In Between Days (18 page)

“Of course.”

“Why don’t you ever mention him?”

“Who?”

“Your son.”

“What do you mean?”

“You never talk about him.”

“Yes, I do.”

“No,” she says, “you don’t.”

He stares at her, shrugs his shoulders. “I guess I’m just protective of him, you know.”

“But you don’t even have a picture of him.”

“What do you mean?”

“In your apartment. There isn’t one picture of him. Don’t you think that’s a little strange? I mean, there’s nothing. No toys. No video games.”

“He doesn’t play video games.”

She stares at him.

“What are you implying?”

“I’m not implying anything.”

“You think I made him up or something?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know what to think.”

“Why the hell would I make him up, Cadence? Jesus. What purpose would that serve?”

“I don’t know,” she says, raising her eyebrows now in innuendo. “Why don’t you tell me?”

At this, though, she can see she’s hit a nerve, that she’s upset him, that she’s gone too far.

“You’re sick,” he says.

“Gavin.”

“Seriously. You’re fucking sick. I know you’re upset about your daughter and all, but Jesus, Cadence, this is too much.” Then he reaches into his pocket and pulls out his wallet. She can see that his fingers are shaking. After a moment, he pulls out a picture and lays it down before her. The picture is of him and a boy standing outside a theme park in Houston, their arms draped loosely around each other, their faces beaming. The boy is a carbon copy of Gavin.

She stares at the picture and feels her stomach drop, feels such a deep sense of shame that she can barely speak. What made her think she could mention this? What gave her the right to express her deepest, most irrational fears? Was it simply the alcohol, or was it something else? Was she finally losing her mind?

“I’m sorry,” she finally manages. “I feel like shit.”

He shakes his head, says nothing, then excuses himself to the bathroom. But when he returns, a few minutes later, he seems fine. He says he understands, that he knows she’s under a lot of stress right now, that he can’t even imagine what she’s going through. He suggests that they just forget about it.

His kindness, of course, makes her feel even worse. She doesn’t deserve him, she thinks. Any normal man would have discarded her by now. She reaches across the table and grabs his hand. “I’m sorry,” she says again. “Truly.”

But he says nothing. He doesn’t say a word.

To appease him, and to mollify some of her own guilt, she agrees to spend the night with him. Upstairs in their room, she allows him to undress her, to sit there on the bed and stare at her naked body as she stands before him, something that she knows he likes to do. When it comes to the lovemaking, however, Gavin is unsuccessful again, something that he blames this time on the alcohol.

They lie there for a long time in silence, but there is no warmth between them. Whatever warmth there once was is gone now. She studies his chest, the smooth hairless surface of it, the paleness of his skin. She runs her hand up and down his legs, across his ribs, but he doesn’t move.

Later, after he’s fallen asleep, she lies there for a long time feeling empty and worn out. Her thoughts return to Chloe and the question that’s been bothering her all night: Should they have called the police, or should they just wait it out and trust her? What would a responsible parent do? What would her own parents do? Nothing she’s ever read about parenting has prepared her for this particular dilemma. There’s no guidebook for what to do when something like this happens. After all, if they did call the police, they might end up implicating Chloe even more than they wanted. Then again, if they did nothing at all, they might end up putting her in even worse danger. She leans back on her pillow and
closes her eyes, her mind returning to Chloe’s journal and a troubling passage she’d read earlier that day, a passage she’d decided not to show Elson, a passage written only a day before Chloe left:

She thinks about these words, what they mean, then looks back at Gavin and the clock, wondering how much longer she has to stay.

FOR MONTHS
, she had imagined bringing him home to Houston with her. She had imagined driving him around town, introducing him to her parents, showing him her old high school. She had always felt an affinity toward Houston that no one up at Stratham seemed to understand. To them, Houston represented big hair and cowboy hats and conservative politics, but to Chloe, it had always meant something else. Houston was the world of her childhood, a magical place, a place that she had always felt truly herself, and it was this side of Houston that she wanted to show Raja, and had circumstances been different she honestly believed that he would have embraced the city in the same way she had. Instead, however, they’d spent most of their time holed up in Brandon’s apartment, arguing and complaining about the heat, and she could tell now that he disliked it, that he wasn’t happy here, that he maybe even wished he hadn’t come.

