The Forgotten Hours

by Katrin Schumann

  “That’s a big deal—an understudy.” Katie put down her leather satchel. Her brother had always been the odd one out, the quiet kid who’d stare at you with big, serious eyes. Once he took up acting, he’d still been the silent observer when among other teens, but when onstage, he became someone utterly different. It was amazing to her that he was capable of such total yet fleeting transformation. She pointed at his drink. “Is that whiskey? I’m going to get some, okay?”

  She went to the sink in the galley kitchen and fished out a glass. The place was dingy but not too dreadful. There were dishes everywhere and the trash was overfull, but the counters were clean, and there were notes tacked up on the fridge with colorful magnets. After their parents had lawyered up, they’d been tight on money, and she and her brother had reacted in radically different ways. The summer Katie was sixteen—when, for the first time in her living memory, they hadn’t returned to Eagle Lake—she took a full-time job at KB Toys in the mall. Everything around her was going to hell, but she could at least bring in a steady paycheck. It didn’t really matter what the work was; what mattered was staying occupied. She was the youngest employee there, and she knew it made her father proud when she handed over her paycheck at the end of each week. It seemed that as David grew up, he’d had the opposite reaction: He learned that he could survive on almost nothing. He cultivated an appreciation for dollar pizza slices and musty vintage clothing. He was an expert at tracking down free events and never said no if you offered to buy him a drink or a meal. It came across as insouciant, though she suspected it was designed to camouflage the zeal with which he pursued acting. It was hard for her to imagine living that way, never sure what the next day would bring. But perhaps she envied David just a bit too. Her path was razor straight; it led right to the horizon, and then what? No turns, no hills, nothing that filled her heart with insane joy? David lived hand to mouth, but at least he felt things fully.

  The freezer was empty, the ice tray furry. The whiskey tasted cheap, but the metallic zing signaled to her that she could relax: she was safe here. Katie took another deep slug and went back into the somber living room. “So, Davey. You talked with Dad recently?”

  “Mm,” he said. “Not really.”

  “When’s the last time you visited him?” It was strange that David—the only son, the longed-for second child—had slipped into the contours of his new reality so much more easily than she had. After the divorce and the sale of the house, their mother had put some of their belongings in storage at the cabin before moving with David into a two-bedroom apartment near Clinton Hill. He’d commuted to PPAS, the performing arts school in Midtown. David had spent all those years alone with their mother while she was gone in college—she really couldn’t expect him to feel the same way about Dad.

  “What’s up?” he asked. “He finally scheduled for release?”

  “Three weeks.”

  David smiled. “Fuck me,” he said. “Almost six years. Since I was just a kid. Be weird having him back.”

  “Have you heard from anyone? Like, anyone call you about the case?”

  “From the parole office, you mean, or who?”

  “Reporters,” Katie said. She took a seat next to him on the couch. Her body felt insubstantial, as though she could float into the air like vapor, dissipating without leaving even an odor. “They’re calling me. They want to talk to me about the case. It’s really—I just don’t know what to do. I thought it was all over.”

  “Damn.” He leaned forward and studied his hands. “No, haven’t heard a thing. But then I haven’t been great about messages and stuff—and now, you know, no phone. What are you going to do?”

  “Why does any of this matter anymore? He’s served his time. You’d think they’d leave us alone.”

  He grunted. “Fat chance. But you don’t have to talk to them. They’ll give up eventually. Move on to another story, something more current.”

  “It just feels so . . . invasive. And Dad, he asked me to go to Eagle Lake. Get the cabin ready for him.”

  “No—no way, not me,” David said. “I’m not going. That place is fucking haunted. I thought Grumpy finally sold it?”

  “No, not the cabin,” Katie said. “Look, Dad’s getting out, and we’ve got to figure out how to put our family together again.”

  “There’s no going back. You know, rewriting things,” he said. “Whether we want to or not.”

  She wasn’t sure she believed him. “Are you even happy he’s getting out?”

