In Between Days (30 page)

As for Raja and Seung, they were immediately expelled and handed over to the Stratham Police Department. This was now a criminal matter and not something that Stratham College wanted to touch. In fact, they seemed to go out of their way to keep the story under wraps, to keep it out of the local papers and away from the national media. They downplayed its severity to outsiders, then played it up on campus. They were “very concerned” they had written in a campus-wide e-mail the following week. They were “very concerned” and “very troubled” by what had happened. They were doing everything they could to resolve this situation in a “satisfactory” way.

During this whole time Raja was living in a motel room near campus. He was forced to stick around until the investigation was over, but was no longer allowed on the campus “grounds.” In the evenings, before his parents came up to join him, Chloe would visit him there, and they would order pizza or Chinese take-out and talk. Raja was always reassuring, always optimistic, never depressed, but still, she could tell he felt responsible for what had happened, that he was carrying a burden of guilt far greater than hers. He never came out and said it, but she could tell by the way he talked about Tyler, by the way he gave her nightly updates on his progress, that he was deeply troubled by it, that he blamed himself, and that the severity of the accident had devastated him.

They talked surprisingly little about the case, however. Nor did they talk about Seung, who was now staying in a much nicer hotel on the other side of campus and whose parents had hired a high-powered attorney to defend him. For all of his talk about repression and marginalization, Seung had come from considerable means, it turned out, had grown up in a wealthy suburb of Connecticut, and had gone to a fancy private school. All things he had kept hidden from Raja and Chloe.

Still, his unconscionable betrayal of Raja was not something that Raja could forgive, nor understand, and it was not something he ever wanted to talk about. The closest he even came to mentioning it was the night after Chloe was sentenced by the Student Judiciary Council, the same night that Richard, back in Houston, had informed her that her father had finally moved out. The combination of these two events mixed with everything else that was happening at the time had sent her into such an
abrupt tailspin that by the time she made it over to Raja’s motel room she was already in tears. He had taken her inside, poured her a glass of beer, then sat down next to her and listened to her as she told him about what had happened that day. Surprisingly, he didn’t seem as upset as she had been by her suspension. Under the circumstances, he said, it was actually not that bad. In fact, she could have gotten a lot worse. If anything, he felt the Student Judiciary Council had been surprisingly lenient to her. She nodded and considered this. He always had a way of relaxing her, of putting things in perspective. And besides, with what he was going through right now, with what he was facing, it seemed pretty absurd to complain. Still, she couldn’t get past the fact that none of this would have happened had Seung not implicated her, had he not told the police. Sure, there was a witness who had seen her leaving the dorm, but there was no other way of linking her to the actual incident without Seung’s testimony. And now they were telling her that she might be facing conspiracy charges if Tyler Beckwith didn’t recover, if he died, conspiracy charges simply for being there, conspiracy charges that could result in jail time, not to mention a criminal record. It made her sick just to think about it.

“Don’t you ever get angry at him?” she asked, swirling her beer, “for what he did? For what he told them?”

Raja shrugged. “It would have come out anyway,” he said.

“Maybe,” she said. “But he didn’t have to tell them everything. I mean, he didn’t have to mention the cricket bat, for example.”

Raja looked away then, and she could see that the topic was making him uncomfortable, but she could also see something else, a shifting in his eyes that made her realize that she might not know everything, that there might be more to this story than he was willing to admit. And that’s when she asked him point-blank for the first time what she’d always wanted to ask him, what she’d always been too afraid to ask. She asked him then whether it had actually been him who hit Tyler.

He looked at her for a long time and then finally said yes, very quietly.

“I don’t believe you.”

“Then, no.”

She looked at him. “Which is it?”

“Whichever you want it to be.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Whatever you want it to mean.”

She sat up. “Why aren’t you answering the question?”

“Because I don’t think you’re asking a question and because the answer to that question is totally irrelevant anyway.”

“Why?”

“Because in the state of Massachusetts it doesn’t matter. In the state of Massachusetts it doesn’t matter who did what. Just the fact that I was there is guilt enough.”

