I quickly wrapped the hijab around me the way I’d seen Vera do hers that first day. Amelia did the same, but added some pins. She handed me one of those as well. “Thank you,” I said, and quickly copied what she’d done.
“You’re welcome. I was green like you once, too.” She hiked her leather bag higher on her shoulder. “So in Aceh, stay in groups, stay near the NGOs, and keep your American passport on hand at all times.
“Got it. Thank you.”
“Sure, sweetie,” she said.
Sticking close together, we walked through the airport toward the street. She asked more about our work in Indonesia, so I filled her in on what we’d been doing at the pesantren. Her eyes lit up when I mentioned my dad’s name.
“Your father is the trauma psychiatrist, Andrew Jones? I’d love to meet him. You probably already know this, but your dad’s globally renowned for his cross-cultural PTSD work. I can’t wait to read about the work he did in Yogyakarta.”
Wow, these doctors from Australia knew about Dad and Team Hope? I knew he did important work, but I had no idea he was famous in his field.
The knife of guilt twisted a little deeper. He was probably worried sick right about now.
“Thanks,” I said with a weak smile. “He’s a good guy.”
Her eyes crinkled in what was definitely a suspicious smile. “I’m surprised he let you come up here alone. Especially someone who is so aware of dangers in a disaster site like this.” Amelia tilted her head, waiting for my response.
“He’ll be here soon,” I replied as nonchalantly as I could. “And like Deni said, I’m not alone; we’re together.”
Gulp.
After promising again that I’d get in touch if I needed her and waving goodbye to her and Mac, I spotted Deni standing at the curb, bouncing on the balls of his feet like an excited kid. He did a double-take when he saw me in the hijab. “Sienna?”
“Do I look weird? I look weird, don’t I?”
“No. You look Indonesian!” He grinned. “My friends, they are coming for us. Now I can’t share my rambut kuning with them.”
“Ha, ha.” I tried to hide my smile. He’d called me—okay, my hair—his.
A few minutes later, an old banged-up white Land Rover raced around the corner and screeched to a halt, shooting dirt clods into the humid air.
A boy about Deni’s age with a bright smile and longish hair jumped out of the driver’s seat and practically tackled Deni, talking a mile a minute in their language. Then a girl, dressed in white pants and a silky pink hijab like the blue one I was wearing, got out more slowly. His friends made me think of Spider and Bev—the three of us together. And Deni looked so happy.
“Sienna!” He waved me over. “Come! I want you to meet my friends. This is the American girl. This is Sienna.”
The boy, wearing a San Diego Chargers jersey, shook my hand enthusiastically, and I couldn’t help but crack up when he flashed me the hang-loose sign.
“Nice to meet you,” I said, returning his surf gesture.
He laughed loudly and clapped. “You know them?” He puffed his chest, showing off his navy-blue shirt. “Chargers?”
“I do.” I nodded. “They’re an American football team from California, where I live.”
He smiled wider and slapped Deni’s back like, “Way to go, buddy.”
“Sienna, this is Azmi. He is my friend from since we were little boys.” He gestured to the girl. “This is Siti.”
She was shorter than the boy but looked more mature. “Hello,” I said. “Nice to meet you.”
Siti lowered her long eyelashes. Her light brown skin was flawless against her pastel hijab.
I checked to see if Deni noticed how beautiful she was, but he was still smiling at me.
After we piled into the car, Azmi insisted on showing me around Aceh before we went to his parents’ house. And it was a darn good thing that beast had four-wheel drive because the road from the airport into Aceh was not in good shape. The road was paved but also covered in mud. I wasn’t sure if it was because of the tsunami or recent rainstorms, and I didn’t want to sound stupid by asking, so I didn’t.
The countryside was gorgeous, though. Emerald green and lush and, like the drive to the temple, farmers wearing cone-shaped hats bent over fields of rice paddies. Everything seemed light, breezy, and fine. So fine that I wondered how far away we were from the tsunami damage we saw from the plane. I was sure I’d find out soon enough.
