Jakarta Missing

by Jane Kurtz

  “Yep. Seven-oh-one,” Melanie said. “Now I’m calling directory assistance.”

  “Aunt Lily doesn’t have a phone,” Dakar reminded her.

  “Oh, right.” Melanie hung up and started chewing on her thumbnail.

  It was Melanie who came up with the idea of seeing if they could get the name of the local grocery store—“Everybody buys food,” she said—and Dakar who suddenly said, “What about the post office?”

  “Perfect!” Melanie started to dial again. “My grandma lives in a small town, and the postmaster knows everyone.” After a few minutes of talking she said, “There! All you have to do is dial a one and then this number.”

  Dakar swallowed. “I don’t think I can,” she squeaked.

  Melanie laughed. “Here. Fine. I’ll do it. What’s her last name again?”

  The woman on duty at the post office turned out to be the daughter of the postmistress, filling in because her mother was sick. “I don’t remember all the older people,” she said, “but my mother would. Not an emergency, but very important, huh? When I get off work this evening, I’ll go right over there, and we’ll figure out something. If we can track her down, what should I say?”

  “Uh, just a minute,” Melanie said. She and Dakar had a whispered conference. Then Melanie said, “Please give Deborah the message that her daughters called. Say their dad was called away, and her daughters need her at home.”

  After Melanie hung up, they scrambled out of the tent and rolled around the floor, laughing and giving each other high fives. “I was great, huh?” Melanie said. “Want to come to my house until Jakarta gets back? I can show you how to make snow angels.”

  “Sure.” Dakar could feel joy rippling across her chest like a jagged stream of lightning. “Just let me put this stuff away so Jakarta doesn’t have a heart attack when she gets home.”

  The rest of Saturday flew by in a blur. That evening, as Dakar listened to Jakarta giving her all the details of the game, she couldn’t keep from glancing at the window. Was that a car she heard? No. It was as bad as waiting for the Jeep in Maji. And as disappointing.

  All Sunday she waited. Nothing. “I guess she’s not coming,” Dakar told Melanie on the phone.

  “Well, she’d have to find someone to take care of her aunt. You didn’t want to worry your mom, remember, so we said it wasn’t an emergency.”

  “I guess.” Dakar hung up, feeling numb. When had Africa turned into Babylon for Mom? It hadn’t always been that way, had it? But at some point Mom must have hung her harp on the willow, alone and melancholy.

  “I’m sending an e-mail to Dad,” Jakarta called from downstairs. “Want me to tell him anything?”

  “Yeah,” Dakar called back. “Tell him to stay away from shaky buildings.”

  At least the Bear Lake game would help keep her mind off Mom. The cheerleaders had even come by the house and put up a big sign that said, GO, JAKARTA! TAKE US TO VICTORY.

  “Isn’t this too much pressure?” Dakar asked as she and Jakarta stood outside and looked at it. Was she just imagining things, or were cars slowing down? Would people driving by see the sign? “What if your shot’s off or something?”

  “Everyone’s shot is off sometimes,” Jakarta said. “Coach says to be patient and calm. There’s nothing to do but have confidence and keep shooting.”

  Jakarta’s shot was not off. Dakar could tell even in the warm-ups that she was hitting. “How tough is this Wildcat team, really?” a man said behind her. “Think they can finally beat those Bear Lake kids?”

  “Don’t know,” another man answered. “Bear Lake’s football team just slaughtered us. Of course, the football team this year is cream … cream puffs.”

  “Those Bear Lake farm kids build muscles baling hay,” the first man said. “Our kids are softies compared to farm kids. They can’t compete.”

  Dakar looked around. She’d never seen the gym this packed. How could Jakarta hear anything? How could she be calm enough to move around the top of the key, making basket after basket?

  “That girl can shoot,” the man behind her said.

  Ha. She’s never even baled hay, either, Dakar thought.

  The men talked through the whole game. Once when the ref whistled a foul on Jen, one of them shouted, “That’s all right. It was a good foul. Next time you foul, though, take her out.”

  Dakar was glad Dad wasn’t here to hear that. “Let’s not take this wildcat thing quite that seriously,” she muttered.

