Sea

by Heidi Kling

  Sure enough, a toddler was balancing on the driver’s hip as she zoomed past us.

  “They all drive motors here,” Tom explained. “Women, men ... even babies.”

  I was shocked. “Do they crash a lot?”

  “They crash all the time,” Tom said. “See those helmets? They call them crackers because your head cracks open if you crash while wearing one.”

  “Don’t they work?”

  “They’re cheap plastic helmets. Not like the ones at home. In fact, a volunteer I knew crashed while riding here. Split in half when he hit the pavement.”

  “His head?” I was appalled.

  “No, silly, the helmet,” Tom said.

  “So he lived?”

  Tom shrugged. “No. He died.”

  Fabulous. I looked to Dad for help.

  “Tom, that’s enough,” Dad said.

  “Yes, lovely, Tom. Thank you,” Vera chastised him.

  I was shocked out of my gourd. “This place is nuts,” I said.

  “Just stay off motors, kid, and you’ll be fine,” Tom said, picking something out of his teeth with his fingernail.

  “I would NEVER go near one of those crazy things. Why do they even sell helmets if they don’t work?”

  Vera stroked the skunk stripe in her moist hair. “Careful about making rash cultural judgments, Sienna. Remember, they might think our customs were odd if they came to America.”

  Like what? Helmets that worked?

  I stepped farther back from the curb as a female driver wearing a chic black pantsuit cruised by. The sun was bright, the tropical air too hot and too wet. I pulled my sunglasses out of my bag and slipped them on.

  Vera, now adorned in a dorky floppy white hat, squinted into the light. Horns blared, and I noticed the skyline was brown, like Los Angeles on a high-alert-no-playing-outside kind of day. It also smelled like smoke.

  “It’s pollution, and from burning garbage and rice fields,” Dad said when I asked him why. “They don’t have air pollution laws like we do in California,” he explained.

  An empty cab finally pulled up, and an enthusiastic driver hopped out, a cigarette hanging from his mouth. Dad spoke to him in Indonesian and we all squeezed into the backseat, which reeked like melting plastic and BO. Dad sat next to him, shotgun. He pulled out the address and gave it to him. I was impressed by Dad’s grip on the language. Though I didn’t understand a word of what they were saying, I listened to them talk as the driver lit up another cigarette and blasted off into traffic.

  At first I didn’t think about the immediate danger as I rolled down my window to avoid the secondhand smoke. The hot air felt good on my face. I could have called it wind, but the air wasn’t moving enough to earn that definition. Then I realized how fast we were zipping through traffic. And the fact that there was nothing strapping me into my seat.

  “Remember that scene in Star Wars where Han is zigzagging his ship through the asteroid field?” I said in a shaky voice. “This is just like that.” I was trying to be cool and breezy like Tom. Trying not to think about our heads splitting open on hot black asphalt.

  “Arrrr.” Tom pounded on his chest, a terrible Chewbacca imitation. Everyone did it except me and the driver. The driver probably thought we were insane.

  “Don’t distract him! He needs to concentrate on the road!”

  “Live a little, kid,” Tom said with an obnoxious grin.

  I rolled my eyes as the driver jerked the car to the right and then a sharp left to avoid crashing into rows of outdoor market stalls. I imagined the baskets of fish and fruit and brains splattered all over the streets.

  Live a little. Okay, fine.

  “I’ll give him some credit. He must be very good at video games,” I mumbled.

  Tom cracked up and then pointed past me. “Check that out!” We whizzed past a booth selling funky wooden clocks in every shape and size you could think of veiled by a kaleidoscope of blankets blowing in the breeze. “I’m going Christmas shopping while we’re here for sure. Look at those bamboo cooking supplies!” Tom said.

  While I was worried about our body parts being splayed all over the road, Tom was dreaming about playing Santa.

  What had I gotten myself into?

  DAY ONE

  THE PESANTREN

  A short, shoeless man stood beside a booth at the top of a driveway, a cigarette dangling out of his mouth.

