CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
TWO YEARS LATER
The fasten-seat-belt light blinked off with a ding. The cabin of the plane was cool and the slight rumble of the engine made my eyelids feel heavy. It was my first time to fly since my trip to New Guinea, over three years ago.
For me, it felt like yesterday.
That time is sealed into my mind as a crucible that changed everything.
Time stopped for me. The life I lived before my time in the jungle is no longer the life I have lived after it.
And no matter how much time passes between that momentous chain of events, and where I am now, I will always be able to recall, in vivid detail, everything I experienced, as if it were yesterday.
I guess that’s why they call it a core memory—a defining moment that completely changed my life forever. A fork in the road…a divergent path that took me in a whole new direction.
Jahnu had talked about these moments with the children.
Live long enough, and these experiences pile up in a labyrinth of pathways that represent your life, like the colony of an ant, or the maze of a spider web.
Each new event opens an expanded perspective, or a new path you didn’t realize was possible before, because you lacked the necessary experience.
I was now living in that expanded reality.
I thought back to those weeks right after my departure from the jungle.
My surgery had been conducted at the Tarakan Regional General Hospital near west Jakarta, since none of the hospitals in Port Moresby were set up for an arthroplasty.
Greg and I traveled back to the states after I was stable enough to fly.
We had tried to fit back into our lives as they were before, but I couldn’t.
I didn’t fit anymore. I was different and something grew between us.
Literally.
“Is this your daughter?” The beautiful, blonde stewardess stopped at my seat, her question pulling me back to the present.
Her light blue suit perfectly tailored to her thin body and she spoke with a practiced sweetness.
I turned to look at the child lying next to me.
I’d laid her down in the seat when she’d fallen asleep in my arms after takeoff.
“Yes,” I said a bit defensively, wondering why she asked.
“Is she adopted?”
I inwardly rolled my eyes at her presumptuous question, but it wasn’t the first time I had been asked. Well-meaning, curious people were just trying to reconcile how my biological daughter could look nothing like me.
“No,” I said flatly, to which the stewardess blinked in surprise at my answer or my bluntness. I didn’t know or care. Why were people so curious? Why did they feel the need to give in to their curiosity with rude and personal questions? Couldn’t they just mind their own business?
The stewardess moved on just as my nineteen-month-old daughter woke with a startled jump.
“Mama,” she turned her big, black eyes to me, reaching for me with little arms, and I gather her in my lap.
Her smooth, mocha skin pulled tight around her small, lean, muscled body and I couldn’t keep my hands from touching her. Her tightly spiraled curls stuck out over her head in a perfectly beautiful spill of inky black.
“Shhhh, it’s ok, sweetie. Just a little longer.” I kissed her head. She smelled of the tea tree and coconut oil I rubbed into her skin to keep it moist and smooth. She quieted in my lap, lying her head against my breast and curling her body into mine. I sighed with contentment.
She was so much like her father. Even at almost two-years old she carried within her a pensive, quiet, old soul.
But she was also fiery when she needed to be.
Fierce and bossy, with a sass that, for now, was cute, but in another year, wouldn’t be.
My mom said she got that from me. I cringed, but she was probably right.
At least there was something I gave her.
Until she started to talk, I felt I truly had a piece of Jahnu with me at all times.
It had been a comfort, really, because after leaving him, I had needed it.
A month after Greg and I returned from New Guinea we had our first fight. The weeks leading up to it had only built steam before it came to a head as he tip-toed around me, giving me space to recover not only from my surgery, but also the trauma of being kidnapped.
He was certain more than just a kidnapping had happened to me, because I was so reserved and didn’t like talking about my time in the jungle.
He pushed and pushed me to go to counseling.
I probably should’ve gone, but I didn’t want to.
I was mourning and I didn’t know how to tell him, so I didn’t tell him anything and the wall I built around my tender, broken heart was an affront to his sensitive, image driven soul—God love him.
He was a good man, but he just couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t talk to him about things, why I wouldn’t let him in. He thought I was mad at him because he shot me, took my silence as anger and resentment, and it ate at him until he couldn’t take it anymore.
