In Between Days (10 page)

“I forgot where I parked,” Richard says, realizing suddenly that this is true, that he has no memory of even arriving.

But Brandon pushes his finger to his lips and leads him around to the passenger side. “Don’t worry about it,” he whispers. “I’ll drive. We’ll get your car tomorrow, okay?”

Then he unlocks the door, and Richard slides in.

When Brandon gets in the other side, he starts the car and pulls out slowly, then waits in the middle of the street. A moment later a second set of headlights turns on behind them, a few cars back, and then the car pulls up behind them and stops.

“Who’s back there?” Richard asks, turning around and squinting against the bright glare of the high beams.

But Brandon doesn’t answer. He just pulls forward and then turns at the nearest cross street, as the other car follows. He turns on another street a few blocks down, and then another, and when Richard looks back again, the other car is still there. He stares at the headlights for a moment, trying to figure out who’s inside, but can’t see a thing.

Finally, he turns to Brandon. “Brandon,” he says. “Who the fuck
is
that?”

STANDING IN THE DIM LIGHT
of Lorna’s kitchen, Elson takes another sip from the sweating bottle of Corona in his hand, then continues his interrogation.

“Twice?” he says. “Are you sure it wasn’t three times?”

Lorna looks at him, exhausted. They’ve been at it now for nearly an hour. “It might have been three times. Who knows? What difference does it make?”

“It makes a difference to me,” Elson says, walking toward her now, standing over the table where she’s sitting.

“Would you mind sitting down?” she asks.

“I’d prefer to stand,” Elson says.

Lorna rolls her eyes and picks up her own beer. “I never would have pegged you for a bully,” she says.

“Is that what you think of me?”

“I think a lot of things of you,” she says. Then she looks at him. “Can’t we go to dinner, please? I’m starving.”

“I’ve lost my appetite.”

“Oh God,” Lorna says, and stands up now, walking toward the other side of the kitchen to retrieve her car keys. “I’m going to dinner, okay. If you want to stay here, that’s fine, but I’m bored with this.”

“I just want to ask you one more question, and then I’ll go. You’ll never have to see me again.”

“Is that a threat?”

“No,” he says. “I just want to get to the bottom of this.”

“We’ve been through this, Elson. Jesus. I see Hector sometimes. We’re friends. And I don’t tell you because I know how paranoid you can be. Because I know you’ll act like
this
. And I really don’t see the problem
with it, honestly. I mean, he has a girlfriend now, and I have you—or at least I thought I did. And so we don’t even talk about it. We don’t talk about us. We talk about politics and art and the freakin’ Houston Rockets. I mean, if you could tape-record our conversations, you’d probably be bored to tears.”

Elson looks at her, wanting to believe her, sensing a sincerity in what she’s saying, but also somehow doubting that this is all there is to it.

“So why don’t you just stop seeing him then? I mean, if it’s so boring, then why don’t you just stop?”

“Because I shouldn’t have to,” she says. “Because it’s the principle of it. Because I should be able to see whoever I want whenever I want and you shouldn’t have a problem with it. Because that’s how normal people act when they’re in a relationship.”

Sensing that he’s suddenly losing this fight, Elson takes another sip of his beer and reaches in his pocket for his cigarettes, but by the time he’s lit one, Lorna is already walking through the living room and unlatching the front door. He wonders if his sense of how normal people are supposed to act in a relationship is in fact skewed, or out of date, as Lorna suggests.

“I’m going to dinner,” she says as she opens the door. “If you want to join me, great. If you don’t, then just make sure to lock the door on your way out, okay?”

“One question,” Elson says.

But Lorna ignores him. She stands there for a moment, waiting for him. This is not how he planned for things to go, but at this moment he cannot bring himself to capitulate, cannot bring himself to give in. Finally, shaking her head, she turns around and disappears through the door, glancing at him briefly before letting it slam behind her.

