Anika's Mountain Read online

Trying to push away worry about the letter that made Mom cry, I said, "We don't even have any warm clothes, and besides, they'll probably say we're too young to climb."

  That made me feel worse. It didn't bother Sandy, though.

  "Hey, I know," she said. "We should figure out warm clothes. Like maybe we could put grass or something inside our shirts, then they can't make us not climb."

  "Yuck!" I said. "That would itch." It made me squirm just thinking about it. Sandy was right, though. We had to figure out how to get warm clothes, or they wouldn't let us climb. In my head, in some silly way everything seemed tied to the need for warm clothes. I frowned, thinking hard.

  "Hey! I know!" I blurted, dropping the dishcloth. "We can put on layers of clothes. Come on!" I grabbed Sandy's hand. "It will work! I know it."

  A few minutes later we had clothes all over our bedroom trying to figure out which things would go on top of each other best.

  I stuffed on two T-shirts and two sweatshirts, then pulled on an old red sweater over that. Sandy had put on so many pants that she looked like a gingerbread man.

  She giggled and waddled around the room. My arms stuck stiffly out. I nearly lost my balance trying to bend them enough to get another pair of pants on and fell onto my bed giggling.

  "I can just see us climbing the mountain," Sandy said, waddling like a marching teddy bear. "At least it won't hurt if we fall over a cliff."

  "I get it! The whole trouble is that the outside layer is too tight. So we just need to put on bigger clothes on the outside. Look, you put on my stuff for the top two layers, and I'll get some of Mom's."

  "You aren't allowed!" Sandy called as I ran downstairs to Mom and Daddy's room.

  "She won't mind," I said and added under my breath, "I hope."

  My idea of putting bigger clothes on top worked. Well, at least we could move freely if we didn't trip over the dragging pant legs. We nearly killed ourselves laughing. My hair stuck to my forehead with sweat from laughing inside so many hot clothes. We kept trying on different things to see what would work best, and just because it was fun. After a bit both of us had about nine layers on, and the top one was Dad's clothes. We were standing in front of the mirror in Mom and Dad's room giggling when we heard the front door open and Daddy talking.

  We stared wildly at each other and started frantically yanking off clothes. The dishes weren't done. There were clothes all over both bedrooms, and we weren't in bed. It's harder to get clothes off in a hurry than you'd think. Especially when you have on nine or ten layers like we did. Halfway out of Daddy's big gray sweater I stopped and stood there. We didn't have a hope.

  Sandy gave me a panicked look, fell to her knees, and crawled under Mom and Daddy's bed.

  "What on earth?" Dad was standing in the doorway with his mouth open.

  "Kevin!" Mom screamed from upstairs. "Kevin, come here! The kids aren't in bed, and their room is all torn apart!"

  "It's OK, Hazel," Daddy called. "They're here."

  Mom pounded back downstairs and rushed into the room.

  "Oh, thank goodness you're OK," she said, out of breath. "I thought for a second someone had broken in. Where's Sandy?" Then she did a double take and echoed Daddy, "What on earth?"

  "I think you'll find your younger daughter under the bed," Daddy said in an odd, flat voice. I gave him a look. Was he trying not to laugh?

  Mom bent over to look, and Sandy crawled out slowly. I'd been standing stock-still, with one arm still in Daddy's sweater. Now I sighed and pulled the sweater off over my head and started on the first layer of pants.

  Mom stood up and looked around the room. "With ith thorst than the wids koom!" Mom is always getting her words tangled.

  Daddy lost his struggle not to laugh and absolutely roared.

  "It's not funny," Mom protested. "They were supposed to do the dishes and get into bed." But then she looked at us again, and suddenly she burst out laughing too.

  Sandy and I grinned uneasily.

  "Let me guess," Daddy said, still gasping with laughter. "Warm clothes for climbing, right?"

  I nodded and blurted, "It would work. It would. If you put bigger clothes on top you can move OK. It will be warm enough, because I'm really hot."

  "You look hot," Daddy said, looking me up and down and trying not to laugh again. "Now get out of those clothes, clean up this mess, and get into bed. Make sure you put our things back exactly the way you found them."

  "I'll help," Mom said. "They won't get done until midnight otherwise."