Of course, given the circumstances, he probably wouldn’t have been happy anywhere. Ever since he’d arrived, he’d been sullen and removed. It was a side of him she’d never seen before, and it bothered her. They’d fought more in the past few days than they had during the entire course of their relationship, and though she’d found ways of explaining this, attributing it to the heat or to their claustrophobic living situation, she couldn’t help wondering whether it was something else, if he had maybe grown tired of her, or if she had maybe disappointed him in some way. She wondered what else she could have possibly done for him. After all, she was essentially jeopardizing her own future to save his. But when she’d brought this up to him the night before, when they were fighting, he’d reminded her that it had been her idea for him to come down here in the first place.

She’d bristled at this, though she’d known it was true. A few days earlier she had called him up out of the blue and suggested it—suggested that he come down to Houston for a few days and hide out—but she hadn’t actually believed that he’d do it. Even when he’d called her up from the Houston airport the night he arrived and told her he was here, even then, she hadn’t believed him. She’d thought he was joking.

“Describe what you’re looking at right now,” she’d said, and then he’d proceeded to describe the giant bronze statue of George Bush Sr., and she’d felt her stomach drop.

That night, as they drove home, he’d cried for the first time since she’d known him. She’d tried to get him to explain what had happened back at Stratham to make him do this, but he said only that things had changed, that Tyler Beckwith had fallen into some type of unconscious state, and that Seung had now agreed to testify against him, and that things were looking worse and worse. He said that he believed his own official indictment was imminent and that he hadn’t known what else to do. He’d panicked, he’d admitted later, and had regretted his decision the moment he stepped onto the plane in Boston, but by then it was too late. By then, there was no going back.

She’d taken him to her mother’s house first, cooked him an omelet, which he hadn’t eaten, then packed up some clothes and her computer and taken him over to Beto’s, where she was sure she’d find Richard.

Later, when they returned to Brandon’s apartment, Brandon had made them up a bed in his study, a small room with a desk and a computer and a few bookshelves against the wall. The bed itself was nothing more than an old futon mattress, which Brandon had laid down in the middle of the room.

After Brandon had gone to sleep, they’d lain there for a long time on the mattress, holding each other. Raja was wide awake, his body filled with adrenaline, his muscles stiff and tense. She’d tried to calm him down, suggested that he drink some water or a beer, but he’d shaken his head. He kept getting up every few minutes to go to the window and smoke. He’d light a cigarette, take a few drags, then put it out. Then he’d come back to the bed and let her hold him. He didn’t want to talk, he said, but he couldn’t sleep either. Finally, he began to wonder whether it was really too late to go back, whether he could maybe call up the Stratham Police Department the next day and turn himself in, promise to come back that evening. Would that be the best thing to do? he’d wondered
out loud. Then he’d answered his own question by saying, no—no, it wouldn’t. Technically speaking, he had just broken his bail, and even if he went back now, he’d still have to contend with that, with the consequences, not to mention the fact that he’d be immediately jailed and lose any chance of ever getting bail again. It would be a nightmare, he said. A nightmare bottom line.

This went on for most of the night, Raja getting up constantly to smoke cigarettes, Chloe sitting there silently, listening. She said very little that night. She knew that bringing up her own concerns would only upset him more, so she’d kept them to herself. It was funny how things had changed, how she’d now become the pillar of strength in their relationship, the stable force. He’d been so stoic throughout it all, so confident and calm throughout everything that had happened back at Stratham, and yet now he was clearly losing it. It worried her, scared her, but also made her feel an even deeper connection to him.
It was the first time in her life that she’d felt that someone else was actually depending on her.

The next day they’d dropped Brandon off at his job at Café Brasil, then taken his car across town to a small sushi place on the other side of Montrose that Chloe used to go to back in high school. Here, over steaming bowls of miso soup, they had sat for nearly an hour without talking.

