Authors: Andrew Porter
“So what did you tell them?”
“Nothing, man. I mean I told them jack shit, but they were pissed. I mean I had to admit that she was here, of course. They knew that much already, but that’s all. That’s all I said. I just told them that she’d stopped by here for a couple hours.”
“And what about Raja?”
“Nothing, man. Didn’t say a word. Acted like I’d never heard of the guy.”
“And do you think they believed you?”
“Who the hell knows?” He can hear the panic now rising in Brandon’s
voice. “Look, man, I told you before, I can’t have this shit sticking to me, okay? I can’t be having detectives, or whatever the hell they were, sniffing around my apartment, tracing my Internet and shit.”
“I know,” Richard says. “I’m sorry.”
“I just can’t have it.”
Opening the door now to his mother’s minivan, he feels the heat of the day, the cold drops of sweat on the back of his neck. Brandon is silent on the other end of the line.
“Look, Bran, give me ten minutes all right. Ten minutes and I’ll be over there, and then we can straighten all this shit out.”
Brandon is still silent on the other end of the line, and it takes him a while, almost several seconds, before he recognizes the lack of music in the background and realizes that Brandon has in fact hung up.
Backing out of his spot in the Kinko’s parking lot, Richard hits the AC, then pulls out slowly onto Montrose Boulevard, his mind still trying to process what Brandon has told him. The strange reality of it all, the fact that Brandon is now getting dragged into this shit as well. Detectives? Internet surveillance? It seemed absurd. Had it really come to that? And how many of his own recent actions had been observed, surveilled? Did they know about the money he had given Chloe? Did they know about his night at the Hyatt Hotel? It seemed ridiculous to even consider such things, and yet how much did he really know about modern technology, about the means by which various authorities could obtain information? All he knows now is that there are bigger problems at hand, bigger problems than even Brandon knows about, and as he pulls up slowly to a stoplight, he looks again at his silent cell phone, scans the messages, then puts it away. In all of the confusion, he hadn’t even bothered to mention to Brandon the most recent development and is no longer sure that he should. Why, after all, had Chloe asked him to erase her messages? Who, in the end, was she afraid of? Was there a third party involved? Another element he hadn’t considered?
Driving through Montrose, he feels suddenly on tilt, his mind racing, the world around him a silent blur. If anything ever happened to his sister, he would never forgive himself. He realizes that now, just as he realized earlier, talking to his father, that everything he had done in the past two weeks, every poor decision he had made, every risk he had taken, had all been for her, for the sole purpose of protecting her. She
was, for him, the one sole connective tissue in what was otherwise a difficult and absurd world, a world that seemed to blur around the edges, a world that rarely made sense, a world that was impossible to negotiate without her. Chloe. She had been for so many years the only person he could talk to, the only person he could tell about the boys that he liked, the only person he could complain to about their parents, the only person who would stay up with him late at night, after their parents had gone to sleep, and listen to him as he hypothesized about this thing or that, as he tried to work out the complex, fragmented pieces of his life. And as he drives along the narrow streets of Montrose now, he can see his sister’s face, smiling at him from the edge of his bed. He can see her sneaking downstairs to steal vodka from their parents’ liquor cabinet, lighting up her very first joint, lying out with him by the pool on one of those endless summer days. He can see her smiling at him from the end of the dinner table, throwing him a wink, telling him to calm down now, relax, telling him that everything is going to be fine.
Pulling over now on the side of the street, he feels his heart racing and has to stop and get out. Fumbling for his cigarettes, he lights one, then looks out at the neighborhood around him, a neighborhood very close to his own, a neighborhood that he must have driven through a dozen times but that suddenly seems unrecognizable. He checks his messages again, dials the number, then waits, hanging up as soon as the computer-generated voice comes on. He thinks of calling up his parents, of coming clean, then he thinks about Brandon, alone in his apartment, waiting for him. He thinks about the way that in the comic books he had read as a child, the concept of time had always been malleable, fluid, something that could be reversed or revised. That life itself was something revisable, and if he had that power now, he suddenly realizes, if he had the power to turn back time, he would have never given Chloe that money, would have never believed that he was helping her out. He would have recognized, as he recognizes now, that her judgment had been clouded by love, just as his own judgment had been clouded by love, and just as his parents, back in the house, playing their old charade, just as his parents’ judgment had been clouded by love.
