In Between Days

by Andrew Porter

  “No,” she said.

  Sprague paused for a moment and stared at her evenly, his friendly expression suddenly gone. “So when exactly would you say Mr. Kittappa decided to go over to Mr. Beckwith’s dorm room?”

  At this, Chloe felt her stomach tightening, thinking immediately of Seung and wondering what the hell he had told them. She stared at Sprague but said nothing.

  “Mr. Cho told me that at one point the three of you decided to go over to Mr. Beckwith’s dorm room and play a prank on him. Is that true?”

  Chloe stared at the tape recorder. “Can you turn that off?” she asked.

  “I’d rather not,” Sprague said. Then he smiled at her weakly. “So are you saying that you didn’t accompany them over there?”

  “No,” she said. “I’m not saying that.” Then she thought of Raja and wondered what he would want her to say.

  “So, you did accompany them over there?”

  Chloe sat there for a moment, staring at her hands, then finally nodded.

  “For the record,” Sprague said. “Is that a yes?”

  Chloe stared at the tape recorder, then quietly said, “Yes.”

  “And what were you planning to do once you got there?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, if you were planning to play a prank on Mr. Beckwith, what type of prank were you planning to play?”

  “I don’t know,” Chloe said. “It wasn’t really something they’d thought out.”

  “So you’re saying that it was Mr. Kittappa and Mr. Cho who came up with this idea?”

  “Yes.” Chloe shrugged. “I guess so.”

  “And what was your role going to be?”

  “My role?”

  “Yes, why were you accompanying them?”

  “I don’t know,” Chloe said. “I was just kind of there, I guess.”

  “So you weren’t planning to participate in this prank?”

  At this, Chloe paused for a long time, her breath very shallow now, her mind racing, everything in the room feeling suddenly smaller. She thought of the two cans of shaving cream she’d brought along, the way she’d stood outside the door and waited for them. Was she on the record now? Were these things that could be used against her?

  “Ms. Harding,” Sprague continued. “What I’m trying to figure out here is whether or not you were in the room when the accident occurred.”

  “No,” Chloe said, shaking her head. “I wasn’t in the room.”

  “You weren’t?”

  “No.”

  “So, if you weren’t in the room, then where were you?”

  Chloe paused again. She weighed the pros and cons of telling him the truth. She stared at the tape recorder. “I was out in the hall.”

  “Outside the door, you mean. Outside Mr. Beckwith’s door?”

  “Yes.”

  “And how close were you to the door?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “A few feet, I guess.”

  “And the door was closed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Could you hear what was happening inside the room?”

  “No,” she said. “Not really.”

  “And how long, approximately, would you say you were standing outside the door?”

  “I don’t know,” Chloe said. “Probably less than a minute.”

  “And what was your reason for being there, for standing outside the door, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “I don’t know,” Chloe said, thinking again of the cans of shaving cream she’d been holding. “Just waiting, I guess.”

  “For Mr. Kittappa and Mr. Cho?”

  “Yes.”

  “So why then—if you were waiting for them—why did you leave so soon?”

  Chloe felt suddenly dizzy, the room around her shifting, her stomach growing nauseous. All at once the air felt very thick. “I think I need to use the bathroom,” she said.

  “Ms. Harding, we’re almost done here. If you could just answer a few more questions.”

  Chloe clutched her stomach, tried to concentrate.

  “What I’m wondering specifically, Ms. Harding, is whether you heard the sound of Mr. Beckwith being hit?”

  “Hit?”

  “Yes, with the cricket bat.”

  Chloe looked at him, confused.

  “You’re aware that Mr. Beckwith is in the hospital, right? That he’s in critical condition.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “But you didn’t know about the cricket bat?”

  “No,” Chloe said, shaking her head. And she didn’t. This was the first she was hearing of it.

  “So, Mr. Kittappa didn’t say anything to you about hitting Mr. Beckwith with the cricket bat?”

  Chloe felt the sickness in her stomach returning, tried to picture what Sprague was describing. It seemed absurd. “He wouldn’t have done that,” she said.

  Sprague smiled. “We’re not saying that he did it on purpose.”

  “No,” Chloe said. “What I’m saying is that he wouldn’t have done that. Period.”

  “Ms. Harding—”

  “I don’t know what Seung told you, but he’s a fucking liar. That’s something you should know about him.” She could hear herself shouting now, could feel her body standing up.

  “Look, Ms. Harding, please sit down.”

  “Where’s the bathroom?”

  “Ms. Harding.”

  “I’m gonna be sick,” she said. “Do you want me to get sick in here?”

  At this, Sprague finally stood up and opened the door, pointed down the hall. Chloe was moving at a near sprint now, and when she finally got to the bathroom stall, vomited twice very quickly. She could feel the room spinning, could hear herself crying, and though she’d eventually catch her bearings, eventually collect herself, she understood at that moment, as she stood there above the bowl, that she was done talking to Detective Sprague, that she was done talking to anyone at all for that matter, not without a lawyer.

  3

  WHAT THEY NEVER talked about afterward, even in the days that followed, even as the world around them seemed to fall apart, what they never talked about was the guilt they both felt. The guilt they felt for what had happened. The remorse they felt for the boy who had once tormented Raja, the boy who had humiliated his family, the boy who had caused him endless pain, the boy who they had both hated. It was impossible now to feel anything even close to hatred for him. It was impossible now to feel anything but a deep, profound numbness, a sobering regret. Still, it wasn’t exactly sadness. Sadness was harder to muster. Sadness would come later. What she felt now, more than anything else, was simply remorse. The boy had a family, after all. He had friends. He was planning to major in French. He was planning to be a teacher. These were things that all came out in the school newspaper afterward, in the same article that implicated Chloe and Raja and Seung in the “crime.” These were also things that would be brought up later, when Chloe was called before the Student Judiciary Council and forced to defend herself. Did she know that Tyler Beckwith had volunteered at a homeless shelter in high school? they wanted to know. Did she know that he had been a National Merit Scholar and a star lacrosse player? The picture they painted of him was so angelic, so sublime, that she almost wanted to correct them at times, almost wanted to remind them of the signs that he had written, of the noose that he had hung on Raja’s door, of the way that he had slashed his tires. But she never did. Her own guilt was so profound that all she could do was sit there and nod. Apologize. Take her licks. In the end, they decided that since her involvement was only tangential at best she would not be formally expelled. Instead, she would be put on temporary probation, suspended for a semester, then reassessed the following fall. At the time, the sentence seemed surprisingly harsh.

  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.

  Part Six

  1

  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.