by Karen Rispin
"Kid! Take it easy!" He sounded closer. It was Rick!
I lunged to my feet and walked as fast as I could. He caught up and walked beside me. He loomed over me. I edged away. This couldn't be my brother!
"What's with you," he asked, "tearing off like that?"
"Where's my mom and them?" I asked over my shoulder, trying to walk away from him.
"I took off after you as soon as those Germans told us you were heading down. I don't think any of them know where I went. They were pitching things into packs so they could come after you. You made your mom really upset." He said "your mom" in a loud, ironic voice.
"I made her upset?" I yelled, stopping dead. "How about you? You barge in here from out of the blue and wreck everything! It's all your fault!"
He flinched like I'd hit him and glared at me out of bright blue eyes. Rain was dripping off his hood.
"Look, it's a pretty big shock for me too, actually seeing her… and you all. I wanted to find my birth mother, OK? Then I find out there are other kids. Besides that, you're so religious—missionaries, no less. Then you act like such a—" He swore. "Some religion! I just wanted to know…"
I ducked away from him, feeling very confused. The swearing had scared me. He seemed rough and angry, and he was so big. Still, when he talked about his birth mother (my mom?!), he seemed like a worried kid. What would it be like, wondering who your real mom was? Why couldn't things just be normal again?
"Leave me alone!" I blurted, shaking my wet bangs out of my eyes. I whirled and started walking away from him.
He stood there and let me go.
I started down the final slope onto the road, skidding in the mud and trying to protect my sore heel. I couldn't stop shivering. I could feel Rick looking at me and tried to walk straighter. My jacket seemed to weigh twice as much as my pack had.
A few seconds later he caught up to me again. "Kid, even if you hate me, I can't let you go on alone. Like, I've done quite a bit of backpacking. Staying soaked and cold like you are is real trouble. I've got to help you."
I kept going, but I walked slower. He'd said he'd help me even if I hated him. He was acting way more Christian than I was. I'd never felt this cold and miserable in my life before. I licked the drips from my bangs off my top lip and stopped walking. The rain had dropped to a light mist.
I stood there, half afraid, stiffly watching him out of the corner of my eye.
"Are you going to let me help you or not?" he demanded.
"I guess," I said.
I glanced up at him and caught him looking at me with an odd expression on his face. This is my mother's child? I wondered and ducked my head. My teeth were chattering, but I hardly noticed.
He shook his head and said, "Weird, isn't it, seeing each other for the first time."
"How," I asked between chatters, "how do you know you are my, I mean—"
He interrupted me, "Leave it!" he said, sounding almost angry. "Get off your wet stuff. I'll get you dry stuff from my pack."
I stared at him with my mouth open. Put on clothes from his pack? Here?
He turned away from me and started digging in his pack.
A violent shudder shook me. I ached all over. I swallowed hard. Being this cold was horrible. I'd have to do what he said.
"Come on, get the wet things off," he said roughly. "I won't turn around."
Taking a deep breath, I turned my back on him to unzip my jacket. My hands were so cold it was hard to hold on to the zipper. The jacket finally slid off my shoulders. I stood up straighter, glad to be rid of that soaking cold weight. The wind cut right through me. I tried to undo my jeans. The big rivet button at the top of the zipper wouldn't budge. My hands were too cold to get a good grip. I struggled madly, trying to get my hands to take hold. It would be horrible if I had to ask Rick to help me.
"Please, God," I whispered, trying desperately to get the button undone. Finally it came.
"Here, put these on," Rick said, holding out a pair of gray sweats behind his back.
As soon as I got them on, they felt dry and wonderful. I held them up with one hand and took the T-shirt he was holding out behind his back. It was impossible to hold up the baggy pants, hold on to a T-shirt, and get out of my sweatshirt at the same time, especially shivering as hard as I was. Finally I stuck the T-shirt between my knees, let the pants go, and struggled to yank off my sweatshirt. I wanted to do it really fast, but fast just wasn't one of the things my body would do right then.
