by Jane Kurtz
She closed her eyes and tried to think. She and Jakarta had done everything together. Every move, every country that had to be left behind, every time when Dad went off on one of his adventures and she wondered if this was the time he wouldn’t come home, Jakata was there. “I always felt so safe when Jakarta was in the bunk bed right above me,” she whispered. “When I was scared of the way the wind whooshed in the trees outside, she’d lean over the edge and sing ‘Barbry Allen’ to me.” Dakar hummed a few notes, then sang. “‘They climbed and climbed to the steeple top, ’til they could climb no higher. And then they twined in a true lovers’ knot …’” She realized she was waiting for Melanie to finish it off the way Jakarta would have, but of course Melanie didn’t know the song.
“I wish you would quit stopping when you get to the good parts,” Melanie said.
“Sorry,” Dakar said. “Have you ever had anyone applaud for you? Not just a polite smattering of applause but really, really clapping?”
“Not yet.”
“Me, either. But sometimes—” She stopped, embarrassed, forced herself to go on. “Sometimes I have dreams where thousands of people are clapping and yelling and whistling. Jakarta could make me feel that way. She and I would make up stories together all the time, and then one day, when I told her a story for the first time, she said ‘You are great!’ It made me feel … all huge inside.”
“I like to dream that I’m having secret adventures,” Melanie said. “I wish I could have one in real life.”
“Mom says Jakarta read to me for four hours straight when we moved to Ethiopia, but I don’t remember because I was too young. I do remember Maji, though. That’s in Ethiopia. We moved there because of a cholera epidemic Dad wanted to study, and we stayed for a long time.”
Melanie was a good listener. Maybe the quest was to make a true friend, Dakar thought. That was something hard and a bit scary. Having a true friend might keep the ice from getting to her heart. But to have a true friend, didn’t you have to be willing to tell some secrets? Okay. She would tell Melanie three real things about Maji. Maybe how on rainy days she and Jakarta would climb into the attic and make up stories for the paper families they cut from Sears catalogs? The families lived in spider webs—American dads and moms and well-dressed little kids all in their charming catalog poses. Sitting by the wood stove, she and Jakarta would turn the pages of the catalog, picking the people they wanted and cutting them out. Then they would carry the people up the ladder into the attic. She and Jakarta had to be careful not to step off the rafters up there because their feet could go through the mud ceiling.
No, she’d rather tell about outside, about how the first thing they always did was check the passion fruit vines to see if any of the fruit was ripe. “If it was,” she told Melanie, “we’d suck the sweetness and seeds out. The second thing was to check the false banana trees for little frogs that hid down where the rainwater collected. Once Jakarta had the idea that we should toilet-train the frogs so they could be better pets.”
Melanie giggled. Dakar thought about the frogs, their cool skin against her palms. She and Jakarta usually had to hide the frogs. Any Ethiopians who saw the frogs would slap at the children’s hands until they let the frogs go, would scold them in Amharic, and pull back in fear or disgust as the frogs scrambled away.
“The best thing about Maji,” Dakar said, “was the water babies.” They played water babies whenever they followed Dad down to the waterfall. The game started where the bushes by the path were thick and you had to be careful not to let stinging nettle touch your legs. The water babies grew curled up at the tops of ferns. She and Jakarta would pick them carefully and hold them, resting in their palms, until they got down to the river. While Dad talked to people at the mill, they’d make boats out of sticks. Dakar could still see the water whirling the boats away, she and Jakarta running after them, down the river, past the mill where people’s grain got ground into flour. She could remember the fine, thin smell of the flour.
If the boats got stuck, they had to wade in and get them free. The cold water shocked the skin of her bare feet, hurting all the way to the tip of her tongue, but Jakarta said they had to save the water babies. She sighed.
“Don’t stop,” Melanie said.
So Dakar explained the game. “We would follow the water babies as far as we could. But finally we’d get to a place where the bushes were too thick and we couldn’t follow. ‘Say good-bye now,’ Jakarta would say, and we would call, ‘Good-bye. Good-bye.’ I always asked her where they went, but she would say, ‘It’s a secret. I’ll tell you someday.’”
Suddenly Dakar realized she was about to cry. She put the tip of her thumb in her mouth and bit it hard. That usually worked.
“Are you sending Jakarta your good thoughts?” Melanie whispered. “One of my aunts says, ‘Trust the universe.’”
Dakar thought about that. Was it the same as when Mrs. Yoder said, “God loves you”? She had always tried to believe that God loved her, but sometimes it didn’t seem possible. Probably Melanie’s aunt had never seen some of the terrible things she’d seen—the man with his milky-white blind eyes reaching out as she went past, or the kids without arms or legs, begging on the sidewalks of the city. But Mrs. Yoder had seen those things, and she still believed that God loved people.
“Is this the first time you’ve been away from Jakarta?” Melanie asked.
