Free Jakarta Missing by Jane Kurtz Page B

face looked so opposite. She had an expression that was even sort of exquisite . “You like it here, don’t you?” Dakar said.
    Mom smiled. “It’s unbelievable. When I think how determined and desperate I was to get out of North Dakota … I never expected it to feel so much like home.” She added, “When your dad was in second grade, his family came back to the United States to live for a year. He was supposed to take some kind of standardized test to see if his schoolwork was up to grade level. The only thing he remembers about the test is that it had a picket fence on it, and he didn’t know what a picket fence was. The woman who was giving him the test had to take him outside to show him one.”
    Dakar thought about fences. In Maji a fence made of thorn branches surrounded their house and the clinic. Outside the fence were wild pig paths, the waterfalls, and the water babies. She wasn’t sure she knew what a picket fence looked like, either.
    â€œWhen he told me that,” Mom said, “he said he never wanted to see another picket fence.” She laughed. “We’d just been snorkeling in the turquoise sea. He and I promised each other right there not to say no to any adventure that came our way.” She sighed. “So why am I having longings for a white house and a picket fence? Like the one I grew up in. Uf-dah, how your dad would yelp to hear me say that.”
    Dakar laughed at the funny word. “When can we go there?” she asked. “I want to see where you grew up.”
    Mom lifted the clippers above her head as though she were preparing to clip the sky. “Well, it’s a very long, boring drive across North Dakota,” she said flatly. “But I do keep meaning to write to Aunt Lily. It would sure be easier if she had a phone, but maybe …” She let the clippers slowly drop. “Oh, well,” she said, “most longings pass.”
    Dakar glanced up at the house. It was awfully sedate compared with the places they usually lived. Dad seemed to give off an energy that pulled people right in, and when he was home, their house in Nairobi was full of people who talked fast, laughed loudly, and shouted when they got into political arguments. Ethiopian emigrants. Roaming photographers with shaggy beards and war stories. Doctors and other medical workers with sad, compassionate eyes. Mom would make sure everyone got fed and would sometimes sit and talk intensely with someone in the corner.
    She and Mom now moved from the hedge to one of the flower patches. “How glorious this will be in the spring!” Mom said. “We should be planting lily bulbs, and probably dividing these irises. Did you know that the Greek goddess Iris was the personification of the rainbow and she carried messages to the ends of the earth?” She knelt down and started to dig. “My mother’s name was Iris, you know. My grandmother, who loved flowers, named her three daughters Iris, Rose, and Lily.”
    Dakar sat down on the grass. Usually when they were in the mood to talk about families, they talked about Dad’s adventuresome one: Dad as a little kid, climbing every step up the 984-foot spire of the Eiffel Tower. Or on the deck of a Dutch liner, seeing the moon over the Atlantic Ocean, or standing at the Acropolis seeing the moon over Athens. Or perched on the shoulders of a spear-shaking warrior in the middle of a big funeral dance. Maybe flowers couldn’t compete. “Did she grow petunias like the ones you planted in Maji?” Dakar asked.
    Mom made a strange snuffling sound. Was she crying? She rubbed at her right eye, and Dakar saw a streak of dirt there. Dreamily she went on. “My grandmother was born at the turn of the century, and her parents sent her to college at a time when not many women got to go. What do you think she did in college?”
    â€œGot a Ph.D. like Dad?”
    â€œHere,” Mom said.