Sea (11 page)

It was pouring rain.
Pouring.
Like gallons of water being dumped on the dorm’s roof.

My little roommates were hanging out waiting for instructions when Vera finally knocked.

Her mascara was smeared and running down her cheeks.
Mascara?
Seriously, in this weather?

“Sienna? We’ve decided to relocate art to this room.”

“Okay.”

She nodded as if surprised I was being so cooperative. “Great. Well, the children’s regular classes were canceled because of a major leak in their classroom’s roof. Andy, I mean, your father, said that room is already starting to flood.”

Vera set down a wet box of art supplies: crayons, markers, pencils, paper, that we brought from home.

“So what should I do?” I asked.

“I will gather the girls and you can pass out the supplies?”

Easy enough.

We all sat in a big circle on the floor. The girls sat on their knees, so I did too.

Vera cleared her throat and sat up tall. “I’d like you all to draw home. The first image that comes to your mind when you hear the word
home
.” I think Vera said it in English for my sake, because the kids looked blankly at her until she repeated it in their language.

The kids all started coloring, so I did too.

I colored a house with Dad, Mom and me standing in the front yard throwing around a Frisbee. I drew myself with short yellow hair and red overalls. I was about six. I don’t know why. Maybe because that’s how old I guessed Elli was? Maybe because that’s the first image I thought of when I thought of home.

I peeked over at Elli’s drawing. A few green palm trees, a small brown house. A purple airplane flying in the bright blue sky between two puffy pink clouds.

Half of the piece of paper had a red background. The rest was white.

“Home?” I asked her quietly, not wanting to disturb the other kids who were busy working.

She didn’t say anything. Kept scribbling more and more and more red.

“My home,” I said, pointing to my picture.

She looked over at the family with the young child. She narrowed her eyes, confused.

She said something to Vera.

“Elli wants to know why you aren’t in the picture with your little sister,” Vera said.

I felt sheepish. “Tell her that is me when I was a kid. That I don’t have a sister.”

She did.

Now Vera must have thought I was even nuttier than she did before.

Crayon-art evidence of me being stuck in the past.

But Vera didn’t look judgmental at all. “We all think of home in different ways” was all she said.

Then we went around the circle discussing our pictures. Some of the kids drew big waves. Some drew rainbows. Some drew the
pesantren.

“Why did she draw an airplane?” I asked Vera, referring to Elli’s art.

Vera asked her in a smooth, patient tone.

Elli looked at her lap while she explained. My gut told me it was some awful reason.

“Because she wished an airplane would have flown in to rescue her mother from the sea. The day the wave came.”

How ironic, I thought. One kid’s nightmare is another kid’s hope.

“What is the red about?” I pressed.

Vera asked Elli.

“She thinks of the tsunami as death and she said the color of death is red.”

My voice caught in my throat. “Like blood,” I said.

“Yes,” Vera said sadly, “like blood.”

I cleared my throat and felt hot. Listened to the pounding rain on the roof. Poor Elli.

Vera asked me to hand out a fresh piece of paper to all the girls. I did.

The rain outside was getting louder.

“This time I’d like you to draw yourself. Any way you’d like. Just make sure you are in the picture.” She said it in English, then translated to the group.

Elli scribbled quickly another palm tree with a tiny stick figure standing below it. This time, thankfully, there was no red.

“You?” I asked, pointing.

“Elli,” she said, patting her chest.

“It’s good.” I smiled. Then I turned and whispered to Vera, “Why did she draw herself so small?”

Vera’s eyes widened as she translated Elli’s answer. “She said that is how she feels when she wakes up each day without her family. Very small and very alone.”

Tears stinging in my eyes, I grabbed a green marker and even though I probably wasn’t supposed to, I drew a stick figure on Elli’s paper next to the tiny one.

A tall girl with yellow hair and orange shoes.

I pointed to my Converse. “You, me, together,” I said.

Elli leaned into my shoulder before beginning to draw again.

This time she drew another figure, then another.

She was drawing her friends here at the
pesantren.

“You are not alone,” I told her. And I think she may have understood what I said. Maybe next time she would draw herself a little bit bigger.

Maybe I would too.

At lunchtime we ran into the hall to eat more noodles before breaking into afternoon groups.

This time in one of the older girls’ dorm rooms.

I noticed the boy with the limp wasn’t at lunch and wondered when I would see him again.

Wind slashed against the shingles. Vera spoke loudly above the rain.

We were sitting cross-legged on the floor. The girls were sitting on kaleidoscope-colored prayer mats. One girl offered to share her mat with me, so we were sitting together.

Vera said I could take pictures, so I zoomed my lens on the doe-eyed face of a girl about my age who was wearing a lime green
jilbab
. I listened as she told her story, in English.

“I was home with my mother and my sisters when I heard the sound. The sound of thunder. My father and my brothers were fishermen and were working. I ran out the door and saw people running toward me, away from the ocean. They were crying out:
The sea is coming, the sea is coming.
My mother grabbed my baby sister and the two older girls and they ran. I grabbed my younger sister’s hand and we ran as fast as we could away from the water. My sister was seven and couldn’t run any more. Even though she was big, I lifted her into my arms, and together we ran until she was too heavy and I stumbled on a fallen man and my sister slipped from my arms. I tried but I couldn’t reach her. There were many people running. The water moved so fast behind me and was so thick and tall that ...”

She stopped talking and crumpled forward onto the carpet.

Vera said something too quietly.

