In Between Days (35 page)

“What is it?” Elson asks finally.

Richard shakes his head.

“What is it, buddy? What’s on your mind?”

“Nothing.”

“Just tell me.”

Richard turns away, then walks over to the patio doors and stares out at the pool. A moment later, Elson walks up behind him and again touches his son’s shoulder, squeezes it until he finally relaxes.

“I think I may have screwed up, Dad,” Richard says finally, without turning around.

“What are you talking about?”

“I think I may have really screwed up.”

“Is this about your sister?”

Richard turns to him then, but doesn’t answer.

“Well, whatever you did, buddy,” Elson says, feeling suddenly nervous, trying to choose his words carefully. “Whatever you did, I’m sure there’s a way out of it, okay. But you’re gonna have to tell me what it is.”

Richard looks down at his hands for a moment, then looks away, and he can tell that he’s lost him.

“Buddy?”

“It’s nothing,” Richard says finally. “Forget it.”

“Look, Rich—”

“Dad, I gotta go. I got stuff to do.” And just like that, he walks out of the kitchen and up to his room, and Elson is left there alone, staring at the kitchen, the charred remains of his failed breakfast.

At various times during their childhood he had been a strict disciplinarian, but he had never struck his children, and this was something he often took pride in. Several of his friends had admitted to him on various occasions that they had occasionally lost their cool, let a hand slip, or grabbed their child too intensely, and he could see in their pained expressions how much they now regretted it. But Elson had never done this. He had never even abused his children verbally, from what he could tell. He may have lost his cool from time to time, may have raised his voice, but he’d never put them down, never degraded them in the way that his own father had degraded him. And yet, they had still come to resent him, even despise him, in recent months, and he wasn’t entirely sure why this was. Cadence had told him that it was all in his mind, that they didn’t really despise him, that it was only a phase, a natural part of the healing process when two people broke up. But Elson had sensed it long before the divorce, had seen it in Chloe’s expressions in high school, had heard it in Richard’s voice when he first left for college. And now, when the three of them were together, when they were together without Cadence, he often felt like a prison warden holding his children against their will, making them eat dinners with him, forcing them to talk about their lives, when it was perfectly obvious to everyone that they’d rather be somewhere else.

It is this that he’s thinking about as he cleans up the kitchen and, later, as he sits with Cadence out on the back patio by the pool, drinking coffee. It is an overcast morning, the threat of a storm coming in the late afternoon. The rhododendron bushes on the far end of the yard look sickly, and just beyond the pool he can see that all but one of the azalea bushes have died. It seems that the entire yard has gone to shit since he left, no one around to take care of it anymore, no one around to weed or fertilize or rake out the beds. He considers mentioning this to Cadence, but he can tell that she’s already somewhere else. Only moments before he had explained to her what had happened with Richard in the kitchen, what he’d told him, and he can tell she’s upset.

“So he knows,” she says finally.

“He knows.”

“And you told him.”

“I didn’t tell him. He guessed.”

She looks at him, shakes her head. “I knew this was a mistake,” she says.

“Cadence.”

“Seriously, Elson. What the hell were we thinking?”

“I don’t know that we
were
thinking,” he says. “Wasn’t that kind of the point?”

She puts down her cup and looks around, and he can see that he’s losing her, that she’s not in the mood to joke around anymore.

“Look,” he says. “It doesn’t have to be.”

“What?”

“It doesn’t have to be a mistake.”

“Elson.”

“I’m just saying.” But he knows, in a way, that she’s right. As much as he wants to believe that this is all just the start of something bigger, a new beginning for their relationship, a part of him knows that there’s too much damage still to repair. And besides, the timing couldn’t be worse. With everything that’s going on right now, with everything they’re being forced to contend with, this is the last thing that either of them should be thinking about. Still, looking at his wife now, he finds it hard to let go.

“Do you regret it?” he asks finally.

She looks at him. “That’s not the point.”

“Just tell me.”

“No,” she says softly. “I don’t regret it, but I also don’t think that this is something we should be wasting our time talking about right now.”

