The Paradise Guest House (8 page)

He blinks his eyes and his face pinches with concentration. “Jamie,” he says.

She can’t speak. Her mouth feels dry and unfamiliar.

He reaches out and touches the scar on her face. She remembers how he would change her bandage, his fingers so gentle on her wound. Now, even though the skin is numb, a jolt of electricity runs through her. She trembles and he takes his hand away.

She watches his green eyes. She waits for him to speak. But he is silent.

“I came to say I’m sorry,” she says finally. She hears the words in her head, and they reverberate, as if she’s been saying them over and over again for months. In a way, she has.

“Jamie,” he says. Then he shakes his head.

His hand reaches toward her face again. This time he touches her lips.

“Please,” he says. “Go home.”

Part Two

2002

“Do you think you’ll come home?” Molly asked, pausing for a moment before she added, “Ever?”

“This is home,” Gabe said gently.

He honked his horn and waited for the pigtailed girl on the motorbike to move over before he passed her. The oncoming herd of motorbikes swerved by, only inches from his window.

“I don’t know how you drive here,” Molly muttered.

Without looking at her, Gabe could envision his sister’s face, tightening as if in pain, trying to hold back tears. He knew Molly better than he knew anyone—even his ex-wife.

“It’s like you threw away a whole lifetime,” she said, her voice small.

“I didn’t throw anything away.”

“I feel a little discarded. Yesterday’s family. Too bad they don’t have a recycling bin for things like that.”

“Oh, come on,” Gabe said. He reached out and flicked her arm with his finger.

“Ouch! What? I’m not supposed to say I miss you?”

He glanced over at her. She was watching the traffic, and he could see her outstretched foot press an imaginary brake. He smiled. They used to tease their mother about pumping the brake when she drove.

“I miss you, too,” he said. “You know that.”

She poked at buttons on the dashboard. “It’s so damn hot. How can you stand it?”

He reached over and turned up the air-conditioning. The fan surged, then slowed, coolish air pushing out at them, making little difference in the temperature.

“You slow down,” he told her. “That’s what I’ve learned.”

“I’m sitting here. That’s slow, wouldn’t you say? And I’m drenched.”

He smiled. “You’re in motion even when you’re sitting still.”

“God damn you,” she said, and then she was crying, her head down, her face in her hands.

He reached out his hand and rubbed her back.

“Sometimes I just need you around,” she said, her voice muffled behind her hands. “And you’re a million miles away.”

“I’ll call more often,” he told her.

“Maybe I’m crying for Mom. I’m forty-three years old and I feel like a fucking orphan.”

When Gabe was eleven and Molly was fourteen, their mother died of a heart attack. Their father, an artist, holed up in his garage studio, creating tortured sculptures out of found objects. He rarely spoke to them; he rarely spoke to anyone after their mom’s death. Molly’s sympathy eventually turned to anger, and one night, after serving Gabe macaroni and cheese for dinner, she barged into their father’s studio. Gabe tagged behind her. Their dad was sitting and staring at a sculpture of a woman twisted into some inhuman shape. “
We’re
here,” Molly said when he finally looked at them. “You still have
us
.”

Gabe found out years later that his dad had told Molly where he kept all the financial papers—just in case something
happened to him. But nothing did happen to him. He poured his grief into his art, turning his back on his kids.

Molly took care of Gabe, choosing to live at home while attending Harvard, so that the two of them could sit at the dining room table, doing their homework side by side, the sound of their dad’s welding tools screeching through the night.

Their father died a year before Ethan was born, and though Gabe and Molly had reconciled with him, it was always their mother’s death that they carried with them like a stone.

“You’re not alone,” Gabe said now, his hand drawing smooth circles on Molly’s back.

“When Ethan died,” Molly said, and Gabe flinched. He returned his hand to the steering wheel. “I felt like I mattered in your life.”

“You do matter.”

“You needed me. But what happens when I need you?”

“Molly, I can’t move back. I don’t want to move back. I’m still trying to make a new life for myself. And it’s here.”

“You’re going to be alone for the rest of your life?”

“I don’t know anything about the rest of my life,” Gabe said. “This is what I want right now.”

“I think you’re just torturing yourself by teaching kids. It can’t be good for you.”

“It
is
good for me,” he insisted. He remembered the first day Lena asked him to help out at the school in Ubud, when a teacher got sick. The kids were seven—the age Ethan would have been then. He’d walked through the classroom door as if entering a nightmare. Would Ethan have been loud and rambunctious like that kid? No. He would have waited for a while before he tugged on Gabe’s shirt, the way a boy named Christopher did.

“What do you need?” Gabe had asked him, squatting to be at eye level with the boy, who had eyes like deep pools. He wouldn’t say a word.

“Do you want me to help you pick out a book?”

Christopher nodded, and his curly hair bounced on his head. Ethan’s hair had been lighter, straighter. His eyes were green; this boy’s eyes were blue. Gabe smelled something familiar—did the kid use the same shampoo?

“Do you like books about animals?”

The boy nodded again.

