Escape Under the Forever Sky (19 page)

Flying back to Addis in the helicopter, Mom told me how awful she felt about everything that had happened, that it was all her fault and we would move back to the States immediately. “Our house is so close to the high school you can walk there yourself. No more drivers, no guards. You can be like every other kid.”

I looked down at the rocky fields and terraced hills, the grazing cattle, and the flock of Abyssinian rollers soaring over it all.

“No way,” I said.

“Lu?” Dad asked.

I pressed my face against the window. I could still see Teddy and his family waving good-bye. They would stay there, I was sure, until we were just a speck on the horizon.

“How can I leave?” I asked, tracing an invisible pattern on the glass. “I haven't had a chance to really live here yet.”

“But, sweetheart, don't you want to go home, where you can be with people like yourself? After everything that's happened, how can you still want to live here?”

I turned to him. “But I
am
with people like myself, Daddy. You and Mom, Iskinder, Tana and Teddy, Bikila . . .”

My parents exchanged looks. “You're tired, Lucy. We'll talk about this later.”

“Yeah, I'm tired, but you don't get it. Bikila and the rest of the people in his village, they protected me from Markos. They didn't care that he was African and I'm American or that he's an adult and I'm a kid. None of that stuff mattered because they knew I was telling the truth.”

“How do you think they knew Markos was the one
who was lying?” asked Mom, sounding genuinely curious.

I smiled faintly. “They said they could tell he had an angry
zar
.”

“Of course,” Dad said, with not a little sarcasm. “An angry
zar
. What else could it have been?”

“Oh, lay off, Dan. Given everything that's happened, an angry
zar
is as reasonable a justification as we're likely to find.”

I stared at my mother, my newfound ally, totally shocked—and almost choked when she actually winked at me.

Coming home was when I really lost it. As soon as I saw Iskinder, I basically collapsed on him, crying hysterically until I had turned his jacket into a red pasty mess.

“Iskinder,” I said when I could talk again, “can you ever forgive me for being so unbelievably horrendous to you?”

“All that matters to me, Lucy, is that you are safe.”

I thought of something else. “What about my mom?” I whispered. “Was she mad at you for leaving
me at Tana's? Because I'll tell her it was all my fault—which it totally was,” I added.

“There is no need for that, Lucy. Your mother knows you very well.”

We both had a laugh at that, and then it was time for me to see the doctor, who was waiting for me at the residence. He gave me medicine for my stomach but said there was nothing more he needed to do for my foot. It was too late for stitches, and the herb mixture that the women had used had disinfected the wound.

Finally, I went to my room. Nothing I had imagined came close to what I saw in the mirror over my dresser. My skin, my hair, the filthy clothes. I was a mess. I gently extracted Bikila's feather from my hair and laid it on top of my dresser. Later I'd figure out someplace special to keep it, but for now I wanted it out where I could see it all the time. One by one, I untangled the braids, and my hair frizzed out like one of those cartoon characters with her finger in an electric socket. Then I peeled off my clothes and threw them straight into the wastebasket.

After the longest shower of my life, I put on my
bathrobe and looked in the mirror again, leaning forward until I was only three inches from the glass. I carefully examined my face and eyes. It seemed so weird: After everything that I had been through, how could it not
show?
How could there be no visible sign of the person I had become?

There was a knock on my door, and I heard Tana say, “Lucy?”

I thought I had cried myself out with Iskinder, but I was wrong. We sank down on the floor together, hugging and sobbing until I said, “Wow, imagine if I had actually died.”

Tana laughed. “Oh, I have. Lucy, we never should have gone out. This was all my fault.”

“You're kidding, right?” I said to her. “First of all it was my brilliant idea, and second of all, if we hadn't sneaked out that day, those guys would have just found another time to do it. Please don't blame yourself, Tana. It really wasn't your fault at all.”

“I cannot help it. How do you know they would have found another opportunity?”

“Because I'm the idiot who kept sneaking out all the time. Face it, I made it easy for them. Hey,” I
said, changing the subject, “guess what? I went to an
ukuli bula
ceremony—and the boys were
naked
!”

“Really?! What did they look like?”

I moved up to my bed and patted the spot next to me. “Come here. I'll tell you everything.”

I
HAD IT
wrong, of course.

The kidnapping had nothing to do with Mom's committee, although it did have to do with drug dealers. There was this big-deal Pakistani drug lord, Syed Ibrahim Kausri, who was on America's most-wanted list for exporting heroin to the United States. Markos and Dawit worked for him, transporting drugs from Ethiopia to Kenya. And—get this—Helena was a flight attendant for British Airways who earned money on the side by smuggling heroin on her flights from Africa to the States. The police had captured Kausri in Ethiopia and were going to send him to the U.S. to be tried and locked up there for the rest of his
life. Kausri's plan was a kind of prisoner exchange—let him go, or else it would be his life for mine. Lucky for me it didn't work out that way.

It took a while for the excitement to die down. For a few weeks I was famous. Newspapers all over the world ran front-page stories about me; TV shows wanted to interview me (guess what my mother had to say about that?). Everyone wanted to hear more about
The Abduction of the Ambassador's Daughter!!
and
Girl Saved by Wild Lions!!
And naturally everyone had an opinion. Some of the wildlife experts said that my crying must have sounded like a cub mewing and made the lions protective. Others said the lions were going to eat me and just hadn't gotten around to it yet. Personally, I have no idea why the lions did what they did. But I know I felt a connection to them, and it was more than just gratitude for saving my life. I wonder if the lions felt connected to me too.