Deni and his pals chatted away while Azmi drove and Siti rode shotgun. Deni and I were sitting together in back, but he leaned forward as far as he could to be near his friends.
We bumped along for a while, bouncing to an Indonesian dance mix on the radio.
Then we arrived at the beginning.
“Whoa. What happened here?”
On both sides of the muddy road the gutters were lined with what looked like parked vehicles.
Completely mangled, crash-test-derby, destroyed things that might at one time have been cars. They were rusted and twisted, and I couldn’t tell headlight from taillight. They lined up one after the other in bands that seemed to snake on forever.
“They ran out of space for the broken autos,” Deni explained. “The line goes all the way to the ocean.”
“Wow. How far are we from the ocean?”
“Far.”
My heart sank. The water had reached all the way out here? Unfathomable, all those people, the kids currently living at the pesantren running from the wall of water with no idea how to swim, no clue where their families were, if they’d made it to higher ground, if they survived. Grasping hands slipping out of terrified palms. I blinked in the blistering air.
Terror. I could feel it, even now. In the still of the car, in myself, in Deni and his friends. They were the survivors—the lucky ones.
As if trying to relieve some of my discomfort, Azmi shot me the hang-loose sign in the rearview mirror. I appreciated the strange gesture. But they lived here. They saw this every day.
It was me who wasn’t used to it.
When Deni leaned back in his seat and finally spoke, it was barely more than a whisper, his words only for me. “They had no tractors, so they brought trained elephants down from the mountain. What a sight it was watching the men ride the beasts and watching the animals’ strong backs pulling the drowned cars out of the water one by one.”
I couldn’t even imagine. The closest I’d ever been to an elephant was on a class trip to the zoo when I was nine. It barely moved the whole time we were there. “How? Were the elephants attached to harnesses or something?”
“Yes, they pulled the cars with ropes and nets, pulled them from the sea that was now our town. It was a big job. A job I wish I would have had.” Deni stopped talking and looked out the window.
A few minutes later I pointed out an enormous mound of mud and dirt on the right-hand side of the road. A sign with the numbers 26/12/04 was written in black marker and nailed to a piece of wood.
“That’s the date of the tsunami,” I said. “What is that pile of dirt?”
Deni’s face hardened. “It is where the dead lie,” he said, his voice heavy.
A mass grave. Jesus. Out of habit and respect, I quickly made a sign of the cross: Father, Son, Holy Spirit.
Deni looked at me, and I explained what I did. He nodded.
“Are there more?” I asked quietly.
“Yes. They are in many places.” He paused, his eyes shining. “That is why they call this the City of Ghosts.”
As if the mood was too dark, too intense, Azmi turned up the radio, and I felt a rush of relief. Deni and his friends stayed quiet for awhile after that, moving their heads to the beat of whatever song came on.
I wanted to kick myself. For five years, I’d clung to my policy of not talking about the past, and yet, half an hour into our trip to Aceh, I’d managed to alienate Deni’s friends. They didn’t need to see all this. Didn’t need to remember.
Way to go, Rambut Kuni
ng.
I stuck my face out the window. The hot air that blasted my skin had an electric buzz to it. Everything was so intense. I felt like I was riding through some other dimension. The music helped.
We bounced along on the semi-paved road until it became so rocky and bumpy that it was nearly unmanageable. Azmi, however, was loving the stick shift and laughed as he cranked the engine up and down the steep ravines.
“The water was more powerful than you can imagine,” Deni said. “This empty land used to be villages and huts and markets. Before, you did not have a view of the ocean from here. Many buildings were in the way. The ocean took everything out to sea like a giant suction.”
“Look at that boat,” I said, pointing out a smaller version of Noah’s Ark flipped completely upside down in a watery sandbank.
“There were so many boats stuck in the sand after the water went back to the sea,” Deni explained. “That one was too big. Even the elephants couldn’t move it.”