Looking down at the phone, he tries to catch his bearings, tries to get his thoughts in order, but the world around him seems suddenly surreal, moving in some ways very fast and in some ways very slow. Was this how his father felt when he had one of his famous panic attacks? Had he
inherited his father’s propensity toward anxiety? He’d only felt this way once before, after his first fight with Marcos, and yet, even then, it wasn’t like this. It hadn’t been this bad.
Leaning against the side of the car, he closes his eyes and tries again to breathe, first very slowly, then quicker, counting to himself, trying to calm down. And then all at once there’s the sound of someone honking behind him, a car trying to pass, a car, which he realizes now, he’s blocking.
“Hey,” the woman behind him yells, rolling down her window. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
Brandon is sitting on his front stoop when Richard finally arrives at the apartment. There’s a large backpack on the ground beside him, and, behind him, leaning against the door, is a tall blond boy in military fatigues and a Fugazi T-shirt, smoking a cigarette. The boy glances at Richard suspiciously as he gets out of the car, then moves over next to Brandon in a proprietary way and sits beside him. As Richard approaches, Brandon introduces the boy as Griffen and then explains that they’re on their way out. Richard looks at Griffen and nods, then says, “Where you headed?”
“That,” Brandon says, “I can’t tell you.”
Richard stares at him. “Well, can you at least tell me how long you’re going to be gone?”
“No,” Brandon says. “Unfortunately, I can’t.”
Richard looks then at the backpack on the ground. “I thought we were going to talk.”
“Talk?”
“Yeah, you said you wanted to talk.”
Brandon stares at him. “No time for talking now, my friend. We gotta head out.”
“Look, Bran, I’m sorry I was late.”
But Brandon ignores him, slings the backpack across his shoulder.
“What’s in there anyway?” Richard says, pointing at the backpack.
Brandon looks at the backpack, then pats it. “In here?” he says. “In here is basically everything I wouldn’t want some motherfucker finding in my apartment.”
There’s an edge to Brandon’s voice now that makes Richard feel guilty again, ashamed. “Look, Bran, let’s just go inside.”
But Brandon turns away. “I’m going to need you to cover my shifts
while I’m gone, okay?” He looks at the ground. “I told them I was going out of town for a few days, okay? Some family emergency. So you’re going to have to work doubles till I get back.”
Richard nods.
“And if those guys come back, you have no idea where I’ve been, okay?”
Richard nods again.
Griffen looks away then, almost in disgust, and Richard feels a small pang of annoyance, then jealousy, not knowing who this boy even is but assuming he’s probably one of Brandon’s recent conquests, a pickup from the Limelight, a boy who is unknowingly being implicated himself.
“And there’s one other thing I didn’t mention to you on the phone,” Brandon says. “I didn’t want to freak you out or anything, but these guys seemed to think your sister might be in some type of trouble, okay?”
“Trouble?”
“Yeah, like danger, you know.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “I’m just telling you what they said.”
“Were they talking about Raja?”
“I have no idea, dude.”
And Richard thinks again of the messages and feels his mind begin to race, wondering what the hell he’s done. He almost wants to say something to Brandon about the messages, but when he looks at Griffen, he thinks better of it.
“Okay, man,” Brandon says, standing up. “We’re heading out now.”
Griffen stands up beside him then, and they start over to Brandon’s car, Richard following.
Richard wants to apologize again, wants to say something else to Brandon to let him know just how sorry he is, but instead he just stands there, watching, as Brandon and Griffen get into the car. Brandon doesn’t even hug him, doesn’t even shake his hand, but after he starts up the car, he rolls down the window and looks at him.
