Jakarta Missing (10 page)

“We should do a project,” Mom said, “to make the time go fast. Take a look at the hedge. I haven't had a hedge since I left North Dakota twenty-five years ago, but isn't it supposed to be neater than that? It looks awfully scraggly compared to the neighbor's side of it.”

“I have a conference call with the president of the American Society of Tropical Medicine at the university this morning. Then I'll be back.” Dad stood up, scooped up Mom's hair, and kissed the back of her neck. “And I like wild hedges. Isn't it bad enough that we're living in a town with square lawns and in a white two-story house? A neat, square hedge, too? Too conventional.”

Mom smiled. “Too conventional.” After Dad had gone, though, she said to Dakar, “I'll bet we could figure out how to clip that hedge. Let's go see if we can find some tools in the garage.”

They made a good team, Dakar thought. She liked the softness of the sunshine, here, and the smooth
schick, schick
of the clippers.

Mom often got this strange look on her face when they were traveling and had gotten absolutely lost and were whirling around one roundabout after another on the wrong side of the road or walking down winding brick streets that all looked the same. Or sometimes it would happen in some airport where people abruptly started shouting and pushing, but no one seemed to speak English. Dad would usually be laughing. Occasionally he'd be yelling. But Mom would get a pained expression as if a big animal were sniffing at her, and if she could stand or sit utterly still, it would go away and not gobble her up. The look always made Dakar's own thoughts start fluttering. What if they stayed lost forever? What if they missed the plane? What if they got kidnapped by someone assuming they were rich Americans? What if they didn't know some custom and people sneered or scowled or laughed?

Out here in the sunshine, Mom's face looked so opposite. She had an expression that was even sort of
exquisite
. “You like it here, don't you?” Dakar said.

Mom smiled. “It's unbelievable. When I think how determined and desperate I was to get out of North Dakota … I never expected it to feel so much like home.” She added, “When your dad was in second grade, his family came back to the United States to live for a year. He was supposed to take some kind of standardized test to see if his schoolwork was up to grade level. The only thing he remembers about the test is that it had a picket fence on it, and he didn't know what a picket fence was. The woman who was giving him the test had to take him outside to show him one.”

Dakar thought about fences. In Maji a fence made of thorn branches surrounded their house and the clinic. Outside the fence were wild pig paths, the waterfalls, and the water babies. She wasn't sure she knew what a picket fence looked like, either.

“When he told me that,” Mom said, “he said he never wanted to see another picket fence.” She laughed. “We'd just been snorkeling in the turquoise sea. He and I promised each other right there not to say no to any adventure that came our way.” She sighed. “So why am I having longings for a white house and a picket fence? Like the one I grew up in. Uf-dah, how your dad would yelp to hear me say that.”

Dakar laughed at the funny word. “When can we go there?” she asked. “I want to see where you grew up.”

Mom lifted the clippers above her head as though she were preparing to clip the sky. “Well, it's a very long, boring drive across North Dakota,” she said flatly. “But I do keep meaning to write to Aunt Lily. It would sure be easier if she had a phone, but maybe …” She let the clippers slowly drop. “Oh, well,” she said, “most longings pass.”

Dakar glanced up at the house. It was awfully sedate compared with the places they usually lived. Dad seemed to give off an energy that pulled people right in, and when he was home, their house in Nairobi was full of people who talked fast, laughed loudly, and shouted when they got into political arguments. Ethiopian emigrants. Roaming photographers with shaggy beards and war stories. Doctors and other medical workers with sad, compassionate eyes. Mom would make sure everyone got fed and would sometimes sit and talk intensely with someone in the corner.

She and Mom now moved from the hedge to one of the flower patches. “How glorious this will be in the spring!” Mom said. “We should be planting lily bulbs, and probably dividing these irises. Did you know that the Greek goddess Iris was the personification of the rainbow and she carried messages to the ends of the earth?” She knelt down and started to dig. “My mother's name was Iris, you know. My grandmother, who loved flowers, named her three daughters Iris, Rose, and Lily.”