“Except the first year Jakarta went to boarding school.” As Dakar said the words, she suddenly thought about her one other true friend—a friend who, like Melanie, had looked at her with admiring eyes and let her make up almost all the games.
Gingerpuff scratched at the door, and Melanie got up, saying, “Little Miss Can’t Decide if She Wants In or Out.”
Her friend’s name was Wondemu, and they played together all the time that year. But she had missed Jakarta too much. So she’d left Maji and followed Jakarta to boarding school. And then she missed her parents and Wondemu and the water babies. At night, when she cried, one of her roommates would have to go get Jakarta. Jakarta would sit on the bed and sing “Barbry Allen” and comb Dakar’s hair.
Gingerpuff jumped onto the bed and walked over to knead Dakar’s stomach. The cat’s eyes, too, seemed drawn to the smoke. All three of them, Dakar thought, were mesmerized by the smoke. She rolled the word mesmerized around in her mind, wondering if Jakarta, wherever she was, could really sense that they were thinking about her. Could candle smoke travel all the way to Kenya? What if Jakarta wasn’t even alive anymore? She scrambled up, brushing the cracker crumbs onto the floor.
“Did you ever find out where the water babies went?” Melanie asked.
It was almost dark outside Melanie’s window. What if Jakarta was in big trouble and needed her right this minute? Dakar hadn’t even told Mom and Dad where she was. “I’ve gotta go,” she said.
“Wait!” Melanie grabbed her arm.
Dakar pulled away. “I can’t wait. I remembered that I need to get home.”
“Well, just a second,” Melanie said. “Hey, I got this great idea.”
Dakar hesitated. The doorknob was burning her hand.
“I think we should have a sleep-over,” Melanie said quickly. “That’s sort of adventuresome. My grandma gave me a dress-up box, so we could act out one of your stories and everything. What do you think? Saturday?”
“Maybe.” How could she have stayed away so long? “I’ll ask.”
She could tell even before she pushed open the door that the house was too quiet. Her father was reading the newspaper on the couch. “Anything about …” The words leaped into her mouth, but saying them would make everything more real. Besides, why would Cottonwood, North Dakota, have any news about Kenya?
Dad was frowning. Dakar tried to breathe. Were his eyes moving on the page? No. She was sure they weren’t. He wasn’t even reading. “Dad?”
He dropped the newspaper into his lap. She ran and flopped down on the couch beside him, wishing she could jump ont
o the newspaper, the way she did when she was little. “Did we hear something?”
“Oh … no.” He rubbed her cheek. “I’m sorry I scared you. Actually, you scared me when you didn’t come home. You should call if you’re not going to come home.”
Dakar glanced warily at the telephone. She didn’t like telephones. There weren’t any in Maji or at boarding school, and she never spent much time using the one in Kenya, where ordinary people for some reason never had their names in the phone book and the phone lines were often down or phones disconnected, anyway. But she could probably figure out how to use this one. “Where’s Mom?”
“She stayed in bed today. Just resting.”
Dakar coughed. It felt as if a small chunk of ice had gotten caught in her lungs. Mom was probably fine, though. She had been unusually cheerful since they came to Cottonwood. “Is she ever going to take a trip to see where she grew up?”
Dad rattled the edge of the paper restlessly. “I have no clue. I thought that was the main reason why we came to North Dakota. She won’t talk about it. I don’t think anybody understands—including her.”
Dakar stared idly at the picture of the family Mom had hung by the table. Dad and Jakarta were laughing, their arms around each other. She herself had her mouth open and was holding up one finger as if to say “wait a second.” Mom must have been looking at something off to the side, but you couldn’t tell what. “No, you’re wrong,” she wanted to say. “Someone might understand. Me.” But people just didn’t go around telling Dad he was wrong. And maybe she didn’t even really understand. Still, it seemed to her that Mom might be like a scarab beetle. The ancient Egyptians considered scarab beetles sacred because new beetles seemed to pop mysteriously and miraculously out of little balls of dung. Really, though, adult beetles laid their eggs and then rolled and rolled the dung with their hind legs until the eggs were hidden deep inside.
Maybe Mom had been like that, burying the North Dakota piece of her heart in a neat little ball of ice. Maybe she was afraid of what might happen if she saw the place where she’d grown up. What if seeing it didn’t help, and the hard little ball was still there? Or … what if she loved it so much that she never wanted to leave North Dakota again?
Dad ran his hand through his graying red hair, making it stick up everywhere. “I was thinking about something that doesn’t have anything to do with Jakarta. The doctors in a medical center in Atlanta have been consulting with me about a case that’s baffling them. They thought it might be something tropical. I was just going over everything in my mind, wondering what I’m missing. What could I possibly be missing?”
Dakar pulled back. She hated the smell of newspaper. And she hated the person Dad was thinking about. Wait. What a terrible thought! She wanted to care about the patient, a person who was lying in a hospital bed … itching, hurting, maybe even dying. I care, she thought quickly. I do care, I do. It’s just that there were so many people all the time, always wanting to be near Dad or neeeeding him.
