Hedging His Bets

by Laura Carter

  “Ah, don’t do this to me, Becky,” Drew grumbles.

  “Sorry, baby, but I think it’s for the greater good,” she says. Then she tells me, “Obviously, desserts are my thing. I’m a patisserie chef, after all. I gave Drew some sample desserts one night when he came to Edmond’s restaurant. I was thanking him for buying me breakfast, which is another story, and because I was trying to convince him he could be a sweet man.” Drew rests his chin on Becky’s head and tightens his hold around her. “So, he took my desserts in a doggy bag. The next day, he came to the restaurant and left a note for me. Do you know what it said? It ranked my desserts out of ten. He gave them all five or six. Then at the end, he signed off with something like ‘I’m still not a fan of mediocre desserts’.”

  “You’re such a dick,” I tell Drew, as the three of us laugh. “That’s so uncool, man.”

  “Jake, have you grasped the point of my story?”

  I feel my eyes narrow.

  “Clothes are Jess’s passion and every day you basically call her mediocre.” There it is. The penny. Falling. “You tease her. You flirt with her. But what you’re actually telling her is the exact opposite. She looks good. You’re proud of her. And the even bigger point is, you’re just like your brother. All the five out of tens you give her now are going to lead to you two being together, once you both get your shit together.”

  Once we both get our shit together? Do we have shit to get together? “You’ve been spending too much time with Sarah,” I tell Becky. “I hear what you’re saying, Becky, but Jess and I aren’t like you and Drew. We’re already friends, you know? I wouldn’t give her up for the world. And I know too damn well how easy it is to mess up a good thing.”

  With impeccable timing, a low voice with a mixed up American accent with a French lilt, or maybe a French accent with an American lilt, comes from inside the house. “I have focaccia, brie, jambon, fine wine.”

  Edmond steps onto the decking with his arms full of boxes. Amelie appears at his side holding two large brown paper bags of food, a baguette poking out the top of one.

  Chapter 8

  Jess

  Seeing Jake with his friends and family warms my heart. The way he cares for them is something I’ve admired in him since the first day we met. It’s something I never had, and I’ll admit it makes me a little envious. I’ve never had a network of people to love, and love me back, the way Jake has. And he’s so easy around them. The way he is with me. He’s himself with everyone. He doesn’t play up to crowds. That charm that is sometimes flirtatious, sometimes endearing, and sometimes a little goofy, is natural for him. He’s a nice guy, a great guy. And, boy, he can make me laugh. For the last two years, he’s continuously managed to find a smile in me that I didn’t think I had.

  It’s not that I’m unsociable, or that I never wanted to be happy. I just wasn’t. I like chatting to people and learning new things. I love that my travels have meant I’ve experienced so many cultures and walks of life. But I can’t boast that I ever had friends. The closest I came to friends were ladies working in rice paddy fields who didn’t speak my language, and Danny. He’s the one exception. And that didn’t end well.

  I was fourteen years old when I arrived in Laos with my aunt and uncle.

  “Look at the lush greenery. Smell that air.” Aunt Ruth sucked in a breath that made her nostrils flare. As I breathed in with her, I got the distinct scent of fish and something foisty coming off Laos’s Mekong River. I didn’t get the freshness she was talking about at all.

  I had to release my breath before my aunt. Her daily yoga and meditation meant she could inhale for an insanely long time before needing to release. Despite being forced to do yoga, tai chi, and meditation a lot over the last two years, I wasn’t at her lung capacity. Not even close.

  “I can sense the tantra is going to be wonderful here,” Uncle John said. Aunt Ruth rocked into his side with a short giggle, which told me they weren’t talking about Hindu and Buddhist traditions but tantric sexy-time. That I didn’t need to know about.

  As our large backpacks—basically containing the entire contents of our lives—were lifted off the barge and set down among a pile of other backpacks, we wormed between the gap-year students and found our luggage.