On the way over, Elson had promised himself he wouldn’t do this, that he wouldn’t let it come to this, that he wouldn’t even bring it up. He knew that he was driving her away, just as he had driven away Cadence and just as he had driven away almost every woman he’d ever dated. It was a fundamental flaw in his character, he reasoned, his inability to trust, a flaw that he had inherited from his own father, a flaw passed down to him through blood. If she was telling the truth, of course, she had every reason to despise him, and yet how would he ever know? It was the not knowing that killed him, the not knowing that brought out this ugliness.

Walking over to the other side of the kitchen, he drops his cigarette into the sink and runs some water over it. Any second now he expects to hear the sound of Lorna’s car returning, the sound of her walking back into the house and apologizing, but when several minutes pass with no sound from her, no sound at all from the front of the house, he begins to realize that she may in fact be serious this time. Making his way across the apartment, he stops at her desk, her makeshift study in the middle of the room, and sits down.

Aligned along the top shelf of her desk are various photographs of her family and friends: her relatives back in the Philippines, her coworkers at the gallery, the various artists and political activists she’s come to know through her involvement in the Houston art scene. It seems strange to consider now, but despite the difficulty of her youth, despite the fact she’d lost her father at such a young age, she had managed to build a fairly nice life for herself here in Houston, a life filled with love, a life filled with the type of unconditional support and kindness that Elson had only dreamed of. In many ways it was this—the richness of her life—that had first attracted him. He could still remember the way she’d caught his eye that night at Dave Millhauser’s party, the way he’d caught her staring at him from across the yard, and the way, later, she’d come up to him out of the blue and introduced herself, claiming to be a fan of his work, claiming to have been a longtime admirer of his buildings. It had seemed like such an easy conquest at first, a casual seduction. He had talked to her about architecture and art, and she had listened to him with the kind of rapt attention that one might normally associate with a smitten schoolgirl, and before long he had found his way into her bed, and she had found her way into his heart. But that was before all of this, before he had allowed his own insecurities and fears to take over, before he had allowed his own strange suspicions to push her away.

Turning now to her computer, her tiny laptop at the edge of the desk, it suddenly occurs to him that this is the first time she has actually left him alone in her apartment, the first time she has actually trusted him this much. He stares at the dusty monitor for a moment, then braces himself. Aligned along the top of the screen are three neat rows of files, most of them with somewhat banal titles like “Loans” or “Work Stuff,” but others with more intriguing ones like “Things I Want” or “Vacation Plans.” Then, in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen, he spots an icon for her e-mail account and clicks on it. And just like that, before he’s
even had time to consider the consequences, he is inside her account, scrolling through her messages, looking for some sign, some indication, that she’s still in love with Hector. What he finds instead, however, are mostly work-related correspondences, a few e-mails from friends, and a lot of forwarded messages from her mother. He runs a search for Hector’s name, but finds nothing. Not even a reference. Then he runs another search, using words like “love” and “sweetheart,” but again finds nothing. Finally, feeling both discouraged and deflated, he leans back in his chair and sips his beer, and it is then, as he’s staring at her account, that he first notices Cadence’s name at the bottom of the screen, attached to an e-mail. He stares at it for a moment, almost in disbelief, then clicks on it without thinking.
Thank you so much for your e-mails
, it reads.
I’m so glad to hear he’s doing better, and yes, I’d love to talk again. Yours, Cadence
. E-mails? Talk? He looks at the message again, but what he’s thinking about now is not the fact that she has been in contact with Cadence, but the fact that she has somehow been hiding this from him. That she’s never mentioned their correspondence before, or even hinted at it, incenses him. It’s a kind of betrayal, he thinks, no better or worse than the betrayal he’s committing himself by looking through her e-mail. How long has this been going on? he wonders. When did this secretiveness begin? First Hector, now Cadence. What else has she been hiding from him? Perhaps a whole other life, or several lives, intertwined and connected like threads of a web.

Suddenly he can feel the neat walls of his world collapsing, and it is then, as he’s reaching into his pocket for his phone, ready now to confront Lorna, that the phone itself begins to ring, a sound so loud and unexpected that he almost drops it on the floor. Fumbling to open it, he answers curtly, but what he hears on the other end is not the voice he expected, not Lorna’s, but Cadence’s, and he can tell right away that she’s pissed.