“Not if you’re innocent,” she said. “Not if you agreed to testify.”

“I’m not testifying.”

“Why not?”

But he didn’t answer her.

“If you didn’t do it, Raj, then you need to testify.”

He looked at her earnestly then. “I never said I didn’t do it.”

So what had happened? A part of her felt like she’d never know. She’d never know for sure. And a part of her didn’t want to know. If it had been Raja, would that change how she felt about him? Would she no longer feel as safe in his presence? Would she no longer trust him? Wasn’t it easier just to believe it wasn’t him? Wasn’t it easier just to believe that it had all been an accident?

Sometimes, late at night, she’d try to reconstruct it in her mind from what she knew. She’d picture the three of them leaving his dorm room that night, moving swiftly across the quad, through the snow-covered grass, their faces hidden beneath baseball caps, their eyes shielded from the wind. She’d remember the sound of snow crunching beneath their feet, the bite of the wind against her cheeks. She’d remember Seung walking far ahead of them, holding a cricket bat in his hand, a cricket bat that he had found in Raja’s closet, and Raja a few yards behind, and then her, right on Raja’s heels, her coat pockets filled with two cans of shaving cream. She’d remember wanting to say something to him then, wanting to talk to him, but it was too cold to talk, too cold to do anything but duck her head and walk.

Earlier, Seung had looked up Tyler’s dorm room in the campus directory, had written it down on the palm of his hand, and as they approached his dorm, she remembered Seung checking his palm again, then motioning for them to stop. He was standing beneath a lamppost, steam rising from his head, his eyes looking up.

They gathered beneath an awning on the side of the dorm, then
Seung said something about Chloe following them, waiting until they entered, then coming in a few minutes later herself with the shaving cream. She remembered Raja looking down at his feet, saying nothing. She remembered trying to catch his eyes, trying to touch his arm, but he was somewhere else now, and before she knew it they were moving inside, then up the stairwell, then down the hallway of Tyler’s floor.

Nobody saw them. Nobody saw them enter the stairwell, and nobody saw them walk down the hall. Nobody had even seen them earlier as they’d walked across the quad. Later, this would seem like an amazing stroke of good fortune, but at that moment she remembered only feeling numb. Her mind had checked out. She was no longer a part of herself. Raja was looking around nervously. He was saying that they should stop, that they should go back, that this was crazy. He was saying that they’d come to regret this later.

This is nuts
, he’d said at one point, and then she remembered him grabbing Seung’s arm and Seung pushing him back. They were standing outside the door now, everything quiet.

Seung gave Raja a look, a look that said
Don’t screw this up
, then he put his finger to his lips and motioned for Chloe to move down the hallway away from the door. Then he lifted his bat.

A moment later, Raja looked at her, she remembered, looked at her as if to say he was sorry, then he turned back to Seung and nodded.

What happened after that was a blur. It all happened so quickly that she could barely process it. She remembered seeing Seung knock and then, a few seconds later, seeing the door crack open. The room inside was dark, she could see that much, but she could only see a tiny slice of Tyler Beckwith’s face, his nose and chin, his profile, before Seung pushed him forward, and then Raja followed, pushing Tyler Beckwith back into his room. She heard Tyler say,
What the fuck?
Then the door slammed shut behind them, and the hallway was quiet. For a good thirty seconds at least, it was perfectly still. For a good thirty seconds, before the screaming started, before Chloe ran, before everything in their lives would forever change, for a good thirty seconds the world was perfectly still.

IT SEEMED STRANGE
to think about now, but in the beginning she had liked so many things about him. She had liked the way he smelled, the way he touched her, the way he exuded a certain confidence in everything he did. And she had liked the way that he had basically taken control of their lives from the start, the way that he had covered every bill, paid for every tab. He seemed so much older than her, so much more worldly and experienced, and it made her feel safe, in retrospect, to be around him. It made her feel safe to know that he owned a house, that he had a steady job, that he had money saved up in the bank. It made her feel safe to know that he would always keep their refrigerator stocked with food and their cabinets stocked with booze, that he would always have enough money to take her on vacations, and that he wanted to have kids, too, like she did, and that he would do whatever he had to to provide for those kids.

