The Paradise Guest House (13 page)

What does one do after a terrorist attack? Gabe imagined that people were huddled around their TVs, watching the news. He had been living in Bali when the planes hit the World Trade Center—he remembered sitting in the living room of his joglo, watching CNN for hours on end. He had felt oddly
numb, disconnected from the horror of it, and even days of television images didn’t bring it closer to his heart.

Now he was too close.

He turned down a private lane and pulled up to the gate of Billy’s cottage, then pressed a code onto the intercom and the gate swung open. Jamie kept her eyes closed.

“We’re here,” he said quietly.

He drove to the end of the lane and parked the car.

He’d always loved the privacy of Billy’s cottage. It was tucked into a grove of bamboo trees, hidden from the road on all sides. Some hotel had offered Billy a lot of money to buy his property, but he turned it down. He was a successful landscape designer, and he didn’t want to give up his slice of Balinese beach life.

Gabe opened the car door, then glanced back at Jamie. She hadn’t budged.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I’ve never been scared like this before,” she said quietly.

“You’re safe here,” he told her.

“How do you know?” she asked, looking at him.

Her eyes searched his. He noted her bandaged head, her plastered arm. Yesterday she was standing next to a wall of flames, impervious to her own fear, her own danger.

“I don’t know,” he admitted finally.

She nodded, then opened the door and slowly stepped out of the car.

They walked up the dirt path toward the cottage. Within seconds, they were swallowed by the forest. They could become Hansel and Gretel, he thought, wandering in the dark woods. But weren’t Hansel and Gretel captured by a witch?

There is no paradise. There is no safety.

He heard hooting from above, and suddenly all of the birds began to squawk. The welcoming committee, Gabe thought.

The cottage appeared at the end of the path. The forest stopped abruptly and a stretch of newly mowed grass surrounded the house. Billy had hired a young boy to keep up the place while he was gone. The house was white shingled, with a red tile roof and a porch that wrapped around all sides. There were six French doors, and Gabe wanted to open all of them at once so that the house could throw open its arms to the outdoors.

Jamie stopped and gazed at the garden. Billy had done his best work here—he had used palms, tropical tree ferns, bamboo, and banyan trees to create a space that was somehow both contained and wild. Gabe always felt drawn in by the grace and beauty of this place. In the center of the lawn was a pond; long wispy fronds framed the edges. Flowers filled the garden beyond the pond—hibiscus, gardenias, frangipani. The air was thick with the smell of jasmine.

“It’s as if nothing in the world should look like this,” Jamie said quietly.

“What do you mean?”

“I keep expecting to see hell. Burning bodies. Fire. Now this kind of beauty doesn’t make sense.”

He reached out and touched the bandage on her face. He could see the spread of something dark under the gauze—more blood? “I need to change this already,” he said. He didn’t want to alarm her.

“Later,” she said. “I want to walk in the garden.”

“I’ll open the house,” he told her, and she nodded.

Gabe walked up to the cottage. A large blue pot containing
a lime tree sat at one edge of the front patio. The house key rested on top of the dirt.

He picked it up, wiped it off on his jeans, and went to the front door. His head brushed some chimes that rang too loudly in his ears. He reached up and quieted them, then unlocked the door and stepped inside.

It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. When he could see the outlines of furniture, he moved toward the French doors, throwing them open. The house brightened. Billy had furnished the living room with two deep white couches, a wide teak table between them. A wooden Buddha sat in the middle of the table. The room was spare and clean and inviting.

Gabe felt his heart ease. They could rest here. He could take care of her. They could hide out for a while.

But of course that wouldn’t happen. She would get on a plane tomorrow. And he would return to Ubud.

He walked through to the one bedroom in the house. He had never seen this room. Whenever he crashed here, he slept on a futon on the patio. Billy brought lovers but never friends into his bedroom. Gabe was a little unsure of what he’d find.

But the room was simple and serene. A large bed sat in the middle of the room, covered with a sea-green silk blanket. The walls and ceiling were covered with green grass cloth. There was nothing else in the room. Gabe smiled, imagining Billy’s boyfriends as they crossed the threshold into his private world.

Well, now it would have to work to heal the wounded. Jamie would stay here, and he would sleep on the futon in the living room.

He pulled down the blanket—the sheets, also pale green, were clean—then walked into the bathroom. A white claw-foot
tub sat at one end, next to a glass wall that looked out onto the side garden. Another Buddha, this one painted green, watched over the bathroom from his perch on the counter.

Jamie will be fine here, Gabe thought.

He walked back to the garden to find her.

But she was gone.

He ran down the lane toward the gate. When he got there, he stopped in the middle of the road. The gate was closed. Did she open and close it? Did she head in some other direction? There was only one other exit on the property—the door on the far side of the lawn, which opened onto the beach. Could she have headed out that way? Why had she run off?

He waved his hand across the sensor on the gate. It swung open slowly and he ran through the gap, glancing up and down the lane. No sight of her. Could she have made it to the beach? To the street? Too far in both directions.

He jogged back through the gate just as it began to close on its own. She must have headed through the door that led to the beach.

He ran, looking into the grove of bamboo trees on both sides. Could she have slipped into the woods? Why would she hide from him? Didn’t she ask him to stay with her at the clinic?

