The Paradise Guest House (4 page)

“I no have wallet,” he repeats. His face droops in sadness.

The kid is a good liar, she thinks. And she can’t figure out his scam—why is he back here? What can he possibly get out of this?

Is it possible he’s innocent?

“I have no money,” she says, trying for a heartfelt appeal. “I have no way to get any money.”

“No, miss. You wrong. I buy your coffee. I have your change!” Again, he waves her money hopefully, like a flag of surrender.

She turns and starts to walk away.

“Stop, miss! Take coffee! Take change! I no have wallet!”

She keeps walking. The dog’s pitiful whine follows her down the street.

Jamie calls her boss but again gets his voice mail. She tries to remember if Larson is traveling somewhere out of cell reach. He went to Houston last week to consult with a new specialist. No, this week he’s got chemo again. He’s supposed to answer his damn phone.

She calls her mother and leaves a message for her, too.

Then she lies down on the bed in her cottage, watching the errant ceiling fan. When her cellphone rings a few minutes later, she leaps at it.

“Mom!”

“Are you all right? Did you get hurt?”

Jamie sits up. “I’m fine. I didn’t get mugged, but someone stole my money and my credit card. I don’t even know how they got it.”

“Come home, sweetheart.”

“No,” she says calmly. “I’m going to stay. I just need you to wire money.”

“All you have to do is change your return ticket. I’ll pay for the penalty.”

Jamie lies back on the bed, the phone at her ear. Jamie loves her mother’s love and flees from her mother’s love. She stayed with her mom in Palo Alto after returning from Bali the year before, seeing doctors at Stanford to reset her broken arm, to remove the stitches on her face. Rose made a list of all the friends who called Jamie, all the good people who tried to visit
and send gifts. But Jamie turned them all away. She took the list and ripped it into tiny pieces, and when she dropped them into the trash can, she saw parts of the names swirl through the air, as if they, too, had been blown apart and were no longer recognizable.

She left Rose’s house a month after the bombing, pushing herself back to Berkeley, to work, to the next Global Adventures trip. She was terrified of spending every evening of the rest of her life watching a romantic comedy on the blue couch in her mother’s den, sharing a bowl of buttered popcorn.

Now, on the phone, they’re both quiet, breathing into each other’s ear.

“Tell me where to wire the money,” Rose says wearily.

“Never mind,” Jamie replies. “I’ll figure this out.”

“You don’t have to stay,” her mother says.

“Actually, I do,” she tells her.

When Jamie was fourteen, she came home from school one day to find her mother baking dozens of brownies. Boxes covered the dining room table, the center island, the kitchen counter. Smoke curled from the edges of the oven—a batch was burning while Rose furiously beat eggs into brownie mix.

Jamie rushed to the oven to pull out the blackened pan. “Mom. What the hell?”

Rose continued to beat the batter into a frenzy.

“Stop. Talk to me.”

“Put those in the garbage,” Rose said, her head down. “I’m starting a new batch.”

Jamie placed her hand on top of her mother’s and held it still. She waited while Rose caught her breath.

“Your father,” she finally said. “He’s leaving.”

“What?”

“He’s tired of marriage. He’s tired of me. I don’t make him happy.”

Her father loved brownies. Jamie turned off the oven. The smell of burned chocolate filled her lungs. Her stomach heaved.

“Come outside, Mom,” she said.

“I can’t. I have to get the next batch in.”

“Now.”

Jamie led her mother into the backyard. They sat down at the table on the patio in the rain.

“You’re getting divorced?” she asked.

Rose looked at her for the first time. “You think it’s my fault. You think everything your father does is right.” Her eyes were burning bright, as if she had a fever.

“That’s crazy,” Jamie said. But already she was thinking: He’ll take me. I’ll go with him.

As it turned out, her father didn’t take her. When he came home that night, he told Jamie that he was moving to Connecticut, that he would send her a plane ticket to come visit him on her school vacations. Already he looked changed somehow. He was wearing a sweater she had never seen before—a dark-green V-necked sweater without a shirt under it. It made him look like a movie star.

“When you visit, we’ll hike the Appalachian Trail,” Dad promised. “It takes months if you do the whole thing. Won’t that be something?”

