In Between Days (40 page)

And then he’d hung up and turned on the radio and tried to block out everything else for a while, tried to forget the very reason he was driving to Cotulla, Texas, in the first place.

Now, staring across the street, he can see a tiny barn covered in flowering vines and wisteria, and beyond it a long stretch of lonely field peppered with loquat trees and live oaks. Above him, in the sky, the sun is starting to lower. He stares back at the mini-mart and checks his watch, then decides to get out, feeling for the first time a sense of panic, a growing uncertainty, realizing that he’s either made a wrong turn somewhere or else something has gone terribly wrong. Either way, he feels a sudden sense of urgency now, a surge of adrenaline, and as he gets out of the car and starts toward the mini-mart, as he reaches the door and thrusts it open, he enters the building so quickly that the man behind the counter almost spills his drink.

“Hello?” says the man, a little startled.

Richard stares at him, a short Mexican man with weathered skin and a fading hairline and a small, serpentine tattoo at the base of his neck.

“Can I help you?” the man continues.

“My sister,” Richard blurts.

“I’m sorry?”

“Has anyone been here?”

The man stares at him, perplexed.

“I’m looking for my sister and I’m wondering if she’s been here.”

“Just now?”

“No, a while ago. Maybe a few hours,” he says. “She said she was calling me from across the street. Did you see anyone over there?”

The man stares across the road and squints, then looks back at Richard. “Blond hair?”

“Yes.”

“About this tall?” The man raises his hand above his head.

Richard nods.

“Drinking beer?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“She was here this morning. Bought some cigarettes, beer. Then she sat out there for about an hour. Then she left.”

“Do you know where she went?”

The man shrugs. “Got in a truck. That’s all I know. But earlier she was asking me about buses. Guess she didn’t need one.”

“A truck?” Richard says, suddenly panicked. “What type of truck?”

“White truck,” the man says, then, extending his arms, adds, “Big.”

“Do you know when that was?”

“A few hours ago.”

Richard stares at him. “And did you see who was driving?”

“The truck?”

“Yes.”

The man shakes his head. “Didn’t see.” Then he looks at Richard. “Do you think that’s her?”

“I don’t know,” Richard says. “Maybe.” Then feeling his stomach tighten, he looks through the window down the road. “Are there any other gas stations around here, you know, on this road?”

The man shakes his head. “Just us,” he says, smiling at him plaintively. “Are you okay?”

“Huh?”

“You’re sweating.”

But Richard is already turning around now, already heading out the door and back to the van.

Sitting in the front seat, he rolls down the window and lights a cigarette, wondering what to do now, wondering what he will tell his mother, and then wondering if the girl the man had described was actually Chloe or somebody else. And, if it was Chloe, where was she now? Who had picked her up? And where were they going? Suddenly he feels foolish for ever believing that it would all be this easy, for ever believing there wouldn’t be a catch. And then he begins to wonder if it had all been a trick from the start, a setup, an elaborate charade to throw them all off.

Shifting into gear, he pulls out of the mini-mart parking lot and starts back toward the highway, realizing that sooner or later—at some point between now and the moment he pulls into his mother’s driveway back in Houston—he’ll have to tell her the news. He’ll have to sit there and listen to her as she questions him, as she breaks down, as she asks him why he hadn’t just let her call the cops in Cotulla as she’d initially suggested, why he’d insisted that she trust him. And he’ll have to tell her then that he doesn’t have a good answer for her, that he doesn’t even know where his sister is at this moment. He’ll have to acknowledge that on a very fundamental level he has failed her.

And the thought of this conversation now is almost as upsetting to him as the very real possibility that Chloe herself has just vanished for good, just disappeared into nothing. And he wonders then how a person could do that, just disappear like that, just cancel out everything else in their life—their family, their friends, their future—just give it all up, for what? A boy? A romantic idea about love? And he thinks then about all of the times he has done this before, all of the times he has protected his sister, covered for her, defended her in front of their parents. All of the times he had picked her up at parties in high school when she was too drunk to drive, all of the times he had written her fake notes to get out of class, all of the times he had rewritten her papers for her, all of the times he had lied for her, misled their parents deliberately, just to keep her out of trouble. And what had it gotten her now? What had he given her but
a false sense of entitlement, a false sense of security, a naïve belief that where there were actions there were not always consequences.

