Sea

by Heidi Kling

  “Wait until it’s been offered twice?”

  “Clever girl.” Deni winked. “Yes. Otherwise ...”

  I held my finger in the air. “They will think I am starving and will overfeed me?”

  “You are too smart. This you already know.”

  I nudged him with my elbow, wishing we were all by ourselves on this plane. “I’m just a quick learner.”

  “And I am a great teacher,” he joked. “When you sit on the mat, sit cross-legged with your feet pointed into you. Never point your toes at another person. It will greatly offend.”

  “At home pointing fingers is considered rude, but pointing toes? I didn’t even know pointing your toes at someone was something that could ever happen. Why?”

  Deni shrugged. “I don’t remember. Just do not do it. Food is the same as at the pesantren except of course better. You eat the same. Ah, and the hot tea is very, very hot and very, very spicy.”

  “How spicy? How hot?”

  He ran his fingers through his thick hair and raised his eyebrows. “Very, very.”

  “We’re almost to Aceh,” Mac said across the aisle.

  Deni leaned over me and peered out the window. He looked nervous and sad and excited all at once. I couldn’t even imagine how he felt, the strange anticipation over seeing his home after being away for six months. I was nervous too, and also excited, and also sad. Maybe looking down at his home, he felt the way I did when I first looked at the ocean after hearing about Mom.

  How could something I loved betray me like this?

  But Deni didn’t want to look away. He leaned farther, trying to soak it all in.

  We switched places so he could see better, and Deni pointed out a flat landmass. The morning sun highlighted a spot where the ocean met the shore.

  “It looks so different from up here,” he said. “That was all a rain forest. That is where the tsunami ripped out all the trees and life. See? The white part between the ocean and land that is not jungle? Everything was torn out. Everything there is gone.”

  From the air, the strip of land Deni was talking about looked like God painted a thick white stripe across the earth.

  “I can’t believe the sea went three miles onto the shore,” I said quietly.

  He tugged on his goatee, which was beginning to grow again. “The water rose across the whole of Aceh, it seemed.”

  The air smelled thick as we walked down the metal stairway attached to the plane. Thick and sweet like perfumed mud. The airport was not much more than an airstrip in the middle of a field of rice paddies.

  “Is that the airport?” I asked curiously, holding on to the rail. A small, open-air terminal was all there was.

  “Yes,” Deni said, behind me. “It is like a tiny version of Yogyakarta airport, no?”

  At the bottom of the stairs drivers held up signs: Red Cross. Doctors Without Borders. World Health Organization. World Vision. World Doctors.

  “That’s you guys, right?” I asked Amelia.

  “Yep!” she said, waving enthusiastically to a young blond man holding their sign. “That’s Ethan. He’s an American fresh out of residency, volunteering in our health clinic for the summer.”

  “Cool,” I said, smiling at the eager blue-eyed doctor waving the sign. Ethan reminded me of pictures of Dad taken while he was in the Peace Corps in Africa, before he met Mom, before they had me. Why did everyone keep reminding me of Dad? I swallowed away a twinge of guilt, knowing it was morning back at the pesantren too. He probably already knew I was gone, and if he didn’t yet, he would soon.

  “You kids need a lift somewhere?” Mac said.

  “Um. Maybe. Deni? Do we need a ride?”

  Deni shook his head. “Thank you, but I will call my friends. They will come. Sienna? We go?”

  Amelia stopped me. “Sienna, would you mind if I talked to you for a second?”

  I glanced at Deni.

  “I will meet you in the front, then. I will call my friends inside,” Deni said. “Nice to meet you.” He waved to Amelia and Mac.

  “It was great meeting you too, Deni. Best of luck here.” Amelia lifted her tan leather purse higher on her shoulder. “Your friend seems very sweet,” she said once Deni was out of earshot.

  “He is,” I said, watching him go.

  “You met him at the orphanage?”

  I nodded. “Yes.”

  “He must have been through a lot.... It seems like you two are very close.”