That night, Jamie rode her bike to the Stanford Park Hotel. Her father had told her that he’d be staying there for a few weeks, until they could “straighten out this mess.” While locking her bike, she glanced through the window and saw him in
the hotel lobby. He walked across the room, took a woman in his arms, and kissed her. Jamie felt a gut punch of fury. As Dad stepped back, the woman looked in Jamie’s direction. Miss Pauline. Months earlier, her father had tried to get Jamie to study ballet, even though she hated all things girly. “Why would I want to take a ballet class?” she’d snapped at her father, who made a deal with her: Take one class and they’d go camping that weekend.

Miss Pauline, tall and skinny with blond hair pulled into a tight bun, made all the girls walk around the room as if they were floating. She told them to imagine a string that pulled them up from the crown of their heads. “Grace,” Miss Pauline had promised them. “Grace and beauty.” Jamie had walked out before the class was over. “Why would you want me to do that?” she asked her father later, finding herself close to tears without understanding why. He didn’t have an answer for her, and, in the end, they didn’t go camping that weekend.

When Miss Pauline pointed at the window, Jamie told herself to run, to get back on her bike and ride as far away from the Stanford Park Hotel as she could possibly get. But she was still standing there when her father walked outside and put his hand on her shoulder. She slapped it away.

“She’s, like, twenty years old,” Jamie said. She felt tears on her face and angrily swiped at them with the sleeve of her sweatshirt.

“She’s twenty-six,” her father said.

“You are such a liar,” Jamie said.

“I haven’t lied. I’m doing the right thing by leaving.”

“You lie about everything,” she told him. Her father had taken her on her first camping trip. They summited Mount Shasta together. He taught her to rock climb at Pinnacles. They
rafted class-five rapids in Idaho the summer before. How could he fall in love with a ballerina?

Over the next years, Jamie visited her dad and Miss Pauline during Christmas break and for a week or two each summer. Pauline had baby after baby, losing both grace and beauty with each passing year. And though Jamie and her dad would take day hikes when they could escape, he never had time to trek the Appalachian Trail. Over the past ten years their relationship had cooled—now Jamie talked to him only a couple of times a year. He didn’t even know she was in Bali last year until weeks after she returned.

Nyoman knocks on the door of the cottage, even though it’s open.

“We leave for the Barong now,” he says. He’s smiling again, tourist guide at his best. He wears a colorful sarong, wrapped like a long skirt around his legs. It’s tied at the waist with a green sash. His shirt is a simple white polo shirt, but he wears a bandanna of some sort around his forehead, wrapped in an elaborate bow.

“Do I need a sarong?” Jamie asks.

“You are fine,” Nyoman tells her.

“I’m not so fine. Someone stole my wallet.”

Nyoman’s face darkens; he lowers his head. “For many years we have no crime in Bali, and now things change. I am sorry for this.”

“I’ll work it out. It happens everywhere.”

“Not in Bali. My country is different.” He looks up at her. Even his sad face makes her feel better.

“What is Barong?” Jamie asks.

“Dance performance. Very important in Bali.”

“I didn’t see it on my itinerary,” she tells him.

“It is on my itinerary,” he says proudly.

“Let’s go, then.” She sighs and then stands up, gathers her bag and her sunglasses, tucks her hair up with a clip.

When they pass through the gate of the compound, Jamie looks for Bambang and his dog. They’re nowhere in sight.

Nyoman leads her to a small car parked down the street. They both climb in and he drives out of town.

“The dance of the Barong,” he explains, “is the story of good and evil. The Barong is a magical lion. He has to fight against Rangda, the witch. We watch the story of the Barong many, many times.”

Jamie doesn’t care about the dance of the lion and the witch, but she likes driving with Nyoman. He’s got air-conditioning in the car, and the view of the countryside is astonishing. They drive through long stretches of rice paddies that follow the land up hillsides and down toward the river. The brilliant blue sky bumps up against the green landscape, and the colors collide. Nyoman falls into a long silence, and Jamie stares out the window.

Several months ago, she sat on the porch of Larson’s Berkeley house, riffling through a pile of catalogs and brochures about Bali, many of them filled with alluring photos of terraced hills like these.

