“I like all of that for you,” I said, dodging her question. “A guinea pig named Bug.”
“Right?” she said again. That must be her new phrase. “Anyway, don’t worry about my brother. For now, maybe enjoy Deni’s Return.”
At his name, I shivered happily.
“I can’t imagine how weird this is for you,” she said. “You haven’t seen or spoken to him since you said goodbye in Banda Aceh. That should be your movie by the way: The Shores of Banda Aceh. It has a ring to it, doesn’t it? I swear to God that story—your true story—makes me Brokeback Mountain kinda sad.”
“I know.” I looked at the sand. “Me, too.”
“So?” Her voice softened like the waves lapping on the shores. “So now what?”
“We get our second chance?” I asked, seeking her approval. After all, a second chance with Deni meant no chance for Spider.
She didn’t say anything, and that was okay. Even though her loyalty was to her brother, she didn’t judge, and it was so kind of her, I wrapped my arms around her and hung on tight.
“It will be okay,” she said, stroking my goose-bumped arms.
“How do you know?”
“Your unfinished love story gets a sequel, Sea. How many heartbroken girls get a second chance?”
Chapter Nine
As predicted, Deni’s film debut in the Indonesian Film Department was a hit. Department heads from the Film, Ethnic Studies, Psychology, Sociology, Medical, and Law Schools gathered around him afterward, asking him questions, wanting a moment of his time among a sea of catered snacks and drinks.
Local news made a showing as well.
It was a big deal, this film. The tsunami was two years ago, but there was something special about Deni’s story. Something new. These strangers saw the same thing in him that I did when we met. The fire in his eyes. The unyielding stretch of his spirit. Deni didn’t quit. Anything. And he had a great eye for film, capturing in others the same thing I saw in him.
He caught my eye in the audience, waved, and smiled. I waved and smiled back.
Spider was invited but didn’t attend.
No surprise.
He’d ducked my phone calls and ignored my texts since the ultimatum at my house.
I busied myself packing, prepping, watching documentaries, and learning basic phrases in Khmer. Tom warned me the girls didn’t want help, but they might like me. Might want to talk to me. I was there as an icebreaker as well as a swim coach. “They love American girls. They see you on TV. California girls especially,” he’d said.
Deni was busy with his new fans, so when my brother got squirmy, I offered to slip outside with him to get some air. We’d been playing for a bit near the ring of statues, when I saw a familiar figure approach.
“I came to say goodbye,” Spider said.
I strained to make my tone normal so I didn’t freak Max out. “I thought you weren’t coming.”
He tugged on his hair, avoiding my eyes.
“Where have you been?” I asked.
“Just out. I can’t…deal with him. With you spending all this time with him.”
“He’s a guest in our house.”
“Sea, this guy—you haven’t ever told me the truth about him, about what happened between you, and now he’s back and I feel like I’m being pushed out of the way. Like—just let me finish, okay? It’s like a force greater than what I want, or maybe even than what you want, has pushed me aside. And I have no choice but to step back and just…let you go. Like I’m a wave no one wants to ride.”
“Spider, you are definitely not a wave nobody wants to ride.”
“Feels that way.”
I sighed. “I need to do this, Spider. I love that you want me to move in with you, and I’m flattered. You know how much I care about you. But I need to go on this trip. I need to see this through.”
“With Deni? Why? There’s no way that guy is your future.”
Ouch. “Why do you go surfing every morning at dawn when the waves are good? Why do you wake up when everyone else is asleep to plunge into the ice-cold sea and risk your life in shark-infested water?”
“Because I want to.”
“It’s more than that, isn’t it? Didn’t you tell me once that you feel it in your bones, that you think about it when you aren’t in it? That you almost hear the sea calling your name, and if you don’t go, you feel it? Like a disappointment you can hardly name?”
“Yeah.” He frowned. “So that’s how you feel about this guy?”
