The Time in Between Read Online Free PDF Page A

looked back at the bed, and in the half-light Charles closed his eyes. She called his name quietly, then she said, “Charlie, I’m sorry.” She waited, but he didn’t answer. He opened his eyes again only after she had left and closed the door. He heard her go, the click of the lock, her footsteps, the revving of the car engine, and then the crunch of the gravel as she backed out onto the street.

    CHARLES LEFT SARA AND THE CHILDREN AND MONROE AND THE United States. He moved across the border close to Abbotsford, British Columbia. Rented two acres on Sumas Mountain and bought an old caboose that he towed up the winding road. He renovated the caboose and insulated it. Installed a woodstove and built a stack-log shed for his machine shop and raised goats and chickens and milked one cow. In the evenings, he spread his correspondence books over the kitchen table and studied for his accounting exam. He planned to make himself into something other than a man who lived on a mountain and operated a drill press and made machine parts for people much wealthier than he was.
    He thought about his children a lot. He had asked Sara, just before he left, if the twins, Jon and Del, were his, and she had said, “Of course,” and when he had asked, “How do you know?” she had looked at him and said, “I know.” He wrote to his mother, adding money to the envelope, and he asked her to buy the children birthday gifts. He had plans, he said, to move the children up onto the mountain. The one time he mentioned this to Sara, in a letter sent through his mother, her response was swift and angry. He would never get the children, she wrote. When his mother called him six months later to say that Sara had died, been hit riding a motorcycle close to the bar where she worked, and that the children would be coming to live with him, Charles suffered panic that brought him back to the hills surrounding the harbor of Danang. When the children arrived, ferried up the mountain in his mother’s Ford station wagon, he squatted and held them and said their names softly, “Ada. Jon. Del.” Ada, who was almost nine, looked him in the eye and said, “Sara’s dead.”
    That evening he walked them across his land and pointed to the tallest tree and said that a fort could be built up there. His mother called him ridiculous and dangerous. Later, he showed Ada how to split wood and they sat by the fire while the rain fell outside and Charles wondered how he would manage. His mother stayed a week and then returned to Monroe, leaving the cabinets stocked with food, the clothes clean, and with the admonishment to teach his children well. The second morning after his mother left, Ada woke him and said they were hungry. “You have to feed us,” she said. “We like porridge or pancakes. Jon actually likes blueberry pancakes.” She said actually as if it were the most important word in the sentence. She was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt that was too big. Her arms were thin. He had noticed the night before that she chewed on the ends of her hair. She knew more about caring for the twins than he did, and so it happened that she was given that responsibility. On an afternoon when he came in from his workshop and found her reading to them on the couch, he saw the light falling behind Ada’s head and he remembered Sara.
    One night Charles sat his children down and told them that their mother was a beautiful woman, there was no one more beautiful, but she had never understood that beauty was like a pail of water. You were given so much at the beginning of your life, and if you wasted it, there was no retrieving what had been spilled. “Your mother spilled her beauty all over the goddamn land, and then she spent the rest of her life scrabbling through the sand and mud, trying to reclaim it. And she couldn’t.” He looked at Ada, and then at Jon, and then Del, and he said, “Don’t let that happen to you, my loves.”
    Years later, Ada would remember those