The Paradise Guest House (16 page)

This time he knocked on her open door before stepping inside the bedroom. She was lying down again, the blanket pulled high. He couldn’t tell if she was sleeping.

He stood there, unsure of what to do.

“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice muffled.

“Can I get you anything?”

“No,” she said. “I’ll go back to sleep.”

“I might drive out to get your suitcase,” Gabe said. “If you’re okay alone.”

“Thank you.”

“What’s the name of the hotel?”

“The Swan,” she said.

“I know where it is.”

“Why did they bomb Bali?” she asked, her voice very small.

Gabe leaned against the door. “I don’t know. Bali is part of Indonesia, but the rest of Indonesia is Muslim. The Balinese primarily practice Hinduism. So this island is a problem for Indonesia. It’s also more popular on the tourist circuit. If it was Indonesian terrorists, it might have been about either of those factors.”

She was quiet for a while and he thought maybe she had fallen back to sleep.

“I don’t understand why they bombed a club,” she said finally.

“They bombed two clubs,” he told her.

“Don’t tell me how many people died.”

“I won’t tell you.”

“It’s not numbers. It’s Miguel. It’s all those people dancing, drinking.”

Gabe nodded. “Someone wanted to create fear, fear in Westerners.” He put his head back against the wall. There was something comforting about speaking into the darkness of the room.

“I remember reading the
New York Times
articles after 9/11,” Jamie said. “All those profiles of the people killed in the towers. I kept trying to imagine their lives and the lives of the people who knew them. I never got close to understanding what they went through.”

“I was already here,” Gabe said. “It felt very far away.”

“Did you know anyone?”

“My sister had a friend on one of the planes that went into the tower.”

Jamie nodded. “My mother knew someone who got out of the building before it went down.”

A bird squawked, and both of them looked toward the window. A small bird with a yellow crest perched on the sill.

“What happens the next day?” Jamie asked. “And the day after that?”

Gabe didn’t answer. He could remember that for a long time after Ethan died, he wore the same pants and shirt every single day, until they wore out. Was it lack of energy that kept him in the same clothes, or a desire to stop time?

“I’m scared to leave,” Jamie said.

“You should go,” Gabe told her, his stomach tightening. “You need to have that broken arm checked. And you probably want a plastic surgeon to look at the scar.”

“I don’t care,” she said.

“You will care. Later.”

She didn’t answer, and then he could hear her breathing change and he knew she was sleeping.

Don’t go, he thought.

On the way to Seminyak, Gabe called his boss, Lena.

“Where are you?” she asked as soon as she answered the phone.

“Sanur,” he said. “I’m sorry. I should have called you.”

“We canceled school. I left a message on your cell.”

“I never checked my messages,” he told her. “I’m helping out down here. I don’t know when I’ll get back.”

“I might go down today,” Lena said. “They need blood. They need volunteers to help organize some kind of tracking system for the people still missing. No one knows how many died.”

“I was there,” Gabe said.

“At the bombing?” Her voice changed. She paused and then said, “Were you hurt?”

“I got there right after it happened. I was having dinner at Santo’s.”

“Jesus,” Lena said. “Gabe.”

Gabe and Lena were lovers for a short time, a couple of years ago. When Gabe stepped in for a teacher who got sick and moved back to Australia, he stopped sleeping with Lena. They became friends then, real friends. And yet, in the past twenty-four hours, he hadn’t even thought of calling her. In the cottage with Jamie, he felt somehow removed from both time and the world. It was only now, driving into the glare of the sun, that Gabe remembered that he should have been driving to work.

“Do you want me to come to you?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “I have things I have to do.”

Lena was Swedish, older than Gabe by five years or so, and
caretaker to the world. When she started a school in Ubud, every expat wanted his or her child to be under Lena’s guidance. She was smart and nurturing and tough enough to train the parents as well as the children.

“Why are you in Sanur?” she asked.