“Fair enough,” he says and crosses his arms.

She picks up her coffee then and sips it. “Did he say anything else?”

“About?”

“About, you know, Chloe.”

Elson shakes his head. “No, but I think he knows something.”

“Why?”

“He seemed like he wanted to tell me something.”

“About her?”

“I don’t know. About something. Earlier. In the kitchen.”

“Maybe we should have him talk to the detectives.”

“You really want to put him through that?”

Cadence pauses. “I don’t know. What other choice do we have?”

And it is then that he hears his cell phone ringing in his pocket and
pulls it out. Glancing quickly at the caller ID, he sees Lorna’s name flashing across the screen, feels a sudden rush, then quickly closes it. As he turns off the ringer, Cadence eyes him suspiciously.

“Who was that?” she asks.

“Nobody,” he says. “Work.”

“They’re still bothering you?”

“Yeah,” he says, and shrugs. “You know, loose ends and stuff.”

She nods, but he can tell she doesn’t believe him.

He sits there and stares out at the yard.

When he first moved out, he’d told himself that he was catching a break, a second chance at life. He’d told himself that the woman he was leaving behind, his wife of twenty-five years, was too old, too needy, too intense, and what he needed right now was someone else, someone younger and more like him. And in his quest to find such a person, he had found Lorna, who was exactly that, the polar opposite of Cadence, but he wonders now, looking at his wife, if this is in fact what he wanted after all. Was there ever an ideal person in the end, and if so, was it possible that that person for him had been Cadence all along? She was certainly far from perfect, and they were certainly far from perfect together, but they were
something
after all, weren’t they? In a very fundamental way, they worked, and in another very fundamental way, he needed her, found it hard to exist without her, and he was pretty sure she felt the same.

And yet now, thinking of the cell phone in his pocket, the message that Lorna has surely left, he feels an irrational desire to sneak off and listen to it, to find out what she wants, even as Cadence stares at him suspiciously, dubious of his intent.

“We need to meet the detectives at three,” she says finally.

He nods. “Okay.”

“So if you have something to do before then—”

“I don’t.”

“Well, I do,” she says.

“What?”

“Homework.”

He stares at her.

“For my business class.”

How she can do homework at a time like this is beyond him, though he senses by the way she averts her eyes that this is simply an excuse, a way to get him to leave.

“Fair enough,” he says finally. “Mind if I stick around?”

“I’d rather you didn’t.”

He stares at her again, trying to meet her eyes, but she looks away. Finally he stands up. “Okay,” he says. “I’m not going to push.”

She nods.

“But you’re sure you meant what you said?”

“About what?”

“About not regretting last night.”

She looks at him now. “I told you I didn’t.”

“But you always have some regrets, don’t you?”

“Well, that’s just me, Elson,” she says. “You know, that’s just my nature.”

He looks at her now, suddenly remembering the strange scene from the night before, standing outside the bathroom door, whispering to her through the keyhole, the pungent odor of marijuana filling up the room. When she’d finally come out, almost an hour later, he was lying in bed, reading a book, waiting for her, but she didn’t even look at him. She just asked him to turn out the light, then she slid into bed and put her arms around him very tightly and began to weep. And as he lay there, holding her, comforting her, he began to think about what a strange testament this all was to family life, to life in the modern age, that you could have a family torn apart by tragedy, you could have a son who despised you, an ex-wife who smoked marijuana in the bathroom, and a daughter who was very possibly going to jail, and yet you could still take simple pleasure in the fact that you were somehow a part of something larger and that the people around you needed you, that they depended on you, even if they didn’t know it.

“You know, if you’d like, I could stick around and work on the garden,” he says.

“The garden?”

“Yeah, it’s a mess if you haven’t noticed.”

“Elson.”

“Okay,” he says. “I’m leaving. I was just offering. But look, sooner or later someone’s gonna have to take care of it, okay. In fact, there’s a lot of things around here, Cadence—if you haven’t noticed—there’s a lot of things around here that need some work.”

