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were there. Do you remember?”
    Of course she remembered. “Don’t let your fear get the upper hand. It has a way of swallowing people—whole,” Dad had said on that terrible afternoon after the elephant charged them and she was sitting on the ground, more afraid than she could ever remember being in her life (which was saying something), shaking so hard she couldn’t move even though an acacia thorn was sticking into her leg.
    â€œI’m okay,” she’d said because that was the sort of thing you said to Dad. But she wasn’t okay. For months and months she’d felt frozen and sick every time the memory flew back into her mind: the elephant fanning its huge ears, staring straight at her, the trackers with rifles in the ready position, everyone walking carefully backward. At night, just before she fell asleep, she saw herself tripping, falling flat, those sharp tusks coming down.
    â€œIt was scary,” Dad said, “but when it was over, I could smell every leaf, see every blade of grass. I felt a oneness with the elephant, with everything.” He laughed. “I felt gloriously, impossibly alive.”
    He loved it when things like that happened to him. Why didn’t she?
    â€œWell, maybe you’ll actually get back to sleep more quickly if I leave.”
    â€œNo.” She grabbed his hand, filled with an immense fear of being alone, utterly alone, the Allalonestone kind of alone where everyone you know has forgotten you and no one will come when you cry or maybe they’re even dead and can’t come. Where were the words to say what she was feeling? What good was it to be a polyglot if you couldn’t find any language to talk about this? “Why did you let me go to boarding school?” she asked because she didn’t know what else to say and she didn’t want him to go.
    â€œBut you wanted to go.” Dad’s voice was full of surprise. “Mom was the one who kept saying it wasn’t a good idea.”
    Dakar tried to think about whether this was true. She had missed Jakarta. That was true.
    â€œLet me rub your back for a minute,” Dad said. “We both need to get some sleep.”
    His hands were strong, and after a few minutes she was drifting. “Did you miss your mom and dad when you were in boarding school?” she whispered.
    â€œAll the time,” he said. “I miss them now. Your grandparents were people of great faith. They had to be, didn’t they? To leave their families, to take a baby halfway across the world and raise him in East Africa? I’ve often wished I had their faith.”
    She wanted to say, “Why don’t you?” but she didn’t want to make him feel bad. Her tight muscles felt like sailor knots under Dad’s fingers. He seemed to have a lot of faith. He could have been rich if he’d wanted to because when he was studying parasites in graduate school, his parents were killed by parasites, and their insurance company gave Dad money. Lots of money. A lawyer, Mom said, invested it, and Dad never touched it until he was working in Ethiopia and the Centers for Disease Control went through budget cuts. Then he was able to say kwaheri to working for institutions. He could go on doing the work that needed to be done. Wasn’t that faith?
    â€œI only know two things,” Dad said.
    His fingers were making her sore muscles hurt, but it was a kind of pain Dakar liked. She also liked it when people put things in numbers that way. It made things easier to hang on to.
    â€œThe first thing,” he said, “is that I never had my parents’ kind of faith. For me, Africa was home, so it never felt scary to choose to live there, even though I’d seen for myself that awful things could happen in a blink.”
    Dakar shook her head. She wanted him to have faith. She wanted him to say that someone or something was watching over Jakarta. Mrs. Yoder would have said