Dakar sat down on the grass. Usually when they were in the mood to talk about families, they talked about Dad's adventuresome one: Dad as a little kid, climbing every step up the 984-foot spire of the Eiffel Tower. Or on the deck of a Dutch liner, seeing the moon over the Atlantic Ocean, or standing at the Acropolis seeing the moon over Athens. Or perched on the shoulders of a spear-shaking warrior in the middle of a big funeral dance. Maybe flowers couldn't compete. “Did she grow petunias like the ones you planted in Maji?” Dakar asked.

Mom made a strange snuffling sound. Was she crying? She rubbed at her right eye, and Dakar saw a streak of dirt there. Dreamily she went on. “My grandmother was born at the turn of the century, and her parents sent her to college at a time when not many women got to go. What do you think she did in college?”

“Got a Ph.D. like Dad?”

“Here,” Mom said. “We need to get the tender bulbs like the gladioli out for winter. Dig carefully like this. No, she played basketball. She only weighed eighty-five pounds when she started high school, but she was a quick little guard, or so she said, and her team won all but one game in four years—and they tied that one!”

“I thought women in the olden days sat and embroidered samplers,” Dakar said.

“Yes. Well, not Grandma, apparently. She went on playing in college. She once told me that her coach had called her the most natural basketball player he had ever seen. By then she was a running center, and she once told me proudly that she made twenty-eight points in one game. Four boys asked her out that night.”

“Is that how she met Grandpa?” Dakar couldn't remember if she had ever felt more contented than sitting here with her hands in the dirt and bulbs, listening to Mom tell family secrets. Mom said Great-Grandma's parents were sure she'd marry one of her classmates, but she fell in love with someone who was wonderful at breaking horses—and hearts. “Nothing that ever happened to my grandma made her lose her spark,” Mom added, “and her kids were all adventuresome.” Her only son went off to the navy in World War II and died in a prison camp. Rose had a career in radio for a while. “Lily …” Mom chuckled. “Well, you're too young to know the old song about the daring young man on the flying trapeze, but Lily actually did fall in love with a trapeze artist when the circus came to town, and she ran off to marry him.”

“What about your mom?” Dakar asked.

“I wish you could have known her,” Mom said sadly. “She surprised everyone and married a farmer. My dad could find more adventure in a square plot of prairie than most people find in all of Africa. My mother collected
National Geographic
magazines, and we'd study them together. ‘I should have joined the circus when I had the chance,' she once hollered at my father.”

Dakar remembered the voices from the night before. What did Mom and Dad holler about in the middle of the night? She didn't dare ask.

“Mama adored her sister Lily's visits,” Mom said. “So did I. My uncle Otis was a very poetic man, and when he talked, I could imagine what it felt like to soar through the air. His hands felt like the hooves of the lambs I fed every spring—that tough and calloused. One time I asked him if he was ever afraid he would fall. He told me that when the circus was in Los Angeles, by sheer chance he came upon the grave of the Great Cadona, the King of Trapeze. He looked for a long time at the sculpted angel on Cadona's grave. That night, when he heard the
hep
and flew into the catcher's hands, he felt Cadona with him. He came to believe Cadona was living out his own life dreams through him.”

Dakar felt an electric excitement squeezing her throat. This had to go in her list of synchronicity.

Mom stood up. “I listened to Uncle Otis's stories, and I promised I would soar. While my friends were trying on lipstick, I was busy dreaming of adventure.”

Dakar stood up and stretched her arms. “And you did soar, Mom.”

“Yes, I did,” Mom said uncertainly. “My poor adventuresome family.”

“Why? What happened to them?”

“I'm sure you remember my mother was killed in a plane crash on her way to Maji to see me. My uncle Otis fell from the trapeze bar one night and died. The only one left is your great-aunt Lily, and she's living in my parents' house about five or six hours from here. I don't know why I haven't written to her yet.” She started to walk toward the house, her hands full of bulbs. “We should go in. Your dad's almost home.”