  At this stage, despite the weight of my backpack, I was a dab hand at swinging it up from the ground and onto my back. Laos was the eighth country we’d moved to in more or less two years I had been in the care of my aunt and uncle.

  After Mum died, they gave me one week after the funeral, which was mostly spent buying second-hand trek clothes and camping gear, before we set off on our travels. I spent some time in formal education but mostly I was home-schooled by my aunt and uncle. My uncle was an ex-professor of history and classics, until he met my aunt and they found themselves in the Galapagos Islands. You know, as people do when they’re eighteen, on a year out before university, not when they’re in their late forties. But, as my aunt has told me repeatedly, “You are never too old to be found by our glorious Earth, Jess.”

  As they traveled my aunt and uncle picked up jobs here and there, teaching English and yoga. Working bars. But mostly they did that to ‘give back’ because they lived reasonably well—for nomads—on the small amount of rent their few properties brought in each month.

  The sun was setting over the Mekong River as I looked back in the direction we had traveled from Thailand. The humidity, together with being squished onto a barge with a load of other travelers for too long, had me feeling grotty. I wanted a shower but I didn’t want a hand-held hose, trickling water over me as I sat on a toilet because the bathroom was too small for separates. I wanted to go home. At least, to the home I used to have with my mum and dad. I wanted to shower in my own bathroom and sleep in my own bed

  But I reminded myself, I didn’t have a home anymore. They were gone.

  I hoisted my luggage higher on my back and tightened the padded straps across my shoulders. I nudged through the crowd of travelers with their Lonely Planet guides and set off up a hill with my aunt and uncle. After twenty minutes, we found the hostel we were spending the night in.

  A petite Asian lady met us at the entrance of the single-story concrete structure, which looked like it had been painted white a long time ago. “Sabaidi.”

  The three of us dipped our heads in reply as we repeated her greeting. Ruth paid six dollars for a double room for her and Uncle John. She paid four dollars for my bunk in the unisex dorm.

  We went our separate ways. Even though I was younger than the gap-year students, they always smiled and said hello. The lone travelers always tried to talk more.

  I found my bunk bed and took off my backpack. A girl, maybe nineteen or twenty, hung over the side of the top bunk and held out her hand. “Hi, I’m Meredith.”

  “I’m Jess.”

  “Are you traveling alone?”

  I shook my head. “My aunt and uncle are staying in a private room.”

  She chuckled. “They’ve found tantric practice then?”

  I rolled my eyes. “God, don’t joke. I can barely deal with their level of hippie. If I think about them sustaining sex for as long as they can, it might finish me off.”

  We talked a little as I unpacked my washbag, my shorts and vest to sleep in, and some clothes for the next day, knowing we were moving on early. I didn’t ask too many questions about her and I didn’t bother telling her much about me. We spoke about the books we were reading and where in England we came from. There was little point establishing any kind of friendship.

  After showering, I lay on my bunk and read The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, using my small flashlight to get to the end once the dorm lights were turned out. When I finished the book—my tenth in the last three and a half weeks—I set it on the floor, where someone else would find it and make use of it when I was gone, and I went to the place I went every night. I went to find th
em.

  I searched my memories for their smell, something that became harder each night. I tried to remember their voices, calm and loving. I willed myself to see every detail of their faces. My dad was becoming so distant it terrified me. My mum came to me more easily, but she was fading too.

  Silent tears rolled down my face and I could feel my heart beginning to beat too fast as I begged my mind to bring them back to me.

  As my chest tightened, I heard my mum’s words. “Deep breaths, baby. Deep breaths.”

  As I took control of my lungs, I told them in my mind how much I loved them. How I would see them one day, and how I would never forget them.

  Eventually, my inhalations became longer.

  The next morning, my cheap pocket alarm went off at four thirty. I silenced it as quickly as I could, although I still received a few grumbles from travelers who’d stayed out late drinking and wanted to rise at a sensible time. When I made it outside the hostel, Ruth and John were already waiting for me. Aunt Ruth held out a bag of rambutan. “Good morning, sunshine. Did you sleep well?”