  While we were cleaning up, Sandy tried to get Mom to tell her what they'd decided at the meeting, but Mom wasn't talking. All she would say was that Daddy and she had to talk before they'd decide.

  When we finally got to bed, I couldn't get to sleep. Mom's and Daddy's voices came up softly through the floor. I was sticky from getting so hot in all the clothes. A picture of Mom, hunched crying at her desk, flashed into my mind. I squirmed and flopped onto my back. Would she make us stay home?

  Staring up at the ceiling, I saw a shadow pattern that looked almost like Mount Kenya. I focused on the top of the shadow mountain. Would I make it even if I did get to try? Suddenly the layers-of-clothes idea seemed silly.

  I flopped onto my side. The top sheet stuck to my sweaty skin and got tangled. I jerked it loose so hard my whole bed came untucked. Sandy was snoring softly.

  "Please God, let it be OK," I whispered. "I mean Mom, and getting to climb, and making it to the top, and everything."

  One of the verses I'd read that morning came back into my head—something about being strong, him making us strong. I felt for my flashlight and pulled it and my Bible into bed with me. Then I ducked under the covers and switched the flashlight on. It took me a while to find the place.

  It was in Ephesians. "I ask the Father in his great glory to give you the power to be strong in spirit. He will give you that strength through his Spirit," it said. "With God's power working in us, God can do much, much more than anything we can ask or think of."

  "Please help me be strong, however you do it," I whispered. I got up to straighten my bed, then decided I'd better go down and go to the bathroom.

  The bathroom is right across from Mom and Daddy's room. I froze with my hand on the doorknob. Mom was crying again.

  "Hazel, Hazel, don't worry," Daddy was saying. "We've had this all out years ago. The letter doesn't change anything between us. I love you."

  Mom said something muffled that ended in "… about the kids?"

  "They'll be fine. Kids are resilient. We've prayed for the child for fifteen years, ever since we got saved. Now this letter means that we may get to see him."

  See who? I thought.

  The bed creaked like someone was getting up, and I shot into the bathroom.

  On the way out I paused again, but Mom and Daddy were talking more quietly. All I heard was Mom saying something like, "… not tell them just yet, maybe after the—"

  Then Daddy interrupted with a very loud "Get to bed!" He'd heard me open the bathroom door.

  I went up the stairs in a hurry. Who aren't they going to tell just yet? Sandy and me? I wondered as I climbed back into bed. Was that last word Mom was going to say climb? Did that mean we were going to get to go?

  The questions chased themselves in circles in my head until they turned into odd dreams about secret agents attacking mountain climbers.

  "Anika! Anika!" Sandy's yell brought me up out of sleep with a jerk. I blinked my eyes at the morning light and struggled to sit up.

  "We get to go! We're going!" she said, jumping full length onto her own bed, then sitting up cross-legged.

  "All of us?" I demanded.

  She nodded with a big grin on her face.

  "All right!" I yelled, leaping out of bed and forgetting everything but Mount Kenya.

  That day was crazy. Daddy spent all day at the office trying to get everything ready for him to be gone, so packing was up to Mom and us. Mom still seemed kind of worried, but it was hard to te
ll in all the rush.

  It turned out that Traci's mom and Lisa's weren't coming to the mountain with us. They weren't going to let Alex and David come either. They said the boys were too little. The noise Alex made about that was hardly to be believed.

  "Listen, you two," Mom said to Sandy and me, "are you dure you want to shu this?"

  "I'm absolutely dure," I managed to say between laughing. Sandy nodded too.

  Mom didn't laugh. "Seriously, it's not going to be easy."

  "We know," I said. "Lots of people don't make it to the top."

  "We will, though," Sandy added solemnly.

  Mom smiled at that, then looked at us both hard. "OK. If that's the way you want it, I'll try to find equipment for you."

  After she left I went into her office, but I couldn't see that letter anywhere. I didn't feel right looking for it and left after a few minutes.

  Mom had told Sandy and me to make spaghetti sauce for the first night out and showed us a recipe. Sandy started chopping onions while I put the meat in the big cast-iron skillet. I could hear her muttering, "Stupid onions," over the sound of the meat sizzling.