“And another thing,” he says, looking around the street suspiciously. “Don’t try calling my cell phone, okay, because I’m not even bringing it with me.”
“How will I know when you’re back then?”
“You won’t,” Brandon says and shrugs.
And then he rolls up the window and turns on the radio, and a
moment later, Richard is standing on the curb, watching the back end of the car as it disappears around the corner.
He waits there for a moment, not knowing where to go next, thinking of his application materials on the front seat of his mother’s minivan and how he’s never going to mail them and then about Brandon heading off into hiding and then about his parents back at the house, trying in their own misguided way to figure things out, and then finally about his sister and the words that Brandon said to him, how she might be in some type of danger, a sentence that only seemed to confirm what he already knew.
His thinking calmer now, he lights a cigarette and looks back at Brandon’s apartment, at the third-floor window, where only days before his sister had probably sat, staring out at the street, planning her escape, designing some elaborate scheme with Raja. Why he’d trusted her so much he didn’t know, but it is this that he’s thinking about as he turns around and feels the slight vibration of the cell phone in his pocket, then hears the shrill ring, which he’d set to maximum volume just to be sure he wouldn’t miss her. And when he first hears her voice, it is muffled and faint, like a whisper from the afterlife, like the voice of an apparition, and he is shaking so much with excitement that he can barely bring himself to speak.
“Chloe?” he says. “Where the hell are you?”
“I’m at a pay phone,” she says faintly.
“No, I mean where the hell
are
you?”
“I don’t know, Richard,” she says calmly. “Honestly, I have no fucking idea.”
THEY HAD WANTED
to meet downtown this time, at the Houston Police Department on Travis Street, an old stone building that Cadence had never been to before, that she had never had occasion to enter before, just as she had never had occasion to enter the courthouse or the numerous bail bonds buildings that surrounded the neighborhood. This was a part of Houston she rarely visited, a neighborhood as foreign to her as another country, and yet, here she was, sitting in what she could only assume was some type of interrogation room, waiting for her husband and the two well-dressed police detectives from the Stratham Police Department who had greeted her earlier.
Elson had called her only an hour before, promised her he would meet her outside the building at a quarter to three so they could review very briefly what they wanted to say, but he hadn’t shown up, and now, almost a half hour later, he still hadn’t shown and hadn’t answered any of her voice messages either. It wasn’t like him to just disappear like this, and yet, in some ways, it was so much like him, so typical, to flake out like this at the worst possible moment, to drop the ball just when you needed him most. She’d found herself remembering all of the times he had missed Richard’s swim meets or Chloe’s orchestra recitals, all of the times he had told her that he would only be a half hour late for dinner and then never shown up, all of the times he had disappeared on business trips, all of the times she had had to cancel family vacation plans or go to dinner parties alone. It had always been because of work, or so he claimed, and yet he wasn’t working now, was he? No, he wasn’t doing anything at all. There had to be another reason, she realized now, but whatever it was, whatever it was that he was doing that was somehow more important than this, well, it better be fucking good.
She leans back now on the cold steel chair and looks out the window at the two detectives from Stratham Police Department who are now standing casually in the hallway, talking between themselves. They had greeted her rather cheerily when she’d first arrived, and yet now she can tell they’re pissed, just as annoyed as she is by her husband’s absence, by his total disregard for the seriousness of this meeting. And of course, without him, she has no idea what to say. After all, it had been Elson who had taken the reins from the start. Elson who had spoken to Albert Dunn about what might be damaging—or “deleterious,” as he put it—to their case. It was Elson who had assured her only a few hours before that he would do all the talking, that he would handle it all, and yet now he had almost certainly abandoned her, left her to fend for herself, left her as the sole guardian and protector of their daughter’s life. That she’d slept with him the night before, that she’d been foolish enough to convince herself that he had changed, that she’d allowed herself to let him back in, well, this was something she’d have to contend with later, on her own. What she needed to do right now was concentrate on her daughter’s case, to think about the best possible way to get themselves out of what was certainly a trap.