Where I Found You

by Heidi R. Kling

  I choke on my scream when I see who it is: my mother. The skeleton of my mother. Trying to pull me into the sea.

  “Deni!” I screamed, tears pouring down my face. “Help me!”

  “Sienna, Sienna!” A child’s voice.

  I rolled over, orienting myself. Elli was shaking my arms. She looked so scared. “Sienna?”

  My ears rang from my own scream. “I’m okay, sweetie. Sorry, I…had a bad dream.”

  Chills ran up my body. I was so embarrassed. The older girl assigned to this dorm, Evi, offered to help her back to bed. I could see she was trying to be polite and not embarrass me further, but she looked a little freaked out, too. I thanked her and hugged Elli again.

  “I’m so sorry I scared you, sweetie,” I said, kissing her cheek good night. “Terima kasih for waking me. I’m fine now.”

  Elli still looked disturbed but kind of smiled for my benefit. Evi nodded in my direction, and took Elli’s hand, leading the younger girl back to her bunk.

  After a long time staring at the half-moon out my window, I fell back into a fitful sleep until pink light floated through the room and someone else was shaking me awake. Calling my name.

  “Sienna? Sienna?”

  Deni?

  “Wake up.” Deni’s voice was no more than a hush. “My father is looking for me.”

  I sat up. Rubbing my eyes, I asked, “What time is it? My father is looking for me?”

  “No. My father.”

  My sleep-mangled brain struggled to catch up. “Your father?”

  He nodded. “Please come. I will tell you.”

  The girls were still asleep, but the call to prayer couldn’t be too far off. Glancing back at Deni, early sunshine washing over his excited face, I wondered what was worth the risk of sneaking over to the girls’ side in daylight?

  “Sienna,” he said, more urgently. “My father is alive!”

  “What do you mean your father?” I whispered. “I thought your whole family was…you know.” Dead.

  His shook his head and spoke quickly in a low voice. “My father was a fisherman and was at sea the day the wave came. He fished his whole life. He knows the ocean like he knows his heart. I never believed that the sea took him. And now there is proof!”

  Holy crap. Deni’s father was alive? The thought was incredible. Impossible. Incredibly impossible. “Let me get dressed. I’ll meet you by the wall near the river.”

  Quickly I snuck off my bunk, slipped on a yellow sundress, and practically flew down the path to meet him. I spotted him waiting for me, looking off in the distance. I stopped short and watched him, feeling weird, like maybe I shouldn’t interrupt. That whatever he was thinking about was important. But then he saw me and grinned.

  “I am not like them, Sienna,” he said, gesturing toward the street kids by the river. “I am not alone. Each week I wait to hear news, knowing if he is alive, he will come looking for me. And he has.”

  “So your father is here? Where is he?”

  Deni’s face twitched. “No. He is not here. But we have word from Aceh, my friend tells me, that someone is looking for a boy named Deni who came to a pesantren in Yogyakarta.”

  My excitement faded. “Oh. And you think this person is your father?”

  “I do not think. I know.”

  We sat quietly for a while watching sunrise. I tugged on a piece of my hair, not knowing what to say, feeling bad for bursting his bubble, but it could be anyone looking. It could be any boy named Deni.

  “Deni, it’s been seven months—”

  “And still,” he cut me off, “they are finding survivors.”

  Why was I being negative? It wasn’t so strange that Deni thought his father might be alive. I read some of those amazing stories about relatives reconnecting after the tsunami.

  The problem was, I knew why Deni believed.

  Because it was easier.

  Easier than grieving.

  “Well, that would be amazing if it was him,” I said.

  Deni’s eyes hardened. “It is him, Sienna. You must believe.”

  I was such a hypocrite. For a long time after her accident I thought my mom was alive, too.

  That instead of dying when her plane crashed into the sea, or drowning like in my nightmares, Mom was marooned on an untouched Thai island, like an Amelia Earhart theory. That she spent her days picking bright yellow bananas and drinking sweet coconut juice out of furry shells. That she walked along white sand in the moonlight, her long hair flowing down her tanned back, sending shiny glass bottles of rolled-up letters to Dad, Oma, and me. That she was waiting to be rescued.