It is this that he’s thinking about as he pulls onto the highway and later as the phone on the seat beside him begins to ring. He’s so overcome with frustration at this moment, though, so overwhelmed with dread, that he just lets it ring, believing at first it’s his mother, or perhaps his father, calling to get a report, but when the caller calls back, he realizes, against all logic, that it might in fact be Chloe and quickly picks up.

“Chlo?”

“Richard,” says a voice he recognizes immediately as Michelson’s. “I’m so glad I caught you. I was afraid that something might have happened when you didn’t show up at our meeting.”

“Our meeting?”

“Yes, our workshop. You were the only one who didn’t show. You and your friend …”

“Brandon.”

“Right, Brandon. Well, I’m so glad I caught you because I have some fabulous news.”

“I can’t really talk right now,” Richard says, suddenly feeling sick.

“This will only take a minute, Richard,” Michelson continues, and then he goes on to talk about something—a conversation he’d had with someone earlier that day, a space that has just opened up at Michigan, financial aid—but it all begins to blur now, the thought of Chloe filling his head, the absurdity of talking to Michelson at a moment like this.

“Did you hear what I said?” Michelson says. “It’s already a done deal. You’re in. You just need to send them that stuff. Have you mailed it off yet?”

“I have to go,” Richard says.

“Richard, are you hearing me?”

“My sister’s gone,” Richard says then, his mind growing numb.

“I’m sorry?”

“She’s gone,” he says. “She might even be dead.”

“Dead? What are you talking about, Richard?”

But before Michelson can continue, he hangs up the phone and turns it to mute, then floors the pedal of his mother’s minivan, weaving through traffic so recklessly that he no longer feels like a person who’s connected to the road, the earth. He no longer feels connected to anything. And as the sun in the distance begins to fade along the horizon,
turning daytime into night, he braces himself, remembering the last thing his sister said to him before she hung up, the last words that came out of her mouth.
I can’t wait to see you, Richie
, she’d said.
You have no idea
. And then she’d said,
Look, Richie, I have to hang up now, okay?
And then there’d been a loud sound in the background, a horn, and then the line had gone dead.

AT THE EDGE
of the kitchen sink, Cadence pours herself another cup of coffee and stares out at the backyard where Elson, even at this late hour, is still working on the yard. Bathed in the artificial glow of the backyard floodlights, he is laying down sod, smoothing it out with a roller, then soaking it with water. He’d come over earlier that evening with a bottle of champagne tucked beneath his arms, fresh flowers, a cake. Then he’d gone out to his car and carried in several patches of fresh sod, which he’d proceeded to set down on the deck. He wanted to cover up the bare spots at the back of the yard, he’d said, wanted to make everything look nice for Chloe. This was long overdue, he’d said. This was a problem that needed to be fixed. And as she stares at him now, she wonders what it was about men and lawns. It was like they saw the health of their lawn as some sort of outward reflection of their own ability to provide, their manliness. Or at least that had always been the case with Elson. If the lawn was in trouble, he’d spend the entire weekend just working on it, fretting over it, wondering if he had burned it with chemicals, watered it too profusely, cut it too short. And it would almost seem comical at this moment—the sight of him now—it would almost seem endearing, if it weren’t for the fact that it had been almost eight hours now since she’d last heard from Richard.

