over the edge of a pool with his arms in the water, and something was splashing like mad. We hopped across the rough coral toward him as quick as we could.
Long snaky tentacles ran up his arm. He slid his other hand down his wet muscular arm and pushed off the tentacles, which made a noise like ripping cloth. Then he grabbed
the octopus with his other hand and made a strong twisting motion. It lay limp. Its skin was still changing colors in waves, but it was dead.
"How did you do that?" I asked, because I couldn't see how he'd killed it.
"He has no headbone," he said. "I turned his head out through his mouth."
Then he showed us two hard shiny brown bits that looked like a bird's beak and said, "This is dangerous. He can bite off your finger with this."
The octopus had tentacles as long as David was tall, but it looked like a pair of old wet pants dragging behind Ali in the water. It wasn't very big. Ali swished it clean and dumped it in the basket he was carrying.
When Ali started hunting again, I stayed closer. I wanted to know how he could tell an octopus was in a pool. I'd only seen one once when I was snorkeling with Daddy, and that was just luck.
I followed Ali quietly for a long time. My shoulders were baking hot from the sun, but I didn't stop to get wet like I usually did.
Ali suddenly pointed at the edge of a tide pool.
"Where?" I whispered.
"Just there. See?" He pointed with a metal stick he was carrying and put his basket down.
I stared and stared, but could not see anything that remotely resembled an octopus.
"Look," he said pointing again.
Finally I realized a splotchy piece of coral under the edge of the pool looked too smooth. I nodded, hoping that was it. It was. Ali made a hard, quick jab at the lump with his metal stick. It squirted black ink, and tentacles raced up Ali's arm. In a second he'd killed it.
He held it out to me, slimy and dripping ink, and said, "For you, it's very good to eat."
I must not have looked enthusiastic, because he said, "I will cook it for you tonight, and you will see."
"All right!" said David smiling. He and Alex had come over while Ali was killing it.
"What'd he say?" asked Alex.
"He said he'd cook us one," David answered. "They're really good, but kind of tough."
"Right, you love to eat octopuses, just like I'm not supposed to pick up stuff?." Alex sounded disgusted. "Well, you aren't fooling me, David Stewart. I'll pick up stuff if I want to and I bet you won't eat octopus, either."
He's going to get stung for sure, I thought. I figured it was time for us to go in. Besides Alex looked sunburnt and so did David, even though Mom had rubbed them both with sunscreen. I was probably getting burnt through my sunscreen, too.
"We'd better go in," I said to Ali.
"Wait a bit. I want to get a fish there first," and he pointed over a little way.
I'd been paying so much attention to watching Ali, I hadn't looked ahead. There was a split in the reef, and ocean water was pouring through like rapids in a river. Mida Creek! I hadn't realized we'd walked so far down the reef.
"Come," Ali said. "It will only take a little time."
He squatted down and started banging on the coral with his piece of metal. He knocked off a piece of coral and pulled out this gross ten-inch-long worm with legs down the side. He took out a piece of wood with fishing line wound around it and tied a hook on the line. Then he baited the hook with that ugly worm.
Ali didn't have a fishing pole or anything. He waded into the edge of Mida Creek, whirled the hook around his head, and threw it out into the fast water.
"Don't you come here," he warned. "This is bad water."
He was right. Daddy warned us about it every time we came to the coast here. There was this long swampy inlet full of mangrove trees, and every high tide the ocean filled it with water. Every low tide, it emptied. So there was a lot of water moving there in a hurry. It poured in and out like a fast river and was only still for half an hour when the tide changed. It could sweep you away in a hurry. We were standing right next to where the water poured through the reef.
Ali looked as solid as a rock as he stood thigh-deep in the fast current and waited. He pulled the line in and threw it out again. This time he caught a shiny orange fish. He stuck it in his basket with the octopuses, and we headed back to the beach.
What happened when we got there made me forget all about asking Daddy to tell Alex not to pick stuff up.
As soon as we got to the beach, I stopped to pull my wet tennies off. My feet were shriveled up like raisins from being in the water so long. I'd just put one foot into the warm sand and was pulling off the other shoe when Sandy yelled at me. "Did you see Lisa Barnes?"
I looked up and yelled back, "No!"Hadn't they found Lisa yet?
Then Sandy yelled something else, but she was way up by the path and I couldn't hear her. So I started tugging at my shoe again.
A second later she and Traci were standing right in front of me, and they looked mad.
"Mom and Daddy made us look all over for Lisa Barnes," said Sandy. "Itwrecked a whole morning! And you guys were out having fun."