  Waiting for someone to find her and bring her home.

  I didn’t cry at her memorial service. There was no casket, no ashes. To me, it hadn’t been a real funeral. I refused to believe she was gone. It had been that phrase. That official phrase that had kept me going. Hoping.

  No evidence of a plane crash.

  No wreckage found.

  No known survivors.

  So what about the unknown ones?

  That was five years ago. I never grieved like Dad or Oma. Dad might still wear his wedding band, but he knew she was gone. They were better because they grieved, but I was worse. Even though I’d already given up hope, it was too late for me. I’d held on too long. Now, all that anger and sadness was locked up so tight, I could only reach it in my nightmares.

  I didn’t want Deni to end up like me.

  I reached out and touched his hand. “I understand. Believe me, I do. I used to think my mother was still alive, too. And I didn’t even have a good enough reason to hope like you do.”

  He stared at the warming sky for a long time. Finally, he said, “Let me hope, Sienna.”

  Nodding, I cradled his hand in mine. “Meet me by the wall after breakfast?”

  “Yes.”

  I brought Elli with me for a distraction, not wanting to encourage talk-talk. She sat next to me, coloring, while Deni and I talked quietly.

  Then Tom walked up.

  “Deni, there you are. The owner wants to speak with you.”

  Wide-eyed, he hopped off the wall. “About my father? Is there more word? Has he sent for me?”

  When Tom glanced at me, I recognized that look. It was the same look Spider’s mom had given me on the rooftop. Whatever they were going to tell Deni, it wasn’t good news.

  Tom touched Deni’s shoulder. “I better let him explain, son.”

  Deni looked at me, his eyes full of worry and questions.

  “It’ll be okay,” I said, for lack of something better to say. I wanted to go with him, to hold his hand, to be whatever he wanted me to be, but how could I do that out here in the open?

  Worse, Tom was looking at me like he was seeing me for the first time. Looking back and forth from me…to Deni…and back to me.

  “What are you two doing out here alone, anyway?”

  Crap. Tom’s keen instincts were dead-on, as usual.

  I lifted my chin. “We’re not alone. Elli is here.”

  His eyes narrowed. This wasn’t Tom’s first rodeo. With Dad, I could probably stretch the truth and get away with it, but not Tom.

  “After breakfast, the owner called a meeting to discuss relocating lost parents, didn’t you hear him?”

  I shook my head. Deni and I had both left early to meet and hadn’t been there.

  “You know you can’t be out here with him alone,” Tom said.

  I shrugged and picked some mud off the wall. “We weren’t alone,” I reiterated, gesturing at Elli. Tom raised his bushy eyebrows as if to say, Still not working. We’ll be talking about this later.

  But Deni backed me up. “It is the truth, Dr. Tom,” he said. “I was talking with Sienna about my father. That is he alive. That is all. Her father knows we are friends.” He glanced at me warmly.

  Of course, all I could think about was us kissing by the wall in the storm, then again in the alleyway, and by the gate under the stars.

  Friends. I guess
that was true, but also so much more.

  Elli and I waited on the porch of Bapak’s office listening to Deni and the owner argue loudly. Elli drew stars, moons, and planets on the concrete in lavenders and mint greens, and I helped her. The heat crawled over my back as the morning dragged on.

  Deni had been in there a long time. Too long.

  I couldn’t make out much but heard Aceh mentioned several times. Deni’s voice kept cracking, and I wondered if he was crying.

  “Stars,” I said, pointing to Elli’s drawing. “Stars,” I said, pointing up at the blue sky.

  She looked at me like I was being silly. “No stars,” she said. “Sun.”

  “Ha, you’re right. Smart girl,” I said, “but the sun is a star, did you know that?”

  “The sun is a star?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sun is a star, sun star, star sun,” she sing-songed, giggling.

