by Jane Kurtz
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?
FIVE
The 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.”
Dakar felt absurdly happy, as though she’d just been told she resembled God. “But my eyes aren’t like his.” Dad’s eyes were deep brown. Her eyes were blue. Not Mom’s blue. Just blue. “And he doesn’t have freckles.”
Mom smoothed Dakar’s bridge of freckles with both thumbs. “I’ll bet he did when he was twelve. If his mom or dad were still alive, we could ask.”
The next best thing about the day was being able to say yes to Melanie’s Saturday plan. Why not? By the time they were walking to school together, Dakar felt expansive, full of goodwill. Goodwill. Just thinking the word made her laugh.
“‘Fear not,’” she said to Melanie, spreading her arms and pretending that she had great, shimmering wings to flap. “‘For behold I bring you good tidings of great joy. Peace on earth and goodwill to all’ … to all human beings.”
“Whoa,” Melanie said. “Including the hockey players?” They giggled together, and Dakar felt she might grow real wings and start floating. She put her hand against her chest. No ice in there today. The glow had melted it all.
Except—except that Melanie’s comment had started worries bubbling again. She’d never seen a hockey game or a football game. How stupid was that going to seem? And what was Jakarta going to play here? “It’s all right,” she told herself. Jakarta had to be happy that the four of them would be together again. “I just remembered I’ve got to do something,” Dakar said. “It’s urgent.” Without waiting for Melanie to answer, she started to run. She had to be sure she had enough time to get downstairs before the first bell rang.
“Africa child,” the cook said before she could say anything. “You are full of glory today. The heavens are telling the glory of God, as my mother used to say to each one of her children every single morning.”
“What about that day to day pours forth speech part?” Dakar asked. “Don’t you like that? Good storytellers pour forth speech, don’t you think? I know I feel that way when I’m telling one of my favorite stories.”
The cook clicked her tongue. “Your parents surely did bring you up to know your good word, Africa child. Or did the Bible just come bubbling up out of the hot springs over there?”
Dakar laughed. “Neither,” she said. “And I wanted to tell you that my big sister is coming home. That’s why I look so full of glory.”
“Your sister.” The cook let out a long, squeaky sigh. “Well, you know, that’s a hallelujah moment, Africa child. I do wish I could see my own sister. There’s a wide, wide ocean between me and my baby sister.”
“Why don’t you go see her?” Dakar asked.
The cook shook her head. “I was born saying I would never, ever get up in an airplane. Then life twisted itself around me, and up I went in spite of all I had to say.” She chuckled. “And isn’t that life? But when God set me safely down on North Dakota solid ground, I vowed that was my last airplane flight. No, I think these willing ears will never be hearing my beloved baby sister pouring forth speech again.”
At the door Dakar hesitated. “About the Bible,” she said. “I went to a boarding school for a while where they thought Memory Work was very important. Mrs. Yoder would write the verses on Holy Cards and make us practice. What if you were on a desert island sometime, she would say to us, or in a prison cell? If you have the words in your heart, no one can take them away.”
“Uh-huh,” the cook was saying as Dakar turned. “It all pretty much comes down to what’s in your heart.”
On her way up the stairs Dakar thought about what the cook had said. It probably all pretty much did come down to what was in your heart. But it was so terribly, terribly hard to have a pure heart. She should care more about the people Dad was finding cures for, for example. The truly true truth was that she was mad at them at least half the time. Because it seemed like Dad spent so much time with them, and when he wasn’t with someone who had some strange disease, he was thinking about them.
“This is the second time you’ve been late, Dakar,” Ms. Olson said as she walked in the door. “Second time is supposed to be detention.”
Dakar swallowed. She wasn’t the kind of student to be late to class, and she’d never, ever had detention.
Ms. Olson was frowning. “Every once in a while my mom gets really sick,” Dakar said. Well, it wasn’t an actual lie, was it? “Sometimes she doesn’t know that she’s going to need me, but then I can’t really leave until someone else is there to stay with her. I’m sorry.”
Don’t give me detention, she thought. How embarrassing did life have to get? She concentrated on looking contrite. What a good word that was. She knew she didn’t have a pure heart, but she surely had a contrite one.
“See me if you need help getting it worked out,” Ms. Olson said. “It’s an important middle school responsibility to get to classes on time.”
Dakar scowled at the kids who had turned around to look. Contriteness had helped again. Or maybe it was only that all the teachers here had probably been warned, “She’s from Africa. She doesn’t know the things normal kids know.”
Sixth grade in the United States was harder than she’d expected. The classes were bigger than she was used to. Plus, the sixth grade had just become part of Cottonwood Middle School this year. “We have to be tough,” teachers said these first days when kids complained about anything. “We have to get you used to the system. Otherwise, you’ll never make it next year.” Were the teachers going to say that every year from now on?
Dakar didn’t dare pull out her lists and thoughts book today, not having just escaped detention. Instead, she doodled on the side of her paper, little hoodies with frightening eyes. She gave one hoodie a talk balloon. “Ferenji,” it was saying. That was “foreigner” in Ethiopia. Not that the little kids who yelled it every time she walked down the Maji road were mean like the hoodies, but she still didn’t like hearing them say ferenji over and over or having them pinch her skin to see what it was made of. In Kenya, the word was mzungu. In Egypt people said khawaaga, with one of those growling sounds that were so fun to say in Arabic.
What was the word going to be here in Cottonwood? Thinking about the hockey and football games, Dakar was sure it would be something. Which was weird,
because wasn’t she supposed to be home? That morning in Nairobi Mom had said, “I can’t believe we’re really going home.” Lots of people in Africa said things like “We’ll be going home for the year” when they meant the United States of America. Dakar couldn’t remember when she had first started thinking that the little frozen spots that sometimes popped up in her stomach and lungs would go away if she could just get home. So why were the spots still there?
“Jakarta’s coming home,” Dakar whispered to herself, and instantly felt better, even though the day crept along and she had to keep trying to think of things to do to keep from dying of impatience. By the time she got to math class, she was writing numbers the way her Egyptian friends wrote them. The numbers looked quite a bit like American numbers, but different in a cool, poetic way. She remembered practicing her numbers on a train in Egypt sitting beside Jakarta and watching mileposts whip by. They had just said good-bye to Mom and Dad, who were going to go off and have an adventure together, and the numbers helped her keep from crying.
Oops. She hadn’t heard a word of math class. She looked up quickly. “You are the engineers of the world’s future,” Mr. Johnson was saying. “You need to have a good foundation in math because it’s going to be up to you to fix the world’s pollution and other problems.” Dakar drew a scowling hoodie face. It was a good thing Jakarta would be here soon. Jakarta was interested in being an engineer of the world’s future. Jakarta thought about that kind of stuff.
She shifted on the chair. Now what would make positive and negative integers go fast? Whole numbers were comforting. What was scary was realizing that between any two whole numbers was an infinity of fractions and other things that made everything too dizzifying and unpredictable. When it came to infinity, all the peace on earth and goodwill could only go so far.
SIX
When Melanie met Dakar at the door on Saturday, the first thing she said was, “Do you know sign language?”
