The Paradise Guest House (11 page)

Dr. Wayan Genep. He called the number.

The phone rang for a long time, and finally a woman’s voice came on the line. “Who is this?” she asked in Indonesian.

“It’s Gabe Winters. I’m sorry to wake you. There’s been a bombing in Kuta. I need to talk to Wayan.” Gabe had met Rai, Wayan’s wife, a few times and knew that she spoke English.
She was Wayan’s assistant at his clinic. Was she a nurse? He couldn’t remember.

“A bombing?”

“At a couple of clubs.”

“Wayan!”

Rai dropped the phone. Gabe heard their voices in the background, speaking in rapid-fire Balinese. And then Wayan came on the line.

“Gabe?”

“I’ve got a woman with me. She’s hurt. She needs help.”

“Where are you?”

“Headed your way. Should I come to your house or can you meet me in the clinic?”

“How bad is she?”

“Bad gash near her eye. Probably a broken arm. She fades in and out of consciousness.”

“Meet me at the clinic. I’m on my way.”

“Thanks, Wayan.”

“Are there many others?”

“Hundreds,” Gabe said, and then he hung up.

“Where are we?” the woman asked, startling him.

They were a few minutes from the exit to Sanur, speeding through empty streets. “We’re going to a clinic. The doctor is a friend of mine.”

“I keep falling asleep.”

“You lost a lot of blood.”

“My boyfriend. Miguel. He wouldn’t have been there …” The woman’s voice faded, as if talking took too much effort.

Had he done the wrong thing? Should he have taken her
away when she needed to stay with her boyfriend? But she needed medical help. Someone else would collect the bodies.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“At first I couldn’t find him,” she said, her voice weak. “And so many people needed help.”

“Are you a doctor?” Gabe asked.

“No. Mountain guide. Wilderness EMT.”

“What’s your name?”

“Jamie. Jamie Hyde.”

“There were too many. We couldn’t save all of them.”

Gabe thought about Ethan again. He couldn’t do a damn thing when it mattered. He couldn’t make Ethan’s headache go away. He couldn’t even make him smile. He remembered lying down next to him in the hospital bed, his boy curled into him. “I’m sorry, sir,” the nurse said, walking quickly into the room as if he had set off alarms. “You’re not allowed to do that.” To hold my son? To whisper in his ear?

“Did you say it was a bomb?” Jamie asked. “I couldn’t remember if I dreamed that.”

“Yes,” Gabe told her.

She was quiet for a moment.

“You live here?” he asked.

“No. Got here a few days ago.”

“Are you in a lot of pain?”

“I think I’m going to rest now, if that’s all right with you.”

Gabe smiled. “I’ll wake you when we get there,” he said, but he knew that she was already sleeping.

Wayan came out to the car as soon as Gabe pulled up—he must have been waiting at the window. The streets of Sanur
were empty at two-fifteen in the morning. They don’t know, Gabe thought, looking up at the dark stores and houses and apartment buildings. When they wake up, the world will be different.

Wayan and Gabe helped Jamie from the seat and walked her slowly into the clinic. Rai met them in the waiting room, wiping her hands on her pants.

“I have the room ready,” she said. She was wide awake and ready to work. She didn’t even acknowledge Gabe.

“We’ll bring her in,” Wayan said.

Jamie moaned when they laid her on the table. Her eyes fluttered open and then closed again.

“Her name is Jamie,” Gabe said. “American, I think.”

“She is a friend?” Wayan asked.

“I don’t know her.”

“We’ll take care of you, Jamie,” Wayan said.

Gabe felt Rai’s hand on his arm.

“Go sit in the waiting room,” she said tenderly. “Get some rest.”

“Can’t I help?” Gabe asked. He felt unready to leave the woman. He needed to do something. “You have to leave,” the doctor had told him when Ethan began to tremble uncontrollably. Gabe had wanted nothing more than to hold his son in his arms. “You have to leave
now
.” Gabe had stumbled out of the room backward, holding Ethan’s gaze as long as he could.

“We will work now,” Wayan said. “I will tell you if you can do anything.”