He took off across the lawn toward the door at the rear of the garden.

Sure enough, the door was thrown open. It was huge and made of carved oak, painted red, with a steel bolt that jammed into the cement wall. He remembered arguing with Billy that the red drew too much attention to the hidden house, and Billy had laughed. “I don’t even have to lock the damn thing,” he joked. “It’s too heavy to open.”

Gabe stepped through the door and onto the path that ran along the beach for miles in both directions. He looked straight ahead, toward the sea. A horrible thought assaulted him: Would she drown herself?

But steps from the water’s edge, Jamie sat, staring out to sea.

Gabe caught his breath and paused, watching her for a minute before crossing the beach to stand at her side.

“Jamie,” he said.

She didn’t respond. She kept her gaze on the water.

He sat in the sand beside her. “Are you okay?”

“I didn’t want to marry him,” she said. “He walked into the club to get away from me.”

Gabe waited to see if she would say more. Finally he said, “It’s not your fault.”

“He wouldn’t have been in there if I had said yes.”

She glanced at Gabe, as if daring him. She looked fierce, her eyes angry.

He nodded.

“He should still be alive.”

“You saved so many people. What you did was heroic.”

“I couldn’t save Miguel.”

He reached for her and she smacked his hand away.

She turned from him. “I’m a fucking coward,” she said, staring at the break of the waves on the beach.

“You’re the bravest person I know.”

She stood and walked back across the sand and through the red door.

Later, Gabe found some soup in the pantry and heated it up on the stove. He needed to eat.

He sat on the patio with his bowl and looked out toward the garden. A couple of birds flitted around the pond. The wind picked up and he smelled freshly cut grass; he heard the trickle of water from the fountain as it cascaded into the pond.

He could lock the gate and the red door and keep the world out. He could keep Jamie in.

But she would leave tomorrow.

What’s wrong with me, he thought. She just lost her boyfriend and all I want is to keep her here with me.

His cellphone rang. He pulled it out of his pocket and answered it.

“This is Larson Willoughby,” a gravelly voice said. “I got this number from Jamie’s mother. I’m Jamie’s boss. Her friend.”

“I’m Gabe. Jamie’s sleeping. Can I tell her to call you when she wakes up?”

“Is she okay?”

“She broke her arm. She needed some stitches for a cut on her face. And she’s pretty shook up. But she’ll be all right.” He didn’t know whether or not to mention the boyfriend.

“Who are you?” Larson asked.

“I live in Bali. I was nearby when the bombs went off.”

“Is she heading home today?” he asked.

“Tomorrow,” Gabe said. “She wants to rest today.”

“Is she safe?”

“She’s safe.”

“Tell her—oh, God. I don’t know. She’s my best friend in the world. Tell her I’ll fire her if she doesn’t get her ass back right away.” The man’s voice broke.

“I’ll tell her,” Gabe said.

Gabe wanted quiet and then the house was too quiet. He wanted to be alone and then he found himself needing to hear the sound of her breath.

He carried a small wooden chair from the patio into Billy’s bedroom, placing it next to the window, a few feet from where Jamie slept. Then he chose a book off one of Billy’s shelves in the living room—a novel set in Hollywood. He took it with him back to the bedroom and settled into the chair.

Turning the book over, he looked at the cover. A kidney-shaped swimming pool. A woman in a bikini, resting in a lounge chair, a large pink hat on her head. A man sitting on the edge of the pool, a dog by his side. No one was smiling. The color had been washed out, as if it had sat in the sun for too long.

He remembered Ethan’s fourth birthday party at his in-laws’ house in Newton. Gabe sat with Heather on the deck, watching Ethan and his best friend play in the shallow end of the pool on a muggy August day. Heather had tried to plan a party for his entire nursery-school class—the school had strict rules about including everyone. But Ethan wanted only one friend at his party, and he stubbornly refused to have a party if more kids came.

Gabe and Heather had argued about it.

“I just don’t want to get in trouble with the school,” she said. “For not inviting everyone.”

“You just wish he were a different kind of kid.”

“What?”

“He’s fine the way he is. He doesn’t need a million friends.”

“It’s got nothing to do with that, Gabe.”

But Gabe suspected that Heather kept hoping her son would be a golden boy, popular and charmed. She had led that kind of life; at her parties, the pool would have been filled with twenty screaming kids.

They sat in the hot sun, barely speaking. Heather’s parents carried too many refreshments back and forth from the house to the deck. Her mother reapplied sunblock to the boys’ skinny backs so many times that the surface of the pool gleamed with oil.

“I had a really good birthday,” Ethan told them that night, surprising both of them. “Can I do that every year?”

Jamie stirred in her bed and Gabe turned toward her.

“Are you reading?” she asked, her voice breaking the silence of the room.

“No,” he said quietly. “I’ve been on the same page for a half hour.”

She sat up in bed and lodged a pillow under her cast.

“Are you thinking about last night?”

“I was thinking about my son,” he said.

“You have a son?”

“He died,” Gabe told her. “Four years ago.”

“I’m so sorry.” Jamie grimaced. When their eyes met, he saw a tenderness that surprised him. He had to look away.

He gazed out the window at Billy’s perfect garden. A couple of finches gathered around a bird feeder. They pecked at the food, flitted away, then returned for more.