Wow! The wind felt cold on my bare skin. I had the T-shirt over my head when Rick said roughly, "You decent yet?"
"Almost," I stammered, then said, "OK," as I got the T-shirt all the way on.
He turned around and his mouth quirked up at the corner. I stood there clutching the huge baggy sweat pants with one hand. The T-shirt was down almost to my knees. He didn't have to laugh! I thought, then realized how stupid I must look and managed a shaky grin.
He gave me a smile and said, "You're a tough one, aren't you?"
I shook my head and said, "I'm still cold."
He nodded and started taking off his raincoat and jacket. "You'll have to put on my shirt and jacket."
I frowned and stammered between shivers, "How about you?"
"I'll be OK," he said, pulling his shirt off over his head.
He held out his shirt to me. When I pulled it on, the warmth came right through the T-shirt. I closed my eyes with relief.
"Um, you might want a belt to hold those pants up," Rick said, grinning. He pulled the belt out of my soaking jeans and held it out to me. We ended up staring at each other again. It seemed very unreal that this guy could be part of Mom.
He blinked, handed me the belt, and turned his back on me to dig in his pack again. I remembered how he'd all of a sudden looked like Sandy just before I'd run off, but he didn't look like her now.
"How do you know you're Mom's kid?" I asked again.
He gave me a half angry look, then said, "I guess you have a right to know. See, Mom and Dad told me from when I was little that I was adopted, but when Mom died…" He paused.
Mom died! I thought, blinking with shock. It took me a second to realize he was talking about another mom. My head spun. He had another, totally different family of strangers.
"… kind of complicated." I caught the end of a sentence. "I guess I can tell you while we wait for your mom and them to catch up."
The thought of waiting for everyone to catch up really snapped me out of it. "No!" I blurted. "I'm still going down. I want to talk to Daddy first."
He jerked his head away from me, and looked into the distance. After an uneasy pause he said, "Yeah, there's still your righteous missionary father. Um, maybe you can tell me. Does he know about me?"
"Didn't Mom tell you when you talked to her?" I asked.
He smiled. "Mostly she made me talk about myself. I didn't get a chance to ask many questions." For a second he stood there with this half smile on his face. He shook himself and said, "I can't believe I've actually talked to my birth mom. For a religious nut, she wasn't too bad."
"She's not a nut!" I blurted. My stomach felt odd. It was strange to hear him talking about Mom like she was someone totally different than the person I knew.
"Do you know?" he asked.
"What?" I asked, trying to remember what we were talking about.
"If your father knows."
"Oh," I said, and I swallowed, remembering the conversations I'd heard in the night. They made sense now. "Yeah, he knows that you're alive, that Mom had another kid. He said they'd been praying for you for fifteen years, ever since they got to be Christians."
"He told you that?" Rick asked, sounding surprised.
"Well, not exactly," I said. "I heard them talking the night after—" I stopped and whirled on him. "You wrote to her! The letter was from you!"
"No, but the people that were helping me look did. Why?"
"Nothing," I said. It didn't matter now. Suddenly I wanted desperately to tal
k to Daddy. He wasn't different. He was still just my normal father. I wanted to be with him, to hold on to someone that hadn't changed.
"Thanks for helping me and everything, but I'm going down now. I've got to see Daddy."
"Does he know I'm here?" Rick asked, moving in front of me and stopping.
"How am I supposed to know?" I said, trying to push past him. "Did it say in the letter?"
"No… no, it didn't. I just came when I found out where she was. I mean I had the money, and—Look," he said, interrupting himself, "how are you going to find your father?"
"He's supposed to come up the forest road as far as he can to meet us with the car. I want to get there first."
He frowned, thinking, then said, "You're dry now, but you're barefoot. You sure you can do it?"
I nodded. "My feet are tough. It will be OK now that we're on the road."
He bit his lower lip, still frowning. He seemed so big, blocking my way. Everything was so weird. This big person standing close to me, my brother? I felt detached, like I was watching this happen to some other kid. When Rick spoke, I jumped.