  When I looked over, she'd stuck her knife right through the center of a huge onion and was whacking it on the cutting board.

  "Hey!" I said. "That's not right. Just lay it down and cut it up."

  "It doesn't work. I tried," she said, keeping right on whacking. The knife broke through the onion, and that onion sailed through the air and hit Barnabas, who was on his way into the kitchen.

  He looked at us both standing there with our mouths open. He laughed, picked up the onion, and handed it to us. "Ninyi ni wapishi wafundi," he said and laughed again.

  That means, "You two are expert cooks."

  We both laughed. Barnabas is great. He got something out of one of the cupboards and left again before I could think of a good answer.

  "I know, we should get him to help us," Sandy said as soon as he had left.

  "No way. Mom probably told him other stuff to do. It'd be cheating to get Barnabas to do this when we're supposed to do it. Here, I'll do the onions," I said, taking the knife from Sandy. "See, first you have to get the skin off," I said, picking at the papery layer. It just kept breaking apart, and the next layer down was kind of like skin too. Finally I just peeled off the whole outside ring.

  "It wastes onion but at least it works," I muttered furiously. My eyes were starting to hurt and water. Without thinking, I rubbed them with my oniony hand.

  "Ow!" I yelled, running for the sink.

  "The meat's burning," Sandy cried. "What do I do?"

  "Stir it!" I hollered, frantically splashing my stinging eyes with cold water.

  "It's stuck to the bottom. I can't!"

  I ran for the stove and grabbed the handle of the big skillet. "Ow!" I yelled again, jerking my hand back.

  The skillet teetered on the edge of the stove. I yanked the handle of the drawer that held hot pads, and the whole drawer fell out on the floor with a crash.

  "Anikaaa!" Sandy yelled.

  "Why didn't you stir the meat before?" I snapped, picking up a hot pad and moving the big skillet to a safer place.

  "You never said to," she protested. "Besides, I didn't ask you to do the onions."

  "OK, you do them then," I said and started scraping furiously at the meat stuck to the bottom of the pan.

  Sandy did get the onions chopped into chunks, more or less. They looked odd floating around in there with the tomatoes. I wondered if we were supposed to fry them first.

  "Gross!" Sandy said, staring into the skillet. "I'm not eating this."

  "It smells OK," I said hopefully and put a lid on it. I felt like I'd been doing the same thing with my worry about that letter. If I just sort of put a lid on it and left it alone, maybe it would come out OK.

  "Whew!" Daddy said the next morning, slamming the trunk of the car shut. "I can't believe you all are going to pack all of this up the mountain."

  "Not all of it!" I said, handing him the camera case. We were almost finished loading the car to leave. Mom had said we were going to carry our own packs. I'd never done that before. I shrugged my shoulders uneasily.

  "See you in Nairobi!" Lisa yelled as we pulled out. Nairobi is Kenya's capital and quite a big city. Mom was very quiet during the hour-long drive. Daddy reached out to hold her hand.

  We stopped at the mission guest house to pick up jackets. Sandy and I found the jackets and started trying them on while Mom and Daddy were talking. Sandy found a jacket that fit her, but nothing fit me.

  "You'll have to stay at the lodge with Daddy!" she taunted.

  "I will not!" I protested. "I'll figure out something."

  When we came out, Daddy was still talking. Usually Mom would have been the one to check and see that we both had jackets that fit us, but she was sitting staring into space and never asked. When Sandy started to tell her, I shushed her.

  Mom, Sandy, and I went over to the African market while Daddy went to the bank. The inside of the huge, high-roofed building smelled of flowers and vegetables, raw meat and blood from the butchers, sweaty people, disinfectant, dirt, and spicy wood chips and wax from the wood carvers.

  Usually I loved the noise and color, but this time I was too busy trying to figure out how to get a jacket without bothering Mom. Maybe Daddy would have an idea.

  When we got back to the bank, Daddy was outside waiting for us.

  "This is our lucky day," Mom said as she slid over to let Daddy drive. "It's an ocrediful incurance to get—"

  "A what?!" Dad interrupted laughing.

  "An ocrediful incurance," Sandy said, giggling.

  "Leave me be," Mom said indignantly. "You know perfectly well what I mean. You almost never get your bank transaction taken care of that quickly."