  “Are you sure this is the right place, Dad? Where are all the kids?” I asked.

  I stepped cautiously out of the cab, and noticed the thick air had turned into drizzle.

  This was the orphanage?

  The man said something to Dad in Indonesian and then held open a decrepit white gate for us as the taxi driver unloaded our bags.

  I hung back by the cab, clutching my backpack to my chest.

  “Vera? You sure you guys gave him the right address?”

  Cats were everywhere. Skinny feral cats: on the cracked tile porches of the dying square buildings I saw through the gate, on the mostly dead lawn and now, rubbing against my pant leg.

  I was more of a dog person.

  “Sienna, come on,” Dad said, coaxing me away from the cab. “We’re here.”

  When the taxi skidded off, shooting wet dirt into the air, I resisted the urge to run after it.

  And then boisterous yelling rang through the silence. Some boys about my age were messing around across the way. Dressed in grungy T-shirts that looked more like dishrags than clothes, they were pulling aluminum cans out of a filthy river.

  “Are those the orphans?” I asked, wincing a little as I said the o word. “I mean, are those the kids that live at the pesantren?”

  “Street kids, probably. Collecting cans to sell,” Tom said.

  “The street kids don’t live here?”

  “No,” Dad said. “Some might be runaways, some orphans.”

  “If they don’t have a home, then why don’t they live here?”

  “Come on, sweetie. We have to find the owner.”

  I should have moved, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the kids.

  “This school is capped for the number of kids they could take,” Dad explained. “In fact, the pesantren owner was able to take only one-third of the tsunami orphans who wanted to come here from the refugee camps in Aceh.”

  I cringed as another black cat, this one carrying a dried-up bone in his teeth, slinked against my leg. His body was so thin and scrawny. Didn’t anyone feed him?

  Dumb question that I didn’t even bother asking out loud.

  If nobody was feeding the street kids, why wouldn’t the cats be on their own too?

  That’s when a man about Dad’s age, but shorter and wearing a black cap on the crown of his head, walked down the path to greet us.

  “Welcome!” he said, arms outstretched. “Thank you for coming, doctors.” He spoke in thick-accented English. “How were the logistics of your trip?”

  “Excellent, thank you,” Dad said, extending his hand for a shake. Excellent was a bit of an exaggeration, I thought as they exchanged pleasantries and introductions.

  And then the owner said, “Now we go meet the orphans. They have prepared a special evening ceremony to greet our welcomed guests.”

  “What time is it?” I asked Dad.

  “We landed around five p.m. It’s about seven p.m.,” he said. “That reminds me.” He fiddled with his watch, resetting it to Indonesian time.

  I followed Team Hope and the pesantren owner down a muddy path past dozens of white-paint-chipped out-buildings decorated with blue accents. Peeking through many open windows, I saw empty rooms, with kids’ clothes draped over scrappy-looking bunk beds.

  On the overgrown lawn, a lone goat was tied to a palm tree with a fraying rope. The same tree held one end of a ripped volleyball net. Besides the mews of the starving cats, the place was silent. Ghost town silent. Like a summer camp might feel like if you stumbled on it years after it was shut down.

  The owner walked with purp
ose, his feet solidly pounding the ground, speaking to my father in a polite but assertive tone until we came to a long rectangular building, also white with blue trim but with double doors etched in elaborate Indonesian designs.

  It was the center of the door that caught my attention. Two carvings shaped like the flower bulbs Oma planted in the winter and waited patiently for spring to bloom.

  “You ready, kid?” Tom asked quietly.

  I had no idea what I was supposed to be ready for, but when the pesantren owner opened the creaky door, it became clear what he meant.

  A sea of faces stared back at me. At us. Dressed in black and white, some of the younger children squirmed on the tile floor until they noticed the pesantren owner. Then they sat immediately at attention: backs straight with legs tucked underneath.

  I flashed on a school assembly at home in El Angel Miguel. Principal Sanchez couldn’t get us to shut up for ten seconds. But this tiny, stern-faced man in wire-rimmed glasses could quiet them with one look? That’s power.