"OK, I'll go back up and tell your mom you are OK… Um, you'll tell your dad I'm here, kind of break it to him before he sees me…?
Rick looked worried when he said that. It struck me all over again how he was like a kid still, like me. Suddenly I wasn't mad about him any more.
Still, I didn't answer his question at first. Even if I wasn't mad, did I want to help him get into our family? Mom and Daddy would let him in anyway. They were like that. That verse about being "strong in love" fits them, I thought, frowning.
Suddenly I was glad about that, really glad that our family was strong in love. I wanted to be part of it. Just as I opened my mouth to say I'd help, Rick said, "Never mind," in a rough voice and took off hiking up the road.
"Rick!" I called. It came out in a kind of squeak. I swallowed and tried again. "Rick!" He didn't even turn his head.
I stared after him, feeling sad. "He must really think I'm a jerk," I whispered. At least I could go tell Daddy for him like he asked. I sighed and headed downhill.
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Chapter Eleven
Slick mud oozed between my toes. Sometimes sharp rocks under the mud scraped across my feet when I slipped.
"I'm sorry for being such a pain, Jesus," I whispered as I trotted and slithered down the road, trying to ignore my sore heel. "Also please help me with this whole thing. Help me be strong in love," I sighed. It wasn't going to be easy, but then the mountain hadn't been easy either and God helped me with that.
"Also please help Rick see that I'm not as much of a jerk as he thinks. Don't let him think that Christians are horrible because of me," I whispered.
Every time I came around a corner I kept hoping and looking for our car. That got me thinking about Daddy. How would he feel to have Rick here?
Suddenly I sucked in my breath and stopped. Did Rick have a different father somewhere? Daddy hadn't talked like Rick was his kid. I stood there biting my lip.
"Of course, stupid. Daddy isn't his father," I muttered and started walking again. I wondered who was. Some guy in Mom's high school class? Thinking about it made my world feel loose from its foundations. Trying to think of Mom as a mixed-up teenager like… like… maybe like Jordie Penner, that tenth-grade girl who'd gotten pregnant. Nothing was the same as I thought before.
Mist settled between the dripping, mossy trees. The rolled-up cuffs on Rick's sweats were soaked and muddy. They slapped my feet and the ground with every step. The steady swack, swack, swack sounded loud in the quiet forest as I slogged downhill.
At least animals will hear me coming, I thought, then went back to puzzling about Mom. I wondered when she had told Daddy about having a kid before and how he had felt. Everything seemed double.
Mom was someone totally different to Rick than she was to me. Also if that man who was Rick's father thought of her, he thought of a mixed-up teenager. It seemed like everyone was covered by layers and layers of pictures. Each picture was another person's idea of who they were. Nobody really knew anyone else at all.
I frowned. All I knew about people was my picture of them, and I'd just found out that my picture of Mom was… was… well, wasn't… wasn't what? I bit my lip. I'd thought of her more as just my mother. She was a whole different person besides. Who else was Daddy? I slowed down.
A crashing noise and a hoarse whoop brought me skidding to a halt. I jerked my head up in time to see a troupe of colobus monkeys leaping off through the treetops. Their long black-and-white hair flew behind them like cloaks. Gradually my heart stopped pounding. It was just monkeys. That's when I remembered Mom's story about the lady and the buffalo. There could be buffalo and elephant on the road!
Suddenly my throat felt dry and tight. I swallowed hard. Why hadn't I stayed with Rick? I looked back up the road, but it was empty and quiet under the misty trees. Just for a second, through the gap in the treetops over the road, I saw the peaks of the mountain, black and jagged through the cloud. That psalm Daddy had read flashed into my head.
"I look up to the hills. But where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord. He made heaven and earth."
I couldn't remember the rest except that it was about God keeping us safe and never sleeping.
"Thanks, God," I whispered. "Please help me to get down to Daddy OK." I squirmed, and added, "Whoever he is."
How was I ever going to get things balanced again?
I started down again, but I was still scared. What if the noise my pants were making wasn't loud enough? Taking a deep breath, I started singing. I mean, I didn't have a great voice, but at least the animals would know I was coming and hopefully get out of the way.
