Marriage Vacation

by Pauline Brooks

  Soon enough the road in front of us cleared. Kasem stopped texting and put the car back into gear, and we were on our way again. “Not much longer now,” he said over his shoulder.

  The next time Kasem stopped I knew we’d reached our destination, though there was no sign to mark the zen center. Just one tiny window that shone with a soft yellow light through the darkness.

  “I’ll wait until you are all organized,” Kasem said helpfully.

  I wanted to tell him not to wait, but I was afraid for him to leave me here in the middle of nowhere with no cell service in the middle of the night. In a country where I knew no one, Kasem now felt like an old friend.

  “OK, just give me a minute to go inside and find out about my room? Thank you.”

  Nina must be here already. There had to be some kind of a clerk who would show me to her room. I imagined I would sink into her soft bed and we’d giggle about the turn of events that had reunited us on another continent.

  I opened a flimsy wooden door to find a room lit by a single bulb hanging perilously by a frayed wire over a rickety wooden desk.

  “Hello?” I called out softly. Then with more intention, “Is anyone here?”

  I walked behind the desk and opened what looked like a back door to find a space no bigger than a closet. The floor shifted. Upon closer inspection I realized it wasn’t the floor, but a blanket covering a small woman. She rolled onto her side and turned to look up at me. When she smiled I saw she was missing her left incisor. Her face was lined and puckered, like she’d sucked too long on a lemon and her features had stuck that way.

  “You’re here.” She said it as though she were expecting me, and I took it to mean that Nina had already arrived and told this woman (maybe the night clerk?) that I would be coming in late.

  “I’m here.” I sighed with relief.

  “Who are you?” she asked in the same tone she’d used moments earlier.

  “I’m Kate Carmichael. Nina Galloway is my friend.”

  “Who is Nina?” The woman had yet to rise from her supine position. I heard someone open the door behind me and turned to see Kasem standing there with a worried look on his face.

  I reached down to help the woman stand.

  “My friend Nina is here already. She organized our rooms. She checked in this morning, or maybe yesterday.” I realized I knew very little about Nina’s itinerary and that in hindsight she and I hadn’t discussed many details of our reunion here at all. Could I be at the wrong place? I pulled my phone from my pocket, but it was long dead.

  “I don’t know Nina. No Nina is here.”

  I turned to look back helplessly at Kasem. “Could we have the wrong place?” I asked him.

  He shook his head. “This is the only place to stay within thirty miles and the only retreat center in this part of the mountains. This is the place you asked to be.”

  The old woman stood, stepped between us, and smiled calmly. She took my hand. Hers was warm and rough. She interlaced her fingers with mine the way a child would, squeezing the knuckles. “You want a room?”

  A small part of me worried that something had gone very wrong. It told me to turn around and get back in the car with Kasem and pay him whatever it took to take me back to Bangkok or up to Chiang Mai, where I could get on a plane home.

  I gritted my teeth. I was going to see this through . . . whatever this was.

  “I do want a room.” It was late and Kasem had been driving all night. It was only fair that I would pay for a place for him to sleep. “And a room for my friend too,” I said.

  “No, no,” Kasem interrupted. “I am fine. You do not need to do that.”

  My actions were selfish. I wasn’t ready for him to leave me.

  “You’re sure you want to stay here?” His concern only made me more nervous.

  “I’m sure.”

  “Good-bye then, Kate. You can call me if you need me.” He turned on his heel and walked out the door.

  I looked back down at the small woman who hadn’t let go of my hand this entire time. She’d begun gently swinging it between us like a small child. The night was warm, but her body was mummified in what looked like five layers of loud sarongs.

  “I’m Kate,” I introduced myself again, hoping she’d tell me her name in return. She merely smiled and let go of my hand. Then, with the brute strength of Atlas, she heaved my suitcase up over her head and disappeared into the closet where I’d first found her.

  She kicked her blankets aside. There was another door leading out the back of the building.

  “Come,” she commanded without looking back at me.

  It took every ounce of courage I had to follow the woman’s small shadowy frame down a steep wooden staircase. We went down several stories and then stopped at a dirt path surrounded by tall trees.

  An animal shrieked in the distance, a bloodcurdling sound like something being murdered, and I remembered Kasem telling me there were still tigers in these mountains.

  My eyes adjusted only enough to see the woman’s silhouette in front of me. After a few minutes on the dirt path she stopped at another stairway. We climbed up about ten steps to an elevated wooden boardwalk that stretched in both directions. She paused in front of a door.

  “Here,” she said. I imagined Nina inside the room, fast asleep in a beautiful handmade hammock, her willowy legs slung over the sides, a book open on her chest. She’d lazily open her eyes when I entered and rise to hug me. We’d laugh over the madness of getting here and she’d hand me her cell so I could call Karl and tell him I was safe. I’d tell him I loved him and missed him and I would mean it. I’d tell him the things I wrote in the letter on the plane. I’d try to explain myself and make him understand why I’d gotten on that plane. I could dimly imagine a point in the future when we would laugh about this—the time I ran away from home.

