The Paradise Guest House (18 page)

“Finn,” she said. “My puppy.”

“Big puppy.”

“A hundred and twenty pounds of dog,” Jamie told him, gazing at the photo. “She died the year before I started traveling with my job. I don’t think I would have taken the job if she were still alive.”

“What kind of dog was she?”

“A Leonberger,” Jamie said. “A big teddy bear. She made me happy for a long time.”

She touched the photo and ran her finger along the dog’s back. “Miguel thought she looked mean. He didn’t like dogs. I could never marry a man who didn’t like dogs.”

“Why didn’t you want to marry him?” Gabe asked.

Jamie turned her gaze back to the garden. A large lizard slithered onto Lakshmi’s head and sat there, staring at them.

“I’m a big kid. I’m thirty-one. And I don’t know anything about love.”

“I’m forty. Still trying to figure that one out myself.”

“You loved your son,” she said.

“I did. With all my heart.”

“You know love, then.”

Gabe watched the lizard skitter across the goddess’s head and disappear down her back.

“We’ll leave for the airport after lunch,” he said.

Jamie nodded. She ran her hand through her hair, then rearranged the sling over her cast. Finally she said, “I’ll call Miguel’s parents.”

Gabe pulled out his cellphone and the piece of paper with the phone number. He passed both to her.

“I’ll leave you alone,” he offered.

“No,” she told him. “Please stay.”

He nodded. She seemed to brace herself while tapping in the phone number. Her breath came in quick, choppy bursts.

When someone answered, she began to speak in an easy Spanish. Gabe was surprised by her fluency and then reminded himself: I barely know her.

He listened to the flow of words, not understanding them, but her voice was warm and compassionate. She talked for a long time.

When she was done, her face was wet with tears. She reached out her good hand to him, and he held it.

“They were glad to talk to me. They knew he was going to propose.”

“What did you tell them?” he asked.

“I told them that he had. I told them that I said yes.”

Gabe closed his eyes.
Yes
. She gave them a gift with that word.

He felt her hand slip out of his and he heard her walk away from him, back into the house. He let her go.

Gabe set out plates and bowls on the outdoor table. Earlier, he’d walked down to a restaurant on the beach to buy lunch. Now he pulled the food from the take-out bag and placed it on the center of the table.

From afar, he heard his cellphone ringing, and when he jogged toward the house, he found it on the wicker patio chair.

“Molly. I’m sorry. I haven’t had a second to call you back.”

“They’re saying it might happen again. I want you to leave, Gabe. I’m watching the news around the clock. They think it’s some Indonesian terrorist group that’s worse than al-Qaeda. They’re going to strike again.”

“Don’t watch the news, Molly.”

“You don’t answer my calls. I don’t know how to find out what’s going on.”

“It’s over. It’s really over.”

“What’s over?”

“The killing. They don’t need to kill more people. They did enough.”

“You tell them that.”

“Hold on,” Gabe said as Jamie appeared in the doorway. He covered the phone with his hand. “Lunch is out in the balé. You can start if you want. I’ll be there in a second.”

She nodded and walked out across the lawn.

Gabe heard the sound of Molly’s TV blasting in the background.

“Are you home?” he asked her. He couldn’t remember how many days it had been since she left.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m home. I just wish you were here with me.”

“It’s too cold back there,” Gabe said.

“It’s Indian summer. It’s gorgeous.”

On an Indian summer day, he had taken Ethan out for a long ride on their tandem bike. The leaves were gold and red, brilliant against a blue sky, and the weather was balmy, as if it were August. “I chase you, Daddy,” Ethan had called from behind him. “Go faster!”

“Do you remember how Ethan loved that bike?” Gabe asked. Molly had bought it when she came to stay with them at the Cape that summer.

“What made you think of that?” Molly said, her voice quiet.

“Indian summer,” Gabe told her.

“He wanted you to sit in the back on the little seat,” Molly said. “He wanted the big seat.”

Gabe smiled. Across the lawn, Jamie reached for an egg roll and popped it into her mouth. She’s hungry, he thought. That’s good.

“Heather called me to see if you were okay,” Molly told him. “She’s been watching the reports on CNN.”

“How is she?”