Staring at the clock above the counter, she tries again to do the math. Five hours to Cotulla and five hours back. Even with traffic, they should have been back by ten at the latest. And now, with the hour hand moving closer to one—one in the morning—she can only assume that something is wrong. Earlier she had stood out in the yard with Elson as he lay down the sod, talking about what they would do, how they would celebrate, agreeing that they would not even mention what she’d done,
how she’d worried them. There would be no accusations tonight, no reprimands. Tonight would be a night for celebration, nothing more. And they would all be together again, at least for tonight, and though she didn’t take this to mean what Elson took it to mean—a new beginning, a new start—she’d still felt giddy at the thought of it. A momentary reprieve from what had otherwise been a very dark time in their lives, a momentary vacation before they had to get down to the business of dealing with the aftermath, the fallout: the civil suit, the inevitable interrogations, the media. But for tonight, at least, they’d keep all of these things far from their minds. Tonight, they would simply welcome back their daughter.

This had been the plan, at least, and Cadence herself had felt so nervous, so excited, that she’d barely been able to keep herself still. Moving around the house in a flurry, vacuuming the living room, fixing up Chloe’s bed, ordering pizzas, calling up Richard every half hour, even though he never picked up, then starting all over again. But somewhere between then and now, between the moment that Richard first called her and the moment she’d begun to notice that the cheese on the pizzas she’d ordered had started to congeal, she’d lost that sense of optimism, that sense of hope.

Now, staring through the patio door at Elson, she catches his eye and waves. Brushing the dirt off his khakis, he waves back, then takes off his gloves and starts back toward the house, smiling.

“It looks nice in here,” he says, as he enters, glancing around the room at the fresh cut flowers she’d set up earlier, the table setting, the votive candles arranged in a row.

“It’s one o’clock,” she says.

Elson looks at the clock. “They probably just stopped to get something to eat, you know.”

“For three hours?”

“I don’t know.” Elson shrugs. “There’s traffic, too. You have to consider that.”

“Elson, he hasn’t returned
any
of my calls.”

“You told me he didn’t want you calling him, right? He said not to call.”

Cadence looks at him, nods.

“Look, you need to stop worrying, okay? They’re coming home. They probably just got held up.”

Cadence moves over to the counter and picks up her coffee, and as she does this, Elson walks past her toward the hall.

“Where are you going?” she calls after him.

“Out front to my car,” he yells back. “Five more patches to lay down, then I’m done.”

A moment later, the front door opens and slams shut, and she walks back to the island in the middle of the kitchen and puts out the candles that are starting to fade.

Through the patio doors, the backyard looks pristine. Elson has not only filled in the bare patches at the back of the lawn but has raked out three of the beds and weeded two others. He has swept up the pool deck, power-washed the patio, added new mulch. This is perhaps his own unusual way of dealing with stress, with uncertainty, but if it is, it’s certainly not something she’s seen before.

Still, it occurrred to her earlier that there was no way to account for a man like Elson, a man who could snake his way back into your heart in the most unorthodox ways, a man who could inexplicably miss out on one of the most important meetings of his life and then try to make it up to you by spending several hours out in the backyard, laying down sod. That she’d chosen to forgive him, that she’d chosen to ignore what he had done, that she’d chosen to overlook his negligence, this was not something she could explain. It was like trying to explain twenty-five years of marriage to a person you’d never met. These habits were simply ingrained in her. They were as much a part of her as anything else. And Elson, too, was a part of her. As much as she wanted to pretend that he wasn’t, she couldn’t. They were inextricably linked, the two of them, bonded like tissues in a single body. And no amount of separation or betrayal or even divorce could ever change that.

It is this that she’s thinking about as she stares out at the backyard, at the stillness of the pool water, and then at the darkness of the sky, and then later at the flashing screen of her cell phone in the distance, which is blinking now, beckoning her.

It had entirely slipped her mind that she’d left her phone out there, on a small glass table by the side of the pool, and as she rushes to it now, as she pushes open the glass door and starts toward the pool, she feels that giddiness returning.
Richard
, she thinks.
Thank God
.

But when she finally picks up the phone, the caller ID says “Restricted.” She stares at it for a moment, then answers.

“Mrs. Harding?” says a voice on the other end. It’s a young voice, male.

“Yes.”

“You don’t know me, but I’m here to relay a message from your daughter.”