  The woman dropped my bag on the floor, opened a door, and pulled a string hanging from the ceiling to light the room. Moths with the wingspans of dollar bills rushed in from outside to thump against the light, their wings making a sound as loud as the beating of my heart.

  There was no Nina, no hammock. Just a thin single mattress on a hard wood floor. No dresser, no bathroom, no mirror. The only other furniture in the room was a wooden desk and a simple metal folding chair, the kind pulled out from behind the bleachers during school assemblies.

  My joy at seeing the elephants stomp in front of our car dissipated. My thirst for adventure began to dry up. “Where do I shower?” I asked tentatively. I was too embarrassed to ask what I really needed to know, which was, Where did I pee? The woman tipped her head forward and let the suitcase tumble to the floor with a clatter. She grabbed my hand again and brought me back out onto the boardwalk, down the stairs, and back to the dirt path. We made a left and a right and came to an even smaller shack with a toilet that was actually just a hollowed-out stool perched over a hole in the floor. Flies buzzed around a roll of toilet paper on the floor. I must have looked completely stricken just then because the woman rooted around in the folds of her robe and produced an object. When she handed it to me I saw that it was a headlamp with REI emblazoned on the side of it.

  I accepted it and flicked on the light. The soft yellow glow was an immediate comfort, though it did little but illuminate the path a few feet ahead. We retraced our steps back to the tiny room with its sad mattress on the floor. In the morning I could ask if there was someplace a little less rustic to sleep. Stop it, Kate, I admonished myself. You’re not some coddled Manhattan mommy who can’t survive without room service and a Klonopin. You’re better than this.

  I reached in my pocket for a baht but couldn’t do the math to figure out a decent tip for a woman who had just carried my suitcase down what felt like twenty flights of stairs on her head. I handed her a sweaty, crumpled bill, but she shook her head and pushed the money away.

  “Sleep now,” she instructed.

  The nap in the car had done little to ease my exhaustion, and the sooner
I slept, the sooner it would be light and I could get my bearings and find Nina and call home.

  I nodded to thank her and sat down on the mattress to show I intended to take her advice and go to sleep. She shut the door behind her, leaving the bugs, who seemed intent on burning themselves alive. I stood to pull on the string to turn off the light and sank back down on the mattress. It was more comfortable than it looked. Buried within the blankets was a thin pillow. I didn’t bother to change my clothes. Something scurried in the corner, small nails scratching the wooden floor. It would be easy for anything to run right across my body and my face. A larger animal shrieked again in the darkness and I knew the flimsy walls wouldn’t keep it out if it decided it was hungry enough to come find me.

  I was too exhausted to care.

  Chapter Five

  * * *

  It was still dark when I opened my eyes. Had I slept the entire day and into the next night? I felt the uncontrollable need to scratch at my arms and noticed nickel-size welts along my biceps, forearms, and the backs of my hands.

  I looked up to see a fat ball of mosquito netting hanging from the ceiling that’d I’d missed last night. All I’d needed to do was pull it over me—a mistake I wouldn’t make again. Something crept up my inner thigh. I slapped at it and discovered a wormlike creature with dozens of squirming legs. I let out a piercing shriek as I flicked it to the floor.

  There was a little more light than when I fell asleep even though the lightbulb remained off. It leaked through cracks in the walls. Upon closer inspection those walls were moving, gently swaying, actually. I reached my hand out to touch one and found it soft. They weren’t walls at all, but curtains shifting in the breeze. The light coming out from the sides was the sun. I grasped for an edge, flung open the fabric, and then fell to my knees in awe at the sight that awaited me.

  The old woman had brought me down so many stairs that I assumed I was now on the valley floor. That couldn’t be further from the truth. My hut was terraced at least twenty stories above a fluttering jungle canopy cut through by a silver river that wound like a snake through emerald foliage. My room was curtained on three sides, and as I flung all of them open I realized I was sleeping in little more than an elevated tree house lined by rickety railings. I’d never seen anything so spectacular.

  I could see the roofs of other structures like mine above, around, and below me. There must have been thirty of them in all. Nina must be in one. The jungle began again just inches from each hut, like it was intent to swallow the man-made structures whole.

  I opened my suitcase and took out my long linen pants and the freshest shirt I had. I’d need bug repellant. I had a brief thought that I could pick some up in the center’s gift shop, like in a fancy hotel, and then I remembered the woman sleeping in a closet who led me to my room and realized I would likely be doing without bug repellant, sunscreen, and a daily green juice. A phone card, though, I had to get a phone card. How long had it been since I’d spoken to Karl? More than forty-eight hours. He must be frantic by now. The last thing he needed was me piling additional stress on his plate when he was already overwhelmed by Paradigm’s finances. I had to at least let him know that I was safe.

  There was only one path leading up. I paused to catch my breath every third set of stairs. No wonder that woman was able to haul my suitcase over her head on the way down. Going up and down these stairs all day would have her in better shape than Tracy Anderson.

  When I finally made it to the top and opened the door to the lobby, the smell of coffee wafted deliciously into my nostrils. I noticed a simple Mr. Coffee filled with steaming brown liquid on a card table along with some kind of doughy pastry and a bowl filled with slices of Technicolored fruit. I had yet to see another person, despite the evidence that someone had been in this room recently enough to turn on the coffeepot.