Azmi said something in his language.
“Azmi and Siti’s father was a fisherman, too. He still is. He was one of the lucky ones.” Deni’s fist clenched tightly as he met my eye. “Lucky like my father.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
We stopped when we could see the shoreline clearly, and Siti brought out some snacks, which we unwrapped and ate at the overlook. It was late morning. We had traveled so far and already seen so much, but were just getting started. I nibbled on a cracker but didn’t have much appetite.
I looked out at the glassy sea. I couldn’t imagine those calm waves rising the way they did. My heart pounded, and I was so relieved when Azmi turned the Rover around at the harbor. We passed more debris. Endless amounts of it. Logs, twisted pieces of metal, chopped-in-half fishing boats smashed into the sand, more metal, more wood, more junk.
“This is clean compared to before,” Deni said, his eyes flashing. “There were bodies everywhere. We had to cover our faces with scarves to hide our noses and mouths from the smells of the decay.”
My stomach clenched imagining it. Like the article I read back home, one of the pictures I saw of the workers could have been Deni. I didn’t dare mention it.
“Me and Azmi worked here,” he continued. “We carried bodies in from the shore. We did it for days and days, all day long, sometimes long into the night. They were everywhere. Here. There.” He pointed out the other window. “Everywhere were rotting bodies. Women were mourning and screaming, and most of the bodies could not be…apa?”
My voice cracked. “Identified?” I didn’t want to hear anymore, but Deni wanted to share. I had to listen.
“Yes.” He nodded, his jaw clenched. “Swollen from the water, they were big and apa? Puffed?” He winced like he could still see the brutal images. I could see them, too. “And cut up. They took pictures of the bodies and hung them up to be identified before they could be buried in the graves that you saw. It was not good.”
Oh God.
I couldn’t stop picturing the hundreds of bodies piled on top of each other, wrapped only in blankets and covered by a mound of dirt. Deni and Azmi dragging the decaying bodies around the shore. How could anyone recover from that? I could barely handle the story, never mind being there in real time.
“I’m so sorry,” I said as he stared straight ahead, my heart breaking for him. And even though I was dying to wrap my arms around him, I didn’t dare. I didn’t know what he’d told his friends about us, who they thought I was to him, and of course, again, it wouldn’t be appropriate.
He faced me. “Why are you sorry? You did nothing wrong.”
“I’m sorry you had to go through all of this.”
He stared into my eyes hard. “I want you to understand. I left my home because I did not want to see. They said you will have a new life. You can get your education. I thought here I had nothing. But I was wrong. This is still my home even if something terrible happened here. If you do not want me to talk about these things, I will not, but please do not be sorry for me.”
I nodded. I hated it when people felt sorry for me, too.
Deni said something to Azmi who turned the music up even louder.
Ahead of us, a white mosque stood alone in a littered field of trash and garbage and metal. It was the only real building for as far as the eye could see. Azmi stopped the car out front.
“You see this mosque?” he asked me. “My family was trapped on the roof watching the water rise around us. On that roof is how my family survived.”
“Wow, that’s incredible. You all survived?”
“Almost all.”
He didn’t add anything else, so I didn’t pry further. Instead, I noticed a row of white canvas tents lined the street across from the mosque. “Is that a refugee camp?”
Deni nodded. “Azmi and Siti’s family lived there for many months.”
He climbed out of the SUV, his voice filled with emotion. “This is the mosque I told you about. After the storm, it was the only thing left. Not even a tsunami could tear it down.” His eyes never left the white, windowless building with its copper roof and three ornate steeples. There was nothing else around it. Just flat, muddy earth. The cut-out windows in the same shape as the pesantren, reminding me of the flower bulbs Oma planted in winter.
“You go on ahead,” I said, sensing he needed a moment alone.
I watched him reverently approach the concrete steps and disappear into the building, as if this was the end of a long, long journey.