  Scanning the crowd more carefully, I noticed the boys were wearing white long-sleeved dress shirts tucked into black pants with small black hats, like the one the owner wore, on the crowns of their dark heads. The girls dressed in the same colors but with flowing jilbabs covering their heads, necks and shoulders. Most of the girls wore skirts instead of pants.

  I was really glad I hadn’t shown up in a tank top and shorts.

  “All the orphans are gathered for our honored guests,” the owner explained.

  The room looked split by gender, with the girls on the left and the boys on the right, the younger kids kneeling in front.

  “The two hundred children of the tsunami from Aceh are in the center of the room,” he said in a not-so-subtle voice.

  My eyes darted to the group he was talking about; I recognized some of the kids from the DVD. When I saw their faces, I heard their voices, heard their stories. Saw the wave rising up and over ...

  The owner addressed them in Indonesian, and suddenly the kids started clapping and cheering. A tall older student, a boy, translated his words to English as we stood in front of the room. “These are visiting doctors from America who have come to meet you,” he said. “Orphans from Aceh, please stand.”

  A huge group, more than half the room, stood up; some of them stared down at their feet uncomfortably. I caught the eye of one little girl. She was standing in the front row of tsunami kids, a curtain of black hair falling out of her jilbab, veiling an eye.

  She looked just like the shy girl in the video! The one I wanted to meet. I smiled at her, hoping she’d notice me, but she didn’t.

  “Orphans from Papua, please stand.”

  The Aceh kids sat down and about fifty other kids stood up. Tom whispered to me that many of those kids suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder too, because many witnessed their parents’ deaths in street riots.

  His words hit me like an anvil to my chest. If you bottled up all the trauma in this room ... I couldn’t even imagine. And these kids were my age and younger. Suddenly I was very glad we were here. Like Dad said—these were people who really needed his help.

  “Thank you, children,” the pesantren owner said, and then he turned to Team Hope. “The Acehnese orphans have prepared a special welcome ceremony for you. Children?” He nodded to the crowd and led us against the wall, where we were apparently supposed to watch.

  A dozen mixed-age boys stood up off the floor and carried gold and red drums entwined with dark leather straps to the front of the room.

  One of the boys stood out immediately.

  He and his drum were the tallest, broadest, most striking. The other boys’ eyes were only on him, silently asking him where to sit, what to do next. He told them with gestures of his head, his hands. His lanky body moved with a sort of shrug, like he was almost annoyed to be there but had committed to going through the motions anyway.

  I totally got that.

  Once situated in a circle on the floor, the instruments splayed across their laps, the boys began lightly slapping both ends of the drums with their palms. The tone was soft at first, then elevated until the beat came harder and faster, their music creating a rich sound that vibrated through the flat-roofed room so frenetically that my pulse raced along with it.

  I couldn’t stop staring at the tallest boy, the one pounding his drum like he was out for vengeance. I didn’t know how he did it, but his music throttled its way through me, straight to my core. He glanced up. Once. Caught me staring. His eyes electric, but steady. I still didn’t break his gaze. Instead I sucked in a breath. Blinked. Took in the sight of him. The sweat trickling down his temple, his square-boned jaw, his rippling arm muscles as he beat the crap out of that drum.

  When his strong hands slowed to a quiet rhythm, when the thumping finally faded to a slow, easy pulse, applause erupted around me. Almost as an afterthought, I clapped along too but couldn’t stop looking. Couldn’t unlock my eyes from the drummer wiping his forehead with his sleeve.

  I hadn’t expected to find anything like him behind those carved doors.

  “The Aceh orphans are talented,” the owner said to my dad. Then he lowered his voice. “Talented, but problematic.”

  Did he mean their nightmares and anxiety were problematic? That they screamed out in the night like I did? That he wasn’t sure how to help them? But something about his tone told me that he meant something else. Something less kind than all of that.

