Sea (2 page)

“How are you
doing,
Sienna?” she asked, laying a manicured hand on my shoulder.

Vera’s words transported me back to after Mom’s plane went missing: Me sitting across from her in her office. That same practiced, compassionate voice asking me the same. Exact. Thing.
How are you doing, Sienna?

I remembered my twelve-year-old self staring at the banana tree in the corner, counting its waxy leaves, trying not to cry.

“I’m fine,” I said, after a beat.

I’m fine,
I repeated in my head. The same lie I told her then.

It wasn’t until Dad handed her a steaming cup of coffee in the JOY mug I gave him last Christmas that she smiled. And then it was an overly grateful display-bleached white teeth and all. I mean, it was just
coffee.
Then she took an unnecessarily long sip to prove how much she appreciated it.

“Great blend, Andy. Ethiopian?”
Slurp.

“Fair trade
Indonesian,
actually,” Dad said with a wink. Icky chills ran down my spine.

I cursed under my breath, but no one seemed to hear. “Ahhh, to mark the occasion,” Vera singsonged back.

“Marking
what
occasion with fair trade coffee?” Oma asked. “What are you two talking about?”

“Haven’t gotten there
quite
yet, V,” Tom said, elbowing Vera.

“Oh. Oops.” Vera threw her hand over her mouth like: Did I just do something wrong?

Dad didn’t say anything. Instead, he set a plate of fresh pancakes on the table. They were sprinkled with powdered sugar just how I liked them, but I wasn’t hungry anymore. Something strange was going on, and I didn’t like it.

“Birthday girl gets first pick,” Dad said, but his face was all twisty and weird. Then I looked at him more closely. I should have suspected foul play when he woke me up sporting a dress shirt tucked into ironed pants, looking more like a young prepster than the ancient hippie that he was. He usually wandered around on Saturday mornings in Mom’s old robe clutching a cup of coffee, looking sort of lost.

“What’s going on?” I asked, patience running out. “Haven’t gotten
where
yet?”

“I was going to wait until after breakfast, but ...” He smiled broadly. “Happy birthday, sweetie.” Dad reached inside a drawer and handed me a white envelope with a big red bow on the top. “It’s really from the whole team. We’re so happy to invite you aboard.”

Aboard?

I slowly opened the envelope, my heart racing.

I scanned the type in disbelief

 

PASSENGER: Ms. Sienna Hope Jones

Flight 13003 depart San Francisco International Airport

(SFO) to Yogyakarta (JOG) June 10, 12:00 a.m. Arrives 5:00 p.m.

CHINA AIR connect in Taipei, Jakarta

Returns ...

 

But my eyes weren’t reading anymore. The words blurred together.

“This must be a mistake. Dad?” I asked.

Silence. Everyone staring at me.

“No. No mistake, kiddo. It’s for you,” Dad said. He rubbed his temple, watching me with a little bit of fear. Like I was teetering on the edge of a cliff and he wasn’t sure which way I’d fall.

Oma pushed her chair back from the table and stood up to read the ticket over my shoulder. “What is this about, Andrew?”

Dad cleared his throat again. “We’d like Sienna to join us for about two weeks at an Indonesian orphanage, a
pesantren.”
He turned back to me. “We think you could really help us with the kids who survived the tsunami, honey. Many of them suffer nightmares and other symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, and our goal, well, one of our goals, is to restructure the dormitories into a family-style system, with an older girl acting as a ‘mother’ or ‘big sister’ figure for the younger trauma survivors to improve their well-being....”

His words spun into gibberish.

He wanted me to go on a plane?

This was my big birthday surprise?

I dropped the ticket like it was aflame.

“You should have talked to me about this first,” Oma said, slicing through the silence. “Isn’t there a war still raging in Aceh? Never mind the whole place is a disaster zone full of disease. How long have you been planning this?” Oma’s usually calm face flushed, her eyes angrier than I’d ever seen them. “You know how afraid she is of flying. I’m shocked you would do this. Especially after the way Hope was killed.”

