The Paradise Guest House (26 page)

“That’s right. And he killed your mother.”

Bambang lowers his head.

“The next day I want to go away from there. I have uncle—brother of my mother—who puts me on airplane to Bali. I do not want friend in Bali. I do not want to say, ‘My father killed my mother. I put him in jail.’ ”

He stops talking. Jamie sees smoke rising from one of the fields on the far side of town. She’s heard that the Balinese still burn their garbage, despite warnings from the government that it’s harmful. But from a distance it’s pretty, and the smoke curls in the sky, reaching toward the clouds.

She puts her arm around Bambang and he leans into her.

“You have done nothing wrong,” she tells him.

Jamie packs the last item into her suitcase and closes it. She’ll leave the straw hat for one of Nyoman’s relatives; she perches it on the middle of her bed. She hears a rustle of noise and turns around.

Gabe appears in the doorway of her cottage.

“Your bags, miss?”

Jamie stares at him, bewildered. For a moment she’s thrown back in time. It’s the man she met a year ago. It’s as if she knows him again, knows the gaze of his eyes, the lift of his smile. She knows the hand that is reaching for her suitcase.

“What are you doing here?”

“You ordered a taxi to take you to the airport?”

Jamie shakes her head. The man who walked away from her a few days ago was a stranger. He spoke to her in a voice that she had never heard before. This voice—it’s familiar. She remembers listening to him tell a story in the dark of her room at the beach cottage and thinking: What would it be like to kiss this man?

“Taxi?” she asks. “What are you talking about?”

“This taxi comes with a guided tour. We leave now, see a little bit of Bali, then I take you to the airport.”

“Who told you—”

“Shall I take this bag?” he asks, pointing to her suitcase.

“Yes. No! Why are you here?”

Gabe leans against the doorway. She remembers that tilt of his head. “I heard you were leaving.” His voice is quieter. He pauses, looking at his feet. “I want to spend a little time with you before you go.”

“I’m glad,” Jamie says, taking a deep breath. She imagines reaching out to touch his lips.

“Let me drive you to the airport,” he says.

“Gabe. Who told you I was leaving today?”

“An Indonesian boy. He found me at school.”

Jamie smiles. “Troublemaker.”

“Nice friends you make in Bali,” Gabe says.

“The best kind.”

“And the guy who runs this place—he cross-examined me as if he were your father.”

Jamie’s smile widens. “Another friend,” she says.

“More like an armed guard.”

“I like Bali this time around,” Jamie tells him.

Gabe nods. “Will you let me take you?”

“Yes.”

He lifts her suitcase and carries it out to his car. When he’s gone, Jamie leans against the door frame, looking out into the garden. Nyoman appears in the window of his cottage, his head down. She feels a rush of too many emotions. It’s as if she’s saying goodbye and hello at the same time.

She hears a shout and sees Dewi waving madly from the door of her grandparents’ cottage.

“Come on over!” Jamie calls out.

The girl runs toward her. Her hair sports streaks of vibrant blue. Today’s T-shirt reads:
SHUT UP AND KISS ME
.

“Hey, you,” Jamie says.

“I come with you,” Dewi says, a devilish smile on her face.

“To the United States?”

“California. I will be California girl.” The girl prances as if doing a go-go dance.

“You look a little more New York than California.”

“New York!” Dewi shouts.

“One day,” Jamie says. “You finish school and get your uncle to bring you for a visit.”

“Really?”

“Will you email me?” Jamie asks.

“Yes!” Dewi races over to Nyoman’s cottage. Jamie watches her, laughing. She runs back with a pad of paper and a pen. Jamie writes down her email address.

“You take picture of me?” Dewi asks.

Jamie pulls her camera out of her backpack. Dewi steps back and poses for the camera as if she’s been trained in Hollywood. She juts one shoulder forward and tilts her head, lets a strand of blue hair fall into her eye. She offers a seductive smile.

“Look at you,” Jamie says with a whistle.

Dewi jumps in the air. “Put picture on Internet. I get discovered by American movie director.”

“No way,” Jamie says. “Your uncle would kill me.” She leans over and kisses the girl on the cheek.