My voice sounded too loud echoing back off the trees. I wanted to stop, to be quiet, to hide. For a second I did stop, but it was no good standing there being afraid. I took a deep breath and kept singing even louder.
The rhythmic slapping noise of my soaked and muddy pant cuffs kept time. I'd been singing anything that came into my head, including little-kid songs like "Jesus Loves Me."
I sang it again. "Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so," I sang, and I paused. He does! I thought. And he knows who I am, too. Not who anybody thinks I am, but who I really am. I frowned, figuring it out. Jesus knows who people really are—not like the pictures we have of each other, but the real person.
I sang it over again twice more, thinking about it. Halfway through the third time two people came around a corner in the road walking uphill. I shut up in a hurry and felt my face get hot. Moving way over to the side of the road, I went by them with my head down.
Just after they'd passed me I realized they might have seen Daddy on the way up. They'd know how far downhill Daddy was.
"Hey!" I yelled, spinning to look back at them. They stopped and looked at me. "Um, excuse me," I stammered, realizing I hadn't been very polite. "Did you see a gray car? I mean was there one by the road with a man waiting?"
"Yeah, we did," one of them answered in American English. "It's about a quarter of a mile back. By the way, good singing, kid." They both laughed.
Without even saying thank you, I took off. Only a quarter of a mile! I even forgot to sing. One of the pant cuffs came unrolled and tripped me flat onto my face in the mud. I jumped up and jerked it out of the way impatiently.
"Anika? Anika! It is you."
I whirled. Daddy was there, walking up the road towards me. I yelled and ran to him.
He held me off with both hands on my shoulders. "Easy, easy, you're covered in mud."
I grinned at him. He was my very own dad. Look at the way he was holding on to me so I wouldn't get him muddy. He hated us messing him up.
"You're my dad!" I said, shakily. "You might be other people too, but you're still my dad."
He gave me a very weird look, then he did a double take and looked me up and down from head to foot.
"What on eart
h happened to you? Those aren't your clothes!" His hands tightened convulsively on my shoulders. "What happened? Is Mom OK?" He shook me. "Where are the others?"
"They're OK," I gasped. Suddenly everything overwhelmed me and I felt like crying. I hate crying. I spun away from him and furiously rubbed at my eyes with a muddy fist.
"You sure they're OK?" Daddy asked again.
I nodded without turning.
Daddy gently turned me back around. "Let's get back to the car, then tell me how you got separated from your mother and where these clothes came from."
I followed him, trying to get back into control.
He got an old towel out of the trunk and covered up the car seat before he'd let me sit down. That made me feel better in an odd sort of way. It was such a normal thing for him to do.
"Well?" he asked, half smiling, "what did you get yourself into this time?"
"It's Rick," I blurted. "See, these are his clothes and I ran from Mom. I mean not really on purpose, but— Anyway, I made it to the top, only me and Uncle Paul did, but—"
"Stop!" Daddy said, holding up his hand and laughing. "How about if I ask questions and you answer."
"But, Daddy," I interrupted. "Don't you get it? Rick is here, Mom's other kid."
He'd been looking up the road, but when I said that, he jerked around to face me. "How do you know about that?" he demanded.
"Daddeeee, he's here! He's that guy that kept staring at us at the lodge, remember? These are his clothes," I said, pointing at myself. "See, I was really mad at first. I didn't want it to be true.…"
Daddy wasn't listening to me. He was staring into space past my shoulder. Suddenly he interrupted, "Your mother's talked to him?"
I nodded and didn't say anything. His eyes were too fierce.
"You made a big scene, ran off, and made things harder for her?"
It wasn't like he was actually asking me, or even paying attention to me. My mouth was too dry to say anything. He stared past me for a couple of seconds, frowning hard, and then said, "I'm going to walk on up to meet her. Rick has to deal with me as well if he wants to have anything to do with my family."
He looked at me like he was seeing me again, and his eyes got kinder. "You'll be OK here. We'll talk properly later."