“You have done a lot already,” Rai added.

Gabe pressed his hand on Jamie’s bare foot. When did she lose her shoe? He curled his hand around her toes. He didn’t want to let go.

“Be strong,” he said quietly. He remembered her administering CPR in the wreckage of the club. She
was
strong. But strong enough?

He walked back into the waiting room, shutting the door behind him.

Gabe must have dozed—when the door squeaked open, he sat up, startled.

“Gabe,” Wayan said gently.

“Is she alive?” he asked, his voice caught in his throat.

“She is alive. She’s sleeping now. I gave her something for the pain.”

“How bad …?”

“I stitched up the gash on her face and put a cast on her arm. I do not know about internal injuries. We’ll know more in the morning when I can run some tests.”

“She’ll be okay?”

“She will be okay. Tell me about the bomb.”

“There were two, I think. Might have been more. Both in clubs in Kuta. Hundreds of people killed, hundreds injured. The place was an inferno.”

“Were you hurt?”

“No, I was in a restaurant nearby. I found her at Paddy’s. There were so many dead bodies.”

“You need a shower and a bed,” Wayan said. “Go back to our house. Rai and I will stay here with the girl. More people may be coming.”

“No, I’ll stay here.”

“The girl will sleep for a while. Take a shower. Get some rest. And then you can help her when she wakes up.”

“I left so many people,” Gabe told him. “I couldn’t help everyone. I stepped over them while they were screaming for help.”

“You did what you could.”

“No. I could have carried more of them out. The building was going to collapse.”

Wayan put his hand on Gabe’s shoulder, and Gabe bent over, releasing a sob that seemed to tear through his body. Wayan’s hand remained there while he cried.

Gabe was deep in a dreamless sleep when his cellphone rang. He reached for it on his bedside table, but there was no bedside table. He bolted up.

His phone was on top of his jeans, which were on the floor at the side of the bed. An unfamiliar room—he was at Wayan’s house. And then the memories flooded him: the bombs, the dead bodies, the woman in his arms. He looked at the light streaming through the window. It was mid-morning, he guessed. Why hadn’t Wayan wakened him?

“Hello?” he said into the phone.

“Oh, my God, I was so worried.”

“Molly.”

“I’m in Singapore. My flight leaves in an hour. I just heard about the bombing. Are you in Ubud?”

“No, I was there. Nearby. I’m fine. But I saw it.”

Molly burst into tears, and Gabe waited a moment while she cried. He looked around the room. His jeans were washed and neatly folded on the floor. A fresh shirt—Wayan’s, he guessed—sat next to the jeans.

“Why?” Molly asked. “Why did they do it?”

“Who did it?” Gabe asked. “I don’t know anything.”

“Terrorists. I don’t know, al-Qaeda, I guess. No one has claimed responsibility yet.”

“Why would terrorists bomb clubs?”

Molly sobbed. “You saw it? You saw the clubs?”

“I went in one,” Gabe said. “I tried to help.”

He didn’t say: I saved people. He felt a rush of emotions that he had buried the night before while he raced in and out of the club. Another bomb could have gone off. A firestorm could have rushed through every inch of space in the building. He had acted on pure instinct, never pausing to think about these possibilities. He remembered the line of the injured—his people—on the street in front of the club. Dozens more waited to be saved. He had failed them. He had quit. He took one last woman and fled as if there was no more that he could do.

“Wasn’t it dangerous?” Molly asked.

“It was awful,” Gabe said, surprised to find his voice. “The clubs were ravaged.”

Once more, he saw the faces of young people begging him for help as he stepped over them, heading toward the street. He was crying now, pressing the phone against his ear, squeezing his eyes closed to stop the images in his mind.

“And you weren’t hurt? You would tell me, right?”

“I wasn’t hurt.”

“Oh, God, Gabe. Come home. Meet me in Singapore and we’ll fly home together. Don’t stay there. It’s dangerous. I’m sure it’s dangerous.”

“I’m not leaving, Molly. I need to be here. I need to help.”