  I crossed the room and opened the second door to find a spacious dirt clearing. A bright pink car parked parallel along the edge of the trees. Either someone else had recently arrived or Kasem had spent the night here. I wandered over and found him curled into a ball in the backseat. He startled awake after I rapped twice on the window.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  “Hello, Kate.” He sat up and blinked his warm brown eyes.

  “I thought you were driving back last night. I would have paid for a room for you,” I said.

  “I do not mind sleeping in the car. I pull over often for naps. I thought I should check on you this morning.”

  A warm blush crept up my neck.

  “I think I’m going to be OK here. There’s coffee and pastries inside. Come in and have something before you head back.”

  Kasem agreed and followed me inside. Together we loaded a plate high with what looked like cinnamon rolls, filled two mugs with coffee, and sat at a picnic bench in the sun.

  “When does your husband arrive?” Kasem asked kindly. It took a beat to remember lying to him.

  “Soon,” I lied again.

  “Why did you two choose here? Second honeymoon?”

  I picked at the doughy pastry with my fingers. My nail polish was chipped and the tips of my nails had grown ragged from biting them. There was something spicy and exotic in the dough, maybe cardamom. It was delicious. Before I could ask Kasem about it I looked up and saw sexy Jesus emerge from the jungle.

  OK, so it wasn’t really Jesus.

  But he did bear a striking resemblance to the Jesus I grew up with in my Sunday school picture books—a taller-than-average white man with thick flowing brown hair with a body wave. He wore loose white pants and a white button-down shirt, completely unbuttoned to reveal what had to be an eight-pack, beneath a long white robe. His face was long and angular with a Roman nose, wide-set eyes, and plump lips. Even Kasem couldn’t take his eyes off him.

  Behind sexy Jesus there followed a motley line of disciples, also wearing white pajamas. I scrutinized the crowd, hoping to find Nina, but the only one with a dark bob in the group was practically a teenager, with the unlined face and eager eyes of a girl who could be taking a gap year from one of the Seven Sisters schools.

  Sexy Jesus grinned at me with his dazzling teeth as he took a few steps toward us and stretched a massive hand in my direction. When I stood I realized he wasn’t just taller than average. He was freakishly tall, maybe six foot six or seven. His hand eclipsed mine.

  “I’m Kevin,” he said in a deep baritone with a crisp Midwestern accent. “I run the zen center.”

  Of course a Buddhist retreat in the Thai mountains was run by an American named Kevin who looked like the offspring of a professional basketball player and an L.L.Bean catalog model. He was probably from Michigan.

  Kevin turned to the rest of the group. “I’ll see you in a few hours.” They each smiled up at him with the sort of glazed Jim Jonesy wonderment of someone who is truly dazzled by another human being or high on really good pot.

  The pajama-clad disciples dispersed in different directions, but Kevin stayed.

  “I’m Kate,” I said. “I got here last night. Late. I’m meeting my friend Nina. Do you know her?”

  Kevin closed his eyes, as if he were accessing the information from his interior hard drive. A devious smile played at his lips, and I couldn’t help imagining Nina and Kevin fucking, her riding him on a dirty mattress in one of the huts, the floor swaying on the thin jungle stilts.

  “She’s the writer,” Kevin said.

  “You do know her,” I said eagerly. “Is she here?”

  “Not this week.”

  That sentence knocked the wind out of me. There had to be some kind of misunderstanding.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure. Everyone who is staying with us, except for you, was just at morning meditation. I’d know if Nina were here. She’s pretty larger than life. One time during meditation she took off all her clothes and was buck naked when everyone else opened their eyes. We call her the nudist Buddhist. She was here maybe a year ago. She’s definitely not
here now.”

  What the hell was going on? Nina couldn’t be so flaky as to promise to meet me halfway around the world and then bail. I wanted to believe that, but I knew Nina was definitely that flaky and absentminded. Of course she would make plans to meet me halfway around the world and then bail. The Nina I knew twelve years ago would break plans at a moment’s notice, usually when something better came along. One December she was so depressed she couldn’t get out of bed. I bought her a plane ticket to come home to Wisconsin with me, since she had no family to spend the holidays with. The ticket cost me a week’s tips bartending at one of those preppy rapey bars on Second Avenue, but she was my friend and I didn’t want her to be alone for the holidays. Then she never showed at the airport. The night before she’d gotten invited to an ayahuasca ceremony in a Tribeca penthouse. I could have gotten a refund on at least part of the ticket had I known even twenty-four hours in advance that she wouldn’t be using it. When I returned to the city after New Year’s she promised to pay me back, but of course she never did.

  “How long will you be staying with us, Kate?” Kevin asked me.

  “A week, I think.”

  “I hope you stay longer than that.” His teeth were so perfect I could see a bit of sunlight glint off a canine.

  “I can’t. I have kids,” I said.

  “How old. My boy is ten and my girl is eight going on twenty-seven.”

  “Are they here?” I looked around and imagined white pajama–clad children running barefoot through the forest.

  “They’re back with my wife in New York. I spend four months here at a time. They used to come more often, but now they’re in school.”