Jakarta Missing (7 page)

Dakar felt absurdly happy, as though she'd just been told she resembled God. “But my eyes aren't like his.” Dad's eyes were deep brown. Her eyes were blue. Not Mom's blue. Just blue. “And he doesn't have freckles.”

Mom smoothed Dakar's bridge of freckles with both thumbs. “I'll bet he did when he was twelve. If his mom or dad were still alive, we could ask.”

The next best thing about the day was being able to say yes to Melanie's Saturday plan. Why not? By the time they were walking to school together, Dakar felt expansive, full of goodwill. Goodwill. Just thinking the word made her laugh.

“‘Fear not,'” she said to Melanie, spreading her arms and pretending that she had great, shimmering wings to flap. “‘For behold I bring you good tidings of great joy. Peace on earth and goodwill to all' … to all human beings.”

“Whoa,” Melanie said. “Including the hockey players?” They giggled together, and Dakar felt she might grow real wings and start floating. She put her hand against her chest. No ice in there today. The glow had melted it all.

Except—except that Melanie's comment had started worries bubbling again. She'd never seen a hockey game or a football game. How stupid was that going to seem? And what
was
Jakarta going to play here? “It's all right,” she told herself. Jakarta had to be happy that the four of them would be together again. “I just remembered I've got to do something,” Dakar said. “It's urgent.” Without waiting for Melanie to answer, she started to run. She had to be sure she had enough time to get downstairs before the first bell rang.

“Africa child,” the cook said before she could say anything. “You are full of glory today. The heavens are telling the glory of God, as my mother used to say to each one of her children every single morning.”

“What about that day to day pours forth speech part?” Dakar asked. “Don't you like that? Good storytellers pour forth speech, don't you think? I know I feel that way when I'm telling one of my favorite stories.”

The cook clicked her tongue. “Your parents surely did bring you up to know your good word, Africa child. Or did the Bible just come bubbling up out of the hot springs over there?”

Dakar laughed. “Neither,” she said. “And I wanted to tell you that my big sister is coming home. That's why I look so full of glory.”

“Your sister.” The cook let out a long, squeaky sigh. “Well, you know,
that's
a hallelujah moment, Africa child. I do wish I could see my own sister. There's a wide, wide ocean between me and my baby sister.”

“Why don't you go see her?” Dakar asked.

The cook shook her head. “I was born saying I would never, ever get up in an airplane. Then life twisted itself around me, and up I went in spite of all I had to say.” She chuckled. “And isn't that life? But when God set me safely down on North Dakota solid ground, I vowed that was my last airplane flight. No, I think these willing ears will never be hearing my beloved baby sister pouring forth speech again.”

At the door Dakar hesitated. “About the Bible,” she said. “I went to a boarding school for a while where they thought Memory Work was very important. Mrs. Yoder would write the verses on Holy Cards and make us practice. What if you were on a desert island sometime, she would say to us, or in a prison cell? If you have the words in your heart, no one can take them away.”

“Uh-huh,” the cook was saying as Dakar turned. “It all pretty much comes down to what's in your heart.”

On her way up the stairs Dakar thought about what the cook had said. It probably all pretty much did come down to what was in your heart. But it was so terribly, terribly hard to have a pure heart. She should care more about the people Dad was finding cures for, for example. The truly true truth was that she was mad at them at least half the time. Because it seemed like Dad spent so much time with them, and when he wasn't with someone who had some strange disease, he was thinking about them.

“This is the second time you've been late, Dakar,” Ms. Olson said as she walked in the door. “Second time is supposed to be detention.”

Dakar swallowed. She wasn't the kind of student to be late to class, and she'd never, ever had detention.

Ms. Olson was frowning. “Every once in a while my mom gets really sick,” Dakar said. Well, it wasn't an actual lie, was it? “Sometimes she doesn't know that she's going to need me, but then I can't really leave until someone else is there to stay with her. I'm sorry.”

Don't give me detention, she thought. How embarrassing did life have to get? She concentrated on looking contrite. What a good word that was. She knew she didn't have a pure heart, but she surely had a
contrite
one.

“See me if you need help getting it worked out,” Ms. Olson said. “It's an important middle school responsibility to get to classes on time.”

Dakar scowled at the kids who had turned around to look. Contriteness had helped again. Or maybe it was only that all the teachers here had probably been warned, “She's from Africa. She doesn't know the things normal kids know.”

Sixth grade in the United States was harder than she'd expected. The classes were bigger than she was used to. Plus, the sixth grade had just become part of Cottonwood Middle School this year. “We have to be tough,” teachers said these first days when kids complained about anything. “We have to get you used to the system. Otherwise, you'll never make it next year.” Were the teachers going to say that every year from now on?