  The door flew open behind us and slammed into the wall. Deni stormed out of the building. He didn’t see us. At least I didn’t think he did. His face was angry. Whatever Bapak told him couldn’t have been good.

  The owner walked out, too, staring after Deni, shaking his head. He glanced over at me and Elli with harsh charcoal eyes but didn’t say anything. I started drawing with Elli again.

  I wasn’t exactly surprised, but I wished he hadn’t wiped away Deni’s hope.

  “Elli,” I whispered once Bapak was back inside, “take this stuff back to the room, please. I have to go find Deni.”

  She tilted her head. What?

  “The bunk,” I said, scooping the chalk up in her hands. “Go.”

  I sprinted across the lawn to the trail. It was so humid I felt like I was running through soup. But Deni wasn’t on the trail. He wasn’t on the wall, either.

  Where would he go?

  The motor.

  I ran toward the front gate. Sure enough, Deni was on the other side revving it up, wearing his cracker helmet. His face was a mix of rage and disappointment. There was no extra helmet for me.

  “Deni!” I cried from the other side of the closed gate. The gatekeeper was nowhere in sight. “What happened? What did he say?”

  He turned at the sound of my voice. I leaned over the gate.

  “Deni!” I yelled. “Please come back in. Or can we go somewhere? Tell me what happened.”

  He stared at me blankly like he didn’t recognize me. Or if he had, he didn’t want to. He revved the engine again and then screeched off into the crowded city streets without me.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  With nothing better to do, I accepted Dad’s invitation to walk with him into town for a little shopping. We still needed to get some souvenirs for everyone back home.

  Guilt crept up my neck. I was a terrible friend, all but forgetting about everyone at home with everything on my mind here. Shopping did distract me. It was fun perusing the colorful shops. I found a coin purse for Bev embellished with a blue elephant dotted with orange and purple beads. I tucked three coins inside. For Oma, I looked through dozens of batiks, which Dad said were the traditional art of Indonesia, until I found the perfect one: a flowing wall-hanging hand-painted in five shades of brown, a bird free-floating in a flower garden of kaleidoscope shapes. Spider was the trickiest to shop for, but when I stumbled upon a small wooden sitar, a bigger version of the one I bought in Borobudur, I knew that was just the thing. I wrote all three of them postcards, thinking about the one Mom sent to me. Hopefully this one wouldn’t be my last. Then I tucked them in with their presents and with Dad’s help mailed them from the post office.

  The restaurant Dad brought me to reminded me of the one I went to with Deni, and that dumped any hope of distraction on its head. I couldn’t keep my mind off of Deni, wondering where he was, who he was with. If he was going to be okay.

  The rest of the day, pesantren talk-talk filled the thick air:

  “A person looking for a Deni but not at a pesantren.”

  “Someone saw Deni’s father in Jakarta.”

  “Not Deni’s bapak. It is his mother who lives!”

  “No one is looking for an older boy named Deni. It is a small boy they are looking for.”

  “Deni gets wild like this sometimes. It is like when the wave came.”

  “He runs away when he is angry. He is very angry now.”

  “Bapak will not let him go. He will not help him find his father.”

  “I do not know if he will come back.”

  I flopped onto a patch of muddy grass, overwhelmed with the talk-talk and guilt that this was somehow my fault, that I’d wished his hope away.

  I needed to fix it.

  I waited for him on our wall, but he didn’t come back.

  When the sun went down, Dad insisted I join Team Hope and the kids for dinner. They talked about this and that, but I could only stare at the end of the table where the other soccer boys were eating without him. I asked Dad if he knew what happened with the owner, if he’d heard anything.

  “Someone from an NGO, a nongovernmental organization, in Banda Aceh called and left a message on the pesantren’s answering machine last night asking if a boy named Deni lived here. The problem is the person asking for Deni didn’t leave any forwarding information. No phone number or name. It wasn’t a lot to go on, and I doubt the pesantren owner would have even mentioned it, but one of the older boys was working in the office and heard it and let Deni know anyway.”

