Time passes. Clouds hang low in the sky, and Katie stares at them as they tumble around sluggishly. She lets the boys’ murmurs wash over her; she isn’t interested in what they have to say anymore, and she isn’t thinking about Lulu either. It is a feeling she hasn’t had all summer, a kind of looseness in her head and her body. The idea comes to her that she can say or do anything she wants, and nobody will stop her. It’s her choice. Her life is hers to make happen—or not. Again and again the boys dive for the low branch, and some of them make it, swinging like monkeys.
Then it is just Jack and Katie. (What happened to the others? How had she not noticed them leaving?) He hoists himself up onto the edge of the shed, his feet in battered leather flip-flops. He doesn’t need to say, Come sit here with me; she knows he wants her to, and so she does. In the shed, everything smells of overturned earth. It is so pungent, this forest smell, primeval. Jack leans toward her, and their lips touch. They begin to kiss. Katie falls into it as though her body is dropping through something viscous.
Her lips become raw. Only their mouths touch, and the kiss is unending. Is he too shy to touch her? At some point, she reaches up and places a hand on his shoulder, feeling the muscles moving under his polo shirt, and she thinks they might stay forever in this dank place, hidden just steps away from everyone.
There is a rumble, a distant clash that could be a plane or a trash can falling or maybe some faraway thunder. Her skin is slick with sweat. She opens her eyes, thinks of the cool lake water. She remembers Lulu, how upset she would be if she knew what was happening now. What Katie’s doing—with Jack—and so she pulls away.
6
The night after Zev’s opening, Katie was thinking about numbers as she rode the subway to her job at the Hamlin Consulting Group offices in Midtown. A single number was a solid, immutable thing; this Katie knew for sure. In and of themselves numbers were indisputable, even though they created new meanings when combined. The trick was making sure you found the right numbers and put them together in the right way: then you could achieve clarity. Then you’d have an answer to a question—not an opinion or a theory but an actual answer. She was turning over numbers in her head, over and over again.
Zev had been triumphant last night. He sold three paintings, which initially didn’t seem like much, until he whispered in her ear that one had sold for almost $100,000, after commissions. Incredible. The Arts reporter from the New York Times had turned up (reeking of booze, accompanied by some wrecked kid wearing a purple bow tie) and promised to write a piece on him. Zev had mentioned to them that he was renting a studio, that he’d be showing his work more often in the city. That’s what started Katie on the math.
If Zev could make more than $100,000 in one night, and she kept doing well at Hamlin (where she earned more than friends like Radha or Ursula—or any of her old college friends, actually, except those who’d gone into banking), then they’d definitely have enough money to get a new place together, maybe somewhere in Brooklyn, somewhere with a fire escape or a shared roof deck, perhaps a garden if they were really lucky. Katie missed the open air, the chance to sit on a stool in the breeze in the evenings or stare at the night sky before going to bed. Zev’s finances were a mystery to her: he drove an old brown Datsun and dressed in jeans and T-shirts, a scuffed motorcycle jacket when it got cold. But he pulled out his wallet with no hesitation, chose restaurants impulsively, seemingly unworried about prices. It would be nice to have space to live, to have company, a life that added up to more than days piled on top of one another without accruing the additional freight of meaning or purpose.
If her father got out in nineteen days, then she had less than that amount of time to figure out how to explain to Zev why her dad might be staying in the loft. Maybe she had a week or two, maybe less. How many days would it take for him to absorb this news, make up his mind whether it mattered to him? Zev knew her parents were divorced, of course, that her mother was up in Montreal. She suspected he knew that her father was somehow banished, that he had done something to distance himself from them all. But Zev hadn’t pried. He didn’t know about Lulu, about the accusations and the trial and the conviction. It was a wound held together with dangerously loose stitches, but this was a problem that Katie wasn’t especially eager to solve. It hadn’t seemed all that urgent, at least not up till now. Somehow the two of them had avoided wading through the messy, confessional stage of new relationships—the endless admissions of weaknesses, the litany of regrets and bad behavior. They’d talked about old lovers; they’d talked a lot about work. But neither of them had dwelled on family—she didn’t even know whether Zev’s parents still lived in Israel. And what was she going to say to him: Hey, we don’t know each other all that well . . . but my father was convicted of raping my best friend? There never seemed a good time to say those words, in any combination. She had a finite amount of time to solve that little problem. And who knew when Zev would bring up the idea of moving in with her again.
If she had seven messages from four different reporters, did that mean they’d keep coming after her until she gave in? Her sweaty palm gripped the steel pole as the subway car lurched, and she did another kind of math too. Almost nine years since she’d been back at the cabin. Six since she’d last seen Lulu. More than two years for them to bring her father to trial and six years in Wallkill after that. What did those numbers mean? They did not add up to something logical, manageable. Shouldn’t they, in the heft of their accumulated reality, mean an end to this uncertainty and shame? Surely it was time to start the clock from zero again, nice and neat, to begin counting forward in a linear way that would lead somewhere logical.
