by Jane Kurtz
Dakar shook her head. “Don’t tell me. Shut up, Jakarta. It’s almost bedtime. Don’t say it, okay?”
“It’s all right,” Jakarta said, giving her a big grin. “It wasn’t a puff adder or something. It was a white-lipped snake, not one of the kind that can kill you. It would have made us sick but not dead.”
“Just shut up about the snake,” Dakar said sulkily. “I’m going to bed.” She was halfway up the stairs when she hesitated and turned around. “Changed my mind,” she said. “I’ll just lie here on the couch. You can read your history.”
For a few minutes she lay still, listening to Jakarta turning pages. Just as she started trying to think of something else to ask Jakarta, the phone rang. Dakar dashed to the kitchen phone, calling, “Get the extension in the living room.”
Mom sounded breathless and faint. “It was a long walk over here,” she said. “But the stars were astonishing, and the stubble crackled under my feet. I felt as if I were walking across an island in the middle of nowhere, with the sea hissing all around me and curling up the beaches.”
Dakar started to say “Mom,” but Jakarta cut her off. “I’m point guard for the basketball team now, Mom,” she said.
Mom’s voice got stronger then. She said all the right, excited things, and started telling Jakarta stories about her own basketball-playing grandmother. Dakar put her hand over the receiver and waved to get Jakarta’s attention. “We should tell her about Dad,” she mouthed.
Jakarta shook her head firmly. “What was their court like?” she asked Mom.
“Well, according to Aunt Lily, they played on a dirt court that was smooth and hard from all the pounding feet. They would ride to the other schools in a wagon pulled by horses with a canvas cover over the top. It took all afternoon to go and come home.” Mom stopped. “Can you imagine? And isn’t this a coincidence? Aunt Lily and I were just talking about it this afternoon.”
“Why not?” Dakar said out loud to Jakarta.
“Tell you later,” Jakarta mouthed back. To Mom, she said, “Do you know what Great-Grandma’s practices were like?”
“I’ll ask Aunt Lily,” Mom said. “Can I talk to your dad?”
“He’s not here,” Jakarta said.
“Oh.” Mom suddenly sounded sad and faraway. “Well, tell him I called.”
As soon as Dakar hung up the phone, she started to pout. “Why not?” she wailed.
“Come on, Dakar,” Jakarta said. “Don’t you think Mom deserves some happiness, too? You and I will be fine, won’t we?”
Dakar didn’t answer. She went over to the window and breathed hot air against the glass, making a steamy O. She drew a sad face on the glass with her finger. “And I don’t care if it’s hard to clean,” she whispered resentfully.
“Come on,” Jakarta said. “I’ll make you hot cocoa. Remember how I would melt chocolate bars on my hot plate at boarding school and sneak milk from the dining room so I could make you hot cocoa when you were sad and couldn’t sleep?”
They sat at the table, and Dakar slurped her cocoa on purpose. She had to think. The family was more apart than ever, and now she didn’t even have the cook to give her advice. Somehow she’d have to come up with a new plan completely by herself.
“I remember when I was in sixth grade in boarding school,” Jakarta said gently. “I thought if I could only get back to Mom, she could make everything right again. But when you’re as old as I am, you’ll realize moms need things, too. Maybe she needs her mother.”
“Her mother is dead,” Dakar said sullenly.
Jakarta didn’t say anything.
“Oh.” Dakar was mad at herself for being such a baby. “You mean, Aunt Lily?”
“Yeah. Aunt Lily.”
Dakar looked up at the family picture on the wall, and Dad’s eyes bore into her. “You are the hero of your own life,” he was saying.
“Don’t give up,” she told herself. “Don’t give up, O ye of little faith.” Okay, but what next? She’d been making herself be brave because she thought Jakarta might want to stay around her if she were brave, the type of person who would handle a white-lipped snake and laugh about it. But what would Mom want? What might be the key to bringing Mom home? What would Odysseus do? He thought up all kinds of ideas when he was trapped by the Cyclops or had to go between Scylla and Charybdis. Or what did Cleopatra do when she was only fourteen and her beloved father was banished and her older sister was about to have her killed any day?