  "I agree absolutely," Dad said, still grinning. "Long live ocrediful incurances. May we meet with many of them."

  When we actually found a parking place right next to the New Stanley Hotel, where we were supposed to meet the others, Sandy yelled, "Another ocrediful incurance!"

  Even Mom laughed that time.

  "We're off!" bellowed Uncle Joey as soon as he saw us. "Anika, you're coming with us! Lisa wants to ride with you."

  Traci ran over to our car. I hung back trying to get a chance to tell Daddy I didn't have a jacket before we left Nairobi. Uncle Joey bellowed at me again.

  "Anika, what's with you?" Daddy asked. "Move!"

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  Chapter Three

  "What were you guys laughing about so hard when you met us?" Lisa asked as I got into the car with her.

  "It's my mom," I answered, only half paying attention. "She said it was an ocrediful incurance."

  "What?" Lisa asked.

  "See, it was especially good that Daddy got done early so we could get the other stuff done—"

  I stopped and sat there feeling sick. It wasn't fair. This should be a great day, and now something was wrong with Mom, and maybe our whole family, and I didn't even have a jacket to wear for the climb.

  Lisa poked me. "Anika, what's with you?"

  I shrugged and ducked my head, then blurted out the easiest part to talk about. "We were supposed to find a jacket for me to wear on the mountain," I said, twisting to face her. "We never did. I can't climb without a jacket."

  "Oh," Lisa said, and she was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "You can use mine."

  "Are you sure?" I asked. "I thought you wanted to climb more now."

  She shrugged and said, "Kind of, but it's not like it's a big deal."

  "You're the best friend ever!" I said and hugged her. When I did, I ended up looking right at the back of Uncle Joey's head.

  "Your dad—I bet your dad won't let you."

  We both stopped and looked at him. Uncle Joey was talking a mile a minute to Uncle Paul and not paying any attention to us.

  "Now the scree," he was saying, "Mark Jeremias said that was about the toughest part. But I figure it
's just plain old will power, the old mind over matter—"

  "Dad," Lisa interrupted.

  He didn't even pause. "We'll just keep right on trucking no matter what—"

  "Dad!" Lisa said, a bit louder.

  "And beat that mountain—"

  "Dad!!" Lisa yelled.

  "What is it?" Uncle Joey said. "You don't need to yell at me."

  Lisa gave me a quick look behind his back and rolled her eyes. Then she said, "Look, Anika doesn't have a jacket. Can I lend her mine and just stay at the lodge with Uncle Kevin?"

  "Absolutely not!" Uncle Joey said. "I put myself on the line to give you this chance. I'm not going to have you miss out."

  "Dad!" Lisa protested.

  I felt relieved and worried at the same time. I hadn't felt really right about taking her jacket. But I wished Uncle Joey would be nicer to Lisa.

  "I think there are jackets to rent at the lodge," Uncle Paul said suddenly.

  I saw a flash of hope. I'd brought the money I had left from my birthday. Maybe it would be enough to rent a jacket, and I could do that without bothering Mom.

  "Hey, look, there's the mountain!" Uncle Joey bellowed.

  I scooted over against Lisa to see out her window better, and there it was. Still far away, the graceful shape of Mount Kenya's three jagged peaks showed above a layer of cloud. My breath caught in my throat.

  I will get there, I will! I promised myself, staring at the peaks.

  "Move over," Lisa hissed, elbowing me in the ribs.

  I jumped and jerked back into my place.

  "The mountain where the god lives," Uncle Paul said suddenly in a flat voice.

  "Yeah, that's right. The Kikuyu thought that a god lived there, didn't they?" Uncle Joey said, laughing.

  "Don't laugh. They knew that fierce spirits guarded the mountain," Uncle Paul said.

  "Demons?" Lisa squeaked.

  "That's right." I could see the little grin under Uncle Paul's big red beard, but Lisa couldn't. "Terrible, invisible demons that hurt hands and feet and made them stiff."

  "I'm not climbing where there's any demons!" Lisa said.

  Suddenly Uncle Joey bellowed with laughter. "I get it! It was just the cold. They'd never been in freezing weather. Their hands got cold and stiff."