  I fidgeted with my backpack. “Well, you know how it is when you meet someone and it’s like you already know them? That’s how it was with me and Deni.” I shrugged as if that explained the rest.

  “But you are going home soon? Back to America?” she prodded.

  I wondered why she was being so nosy.

  “Yes. But ...” I wasn’t thinking about that just yet.

  To stop her from asking me anything else, I blurted out, “We’re going to be ... looking around the different NGOs.... Maybe we’ll run into you later?”

  “That would be lovely. Where are you staying?”

  “With Deni’s friends.”

  “You know there’s not much here for ... tourists. Since the tsunami, things are better—they recently signed a peace treaty for the civil war, but there is still a lot of political unrest.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  Her eyes narrowed. “I know you are with your friend, but before your father joins you, if you run into trouble, come see us. We’re at the World Doctors headquarters in the tent in the old town center. Here’s my card.”

  If we run into trouble ...

  Amelia’s perceptive. She figured out right away that we didn’t know quite what we were doing. As we walked through the airport toward the street, I filled her in on what we’d been doing at the pesantren. Her eyes lit up when I mentioned my dad’s name.

  “Your father is the trauma psychiatrist Andrew Jones? I so hope I get a chance to meet him! You probably already know this, but your dad’s globally renowned for his cross-cultural PTSD work. I can’t wait to read about the work he did at the orphanage.”

  Wow, these doctors from Australia knew about Dad and Team Hope? I knew he did important work, but I had no idea he was actually famous in his field.

  “Thanks,” I said proudly. “He’s a good guy.”

  Her eyes crinkled, not unkindly, but loaded with suspicion. “I’m just surprised he let you come up here alone. Especially someone who is so aware of the environmental dangers of a disaster site like this.” Amelia tilted her head, waiting for my response.

  “I’ll see my dad soon,” I said with more confidence than I felt. “And like Deni said, I’m not alone, we’re together.”

  After promising again that I’d get in touch if I needed her and waving good-bye to Amelia and Mac, I spotted Deni standing at the curb, sort of bouncing on the balls of his feet like an excited kid. I jumped back as an old banged-up white Land Rover raced around the corner and screeched to a halt, shooting dirt clods into the humid air.

  A boy about Deni’s age with a bright smile and longish hair jumped out of the driver’s seat and practically tackled Deni, talking a mile a minute in what I assumed was Acehnese. Then a girl, dressed in white pants and a pink silky jilbab, got out more slowly but took Deni’s other hand in her own just as eagerly. His friends made me think of Spider and Bev—the three of us together. And Deni looked so happy.

  “Sienna!” He waved me over. “Come! I want you to meet my friends. This is the American girl. This is Sienna.”

  The boy, wearing a San Diego Chargers jersey, shook my hand enthusiastically, and I couldn’t help but crack up when he flashed me the hang-loose sign.

  “Nice to meet you,” I said, returning his surf gesture.

  He laughed loudly and clapped. “You know them?” He puffed his navy blue shirt out. “Chargers?”

  “I do.” I nodded. “They’re an American football team from California. Like me.”

  He smiled wider and slapped Deni�
��s back like, Way to go, buddy.

  “Sienna, this is Azmi. He’s my friend from since we were little boys. This is Siti.”

  “Hello,” said Siti, who was shorter than the boy but looked more mature. “Nice to meet you.” Siti lowered her long eyelashes. Her brown skin was flawless against her pastel scarf

  I checked to see if Deni noticed how beautiful she was, but he was still smiling at me.

  After we piled into the car, Azmi insisted on showing me around Aceh before we went to his parents’ house. And it was a darn good thing that beast had four-wheel drive, because the road from the airport into Aceh was not in the best shape. The road was paved but also covered in mud. I wasn’t sure if it was because of the tsunami or recent rainstorms and I didn’t want to sound stupid by asking, so I didn’t.