  I took the red prickly fruit and bit through the shell, discarding it to suck the sweet translucent fruit inside. Nodding as I chewed, I eventually told her, “Can it qualify as sleep if you’re not finished by half?”

  She raised a brow. “Were you reading again?”

  I shrugged and took another rambutan from her as we headed in the direction of a local bus. We rode with chickens, local people carrying huge bags of rice, and the occasional baboon that jumped on the roof when we stopped. After my bum had gone numb from the hard seats and the bumpy ride over dirt roads and potholes, we arrived in Vang Vieng.

  Once we’d dumped our backpacks in yet another hostel, Ruth and John prepared themselves for yoga and meditation. I was hungry and tired of sitting down, so I left them to it and went to explore the city.

  You’re probably thinking I was too young to be exploring a new place, in a new country, with a vastly different culture from the small country town in England where I had grown up. Frankly, I was. But I will say this for Ruth and John. They never treated me like a child. They always spoke to me as if I were a young adult. Sometimes, I did wish they would put an arm around me, nurture me, tell me it was okay to be a child. Other times, I realize, looking back, they showed me things about the world and people that I would have never experienced if I had stayed in my small town.

  I wandered until I reached the river. There, I listened to the water as it rolled idly by, as if it didn’t have a care in the world. As if it had nowhere to go but that didn’t matter because there was only one direction to travel. One path. And it would have to flow the course. It was the destiny the Earth had given it. It just had to get on with it. I felt the inevitable flow of the river in my own inability to control or change my path.

  Then I picked up my head and gasped at the lush green mountains towering over me. I thought I had never seen anything more beautiful in my life. In that moment, I understood how small and inconsequential I was in the grand scheme of life and death. And I made a decision to accept that I couldn’t change my destiny. It just was. I just was. I was alone and that had to be okay.

  For two years, I had longed to have a sibling, or to stay in one place long enough to make a friend. I had pleaded with whatever higher power existed, I had begged my parents to send someone to me, someone who could share my pain and alleviate the weight in my chest, if only by an ounce.

  I cried under the shadow of the mountains. My tears fell to the river’s edge and I imagined them being carried away, taken to somewhere my parents could hear me. I knew that somewhere, one day, I wouldn’t be alone. That one day my flow would find a home, where it could be still. Until then, I had to protect myself. I had to look out for my heart. Because I knew it couldn’t take any more pain.

  I walked along the river until I came to paddy fields. I watched workers going about digging up rice, fascinated, since I had never really thought about where rice came from. I had seen it in boil-in-a-bag packaging. I had never appreciated that the world made it.

  Ladies raised their heads, looking up through their cone-shaped hats to smile as I greeted them in their language. It was something I had learned on our trip through Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia and Thailand. Even in Chiang Mai jungle. If you made the effort to speak someone’s language, they would always smile.

  Ruth told me that I should enjoy the freedom of traveling and not having a routine like other kids. She said I should see the branches of the tree she and John gave me. “Feel the wind through your new leaves, Jess. Experience. Feel,” she would say. I decided in that paddy field to experience my branches and leaves. But I decided I had done enough feeling to last me a lifetime. And I never gave up hope that I could someday have roots to my tree and that they would anchor me.

  I walked by the river to the paddy fields every day. I was there so much that the ladies would boil me a bowl of rice to eat with them in the afternoon. I could communicate with them very little but I enjoyed the company. I also enjoyed the rice.

  That ended after twenty-three days, when Ruth, John and I packed up our backpacks and took a sleeper bus to Luang Prabang.

  * * * *

  I had been eating street food in Luang Prabang with Ruth and John. I was sitting on a pink plastic stool for children at an elderly gentleman’s stall, a bowl of sticky rice in my lap, when I overheard some other travelers being told about the Buddhist Alms Giving Ceremony that took place each morning. When I enquired about it, the street vendor was happy to share his knowledge with me, I think because I showed an interest in the local culture.

