When he reached the top of the beach, Ruslan stopped screaming. He forced himself to turn around. The wave that had frightened him swished a few feet up the sand. Just a normal wave, the kind he used to enjoy playing in.
Nonetheless, as he trudged toward Calang, he stayed on the landward side of sandy ridges as much as he could to keep the unsettling ocean from sight. He wondered if he’d ever be able to trust the sea again.
The land was silent. No birds whistled, no goats bleated, no children shouted, no horns honked, not a single mosque summoned the faithful to prayer. Caught in a leafless thornbush on one ridge was a sheet of yellowed newspaper. A corner of the sheet fluttered in the breeze, the crackle of paper unnaturally loud in the silence of this dead land. Ruslan picked it up. It was the front page of a Banda Aceh newspaper, dated December 25. He calculated on his fingers—it was the day before the flood. He scanned the headlines, which spoke of corruption in high places. How angry his father would get when reading such things. Ruslan, he’d say, don’t you ever forget, a poor man with honesty is richer than a thief with gold. But the headlines’ events were now meaningless to Ruslan, and he fashioned a hat out of the sheet. In the shade of its brim, he drank half the water in the remaining bottle.
He was trying not to look at the sea, but a curious sight caught his attention. In the distance ahead of him, a hundred yards offshore, a man pedaled a strange-looking boat, its sunshiny colors vibrant against the mottled water. One of those fiberglass stern-wheeler paddleboats from the Calang water park, where his father had taken him several times as a boy. It seemed an odd form of transport, but then again, why not? Probably easier than plodding through soft sand.
He lowered his head and kept walking, picking a path behind a wall of flattened weed that bordered drowned rice fields, newly planted green shoots turning brown. He came to another flattened village. For several minutes he studied the area from behind a stout tree that had survived the wave. When he saw no rebels foraging through the rubble, he moved forward. He forded several streams and had to swim partway across a wide estuary. When had he eaten last? The tangerines, and before that, Ibu Ramly’s banana fritters. How delicious those fritters had been. How he’d love to have some now. Just one. Just a bite of one. The remembered taste of that filled his mind as he kept walking, walking, walking. The hills of Calang didn’t seem to get any closer.
Cresting a sand hill, he saw a small fishing boat with a blue plastic sail tacking back and forth. He kept an eye on it as he walked. An inexpert sailor at the helm, that was for sure. Whitecaps from the stiffening sea breeze slapped the small hull. The sailor turned around and headed for shore, where the beach came to a small point, catching the bigger waves.
“Not there,” Ruslan said, “not there!”
But the boat didn’t change course. A big wave rose up behind the boat. That irrational panic seized him again, urging him away from the sea, but he could see what was going to happen, and he forced himself to sprint down to the point. The wave tipped the boat, catapulting the stern. Three people and a cat flew out of the hull. The orange cat and the white boy and white girl were in the air for only a second, but Ruslan recognized them at once. He had no time to wonder what they were doing here. Racing into the rushing wave, he first picked up the blob of orange washing past his thighs and threw the cat as far as he could onto the beach. An Acehnese woman in a head-dress bounced toward the shore. The white girl struggled to get to her feet. He grabbed her arm to help her, but she jerked free, fighting through the swirling foam to the overturned boat.
“Peter!” she yelled. “Peter!”
The boy hadn’t come up. The girl tried to right the hull, but the next wave sent the boat crashing into her, and she lost her balance. Ruslan grabbed the edge of the hull and lifted it. The boy pushed out from underneath, spluttering and crying. Ruslan dragged him up to the beach and plopped him onto a piece of broken bamboo matting. The white girl raced up and grabbed her brother. “God, Peter, are you all right?”
He was coughing and crying. “I don’t ever want to be on a boat again, I don’t ever want to swim again, I want to go home, I want Mom and Dad, I want to go home, please, I want to go home.”
The girl hugged him.
He stopped crying with a loud sniffle. “Where’s Surf Cat?”
The cat was licking its belly. Ruslan picked it up and gave it to the boy.
“Thank you,” the boy said.
The girl looked at him then with her blue eyes, the color fracturing the light. “Yes, thank you.”
