Jakarta Missing (4 page)

“Africa child? Are you gone to class?”

Dakar wrapped her arms around her backpack and hugged it. “Okay, it's this. My mom says that when her mother died, she heard her mother speak to her plainly. You know. After it turned out her mother was already dead. Maybe my grandma's spirit was still hovering for a few hours, or something. Well, I know it can happen because it happened to my mom, but do you think that's the only time you would hear a person's voice so clearly? If the person was dead?”

The cook began to hum. Dakar listened. After a few minutes she thought she would have to just go to class after all. But then the woman pointed the long knife at Dakar and said, “The earth and the firmament are full of the glory of God, I do know. I also know glory has such mysterious ways. Such mysterious ways. You never know where a bit of glory is going to pop up or why. I do know that.”

“‘The heavens are telling the glory of God,'” Dakar said. “‘And the firmament proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge.' Psalms nineteen, one and two. I learned it in school in Ethiopia.”

The cook chuckled. “You must have gone to some school there. Life's a miry bog, Africa child. A dry and weary land. You're going to need knowledge to get through this life. Go to class.”

Dakar put her book on her head and balanced it there. “A lot of Ethiopians get insulted if you call them African,” she said. “I don't know why, but they do. I was actually born in West Africa, though, where the sand was soft and fine as flour and where the rooms of our house were sometimes so steamy and hot that my father's glasses would slide from his nose in a river of sweat. That's what my mother says, anyway. And I just now lived in Kenya. So you can call me Africa child.” She turned, her books still on her head, and moved off with those gliding steps she and Jakarta used to practice. Jakarta! She jerked her head, and the book tumbled off.

H
alf an hour before lunch Dakar decided she might have to lie down in the middle of the classroom and perish from hunger. But it was good to think about the gnawing in her stomach, something powerful enough to take her mind from the worry, worry, worry.

When she made it until the fourth-period bell without perishing after all, there was the cafeteria to think about. Melanie had lunch second half, so Dakar didn't have anyone to eat with. She always navigated the cafeteria carefully, “with absolute stealth,” she whispered to herself. If she was lucky, she could get through lunch without having her tray bump any of the wild animals (“wildebeests,” Jakarta would call them). She could find a place to sit where she wouldn't be noticed, never downwind where her fear could be scented.

She thought the afternoon classes would be the worst, but in fact she discovered that she was able to concentrate fiercely, not wanting—even though she did want—to hear Jakarta's voice again. “Jagged,” she whispered to herself as she walked down the hall after her last class. “I'm feeling jagged, jagged, jagged.” She said the word
jagged
so many times in her mind that it began to sound like mush and not even like a word. And then she suddenly didn't feel jagged at all, but more like frozen. That was it—her stomach was frozen. Soon her heart would be, too. How long did it take ice to creep from stomach to heart, and what, exactly, would happen when her heart iced over?

“Dakar!” It was Melanie. “Hang on. Hey, what
did
happen to your knees?”

Dakar blushed. “Um … nothing.”

“Want to go to my house?”

She could go home. They might have news. But they might not, and what would that be like? Like an elephant stepping on her heart.

“What's wrong?” Melanie said when they were walking. “In math class you were staring at Mr. Johnson as if he was a squid. A dead squid. Was someone evil to you at lunch?”

“It's Jakarta.” Dakar said the words quickly so she wouldn't think about them first. “I think she's in trouble. I wish more than anything that she hadn't stayed in Kenya. Have I told you much about Jakarta?” She knew she hadn't. She felt guilty every time she even
thought
about telling Melanie any stories about Jakarta.

“Jakarta, your sister?” Melanie chewed her thumbnail. “Wow. What kind of trouble? What are you going to do?”

“Maybe we need to light a candle for her,” Dakar said. “As the smoke drifts up and away, we'll send our thoughts for Jakarta up with the smoke.” The idea of being able to communicate with Jakarta in some way made the frozen spots that had somehow leaped to her lungs a little easier to breathe around.

Making conversation with Melanie's mom was going to be tough. She'd only met her once before. Besides, Dakar was never good at knowing what to say to strangers, and it would be even harder now that she was feeling so jagged and jangly. She concentrated on pretending that she had a governess, that the governess was sweeping them through the kitchen, managing her. “Time for your supremely gracious smile now,” the governess was saying to her. No,
chiding
her.
Chiding
was a great word. She gave Melanie's mom what she hoped was a gracious smile and patted Gingerpuff, who leaped up on the counter and wound herself into Dakar's fingers while Melanie pulled out some crackers and slathered cream cheese on them and then slipped a candle from a drawer marked “Emergencies.”

“Okay,” Melanie said as soon as they were settled on her bed. “We won't even eat our crackers yet. Tell me all about Jakarta.” She struck a match and reached over with a flourish to light the candle. “I'll concentrate on sending my thoughts off,” she added, closing her eyes.