Later, when they got back to the apartment, Raja had started to speak. He said that they needed to figure out a plan, that they needed to figure out a logical course of action. He asked her how long she thought they could stay at Brandon’s, and she had said a couple of days, maybe four or five max. He nodded, looked around the room. By now, he said, the authorities up in Stratham would be aware of his absence. They would have taken some action themselves. Maybe called up some airports, sent around his picture, contacted the Canadian and Mexican borders. She looked up at him. It was strange to hear him talking in this way. It felt like something from a dream or a movie. Up until this point she hadn’t really considered their next step, hadn’t really considered where they might go now. In retrospect, she realized then, she had been living only in the moment, but now it seemed that living in the moment wasn’t going to be enough. As Raja paced around the room, she felt the sudden reality of it all finally settling in. This was actually happening, she thought, and it was actually happening to them. She felt her stomach tighten. She looked up at Raja and wanted to say something, but he kept going. He said that
he’d taken some precautions himself, that he’d bought two plane tickets, for example, one to Newark, and then another one in Newark to Houston, and that he’d paid for both tickets with cash. This might throw them off for a couple of days, he thought, make it harder for them to find him, but eventually they would. They’d figure it out. And when they did, they’d press her parents, and then they’d question Richard, and eventually they’d find them. It was only a matter of time, he said. Maybe three or four days at the most. That was the window they were looking at. After that, they’d need another plan, or at least he would.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she’d asked when he said this.

But he hadn’t answered.

“I’m coming with you,” she said. “Wherever you’re going next, I’m coming, too.”

Raja shook his head. “It’s not safe,” he said. And then he explained to her that he wasn’t going to let her implicate herself any more than she already had. It was bad enough that she’d already implicated herself this much. Anything more and she’d be jeopardizing her own future, her own life, and he wasn’t going to let that happen. He was very adamant about this, almost belligerent about it, and for most of the night they had fought about it, Raja insisting that this was his problem now, not hers, and Chloe insisting that she wasn’t going to let him go anywhere without her. The air-conditioning unit in Brandon’s apartment was on the fritz, and it seemed that the more they fought, the hotter the tiny room became. Finally, growing exhausted, Raja had lain down on the bed and closed his eyes.

“I don’t want to fight anymore,” he’d said, sighing, and then Chloe had lain down beside him on the bed and kissed his shoulder.

“Me neither,” she said.

“It’s only because I’m worried about you,” he’d said finally. “Because I don’t want to involve you.”

“I know that,” she said, and this time kissed him on the lips.

They made love twice that night in the muggy heat of Brandon’s tiny study while Brandon sat silently down the hall, watching TV. Later, after he’d gone to bed, they took a cold shower together and then returned to the room to talk.

For the time being, the issue of whether or not Chloe would be coming with him was going to be left off the table. They would resolve that
later. For now what they needed to do was figure out a next step. Raja said that he had a close friend from high school who was now living out in California, studying at Stanford. He trusted this friend completely, he said, and was sure that he could put him up for a couple of days, but that wasn’t really a long-term solution, was it? What he really needed to do now was get out of the country. That would be the safest thing. Unfortunately, he’d left his passport back at his parents’ house in New Jersey, which made air travel, train travel, and even buses out of the question.

“Out of the country?” she’d said. “Are you serious?”

He looked at her, shrugged.

“Come on, Raj. I don’t think we’re really at that point yet, do you?”

He shook his head, then stood up and walked over to the window and lit a cigarette.

She could tell he felt trapped. She had seen it in his face that morning, and she could see it again now. Still, she kept talking, wondering whether leaving the country wasn’t a little extreme. I mean wasn’t that essentially admitting to their own guilt? Wasn’t that essentially throwing in the towel? After all, what if Tyler Beckwith recovered? What if the charges were lowered? But the truth was, the thought of him leaving the country, of both of them leaving the country, was simply too hard to process. The thought of them living a life in exile, a life on the run, it seemed insane.