“It’s how I feel about travel. And adventure. And Deni is all wrapped up in that. Telling me not to do this, is like me telling you not to surf.”
He looked horrified. “You wouldn’t.”
“Why wouldn’t I?” I asked. And he got it. He did.
“Because you’d know I had to do it.”
His eyes softened and at least we weren’t fighting anymore. We’d come to an understanding at least for the moment. “You drive me mad, lady,” he conceded.
“I know. I’m sorry.”
He pulled me close and kissed me, once, on the forehead. “Just be safe,” he whispered. He smelled so good. I could feel his heart pound against my chest, and I almost gave in to him, to the safety of home, to the promise of a future.
But I didn’t back down. I wouldn’t give in. I couldn’t. Instead, I did the hardest thing I’d done since finally letting go of the hope of my mom being alive and leaving Deni on the shores of Banda Aceh.
I let him say goodbye to me.
I let neither of us win.
He walked away from the Rodin sculpture garden and into the night, to go who knows where with who knows who.
“Where Spider go?” Max asked.
“Away,” I tell Max.
“When he coming back?”
“I don’t know, buddy, we’ll have to wait and see. Hey, do you want to go home and help me pack up?”
“Pack up. Okay.”
Turned out, packing for Phnom Penh was going to be a lot like packing for Indonesia. “It’s going to be hot,” Dad warned as we loaded into the car. “Sweltering. Pack loose clothes.”
“Why do we have to leave early?” I complained. “I want to show Deni around California. He just got here!” There was so much he wanted to see and do: Disneyland, Yosemite, Napa, driving along Highway 1 through the fog, seeing elephant seals, hitting up beach boardwalks, and eating cotton candy. I needed at least a week to get through it all, and we no longer had that much time.
I’d fantasized about taking him to all the places we talked about the night he proposed in Indonesia. Now none of that would happen.
Team Hope was busy adding the travel to Deni’s US student visa as well as getting him school credit for the trip, and that meant our original trip timeline had to shift up a little over a week. The film department offered to loan him top-notch equipment in exchange for presenting any footage he shot once it was edited. As a life opportunity, this was huge for Deni, and he was eager to take it. Even though he hadn’t said anything, he was more than pleased that Spider wasn’t coming along on our journey. Dad was obviously nervous about me traveling without him, but I could see he wanted to empower me. He wasn’t fussing or micromanaging me as much as usual, which was a nice change.
Deni didn’t ask about what happened outside with Spider, and I didn’t tell him. I was quiet in the car on the long, winding drive over the mountain highway that separated the university from our little beach town. Excited about the night’s success, he chatted easily with Dad and Vera while I cooled my forehead on the window and stared out at the darkness thinking about what was behind me and what lay ahead.
Chapter Ten
“I had a solution to our Missing California Tours By Sienna problem,” I told Deni the next day after our last bag was packed. “Come with me.”
I pulled him around the house to our garage. “Look.”
The garage door rose, and a big smile broke out on his face.
“A motor!”
When he took a step toward me, he reduced the air in the stale garage to stardust. “You have been thinking about me.”
“Of course,” I admitted.
“Are we going for a ride?”
“What do you think?” Grinning, I climbed onto the seat and dangled the keys in my hand, mimicking what he’d done the first time we rode on his motorbike.
Deni jumped on behind me. “Where are you taking me?”
Like he said to me that day in Indonesia when we took off from the pesantren together, I said, “Today, we go everywhere.”
We cruised up Highway 1 to the lighthouse, past the surf museum, along the old lighthouse. Rounding our way past groups of cold-water surfers dressed head to toe in thick wetsuits, I pulled over and we hopped off the scooter. The air was thick with fog, and cold in that unexpected way Northern California beaches tend to be. The barking elephant seals amused Deni as we ducked under thick eucalyptus trees along the path on the way to the lookout spot. I pointed out the wide expanse of strawberry fields in the open sea part of town north of San Miguel where the wind blew so cold your ears ached. Strawberry fields and tangles of blackberry vines spread out under the clouds.
