Jakarta Missing by Jane Kurtz Page A

tell when he was near. As Dakar tagged after Mom, she wondered, Did longings pass? She was pretty sure they didn’t. They mostly hung around and made people sad, even if you weren’t sure why.
    When they were finally on their way to the airport, she stared out at the trees. Some of them definitely had yellow streaks. The trees were starting to put on their party clothes for Jakarta.
    To make the time pass, she tried to count all the airports she had ever been in, but there were too many. Instead, she’d make a list of words that she especially liked the sounds of: Jambalaya. Jambo. Simba. Fit-fit. Korra-korro. Buff. Bippy . She giggled. It took forever to park, even though the airport had only two little parking lots and you could see the main building from both of them. Every minute seemed to stretch out like a long thread unrolling from a spool.
    Inside, Dad thumped his hand against his leg nervously. “Can we get Jakarta some Gummi worms?” Dakar asked. “She hasn’t had any American candy for a long time.”
    â€œYeah, why not rot her teeth and start her off right?” Dad handed Dakar two dollar bills.
    â€œWill you do it?” she wanted to say. “Please?” What if Gummi worms cost more than two dollars? What was the thing with tax? But she couldn’t admit to Dad that she still felt nervous when she had to figure out American money. “Ayezosh,” she told herself. “Be brave.” Any sixth grader in America knew how to buy Gummi worms.
    As she waited in line for the man in front of her to choose his doughnut, she thought about when she and Mom had sat by the woodstove waiting for Jakarta to come home from boarding school. She remembered the warm smell of Mom’s arm, the sleepy excitement of listening for the roar of the Jeep. “Is that it? Is that it?” No, it was always only the roaring of the fire in the stove or the wind roaring in the cedar trees.
    Eventually she’d panicked and started to cry. What if the plane didn’t land?
    She’d somehow been able to sense Mom was as scared as she was. Every week, the mules dutifully climbed the hill behind the house, trotted through Maji town, and then followed the lead horse onto the steep, rough road that led down the mountain to the savanna where Ethiopian Airlines planes landed once a week. The trip was only thirty-two miles, Dad said, but it took two days for the mules to descend 8,000 feet. A few days later, when shouts relayed the news that the mules had managed to trudge back up the mountain, Mom and Dad would rush out—but often they had to sigh over empty mailbags because the plane couldn’t land. “Don’t cry,” Mom had said, crying a little, too. “Oh, I hope the plane lands.” And then, finally: “Shh, isn’t that the Jeep?”
    Finally, gloriously, it really was the faint sound of the Jeep engine. She could remember her nightgown, wet with dew, flapping against her cold legs in the mountain wind as they ran outside. Mom whirled and whirled until her dress twisted around her slender legs. They held hands as the Jeep came around the corner and down the last hill, headlights shining, seeming to pick up speed on that hill just the way the mules did.
    â€œA dollar fifty,” the young woman behind the counter said.
    Dakar was startled. She was in North Dakota, not Maji. Planes here didn’t circle and circle and then not land because the weather was bad or there were too many animals on the field. They didn’t disappear, the hum growing fainter and fainter and finally fading completely away. She handed over the money, relieved that the change was going to be easy.
    The woman behind the counter had on an interesting turban, and her voice had a lovely accent. She might be from somewhere in Africa. Why would someone like that come to North Dakota? Dakar wondered. Maybe for the university? She wished she weren’t too shy to