“Where are you?” she says.

“What?”

“Where are you right now?”

“I’m home.”

“That would be impossible, Elson, as I’m standing outside your apartment right now.”

“Look, Cadence, I gotta deal with something right now,” he says, looking
again at the e-mail and wondering if he should mention it. “Unless this is an emergency—”

“Chloe’s gone.”

“What?”

“She’s gone. She’s disappeared.”

He stands up then and switches the phone to his other ear, trying his best to process what she’s saying. “What do you mean she’s disappeared?”

“I mean she took the car and she left.”

“How do you know?”

“Because she left me a note, Elson.”

“Well, where the hell did she go?”

“I have no idea. If I had an idea, I wouldn’t be calling you right now, would I?” She pauses. “Has she contacted you?”

“No.” He can feel himself going numb, the overload of information settling in, the thought of his daughter vanishing in the midst of everything else, it’s almost too much for his mind to process at the moment. He reaches for his cigarettes.

“I think we should call the police.”

“Hold on,” Elson says, lighting his smoke. “Slow down a second. What did the note say?”

“It said to give her forty-eight hours, and to not call the police.”

“Forty-eight hours for what?”

“I have no idea.”

“That’s it?”

“No. It also said that
the situation
had changed. That she’d call us in a few days and explain it all.”

Elson can feel the clarity of the world, the room he’s standing in, shifting.

“Look,” he says finally. “Don’t call the police, okay? We need to think this through. Jesus, this is crazy.”

“Elson.”

“Seriously. Don’t do anything, all right?”

He looks at the computer again, the cryptic e-mail, then thinks again of his daughter. “Give me ten minutes, okay? Give me ten minutes to come over there and promise me you won’t do anything in those ten minutes but wait for me, all right?”

Cadence says nothing.

“Honey?”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Ten minutes.”

“Okay.”

“Promise me.”

“I promise.”

Looking back at the e-mail, he rereads the message one more time, but his mind is elsewhere now, on his daughter and on the absurdity of what has just happened. Walking across the apartment, he drops his beer in the trash, picks up the remaining slices of lime, then brushes off the countertop and sits down to catch his breath. He can feel a panic attack coming on, or something akin to one, the rhythm of his breath quickening, his heart tightening. He thinks suddenly about the doctor’s admonitions and tries his best to compose himself. Then he reaches again for his cell phone and dials his daughter’s number, hoping beyond all logic that she might answer, believing, even when he gets her voice mail, that she might actually want to hear from him.

“
WHAT’S HER NAME
?” Richard says.

“Who?”

“The girl in the pool.”

They are sitting in the parking lot at Taco Cabana, the motor running, waiting for the SUV that has been following them for the past ten minutes to pull around the corner. Brandon still hasn’t told him who’s inside the vehicle or what they want, and because of the glare of the headlights, Richard has only been able to discern that the vehicle itself is a large one, an SUV of some sort, or maybe a minivan. His best bet is that this is one of Brandon’s clients or maybe someone from the party who has offered to sell them drugs. Once before Brandon had taken him on a little excursion to the Galleria parking lot at three in the morning, only to reveal to him once they arrived that he was there to buy weed. A few minutes later a young girl in a CR-V had pulled up beside them, tossed a tiny bag of weed into their car, grabbed a wad of cash from Brandon’s hand, and driven off. This was the extent of Brandon’s paranoia, of course, his cautiousness, as he called it.

“No idea,” Brandon says finally. “Never saw her before.” He reaches into his pocket, pulls out his pack of cigarettes, and lights one.

In front of them, the Taco Cabana parking lot is empty. Richard stares at the bright pink stucco façade of the building, the outdoor seating area surrounded by palm trees. He is thinking of the girl, the image of the blood in the pool, the sight of the ambulance lights and the people standing around dumbfounded, confused, stoned. He wonders if he knows her, if he has ever met her before. And then he wonders if the sadness he feels now is real or just a by-product of the pot, if he’ll wake up tomorrow morning and feel nothing.