Larson walked outside with two beers and handed her one.

“Put that crap away,” he snapped. “We’re not going to Bali.”

“We?” she asked, as if she didn’t know what he was talking about.

“Global Adventures. You’re off that assignment, remember? There’s not one American who will sign on for a trip to Bali right now.”

“Later,” she mumbled. “A year from now.”

Larson leaned over and swiped all the catalogs off the table. They tumbled onto the floor at her feet.

“Hey!” she yelled.

“Jamie, listen to me.” He squatted down at her side. “I don’t think this is about Bali. You don’t even want to go back to Bali.”

“It’s not for me,” she said weakly. “It’s for a tour.”

“You haven’t stopped thinking about Gabe. Not for one minute since you got back.”

“Cram it, Larson.” She tugged on his ponytail. Before he stood up, he kissed the top of her head.

“Let him go,” he said softly.

Now she glances at Nyoman, who is lost in his own thoughts.

“We are here,” he says finally.

At the edge of a small village, he pulls the car over to the side of a road. They walk into a park where rows of chairs face a makeshift stage. Most of the chairs are filled with children. There are a few old men sitting in the back row and a group of tourists who gather around a Balinese guide. Nyoman leads her to a couple of seats near the front, among the children. The day is hot, and the only shade comes from a large banyan tree.

Music fills the air. The musicians file in from somewhere behind the audience, and they take their seats on the grass at the side of the stage. Jamie can’t identify many of the
instruments—this must be a gamelan orchestra. There’s a collection of bronze gongs, a xylophone, drums, flutes, cymbals. The music percolates and flutters.

Jamie would be happy just to listen to this for an hour or so. Already she feels better.

But soon the curtain that stretches behind the platform opens up and a lion scampers onto the stage. He’s a two-man lion, with a shaggy coat made of something that looks like shredded leaves. His face is a spectacular mask, carved of leather, painted gold.

The audience cheers wildly.

“This is the Barong,” Nyoman explains.

The four legs of the Barong, dressed in striped leggings and with bare feet, dance wildly, and somehow the huge head of the beast moves as if it’s light as air. Jamie notices that Nyoman already wears a smile on his face.

“And this is Rangda,” Nyoman whispers in her ear.

Rangda explodes onto the stage. She is more ferocious than the Barong, and more opulent. She has a gold-painted mask with bulging eyes. A long red tongue hangs from her open mouth, reaching almost to her knees.

Rangda looks out at the audience. Her gaze settles directly on Jamie. She cocks her head, as if thinking, and then she bellows. The monster stares at Jamie, and Jamie stares right back. I know you, she thinks.

For the next hour, the Barong and his followers try to kill Rangda, but she is too powerful. They finally turn the daggers on themselves.

When the show is over, and when the applause dies down, Jamie turns to Nyoman.

“Good doesn’t win over evil?” she asks.

“No one wins,” he tells her. “There is always a balance. That is the way of the world.”

“My wife, she was a waitress at Sari Club,” Nyoman says into the silence of the car. “She loved her job very much. She went to work that night—the night of the bombing—and she was very happy.”

They are driving back through the rice fields. These are his first words since watching the performance.

“I’m so sorry,” Jamie says.

“I was angry for a long time,” he tells her.

“At the terrorists?”

“Yes. And I was angry at you. At Westerners. The bombs were meant for you. Not for my wife.”

“You’re no longer angry?”

“No. There is no reason for my anger. It does nothing. This has happened, so it was meant to happen. I accept my loss.”

Nyoman is squinting into the sun, and it looks as if he’s making an effort to believe what he says. Jamie doesn’t know this man or this religion. Maybe acceptance is the easiest thing in the world.

“My wife, she died right away,” he says.

For a year now, Jamie has been haunted by the bodies she saw in the nightclub after the bomb exploded. They hover like shadows in her mind; they whisper to her when she first awakens.

Her body trembles as if she’s freezing. Tonight she will sketch the face of Rangda.

“My wife was the young sister of my friend,” he says. “I knew her when we were children. I was a serious boy, and she
was a spirited girl who laughed a great deal.” He stares at the road ahead. “We lived in the same village and our parents knew one another well. I loved her the moment I saw her.”