Where the Sea Takes Me

by Heidi R. Kling

  BED 2: DEAD

  BED 3: CRITICAL

  BED 4: CRITICAL

  BED 5: DEAD

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “Hi, Frank,” a woman in a white coat with a baby crawling up and down her side like a koala bear, greeted Tom.

  “It’s Tom,” he corrected her, putting his hands together and bowing.

  She made the same gesture and laughed, apparently liking his attempt to greet her culturally appropriately.

  “Frank?” I asked.

  Tom turned to us. “Their name for all white men is Frank.”

  Deni and I exchanged a look. He shrugged.

  Tom asked them about their psych meds, and they got into a conversation about trauma symptoms. The doctor didn’t seem to know what that was which fascinated Tom. They invited us all on a “house call.”

  “You guys up for it?” Tom asked us.

  “I guess so.”

  I mean, how much worse could it be than this hospital?

  “Can I film?” Deni asked Tom.

  “Let me ask. It’s probably fine, though.”

  Tom “Frank” asked the doctor, and they nodded. “Normally we would be concerned about doctor/patient confidentiality but your documentary, if we get it into the right hands, will likely ignite donor support and awareness. So film on, son!”

  With renewed interest, Deni readied his film equipment; fortunately, his camera was small and fit into his knapsack.

  “Hey,” I said, wiping sweat off my brow. “Did you get any good footage on the junk boat?”

  His eyes flickered toward me and then back to his equipment. “I filmed while you slept.”

  “Why?”

  “Sometimes if I am always looking from inside the lens, I miss out on what is right in front of me.” His eyes turned to mine. “I am not making that mistake when I am here with you.”

  “Deni…” I said. Secured with the knowledge of how he felt, the lump in my throat grew.

  “It is true. We go now?”

  “We go.” I grinned.

  As we bumped down a dirt road, Tom explained that the town was full of French influence from the time the French occupied Cambodia. There were motorbikes followed by ox-drawn carts, bicycles passing street kids, monks in bright orange robes carrying umbrellas to avoid the hot sun, venders selling fruits I’d never seen before, and mud and dirt everywhere—trash, dirty street kids—a collage of the exotic and bizarre.

  At a jungle pagoda, we met a monk friend of Tom’s. Sitting crossed-legged in front of each other, they launched into a deep conversation about mental health and meditation.

  Tom warned me I couldn’t touch the monk, or shake his hand, because I was female.

  “Not touch him? Why?”

  “Just don’t.”

  “Okay.”

  As we got deeper and deeper into the jungle, the sights changed. The houses shifted into huts. The children morphed from begging street kids into naked and wild things, running about the sides of the roads, some carrying sticks. No technology to be seen. It was like going back in time.

  When we arrived at the house call, Tom explained. “There’s no electricity out here, and the water is pumped from a well. You might want to stay outside. The kids in there are really sick.”

  “What do you mean really sick? Contagious?”

  “No. Mentally ill. Extremely.”

  “Why?”

  “They’ve been that way since birth,” he said, “was what was explained to me.”

  We pulled over and a shack on stilts with an ox in front loomed.

  Two babies crawled around in the dirt as we headed up the stairs of the rickety place that looked like a backyard tree fort built by kids.

  A lady with gnarled and missing teeth and dressed in rags opened the door.

  A kid in the corner banged its head on the wall; another one frantically scratched at her arm. One of the kids made a terrible sound halfway between crying and laughing.

  The white lab-coat lady spoke to the woman (the mom? Grandmother?) before digging through a selection of pills on a wooden tray.

  “She’s counting the pills to make sure she’s giving them to the kids,” Tom explained quietly while we looked on.

  The heat felt oppressive. Sticky. The sounds, the air, the cruelty of these desperately sick kids living like animals made me sick, especially after what I’d seen the day before.

  The weight of what I’d seen the last two days pounded me like a sudden storm, and I started to cry. Quiet. Silent tears. Deni noticed—of course he did—and scooted closer, wrapping his arm around me.

  Maybe we shouldn’t have come on this trip.