“Do you think Mom is ever coming back?” she said. “Maybe the Allalonestone got her again.”
Jakarta shook her head, then reached over and gave a piece of Dakar’s hair a little tug. “I hope not. I think she’s sailing right along the top of the water on one of those boats we used to make for the water babies. The hoodies can’t get her and pull her under as long as she stays on the boat. Pretty soon the river will swirl her right back to our door.”
“How did you first make up the water babies, anyway?” Dakar asked.
Jakarta looked surprised. “Don’t you remember? It’s a book. Mom read it to us, but you were probably too little to understand it then. There were lots of words and things I didn’t understand myself. But later I read it out loud to you. And we made up a game about it. We cleared a path down in that place where the vines were. I used to make you swing on the vines to be sure they would hold us. Remember?”
Dakar remembered the vines and how honored she used to feel when Jakarta would tell her that it was an important job to be the Vine Tester. After Jakarta left, Dakar taught Wondemu to be a Vine Tester, too. They took turns being Vine Testers. She’d always felt sorry for Jakarta that Jakarta was too big to be one. Now she realized that she’d been naive and that Jakarta had been saving her own tail by making Dakar test all the vines first.
“We named places along the path to go with the book,” Jakarta said. “The Other End of Nowhere and the Shiny Wall and the White Gate that was never opened and finally Mother Carey’s Haven, where the good whales go when they die. Don’t you remember that?”
Mother Carey’s Haven. Something was really important about that. What was it? Dakar shook her head, frustrated that she couldn’t catch the slippery memory.
“Do you remember that Mom would read books to us when we were in the bathtub? We had to save water in Maji because it always had to be heated up on the woodstove.”
“Yes,” Dakar said. “I remember that.” She remembered Jakarta or Dad soaping her hair, the sting of the soap in her eyes, the soft light of the kerosene lamp. She remembered running down the hall in her nightgown afterward, her feet cold on the concrete, leaping so that the lion that hid under her bed wouldn’t grab her.
“After a while we didn’t play on that path anymore,” Jakarta said. “I don’t really remember when we quit playing the game about getting to Mother Carey’s Haven. But the first time we went with Dad down to the waterfall and saw those fern tips, I knew instantly that they were water babies.”
Dakar rubbed her arms. It was chilly in the house. Did she and Jakarta know anything about how to turn on the heat when it got really cold? What if they had to wrap up in blankets with their arms around each other to try to keep warm? What if Mom and Dad came home and found them-huddled together in bed, frozen solid? “Did you ever know where the water babies went after we couldn’t see them anymore?” she asked.
“Not really. On down the river.”
Dakar got up and dumped the rest of her cocoa in the sink. Her stomach was jumping, and she felt slightly sick.
She couldn’t even remember now why she’d gotten so determined that day to follow the water babies to the very end of their journey. That afternoon, just like every other time, the boats had gone into a deep pool where they turned slow, loopy circles. Then the current began to slowly pull them out the far side of the pool. “Come on,” she’d shouted to Wondemu over the roar of the water. “We have to follow them.”
They’d had to push and fight through the thick bushes. If Wonde
mu weren’t there to help her, she would never have gotten through. When they couldn’t make the bushes budge anymore, they got down on their hands and knees and crawled, heads down, pushing through with their arms. Suddenly the bushes gave way. Dakar could still feel the lurch, the way her breath fluttered in her throat as she stumbled out and saw that they were right at the edge of a cliff.
With a huge roaring that made talking impossible, the water babies’ river spun away from the rocks and flung itself hundreds and hundreds of feet down. When Dakar and Wondemu inched forward on their stomachs and stared into dizzying space, she could see it shattering into droplets on the rocks far, far below.
FOURTEEN
That night Dakar dreamed she was trapped in the Allalonestone. She couldn’t move her arms and legs. Grayish black flat stone was all around her, and she was utterly and forever alone. She woke up panting and rummaged in her drawer for the candle and matches. “Come back,” she whispered as she stared into the flame. “Come back. Come back. Come back.”