Gabe walked to the shelf as if expecting to find all of Ethan’s books lined up there. No, these were unfamiliar. The boy pulled one off the shelf. A red lion, mouth mid-roar, graced the cover.

Christopher took Gabe’s hand and led him to the reading corner, tugged until Gabe settled on the floor, and then the boy sat, leaning his bony shoulder into him.

Gabe began to read and soon the other kids gathered around, trying to sit as close as possible.

A car honked, and Gabe swerved around a stalled truck in the middle of the road. He glanced at Molly, who had her eyes squeezed shut.

“It helps me remember him,” he told her. He didn’t tell her about the days that he couldn’t speak because someone said something Ethan-like. Or the days when parents came to complain about their children because they weren’t reading well enough or weren’t making friends and Gabe found himself shaking with sudden anger. What he would give to have problems like that.

“I remember his voice,” Molly said. “When I’m lying in bed at night I listen for him. If I could hear him say Mollipop again—just that would make me happy.”

Gabe imagined Ethan at the beach on the Cape, shouting for his aunt to come in the water.
Mollipop! Jump waves with me!
He was brown from a summer in the sun, and his hair had turned blond. He hopped around the edge of the surf, a boy with too much energy. When Molly ran toward him, he leapt into her arms and wrapped his body around her like a monkey.

A bus driver blasted his horn behind them, and Molly startled.

“They call this paradise?” she grumbled.

Molly had been single for two years, ever since the man she loved moved to Germany and didn’t ask her to join him. She wanted a child, she wanted love in her life, she wanted to belong to someone else’s family if she couldn’t have her own. Gabe worried about her, but he knew he couldn’t save her. Since Ethan’s death, it took all his resources to save himself.

“We almost there?” she asked, looking up at the long stretch of crowded Bali highway. In a quick second, she was a kid again, nine years old, in the back of the car with him, while their parents drove them to the Cape.

“We’re almost there,” he assured her.

At the airport, after hugging Molly and promising her that he’d come visit in Boston sometime in the next year, Gabe sat in the car for a moment, feeling her absence. She stirred up the air around him, and even though he worked hard to keep his life calm and measured, he already missed the intensity of his sister. There was something about all that love emanating from her, uncovering needs and desires that he was usually so good at tucking away somewhere safe.

Was he lonely? She had asked him that in the middle of a
dance ceremony they watched last weekend. They were surrounded by colleagues from his school, friends with whom they had just spent a few busy hours. She knew him too well. All of those people, and still he ached with loneliness.

He pulled out his cellphone and scrolled through his contacts. Theo Huntley. A guy who could be counted on to fill up all the space. He called the number.

“Gabe Winters!” a deep voice boomed. “You still in Bali? Haven’t heard from you in two years, mate.”

“I’m in Ubud,” Gabe said. “Teaching gig.”

“No shit.”

“You doing anything for dinner?”

“Tonight?”

“Yeah. I’m at the airport. Meet me in Kuta in an hour.”

“Guess I better show up. Might be another long while until I hear from you again.”

“Might be.”

“Santo’s?”

“Thanks, Theo.”

He dropped the phone onto the seat next to him and pulled out of the airport. Theo had been his first contact in Bali, a friend of a friend at
The Boston Globe
. He, too, had been a journalist; he, too, had dropped out. Theo rented a villa near the beach in Seminyak to write the Great Australian Novel. From what Gabe understood during the two weeks he spent with Theo when he first arrived, the guy spent much more time surfing than writing. Bali was a mecca for young Australians—a short flight, cheap rooms, great waves. They partied hard. Gabe stayed in Theo’s small, cluttered writing room, on a sofa bed, and Theo had promised him: “Oh, don’t worry about
wrecking my rhythm, man. I haven’t written a word in a month.” The desk was covered with surfing magazines.

Gabe turned in to traffic and headed to Kuta, his mood lighter. He didn’t want to go back to Ubud just yet. Maybe for one night he could use a little party in his life. Ubud was the anti-Kuta. An hour away, up in the mountains, Ubud attracted the spiritual seekers, the thinkers, escapees from the frivolous life.

If he drank too much, maybe he’d crash on Theo’s sofa bed, for old times’ sake, and make the drive back to Ubud in the morning.

“It’s not as if you didn’t have a life before you moved here,” Molly had said at the airport. “You were happy in Boston before Ethan died.”

“I can’t remember,” Gabe told her.

But he could remember. One night Ethan woke up in the middle of the night from a nightmare. He climbed into bed with Gabe and Heather, squeezing between them. Heather sang to him, a soft lullaby that settled the boy into an easy sleep in minutes. She kept singing, though, and Gabe stroked her hair, his arm stretched over Ethan’s shoulder. “Don’t stop,” he whispered, as if he knew that all of it—sleep, good dreams, a beautiful boy, a loving marriage—was minutes away from its last sweet note.

Now he turned on the radio and blasted the music—Bob Marley—then opened the windows and let the heat, the thrum of motorbikes, the blare of horns, course through him. So much for quiet. A visit from his sister and all he wanted was noise.