and was toddling up the walk. “Get her out of here,” Tyo yelled to the officer by the gate, who had been too respectful of his elders to do more than scold her gently as she entered.
I pulled the sack out of my pocket. “Tyo, I need to—”
“Really, Jenna. We can talk tomorrow. You will come to my mother’s house for dinner, and we can talk then.”
“I think it’s better if . . .” I wanted to give him the sack. I wanted to turn back time and stop myself from taking it.
He said to one of the officers who had held up Ulih, “Take her down to the station and have Nyoman question her. Tell him that she was the one who found the body.”
I was beginning to panic and tried to catch his eye. “I want you to question me.” He didn’t answer. “Please, Tyo.”
Exasperated, he said, “Tomorrow. We’ll talk tomorrow.” And he turned and walked into the house.
“I need to speak with you in private,” I called out and started to follow, but the officer who was to take me to the police station stepped belligerently between us.
I felt abandoned. Annoyed. I fingered the outline of the small figure in the sack. Angry. At Tyo for not listening to me. But more at myself for taking the thing. As we walked toward the gate, I considered dropping the sack on the ground, but the thirty or forty people who had gathered to watch the excitement would see, and really, I wanted to give it to Tyo. To explain to Tyo what had been going through my mind when I’d taken it.
What had I been thinking?
I looked back at the chaos of the crime scene. At least a dozen people milled around the front yard. How many more were in the house, I didn’t know. But they were walking everywhere, through the garden, around the pool.
The officer said, “Come,” and tugged at my elbow, gently at first, but when I still didn’t move, more forcefully.
“Just a minute. What are they doing? Why aren’t they trying to find footprints? Trying to preserve the scene as it was when I arrived?”
He looked toward his colleagues and shrugged.
“They don’t know what they’re doing,” I said.
“We do not have murders in Ubud,” he said, as if that excused their behavior. They did have TV, and everyone who had TV knew what you should do at a crime scene. You should wear white booties on your feet, a mask on your face. “Come.”
“Did she do it?” someone called out as we pushed through the crowd.
“No,” he said.
But when I got to the police station, you would have thought otherwise. They took my prints and photographed and questioned me as if I were their number one suspect.
3
Walking numbly away from the police station, I tried to find balance. I’d been thrown by Flip’s lifeless body. By meeting Tyo. By my own foolish action.
The one positive thing that had happened in the station was that they hadn’t frisked me. If they’d found the sack, I would probably be in a cell. I wasn’t a thief. I wasn’t a criminal. But I was impulsive. I shook my head. I had to give the sack to Tyo—though after seeing the way the police were acting at the crime scene, I doubted they would ever find the killer.
What should I do? I tried to calm my racing mind, but the busy streets only heightened my anxiety. Cafés bore names like Lucky’s Warung, their menus all alike, spiceless fried rice and fried noodles, pizza and ice cream. They had embraced the Western need for choice, though they called themselves warung, those individual stalls that traditionally served a single dish—fried fish, roast chicken, suckling pig.
If I could transport myself from the events of this day, get some distance . . . I stopped walking, closed my eyes, tried to visualize Ubud that summer twenty years ago when my family visited. The color green flashed before me—trees, rice—a lushness only intermittently interrupted by yellow or a splash of red. I didn’t recall this busy scene.
I opened my eyes. Unable to hold the memory of Ubud a lifetime ago, I stopped and read one menu after another, my finger underlining the words, as if by this mundane act I could reverse time. As if I were on my way to Flip’s, ready to eat. As if I would arrive early to find a living man. As if I didn’t have this sack in my pocket.
My stomach roiled with hunger. Yet the hunger battled with a queasiness. The officer’s abrupt, threatening questioning at the police station had done nothing to calm me. If only it had been Tyo.
I recalled his warmth when he’d explained who he was. But then he’d been abrupt as I left. I sighed, looking blindly into the café before me. “Come in, come in,” said a waiter.
The cafés wanted me to eat, but I couldn’t, so I moved on to a row of boutiques. They insisted I buy. Flowing garb, gaudy jewelry, carvings in multiples of twenty or forty. I stared in at a jewelry store window, not at the displays, but at my reflection. Me in Ubud, me alive. I held the image in my mind, but only for an instant. Flip with a spear through his chest, blood haloing his body, gazed back at me. I closed my eyes.
A stranger, I consoled myself. A man I never met. A man whose last moment was etched on my mind forever. The spear, the blood . . .
“Come in, come in,” said a young shopkeeper. “Very pretty earrings for you.”
“Taxi,” said a man to my right.
“Taxi,” said his friend.
I turned and walked on.
One day soon, when the world righted itself, I would go through the shops, searching for a bargain. I’d enjoy the back and forth, the foreplay and the consummation of making the deal, of the haggling. Not today. I needed to get back to my hotel. I needed to curl up on my bed. I needed to sleep. I concentrated on navigating a path through the throng of tourists. A man’s elbow jabbed my ribs. A woman yammering to her husband collided with me, then glared.
I stopped to take my bearings. The distraction of stores and restaurants, the art galleries with their gaudy abstract paintings bursting with hints of Bali—half-visible sheaves of rice, Rangda the witch’s bared teeth, the thatched roof of a temple—was not enough. Not enough to wipe Flip, the wisps of his hair, the arc of his arm, the arch of his back, from my eyes.
I stepped off the curb to avoid being run over by a group of jostling Australians.
I felt like Alice in some overwrought version of Wonderland. The roar of motor scooters and horns honking, the jostling of tourists and hawkers, a visual and aural onslaught. I reached my turnoff and was within five minutes of my hotel when I noticed a small building set back from the road, a little retreat from the madness. A discreet sign read “textiles,” and in a bid to escape I turned down the short path. Tactile textiles were a soothing promise, a reprieve from that pool of blood.
“Selamat siang,” the young shopgirl said.
“Siang,” I answered, and automatically asked her how she was. “Apa kabar?”
She smiled. “Baik. Can I help you with anything?”
