In Between Days (43 page)

Walking out to the back veranda, he lit a cigarette and sat down at Lorna’s patio table, staring out at the backyard furniture illuminated by the lights from the alley. He thought about Lorna, asleep in her bed, and how in so many ways she had been right to be concerned, how on a certain level he would always be in love with Cadence, and how a part of him would always hold on to the idea of regaining what they’d once had. Even if it was impossible now, even if Richard was off in the chilly Midwest, trying to be Jack Kerouac, even if Chloe was off in some foreign country, living under an assumed name, even if he would soon be the father of a newborn baby girl, even if their lives, and everything that had happened these past six months, was irreversible, he still found himself fighting against it, this notion of time, still willing his way back into the past.

And at moments like this, when he found his mind drifting back, there was one memory in particular that he always returned to, a memory of the four of them eating together on the night before Chloe left for college her junior year. The memory, which took place over a year ago, was the last time he could remember the four of them being together as a family. It was long before he and Cadence had ever announced their divorce, long before Richard had ever talked about going to graduate school, long before Chloe had even met the boy she would later be accused of hurting. It was long before all of that, and in this memory, which is unremarkable in almost every way, they are sitting together at the table, eating fresh corn on the cob and hamburgers, which Chloe has helped him prepare on the grill. They have all participated in different ways in the assembling of this meal, Richard husking the corn, Cadence making the salad, he and Chloe out in the backyard, grilling the burgers and lining up the condiments. And now they are sitting here together to eat, the four of them, as a family. In a year from now they will barely be talking to each other anymore. They will not even know the smallest details about each
other’s lives. They will not even know where Chloe is living. But for now, they are here. For now, they are simply sitting together in a room, around a table where they have sat a thousand times before. They are eating a meal together, in silence. And they are together in this moment. They are doing what they believe, what they’ve been taught, families do.

AT A SMALL CYBER CAFÉ
on Wörther Straße, across the street from the School of Fine Art and Design, Chloe is trying yet again to explain to her brother why it was she left. In the six weeks since she and Raja have been here in Prenzlauer Berg, in East Berlin, she has written over twenty versions of this e-mail, each one over a page in length. In the only one she actually sent him she’d simply asked him if he hated her, but a few days later, she’d panicked and canceled her account. She knew that if Raja ever found out what she was up to, if he ever discovered what she was doing, he’d never forgive her, and yet here she was again, trying once again to explain it.

In most of the e-mails she’d already drafted, she had found the tone too defensive, too cold. She was trying to explain with logic something that couldn’t really be explained. She was trying to give justification to something that couldn’t really be justified. This time, though, she is simply trying to describe in detail what actually happened, hoping their actions will speak for themselves. She is trying to explain to him that somewhere outside of Laredo, somewhere between the moment they left her and the moment the van began to slow down outside the border, Raja had had a change of heart. He had changed his mind. This is what he’d told her at least. Something inside of him just snapped. He described it as a moment of weakness, of course, a wavering of his convictions, but she had never seen it that way. She had always seen it as something else—a testament of his love for her, a sign of his inability to live without her. He had banged on the wall of the van for nearly twenty minutes, he’d told her later, banged until his knuckles were bloody and bruised, banged until the girl who was traveling beside him began to cry. And when Teo
finally pulled over, he had begged him like he’d never begged for anything else in his life. He had begged him to turn around and go back.

Later, he would get angry when she’d ask him to retell it. It was a moment of great embarrassment for him, he’d claim, the way he cried in front of Teo, the way he stood there and begged. But it was this story that she most wanted to tell Richard. It was this story that best explained why she was where she was, and why she’d done what she had done.

He wouldn’t need to know everything, of course. He wouldn’t need to know how they had spent less than a month in Nuevo Laredo, then Mexico City, before finally deciding to leave the country. He wouldn’t need to know how easy it had been for Raja’s friend in Palo Alto to wire them the money they needed for their plane tickets or how easy it had been for Raja himself to obtain a passport or how they’d both changed their appearances—Raja growing a beard, her dying her hair—or how they’d made it through the customs terminal at the Berlin Brandenburg Airport without a hitch. He wouldn’t need to know about the first week they’d spent at the Generator Loft in East Berlin or how they’d managed to find three American art students who were willing to put them up for the past few weeks. He wouldn’t need to know how friendly everyone had been to them since they’d first arrived in Berlin or how much they loved the city or how they’d both recently found jobs—Raja washing dishes at the Morgenrot Café in Prenzlauer Berg and her waiting tables at Luxus Bar—or how they were now only a few weeks shy of being able to make a first month’s deposit on a small one-bedroom apartment in Friedrichshain.

He wouldn’t need to know any of that. Just as he wouldn’t need to know that she now went by the first name Anne, or the last name Leigh. For now, all he needed to know was that she had done what she had done not out of fear but out of love, because the man she loved most in the world had banged on the metal wall of a dirty cargo hold for nearly half an hour. This was the only story he needed to know.

But even as she sits here now, staring out across the street at the rain-drenched sidewalks in front of the School of Fine Art, even as she sits here at her tiny terminal, typing out the final lines of her latest e-mail, even now she knows she can never tell him this story, can never send him this e-mail. To give him this amount of information at this point would be tantamount to turning themselves in. Even sending him that initial e-mail had been a risk. And so instead, she logs off her computer, saving
the e-mail as a draft, and then goes back to the counter for another cup of coffee.