Hamlin Consulting Group was located in an unassuming block on Sixth Avenue. The lobby was spacious, decked out in stained marble and high ceilings that spoke of an earlier era, when gilded trim and gold elevators meant high class. Drasko sat behind the small reception desk. He smiled and raised a pudgy hand in greeting when Katie walked in.
“Good day, Miss Pretty,” he said. His hair was so lush it looked as if a comb wouldn’t make its way through the thicket. It shone under the overheads, giving off a faintly perfumed smell.
“Morning, Drasko,” Katie said, pressing the up button. “Good weekend?”
Drasko was one of a small roster of security-guards-cum-receptionists and the only one who had been there since she’d worked as an intern the summer between her junior and senior years. Back then her hair had been very short, and the Serb had always looked a little alarmed when he saw her, as though thinking, each and every time, Why would a woman choose to have hair like that? The next summer on her first day back—as a paid consultant this time—she’d been growing out her hair, and he’d broken into a grin of instant recognition and approval. That’s when he started calling her “Miss Pretty.” It seemed like something Katie should be upset about (she noticed he never greeted other employees that way), but she didn’t find it upsetting. She often wondered about that. Sometimes in those early months in the city, she’d been so lonely that Drasko’s cheerful, soft face had been the only thing that made her feel connected to humanity. It had been wintertime; she’d graduated from Vassar a semester early, taken a tiny sublet in Queens. Those months, dark and frigid, while she’d hauled groceries to her walk-up so she could eat alone at a card table, Drasko’s face would pop up in her mind periodically, the uncomplicated smile, the welcoming gesture, the predictability of it. Miss Pretty. It wasn’t always bad or uncomfortable to be noticed.
On the fifty-second floor there was a real reception desk, above which hung a sign with blocky gold lettering that read HCG. The entire floor was studded with cubicles personalized with a plant or a light or family pictures, some piled high with papers and others pristine. The office itself was not all that important to Katie—during the workday she really only craved light, which she got plenty of, since she sat on the outer edge of the room near a window overlooking West Forty-Eighth Street. She liked the quiet studiousness of the place: ever
yone’s head bent over spreadsheets, inches from a screen, absorbed by some presentation, banging out client reports with a focus unbroken by ringing phones or collegial chatter. She’d taken to the work quickly, even though she found spreadsheets boring and was, truthfully, only mildly interested in the problems the consultants were trying to solve. Since she was good with numbers, she was able to lose herself in the work; that was helpful. She tried to ignore the fact that it all didn’t seem to amount to much, that it was soul deadening. Every problem they wrestled with seemed to end up in the same place: yet another slide in some endless deck showing how many people to lay off.
The morning went by quickly; she was researching the production cycle of various breakfast cereals. It was pointless work, since she wasn’t currently assigned to a project. She was “on the beach,” in consulting lingo. The other junior consultants loved being on the beach because it meant weeks of early nights and lazy mornings, but Katie far preferred being busy. At lunch she stepped out to stretch her legs. When she got back, one of the vice presidents was sitting behind the front desk, tapping into a smartphone. “Hey, Mr. Montague,” she said. “Changed jobs, have you?”
Montague was in his late sixties. He was huge around the middle and had the disconcerting habit of sucking his teeth. “Filling in for Janis while she visits the ladies,” he said. “Sometimes it’s good to get a feel for what’s happening out here in the real world.” He frowned while not moving his eyes from her.
Katie stopped her forward movement. “Everything okay? Can I help with something?”
He held out a piece of paper. “You got some calls. I took messages for you,” he said.
Before she even took the paper from him, her skin started to tingle. “Oh, thanks,” she said. He had written in block letters: Dennis Kanton, the Guardian, and Juliana DeVorgay, from some unfamiliar online site. Montague’s watery eyes bored into her, and she felt she had to give him some sort of explanation. “Some old business I need to deal with. Nothing to worry about.”
“You’re not in some sort of trouble, are you, sweetheart?”
His endearment put her on edge. “No,” she said, “nothing to worry about.”
“You’re on the beach, right?” he asked.
“Yup,” she said, “but just for the past week or so.”
“Good. Why don’t you take it easy for a bit?” He hesitated, his lips curling inward toward his teeth. “You’re looking a bit peaked, if you don’t mind my saying.”
Involuntarily, her hand rose to her face, and she smoothed away some stray hairs. This morning she’d applied her makeup carefully, dressing in a new silk shirt and a dark-gray jacket and skirt, styling her hair in a low bun. It was a curse that people felt they could read her moods or her needs on her face, when she herself was trying so hard to appear decidedly neutral.
Smiling at him as naturally as she could, she said, “Maybe I’ll do just that,” and headed to her cubicle.
