Jakarta Missing
Authors: Jane Kurtz
Missing
BY JANE KURTZ
To
J
onathan, who took 60,000 basketball shots one summer and thus became my #1 basketball hero
FROM DAKAR'S BOOK OF LISTS AND THOUGHTS
Spring
Okay. Dad was right. Anyone
would
have to be crazy to want to live through this kind of winter. I know now about days when the hair inside your nose freezes and you feel like someone stuck a toothbrush up there. I know about days when the wind hits you in the face so hard that you gasp for breath and think you must still be asleep and dreaming of Antarctica. The snow squeaks like Styrofoam when you walk to school, and you can see the breath of every car that passes.
“I knew you'd be sorry,” I can hear him saying. But I'm not sorry.
Winter made me feel
solid
. Before, I was always a ghost, slipping through places, never leaving a mark. I didn't belong any of those places. And they closed up behind me like water.
Besides, if I hadn't lived through torturous winter, would spring make my eyes sting with joy? Outside the back door there's a vanilla puff of a tree right beside a coral one, like two ice-cream cones. The trees remind me of my leaf quest, which did and did not work.
Is North Dakota as pretty as Kenya can be when the rains finally come and wash the red dust off the flowers? No. But getting through winter makes everything seem glorious. Yesterday the ash trees laid down a green carpet that I could dance on, and I didn't even care when Mom said it was because of a fungus, since this spring was so wet.
No, I'm not sorry. But I am embarrassed to admit that I still haven't stopped turning that one moment in the gym over and over in my mindâlike the end of a movie ⦠but a movie where I get to be the director, so it always ends the way I decide.
Jakarta dribbles wildly down the court. Sometimes she takes it right to the basket, charging straight at her defender until the last minute, when she steps to the left and goes up, up, flicking the basketball toward the basket with her left hand. The ball slides in and catches on nothing but the bottom of the net. I hear its whispering swish, just before the gym fills with a giant roaring. Other times Jakarta pulls up at the three-point line and launches the ball into the air. It soars in a high arc, up and in. Always, always in.
D
akar stood at the top of the stairs and held her breath. No voices. No music. No rustling pages. She wanted ⦠the click of a fingernail clipper. The tiniest creak of a chair sending little splinters into the silence. No. Nothing.
She clutched her throat melodramatically. Deadly cholera had swept through the house while she was asleep. She was the only survivor. Nothing to do but go down ⦠into the valley of dry bones.
“Stop it, Dakar,” she told herself. “You're scaring me.” She grabbed on to the railing. Was this what books called a banister? She'd always wondered, reading those books, what it would be like to slide down a banister. In her imagination it had been a little like flying. Now, staring down at the polished wood, she felt stupid with fear.
“It is a poor life in which there is no fear.” Dad had that pinned on a scrap of paper above his desk. And he said it to her one timeâthe afternoon the elephant charged them. Dad also thought that if you gave in, even once, to things like fear and injustice and cruelty, they would get a toehold and come back the next time double strong.
All right. A banister couldn't possibly be as scary as an elephant. Dakar closed her eyes and scooted herself onto the railing. But what if she slid off halfway down and split her lip? What if she went off the end so hard she sprained her ankle? She hastily scooted back off. “You're such a worrywart,” her big sister, Jakarta, would say. “Dakar, the worrymeister.” By some kind of magic, Jakarta seemed to have inherited 100 percent of Dad's risk genes.
Thinking about Jakarta made Dakar seasick with longing so that she had to sit down on the top step and put her hands on either side to steady herself, still surprised to feel carpet there. “Isn't this luxurious?” Mom had said the first day they walked into the house. “We've never had carpet before.” She'd stretched out flat in the middle of the living room, laughing as she tickled her palms with carpet strands. But Dakar missed the cool, dark floors of the Nairobi house. She missed the geckos like ghost tongues flicking and licking up the walls. She wasn't even sure she knew how to make friends with a two-story house. More than anything else, of course, she missed Jakarta.
How
could
Jakarta have decided to stay in Kenya? Maybe ⦠Dakar chewed her fingernail thoughtfully, sadly ⦠was Jakarta sick of always having to take care of a worrymeister little sister? She glanced up at the banister. Okay. She'd do it. She could become less of a wart, she just knew it.