When school was over that afternoon, she didn’t even go into the silent house. Instead, she hunted around in the garage until she found a rake. Mom wanted picket-fence neat? Fine. It was time for one of those quests like the ones where the princess has to pick up a thousand pieces of corn before nightfall. Dakar carried the rake outside, studied the yard, and then picked a spot and began to coax the leaves into a pile.
She raked for what she was pretty sure was hours and hours. Leaves were still dancing down, and they got caught in her hair and sweater, but she didn’t care. She got a blister on her hand, and she didn’t care about that, either. From time to time she stopped and counted how many piles she had made. She loved raking. Today was just exactly the way autumn was in the books. She stared up at the two-story house, and for a change it was looking back at her, smiling and nodding.
Sooner or later she’d given each of their houses a name because they came to remind her of certain people. The apartment in Egypt had made her think of a picture of teenage Elvis Presley, surly and full of itself. So she named it Elvis. Some days the house in Nairobi was Cleopatra, and some days it was Donbirra. Finally she called it Donbirra Cleopatra. Elegant, with unknowable eyes. The house in Maji was best, of course, because they stayed there the longest and it felt most like home. She named it Gabriel, after the angel. The Bible didn’t say that Gabriel was the angel who said, “Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people,” but Dakar was sure he was. Angels had to be team players because they hardly ever got their individual names mentioned.
She was the only one who got that attached to most of the houses. Dad didn’t like cities, and once they left Maji, he seemed to hover uneasily, like some exotic moth, over Elvis and Donbirra Cleopatra, mostly escaping to places where his favorite people—peasants, farmers, nomads—lived. Mom didn’t like cities, either, and chose to live in them only so Jakarta and Dakar wouldn’t have to go to boarding school.
What was this house’s name? She squinted up at it, moved to the other side of the yard, and looked at it again. It didn’t seem able to communicate, maybe because it was only a shell without Dad’s energy and Mom’s warmth. No matter how many different angles she studied, the name didn’t come. A shout startled her, and she looked up. It was Jakarta and Pharo, jogging home.
“You’re making more work for yourself than you need to,” Jakarta called. “Dad said just ignore them.”
“I like to rake,” Dakar called back. “I never had a chance to do it before.”
At the supper table Jakarta said, “You should at least wait until all the leaves are down. You’re just going to have to do it all over again.”
“You’re crazy, man,” Pharo told her. “My mom always tells me I have to rake. The day she left she said, ‘You be sure to rake for those people you stay with.’ Your sister says you don’t have to rake, and you still rake.”
But she did have to. They just didn’t understand. That was okay, though. People hardly ever did understand heroes like Gilgamesh and their quests. “Where are you staying?” she asked Pharo.
“With Aaron Johnson. From the team. I’d already been overnight there lots of times. Every day I go to the apartment and water my mama’s plants.”
Dakar sneaked a quick frown at Jakarta. “Does your mama call you all the time?”
“Nah, man.” Pharo chuckled. “She’s not in a place of any telephones. Besides, the Johnsons are lawyers. Nothing scares them. And my mama has had no life to herself for years. Why should she spend this trip worrying about me?”
Jakarta lifted her eyebrows at Dakar with a look that said, “See?” To Pharo, she said, “Lawyers, huh? Well, don’t tell the Johnsons anything about us.” Her voice got even more stern. “Or if your mom comes back. Don’t tell.”
He laughed. “Hey, keep it friendly, baby. Long as things are okay here, I got no need to be blabbing. But if you need anything, you find me right away.”
Jakarta pulled the baked chicken out of the oven and put it on the table with a flourish. “We’re doing pretty well, aren’t we?” she said. “For a bunch of motherless chicks.”
“We haven’t bought groceries yet,” Dakar pointed out. “Or done your smelly, sweaty laundry. Or figured out how to turn on the heat.”
“Pharo can show us about the heat, can’t you?” Jakarta said.
“I’ll look at your furnace,” Pharo said. “Hope it’s like ours. Anyone else want a glass of H-two-O?”
“Oops. Guess we need something to drink.” Jakarta reached behind her for the mug tree. “Did you know that elements like hydrogen and oxygen were forged in the hearts of stars? Hey, tomorrow’s going to be a great game. You guys are coming, aren’t you?”