She wished she were more like God and Dad. Mrs. Yoder said, “The Bible suggests that God loves poor people most especially.” The first story Dakar ever wrote said, “God loves lepers. My dad loves lepers. But I am scared of them.”
Well, okay, her heart definitely wasn’t frozen yet, if she could feel guilt. The honest, shameful truth was, she wanted him to be sitting on the couch and thinking about Jakarta, only Jakarta. But she would never say that to him. Dad, who had such a big heart for the wretched and the poor and the sick, would never understand. Besides, ever since boarding school she and Jakarta had been careful about saying anything that would hurt Mom’s or Dad’s feelings. Every moment with your family was precious. You learned that in boarding school even if you didn’t learn anything else.
FOUR
That night in her sleep Dakar quit breathing again. She woke up gasping—huge, noisy gulps. When air was finally trickling back in her lungs, she started to cough.
Through the coughing she heard footsteps. She felt the light in her face. “Dakar?” She felt Dad’s hands pulling her up. He held a glass of water to her mouth.
“I’m okay.” It was a good sign she could talk, even if she had to croak the words out.
“Don’t try to talk. Just breathe calmly.”
Breathe calmly. The cough was a crocodile, its eyes sinister above the surface of the water. It wanted to pull her under, but she wouldn’t let it. She could still fight back. She made herself breathe in time to the words Mrs. Yoder had taught her: “‘You will not fear the terror of the night.’” In. Out. “‘Nor the arrow that flies by day.’” In. Out. “‘Nor the pestilence that stalks in darkness.’” In. Out. “‘Nor the destruction that wastes at noonday.’” Too bad she did fear all those things, no matter how many times she said the psalm.
“Has this happened to you before?” Dad asked.
“A few times in boarding school. My roommates would run and get Jakarta.” Jakarta. Jakarta singing. “‘They climbed and climbed to the steeple top, ’til they could climb no higher. And then they twined in a true lovers’ knot—the red rose and the briar.’” Dakar would feel warm and attached, knowing that Jakarta was the red rose and she was the briar.
“More than once or twice?” Dad’s voice made her a little scared—as if he were mad, though she knew he probably wasn’t mad. Just impatient.
“I can’t remember.” She didn’t want to remember. “One of my roommates told Jakarta that sometimes it sounded like I was holding my breath, and this roommate had trouble sleeping, anyway, and she said I made it all the worse because she felt like she had to stay awake and listen in case I … you know. So they moved her to another room.”
“I wish someone had told us.”
He isn’t mad, Dakar reminded herself. He just sounds that way. “Jakarta used to sing to me,” she whispered.
“Well, lie back. Here, I’ll turn out the light, and then I’ll sing.”
It wasn’t “Barbry Allen,” but she liked his songs, and he had a good voice. Such interesting music in the world. The shepherd flutes in Ethiopia. And sometimes in Egypt there were weddings right outside the compound, with wailing Arab music all night. Everyone showed up for class bleary-eyed after nights like that, and tests were postponed. In Nairobi Mom got their cook to teach her some songs in Swahili.
Mom. Dakar sat up. “Where’s Mom?”
He stopped in mid-phrase, and she had the discombobulating feeling that they weren’t in Cottonwood at all, but out on the African plains together, in the dark. Out there she always knew when he’d heard a dangerous sound, a pestilence that stalks in darkness. She’d lie there with her heart just throbbing.
“Things can get unpredictable out here, fast,” he used to tell her. “When I say frog, you jump.” She had sat with him in silence like this many times, wondering what was happening, listening to the way his breath whistled in and out. Not asking.
But no. They weren’t in Africa. Perhaps pestilence didn’t stalk in darkness in quite the same way in Cottonwood, North Dakota. “Never mind,” she said. “Now I remember you told me she’s been in bed all day. Did she eat any supper?”
“No. But don’t worry, Dakar. She’ll be fine.”
She settled back. Fine. But what if she wasn’t? What if—what if the hoodies were after her? When the hoodies pulled Mom into the Allalonestone in Maji, Jakarta knew what to do. Now Dakar would have to figure out how to save Mom. “Don’t worry,” people always said. “Don’t worry.” But she had to worry. “What’s the scariest thing that ever happened to you?”
“Hmm.” Dad’s fingers found a knot in her left shoulder and kneaded it so hard she wanted to wince, but he liked her to be strong, so she didn’t. “Well, I think you were there. Do you remember?”
Of course she remembered. “Don’t let your fear get the upper hand. It has a way of swallowing people—whole,” Dad had said on that terrible afternoon after the elephant charged them and she was sitting on the ground, more afraid than she could eve
r remember being in her life (which was saying something), shaking so hard she couldn’t move even though an acacia thorn was sticking into her leg.
“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.”