"We had to walk all the way to that old Arab mosque ruin, down by where the mangroves start," said Traci.
"Did Daddy still rest?" I asked
"Yeah, but nobody else did," Traci said.
"That's OK then. Maybe the grown-ups found Lisa while you guys were looking," I said.
"Come on, Sandy. Let's go see if they did," said Traci, and they headed up the beach. Alex and David had come up behind me while Sandy and Traci were talking. As soon as Alex heard that Lisa was still gone, he took off for the house.
"Weshould tell Ali," David said and ran off to where Ali was cleaning the octopus down by the water.
I watched him go. Then all of a sudden, where our beach ends and the next one starts, someone walked out of the coral. It looked really funny until I remembered that there's a sort of cave where the sand runs underneath the black coral at the back of the beach. I squinted my eyes, but the person was gone. It was hard to see that far away, especially when the white sand makes you squint.
But I was almost sure it had been Lisa Barnes.
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Chapter Six
Wow! Was she ever going to be in trouble. If the person I'd seen hide in the coral rock at the edge of our beach was Lisa, she had been hiding out right by the house all morning.
I looked up. Sandy and Traci had just reached the top of the beach. I took a big breath to yell at them, then stopped. Sandy and Traci would be really mad. If it was Lisa, she must have heard people calling her. She was going to be in enough trouble without me making it worse.
All of a sudden I had a plan. I'd go find Lisa and have her say she'd been lost somewhere else. That way she wouldn't get into so much trouble. Without stopping to think—or to ask God about it—I ran across the beach to the place I'd seen Lisa disappear. I didn't even pick up my shoes.
Higher on the beach, the dry sand pulled on my bare feet so it was hard to run. When I slowed down I could see the cave. A second later I was standing on the damp, packed sand of the entrance.
Clink, chink, clunk! Thesound of the small rocks hitting the coral walls echoed loudly. I couldn't see anybody. The cave wasn't very high, but I still couldn't see to the back of it.
"Lisa! Lisa, are you in here?" I called.
One of the big flat rock crabs scuttled around a corner, making a scratchy rustling noise. I bent over and walked into the cave.
The sand felt cold and damp. My eyes were so used to the bright sun that I could hardly see. A drop of water fell off the ceiling onto my hot, bare back. More crabs scuttled into corners.
"Go away!"
The yell made me jump, but at least I knew now that Lisa was in this cave. That was definitely her voice.
"No, you come out," I answered. "We can say you went down the beach and got lost. Then everybody won't be so mad."
"Leave me alone. I don't need your dumb plans," Lisa yelled.
"Lisa, wise up," I said kind of irritated. "I just want to help you." I could see her now. A big blotch of sunlight came in from a tunnel up through the roof of the cave. Lisa was in the tunnel, halfway up. She was hanging onto her knee like it hurt.
"Go away!" she yelled. "Do I have to spell it? G-o a-w-a-y. You made me cut myself trying to get away from you." She lifted her hand off her scraped knee to show me, then went on. "You tried to make me a slave driver, and now you want me to lie. I do not, n-o-t, not, need your help, Anika Scott."
A sound behind me made me jump. Someone else was coming into the cave.
"Anika?" that was David Stewart's voice. "Anika, how come you came running here? What happened?" A second later he'd crawled back to where I was, and he saw Lisa.
"How'd she get up there?" he asked me in a whisper. I just shrugged, but Lisa yelled, 'I'm not deaf. Don't talk about me! I got up here because You were chasing me. Go away!"
"We'll get your dad," I said and started backing out.
"No!" she said and started crying. It seemed like all she ever did was cry.
"OK, I'll help you get down then," I said.
"No! Just leave me alone!" she howled.
"Get Mrs. Barnes," I whispered to David, and he scooted out of the cave.
I sat down to wait. The wet sand felt cold on my legs. Lisa wouldn't look at me, but she didn't yell at me again, either. More drips fell from the ceiling and made patterns in the sand floor. I drew a circle in the sand around a drip mark and patted it away again. It seemed like it had been years since David left. Suddenly my stomach growled hungrily.
"Please, God…," I whispered, then I didn't know what to say so I stopped. I felt bad about telling Lisa Barnes to lie.
I swallowed hard and said, "Lisa, I didn't really want to make you a liar. I just wanted to help. I want to be your friend."
She never even looked down, but I felt a little bit better anyway. I drew a butterfly around another drip. The wet sand stuck to my finger.
Clink, chink! Bits of rock rolled down out of the hole Lisa was in, and I looked up. She was climbing toward the hole in the cave roof.
"Hey, don't! Please wait, Lisa," I pleaded.