And yet somewhere along the way, things had changed, though it was hard for her to say now when this was. Was it after Richard was born? After Chloe? For so many years her life had been consumed by the children, by their needs, by the responsibility she felt to take care of them, and she was even surprised, at times, by how easily she had come to accept this, how easily she had fallen into this role. While her friends were still in college, she was nursing Richard, and by the time these same friends had entered graduate school, or law school, or started working, she was already pregnant with Chloe. It seemed that the strange uncertain terrain of her early twenties was something she had missed. She had not had to contend with finding a job, or discovering who she was, or negotiating the single dating scene. She had had Elson and the security
that came along with being married to a man who was forever moving upward.

Sometimes her friends would come to visit her on their winter breaks, and as they sat over beers on the back veranda, overlooking the pool, they would talk about their failed relationships, their growing credit card debt, their student loans, all the while marveling at her house, her pool, her children, at how together she seemed, how grown up. And yet, whenever they left the house, she’d feel an emptiness filling her up, as if she’d somehow been left behind, cheated out of a life she hadn’t thought she’d wanted until she’d realized it was lost.

Meanwhile, the women she did hang out with on a regular basis were all friends of Elson’s, wives of his colleagues and friends, all older women who seemed to take pity on her, who spoke to her like older sisters or mothers, giving her advice on where to find the best bargains on clothes for her children or what to do if Richard was sick or who to call if Chloe was acting out. They spouted off names and addresses, gave her business cards, but never asked her once about herself or what she wanted. These were all women who had long ago resigned themselves to their marital roles, who somehow, like Cadence herself, had lost themselves in the lifelong pursuits of their husbands.

And, of course, it had never occurred to Elson to ask her if she was happy. If he had, she wonders even now what she would have said. Probably nothing. Or maybe she would have told him the truth. Maybe she would have told him that at night, after he’d fallen asleep, she wandered around the house aimlessly for hours on end, trying to fight back the anxious thoughts that crept into her head, thoughts of Richard and Chloe and what type of children they would become, what type of adults they’d turn into, whether they’d end up resenting her or whether they’d inherit her propensity toward sadness or whether they’d end up being poisoned by the residue of a troubled marriage. She had long ago convinced herself that she had ruined them, that by allowing them to live together under this roof she had somehow stunted their growth, their emotional growth, and though they were children, and relatively good children at that, she knew that they must have somehow sensed the growing distance between her and Elson and internalized it, stored it away in the darkest recesses of their minds. Just as she had been corrupted by her own parents’ marriage, they would be corrupted by hers, doomed to repeat her
own mistakes, doomed to reinvent their own neuroses, doomed to live a life spent searching for a better model, a better paradigm, of love.

She never expressed any of these thoughts to Elson, however, and had he ever asked, she probably wouldn’t have even then. Instead, she spent her days paging through clothes catalogs and books on parenting, researching summer camps for Richard, hosting Brownie-troop meetings for Chloe. She took up running on the weekends, joined a bridge group in the winter of Richard’s seventh year, hosted parties for Elson and his colleagues, organized dinners and luncheons for their wives. She learned how to do Pilates, how to macramé, how to plant a sustainable eco-friendly garden. She bought the children the clothes they wanted, took Richard to swim practice, Chloe to ballet. She made sure to pay the bills on time, made sure to be home whenever the pool guy showed up to clean, made sure to keep the air-conditioning unit filled at all times with fresh filters.

But throughout it all, she never felt happy, and with each passing day it seemed that her sense of regret only increased. She thought a lot about college and how she’d never finished. She thought about Elson and how he was only the third man she’d ever slept with and how unfortunate that was. And she thought, of course, about her children and how despite their good grades they seemed to be falling behind their classmates in terms of their emotional development.