“Helping out,” he said. “Some of the bombing victims ended up here.”

“Was it as bad as they say?”

“I don’t know what’s being said,” he told her. “But it was unimaginably bad.”

“Putu’s brother hasn’t come home,” she said. Putu was one of the Balinese women who worked at the school. She was the cook and housekeeper, but she was training to be a teacher one day.

“Was he at one of the clubs?” Gabe asked.

“He worked at a hotel in Kuta,” she told him. “He had left his shift twenty minutes before the bombs went off. He might have been driving past—”

He could hear Lena catch her breath. He didn’t know Putu’s brother, but she talked about him often. He drove his two sons up to Ubud on his motorcycle once to see the school. Putu had asked Lena if the children could attend the school next year. Her brother would drive them back and forth from Legian. He wanted them to get ahead in the world. He didn’t want them to work as a security guard at a hotel, like he did.

“I’ll see if I can find out anything,” Gabe told her. “What’s his name?”

“Ketut Taram,” Lena said. “Two school families are leaving Bali. There will be others, too. I may lose the school.”

“Don’t worry about that now,” he said.

“I know. I’m sorry. I don’t know what to worry about. I feel so far away. Can I meet you down there?”

“I don’t know where I’ll be today. I’ll call you along the way.”

“You’re okay, Gabe?”

“I’m trying as hard as I can.”

The Swan was a high-end luxury resort on the beach in Seminyak, one of a half dozen that had opened in the past five years. Kuta kept its surfer image, its beer-and-bong atmosphere, but Seminyak went upscale, attracting tourists from New York, L.A., Paris.

Two marble swans graced the entrance to the hotel. Gabe drove along a manicured garden with a series of pools, one lapping into the next, all filled with floating candles. He stopped in front of the lobby and told the valet to keep his car near the entrance—he was only going to run in for a few minutes.

“That is what everyone is doing,” the Balinese boy said. “Getting their suitcases and leaving the country.”

Gabe turned back, surprised.

“No,” he said. “I’m not leaving. I’m getting some things for a friend who was in the bombing.”

“Sorry, boss,” the boy said, looking at his feet.

“The place is emptying out?” Gabe asked.

“Everyplace is empty. Twenty-four hours and everyone’s gone.”

“Every tourist left?”

“The airlines had to add flights. Everyone is scared.”

“Will the hotel stay open?”

“Our boss says that he will stay open. But he will not. He cannot. We all know it.”

Gabe felt a wave of anger. Bali, this sweet island, was going to suffer greatly.

“You will stay?” the boy asked, hopeful.

“I live here,” Gabe told him. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“That is good.” The boy smiled for the first time. “Tell all of your friends that.”

“I will,” Gabe said.

He headed into the grand lobby. It was beautifully designed, with teak floors and walls and billowing white fabric draped from the ceiling like clouds. A young man in formal costume played the gamelan from the center of the cavernous space. He was seated on a stone in the middle of a round basin, lily pads filling the water. How did he get to the stone?

“Can I help you, sir?” a woman asked. She was Balinese, dressed in a white blouse and a white sarong. She wasn’t smiling—the Balinese are famous for their smiles. Balinese service, always with a smile. Not anymore.

She was the only person in the lobby except for the musician. Gabe couldn’t find anything that looked like a desk or a counter.

“Where is the reception?”

“I can help you.”

“I’m here to collect Jamie Hyde’s belongings. She was hurt in the bombing and I’m taking care of her in Sanur.”

“I am so sorry.” The woman lowered her eyes.

“Can you take me to her room?”

“Of course.”

The woman bowed and turned away. “Follow me.”

They headed out the back door of the lobby and across a
long stretch of lawn. A few men bent over, cutting the grass with scythes. Gabe could see a deserted pool at the far end of the lawn.

The woman gestured for him to follow her down a long passage of stairs.

As they walked, Gabe listened to the click of her heels. There was no other noise.