Dewi runs to her grandparents’ cottage. Before she disappears inside, she turns and waves at Jamie one last time.

“Who’s that?” Gabe asks. He’s walking up the path to her cottage.

“Another friend,” she tells him.

“You’ve been busy.”

“Very.”

“Anything else I can carry?”

Jamie shakes her head.

“I have to say goodbye to my host. You better go wait in the car like a good cabdriver, or he might run you out of town.”

Gabe salutes and turns back. Jamie looks inside her cottage one last time. She remembers her first night here. It was only six days ago, yet it feels like much longer. She’s a little sad to leave.

When she turns around, Nyoman is standing in front of her.

“I was just coming to see—”

“You have a man here—”

“I know.”

They stand awkwardly for a moment.

“I thank you—”

“You will—”

They both start speaking at once and stop again. Jamie laughs.

“My turn.”

“Your turn,” Nyoman says.

“Thank you.”

“I say the same words,” he tells her. “The words are not big enough.”

“I know what you mean.”

“The man is the one who saved you after the bomb.”

“Yes,” Jamie says. “He’ll take me to the airport.”

“I would take you—”

“I know. Thank you.”

“You come back one day.”

“I will come back one day.”

Jamie puts her arms around Nyoman. He stands stiffly for a second, and then he wraps his arms around her.

When she steps back, she sees the sadness on his face.

“One photo,” she says. “With a smile.”

He stands very straight and offers his dazzling smile. Through the viewfinder she sees that his glasses are crooked. She snaps the photo.

“Where are we going?” Jamie asks.

Gabe drives along unfamiliar roads through the countryside. They cross a river, where a couple of women bathe their children under a small waterfall. The water glistens on their brown bodies.

“That depends on how much time we have,” Gabe tells her. “When is your flight?”

“Nine
P.M.
”

“We have time,” he says.

“For?”

“You’ll see.”

“Thank you,” she says.

“For what?”

“For what you did at the ceremony. I was very touched.”

He shrugs. “I figured if I had to suffer through all that attention, then you should, too.” He smiles.

“It wasn’t easy,” Jamie says. “I almost passed out, but I thought it wouldn’t look very heroic.”

“It was a good ceremony,” Gabe says. “For a long time I didn’t want to go. I thought it was too soon. But it was good for Bali.”

“And for you?”

“Yes, for me.” He smiles.

“You’ve hated me for a year now,” Jamie says, her voice quiet.

He glances at her, his smile gone. “I was hurt by you,” he says seriously. “I understood why you left. But I had opened my heart to you.”

Jamie wants to reach out to him, but she keeps her hands folded in her lap. She won’t say: I opened my heart to you, too. He’s talking about the past, not the present.

Besides, she has a plane to catch.

Finally she says, “I’m sorry, Gabe.”

He nods. She wants to run her finger along his jaw. She looks away.

The rice fields spread, like a lush carpet, over the hills. She thinks about her swim by the waterfall a couple of nights ago, the cool night air on her body as she and Dewi trekked back through the woods to find the motorbike, the hum of the girls’ foreign voices as they gossiped with one another. I have always been a tourist, an outsider. What would happen if I belonged to a place? Now, driving through the Balinese countryside, she thinks about Berkeley, about a walk in the hills with her sketch pad. I’ve never drawn a picture of home, she thinks.

When she has been quiet for a long time, Gabe touches her knee. She watches his hand float beside her for a moment before he curls his fingers back around the steering wheel.

“Please,” he says gently. “Tell me about you.”

She nods. “I had a hard time. I was a complete disaster for a few weeks.”

“Did you go back to your mother’s?”

“Yes. But I hated having her take care of me. It’s odd: I had such an easy time letting you take care of me.”

“I think you didn’t have a choice,” Gabe offers with a wry smile. “If you could have, you would have bolted after the first day.”

Jamie remembers lying in bed one morning after the bombing, listening to the silence of the beach cottage. He’s gone, she thought. He went back to his mountain house, to his schoolkids, to a life of healthy people. And then she heard the front door open. Gabe walked into her room and he brought with him the smell of the ocean. I’ll get through this, she had thought.

