Escape Under the Forever Sky (6 page)

My mother tried to look stern, but I could tell she thought I was funny. Her dimples were showing. It was a dead giveaway. “Those sound like excellent and appropriate compliments. Now let's go.”

Iskinder was waiting for us with the BPM. We got in back, and he took off. I stared out the window while my mother reminded me for the ten millionth time how not to act like a Neanderthal.

“. . . And remember, it's not polite to refuse any food. Just take small helpings of everything they serve tonight and do your best to finish them.”

Had she honestly forgotten how many of these things I'd been to in my life? And when had I ever embarrassed her? True, there was the time I got into a fistfight with that Belgian kid. But we were eight years old—and he'd started it.

The stadium was in the center of the city. Tall black iron gates blocked the entrance. We cleared security and drove slowly down a long winding driveway paved with pale yellow bricks. Lining the driveway on both sides were Chinese workers wearing round flat straw hats, stationed there to greet us.

“Hey, Mom,” I said, “I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.” She gave me a nudge.

Ambassador Li was waiting for us by the front doors with a big smile on his face. “Hello, Willa! Welcome, Lucy! I am so glad you are here tonight to see the very beautiful stadium my country has built for Ethiopia.”

“And we are so happy to be here, Ming,” my mother gushed. “What a wonderful gift. It will do so much to enhance the lives of the many people who use it.”

Just to show I'm not such a clod after all, I shook hands with Ambassador Li Ethiopian-style—with a slight bow and my left hand holding my right forearm. I could tell he and my mother ate it up.

“Come,” the ambassador said, “I will give you a tour.” I followed obediently as Ambassador Li led us and the rest of the dinner guests inside the stadium.

Suddenly I noticed the music that was being piped in throughout the arena. “Excuse me, is that Elvis?”

Ambassador Li beamed. “American music in honor of our American guests.”
Weirder and weirder
.

Our tour began in the arena, which, we were informed, could accommodate 15,000 spectators. “My, the seats look so comfortable, Ambassador Li!” I exclaimed. My mother gave me a warning look, and I flashed her a smile.
See how good I am?

On our way to the prime minister's personal viewing box, we passed the restrooms. My mother shot me another look, and this time I kept my mouth shut.

When we were all seated in the box, Ambassador Li announced, “And now I have something very exciting to show my guests.” He leaned over and whispered to me, “Usually I do this only for the prime minister. But tonight”—he paused for dramatic effect—“I do it”—
pause
—“for you!”

Suddenly jets of water erupted all over the field, pumping so hard they looked like fireworks.

“This is how we keep the grass healthy!” yelled Ambassador Li over the din. “The jets pump two tons of water per minute!”

Two tons of water per minute in a country where more than a million people have died in droughts. I felt sick to my stomach.

And dinner didn't help.

The dining room was large, a crazy mix of Chinese architecture, with red lacquered walls and black trim, and early-Ethiopian art in carved wood frames. Since the country is mostly Christian, all the paintings showed religious scenes, not that I recognized any of them, except for Saint George slaying the dragon. We had studied paintings like these in art class. It's kind of cool, actually. Four hundred years ago there were all these studios with artists who specialized in one tiny detail: Master of the Eyelashes, Master of the Small Chin, and my personal favorite, Master of the Sagging Cheeks.

We sat at a shiny black table in the center of the room underneath a huge gold chandelier. I looked at the endless spread of silverware and chopsticks in front of me and cringed. This was going to be a long night.

Ambassador Li clapped his hands, and on cue three waiters swept into the room carrying silver trays
overflowing with food. They placed the mammoth platters on a giant lazy Susan in the middle of our table.

I'm a pretty adventurous eater, but there was stuff here I'd never seen in my life. Something pale and spongy called fish maw (I found out later that
maw
means “stomach”!) and some squiggly stuff I didn't even want to know about. Ever the dutiful daughter and under my mother's eagle eye, I put a little bit of each dish on my plate. Lucky me, I was seated next to Ambassador Li, who made sure nothing got by me. Even worse, he confessed he had a “bad stomach” (
please, spare me the details!
) and graciously sent all his portions of spicy food to me.
Maybe if I throw up all over the table, it will liven up the party—you know, make the evening memorable
.

Dr. Jonathan Clarke, from Chicago, the prime minister's personal physician, sat on my other side. I have to give him credit—he really did try: “So, Lucy, I imagine you've been to lots of places around the world in your young life. How do you like living in Ethiopia?”

“Well, to tell you the truth, Dr. Clarke,” I said in between bites, “most of the time I don't feel like
I
am
living in Ethiopia. My mother doesn't let me go out on my own, and visiting museums gets a little old after a while. So mostly I just go to school and sit around at home.”

Awkward silence.

“I'm, um, sorry to hear that,” he said at last. “I can imagine it must be very frustrating to find yourself living in Africa and unable to experience it. Surely there must be times you get to go out and about?”

“Actually,” I admitted, choking down a long piece of bok choy, “I do go on game drives sometimes.”

“Really?” he said, adjusting his glasses. “Tell me about that.”