I stood against the car and stretched in the beating sun. It was even hotter here than in Yogyakarta, and without the breeze from the car windows, I felt woozy. I wiped some sweat off my forehead and fluffed my T-shirt, but it was no use.
I followed Azmi and Siti halfway up the mosque’s steps, hoping to get a closer look of the exterior while still giving Deni privacy.
The mosque had an ornate copper roof. The arches carved out of the walls cast shadows on the now-dry floor, and I imagined the flood of water rushing through, desperate families dashing for the rooftop.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Deni, standing there, looking lost.
“I’m going to pray,” Siti told me. I watched as she took a black skirt out of a barrel and wrapped it around her waist, concealing her white pants. She wrapped a second scarf on her already-covered head.
After she was dressed, she took a brightly colored prayer mat out of a big barrel in front of the mosque and looked at me under those incredibly long lashes. “You stay?”
I glanced inside. Was Deni praying? I felt like I was intruding enough by loitering here.
“Yes, I’ll stay out here.”
She nodded and joined Deni inside.
Azmi lingered behind and followed me around the side of the building.
Indonesia Menangis was spray-painted on the white chipped paint. “What does that mean?” I asked, shielding my eyes from the sun’s bright glare.
“Cry,” he said. “Indonesia cry,” he translated before deciding to join the others inside.
While they were in the mosque, I wandered around the marshy land, hyper-careful of where I stepped.
It was so hard to believe this was the place where so many died.
I felt weird walking there, like walking in a graveyard, but waiting in the hot car wasn’t an option, so I slogged through the mud over to what must have been the foundation of a house with its cement blocks laid in a rectangular shape, and rusted metal pipes sticking out. Everything was covered with sand and muck.
I walked around the inside, imagining the people who had lived there.
Were they home the day the tsunami came?
A rusty pot handle stuck out of the dirt. Were they cooking when they heard the roar? Did they run out the door toward the mosque or toward the mountain? Did they have a teenage boy who escaped by motor? When Deni finally came out, I touched his arm—I couldn’t help it—and in that moment I didn’t care who saw. He took a deep long breath and looked up at the cloudy sky.
&nb
sp; “Are you okay?” I asked.
“I do not know,” he said. “Are you?”
I thought about all the images I’d seen that day: the mass graves, the beat-up cars, the destroyed homes. I thought about Dad back at the pesantren, certainly worried about me. I thought about how everything was a million times worse for Deni.
“Yeah,” I said, squeezing his hand. “I’ll be fine.”
Later that afternoon, we arrived at Azmi and Siti’s house and were asked to sit on a large bamboo mat that covered most of the small living and dining space.
“Come, come, come, come. Please, sit, sit, sit, sit,” said their ibu, who was wearing wide round glasses and a peach silk hijab on her head. She was soft and round in all the places a mother should be. Their bapak was short, with Azmi’s beaming smile. Dressed in dried–mud-covered pants, he smelled like fresh fish when he took my hand and placed it to his heart.
I liked them both. Thank God Amelia had me wear the hijab, or they might not have liked me.
“Where your father? Your mother?” Ibu asked me immediately, taking her turn with my hand in her rough warm one.
I glanced at Deni, who nodded. “My father is joining me soon,” I said.
Frowning, Bapak turned to Deni. “You bring American girl here alone? Without her father?”
“He’s coming,” Deni insisted in the same firm voice, glancing over at me like, We better stick to this story. I nodded quickly.
“Okay.” Bapak grinned with open arms. “Tonight you stay here. You are our family tonight. Deni, Azmi tells us you are coming home, that you sent letter from Yogyakarta! We are happy! Please. Sit. Eat.” He gestured toward the mat where tea and plates were set up, waiting.
“I’m happy too, Bapak,” he said. “I have missed my friends.”
Ibu held tight to Deni’s arm. “Much has changed in Aceh. Much is better, no?”
Deni nodded. “Much has changed, but much is still the same.”
Where I Found You Page 18