  As the applause died down, as the boys packed up their drums and wandered back to their seats, I wondered why the owner referred to the kids as the Aceh orphans anyway.

  Just because they survived the tsunami, why should they be defined by it?

  I’d be beating the hell out of a drum if someone kept referring to me that way too. What if Dad had been with Mom on that small plane? What if I had lost both of them to the sea?

  Orphaned by a plane crash, Sienna Jones, please stand.

  Then a chorus of little girls approached the front, taking the place of the drum circle. They stood side by side, facing their peers and four American strangers.

  “The song is about a fragrant jeumpa flower that grows only in Aceh,” the translating boy explained in a throaty voice.

  Of course, I didn’t understand a word of what I assumed was now Acehnese, but I could tell by the far-off looks on their faces that the girls were singing about their home.

  When the song ended, the girls bowed and we all clapped.

  I was already glancing at the back door, ready to bolt. The hot, stale air was suffocating, and my shirt and pants were both stuck to my skin with glue-like sweat.

  Just when I was about to flee, a line of older boys began to form, winding their way toward us.

  “What’s going on?” I whispered to Dad.

  “They’re coming to meet us. The boys first, then the girls.”

  He had to be kidding. “All five hundred?” I eyed the door.

  “I think so. Are you okay? I know this is an awful long time to stand.”

  I fanned my face. “It’s just so hot in here ...”

  Too late.

  One by one, the boys approached us like we were a receiving line at a wedding reception. When I realized the leader of the drum circle was first, my heart sped up. I stopped worrying about the heat. Wished I were wearing something clean. Something nice.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I watched the drummer take Tom’s right hand, hold it to his forehead and then let it fall as he touched his own heart, bowing as he did.

  Closer now, I noticed the boy’s thick sideburns, his full, serious lips, the stubble of goatee peppered across his chin like it wasn’t sure if it should keep growing or fade away.

  I swallowed. I was next.

  Quickly, I wiped my sweaty hands on the sides of my pants.

  “What is that?” I whispered to Dad, suddenly wishing like heck I’d read that handbook.

  “It’s their welcoming handshake,” Dad whispered back.


  And then he was standing in front of me.

  He looked about sixteen or seventeen. When his eyes met mine, they were so intense and dark. Bottom-of-the-ocean dark, the darkest eyes I’d ever seen. Up close his eyes were even more piercing, like he was trying to peer right into my soul.

  Before I had time to wipe the new nervous sweat off my palms, he reached out, took my hand in his and lifted my fingers gently to his forehead. His skin, the color of driftwood, was soft, smooth, hot to the touch. When he let go, when he let my fingers fall gently by my side, his penetrating look dove even deeper. When he touched his heart with his palm and shyly bowed his head, then, only then, did he lower his gaze.

  Whoa.

  My brain was swimming, and I had to focus to remember the one Indonesian phrase I overheard Dad say to the taxi driver.

  “Terima kasih,” I whispered. Thank you.

  At that the boy raised his eyebrows, mischievous, teasing.

  What? Had I pronounced it wrong?

  I hoped he couldn’t hear my heart pound. I tried to calm down, but it was hard to do. Practically impossible, in fact. When he finally walked away, I watched the hard muscles in his back ripple under his white shirt, shadowed with sweat. He walked with a slight limp, which only added to his allure. I wanted to find out why.

  But he didn’t turn around again.

  When he opened the back door and slipped into the daylight, I had to fight the urge to run after him.

  “Sienna?” Dad’s voice slowly pulled me back to reality. “This young man is trying to get your attention,” he said.

  “What? Oh. Sorry.”

  Standing in front of me waiting to greet me was another boy. A new boy. I gave him my hand, but I knew his welcome would feel nothing like the one that came before him.

  ELLI

  Even after the hundredth greeting, I started to eye the door again, distracted, wondering about the drummer. Then the little girl from the DVD wound her way up in line to greet me. I smiled at her, and when she grinned back, the space where her two front teeth should be were tiny pearls budding from her gums.