  At halftime the announcer talked about how Jakarta now had 469 season points, close to a school record. Some kids in front stood up and started to cheer.

  “History in the making!” the loud guy behind Dakar shouted.

  “At this rate,” the other guy said, “she’ll break the state record. Maybe even next year.”

  Then everyone was hollering. But Jakarta just stood there with fierce eyes, not looking the least bit flustered.

  Dakar felt so bursting with pride that even her feet were warm when she walked home in the snow. The minute she saw the house, she knew instantly that something was different. What was it? Was the house trying to tell her its name? Oh! Of course. Thistle gray smoke drifting out of the chimney. Dakar started to run.

  “Mom?” she shouted as she shoved the door open.

  The house smelled of wood smoke and roasting corn. Mom and a little gnome woman with wispy white hair were sitting by the fireplace, both looking a bit frail. Mom jumped up and held out her arms. Her face was full of puzzlement and pain, and as they stared at each other, Dakar could feel all the things she’d been squashing for so long rushing up and into her own eyes. She wished she could make herself be stronger for Mom. Pale, blank eggshell eyes weren’t pretty, but at least they were calm and expressionless.

  “Come here,” Mom said, and Dakar ran to her. Okay. Crying wasn’t the end of the world. “How are you?” Mom said finally. “How’s Jakarta?”

  “She’s so great. You missed the best game!”

  “What’s this about your dad?”

  “I …” Dakar opened her mouth. She closed it again.

  “He hasn’t been here for some time, has he?” Mom said faintly.

  Dakar shut her eyes. Mom had always had that sense about those things. “He’s in Guatemala,” she said unhappily. Something clunked at the front door. Jakarta must be home.

  “Guatemala.” Mom shivered slightly. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Yes …” Dakar stopped. The door opened. The smell of incense and sweat swept in.

  FROM DAKAR’S BOOK OF LISTS AND THOUGHTS

  Synchronicity

  Dad was in line to buy a ticket to Guatemala City when he suddenly heard the woman in back of him say “Dakar.” He turned around but she was just talking to a friend beside her. Then she said, “I’m sure he’s doing good things in Dakar, but … don’t you think some people find it easier to love the whole world than the people right beside them?” Next thing Dad knew, he was at the counter asking about flights to Minneapolis.

  Mom didn’t get my message until Sunday morning, and then Aunt Lily wanted to come, too. So they had to wait for Monday morning to get Aunt Lily’s medication. So now everybody is here—even Aunt Lily. But how maddening! They made me come up to bed and they’re still talking. What they don’t know is that I’m sitting at the top of the stairs trying to hear.

  I thought Mom would be happy to see Dad, but after he explained what happened, she stared at him as if she were seeing a tree fungus. “It’s so great to be home,” he said. Mom looked like a water buffalo about to charge. “Whoa,” he said, backing up. He laughed but a bit nervously.

  Now Dad is shouting. “Look!” he’s saying. “I assumed they’d tell you when you called. Besides, they were fine, weren’t they? I was living three continents away from my parents when I was Jakarta’s age.”

  Jakarta is shouting, too. “Look!” she’s saying. “We made it, didn’t we? We were fine, weren’t we? We were resourceful, just like little
kids in East Africa—and Guatemala, I’m sure.”

  I hope they’re all looking. Whenever this family is back together, why does everyone have to be mad?

  EIGHTEEN

  Dakar woke up to noises—voices below, someone laughing, the scrape of a shovel outside. She got dressed as quickly as she could and rushed downstairs. At the stove Aunt Lily was perched on a stool, sculpting paper-thin pancakes. First she drizzled batter onto the pan in a circle. A few minutes later, she loosened the edges of the pancake with deft fingers and flipped it. After a moment, she scooped it onto a plate. “Sit down,” she told Dakar. “Uf-dah, you’re skinny, my dear. You need to eat.” On the table three jars of homemade jelly sat like jewels: translucent coral, pale green, sumptuous purple.

  “How are you feeling?” Dakar asked.

  Aunt Lily gave her a gleeful smile. “I got up and checked the obituaries, and I wasn’t in there, so I know it’s going to be a great day.”