Of course, she knew what would happen if they ever went back. She had been following the story on the Internet for months. She knew about Seung, about how he’d been indicted, and she knew of course about Tyler and how he’d gradually recovered. And she knew that if they ever agreed to testify they could probably get immunity from the district attorney. Richard had made all of this very clear to her in the e-mail he had sent her, an e-mail that had included the trial date, the name of the attorney to contact, and even a post office box for the private investigator her mother had hired. But none of this mattered to her now. Even when she’d mentioned it to Raja the previous week, he’d simply smiled at her and said, “Yeah, we could do that. We could go back. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to testify.”

And she knew when he said this that he meant it, that no amount of exoneration would ever change the simple fact that he was never going to betray a friend, even a friend like Seung, who had already betrayed him. It wasn’t in his nature. It wasn’t in his makeup. And though she used to resent it, she’d recently grown to accept it, even admire it, this stubbornness. It was simply a part of who he was. Thinking about this now, she picks up her coffee and returns to her table.

The café itself is small and dark, filled with German art students typing away at their computers, chain-smoking their Gauloises cigarettes, talking in earnest voices about things she doesn’t understand. On the walls around her, there are symbols of a bygone era, black-and-white photographs depicting the neoclassical buildings that had once stood on this street, bright-colored advertisements filled with Communist propaganda, a World War II gas mask framed in a box. This is a city that will forever live in the past, she thinks, a city that will forever be defined by its history. Even in its newly revitalized state, even with its burgeoning art scene and urban renewal, it will never fully move on. And perhaps that’s the point. Perhaps that’s the point of all these reminders hung along the walls: that no matter how hard we try, no matter how far we go, we can never truly escape what’s happened before.

But if this is true, she wonders now, sitting down at a small table by the window, then how could she account for what she’d done or for the exhilarating sense of freedom she’d felt since leaving the States?
Was it possible that the only true way to escape your past was to erase it, to
erase yourself, to invent a new identity, to sever all ties from your family and friends, your country of origin? And if this was true, then how long could it last? Was it possible she could go on forever, living like this, or would she eventually feel the need to return? If there was anything standing in her way, it was only guilt, a strange sense of familial obligation, a responsibility she felt to her mother and to Richard, a sense of remorse for leaving them so little. A cryptic e-mail sent to her brother in haste. A phone message to her mother, relayed from Teo to Dupree, which had probably scared her mother more than it had assured her. It was something that she thought about often, a question that plagued her, whether or not she’d ever return. And she knew the consequences, of course, but it wasn’t about that. It was about whether this new life she’d created, this new life she’d just begun, would be enough to fulfill her.

All she knows now is that in less than an hour Raja will be getting off work and meeting her here. As soon as he arrives, they will switch over from coffee to beer, and then they will go off to another bar on the other side of town where they will meet with a small group of friends, new friends, who they’ve only just met and who they don’t know very well, but who they’ll know a lot better by the end of the night. They will use whatever money they’ve saved up for going out to buy as much beer as they can, and they will stay out as late as their bodies will let them, trying to speak what little German they’ve learned, trying to remember the lyrics to the German songs their new friends have taught them. The bar will be small and warmly lit, and the air will be thick with cigarette smoke, chaotic with laughter, and in that moment, sitting across from her new German friends, sitting beside the man she loves, the idea of returning to Houston will seem impossible to her. She knows this now, just as she knows every time she looks up the cost of transatlantic flights, every time she calculates the distance between here and Houston, every time she thinks about her parents’ divorce, or the trouble back at Stratham, or her brother’s handsome face, every time she considers the damage that’s been done and the bridges that have been burned and the utter irreversibility of time, every time she thinks about these things, she knows, as she knows now, staring out the window at the rain-drenched streets of East Berlin, the foreign signs of this foreign city, that even though she will soon have enough money to buy a plane ticket, even though she will soon have the means to go home, it is simply too far a journey, too great a distance, to go.

I would like to gratefully acknowledge Trinity University and the Artist Foundation of San Antonio for their generous support during the writing of this book. I would also like to express my deepest gratitude to my brilliant and tireless editor, Diana Coglianese, and to my generous, wise, and always supportive agent, Terra Chalberg. Finally, my most profound thanks to my friends and family and to my wife, Jenny, without whose love and encouragement I would have never been able to write this book.

Andrew Porter is the author of the story collection
The Theory of Light and Matter
. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he has received a Pushcart Prize, a James Michener/Copernicus Fellowship, and the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. His work has appeared in
One Story
,
The Threepenny Review
, and on public radio’s
Selected Shorts
. Currently, he teaches fiction writing and directs the creative writing program at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.

About the Guide

The introduction, discussion questions, and suggested further reading that follow are designed to enliven your group’s discussion of Andrew Porter’s engaging first novel,
In Between Days
.

About the Book

The Harding family of Houston is in the midst of an upheaval. Recently divorced, Elson and Cadence find themselves thrown together when their daughter, Chloe, returns home after being forced to leave her East Coast college under troubling circumstances. Into the mix come Elson’s girlfriend, Lorna, and Chloe’s older brother, Richard, a poet working at a coffee shop and struggling with what it means to be a writer. When Chloe’s boyfriend, Raja, also flees to Houston, bonds of friendship and family are tested to their breaking points. Psychologically astute and utterly compelling,
In Between Days
asks us what responsibility we have toward our own lives and the lives of others.

Questions for Discussion