“Well, there's this ranger. His name is Daniel Negash, but I call him Dahnie. He takes me into the parks, to the ones that aren't too far from Addis. He's amazing. He knows everything about all the animals, which is great for me because I'm going to be a conservation zoologist. I don't get to go as often as I want to—maybe once every two weeks or so—but I go whenever I can.”

I was just getting warmed up, but Dr. Clarke wasn't listening anymore. He had turned his attention to the
German businessman seated on his other side.

Since my other dinner partner, Ambassador Li, was busy with my mother and the deputy ambassador, I was left, as usual at these things, sitting at the table with no one to talk to.

The conversation was excruciating. Listening for more than three seconds was impossible.

“It's got to be stopped before the problem gets any worse,” I heard my mother say. “The United States is taking a very aggressive position.”

“As you should, Madam Ambassador,” said Ambassador Li. “Ethiopia has enough problems without adding this new plague.”

“I agree, Ming. Poverty, famine, disease . . . One of the beautiful things about this country is that despite its overwhelming difficulties, there has been very little crime—nothing like the kind you see in Kenya or South Africa. The Ethiopian government is deeply concerned. That's why I'm cochairing the new Committee against Drug Trafficking in Ethiopia.”
Wahoo! Another committee
.

I played silent games with myself to stave off boredom.
I packed my grandmother's trunk, and in it I put
A
frica. I
packed my grandmother's trunk, and in it I put
A
frica and a
b
oring dinner. I packed my grandmother's trunk, and in it I put
A
frica, a
b
oring dinner, and
C
hina spending millions of dollars on a stupid stadium no one wants when it could have spent that money saving people who are dying of AIDS and starvation
.

Finally, Ambassador Li took pity on me. “Lucy, your mother says you are becoming quite a naturalist. Tell us, what is the most interesting thing you have learned so far about Ethiopian wildlife?”

I thought for a moment. “Well, Ambassador Li, I'm sure you know there are many fascinating things to learn about African mammals. For example, did you know that when female lions are in heat, they will mate every twenty minutes for as long as five days? They hardly even stop to eat!”

My mother choked on her water, and the rest of the table was stunned into silence, but out of the corner of my eye I could see Dr. Clarke grinning.

After about fifteen endless seconds Ambassador Li leaned back in his chair and slapped the table. “Ha! No wonder the lion is king of the jungle!”

The air rushed back into the room. I glanced at my mother. Her dimples were showing.

Something about this memory bothered me, like a tiny unreachable itch in the center of my back. It wasn't just the way I had felt about being forced to go to yet another boring dinner. It wasn't remembering having to gag down food I hadn't wanted to eat. It was something else. Something important . . .

The committee
.

The American ambassador agrees to chair an anti-drug-trafficking committee, and three months later her daughter gets kidnapped. By drug dealers?

I packed my grandmother's trunk, and in it I put a
d
ead girl
.

M
Y BRUISES ACHED
, and a mosquito kept buzzing around my head. I named him Mr. Malaria. The good news was that whatever was in the water hadn't made me sick. Yet. It was late, after midnight, but I couldn't sleep. I kept thinking about all the things that could come crawling onto my mat, up my legs, over my face—
ugh!

And I kept thinking about Mom and Dad. I was starting to feel pretty mad at them. How could they have put me in a situation where something like this could happen? I mean, obviously living in Ethiopia wasn't safe for me. Otherwise why would we have to live behind cement walls and razor wire?

Even though it meant getting to see African wildlife, I was totally against living in Ethiopia from the minute I'd found out we were going. Because of my parents' jobs, we've moved around my whole life—to Rome, London, Kenya, and Morocco. When I was little, I thought it was really fun and exciting to go to all these foreign countries. But when we got to Morocco, which was where we lived before coming here, I'd wanted to stay for a while. I mean, I had made really good friends in Morocco—the last thing I wanted to do was start all over again. Honestly, was it so unreasonable for someone to want to start and finish high school in the same place with the same people?

Not that my parents cared about what I wanted. This was my mother's first chance at being an ambassador, and my father was going to Indonesia to work on a huge banking-scandal thing. So they decided moving up in their careers was more important than keeping our family together. I didn't get a vote. It was one of those “this is a family, not a democracy” moments.

So, yeah, I had been really upset about not being with Dad and leaving all my friends. But even though
I had known moving to Ethiopia was a mistake, being proved right didn't feel as good as I would have expected. For one thing, getting kidnapped is a pretty high price to pay for validation. And for another, there was a not-so-tiny voice in my head telling me that part of this was my fault too.

Stupid, stupid, stupid
.

I had been stupid to get in the car with Dawit. Face it, I had been stupid to sneak out in the first place. I should have known something was wrong when Dawit showed up so soon. If I had just stopped to think—or if I had trusted my gut when he first gave me the creeps—none of this would have happened. I'd have been home sleeping under my mosquito netting instead of out in the middle of nowhere probably about to die.

It was so incredibly ironic. All I'd done was complain nonstop about never being allowed out, and here I was, really out, and all I wanted was to get back in.