Jakarta Missing (5 page)

Dakar thought about that. Was it the same as when Mrs. Yoder said, “God loves you”? She had always tried to believe that God loved her, but sometimes it didn't seem possible. Probably Melanie's aunt had never seen some of the terrible things she'd seen—the man with his milky-white blind eyes reaching out as she went past, or the kids without arms or legs, begging on the sidewalks of the city. But Mrs. Yoder had seen those things, and she still believed that God loved people.

“Is this the first time you've been away from Jakarta?” Melanie asked.

“Except the first year Jakarta went to boarding school.” As Dakar said the words, she suddenly thought about her one other true friend—a friend who, like Melanie, had looked at her with admiring eyes and let her make up almost all the games.

Gingerpuff scratched at the door, and Melanie got up, saying, “Little Miss Can't Decide if She Wants In or Out.”

Her friend's name was Wondemu, and they played together all the time that year. But she had missed Jakarta too much. So she'd left Maji and followed Jakarta to boarding school. And then she missed her parents and Wondemu and the water babies. At night, when she cried, one of her roommates would have to go get Jakarta. Jakarta would sit on the bed and sing “Barbry Allen” and comb Dakar's hair.

Gingerpuff jumped onto the bed and walked over to knead Dakar's stomach. The cat's eyes, too, seemed drawn to the smoke. All three of them, Dakar thought, were mesmerized by the smoke. She rolled the word
mesmerized
around in her mind, wondering if Jakarta, wherever she was, could really sense that they were thinking about her. Could candle smoke travel all the way to Kenya? What if Jakarta wasn't even
alive
anymore? She scrambled up, brushing the cracker crumbs onto the floor.

“Did you ever find out where the water babies went?” Melanie asked.

It was almost dark outside Melanie's window. What if Jakarta was in big trouble and needed her right this minute? Dakar hadn't even told Mom and Dad where she was. “I've gotta go,” she said.

“Wait!” Melanie grabbed her arm.

Dakar pulled away. “I can't wait. I remembered that I need to get home.”

“Well, just a second,” Melanie said. “Hey, I got this great idea.”

Dakar hesitated. The doorknob was burning her hand.

“I think we should have a sleep-over,” Melanie said quickly. “That's sort of adventuresome. My grandma gave me a dress-up box, so we could act out one of your stories and everything. What do you think? Saturday?”

“Maybe.” How could she have stayed away so long? “I'll ask.”

She could tell even before she pushed open the door that the house was too quiet. Her father was reading the newspaper on the couch. “Anything about …” The words leaped into her mouth, but saying them would make everything more real. Besides, why would Cottonwood, North Dakota, have any news about Kenya?

Dad was frowning. Dakar tried to breathe. Were his eyes moving on the page? No. She was sure they weren't. He wasn't even reading. “Dad?”

He dropped the newspaper into his lap. She ran and flopped down on the couch beside him, wishing she could jump onto the newspaper, the way she did when she was little. “Did we hear something?”

“Oh … no.” He rubbed her cheek. “I'm sorry I scared you. Actually, you scared me when you didn't come home. You should call if you're not going to come home.”

Dakar glanced warily at the telephone. She didn't like telephones. There weren't any in Maji or at boarding school, and she never spent much time using the one in Kenya, where ordinary people for some reason never had their names in the phone book and the phone lines were often down or phones disconnected, anyway. But she could probably figure out how to use this one. “Where's Mom?”

“She stayed in bed today. Just resting.”

Dakar coughed. It felt as if a small chunk of ice had gotten caught in her lungs. Mom was probably fine, though. She had been unusually cheerful since they came to Cottonwood. “Is she ever going to take a trip to see where she grew up?”

Dad rattled the edge of the paper restlessly. “I have no clue. I thought that was the main reason why we came to North Dakota. She won't talk about it. I don't think anybody understands—including her.”

Dakar stared idly at the picture of the family Mom had hung by the table. Dad and Jakarta were laughing, their arms around each other. She herself had her mouth open and was holding up one finger as if to say “wait a second.” Mom must have been looking at something off to the side, but you couldn't tell what. “No, you're wrong,” she wanted to say. “Someone might understand. Me.” But people just didn't go around telling Dad he was wrong. And maybe she didn't even really understand. Still, it seemed to her that Mom might be like a scarab beetle. The ancient Egyptians considered scarab beetles sacred because new beetles seemed to pop mysteriously and miraculously out of little balls of dung. Really, though, adult beetles laid their eggs and then rolled and rolled the dung with their hind legs until the eggs were hidden deep inside.

Maybe Mom had been like that, burying the North Dakota piece of her heart in a neat little ball of ice. Maybe she was afraid of what might happen if she saw the place where she'd grown up. What if seeing it didn't help, and the hard little ball was still there? Or … what if she loved it so much that she never wanted to leave North Dakota again?

Dad ran his hand through his graying red hair, making it stick up everywhere. “I was thinking about something that doesn't have anything to do with Jakarta. The doctors in a medical center in Atlanta have been consulting with me about a case that's baffling them. They thought it might be something tropical. I was just going over everything in my mind, wondering what I'm missing. What could I possibly be missing?”