She smiles at him then and rolls her eyes in that wry, ironic way of hers. “Yeah, Elson,” she says, sighing. “I’ve noticed.”

STANDING IN LINE
at Kinko’s, Richard feels suddenly nauseous. The thought of his parents getting back together, the thought of them actually being civil to one another, the thought of that combined with everything else, with the very real possibility that he has just enabled his sister to leave the country, that she is quite possibly standing on foreign soil at this very moment, the thought of all of these things put together, it’s almost too much for his mind to process at this moment.

All around him people are jockeying for position, moving around frantically, holding large stacks of documents in their arms like babies or waving desperately at the attendants behind the counter, trying to get their attention, voicing their complaints, explaining that what they’re trying to do here is very urgent. He closes his eyes and tries to block it all out and then looks again at his cell phone, rereads the text messages that have been sent to him in the past half hour, each one more cryptic than the last, all of them sent from a number he doesn’t recognize.

The first arrived as he was leaving the house, just as he was pulling out of his parents’ driveway in his mother’s minivan, his poetry manuscript on the seat beside him.

rich, where r u ? pls call!

He had tried to call back immediately, assuming it was Chloe, but the phone call had gone to some anonymous voice-mail account, and when he’d tried again, a few minutes later, to send her a text, the text had been rejected.

A few minutes after that the second text arrived.

in trouble, pls call

But again he’d had no luck. He had tried the number probably a dozen times, but each time the call had gone directly to the same voice-mail account, and each time he had left a message for his sister, begging her to please call him, but she never had.

And then, just a few minutes earlier, he’d received the last message, the longest and also the most baffling.

need ur help. not safe now. will call fr landline.
pls erase these messages! -c

But he hadn’t erased them, fearing somewhere deep inside that this might be the very last communication he ever had with his sister. Now, however, he isn’t sure, and as he stands in line, feeling utterly absurd about his reason for being here, about the fact that he is somehow attempting to apply to graduate school in the midst of all this chaos, he begins to wonder if he should have tried to do something else, if it’s finally time to come clean to the cops or to let his parents in on what has happened.

In front of him, a woman is arguing dramatically with one of the cashiers, claiming that they have ruined her daughter’s invitations, that they have essentially destroyed her daughter’s debutante party, and that it’s too late for them to do anything about it. Beside her, a young teenage girl with blond hair, probably only a few years younger than Chloe, is staring down at her feet, clearly embarrassed. The woman demands to speak to the manager, and as the cashier disappears sheepishly into one of the back rooms, Richard feels a sudden desire to pull this woman aside and explain to her how lucky she is, to let her know how fortunate she is to even know where her daughter is at this moment.

But instead he just turns around and heads out the door, and it’s then that his phone rings, and he feels a jolt of adrenaline rushing through him. Moving over into the shade of the Kinko’s awning, he reaches quickly for the phone in his pocket, almost dropping it as he fumbles to answer.

“Chloe?”

“What?” says a male voice.

“Who is this?”

“It’s Brandon, man. Look, you gotta get over here.”

“Where?”

“To my place.” He can hear the anxiousness in Brandon’s voice.

“What’s going on?”

“Dude, things are fucked up.”

“What are you talking about?”

There’s a long pause. Then Brandon says, “Look, man, just come over.”

Richard moves out of the shade and starts over toward the minivan. “Can you at least tell me what’s going on?”

“I don’t know,” Brandon says. “Can I? I mean, is my phone being tapped?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about two detectives—or I don’t know what they were—two guys in black suits, okay, coming over here and grilling me for like half an hour.”

“When?”

“Just now.”

“Just now?”

“Yeah, just
now
.”

“What were they grilling you about?”

“What do you think?” Brandon pauses. “Look, man, they were doing some Internet surveillance or something. I don’t know. But somehow they figured out that Chloe was using the Internet at my place. Traced the ISP or something. I don’t know. But they’re like
We know she’s here
. And then when they looked around and saw she wasn’t, they’re like
Where is she?
”