The Lady Wildcats, Dakar saw when she picked up the program on her way into the gym the next afternoon, were more than halfway through their season, and they had won a few more games than they had lost. She found Jakarta’s name and height and then looked around. About thirty people were scattered in the gym.
“Let’s go!” someone shouted. A cheerleader did backflips across the gym floor. Everyone stood for the school song and the national anthem. Then the starters were introduced. Each player ran to the middle of the court as her name was called, and there was great slapping of hands and hips.
“Go, Jakarta,” Dakar said softly as the two centers squared off for the jump.
“How are they doing?” Dakar asked Pharo halfway through the game, when the gym was juicy with sweat and panting.
He shook his head. “Little wobbly,” he said. “Just a little bit wobbly.” The Wildcats weren’t used to having someone like Jakarta at point guard, he explained. “She’s more aggressive than they’re used to, and she passes harder. Hey!” He jumped to his feet. “Wake up out there.” He sat back down. “See that? It was a great pass, but Emily wasn’t expecting it. She’ll get it, though. If she doesn’t, Jakarta will start putting it in herself.” He pulled a candy bar from his pocket and offered Dakar the first bite. “Take it yourself, Jakarta,” he hollered as he chewed. “Put that biscuit in the basket.”
The Wildcats lost, 54–50. After the game, though, the team huddled together, and Dakar heard someone say, “We’ll get the next one.”
“Jakarta, you were high scorer again,” the coach barked. “Let’s see if we can set some picks and get you open for more shots next time.”
“Your sister is some player,” Pharo said to Dakar. “Did you see the way she inhales rebounds?”
That night Mom called again. “Aunt Lily says her mom told her that they learned basketball by watching the boys practice.” Mom’s voice sounded faraway and fragile, and Dakar pressed her ear to the phone. “Grandma could make layups and also long shots. And they wore blue bloomers and blue middy tops with white sailor collars and tennis shoes.” Mom laughed softly, and her voice was suddenly sad. “It was all such a long time ago, though. That’s really all Aunt Lily can remember.”
“Come home,” Dakar longed
to say. “I’m trying to make the lawn and everything just the way you’ll like it.” But she didn’t.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“Some days I walk for hours through the fields,” Mom said. “I almost imagine I’m a little girl and my parents will be there when I get home. Well, I love you guys. Could I talk to your dad?”
“He’s out saving the world,” Jakarta said.
Dakar squeezed her lips into a thin, disappointed line, and she shook her head.
“What?” Jakarta mouthed. “It’s the truth.” Into the phone, she said, “We’re fine.”
Dakar shook her head again. Did Jakarta really want to be kind to Mom, or was she just being stubborn to prove something to Dad?
She hung up and started slowly up the stairs, sliding her hand along the banister. Why didn’t Mom ask where Dad was? Then they would have to tell her, right? They couldn’t just be False Dimitris to Mom, and if they told her, she’d have to come home. For a moment Dakar felt a stubbornness to match Jakarta’s. Maybe she should say something no matter what Jakarta thought.
Nah. Jakarta and Pharo would think she was such a tree fungus for not caring about Mom. She had to be stalwart. She had to ignore all these feelings thumping on her, making her feel like a drum. She had to be brave for Jakarta and Mom—and hope the leaf quest somehow worked.
“You will not fear the terror of the night,” she told herself as she climbed. “Nor the arrow that flies by day. Nor the pestilence … the pestilence …” She turned around and went back down. “Can I sleep in your room?”
Jakarta looked up. “Okay. But you have to take the little bed by the door.”
“Fine,” Dakar said, her voice shaky with relief. “That just means anything that comes in the window will get you first.”
The Lady Wildcats won their next three games. Dakar loved to watch. The gym was always nearly empty except for the cheerleaders and a few parents, but she didn’t care about that. She just liked to watch Jakarta running up and down the floor, her long hair caught in a ponytail or braids that bounced every time her feet hit the floor. Sometimes Jakarta yelled out numbers as she ran. Sometimes she just waved her teammates into place or gave them hand signals, and they obediently fanned out this way and that, doing a delicate dance. “Go, Jakarta!” Dakar learned to scream. She hadn’t felt this good since they left Africa.