Dakar pulled back. She hated the smell of newspaper. And she hated the person Dad was thinking about. Wait. What a terrible thought! She wanted to care about the patient, a person who was lying in a hospital bed … itching, hurting, maybe even dying. I care, she thought quickly. I do care, I do. It's just that there were so many people all the time, always wanting to be near Dad or neeeeding him.

She wished she were more like God and Dad. Mrs. Yoder said, “The Bible suggests that God loves poor people most especially.” The first story Dakar ever wrote said, “God loves lepers. My dad loves lepers. But I am scared of them.”

Well, okay, her heart definitely wasn't frozen yet, if she could feel guilt. The honest, shameful truth was, she wanted him to be sitting on the couch and thinking about Jakarta, only Jakarta. But she would never say that to him. Dad, who had such a big heart for the wretched and the poor and the sick, would never understand. Besides, ever since boarding school she and Jakarta had been careful about saying anything that would hurt Mom's or Dad's feelings. Every moment with your family was precious. You learned that in boarding school even if you didn't learn anything else.

T
hat night in her sleep Dakar quit breathing again. She woke up gasping—huge, noisy gulps. When air was finally trickling back in her lungs, she started to cough.

Through the coughing she heard footsteps. She felt the light in her face. “Dakar?” She felt Dad's hands pulling her up. He held a glass of water to her mouth.

“I'm okay.” It was a good sign she could talk, even if she had to croak the words out.

“Don't try to talk. Just breathe calmly.”

Breathe calmly. The cough was a crocodile, its eyes sinister above the surface of the water. It wanted to pull her under, but she wouldn't let it. She could still fight back. She made herself breathe in time to the words Mrs. Yoder had taught her: “‘You will not fear the terror of the night.'” In. Out. “‘Nor the arrow that flies by day.'” In. Out. “‘Nor the pestilence that stalks in darkness.'” In. Out. “‘Nor the destruction that wastes at noonday.'” Too bad she did fear all those things, no matter how many times she said the psalm.

“Has this happened to you before?” Dad asked.

“A few times in boarding school. My roommates would run and get Jakarta.” Jakarta. Jakarta singing. “‘They climbed and climbed to the steeple top, 'til they could climb no higher. And then they twined in a true lovers' knot—the red rose and the briar.'” Dakar would feel warm and
attached
, knowing that Jakarta was the red rose and she was the briar.

“More than once or twice?” Dad's voice made her a little scared—as if he were mad, though she knew he probably wasn't mad. Just impatient.

“I can't remember.” She didn't want to remember. “One of my roommates told Jakarta that sometimes it sounded like I was holding my breath, and this roommate had trouble sleeping, anyway, and she said I made it all the worse because she felt like she had to stay awake and listen in case I … you know. So they moved her to another room.”

“I wish someone had told us.”

He isn't mad, Dakar reminded herself. He just sounds that way. “Jakarta used to sing to me,” she whispered.

“Well, lie back. Here, I'll turn out the light, and then I'll sing.”

It wasn't “Barbry Allen,” but she liked his songs, and he had a good voice. Such interesting music in the world. The shepherd flutes in Ethiopia. And sometimes in Egypt there were weddings right outside the compound, with wailing Arab music all night. Everyone showed up for class bleary-eyed after nights like that, and tests were postponed. In Nairobi Mom got their cook to teach her some songs in Swahili.

Mom. Dakar sat up. “Where's Mom?”

He stopped in mid-phrase, and she had the discombobulating feeling that they weren't in Cottonwood at all, but out on the African plains together, in the dark. Out there she always knew when he'd heard a dangerous sound, a pestilence that stalks in darkness. She'd lie there with her heart just throbbing.

“Things can get unpredictable out here, fast,” he used to tell her. “When I say frog, you jump.” She had sat with him in silence like this many times, wondering what was happening, listening to the way his breath whistled in and out. Not asking.

But no. They weren't in Africa. Perhaps pestilence didn't stalk in darkness in quite the same way in Cottonwood, North Dakota. “Never mind,” she said. “Now I remember you told me she's been in bed all day. Did she eat any supper?”

“No. But don't worry, Dakar. She'll be fine.”

She settled back. Fine. But what if she wasn't? What if—what if the hoodies were after her? When the hoodies pulled Mom into the Allalonestone in Maji, Jakarta knew what to do. Now Dakar would have to figure out how to save Mom. “Don't worry,” people always said. “Don't worry.” But she
had
to worry. “What's the scariest thing that ever happened to you?”

“Hmm.” Dad's fingers found a knot in her left shoulder and kneaded it so hard she wanted to wince, but he liked her to be strong, so she didn't. “Well, I think you were there. Do you remember?”

Of course she remembered. “Don't let your fear get the upper hand. It has a way of swallowing people—whole,” Dad had said on that terrible afternoon after the elephant charged them and she was sitting on the ground, more afraid than she could ever remember being in her life (which was saying something), shaking so hard she couldn't move even though an acacia thorn was sticking into her leg.