“And what about Seung?” she says. “Do you understand about that, too?”
He looks at her, something in his eyes darkening. “That’s a different situation.”
“Why?”
“It just is,” he says.
“So you forgive him?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But you’re admitting he did it.”
“Did what?”
“That he was the one who hurt Tyler.”
“Why are you so hung up on that?”
“I’m not. I just don’t understand why you won’t at least tell me the truth. I mean, what difference could it possibly make now?”
He stares at her coldly, and she can suddenly see that she’s ruined the moment. Ever since he’d come down here, they’d avoided the topic of Seung, and yet now, for some reason, she can’t let it go.
“Look,” he says finally. “Seung did what he thought was right, and I did what I thought was right. It’s not for me to judge him. Whatever he might have told them, that’s something he’s going to have to live with for the rest of his life.”
“So you’re admitting that he lied to them.”
“I’m saying that we were both there that night in the room, and in this way we’re both guilty.”
“But you didn’t hurt Tyler.”
“Like I said, I was there. Being there is guilt enough.”
This is the closest he’s ever come to actually acknowledging his own innocence, but she knows that no matter how hard she pushes she’ll never get him to say the words.
She feels almost sick with frustration now, with his stubbornness, and yet at the same time relieved that he’s finally confirmed, at least on some level, her deepest suspicions. How he could protect such an asshole like Seung, though, is beyond her.
“And do your parents know?” She looks at him. “Did you tell them the truth?”
He sips his beer. “It wouldn’t have mattered what I told them,” he says. “They would have believed I was innocent no matter what.”
“And they weren’t angry at you for protecting him?”
“I never said I was protecting him.”
“Okay,” she says. “Then they weren’t angry at you for not talking?”
“At first,” he says. “Yeah. At first, they were. But then they understood.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“Why?”
“I just do.”
“You don’t understand my parents.”
“Well,” she says. “Do you think they understand now?”
He looks at her. “I don’t think that’s fair.”
He picks up his beer again and sips it, staring out at the flowering cacti and the bright pastel houses that line the street. Finally, he turns back to her.
“My mother said, Aap bhalaa toe jag bhalaa. which means ‘If you are noble, you will find the world noble.’ ”
She steadies her beer. “There’s nothing noble about martyring yourself for a guy who’s just sold you down the river.”
“I’m not martyring myself,” he says.
“No? Then what do you call it?”
“I don’t call it anything,” he says and sips his beer. “If I truly believed myself to be innocent, then I would protest, you’re right, I’d testify against him, but I don’t.”
“You don’t consider yourself to be innocent?”
“No.”
“Because you were there.”
“Yes,” he says. “Because I was there.”
On the other side of the icehouse, she can see a group of young Mexican girls in leather skirts dancing by the side of the bar, waving their beers at a group of boys in the distance. The boys wave back, thrust their hips dramatically, then laugh. She feels suddenly sick with the thought of going to Mexico, of running away from a situation that could have been so easily resolved, if he’d only told them the truth, if he’d only been honest. And she wants to say this to him now, wants to tell him that everything can be resolved right now, if they simply go back to Stratham and talk to the cops, explain it all in detail, the real story, but she also knows how it would look, how it would seem unlikely that a boy who had just run away from the law could now suddenly be innocent. And besides, she knows that Raja is resigned to his decision, regardless of the consequences. He’s made up his mind, and once he made up his mind, it was nearly impossible to dissuade him from anything.
She looks over again at the boys in the distance, who are now approaching the girls who had been waving at them. They are laughing wildly and swigging their beers, and then a moment later there’s a group of men who appear—perhaps older brothers of the girls or maybe uncles—from behind the icehouse. They come out from beneath the shadows and confront the boys, get up in their faces, and just like that, there’s a scuffle, the sound of bottles breaking on the ground, someone yelling, and then the girls screaming. Pretty soon there’s a circle forming around them, and someone is yelling to call the cops, a fight breaking out in full force right before them. Chloe looks over at Raja, but he is looking down, and then, before she knows it, there’s a hand on her shoulder, and when she looks up, she sees Teo.
“Let’s go,” he says, looking first at her, then at Raja.
“Where?” she says.
But Teo doesn’t answer. “Come on,” he says, yanking her up now, forcing her to stand. “It’s not safe here.”
Earlier that night, on the long ride from Houston to San Antonio, as they sat there quietly in the back of the van, unable to see each other’s faces, he had talked for the first time about the guilt he now felt for what had happened. He talked about Tyler Beckwith and what he had learned about his family, about how he hadn’t come from money, as they’d assumed, but rather was born into a family of immigrants, just like him. How his parents had immigrated to the States from Northern Ireland when he was five and how he had grown up poor, moving around the country for most of his childhood while his father looked for work. Everything that Tyler had earned—his scholarship to prep school and later Stratham—he had earned on his own accord, by working hard and by trying to assimilate into the world of his privileged peers. Raja had learned all of this stuff by doing research, he said, by reading the various articles posted around the Internet and by reading the various testimonials on the website that had been set up for Tyler.
Still, Chloe said, it didn’t justify what Tyler had done, it didn’t exonerate him.