Dakar nodded. Mom had a weird telepathy about Dad and always seemed to be able to tell when he was near. As Dakar tagged after Mom, she wondered, Did longings pass? She was pretty sure they didn't. They mostly hung around and made people sad, even if you weren't sure why.

When they were finally on their way to the airport, she stared out at the trees. Some of them definitely had yellow streaks. The trees were starting to put on their party clothes for Jakarta.

To make the time pass, she tried to count all the airports she had ever been in, but there were too many. Instead, she'd make a list of words that she especially liked the sounds of:
Jambalaya. Jambo. Simba. Fit-fit. Korra-korro. Buff. Bippy
. She giggled. It took forever to park, even though the airport had only two little parking lots and you could see the main building from both of them. Every minute seemed to stretch out like a long thread unrolling from a spool.

Inside, Dad thumped his hand against his leg nervously. “Can we get Jakarta some Gummi worms?” Dakar asked. “She hasn't had any American candy for a long time.”

“Yeah, why not rot her teeth and start her off right?” Dad handed Dakar two dollar bills.

“Will you do it?” she wanted to say. “Please?” What if Gummi worms cost more than two dollars? What was the thing with tax? But she couldn't admit to Dad that she still felt nervous when she had to figure out American money.
“Ayezosh,”
she told herself. “Be brave.” Any sixth grader in America knew how to buy Gummi worms.

As she waited in line for the man in front of her to choose his doughnut, she thought about when she and Mom had sat by the woodstove waiting for Jakarta to come home from boarding school. She remembered the warm smell of Mom's arm, the sleepy excitement of listening for the roar of the Jeep. “Is that it? Is that it?” No, it was always only the roaring of the fire in the stove or the wind roaring in the cedar trees.

Eventually she'd panicked and started to cry. What if the plane didn't land?

She'd somehow been able to sense Mom was as scared as she was. Every week, the mules dutifully climbed the hill behind the house, trotted through Maji town, and then followed the lead horse onto the steep, rough road that led down the mountain to the savanna where Ethiopian Airlines planes landed once a week. The trip was only thirty-two miles, Dad said, but it took two days for the mules to descend 8,000 feet. A few days later, when shouts relayed the news that the mules had managed to trudge back up the mountain, Mom and Dad would rush out—but often they had to sigh over empty mailbags because the plane couldn't land. “Don't cry,” Mom had said, crying a little, too. “Oh, I
hope
the plane lands.” And then, finally: “Shh, isn't that the Jeep?”

Finally, gloriously, it really was the faint sound of the Jeep engine. She could remember her nightgown, wet with dew, flapping against her cold legs in the mountain wind as they ran outside. Mom whirled and whirled until her dress twisted around her slender legs. They held hands as the Jeep came around the corner and down the last hill, headlights shining, seeming to pick up speed on that hill just the way the mules did.

“A dollar fifty,” the young woman behind the counter said.

Dakar was startled. She was in North Dakota, not Maji. Planes here didn't circle and circle and then not land because the weather was bad or there were too many animals on the field. They didn't disappear, the hum growing fainter and fainter and finally fading completely away. She handed over the money, relieved that the change was going to be easy.

The woman behind the counter had on an interesting turban, and her voice had a lovely accent. She might be from somewhere in Africa. Why would someone like that come to North Dakota? Dakar wondered. Maybe for the university? She wished she weren't too shy to ask.

“Hurry,” Dad suddenly called. “People are starting to come off. Hey, there she is!”

Dakar raced back. She stared at the people who were trickling down the stairs. “Nah. That's not her.”

“It's not,” Mom agreed, poking Dad's arm teasingly. “You're so excited you're seeing things.”

“Don't be afraid to run up there, just
push
people out of the way,” Dakar told herself, bouncing with excitement. “Run up and
fling
your arms around her.”