  Dakar put her arms around Mom, soaking in the smells of the kitchen, the spattering sound of water dripping, the scrape, scrape from outside the window that must be Dad shoveling snow.

  “I raked all the leaves,” she said shyly. “I wish you could have seen how glorious the yard looked. It would have made you feel all picket-fency.”

  Mom’s shoulders felt thin. She was the one who needed pancakes.

  “Ah, what we’ll have to look at in the spring!” she said. “Please put the butter on, Dakar.”

  “And Jakarta, Mom. You should see her. She has an away game Wednesday, but she better not break the record there because I want to see her break it, and so does everybody else.”

  “Oh, you know it!” Aunt Lily said. “That girl had better wait.”

  “Mom?” Dakar paused. She wanted to say, “Are you still mad at Dad?” But that would break the spell of the jeweled kitchen morning.

  She made three pancakes slithery with butter—with a different jelly on each one—and didn’t even care that butter dripped down her chin.

  When Jakarta came downstairs, yawning, Dakar told her, “I’m going to stop by Melanie’s house on the way to school.” She didn’t bother to say, “Are you coming?” Whatever Jakarta thought, Melanie was on her team.

  Jakarta followed Dakar up the sidewalk, without saying a word. Melanie came bouncing out. Stopped. “I haven’t touched an onion since that night, you know,” she finally said to Jakarta.

  “We’re even,” Jakarta said. “I never touched snow before this week.”

  Dakar could see from their expressions that that was that.

  After Jakarta had turned toward the high school door, the girl with purple hair ran up to them. “Do you think Jakarta would teach me how to do a layup with my left hand?” she asked breathlessly.

  “Probably,” Dakar said. Imagine. Someone with purple hair wanted to be a better basketball player.

  When Melanie introduced them, Dakar reached out and gravely shook the girl’s hand, the way she’d been taught to do in Africa. Her name was Andrea, and she didn’t look scary anymore. And her hair was fine.

  All week Dakar felt special. Kids she didn’t even know said “hey” to her. At lunch she sat with Andrea and her friends. When they swapped food, she gleefully handed over Aunt Lily’s homemade cookies, remembering lunchtime trades at the student center by the little round cafeteria in Nairobi—Indian kids with dried mango strips, Taiwanese kids with metal tins of rice and pork, Ethiopian kids with wat and injera. Dakar had been too shy there. Now she traded the homemade cookies for a cruddy granola bar just because it made her feel so un-ferenji, -mzungu, -khawaaga to be trading.

  Wednesday afternoon they all went to Melanie’s house and made little maroon-and-gray pompoms. I’m … quivering with joy, Dakar thought. She had actual friends, friends Jakarta didn’t even know. And next Monday night Jakarta and her team were going to dazzle up and down the court in the last game of the season, the one that would get them into regionals. The Wildcats were going to win easily—everyone said it. Best of all, Jakarta was going to set a school record, and her name would go forever on the wall o’ jocks. Jakarta would be a Wildcat superstar. And she, Dakar thought, hugging herself, would be the sister of a superstar.

  “Hey,” Melanie said, “will you tell them the story of Donbirra?”

  Dakar opened her mouth, then paused, trying to think through what she’d been about to say. Would she betray her memories if she made them into stories? If she didn’t start talking about them, though, Jakarta was right. Soon they’d be gone. She took a deep breath and put her best storytelling voice on. “I’ll do something better,” she said. “I’ll tell you true stories of things that happened to me in Africa.”

  That afternoon she ran home, slipping and sliding on the shoveled sidewalks. Dad couldn’t stay outside and shovel all day. How would things be now? Cautiously, she opened the door. She could hear voices, and they weren’t hollering. Someone had been baking cinnamon bread. She closed the door quietly behind her and tiptoed toward the voices.

  “… could hear the clank of pots and pans,” Dad was saying as she peeked into the living room. “It was the mules arriving from one direction. Meanwhile, I heard shouts from another direction as the group that had gone looking for our supper came back with the gazelle they had shot.” It was one of his favorite true stories about a time when he and a research team had gone out from Maji to gather information in the remote mountains. Aunt Lily was sitting on the couch with a blanket over her knees. She looked up with a smile and waved Dakar in. Dakar grinned. Dad must be okay, then—contrite, absolved, forgiven.