Gabe thought back to that day in Cambridge, waiting for the doctor down the hall from Ethan’s hospital room. The lounge was painted in pastel colors, and still everything was
too bright. Heather had sat in a child’s chair at a child’s table doing a child’s puzzle. She’d create the picture of the house, the tree, the swing, the cartoon family, and then break up the pieces and start all over again.

“Sit down,” she told him. “You’re making me crazy.”

He kept walking in circles around the room. Each time he passed the window, he’d look outside and think: It’s a normal day. There are cars driving down the street. There’s a woman pushing a stroller. Your son can’t die on a day like this. If the day is normal, Ethan will live. If Heather puts the puzzle pieces together, the family is whole. If the doctor comes out of the room, he will say, “Ethan’s waiting for you. He wants to tell you a secret.”

The boy loved secrets.

“You can’t help them,” Molly insisted, pulling him out of his memory. Her voice was loud, and Gabe held the phone away from his ear. “This isn’t your problem. This is their problem.”

“This is my home now. It’s my problem, too.”

Gabe dressed and hurried out of the bedroom. Wayan’s small and tidy house was empty, but there was a note on the kitchen table.
Call when you wake up. The news of the bombing is terrible
.

Next to the note was a bowl of fruit and a small cake. A glass of juice and a plate were set on the table for him.

He thought about the last time he ate. Lunch with Molly at a café in Ubud before the drive to the airport. The Balinese waitress had known him—she had a child at the school. She gave him a kiss and whispered in his ear, “Is she your girlfriend?”
“My sister,” he said, and he introduced the two. The waitress teased: “Why this man has no girlfriend?” When the waitress walked away, Molly had said to him, “It’s time, Gabe. You could try again, you know. It’s been more than three years since your divorce.”

Had he answered her? He had been so singularly focused since he moved to Bali. Engage in life. Find meaningful work. Be a part of something. And yet he still felt as if he was watching his life from a distance. Love? He hadn’t written that part for himself yet.

He knew that Molly hadn’t dated since her boyfriend, Max, moved to Germany. Max hadn’t wanted children—was that the reason he left her? Gabe never asked. Molly told him one night that she’d choose a child over a man at this point in her life. He was still hoping she’d have a chance at both.

“You can have another child,” Molly said at the café.

“A replacement?” he asked.

“No, of course not. But don’t give up on the possibility. You loved being a dad.”

“I did. And so I teach.”

“And then you go home alone.”

“I don’t know what will happen, Molly. I move a little more slowly these days. Maybe it’s the heat. But it’s easier to wake up in the morning now. I have something to look forward to.”

Molly had reached out her hand across the café table. “I’m a pain-in-the-ass big sister,” she said.

For the rest of lunch, they simply ate their sandwiches and talked about the Red Sox.

Now Gabe realized he was hungry. But he didn’t want to take the time to eat—he wanted to find out about the woman. Jamie. In the car he had told her, “You’re going to be all right.” She had lost her boyfriend and she had almost died. How did
he
know she was going to be all right?

He pulled out his phone and then decided against calling Wayan. He didn’t want to be told to stay away. He didn’t want to hear Wayan’s words: There’s nothing you can do.

He drank the juice and took the cake with him to eat as he drove to the clinic.

The streets of Sanur were almost entirely deserted. Gabe loved Sanur—a beach town south of Denpasar, very different from the resort areas of Kuta and Seminyak. Sanur was not hip—the Seminyak set called it Snore. It was sleepy and quiet, without upscale boutiques and gourmet restaurants. Young people didn’t vacation here, but families did: They loved the white-sand beaches, the calm sea, which was protected by a reef, and the low prices of the hotels and restaurants. The Balinese who lived in Sanur didn’t seem to care that the big hoteliers ignored them and the European jet-setters who once flocked there had now moved on. Sanur was a good place to live.

Gabe had a friend with a weekend house here, and he often came down for a few days to swim in the warm sea or to take long walks on the beach. Billy had moved from Sanur to Ubud for a yearlong landscaping project, but he kept his beach cottage. Sanur was less than an hour from Ubud, so Billy rented a studio in Ubud and headed south as often as he could, usually with a carload of friends and beer.