Everyone leaves a trace. Some we spend our whole lives scrubbing at, like a stain already set into the weave. Others never lift, no matter how many years you pile on top of them, no matter how many nights you promise yourself you'll set the thing down.
My name is Vika. I am nineteen now, and I am writing this in the same house where it happened, at the same table. I was the third child, the youngest, the smallest — two brothers came before me, so the family already had its shape by the time I arrived, and I fit into whatever was left over. In our house I was the one things landed on. When something broke, when the rice cooked out wrong, the eyes found me. My father was strict. He was also the one who loved me most loudly, and I have never learned how to hold those two facts apart.
On my seventeenth birthday he pressed fifty thousand rupiah into my hand and told me to buy something for a friend. Treat someone, he said. He was sick already, though I didn't understand how much. Maaf ya, Dek. Sorry Ayah's like this on your birthday — as if the illness were something he had chosen to do to me.
That evening someone brought pizza. The smell reached me before anything else, warm and cheap, filling the whole small room. My father half-rose from the bed just to catch it in his chest. Bagi dong. Share with Ayah. Just one piece. And I said no. His stomach had been bad for weeks; I was afraid; some part of me already knew. He kept at it anyway, begging, joking, a grown man wheedling like a boy, until my mother sighed and said, satu potong aja — one piece, it's her birthday. So I gave it to him. He ate it slowly, drawing it out, then kissed my forehead. Selamat ulang tahun.
I gave him the pizza.
That night his stomach turned to fire. By morning we were on the road to the hospital I had ridden a hundred times, and the word came out into the open at last. Hepatitis B — an illness he had carried and hidden for years. My second brother looked at me across the corridor and said it flatly, as if reading the time off a clock. Harusnya nggak usah kamu kasih pizza itu ke ayah. You shouldn't have given him that pizza. My mother said nothing. She didn't look at me at all, and that was worse.
It was Ramadan, the third day of fasting. I was at the mosque for tarawih when my phone lit in the dark and my mother's voice came shaking through it, telling me to come now. I came. He was awake enough to see me. Udah solatnya, Dek? Have you prayed yet? I couldn't speak, so I only nodded. That was the last thing he ever asked me — whether I had prayed.
He went cold under my hand at one in the morning. My fingers stayed on his arm and I would not tighten them, because to hold him was to admit the thing I could not admit. My brother wept beside the bed, saying it over and over. Ayah, nanti siapa yang nemenin Bima wisuda. Who's going to sit in the empty seat when Bima graduates, Ayah. Who.
Six months before, in that same bedroom, he had told my mother where he wanted to be buried. In Jawa, he said, so the children would always have a reason to come home, a village to return to. He had arranged it so that we would keep coming back to him.
We left Jakarta after Subuh and reached Jawa Tengah by seven that night — twelve hours across the island to put him where he'd asked. No one spoke for most of it. And when the men gathered at the grave to lower him in, one of them said it gently, without room for argument. Anak perempuan nggak usah ikut. Girls don't need to come.
I stood there a moment too long, the words arriving late, their meaning landing only after my body had already stayed put. Then I went and knelt in my grandmother's spare room and listened to the prayers carry in through the wall, men singing my father down into the earth without me. He had wanted a village that would always call his children home. When I finally reached him, they turned me back at the edge of his grave, and the pizza and the turning-away fused into one thing I have never been able to pull apart since.
The traces are everywhere in this house. The chair in the front room where he used to lie, that no one sits in now. The road to the hospital, which I still can't drive without my throat closing. My mother's silence, which has its own weight now, its own place at the table. And the pizza — that warm, ordinary smell that will follow me as long as I live.
I am part of the trace too. I am the one who gave him the pizza, who couldn't answer when he asked if I had prayed, who was sent away from his grave. I have carried it alone since the night his arm went cold, and no one has ever reached for the other end.