  She curled up beside Aunt Lily. This was one story she knew almost by heart. Dad was about to say, “I was suddenly aware of another sound: a low, intense buzzing. ‘Bees!’ I yelled as the air filled with furious brown clouds of them.” Aunt Lily reached out and patted her. Dakar felt like a cat, with Dad’s story tickling her ears and chin.

  The men dived for cover in the brush. The mules bucked in all directions, pots and pans ringing madly, seeming to make the bees even more angry. Dad, in the middle of the biggest cloud, slapped at his neck and waved his arms around as he ran. Swiftly, he swept off the few bees still clinging to his skin. He could count nineteen welts from his neck up. His face was getting puffy.

  Hungry and sore, they huddled in the brush for hours. Finally, the Amhara cook managed to sneak past the bees and get mosquito nets for everyone. The next day most of the group went off, ferried across the river by tall Teshena warriors in their dugout canoes. Dad, who had volunteered to stay behind with the cook, watched how the men paddled furiously to the middle of the river to catch the current, then maneuvered into an eddy with a back current that brought the canoes in a circle to the other shore. When the others were gone, the cook showed Dad how to make kita, unleavened journey bread, and the two of them sat trading stories, eating the bread, and drinking strong tea.

  Early the next morning the cook, who knew some Teshena, woke Dad to say that he had overheard drunken boasts from the Teshena warriors. “They will first kill us and steal the mules. They will kill the others when they have brought them back over the river.”

  Dad wasn’t sure what to think. Was this just typical Amhara mistrust of other ethnic groups? But it was true that the village was eerily still, no women calling to each other as they pounded grain, no smell of cook fires, no children playing. Unfortunately, there were no other places where the river was safe to cross. And the research team had to be ferried back to the side Dad was on in order to get home. Quietly the cook and Dad packed up. Then they blew air into the air mattresses and tied them in a double layer. When the research team returned, Dad shouted the news across the river and then paddled his makeshift raft to the middle, trying to catch the current the way he’d seen the men in the canoes do. He had just found the current when he heard shouts. Rising slowly out of the brown water were the eyes of a crocodile. Someone shot a rifle, and the eyes disappeared.

  Dakar shivered. What a trip that wa
s. Dad got everyone safely across, and the village stayed silent, so silent he wondered if anyone was even there, if the cook had somehow misunderstood what was happening. He never did find out. But as they began the trip back, they gradually discovered the mules had saddle sores and couldn’t carry the gear back up Maji Mountain. Dad and a Maji policeman volunteered to climb for help. So they set off with no food to stave off their hunger except a little roasted grain the policeman had along. At dusk they ran into a snarling cheetah. Luckily, when the policeman cocked his pistol, the cheetah leaped off into the brush.

  She’d always liked the end, when Dad got home in the middle of the night and shook Mom awake. “What are you doing here?” Mom said. He told her to wake him at dawn so he could go back to rescue the others with the Jeep. Dakar had never before thought to wonder what Mom felt as she shone her flashlight up into Dad’s puffy, bee-stung face.

  “Merciful heavens,” Aunt Lily said. “You remind me of my late husband. Otis used to say, ‘Don’t take needless risks, but do take interesting ones.’”

  “Great-Uncle Otis was very different from Grandpa, wasn’t he?” Dakar asked.

  “Yes,” Aunt Lily said. “Otis was a different breed of fish altogether. Charles believed one of life’s greatest blessings was to die in the same place you were born. Otis had no roots to speak of. But you know, they had a lot in common. Charles could see beauty in rippling prairie greasy grass under the moon. Otis could see the beauty in just the right tuck of the chin—or in a graceful fall. They both had the gift of doing one thing at a time.”

  Mom had that gift, Dakar thought. Jakarta, too. She herself would have liked to have it, but she was more like Dad. Restless. With a start she realized that Aunt Lily was saying something else. “On one of our visits home I heard the two of them philosophizing out by the barn. I heard Charles say life wasn’t a matter of fearlessness but of practicing courage. Otis said he made it a point to make friends with one of his fears every day. ‘Life is terrifying,’ he said. ‘Terrifying—and wonderful.’”