  Now I couldn’t unsee what I’d seen.

  Now I couldn’t unlearn what I’d learned.

  That was the downside of opening my eyes to the underbelly of humanity.

  Of allowing my eyes to adjust to darkness.

  When I woke up, we were at the temple. I gasped from the beauty in front of me, which was the polar opposite of the shack. A place I never wanted to think about again.

  Sunset at Angkor Watt was better than a photograph.

  “Look,” Deni said.

  “I see.”

  Still we both sat and stared at the awe before our eyes.

  We scrambled out of the car and hiked across the entry road over a great lake, and then crossed an entry gate. It started to rain heavily, adding to the experience. People from all over the world scattered when lightning hit—monks taking shelter along with Cambodian locals and Korean tourists. The temple itself was fantastic, the carvings all around it ornate. We met a monk at the top of the temple—a tourist, too—who blessed us.

  My mood lifted from the nap, the proximity to Deni, and the sight spread out before us like a movie scene. I took in a deep, cleansing breath and prepped for something magnificent.

  The rain stopped as we ascended the mountain. The climb to the top of the temple was steep, but we were refreshed from the rain.

  The setting sun cast orange and golden light through the stone windows of the temple. Awesome. Glowing off our skin, our faces, our hands. Deni and I shared a knowing smile as we sat close to each other, in the quiet, soaking it all in.

  After sunset, we walked to the Cambodian Culture Center. The center celebrated the Angkor period with huge murals of an empire at the height of the Cambodian grandiose. “Once, Cambodia was the highest culture in the world,” a woman outside the museum told us. “Now, I don’t think so.” The paintings on the wall depicted great kings riding elephants covered in gold-plated armor, fantastic architecture in the backdrop. “After Pol Pot, I think Cambodia will never be great.” She looked at the paintings sadly. “Never.”

  “The cultural center was careful to omit Pol Pot and the genocide,” Tom explained when we were alone at the gift shop. “No mention of the famine that followed, nor the civil war in the 1990s. No clues as to how a civilization so splendid could become what it is today. These are the haunting repercussions of war,” he told us. “In a country clinging to their pride.”

  A street kid ran up to me, begging for money.

  I was reaching into my pocket to give him some change when Tom stopped me. “He’ll use the money to sniff glue. Don’t give him anything.”

  “But he’s starving. Look at him.”

  “He won’t use it for food.”

  In front of me was a clearly undernourished kid who looked to be about Maximillian’s age. “Where is his mom?”

  “She could be anywhere. He probably doesn’t have a mom.”

  “Shouldn’t he be in a group home then? An orphanage?”

  Tom shook his head sadly. “There are too many of them. War doesn’t just hurt the generation during; it hurts and ruins many generations to follow. This is a broken land, and these are broken people.”

  “That’s so bleak,” I said.

  “It’s true. The children of the street sleep on the patios of the temples during the day because it is dangerous to sleep at nigh
t in urban Cambodia. A pimp might nab them into sex slavery if they are pretty enough. So they roam in the night and sleep in the day. Their hunger makes sleep difficult. Pain in their tummies, as they lay on cement steps in the hot, humid day. Hunger at night while they roam.”

  I wanted to help every single one of them. How could a society allow children to exist like this?

  Deni looked solemn. “We were hungry when we left the orphanage,” Deni said. “We had no money for rice. It is hard to sleep when you are hungry.”

  We all looked to him with a deeper understanding of what he’d been through. He was a marvel.

  “You are an amazing success story, Deni. Unfortunately, yours isn’t the norm,” Tom said.

  Deni shrugged. “What can you do then when the problems are too big to fix?”

  “You fix the little things you can. This trip, I’m learning about their mental health clinics so I can better help the refugees in my clinic back home. A once great nation now inhabited by monkeys and lizards.”

  “And foot-long centipedes,” I added, pointing to a slithering creepy crawler in the dirt. “I don’t understand how things could get this bad, how human beings could be so terrible as to destroy a whole culture.”