“I don’t want to push you, Sid, but how long are we going to keep avoiding the issue? How long do you need until you’re back to normal?”
I didn’t know what to tell him. Never?
My period didn’t come that first month back, but I chalked it up to the stress of traveling, surgery, recovery, and the general stress of easing back into a world I no longer felt belonged to me.
It was the strangest thing, because I truly tried to acclimate back into the lifestyle of busy America. Though it looked different because I couldn’t go back to work right away with the loss of use of my arm, I never seemed to find my footing—even in the things that were once so familiar.
I found myself doing strange things those first few weeks back.
I turned off my air-conditioning and opened the windows.
I missed the warm, sultry air of the jungle and everywhere I went, I was too cold.
I stopped sleeping on my mattress, but pulled a blanket and pillow on the floor next to the window so I could hear the noise of night and look out at the stars.
Of course, the noise of night in my apartment was not the hypnotic melody of nature, but instead, the blazing of sirens, interspersed with cars driving on the nearby street, and my neighbors having a fight.
The brilliance of the jungle stars clearly outshone night sky in the city.
Often I would climb the stairs to the roof of my building, lay the blanket on the concrete, and lie down on my back the way Jahnu and I had done.
I tried to find Pleiades, Orion, and Arcturus in the formations, and actually downloaded a constellation app on my phone to help me identify the night sky the way Jahnu had done for me.
I pretended he was looking at the same moon, lying in the grass, staring at the same constellations.
I know he ached for me as I did for him, but I was home now, back to my life, the way I had always known things were going to be.
Very often, my tears would come unbidden while I lay looking up at the stars. I was no longer the person who buttoned up her emotions, I was like the man who cried the Sepik River and one night I prayed a prayer to a God I used to know, but hadn’t given much thought to in years.
“God?” I asked shakily. “If you can hear me, please take this pain. Help me…find my way.” I pulled up a Bible app on my phone and took two weeks to read through Ecclesiastes and Job, and sobbed because reading it made me feel closer to Jahnu.
The words I read reminded me of him and on one of my nights of reading, I stumbled upon a passage in Hebrews that made me cry even more.
My son, do not make light of the Lord’s discipline, and do not lose heart when He rebukes you, because the Lord disciplines the one He loves, and He chastens everyone He accepts as His son.
Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as His children. Finally, I understood.
But my prayers seemed to go unanswered yet again, because I still felt a deep, gaping hole in the pit of my stomach.
I felt sick, and the mornings I woke and ran to the bathroom, I thought were perhaps the last vestiges of grief making their way out of my system so I could move on with my life.
But when my breasts also started feeling sore and tender and I missed my second cycle, I knew with a sinking feeling, without having to take a test, that Jahnu had left more than a piece of his heart with me.
I came out of the jungle with a part of him. Together we had made a new life.
I treasured my secret for another two months, not sure how to share the news with anyone else. This is what I had always wanted. A child of my own. My womb to be filled. It wasn’t exactly how I thought it would go, but I was learning not much in life ever is.
I continued physical therapy for my shoulder, slowly gaining mobility and use of my arm, and picked up a couple shifts, slowly easing back into my life as it was before.
Greg checked on me often, probably hoping he could slip the ring he’d given me back on my finger. When I asked him to dinner, I think I’d given him false hope.
He was all sweet and tender, but the past four months we’d grown apart and I think even he could feel it. We were polite in our conversations, tip-toeing around each other as if we were strangers on a first date and not the engaged couple we had been just a handful of months ago.
We sat at one of our favorite restaurants. Greg sipped wine. I sipped water. We talked, caught up on my healing, his rotations, when he finally spoke,
“God—Sid, you look…beautiful.” I was taken back with his intimate compliment since our conversation had been so platonic, and void of all our previous intimacy.
“I’m sorry,” he laughed, wiping his mouth with his napkin, “But I had to say something. There’s something different about you…
you’re practically glowing, you’re so beautiful. ”