Dakar didn't dare pull out her lists and thoughts book today, not having just escaped detention. Instead, she doodled on the side of her paper, little hoodies with frightening eyes. She gave one hoodie a talk balloon. “
Ferenji
,” it was saying. That was “foreigner” in Ethiopia. Not that the little kids who yelled it every time she walked down the Maji road were mean like the hoodies, but she still didn't like hearing them say
ferenji
over and over or having them pinch her skin to see what it was made of. In Kenya, the word was
mzungu
. In Egypt people said
khawaaga
, with one of those growling sounds that were so fun to say in Arabic.

What was the word going to be here in Cottonwood? Thinking about the hockey and football games, Dakar was sure it would be something. Which was weird, because wasn't she supposed to be home? That morning in Nairobi Mom had said, “I can't believe we're really going home.” Lots of people in Africa said things like “We'll be going home for the year” when they meant the United States of America. Dakar couldn't remember when she had first started thinking that the little frozen spots that sometimes popped up in her stomach and lungs would go away if she could just get home. So why were the spots still there?

“Jakarta's coming home,” Dakar whispered to herself, and instantly felt better, even though the day crept along and she had to keep trying to think of things to do to keep from dying of impatience. By the time she got to math class, she was writing numbers the way her Egyptian friends wrote them. The numbers looked quite a bit like American numbers, but different in a cool, poetic way. She remembered practicing her numbers on a train in Egypt sitting beside Jakarta and watching mileposts whip by. They had just said good-bye to Mom and Dad, who were going to go off and have an adventure together, and the numbers helped her keep from crying.

Oops. She hadn't heard a word of math class. She looked up quickly. “You are the engineers of the world's future,” Mr. Johnson was saying. “You need to have a good foundation in math because it's going to be up to you to fix the world's pollution and other problems.” Dakar drew a scowling hoodie face. It was a good thing Jakarta would be here soon. Jakarta was interested in being an engineer of the world's future. Jakarta thought about that kind of stuff.

She shifted on the chair. Now what would make positive and negative integers go
fast
? Whole numbers were comforting. What was scary was realizing that between any two whole numbers was an infinity of fractions and other things that made everything too dizzifying and unpredictable. When it came to infinity, all the peace on earth and goodwill could only go so far.

W
hen Melanie met Dakar at the door on Saturday, the first thing she said was, “Do you know sign language?”

Dakar shook her head. “Not even one word.”

“Everybody in the whole world knows ‘I love you.'” Melanie showed Dakar. “One of my aunts is taking a class because she's going to be a teacher. She's teaching me a bunch of other words.” She signed again. “Know what I just said? ‘Help me. I'm a buttery potato on fire.'”

“If I was a potato,” Dakar said, “I'd want to be a buttery potato.”

“If I was a butterfly,” Melanie said, “I'd want to be an empress butterfly.”

“If I had to be a butterfly,” Dakar said, “I'd want to be a big strong blue one.” Melanie was staring at her with a look of fascination. “If I had to be a pizza,” she added, laughing, “I'd be a greasy one with cheese sliding off in six different directions.”

Melanie made a magnificent leap toward her room. “Inside the magic room,” she said, “we can be anything we want. Hurry.” So Dakar hurried. Melanie had put a gauzy purple scarf over the lamp so the room was lit in dim softness. Some kind of incense burning filled the room with a smell of black silk and yellow amber. Melanie pulled a green cowboy hat out of the box in the middle of the room.

“Huzzah,” Dakar said dryly.

Next, Melanie pulled out a scarf from a box and draped it around her head, making a veil. “Is this more like it?”

“It definitely fits my stories better,” Dakar said. “I could think of one to go with that.”

“Cool.” Melanie plopped on the bed. “I knew it. I just
knew
it.”

Dakar looked into Melanie's eyes, which blinked over the top of the veil. “Okay, I'll tell you a story from Somalia. I've never been there. Too dangerous. But usually when my dad comes home from anywhere, he tells me stories.”

“Why did he go to Somalia?”

“Some medical thing.” Dakar tried to remember if he had ever told them, exactly. People desperately needing help. War probably. There were always so many sad true stories.

“Where all have you lived?” Melanie asked.

Dakar settled herself into storytelling position on the chair, back straight, legs crossed. “In West Africa until I was three. I don't remember that at all. In Egypt when I was four. I think I remember Egypt, but we lived there again when I was ten, so maybe I'm really remembering that. In Maji the longest—five to seven. I went to boarding school in Addis Ababa when I was eight and nine and only went home to Maji at Christmas and in the summer.”

“Wow,” Melanie said. “How could you stand not seeing your mom and dad for so long?”

Dakar shrugged. “It was hard. Egypt when I was ten. Dad was in Somalia. Nairobi when I was eleven and Dad spent a lot of time in the Sudan. Now I'm twelve and I'm here.”

“I thought you'd be eleven, like me,” Melanie said.

“I'm used to being the oldest in my class. Mom says I was always small for my age, and she home-schooled me for the first two years, so she didn't want to push.”

“No wonder you're so mature for your age. Here, put this on.” Melanie tossed a bracelet to Dakar. “It's the most exotic thing I have. My aunt got it at the Wisconsin Dells.”