“She had news,” Molly said, her voice hesitant. “She and Hannah are going to adopt a baby from China.”

Gabe turned away from Jamie, as if he didn’t want her to witness his sense of loss. First Ethan, then Heather, and now the chance for a new child. No, he reminded himself. That’s not the life that he chose for himself.

“Good for her,” Gabe finally said.

“That doesn’t make you sad?”

“No,” he assured her. “She should be happy.”

“
You
should be happy,” Molly told him.

“I’m working on it,” Gabe said.

“Delicious,” Jamie said. “I couldn’t wait.” She was devouring another egg roll.

She seemed to have changed moods in an instant. She’s scrappy, Gabe thought. She’ll need that now.

He sat across from her at the table. “I’m glad.”

“Who was that on the phone?” Jamie asked. “My turn to be nosy.”

Gabe smiled. “My sister. She wants me to come home.”

“Will you?”

“This is my home.”

“Does it really feel like home?”

“Not yet. But I don’t want to give up on Bali because of the bombing. This island will need a lot of love in the next months.”

“This is what you did to start over?”

“Kind of drastic, huh?”

He reached for the bowl of pad thai and served himself a small portion. He thought of Heather and a new baby. I’ll write
to congratulate her, he thought. He imagined how pleased she would be.

Jamie tore a piece off the roti prata and bit into it. He watched her eat and felt the pull of desire.

“I forgot how good food tastes,” she said.

“I bet you’re not a woman who picks at her food and worries about her weight.”

“Ya think?” she said, tearing at the buttery grilled bread.

“Were you always an athlete?” he asked.

“I hated team sports when I was a kid. I was a tomboy, but I couldn’t get any charge out of girl games. Then my father took me camping in Utah. I was in heaven. The next year we hiked in Yosemite, and that’s all I ever wanted to do for the rest of my life. Every year I waited for the next trip—just my dad and me and all that wilderness. Best times of my life.”

She swiped the roti prata across her plate, soaking up all the juices from the different dishes, then filled her mouth with the rich bread. Gabe wanted to clear the spot of sauce at the side of her lips with his finger. He took another bite of his food, forcing his eyes away from her.

“When did you decide to make a career out of your love for the wilderness?”

“After college. Everyone else was heading to law school or business school—I wanted a higher mountain, a faster river. Some guy told me about a company in Berkeley that paid people like me to play on mountains all around the world. Being a guide isn’t quite the same as going it alone. But it pays the bills.”

“You’re an adrenaline junkie.” Gabe was smiling at her.

She looked away. “I was. I don’t know what I am anymore.”

“You’re still that person.”

She shook her head. “I woke up in the middle of the night and I thought I was buried alive. I pushed the blankets off me and still I couldn’t get air.”

“Last night was bad for me, too,” he said.

She watched him. “I don’t even know what you do here.”

“I teach at a school in Ubud.”

“Really?”

“You’re surprised?”

“I would have guessed something more … I don’t know … gutsier.”

“You think facing a classroom of seven-year-olds isn’t gutsy?”

“You didn’t want to be a journalist anymore?”

“I couldn’t.”

Gabe remembered a meeting with his boss at the
Globe
, weeks after Ethan’s death. “This is what you need,” she told him, sitting across from him in her office, spreading her arms wide. How do you know what I need, he thought. She had a photo of her family on her desk, three smiling kids and a beanpole of a husband. From what he had heard, she rarely saw her kids.

“I need a break,” he had told her.

“If you throw yourself back into your work, you’ll remember that you had a life before Ethan. You love what you do, Gabe. Don’t give it up now.”

But he didn’t want anything to resemble his old life, with Ethan or before Ethan. He felt so unlike himself, so unfamiliar to himself, that he didn’t want to fit this new dark being into old comfortable spaces.

“Can you pass the pad thai?” Jamie asked. “You’re hogging it all.”

He passed Jamie the bowl.

“Where did that come from?” Jamie asked, pointing to his arm. “I’ve been wondering.”

“The tattoo?”

A small green and yellow bird spread its wings across his forearm.

“You don’t seem like the type,” she said.

“I got it the first day I moved to Ubud. I wanted a reminder.”

“Of flight?”