No, Raja had agreed, it didn’t exonerate him, but it did mean something, didn’t it? The fact that he had never taken the time to get to know Tyler, the fact that if he had, it might have all turned out differently.
“You don’t know that,” Chloe had said. “He may have never even acknowledged that he did it, you know. He may have denied the whole thing.”
“That’s true,” Raja said. “But I guess we’ll never know, will we?”
And for a long time after that, he said nothing, and for the rest of the ride down to San Antonio, they had simply sat there, holding each other, bracing themselves against the threat of a falling box or a tumbling crate every time the tires of the truck hit a bump.
Even at that moment, however, the thought of going to Mexico had still seemed exciting to her, the thought of making a life for themselves down there, the thought of everything that they didn’t know that still lay before them. Her entire life, it seemed, she had always known the next step, had always known where she would end up in a couple of months, or a couple of years, but now it all seemed so elusive, so vague, so undetermined. It wasn’t until they had arrived in San Antonio, however, that she’d actually begun to have some second thoughts about it, some doubts. And yet, the more uncertain she became, the more resolute Raja appeared, the more determined.
“I can tell that you’re scared,” he’d said to her earlier as they’d walked from the truck to the icehouse.
“I’m not scared.”
“Yes, you are,” he’d said. “But that’s fine. It’s natural.�
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She looked at him. “And you’re not?”
“I don’t know,” he’d said, and shrugged, and she could see then that all of the worry had vanished from his face, all of the anxiety she’d noticed earlier, when they’d first left Houston. “I had a thought on the way down,” he continued abstractly. “I feel like I see things a lot clearer now.”
“What things?” she’d asked.
But he hadn’t answered, and before long they were at the icehouse, and everything was loud and chaotic, the Tejano music, the children shrieking, the men and women playing dominoes and laughing over steaming plates of food. He had gripped her hand tightly and then led her over to the bar, and then he’d whispered to her very softly, “I will never let anything bad happen to you, Chlo. Okay? I promise.” And then he’d turned around and ordered them both beers.
The place where Teo takes them is an old, abandoned apartment complex down the street. Nearly every room in the building is vacant, from what Chloe can tell, but Teo has told them it’s safe, that he knows the owner and that it’s safe for them to be here, at least for the night. He’s gotten hold of the girl, he says, but she’s still a few hours away, coming down from someplace north of them. She’ll be here by morning, he says, but for now, they’ll just have to wait it out, stay here until morning, and then make the crossing then.
This is the most Teo has said to them the entire night, and now that he’s left the room, now that he’s off somewhere else, talking to his friends, a group of older men in dark blazers and cowboy hats, she asks Raja what he thinks about it all.
“Could be worse,” he says. “I mean, he could have made us sleep in the van, right?”
She looks at him and nods. The room they’re sitting in is filled with painting supplies, buckets of dried paint, a ladder, a few rollers in trays, some bedsheets bundled up in the corner. Everything smells of turpentine and old chemicals, and above them, a lone lightbulb dangles loosely from the ceiling. Someone must have been working on the room earlier that day, she thinks, the walls still wet with primer, the crisscrossed patterns of roller marks across the ceiling. They’re sitting at what appears to be a kitchen table, and across from them, in the corner, is a dusty mattress, covered in a clear plastic sheet, where Teo has told them they can sleep.
“I think I might have actually preferred the van,” she says.
“Really?”
“Well, at least the van had blankets.”
He laughs. “We’ll be fine.”
She looks at him and shakes her head.
“Someday we’ll look back on this and laugh about it,” he says. “Someday we’ll think about how romantic it was, right?” He reaches over then and squeezes her hand, and suddenly she feels tense.
Earlier that night as they’d made the three-hour trip from Houston to San Antonio, they’d sat in the darkness of the van and talked, mostly about Mexico and what they’d do once they got there. Raja had told her that he’d always had a romanticized vision of Mexico, but the more he talked about it, the less realistic it seemed. It was clear that his vision of Mexico had been informed by the movies—by films like El Mariachi and Touch of Evil—and she’d tried to explain this to him then, that she’d gone down there a lot as a kid and that it wasn’t what he was thinking it would be. Yes, it was beautiful, she said, but it was also very dangerous in parts, especially in cities like Laredo, and that it was also very poor. She suggested they try to go down to the coast, to one of the cities along the Gulf, a coastal town, where there would be more American tourists and people who spoke English, but Raja had said no, he wanted to find the smallest, most out-of-the-way town in the country, someplace right in the middle, where no one would look for them. He talked about finding a little casita to rent, looking for work in the fields. There aren’t many fields out there, she’d said to him. Not in the middle. It’s mostly desert. Though she hadn’t actually known if this was true.
Well, whatever, he’d said. There’s got to be some type of local industry, right?
But the thought of this then, of Raja working in a field or picking up some random job at a factory, depressed her. Only three months before, he had been a straight-A chemistry major, on his way to a lucrative job in chemical engineering, and though he’d never truly embraced this path, at least it was a path, right? At least it had a future. At least it made sense. And the fact that he was so willing to give that all up so easily confused her.
