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.
Acknowledgments
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.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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 fict
ion writing and directs the creative writing program at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.
In Between Days
By Andrew Porter
Reading Group Guide
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
1. Andrew Porter’s title, In Between Days, is an evocative one. What do you think the “in between days” are? Does the phrase resonate differently for each character?
2. What do you think went wrong in Cadence and Elson’s marriage? Do you think they would have gotten back together if Lorna hadn’t been pregnant?
3. Richard is afraid of school because it would mean that “he’d have to acknowledge to the world, and to himself, that he had something to say, and that he had something to say that he wanted other people to hear” (this page). What do you think compels him to accept the offer at Michigan? Have the experiences of prostituting himself and of his sister’s disappearance taught him that he has “something to say”?
4. When Chloe first starts dating Raja, the narrator says, “It was impossible to explain, but she felt drawn to Raja in a way that she had never felt drawn to another human being before. And it didn’t seem to have anything to do with logic” (this page). Later, when the couple is in Houston together, the narrator observes, “It was the first time in her life that she’d felt that someone else was actually depending on her” (this page). Upon what foundation is Raja and Chloe’s relationship built? It is a relationship that withstands enormous pressures—what do you imagine their future will bring?
5. What do you make of Elson and Lorna’s relationship? Does it surprise you that Lorna stays with Elson after she learns she’s pregnant? How do the different relationships in the book compare to one another: Raja and Chloe’s, Elson and Cadence’s, Cadence and Gavin’s, Elson and Lorna’s?
6. What role do some of the secondary characters play in the novel? What do you make of Simone’s conversations with Chloe and later with Cadence? What do you think Michelson wanted from Richard? What themes does Gavin’s relationship with his disabled son represent?
7. What kind of people do you think Chloe and Raja are? Chloe remains loyal to Raja, but leaves her family. Raja won’t turn on his friend Seung, but will abandon his family and have Chloe abandon hers. Do you admire them for their decisions?
8. Imagine yourself in the role of each character: Would you have behaved the same way or differently in the situation if you were a parent? A sibling? A girlfriend/boyfriend?
9. Cadence asks herself how she can “blame her daughter for doing the exact same thing she had done?” (this page). Do you think her early marriage to Elson clouds her judgment in deciding what to do when Chloe is missing? She says that she trusts her daughter, but do you think that trust goes too far?
10. What role does betrayal play in the book? Who betrays whom? Does the idea of betrayal mean the same thing to every character?
11. In referring to Seung, Raja says, “If I truly believed myself to be innocent, then I would protest, you’re right, I’d testify against him, but I don’t” (this page). What does innocence mean for Raja? Do you think Chloe has the same belief? What is your own opinion about Raja’s guilt or innocence? Would your opinion have changed if Tyler had died instead of recovering?
12. What do you make of Cadence’s, Richard’s, and Elson’s reactions to Chloe’s final disappearance? Why does Cadence hire the private investigator? Why does Richard suggest that “maybe we should just let her be lost for a while … Maybe she’s just not ready to be found” (this page). Do you think Elson is right to believe that Chloe “thought so little of them. That she hadn’t even bothered to call” (this page)? How do anger, guilt, sadness, perhaps even jealousy play a role in their reactions?
13. At the heart of the book is a family, one that is tested and breaks apart. In thinking about her family’s past, Chloe believes, “It had been the greatest hypocrisy of all. These family meals. The greatest charade” (this page). What is Porter saying about families in the novel? Does it seem as if the Hardings were a charade from the beginning?
14. At the end, Chloe wonders, “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?” (this page). What do you make of her questions? Has she succeeded in escaping her past? Is it possible to even do so?
Suggested Reading
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen; The Ice Storm by Rick Moody; The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides; What Happened to Sophie Wilder by Christopher R. Beha; Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin; Carry the One by Carol Anshaw; Forgotten Country by Catherine Chung
ALSO BY ANDREW PORTER
The Theory of Light and Matter
In Between Days Page 35