  The countryside was gorgeous, though. Emerald green and lush and, like the drive to the temple, farmers wearing cone-shaped hats bent over fields of rice paddies. Everything seemed light, breezy and fine. So fine that I wondered how far away we were from the tsunami damage we saw from the plane. I was sure I’d find out soon enough.

  Deni and his pals chatted away while Azmi drove and Siti rode shotgun. Deni and I were sitting together in back, but he leaned forward as far as he could to be near his friends.

  We bumped along for a while, bouncing to some kind of Indonesian dance mix on the radio.

  Then we arrived at the beginning.

  “Oh my God, what happened here?”

  On both sides of the muddy road the gutters were lined with parked vehicles.

  Not cars, but completely mangled, crash-test-derby, utterly destroyed things that might at one time have been cars. They were rusted and twisted, and I couldn’t tell headlight from taillight. They lined up one after the other and seemed to snake on forever.

  “They ran out of space for the broken autos,” Deni explained. “The line goes all the way to the ocean.”

  “Wow. How far are we from the ocean?”

  “Still far.”

  As he drove, Azmi shot me the hang-loose sign in the rearview mirror, which seemed so weird now that we were in the midst of all this devastation. But they lived here. They saw this every day. It was me who wasn’t used to it.

  Deni leaned back in his seat and told me the story. “They had no tractors, so they brought trained elephants down from the mountain. What a sight it was watching the men ride the beasts and watching the animals’ strong backs pulling the cars out of the water one by one.”

  “How did they do that? Were they attached to a harness or something?”

  “Yes, they pulled the cars with ropes and nets, pulled them from the sea that was now our town. It was a big job. A job I wish I would have had.” Deni stopped talking and looked out the window.

  A few minutes later I pointed out a mound of mud and dirt on the right-hand side of the road. A sign with the numbers 26/12/04 was written in black marker. It was nailed to a piece of wood.

  “That’s the date of the tsunami,” I said. “What is that pile of dirt?”

  Deni’s face hardened. “It is where the dead lie,” he said, his voice heavy.

  Oh my God, it was a mass grave.

  “Are there more?” I asked.

  Deni nodded solemnly. “Yes. That is why they call this the City of Ghosts.”

  Azmi turned the music up even louder as if to drown out our conversation. Deni and his friends were quiet, moving their heads to the beat.

  The hot air hitting my face had an electric buzz to it. Everything was so intense. I felt like I was riding through some other dimension. The music helped.

  We bounced along on the semi-paved road until it became so rocky and bumpy that it was nearly unmanageable. Azmi, however, was loving the stick shift and laughed as he cranked the engine up and down the steep ravines.

  “The wave did all this damage?” I asked over the music.

  “The water was more powerful than you can imagine,” Deni answered.

  Deni clarified what I was looking at as we drove along, but instead of its usual softness there was an edge in his voice, and I didn’t blame him for being angry. I remembered how I acted after my mom disappeared.

  “This empty land used to be villages and huts and markets,” Deni said. “Before, you did not have a view of the ocean from here. Many buildings were in the way. The ocean took everything out to sea like a giant suction.”

  “Look at that boat!” I said, pointing to a smaller version of Noah’s Ark flipped completely upside down in a watery sandbank.

  “There were so many boats stuck in the sand after the water went back to the sea,” Deni explained. “That one was too big; even the elephants couldn’t move it.”

  Azmi said something in his language.

  “Azmi and Siti’s father was a fisherman too. He still is. He was one of the lucky ones.” His fist clenched tightly as he met my eye. “Lucky like my father.”

  GRIEF

  We stopped when we could see the shoreline clearly.

  I looked out at the glassy sea. I couldn’t imagine those calm waves rising up the way they did. My heart pounded and I was so relieved when Azmi turned the Rover around at the harbor. We passed more and more debris: logs, twisted pieces of metal, chopped-in-half fishing boats smashed into the sand, more metal, more wood, more junk. “This is clean compared to before,” Deni said quietly, his eyes flashing. “There were bodies everywhere. We had to cover our faces with scarves to hide our noses and mouths from the smells of the decay.”