“You’re wrong,” she tells him now. “I may not have known very much about letting someone take care of me—I hadn’t had much practice—but I wanted you there.”

Gabe glances at her and his smile disappears. She tries to read his expression: He seems to be looking for something he can’t find. I’m right here, she wants to say.

“Did you go back to your job?” he asks.

Jamie tells him about her mother’s remarkable attention—the trips to the hospital and to doctors’ offices to treat her wounds, the long nights when neither of them slept.

“I was scared that I’d never leave my mother’s house,” Jamie says. “After a month I knew I
had
to leave. I moved back to Berkeley and asked my boss for the first travel assignment he could find for me. I wasn’t ready. But I needed to be busy.”

Gabe reaches out his hand and tucks her hair behind her ear. It is a gesture so gentle, and yet she feels it deep inside her. Then he runs his finger along her scar.

“This healed well,” he says. “You healed well.”

“Not right away,” she tells him. “I made myself believe I could do it. In the same way that someone talks herself into walking across a hanging bridge hundreds of feet above a raging river, I talked myself back into life. It worked. Some of the time.”

She stops speaking for a while, exhausted by her torrent of words. They’ve been driving and driving, the countryside a continual stream of terraced rice paddies against a cloudless sky.

Jamie watches a young girl biking across the field. A boy chases her on his bike; she can hear the girl’s triumphant shouts. Catch me, she thinks.

“Where are we going?” Jamie asks.

“We’re almost there,” Gabe tells her.

They drive into an unfamiliar town. Jamie thinks: He’s wrong. I don’t want to visit another town, another temple or tourist attraction.

But then she rolls down the window and she can smell the ocean.

“Is this where—”

“Yes,” he tells her.

He pulls down a small street and drives to the end, where he parks the car. They both get out and walk toward the sound of the waves.

A path cuts between two stores, and then the sea is in front of them, calm and blue and enormous. They walk onto a small path that borders the beach; Jamie can see that it stretches in both directions.

“I remember this,” she says.

“This way leads to town,” Gabe says, pointing left, “and this way leads to the beach cottage where we stayed.”

“Let’s go to that restaurant—”

“La Taverna,” Gabe says.

“Yes.”

Jamie remembers every detail of the restaurant. She remembers running to the table in the balé in the rain—this time they take an umbrellaed table under clear skies. She remembers the waiter who talked about the meditation session interrupted by the bomb. She remembers their invention of Audrey and Cary, doppelgängers out for a spin on the dance floor. This time there is no band, only a recording of a popular Balinese song that makes Jamie think of waterfalls.

“And you?” she asks once they’re seated. “What was it like to return to your life after the bombing?”

They’re both drinking white wine. Their table faces the sea, and, since it’s midday, they’ve got a view of the dozen or so tourists brave enough to come to Bali. It’s different from the nearly empty beach in the days after the bombing. Now people swim in the shallow water; others sit in lounge chairs on the sand, reading or sleeping. A blond woman and her young son build an enormous mound in the sand, and, while Jamie watches, the mound becomes a turtle. There’s a constant flow of people walking along the path between the restaurant and the beach—many of them young Balinese kids, in small groups and in pairs. One teenage couple holds hands and bumps shoulders as they walk.

“I fell in love with you,” Gabe says, so suddenly that Jamie catches her breath. “At first I thought it was only the shared experience—no one else could understand what we went
through. But, no, it was you. I knew that the last night, when we made love.”

Jamie remembers the smile on his face while he slept.

“Then I ran away,” she says quietly.

He nods. “I didn’t know how to lose what I’d just found. Nothing in the world felt familiar except for you. And you were gone.”

“Gabe, I’m so sorry.” She wants to reach out and press her fingers to his lips. Don’t say more. I understand.

The waiter brings a tuna carpaccio and a salad of oranges and mint. They wait until he refills their wineglasses and leaves.

“I went back to Ubud after you left,” Gabe says. “I returned to my classroom. I lived my life more fully after that week. But when I saw you outside my school the other day, I was stunned. I had imagined that moment so many times, and in all my imaginings I reacted a little more like Cary Grant than Gabe Winters.” He offers Jamie a smile. “Gabe Winters walked away.”