“It is beautiful,” he said.
“Yep.”
Back on the bike, we passed tiny seaside fruit and vegetable shacks. Like we did in Indonesia, we pulled over. This time, on the other side of the world, I bought Vera fresh peas, kale, and berries to go with dinner. We sampled organic strawberry jam, and I told stories about how I liked to take Max to pick berries, how cute he was with his little basket and a ski cap that kept his ears warm. Deni listened, smiling at all the right places.
If this was all he saw of our beautiful coastline, I had to make it count.
My turquoise scooter shone in the sun like sea glass. I saved up for it for a whole year, working all summer teaching swim lessons and lifeguarding at the public beaches. I rode my beach cruiser on campus, but at home, I rode this. It didn’t go very fast and Spider made fun of it, but I loved it because it was a memory machine.
“Remember, the ‘head crackers’?” I asked him. That’s what we’d called the seriously unsafe motorcycle helmets in Indonesia. He pantomimed a head exploding. We reminisced more about the trip, as if there hadn’t been two years and secrets separating then from now. Like two kids reuniting at the camp every summer, we knew we still had so much to catch up on.
“What if this is real life?” I asked him. “What if everything else is just the space between?”
Nodding, Deni looked off at the fog-dusted fields of growing berries. I wondered if he was thinking the same thing as me.
“You bought this motor, so you can remember,” he said.
“I bought it so I wouldn’t forget.”
Without discussing it, we switched places. He sat confidently in front of me, set to drive. I climbed on behind him.
On the ride home, I held onto his waist and pressed my cheek into the warmth of his back. Bev was right; we were getting our second chance.
That moment was the beginning of our sequel, and I knew better than to waste a single moment.
Chapter Eleven
To think I’d thought the flight to Indo was long.
I’d complain but, in all honesty, spending seventeen hours to Hong Kong with a two-hour layover in Taipei plus five more hours to Phnom Penh, the Capitol of Cambodia, was a memorable experience if for nothing other than the pure joy of spending so much uninterrupted one-on-one time with Deni.
From the second we boarded, I was brought right back to the two bumpy hell flights we took from Yogyakarta to Banda Aceh on my “emergency credit card” the day we ran away from the pesantren. That was the same, only Tom now sat behind us, so the nervousness of us doing something bad was replaced only by uneasiness of what we were about to do.
The food was fine. Mostly rice and some vegetables and plastic-wrapped candies. I ate everything handed to me. So did Deni. We drank Sprites, watched the same movies—a zombie action film—and laughed at the same parts. I fell asleep on his shoulder. By the time we landed for the last time, I was an ocean away from everything I knew before.
To fight the smothering jetlag, we needed a good night’s rest. Then we’d be able to head to the clinic to meet Dad and Tom’s patients and get me started at the pool. Deni had his filming equipment all set and ready to go.
Tom told us that the tropical hotel we were staying at was known for trafficking sex workers, a fact which both disgusted and intrigued me. I wanted to snare them. Catch them in the act and bust them.
“Is it that obvious?” I asked Tom. “When they stay here?”
“Is it normal to see a fifty-year-old man with a ten-year-old boy?” I ask.
“If it’s his son, of course, but the first time I traveled here, I saw this old dude with two young street boys. At first, I thought, ahh, how sweet, he’s getting them a room for the night. Then I realized with a sinking feeling in my chest, oh.”
“Gross. That’s just beyond sick. Did you try to help the kids?”
“No. I regret it now but was so shocked by the realization and I, of course, had no proof. By the time I thought better, they had checked out. My error made me so angry I vowed to make it my personal mission to help. Like your dad is invested in post-disaster, ridding the earth of these sex trading pedophile perverts is my personal goal. As well as rehabilitating the kids who escape.”