  “It happens all the time,” Deni said. “From the beginning of time, cultures have tried to destroy others for being not like them, or for being too much like them, for gold, for oil, for religion. It is happening now all around us.”

  “I know,” I said sadly. “It just seems like such a waste of our time on Earth to use it for fighting.”

  It was one thing after another after another caused by devil men, like Deni said. How else can you explain people with such cruelty in their hearts?

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  That night I slept for what felt like days—a deep, drowning sleep. When I finally woke up, the hotel room was bathed with full daylight.

  Tom and Deni were out someplace, so I ate breakfast or lunch—something, alone, in the little restaurant.

  The waitress was sweet, fawning over me. The Cambodian people were almost overwhelmingly friendly. First off, they rarely arrived alone to anything; they came in large, laughing, chattering groups. Second, they were almost all small. Most of them smaller than me or at my height.

  I practiced my limited Khmer at breakfast and read my guidebook more.

  The jasmine tea was warm and perfect as the rain fell outside my window, and I enjoyed the quiet calm of waiting for what was next to come.

  After I ate, I took a long, hot shower and put on clean clothes: a white short-sleeved top and a skirt. It reminded me of getting dressed in Indonesia before Deni and I went out on our first date to dinner. The night we kissed in the alley in the rain.

  I got the chills all over, wondering where he and Tom were off to. I’d had enough time alone now and was ready for their return.

  I wondered about Deni, how he could be so progressive coming from a place that was so not.

  Maybe it was because he didn’t have parents anymore, so he had no one he had to report back to and could be completely himself.

  I made a mental note to ask him about that later.

  While I waited, I wrote some postcards home in the air-conditioned lobby. One to Vera and Max and Dad, one to Bev. One to Spider.

  Then I called Amelie and filled her in on what we learned; what we saw.

  “Wait, you just let them go?” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said guiltily. “The one slammed the door in my face. There was nothing more we could do.”

  “Then what did you do?”

  “Went with Tom and Deni on a house visit way out in the middle of nowhere and then to Angkor, which was amazing.”

  “Wait, let me get this straight, you saw the guy who might be the perp who stole my sister and you just…left to sightsee?”

  Ouch. “Yes. I mean, we couldn’t do anything else. We had lost Tom, and we had to go find him and ask for help.”

  “Sienna, you’re not a little kid anymore. You can handle this kind of shit on your own.”

  “No, Amelie. I’m not you. I—I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s too dangerous! It’s too…”

  Why hadn’t I waited? Deni and I could’ve brought Tom back to the hotel and staked it out or had Tom confront the creep.

  “What if it was your brother who was missing, Sienna? Or your best friend from home? That’s how I feel all the time. Every. Single. Day. Leads are my only hope.”

  “I’m sorry,” I choked out.

  She sighed. “Come back soon. I need all the info ASAP.”

  “Kay. Bye.”

  She hung up without saying goodbye.

  Feeling like crap, I wandered onto the roof alone. From the rooftop, I watched the tourists and locals scamper around like characters in a video game zipping this way and that. Amelie’s little sister was out there somewhere, waiting to be rescued.

  If it was Max, I’d move mountains to find him.

  If it was Bev, I’d never give up until she was rescued.

  Amelie was right; we gave up too soon.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  “You look great, Sea!” Tom boomed, filling the quiet with welcome familiarity. “Sleep well?”

  “Like a baby,” I said. “You know those imaginary babies, unlike Maximillian, who actually sleep. Where were you guys? I’ve been waiting for you forever!”

  “Were you missing us?” Deni asked me.

  “Yes. I caught an earful from Amelie, who was right. We should’ve waited longer for the girls, pressed harder. Where were you?”

  “I’m sorry,” Tom said. “Amelie is rightly very passionate about the issue, but you did the right thing not to take on that man on your own.”

  I nodded, still feeling like crap. “So you just left without me?”

  “You were still sleeping and we didn’t want to wake you, so we explored a temple, Ta Prohm. It was pretty cool, like something out of Indiana Jones. The roots of the banyan trees wedged out in all directions, like the jungle was eating them alive. Monkeys were everywhere. There’s another one, supposed to be even better. Want to come?”