  The call came while we were out. While he was with me in the alley in the rain.

  “It could be our Deni, though, right?” I asked.

  “Doubtful,” Vera chimed in between bites of sticky rice. “Indonesians don’t use their last names, and there are many Denis. Before the owner is going to invest valuable resources into considering it, he would need confirmation. The name of Deni’s father at least. Deni, son of…”

  “Are they going to start looking for the person who left the message?” I asked.

  Vera and Dad exchanged looks. “No one has that kind of manpower, honey,” he said. “They’re still head high in disaster relief up in Aceh. And everyone is tremendously busy here at the pesantren. The few adults they have working are up to their eyeballs in stuff to do.”

  “They can’t call every single NGO regardless,” Vera added.

  I bit my lip. “No one will do anything to help Deni?”

  Tom shrugged. “The person may call again, but it’s unlikely. Deni knows that. That’s why he asked the owner to book him a bus ticket back to Aceh so he could look for himself. Problem is, Deni is a ward of the pesantren now—the owner adopted the surviving Aceh kids—if he pays for Deni to go searching based on a rumor, all the kids will want to go back home.”

  “So he has to stay here? Even though his father may be alive?” I blinked at them. “That’s so unfair! He may not be an orphan at all. Dad, we can give him money, right? For a bus ticket? He probably asked because he doesn’t have it himself.”

  I stopped. He paid for my dinner. Why had I let him do that? It was probably all the money he had in the world, and I’d let him use it. Now he couldn’t go home.

  No wonder he didn’t want to see me.

  Dad scratched his chin. “It’s not that simple, kiddo.”

  I pushed my bowl of untouched rice away from me. “First, I’m not a kid, and why not? How much could it cost? You could go with him, Dad. You said you wanted to go to Aceh. Or we could all go? You talked about something productive—helping Deni find his dad is extremely productive.”

  My mind raced with ideas.

  Until I registered their faces.

  “What? What’s the matter?”

  “We’re leaving in a few days, Sienna. To go back home. We still have a lot to do here. We’re just now placing the older kids with the younger ones and so far, the trial is successful, but there are still kinks to work out. While we’re making great progress in the afternoon therapy sessions, we aren’t finished. We can’t just leave these kids without following throu
gh on what we started.”

  “But—”

  Vera added, “While your intentions are noble, we can’t just go jetting off to Aceh,” to which Dad nodded, of course, in utter agreement. “Not to mention the fact that it’s completely out of our jurisdiction to go against the owner’s wishes.”

  I pushed away from the table. I needed to get out of there. “Whatever.”

  Dad grabbed my arm. “Hey, the pesantren may not have a lot of funding,” Dad said, “but at least the kids get to go to school. That’s more than most have. It’s best for Deni to stay and focus on his future. And sweetie,” he said lowering his voice, “I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to get so attached.”

  Tom caught my eye and held it.

  Oh. Great. They both knew I had feelings for Deni.

  “Or to encourage false hope,” Vera added, pounding the last nail in the coffin.

  When I stood up, the table rattled. “I’m not giving him false hope.” My heart burned with frustration. “I thought we were here to help. This is someone who needs us—needs us—and you won’t help him? Great. That’s just great. Why the hell did we even come?”

  Tears scorched behind my eyes as I ran out of the room.

  “I told you something was going on between the two of them,” I heard Tom’s deep voice mutter behind me.

  “I was hoping you were wrong,” answered my dad.

  I spun around on my heels, forgetting where I was, forgetting it wasn’t okay to make a scene. “Well, he wasn’t!” I yelled at their startled faces.

  I fell into a turbulent sleep, filled with falling stars, exploding planets, and drowning fishermen. I woke up in a cold sweat and squinted into the darkness, wondering if I’d screamed out in my sleep. The other girls were still, though, their long hair spilled over thin pillow tops.

  I couldn’t go back to sleep. I needed to look for him.

  The night was so warm I didn’t need a sweater. I just slipped on my flip-flops and headed toward the wall.