The girl wiped her eyes and continued talking. Her words had frozen me to the floor and I didn’t know what I wanted more: for her to stop talking or to finish the story.

“It’s okay,” Vera told her, gently prodding.

“My sister was swept away.”

The knot in my throat swelled up. I leaned in to hear the rest.

“I had no choice but to run. To leave her behind. I climbed up a banana tree and hung on tight as muddy ocean rose around me. Many people go past me. And some already quiet.”

She lowered her voice. Her face was broken.

“Finally, when I cannot hang on any longer, the water falls back to the sea. When I climb down, for days and days I look in the camps for my mother and for my sisters. One of my sisters is here at the
pesantren
with me. But not the sister I lost. I never found that sister again.”

Vera put her arm around the girl and spoke quietly, letting her talk and cry.

“It’s not your fault,” Vera said in English before translating. “You were a hero for trying to save your sister. You are a hero for saving yourself.”

The girl’s eyes widened. I could tell Vera’s words really helped her and I believed they were true too.

I set the camera down without taking a picture.

I screamed. But this time not from a nightmare.

Lightning flashed through the pitch-black room like a strobe light, followed by a massive crash of thunder.

It had to be the middle of the night.

After a long first day of the emotional art therapy with Elli and then the super-sad teen therapy group, I was completely drained by bedtime and quietly cried myself to sleep replaying the girl’s story in my head to the melancholy beat of the rain pounding on the roof

And now this.

Rain poured through the narrow slits in the shutters, leaving half my bunk soaked. Elli was so afraid, she jumped up onto my bunk and clung to me.

“It’s okay, sweetie. It’s just a thunderstorm,” I said, but her face was soaked with tears. The sounds of the other girls’ cries were drowned out by the heavy thunder. Rain hammered against the window so hard, I was afraid the shutters might blow off their hinges. “We better move,” I said.

I slid down, Elli clinging to my neck. I yanked on the string and the light sparked once, pulsed and then fizzled out. Great. Following the whimpers, I stumbled across the floor, finding half of the kids huddled together on a lower bunk, looking scared to death. Meanwhile, the rest of the kids were slowly waking up wondering what all the fuss was about. They didn’t seem to be fazed by the storm at all.

Strange.

Then I realized my bare feet were wet. Water was leaking in from somewhere. “Crap,” I muttered.

I sat Elli down with the other kids and investigated the leak with my flashlight, which thank goodness was easy to find under my balled-up hoodie pillow. I pointed up at the ceiling, but aside from old water damage and mold it looked okay. Then I shone the light at the front door.

“Get some towels—uh, get some clothes.” The girls didn’t understand me, so I grabbed a bunch of my stuff—T-shirts, one sweatshirt, an already-damp striped towel—and shoved them into the crack of the front door, hoping to stop more water from pouring in.

There was a loud crash of thunder and the girls shrieked; it sounded like it was right outside the door. Lightning flashed across the dorm room again, the shutters flapping open and then slamming shut with the heavy wind. My barricade wasn’t working: the water was soaking right through the material. What was I supposed to do?

I bit my lip and made a decision.

“Okay. Everybody up. Move over and climb onto that bed; it’s farthest from the window and the safest place to wait out the storm.”

The huddled girls didn’t budge, so one at a time I picked them up and carried them across the room, setting them on the top bunk. Elli wouldn’t let go of me, so I was doing double duty, balancing two girls on my hips. The rain beat the roof like hail.

“Okay,” I said as I got the last girl on the top bunk. “You guys stay here.” I held up my hand for emphasis. “Stay. Here. I’m going to go find some help.” My dad said the storm might be bad, but I didn’t think he meant this bad.

Elli was still clinging to me, so I carefully unhooked her hands from around my neck and handed her my flashlight and my journal. “Here, you can look at these pictures. I promise I’ll be right back.”

She smiled a bit and nodded, flicking the light on and off.

Then, I slipped on my sneakers, and grabbing a towel to use as a tarp, I stepped out into the storm.

The lightning was so close, I hugged the side of the building as I went.

The wide path was ankle deep with water. My sneakers were drenched and the rain was hitting my face so hard it was like standing under a faucet on hyper-speed. I ducked my head and ran.

I could have gone looking for Vera, that would have been the most logical choice, but I wanted to find Dad, to make sure I was doing the right thing with the girls. But mostly I just wanted my dad.

So even though it was totally against the rules, I ran down the central path and then headed down the muddy trail toward the boys’ dorms, screaming into the streaking blackness, “Dad! Tom!”

Lightning shot across the sky as I stumbled through the mud—now as deep as a half-filled baby pool. “Dad!”

From outside, the boys’ dorms looked just like the girls’. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but I was surprised: white with blue roofs and basically falling apart. I heard terrified shrieks coming from a stocky building with a flapping blue door. Shadowy figures were scurrying in and out of the flap. They were using the sort of scoopers I saw in the buckets in the bathroom to bail the water off the floor. Ick. Then I saw who was doing the scooping.

“Sienna!” Dad yelled when he saw me. “What are you doing here? Are you okay? Are the girls okay?”

“Yeah!” I screamed. “They’re scared but okay.”

Dad handed his scooper to Tom and gave me a quick wet hug. “Good. Just go back to your dorm. It’s on higher ground than this one. Shut the door tight and shove anything you can find under the crack to keep the water out.”

“That’s what I did.”

“Great. And put the girls together on the highest bunk farthest away from the window.”