She stopped in front of a white villa and pulled a key out of her pocket.

“We didn’t know how to contact Miss Jamie. We didn’t know if she was coming back.”

She opened the door and light filled the room.

Gabe saw that the room had been cleaned by the maid—the bed beautifully arranged with pillows, some clothing piled neatly on one dresser. It was a large, airy space, and the fan moved silently overhead.

“Do you know where her suitcase might be?”

“Yes, sir,” the woman said.

She slipped off her shoes; Gabe did the same.

He saw a jacket hanging over the back of a chair: Miguel’s.

“She was with a young man who died in the bombing,” he said.

The woman spun around and looked at him, her mouth open.

“I’ll get you an address,” Gabe said. “Maybe you can ship his things to his family in Chile.”

“Yes, of course,” the woman said.

“I’ll gather them together,” he told her.

The woman walked across the room and opened a closet door. Two small suitcases were set on a high shelf. A few dresses hung in the closet, along with a couple of men’s dress shirts.

Gabe studied the dresses—one black and slinky, the other flowery and bright. Jamie would wear these, he thought. Before.

The woman reached for the suitcase.

“Let me get that,” Gabe said.

He stepped up to her and pulled down the first bag.

“Can I help you pack, sir?”

“No,” he said. “I can do it. Thank you for your help.”

“There are phone messages for Miss Jamie. Will you give those to her?”

“Of course.”

“I will have them ready for you when you leave.”

The woman turned and left.

Gabe lifted the two dresses out of the closet and held them in front of him. Who are you, he thought? He pressed the black dress to his face—he could smell some kind of perfume, a little sweet, a little spicy. Adventure guide who tossed this on at the end of her day? He laid the dresses carefully on the bed.

He read the tag on the first suitcase:
Miguel Avalos
. An address and phone number in Santiago, Chile. Good. He wrote down the phone number. He found Miguel’s clothing in a dresser on the other side of the large room. Jeans, shorts, T-shirts. Boy clothes, Gabe thought. A boy who went off on an adventure with a beautiful girl to Bali. A boy who wanted to marry that girl. Gabe packed his clothes quickly, his chest tight. Who would open this suitcase? His mother? His father?

He remembered packing Ethan’s clothes in boxes to give away. Heather lay on the small bed in his room, staring at the plastic stars on the ceiling, humming the tunes to songs she once sang to him. Deep in the closet, Gabe found a baseball cap he had bought Ethan at the boy’s first Red Sox game. He
tucked it into his back pocket, unable to put it in the box. Then he opened a shoe box wedged in the corner of the closet.

“Heather,” he said, his voice loud.

She stopped humming but didn’t move from the bed.

He walked over to her, the box in his hands. He placed it on the side of the bed and she sat up to peer in.

“What is it?” she asked. Gabe had barely spoken to her in the days since Ethan had died. Molly had told him that he was pushing his wife away because she was so much a part of his life with Ethan. Without Ethan, he couldn’t have Heather.

The box was filled with bugs, dozens of dead bugs. Both Heather and Gabe smiled at the collection as if they had found gold. Ethan would have known the name of every single one. Heather reached over and took Gabe’s hand, and he lifted her hand to his lips. Don’t leave me, he thought. But he couldn’t bring himself to say a word.

The box now sat on the dresser in his joglo, next to the Red Sox cap and a photo of Ethan jumping into a swimming pool, a wide smile on his face.

He closed Miguel’s suitcase and ran the zipper around the edges, then left it outside the door, on the patio.

He lifted the other suitcase from the closet and placed it on the end of the bed. The name tag read
Jamie Hyde
. He opened it. There was a photo of a dog in the empty case—an enormous hound that looked like a mix of Newfie and Saint Bernard. The long-haired dog gazed into the camera, pure love on its face. He turned the photo over—no caption to help him out. Jamie left a beloved dog at home while she traveled the world? No, the photo was old. This was a childhood pet, he guessed.