  Just like the article I read back home. One of the pictures I saw of the workers could have been Deni. I didn’t dare mention it.

  He stopped talking for a second, remembering. “Me and Azmi worked here.... We carried bodies in from the shore. We did it for days and days, all day long, sometimes long into the night. They were everywhere. Here. There.” He pointed out the other window. “Everywhere were rotting bodies. Women were mourning and screaming and ... most of the bodies could not be ... apa?”

  My voice cracked. “Identified?”

  “Yes.” He nodded, his jaw clenched. “Swollen from the water, they were big and apa? Puffed?” He winced like he could still see the brutal images. “And cut up. They took pictures of the bodies and hung them up to be identified before they could be buried in the graves that you see. It was not good.”

  I couldn’t stop picturing the hundreds of bodies piled on top of one another, wrapped only in blankets and covered by a mound of dirt. Deni and Azmi, just boys, dragging the decaying bodies around the shore. How could anyone recover from that?

  “I’m so sorry, Deni,” I said as he stared straight ahead, a mask of vile memories shrouding his face. And even though I was dying to wrap my arms around him, I didn’t dare. I didn’t know what he’d told his friends about us, who they thought I was to him, and of course, again, it wouldn’t be appropriate.

  He faced me. “Why are you sorry? You did nothing wrong.”

  “I’m sorry you had to go through all of this. I wish I could have been here to help you.”

  He stared into my eyes hard. “I want you to understand. I left my home because I did not want to see. They said, ‘You will have a new life. You can get your education.’ I thought here I had nothing. But I was wrong. This is still my home even if something terrible happened here. If you do not want me to talk about these things, I will not, but please do not be sorry for me.”

  I nodded. I hated it when people felt sorry for me too.

  Deni said something to Azmi, who turned the music up even louder. Deni stared out the window, remembering a horror I could barely imagine.

  “You see this mosque?” Azmi asked me, stopping the car again a few minutes later. “My family was trapped on the roof watching the water rise around us. On that roof is how my family survived.” A white mosque stood alone in a littered field of trash and garbage and metal. It was the only real building for as far as the eye could see. A strip of white canvas tents were lined up across the street.

>   “Is that a ... refugee camp?” I asked.

  Deni nodded. “Azmi and Siti’s family lived there for many months.”

  Deni stepped out of the SUV, his voice filled with emotion. “This is the mosque I told you about. After the storm, it was the only thing left. Not even a tsunami could tear it down.”

  I remembered the story. “It was a miracle it survived the water.”

  His eyes never left the mosque as he spoke to me. I could tell he wanted to be alone but didn’t want to be rude and leave me alone.

  “You go on ahead, I’ll catch up,” I said.

  Meeting my eyes for a second, he nodded, and I watched him stagger up the concrete steps and disappear into the building, as if this was the end of a long, long journey.

  I stood against the car and stretched in the beating sun.

  The mosque had an ornate copper roof and open windows that were bulb-shaped like the carvings in the doors at the pesantren.

  I wiped some sweat off my forehead and fluffed my T-shirt. It was even hotter here than in Yogyakarta, and without the breeze from the car windows I felt almost faint. I walked halfway up the steps, following Azmi and Siti to get a closer look at the exterior while being mindful of giving Deni privacy.

  The arches carved out of the walls cast shadows on the now-dry floor and I imagined the flood of water rushing through, desperate families dashing for the rooftop.

  And then I saw Deni.

  He was kneeling on an orange prayer rug, bending forward rhythmically. I’d never seen him do his prayers before.

  “I’m going also to pray,” Siti told me. I watched as she took a black skirt out of a barrel and wrapped it around her waist, concealing her white pants. She wrapped a second scarf on her already-covered head.

  After she was dressed, she took a brightly colored prayer mat out of a big barrel in front of the mosque and glanced at me shyly. “You come?”

  I glanced inside. Deni was still praying. I felt like I was intruding enough just by watching him.

  “No, thanks, Siti. But thank you for asking.”