  “Every day at sunrise,” he told me, in his broken English, “the monks come from their temples. They bring baskets and people offer them food for their one meal of the day.”

  “Could I go?” I asked him.

  “Of course. All welcome. But you must obey rules. Cover your skin and arrive before the monks. Offer your food but do not get close and do not try to talk to them. You must be respectful.”

  I nodded. “Of course. Can we go?” I asked Ruth.

  “We have meditation at sunrise, Jess. But you could go alone.” Alone. Of course. It was something I was too familiar with.

  But I bought rice from the street vendor and took it home that night. I asked Ruth and John to wake me before sunrise and I went down to the ceremony. I stood next to a local lady who barely spoke English, as we waited in a line along the street the monks would traverse. She tugged on my baggy pants and kaftan, which I wore to cover my knees and shoulders. She pointed to her feet, which were naked, then to mine, which were in sandals.

  Understanding her, I took off my shoes and followed her lead as she sat on the ground and tucked her legs beneath her. When the monks came by in a line, I, like her, held out my rice for them to take, sneaking a glance, even though I was told not to stare.

  The young boy I offered food smiled at me, even though I knew he shouldn’t, and I couldn’t help smiling as I tucked my head down again. The sun began to rise and heat my body. I felt the warmth of the new day and the warmth of being part of something. It kept my shadows away and it masked my pain, even from me, for the moments I sat on the ground. I promised myself I would hang on to the feeling for as long as I possibly could. Tomorrow, I could steal the heat of sunrise again.

  After the ceremony, I wandered the street market. I bought a banana and a handful of rambutan for breakfast and I sat on a wall to eat, looking out to the Mekong River.

  “I’ll trade you mango for a rambutan?”

  I looked up to see a young man, perhaps eighteen. He sat next to me on the wall and we traded fruit. “Have you been to the giving ceremony?” I asked.

  He nodded, sucking on his new food. “These are good.”

  “They’re my favorite,” I told him.

  “Did you enjoy it?”

  “The ceremony?” I
asked. He nodded again, seemingly not a boy of too many words. “Yes, I liked it very much.”

  His eyes narrowed and he seemed to study me. “What did you like about it?”

  I couldn’t tell him that I liked being among people, having something in common with the people around me. So I shrugged. “I like learning new things.”

  He nodded again and looked out to the water, where the sun was now midway through the sky. “You know, Buddhists believe in karma. It’s one of their key beliefs.”

  “Karma? You mean like what goes around comes around?”

  “Sort of. It’s more than that. Have you heard of The Four Noble Truths?”

  I shook my head.

  He spat the pip of his rambutan into the river, making my nose scrunch with distaste. “In Buddhism, people believe that we cling to impermanent things. Because of that, we enter the cycle of painful death and rebirth and being unsatisfied between those two things. They call that state, being unable to satisfy oneself, dukkha.”

  Dukkha. I repeated the word a number of times in my mind. “I’m not sure I follow.”

  “See, we are constantly trying to find happiness in impermanent things, therefore, we can never be truly happy.”

  I would come to understand those words one day when he spoke them to me again. But it would not be that day. I was uncomfortable with my lack of knowledge. I knew on some level, those words were speaking to me, speaking to my soul, and that somehow, they were words I was supposed to hear in that moment.

  So, I changed the subject. “What are you? Some kind of eighty-year-old prophet trapped in a teenager’s body with bright green eyes?”

  He smiled. It was a cute smile. It made him look younger but still a few years older than me. “You’re pretty,” he said. “And I’m Daniel, or Danny.”

  I felt my cheeks blush red. I couldn’t think of a time a boy had paid me a compliment. I looked out to the river as I said, “Well, Daniel or Danny, I’m Jess.”