A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [143]
On Christmas Day, Heringa told me, she met Ann and Made Suarjana for lunch. The occasion was not festive. Ann, for whom food had always been a source of great pleasure, ate almost nothing. “She clearly was in pain,” Heringa remembered. “Made was as concerned as I was. We both felt pretty helpless.” Five days later, Ann made an appearance at the birthday party of Ong Hok Ham, the historian. Three weeks later, she and Heringa made a plan for lunch, which Heringa’s diary showed was canceled. “Isn’t it strange, though, how we continued our regular routine of meeting at restaurants, almost denying what was going on with her?” Heringa said to me, after going back over her datebook. “It looks as if she was of two minds.”
In late January, Bruce Harker, in Maryland, received a second late-night call. This time, Ann sounded scared. She had had the appendectomy, she told him, and pain medication had got her through the recuperation. But the pain in her abdomen had returned with ferocity.
“How urgent is it?” Harker asked.
“Urgent,” Ann said. “I’ve got to get out of here and go home to Hawaii.”
Ann was afraid to board a flight to Honolulu without knowing that her employer would reimburse her for the cost of the ticket. At fifty-two years old, she did not have what Harker later called “the screw-you resources”—the financial freedom to do what she needed to do and take her chances. When she had asked her younger colleague Gillie Brown if the project had the money to cover the flight, Brown had referred her to Harker. By the time Ann reached him, she seemed to have made up her mind to leave. Harker understood. In that situation, a foreign resident in a place she loved would suddenly feel like she was in a world of strangers—no matter how much affection she had for the culture and the people.
“You have to do what you have to do,” Harker remembered telling her. “I can’t authorize you to go—that’s not something I can do without doing some homework. But just because I can’t authorize you to go doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. Between you and me, two friends talking, I can’t authorize you and buy you a ticket, but if you go home, you’ve made the strongest possible case for being reimbursed. Plus, you’ll get the care you want.”
Ann slipped out of Indonesia quietly, keeping her fears to herself, for the most part. When she met with Gillie Brown to brief her on how to fill in as team leader, Ann reassured her: “You’ll be fine. It’ll only be a couple of weeks. I’ll be back.” She told Julia Suryakusuma, who had postponed a planned birthday party for Ann, that she would be returning quickly. “Don’t be long,” Suryakusuma said. “You promised to help me with some stuff.” Ann called Made Suarjana and told him simply that she was going to Hawaii for a checkup, which seemed reasonable enough. Yang Suwan, who had planned a celebratory birthday meal with Ann, was puzzled by not being able to reach her by phone. From late November on, Yang’s calls to Ann’s house went unanswered. Once, a man picked up the phone and explained simply that Ann had put off her birthday. On another occasion, he said Ann was very sick, but he did not say with what. A few days after that, Yang heard that Ann was no longer in Jakarta. It seemed unlike Ann not to explain, Yang thought, but Ann had always moved within multiple but separate circles of friends. Perhaps that was how she wanted to live, Yang figured. In which case, she should respect Ann’s wishes.
Rens Heringa, however, glimpsed Ann’s terror. The two women had been close friends for more than a decade and had many experiences in common. Both had grown up in the West and married Indonesian men whom they had met at university. Both had followed their husbands to Indonesia, raised children there, and eventually divorced.