I’d never heard Tom so passionate about something. His large body shook, and anger flashed across his burly features. “Pol Pot led the Khmer Rouge from 1963 until 1997; it’s essentially a lawless land.”
“Why don’t they stop the sex traders?”
“That’s the thing,” Tom said. “Since Pol Pot killed nearly all of Cambodia’s educated population—which, in essence, killed the country’s morale—the population is so riddled with PTSD, people do desperate things and are afraid to speak out against the so-called government.”
He shook his head. “The clinic we’ll be working in partners with an agency that also deals with law enforcement, but it’s tough to find. Most of the time people take matters into their own hands.”
“They take them down themselves?”
“Sometimes. But we stay out of that side of things. We are here to take care of the kids who manage to break free or escape or are freed.”
I looked around the seemingly innocent tropical hotel, anxiety rippling through my spine. “Can we stay somewhere else?”
“It’s fine. It’s the closest hotel to the clinic. I didn’t mean to scare you. If you see anything weird, just come tell me right away.”
“Okay.” I was suddenly very homesick, but the exhaustion had started to catch up to me. Beside me, Deni yawned and rubbed his eyes.
“I got you two separate rooms—they’re so cheap, it’s no problem. We can meet for dinner after we wash up and rest. There’s also a pool if you want to check it out.” Tom tugged on his beard. “I’m bushed. Heading straight for a nap. Let’s meet in three hours? Just make sure you keep all your valuables in the safe. Sometimes the housekeepers steal, too.”
Oh great. Sex traders and thieves. What could go wrong?
“I will see you later,” Deni said as he headed into his hotel room, and I reluctantly headed into mine. I was dog-tired, too, but it was only midday. My dad taught me that whenever I landed in a new country, or a different time zone in the states, I should stay awake until it’s that place’s nighttime. Then I had the green light to surrender to that specific kind of tired. The siren’s song of sleep that pulled like Max on my ankles.
Since giving in to the exhaustion was out of the question, I slipped into my swimsuit and headed out to the tropical pool. The water was warm and felt fantastic. Tourists buzzed around the garden bar, but otherwise I was alone. I floated on my back wondering if maybe Deni was upstairs somewhere watching me.
I hoped he was.
At the clinic the next day, Tom introduced us to a Cambodian clinician
named Sophany Chhim, who spoke very good English. I learned that she went to college and medical school in Paris before returning to Cambodia to pursue her passion of helping girls being trafficked out of Southeast Asia. Her nurse, who was just a little bit older than me, also went to school in France and spoke English, French, and Khmer. So far, all the physicians were female, which I loved and admired.
“Thanks for coming, Thomas. It’s good to see you after all these years,” Dr. Chhim said.
“You, too.” Tom, acting uncharacteristically well-behaved, said in a shy voice.
“Have you known each other a long time?” I asked.
“We go back ways,” he said. “She’s a helluva doctor. I just try to keep up.”
She looked at him and their eyes met. “The feeling is mutual, Thomas.”
Oh boy, something was definitely up between these two. I couldn’t wait to find out their backstory.
They went on like that for a while, a sweetly shy rapport that reminded me a bit of Deni and me as she showed off the clinic. Were they like me and Deni? I paid attention to both the content of the tour and the dynamics in play between them.
I caught Deni’s eye, and he cocked his eyebrow with a little shrug, totally reading my mind.
Was there something real between them once upon a time?
A wish-list person—yeah. Wish list. Like Deni was to me.
“Oh, Thomas,” Dr. Chhim said with a flush. “It is truly good to see you.”
“It’s been too long. Too long,” he said, their eyes locking.
Deni flashed me another look, as if he was asking, “What’s with all this ‘Thomas’ stuff?” Entertained, I shrugged as they complimented and teased each other in a more-than-professional way.
That was when I noticed Tom was wearing a nicer-than-usual clean shirt, tucked in. “I think he trimmed his beard,” I whispered to Deni who grinned.
Where the Sea Takes Me Page 7