Dakar settled back against Melanie's pink pillows. What had Malika said that time when Malika and Jakarta had done a candle ceremony and let Dakar sit in? The universe is flowing goodness all around you. Open to the universe. “Well,” she started, “Jakarta was always there. By the time I was born, she was already four years old.”

“How come they named her Jakarta?”

“My mom and dad adopted her when they were living in Indonesia. Anyway, Jakarta always took care of me. At boarding school. And in Maji, when the Allalonestone—” She stopped. This was bad. The Allalonestone was something between Dakar and Jakarta. Now Melanie was staring at her with those wide, amazed eyes, waiting to her to go on. But she couldn't talk about something so personal. “Uh …” she said, “it's a long story that has to do with my mom. I don't think we should think about my mom, because the candle smoke is for Jakarta.”

She closed her eyes and tried to think. She and Jakarta had done everything together. Every move, every country that had to be left behind, every time when Dad went off on one of his adventures and she wondered if this was the time he wouldn't come home, Jakata was there. “I always felt so
safe
when Jakarta was in the bunk bed right above me,” she whispered. “When I was scared of the way the wind whooshed in the trees outside, she'd lean over the edge and sing ‘Barbry Allen' to me.” Dakar hummed a few notes, then sang. “‘They climbed and climbed to the steeple top, 'til they could climb no higher. And then they twined in a true lovers' knot …'” She realized she was waiting for Melanie to finish it off the way Jakarta would have, but of course Melanie didn't know the song.

“I wish you would quit
stopping
when you get to the good parts,” Melanie said.

“Sorry,” Dakar said. “Have you ever had anyone applaud for you? Not just a polite smattering of applause but really, really clapping?”

“Not yet.”

“Me, either. But sometimes—” She stopped, embarrassed, forced herself to go on. “Sometimes I have dreams where thousands of people are clapping and yelling and whistling. Jakarta could make me feel that way. She and I would make up stories together all the time, and then one day, when I told her a story for the first time, she said ‘You are great!' It made me feel … all
huge
inside.”

“I like to dream that I'm having secret adventures,” Melanie said. “I wish I could have one in real life.”

“Mom says Jakarta read to me for four hours straight when we moved to Ethiopia, but I don't remember because I was too young. I do remember Maji, though. That's in Ethiopia. We moved there because of a cholera epidemic Dad wanted to study, and we stayed for a long time.”

Melanie was a good listener. Maybe the quest was to make a true friend, Dakar thought. That was something hard and a bit scary. Having a true friend might keep the ice from getting to her heart. But to have a true friend, didn't you have to be willing to tell some secrets? Okay. She would tell Melanie three real things about Maji. Maybe how on rainy days she and Jakarta would climb into the attic and make up stories for the paper families they cut from Sears catalogs? The families lived in spider webs—American dads and moms and well-dressed little kids all in their charming catalog poses. Sitting by the wood stove, she and Jakarta would turn the pages of the catalog, picking the people they wanted and cutting them out. Then they would carry the people up the ladder into the attic. She and Jakarta had to be careful not to step off the rafters up there because their feet could go through the mud ceiling.

No, she'd rather tell about outside, about how the first thing they always did was check the passion fruit vines to see if any of the fruit was ripe. “If it was,” she told Melanie, “we'd suck the sweetness and seeds out. The second thing was to check the false banana trees for little frogs that hid down where the rainwater collected. Once Jakarta had the idea that we should toilet-train the frogs so they could be better pets.”

Melanie giggled. Dakar thought about the frogs, their cool skin against her palms. She and Jakarta usually had to hide the frogs. Any Ethiopians who saw the frogs would slap at the children's hands until they let the frogs go, would scold them in Amharic, and pull back in fear or disgust as the frogs scrambled away.

“The best thing about Maji,” Dakar said, “was the water babies.” They played water babies whenever they followed Dad down to the waterfall. The game started where the bushes by the path were thick and you had to be careful not to let stinging nettle touch your legs. The water babies grew curled up at the tops of ferns. She and Jakarta would pick them carefully and hold them, resting in their palms, until they got down to the river. While Dad talked to people at the mill, they'd make boats out of sticks. Dakar could still see the water whirling the boats away, she and Jakarta running after them, down the river, past the mill where people's grain got ground into flour. She could remember the fine, thin smell of the flour.

If the boats got stuck, they had to wade in and get them free. The cold water shocked the skin of her bare feet, hurting all the way to the tip of her tongue, but Jakarta said they had to save the water babies. She sighed.

“Don't stop,” Melanie said.

So Dakar explained the game. “We would follow the water babies as far as we could. But finally we'd get to a place where the bushes were too thick and we couldn't follow. ‘Say good-bye now,' Jakarta would say, and we would call, ‘Good-bye. Good-bye.' I always asked her where they went, but she would say, ‘It's a secret. I'll tell you someday.'”

Suddenly Dakar realized she was about to cry. She put the tip of her thumb in her mouth and bit it hard. That usually worked.

“Are you sending Jakarta your good thoughts?” Melanie whispered. “One of my aunts says, ‘Trust the universe.'”