Charlie Gregory had spoken to reporters once, right after her husband’s sentencing. The headline the next day read, “West Mills Wife Stands by Convicted Rapist” (especially ironic, of course, as it was soon proven to be untrue). For a few semesters at college, Katie had devoured a variety of seminal journalism books in a class that advertised itself as offering a fresh look at the modern media landscape: she’d read Blur, Flat Earth News, The Death and Life of American Journalism, and so on, all those doom-and-gloom books that cast a cold shadow over what was supposed to be such a noble profession. But what had stuck with her most was a book she couldn’t remember the name of. It was slim and somewhat outdated, with a faded orange cover that curled at the edges, and it covered how data could be manipulated. As she’d flipped through the pages in the stacks at the library one day, it had seemed as though she were waking up to a world made up of rules she hadn’t even known existed. She had already learned that people could not be trusted, but she had put her trust in numbers. Reading that book made her understand that there were no exceptions to the rule: human beings were always compelled to bring their own agenda to any endeavor. Juries, for example, didn’t operate on mathematical principles: they didn’t simply add up complex numbers and provide an airtight solution, presto. They came to their job as human beings, flawed and easily swayed. You could never truly be objective or dispassionate; your biases would always drive the way you saw reality and expressed facts. Returning to her cubicle at work, sliding into her chair, she thought again of that little orange book.
Too often, people who suffered trauma let themselves be defined by it, and she had been determined to avoid that fate. When she became Katie Amplethwaite—a name so alien, so liberating—she thought she’d freed herself from the past. She’d never told her first real boyfriend, Nate, about her father—or the next or the next, or now Zev. There was no reason for them to suspect anything. Her two closest girlfriends from college, Radha and Nicole, knew about it and had been sworn to secrecy, but even telling them had made her feel as though she were free-falling. Sometimes they would look at her and she could read the questions in their eyes like a data programmer reads code: the curiosity, the doubt, the desire to support her competing with the inherent pity they felt for Lulu.
Katie looked at the list of names and phone numbers she’d accumulated over the past few days: the Baltimore Sun, the Milwaukee Current, the Providence Journal, the Boston Globe, the Arizona Republic, the Guardian. Websites she knew and others she didn’t. She wondered—with a genuine sense of curiosity but also some disdain—about the journalists trying to reach her, the ones who had now called her employer and would soon be calling her brother, no doubt, and maybe even her boyfriend. They’d probably already called her mother in Montreal, or maybe that was an old story not worth telling. Were they just in it for the scoop, or did they ever feel compelled by the stories they reported? Did they think about the people they were talking to, really think about them—the actual human lives they were disrupting with their intrusions and innuendoes? In times of quiet contemplation, did they ever wonder what it might be like if one of their own parents had been accused of some unthinkable crime?
Perhaps she was being cynical and these reporters believed in facts, the way people believed in what happened when you added chemical elements together, because they knew it to be true: hydrogen and oxygen made water. In this way one fact plus another equaled something new. As though the truth were some sort of pure, golden place that emitted an angelic chorus upon discovery, where everything had an order and a luster that could not be tarnished. But for Katie, that kind of thinking was treacherous: feelings were not facts, memories lied, and people were not who you thought they were.
7
“David? You there?” Katie called out, holding the buzzer down. It was early evening, and she’d trekked down to Red Hook after work, first a subway, then a bus, and then a ten-minute walk. The lights were on inside the apartment, and a vinyl jacket lay on a bench, some shoes thrown, helter-skelter, underneath. A sleeping cat stirred ever so slightly. She knocked on the window.
Finally, the door opened, and her brother stood in front of her. The nubs of his shoulders stuck out from his T-shirt, and a pair of white briefs hung from his hips. David shared a rent-controlled apartment in the basement of a brownstone next to a Con Edison power-exchange yard that took up two city blocks. His skin was sallow and drawn, his thick blond hair darkened as though he hadn’t washed it recently.
“What the hell? I’ve been trying to call you,” Katie blurted out.
“Ack,” he said, yawning widely. His angular face was striking, with high cheekbones and a full, curving mouth. “Lost my cell. Sorry, sis. Come in.”
She followed him into the apartment, watching his saggy briefs shift around as his muscles contracted. The catatonic cat opened one eye and shut it again. “Why don’t you get a new one?” she said. “I’ve called you like a hundred times.”
He raised his pale brows at her. “Something wrong?” He rubbed his eyes, digging at the soc
kets. “Just took a nap. I’m so beat.”
“Are you going to school anymore?” Katie asked. Her brother was studying to be an actor, but she didn’t really know what he did with his time. Whenever she called him, he seemed to have just woken up.
“Ha, you think I’m living la vida loca?” He flopped onto a beige couch and took a long slug from a glass that held an amber liquid and two small ice cubes. “I’ve got a job as an understudy at the Broadmore. Show starts in, like, two months. It’s a ton of work.”
The apartment was subterranean and dark, trade magazines and carryout cartons littering the floor and a dead spider plant sitting in a saucer of brown water. “You okay, Davey?” she asked. “I’m worried about you.”
“Is that why you came? Sorry. I’m just tired is all. Kyle and I broke up, but it was a long time coming. I’m actually super happy.”
“Okay,” she said, stalling for time. “Sorry to hear about Kyle—I guess that’s good, if you’re all right about it.”
“Yeah. I feel like I’ve been working so hard for years, you know? I want to just focus. It’s all finally starting to make sense.”
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