“I’d been running away for a long time. I wanted to land somewhere.”

“Did you?”

“Not yet,” Gabe said.

Jamie reached out and touched his arm, tracing the bird’s wing.

“I like it,” she said, and then she took her hand away.

Jamie was quiet during the drive to the airport. She changed the radio station when news about the bombing came on and kept pushing buttons, trying to find a song she liked. Finally she turned it off.

“You packed your meds?” Gabe asked.

“Yes.”

He’d left his own clothes at Billy’s cottage—he would go back to Sanur after dropping her off and spend one last night there before returning to Ubud. He, too, felt unready for the real world.

He suddenly remembered Theo and their dinner at Santo’s. He hadn’t even called to find out if his friend was okay. Theo
hadn’t called him, either. No one knew the rules of behavior for post-terrorist bombing. Sympathy cards? Support groups?

He’d call Theo later.

“If you come to San Francisco—” Jamie said, and then stopped.

Gabe glanced at her, hopeful.

She shook her head. “I’ll never see you again.”

“You might.”

“So strange,” Jamie said. “I know you.” She glanced at him. “And I don’t know a thing about you.”

“If you come back to Bali—”

“Not a chance,” she said.

“Then I’ll have to go to San Francisco. We’ll have dinner and tell each other how we survived.”

“What will you say?”

“I’ll say that I love Bali more than ever. That I’ve finally made it my home. That it took a terrorist attack to get me out of my stupor and kick my ass back into life.”

“I’m impressed. You’ve come far.”

“One can dream.”

He thought of another dream, one that included Jamie sitting with him on the deck of his joglo, drinking a glass of wine as they talked about their day. He pushed the thought away.

They passed a sign for the airport, and she looked down at her lap.

“And you?” Gabe asked. “What will you say?”

“Years from now? When we meet for dinner?”

“Yes.”

She kept her head low. “I’ve become the poster child for survivors of terrorist attacks. I speak at international conferences
worldwide and tell people that we have to join together to create a better world.”

“Wow.”

“Not likely, huh? I’m probably a barista in some stupid café in Berkeley. I’ve become an expert at making those designs with latte foam.”

“At least you get out of bed every morning.”

She looked at him with a flash of pride. “I’ll get out of bed every morning.”

“I know you will.”

Gabe pulled the car up to a barricade at the entrance to the airport. While security guards ran a mirror under the chassis of the car, Jamie kept her eyes closed.

“Do they always do this?” she asked through gritted teeth.

“I’m sure they’re taking extra precaution,” he assured her.

One guard asked for their identification. Gabe answered his questions: Yes, she had a flight in an hour; she was heading to the United States; yes, he would drop her off and leave. Yes, he was a resident of Bali. He was an American citizen.

When the guard let them through, Gabe could hear Jamie release her breath.

“It’s good,” he said. “We want tight security.”

“Maybe there’s been another threat,” she said, her voice trembling.

“No. If there were, they’d have closed down the airport.”

“How do you know?” she asked.

“You’ll be fine, Jamie. I won’t drop you off. I’ll walk you in. As far as they’ll let me.”

“You don’t have to do this,” she said.

Gabe inched along in traffic, moving toward the front of the airport.

“Breathe slowly,” he told her.

She kept her head down.

“I’m going to turn in to the parking lot now,” he said. “We’ll walk in together.”

He took the first parking space he could find, then switched off the engine and turned toward her.

“Jamie, you can do this,” he said. “There’s so much security here. Nothing’s going to happen.”

She looked toward the terminal, then back at Gabe, her eyes wide.

“Are you ready?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“Let me get your bag. Then I’ll come around and get you.”

She didn’t say anything, so he got out of the car and pulled her suitcase out of the backseat. He came around to the passenger side and opened her door.

“Take my arm,” he said.

She hesitated a moment. Then she stood, holding his arm with her good arm. He could feel her hand close around his biceps.

“Maybe they’ll let me walk you all the way in,” Gabe said. He kept his voice low and calm. “We can do this together.”

He started moving toward the terminal, and Jamie kept pace beside him. He knew that she was watching the same thing that he saw: an enormous crowd of people, mostly Westerners, gathered together in front of the terminal. He felt her grip tighten on his arm.