Ruslan waited for her to recognize him, but she didn’t. His disappointment seemed outsized. What did it matter? Besides, the few minutes she’d been at the café she’d been fighting with her mother, not paying attention to who was serving the cold Cokes.
The Acehnese woman who’d been in the boat held her wet headdress tight under her chin with clenched fists, gazing out at the sea with a thousand-yard stare.
Green coconuts bobbed in the water, the swish of waves rolling a couple onto the sand. Ruslan chucked them higher onto the beach and waded out to get the others.
The woman broke out of her trance and called out in Acehnese, “There was a machete on the boat, but I suppose it’s lost now.”
The thought of the delicious meat in the coconuts made Ruslan light-headed with hunger. After taking off his shoes, he waded out to where the boat had tipped over, feeling the sand with his toes. Waves smashed into his chest. He knew this was a futile effort, that the chances of finding the machete were next to nothing, so perhaps that was why on the next step he felt the flat blade. He ducked into the water and plucked it, waving it triumphantly in the air.
Back onshore, he began hacking open a coconut. The woman grabbed the machete away from him. “You city boys are useless.”
“How do you know I’m a city boy?”
“By the way you cut a coconut.” Within seconds she handed him the sliced coconut, the exposed shell neatly holed. Ruslan’s mouth watered and his throat convulsed, but he took the coconut to the girl.
The girl first let her brother drink. He guzzled and then turned his head away. She finished the rest. The woman whacked open the nut, making a scoop spoon out of discarded husk, and the girl slurped at the soft white meat.
The woman opened two more nuts, one for Ruslan and one for herself. “I hope you at least know how to climb a coconut tree,” she said. “We’ll need more.” She put down the machete and said, “Where were you when it happened?”
Ruslan didn’t have to ask what she meant. “Meulaboh.”
“Me too. I’d gone to the market.” She opened her mouth to say more but then squeezed her lips shut and lowered her head, pressing the crook of her trembling arm to her eyes.
Ruslan sat a distance away to give the woman her privacy and ate his coconut, forcing himself to take slow, measured scoops, wasting not a single delicious bit of it.
“Hello, excuse me,” the girl called out to him. “My brother is sick. He needs a doctor. I need to go to Calang for a doctor.” The girl spoke slowly and loudly, her tone capitalizing each word.
“That’s where I’m going myself,” Ruslan said.
The girl blinked. It seemed almost like magic, the way those blue eyes vanished and reappeared again. “You speak English?”
“Yes.” Again he waited for her to recognize him—after all, how many employees in Meulaboh harbor-front cafés spoke English?
“Great. You can help me. What’s your name?”
She still didn’t place him. “My name is Ruslan.” He didn’t tell her that he’d served her family cold Cokes at the harbor, didn’t tell her that his father had fixed their engine, didn’t want his disappointment to deepen.
“Mine’s Sarah. He’s Peter.”
What had happened to their mother and father? But that he could imagine quite clearly, the sailboat taken by the flooding sea, the children becoming separated from the parents.
The girl Sarah rose to her feet. “We’d better get going, then.”
The going was slow. Here the beach had sunk under the sea, which now lapped against swamps and toppled oil palms they had to navigate. Ruslan and the woman, whose name was Aisyah, took turns helping the fevered boy, whose main concern was his cat. Matter of fact, it seemed to be the cat who found the easiest traverses. At one point Aisyah muttered to Ruslan, “I think the creature’s actually a djinn.”
An hour before sunset it was Aisyah, and not the cat, who pointed out a grove of coconut palms several hundred yards inland. “We need some of those nuts,” she said. “And we might as well spend the night.”
They made what camp they could, using a torn piece of tarp they found in the grove for both ground cloth and roofing. Ruslan tucked the machete in the back of his jeans and wandered out of sight. Each village had men who specialized in climbing coconut trees to harvest nuts—pilots, they were called, because they were always up in the air—and he knew many boys who could do the same, but he’d never climbed a palm tree in his life. He didn’t want to embarrass himself in front of the others.
Still, he managed, even though he slipped twice, scraping his arms. He whacked a couple of clusters out of the first palm, the nuts thudding on the ground. High on the second palm, a swarm of biting ants attacked him. Not wanting to climb a third tree, he gritted his teeth and chopped down the first cluster.
He was just raising the machete for another chop when he heard Sarah screaming.