  “Is it still raining?”

  We looked out the window where rain was falling so hard it looked like someone was outside spraying it with a mighty hose.

  “Hardly,” he said.

  “Sprinkling,” Deni added.

  I grinned at our new running joke after the monsoon “little bit of rain” scenario. I was still feeling bad after my talk with Amelie, but Tom was right; there was nothing we could do now. “Sure,” I said, “let’s go.”

  The hotel’s driver had a Land Rover—another running inside gag that we joked about throughout the ride, and it took us way, way, way, way out into the jungle, passing women dressed from head-to-toe in sun-covering garments who, once the rain stopped, were back to work in the rice patties.

  “Here we are,” Tom said. Ancient ruins covered in tree roots of a banyan tree. “This site is a true ruin,” Tom says, “i.e. ruined.”

  “It’s awesome. Deni, get your camera!” I hopped out of the car unable to believe what I was looking at. “Look at that monkey!” On top of the ruin was a monkey running back and forth like he was the king of the temple, howling into the air.

  Some backpackers sat on top, eating something, like we did on the roof deck of the riverboat. “Can we go up there?”

  Tom looked around with a shrug. We were in the middle of nowhere. No one was working here. There were no bathrooms, no gift shop selling trinkets. Other than the backpackers and the monkeys, we were entirely alone. “I don’t think anyone is going to stop you.”

  The jungle temple was like an adult playground. We easily climbed up the side, scrambling along slick, thick branches. My palm loved the feeling of the curled and smooth roots along the banyan trees up and over the reliefs.

  I inched closer to the monkey, but as soon as I got to him, he scampered off. “Watch out, they bite,” a femal
e backpacker said. “I learned the hard way.” She had an Irish accent and showed us two tiny puncture wounds on her wrist that looked like a vampire bite.

  “What is that?” I asked as a blurred and buzzing sound erupted through the thick clouds. I jumped when I saw what looked to be a thousand bats circle right over us, each about two feet long, flying like a flock of vampires. “I hope you don’t turn into a vampire,” I joked. “I don’t have a stake handy.”

  She laughed. “These bats are fruit bats. Vampire bats are small—and I don’t think they are in Cambodia. Try Romania? Cambodians eat bats, not the other way around.”

  “Bats,” Deni said, adding it to our list of “things to try in Cambodia.”

  “You first,” I said. I slid down the trunk, then scrambled up another and into another part of the tree and onto some old ruins.

  Deni caught up with me and I screamed, playfully, before running off again. Together we scurried all over the ruins, goofing around, exploring, hiding behind branches and the thick, waxy jungle vines half expecting enormous spiders and thick, coiled snakes around every corner and cranny, but instead it was light and fun and the highlight of this trip thus far.

  “I love this,” I told him.

  “Me, too,” he said with a grin.

  Later, we all sat together on a deep, smooth root of the banyan tree and enjoyed the picnic Tom brought from the hotel. We were all hot and sweaty and surrounded by jungle creatures. Tom snapped a photograph of us, and we must’ve looked terrible: me in a now dirty floppy white hat, Deni dripping in sweat, both with wide, open grins of pure happiness, covered in mud.

  It was the happiest I’d been in ages.

  Later, Tom looked up at the storm clouds. “Fun’s over, kids. A storm is coming. We best be on our way back to Phnom Penh before we get stuck in it.”

  Too late.

  By the time we’d finished packing, the rain fell so hard trees fell, crashing about outside.

  The sweet lady at the front desk told Tom all the buses were cancelled.

  “Cancelled? Are we stuck here?” I asked, semi-hoping we were. I could think of worse things than being stuck overnight somewhere with Deni.

  Tom held up his finger to silence my question, or at least postpone answering it, before engaging in a flurry of negotiations. Deni and I waited, trying to figure out what he was saying. He really needed to be at that clinic, he told us, so he hired the driver who drove us out to the temples to drive us to Phnom Penh in the hotel’s Land Rover.