Dad slammed his coffee mug on the table so hard, hot liquid spilled over the top. Vera quickly grabbed her own napkin and wiped up the mess. “Sienna’s
my
daughter, Mother,” Dad said. “I know what’s best for her. And Banda Aceh was the epicenter of the tsunami; we aren’t going there. We’re traveling to Java. We’ll be perfectly safe.”

Safe?

How could Dad promise we’d be safe? He said the same thing three years ago.

He came home and Mom didn’t.

How could he ever make that promise again?

“Sienna, are you okay?” Oma asked. “Andrew, get her some water! She looks like she’s going to faint.”

Their voices drifted into echoes, like they were arguing from opposite ends of a tunnel. A horrible knot grew in my throat that I couldn’t swallow away. My hands shook. My heart raced faster than I knew it could. I could barely breathe.

“I ... I’m not thirsty, I’m ...” The bright kitchen morphed into black and then dotted with flashes of white spots like a psychedelic planetarium show. Alternating shocks of heat and chills coursed through my body. I had to get out of there.

Stumbling up the broken stairs, I headed toward the only thing I needed to see.

Behind my locked bathroom door, my hands shook as I held the worn postcard, watching the sea turtles swim carefree in blue-green water. Gently outlining their hard shells, I dared to flip the card over and read the familiar handwriting, faded and streaked from my old tears.

I swallowed back tears. The postcard arrived three years ago on my twelfth birthday in a mix of other cards and junk mail. A week after Dad came home from Thailand without her.

I never even told my dad I got it, because it was ours.

The last secret I shared with my mom.

Carefully, I tucked the card back into my old journal and splashed cold water on my face. I stared at myself in the mirror, the counter cool marble on my palms.

The glass was clear. But three years later, I still didn’t look like me.

My bedroom felt dusky in that walking-out-of-a-matinee-movie way when the pinging started.

I got up off my bed and moved aside my window curtain.

I blinked to make sure my eyes weren’t teasing.

With his free hand, the one not wrapped around his surfboard, he waved up to me, his sandy blond hair still wet from the sea. I cracked open my window and a cool foggy breeze rushed in.

“Are you throwing rocks at my window?” I asked.

“Shells. Guilty as charged. I heard you locked yourself in your bedroom.”

“Really? Who told you that?”

“Bev told me you called her, freaking out. I figured it wasn’t a good time for me to knock on your door, but I figured you might let me harass you from down here.” He grinned confidently. Everyone was always happy to see Spider, and he knew it.

I couldn’t help but smile back. It
was
good to see him.

When his head cocked to the side, his eyes weren’t joking anymore. “So I found something of yours the other day. And since it’s your birthday I figured it was the perfect time to give it to you.”

He remembered my birthday? I hadn’t talked with Spider one-on-one in forever. Whenever I saw him, it was in passing at his and Bev’s house or at the beach surrounded by his posse of surf rats and girl groupies. He barely even looked at me at school when we walked by each other in the halls, and now he showed up at my house all nonchalant, remembering my birthday?

“Really? What is it?” I asked.

He scrunched his eyebrows, teasing. “Not telling. You have to come over and find out. It’s in my closet, waiting for you.”

I felt my face flush imagining being in Spider’s house not because it was Bev who had invited me. About being in Spider’s room alone with him after all this time.

I had to think of something to say.

Tugging on the back of my hair, I asked the obvious. “You were surfing?”

His eyes lit up. “The waves were shoulder high,” he said. “Must be a storm coming in. You should have been there.”

I should have been there?
Yeah, right.

Speaking of giant waves. “So Bev told you about my birthday ‘surprise.’”

Spider nodded. I nibbled on the rough skin next to my index finger and startled myself when I blurted out, “You know I don’t fly.”

“I know,” he said without missing a beat. Of course he knew. He was there when it all happened: Sienna doesn’t fly anymore. Sienna doesn’t surf anymore. Sienna doesn’t do anything anymore. Sienna just
doesn’t.