I’ve never thought that the happiness in my life would come from my job, he’d explained. And so, you see, it doesn’t really matter.
But she hadn’t really believed him when he’d said this, or perhaps hadn’t wanted to believe him. All she knew now was that the closer they got to the border, the worse this whole idea seemed to be. At one point Raja had even talked about the fact that they might have to change their names once they got there, once they arrived in Mexico, and what those names would be. Chloe had said she’d always wanted a Russian name, something like Anya or Natasha, something sexy, but Raja had said he’d actually go the other direction, something plain and inconspicuous, something like John or Doug.
“No offense”—Chloe had laughed—“but you don’t really look like a Doug.”
“And you think you look like a Natasha?”
She’d laughed.
It had been fun playing this game, thinking about the idea of reinventing themselves, and in some ways, she was kind of looking forward to the idea of switching her identity, of becoming someone else. It would be almost like acting, like playing a role, just as she’d done back in high school, and she felt certain she’d be good at it, that they both would. But on the other hand it also seemed somewhat strange, even frightening. After all, if she was no longer Chloe Harding, then who would she be? And would she begin to forget after a while who she truly was and who Raja truly was? Would their false identities, their make-believe lives, begin to blur with their real ones, and what would this mean in the end? She thought of the way that Simone had completely transformed herself into somebody else, the way she’d completely eviscerated any trace of who she’d once been. Was it really as simple as that? Could a person really erase who they were? And if they could, was that something she even wanted?
She wants to ask Raja about this now, wants to beg him to change his mind, but somehow in the dim light of this room, as he sits across from her smoking his cigarette casually, she can see that any mention of going back now would be pointless.
“And what about Teo?” she says finally. “Do you still have a bad feeling about him?”
He looks at her and shrugs. “Not really,” he says and draws on his cigarette. “Not anymore.” He smiles at her. “We talked.”
“You talked? When?”
“Earlier, when you were in the bathroom at the icehouse.”
“I didn’t see you talking to him.”
“Well, I did,” he says, and winks. “And I think it’s okay. I mean, I think it’s all going to be fine.”
And suddenly all of the nervousness in his face is gone, almost like he has resigned himself to something that even she doesn’t yet understand.
“So you and Teo are tight now?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Well, what did you guys talk about then?”
He looks at her, shrugs. “Nothing really,” he says, and then he smiles at her again.
Earlier she had gotten a funny feeling about Teo. When Raja was up at the bar, getting them another round, she had caught him staring at her from across the street, looking right at her, just as he had when they’d first arrived in San Antonio and he’d let them out of the van. And later, when he’d led them down the street toward the bar, she’d felt his eyes on the back of her legs and twice caught him staring at her breasts. Beneath the finely pressed suit that he wore, beneath his polished exterior, she could sense a muscled physicality about him, an animal nature, as if his suit were just a façade, a secret skin.
“Look, let’s talk about something else,
okay? I want tonight to be a nice night, okay? Our last night in the States, right?”
And the sound of those words, the finality of them, unsettles her. She thinks about the ride down again, about the darkness of the cargo space in the back of the truck and how frightening it had been, how uncomfortable, how she’d used the clock on her cell phone to chart their course, imagining in her mind the various towns they were passing through, and how for a long time they had just sat there in silence, holding each other, calming each other’s nerves. When they arrived in San Antonio, she could tell by the way the truck slowed down, the sound of cars honking outside the narrow walls. She had tried to explain to Raja how she had come here all the time in grade school, and then later in middle school and high school, how every other class trip she had ever taken seemed to involve a stop at the Alamo. And Raja had laughed then and nodded, saying that he had only ever seen the Alamo in films. Well, it’s a lot smaller than you’d think, she’d told him. And like so many other things you hear about, kind of disappointing, you know. And then the truck had stopped, and there had been the sound of Teo opening up the back door, unlocking it, and then yanking it up, and there was a moment when the lights from the streetlamps were so bright that they had had to close their eyes and squint against them, and then there was the sound of Teo stepping up into the cargo space and moving around the boxes and crates. Like something from a dream, he had stood there, a looming silhouette. Time to get out, he’d finally muttered and then he’d smiled at them and winked.
• • •
Later, lying with Raja on the mattress in the corner, she kisses his eyelids and tells him to sleep. They are lying side by side, his arms wrapped tightly around her.
“You look exhausted,” she says.
But he shakes his head. “I’m not sleeping,” he says, “but you should.”
Up above them, the lone lightbulb dangles from the ceiling, casting shadows against the wall, and in the distance, outside the window, she can hear the sound of police sirens and people shouting, the fight at the icehouse breaking up, people heading home to their houses along the dark empty streets. Raja places his hand on her hip and squeezes it, then brushes her hair with his fingertips, and a moment later, everything is silent, and she feels herself relaxing, listening to the lilt of his voice, she feels her eyelids growing heavy, and then, just as she’s about to drift off, she hears a rapping at the door, a violent knock, and then Raja is up and walking over there, standing in the open doorway and talking to Teo. She can’t hear what they’re saying, but she can see the top of Teo’s head bobbing, and then a moment later the door slams shut and Raja is coming back to her.
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