Mom and I are getting along much better now. A couple of days after it was all over, I asked her what she did when she found out I was gone.

“I cried,” she said.

I was stunned. Mom crying? “But what about
calling the police and the army and the president and giving them all hell and telling them they'd better find your daughter in five seconds or heads would roll?”

She smiled. “Oh, I did all of that first. But then I sent them away to do their jobs, and I closed the door to my office, sat down on the floor, and cried.

“Lucy,” she went on, “you're my . . . I could never . . .” Her voice broke, and she looked at me with tears in her eyes.

“It's okay, Mom. Everything turned out all right, didn't it?”

Actually, it turned out better than all right. We're staying. All of us together, as a family. Dad took a job teaching economics at Addis Ababa University, and Mom tries to be home for dinner at least three nights a week, which she does—well, most of the time. Not only is my curfew lifted, but Mom and Dad promised to take me on trips to see every last inch of this country before it's time to move on to the next one. Tana and Teddy are coming with us to the Simien Mountains as soon as school is out in June. I'll finally get to see the gelada baboons!

Tana is officially going to London next fall, and
I'm trying not to think about life here without her. At least she'll be back for Christmas and summer vacation, and she promises she'll come with us on some of our adventures. Of course Teddy will still be here—and that's turning out to be a whole new kind of adventure.

Speaking of adventure, I've upped my game drives to twice a week. The first time I returned to the bush it felt like a homecoming. Dahnie drove over the familiar trails, and I stared out the open windows at the tall grass, imagining a flash of gold fur, wisps of a black mane, the glint of an amber eye. Watching me. Waiting.

Author's Note

E
SCAPE
U
NDER THE
Forever Sky
was inspired by a true story. In June 2005, a twelve-year-old girl was kidnapped from her village in southwestern Ethiopia and held captive for a week before she managed to escape. Running through the forest, the girl happened upon three wild lions. The lions surrounded her and chased off her abductors, standing guard for several hours until the police arrived.

Two things drew me to this story the instant I read it. The first was the image of a girl alone in a forest, surrounded by wild lions. What did that feel like? I wondered. What was she thinking? She was never named in any of the news articles, so I had to find a way to answer those questions myself.

I started by doing a lot of research, interviewing experts, and traveling to Ethiopia. While the people and the events in the book are fictional, almost all the descriptive details are factual (yes, Selassie did employ a pillow bearer, a keeper of the cloth, and a minister of the pen).

The second thing that drew me to this story was the idea of bridging the differences to make connections with beings unlike ourselves. Witness the account of the lioness in Kenya that adopted a baby antelope, guarding it fiercely for weeks. Or the hundred-year-old tortoise that acted like a father to a baby hippo that had been orphaned by a tsunami.

Lucy is an American girl in an African country, a child among adults; she is white, and almost everyone around her is black. And yet the people in the tribal village see past all of those differences. They recognize that Lucy is telling the truth and offer her the help she so desperately needs. As the curator at the National Museum in Addis says to Lucy, and as a curator at the National Museum in Addis said to me when I visited Ethiopia, “Nationality and religion are just politics. We are all one species.”

Acknowledgments

N
ICK
, J
OE, AND
Maya, eleven days were just the tip of the iceberg. Thank you for being the best cheering squad, the most faithful readers, and the all-around greatest family ever. I promise the next time I need to travel across the planet to research a book, we'll all go together. And thank you to the rest of my family, especially Mom, Dad, Jen, Ron, Jake, and Leni, for all your support.

Thank you, Eileen Katz, Sam Hoffman, Patty Saidenberg, Greg Dalvito, Lynn Goldner, and Tali Balas, and Rebecca Davis, for your advice and encouragement.

Ahmed Beshir and Daniel Shewalem, thank you for introducing me to your extraordinary country, and for patiently fielding about ten thousand questions. Thanks to Luke Hunter of the Wildlife Conservation Society, without whom I never would have known what a lion feels like.

Special thanks to my agent, Judy Heiblum, my editor, Victoria Rock, and the rest of the team at Chronicle Books.

Finally, to my first reader, alter ego, and cherished friend, Marc Acito, who urged me to climb the mountain—and then held my hand all the way up—
amasegenallo
.

• What are some of the ways in which living in Ethiopia is different from living in your country? What are some of the similarities?
  
• In the beginning of the novel, Lucy believes her mother cares more about her career than she does about her daughter.
  Do you think that is true? What about Lucy's father and his career?
  
• Lucy feels free to “just be herself” when she is in the bush.
  Is there a place that makes you feel that way?
  
• In Chapter Five, Tana describes what it's like being a girl in Ethiopia: “Lucy, if you think it is bad to be a girl here, just imagine what it is like to be a woman. Men are in charge of everything. . . . When I grow up, they will all expect me to behave a certain way just because that is how it has always been. I hate it.”
  How does that compare to how girls are treated in your country?
  
• In Chapter Six, Lucy blames her mother for what happened in the market. Her mother blames her.
  Who do you think is right?
  
• Why do you think the lions surrounded Lucy?
  
• Did you expect Abba and the rest of the villagers to believe Markos or Lucy? Why?
  
• In Chapter Nine, the curator of the National Museum says to Lucy, “Nationality and religion are just politics. We are all one species.”
  What do you think he means by that? Do you agree?