“But if things were ... different, it would be kind of cool helping the tsunami survivors and all that,” he said encouragingly.

Then I grew suspicious. “Hey, did my dad ask you to try and talk me into going with him?”

Spider frowned. “No. Why would you think that?”

“I don’t know. It’s just ... I’m kinda surprised to see you.”

Spider bobbed back and forth from one bare foot to the other on the sidewalk, the same sidewalk we used to skate race when we were kids. Once white and smooth, the concrete was now chipped and cracked, bits of scraggly grass growing between the spaces.

“Look,” he called up, scratching his salty hair, “I better jam. Just wanted to stop by and wish you a happy birthday. Come over when you’ve bailed yourself out of your self-imposed isolation cell,” he joked.

“Okay,” I said.

He looked up at me for a second like he might want to say something else. But then he just shrugged. “See ya,” he said, with a little wave over his shoulder.

“Spider?”

“Yeah?”

I wanted to ask if he was here because he wanted to be friends again and if so, why after all this time? But that sounded lame, so no words came.

He cupped his ear like a conch shell. “I can’t hear you, Sea,” he yelled up.

I winced at the sound of my old nickname.

“What’d I say?”

He must have noticed my expression. I wondered how to explain it. That we weren’t little kids anymore, that instead of being the skinny hyper kid I used to know, Spider was one of the hottest guys on the cove, his body filling out his chin-to-toe wet suit in all the right places, his lean surfer body six feet tall.

He was Mr. Cool and I just ... wasn’t anymore. I wasn’t Sea anymore. And I got over him a long time ago.

“It’s Sienna now,” I corrected him.

He blinked. “Oh, right.” He sounded disappointed. “I forgot.”

Shrugging, I tore my eyes away from Spider’s, stared past him, down the long street of our neighborhood, toward the peek of silver-blue ocean.

If there were ever a tsunami here, it would hit Spider’s house first.

I imagined the tall windows shattering into razors of glass. Spider, Bev and their perfect tennis-playing parents running from the giant wave as the water thrashed over their expensive furniture, flooding their polished wooden floors and overflowing their granite countertops.

Spider wouldn’t be so happy-go-lucky after that happened.

Cringing, I looked back at his uncomfortable face and felt horrible. What was wrong with me?

“See ya, then, Sienna,” he called up from below.

“See ya,” I echoed back.

A half smile crept up his mouth before he turned to go. Why wouldn’t it? It wasn’t like he could hear my awful thoughts. Spider had that easy way about him that people who have never had anything bad happen to them seem to possess.

Lucky him. Lucky Spider.

I took another deep breath of salty air, let it tingle down my throat. Even after all the grief it had given me, the ocean still smelled good.

I watched Spider walk away until he disappeared up his driveway ten houses down, leaving nothing but watery-gray footprints on the sidewalk.

Dad was reading a thick book about child soldiers when I peeked into the den. The African boy on the cover was staring straight ahead, his eyes angry but empty somehow. He looked about ten years old and was bare-chested, pointing a gun toward a broad blue sky; the gun was obviously not a toy. A dim fluorescent light bent over Dad’s book, illuminating the unsettled look on his face.

Dad’s office smelled like stale coffee and lavender; lavender from Oma’s garden, dried and hanging on the wall. The scent still reminded me of Mom, and I wondered why Dad kept it in here, when it seemed like most of the time he didn’t want to be reminded, or talk about her, anyway. About what happened.

“Oma said you wanted to talk,” I said, standing in the doorway.

My birthday was several days ago and we’d pretty much been avoiding each other since.

Worked for me, but apparently it wasn’t working for Dad.

Jazz music blasted from two old speakers on opposite ends of the mahogany desk where Dad sat. When I was little, he used to spin me around and around in that worn black office chair. Now I didn’t come in here much; we all have our corners in this house. This den was Dad’s.