  “Of course I am.” But there was something about David’s tone that suggested he wasn’t telling her what he really felt. “It’s just, you know. Like I don’t really even know the guy.”

  Should have visited him more often, she thought, but she didn’t want to be mean spirited.

  The heavy gloom of the apartment made it impossible to tell whether it was day or night, and they decided to take a walk around the block. Katie offered David a cigarette, and they both lit up, walking side by side in the cooling dusk. A light wind blew in from the Upper Bay, tinged with the smell of salt and fish. Surrounded by stunted brick buildings, the neighborhood felt far removed from Manhattan—so quiet, almost peaceful, yet in the silence, an unspoken conversation seemed to be running between the two of them: David telling her to not ask too much of him, to leave him be; Katie asking him to help her figure out what life would look like once their father was a free man again.

  David held the butt between thumb and forefinger like a villain in a movie before grinding it out under a pair of canvas sneakers. “Come on; chuck that thing and follow me. We can talk a bit in here. It’s nice.” He headed up the stairs of an old church on the corner of the block. A sign outside read VISITATION BVM PARISH. The wooden front door was locked, and he headed to a side door, motioning for her to come.

  Inside, low lights were on, and there was a chill in the air, as though the church were lagging behind by a few months and inside it was still December while outside it was already June. Katie’s heels made staccato taps on the floor. When they were little, she and David had attended the Episcopal church in West Mills with Grumpy and Gram for a while, and she’d loved the weighty silence that seemed oppressive at first but became soothing the longer she sat and waited for something to happen. Usually she’d fall asleep, but Grumpy never woke her. Once Gram died, they stopped going. This church was different, starker, shaped like a ship in back but inverted like an upside-down keel. She slipped into one of the pews, and David took a seat next to her.

  “They let me play the organ. No one can actually play that thing anymore; everyone’s dead. It’s an old Midmer-Losh. I come practice almost every day. I love it in here,” he said. They sat in silence for a while. “Remember how Dad used to read to us at night? All those obscure English stories that Mum passed off on him. Way past the time when other parents were all, ‘Go watch TV, and leave us alone.’ I was obsessed with Babar. I think about that time a lot when I come here. It was nice, you know?”

  “Yeah, those Uncle Arthur stories,” Katie said, fiddling with the hem of her jacket.

  “Enid Blyton. You loved that shit!”

  “I was just pretending. It was Dad’s voice I liked,” she said. “You know I couldn’t actually read till I was like eight, right?”

  “Really? They didn’t know?”

  “Did a great job hiding it, I guess.” When she was six, seven, even eight years old, making sense of the string of words on a page was a monstrous task. Her confusion was like a hideous scab she managed to hide from everyone, even her teachers. But before any of the grown-ups fully understood what was going on, Lulu figured it out. Though she told Katie that she didn’t like books either—too long! too slow! too boring!—that very first summer, she would read to her aloud in the den at the cabin, helping her sound out the words. When they got frustrated, Lulu would goof around, using funny voices, stretching and scrunching her face to act out the story. Eventually Katie switched schools, got special tutoring. Learned tha
t she was not in fact stupid, just dyslexic.

  “You know what I think of, when you tell me things like reporters are hounding you, or when I think about Mum and the divorce?” David said. “I remember when Dad took me with him to go visit this woman at Eagle Lake—Constance, remember? Constance Nichols?”

  “Yeah, sure. The one who used to wear kimonos to the beach.”

  “Right. Well, she was sick or something. We went over there, Dad and I, and took her this pile of cupcakes. Orange cupcakes. And he was so nice; he felt so bad for her. Her face just lit up, and she ate one right away. It was a small thing to do, but it mattered.” David ran a hand through his hair. “On the way back to the lake, he was all emotional. I remember his eyes welled up, like he was going to cry. And I was scared for a bit, thinking, like, something was wrong and maybe she was dying, but then he told me that her husband didn’t take good care of her, he’d cheated on her, and how he was so dishonorable. That’s what he said: ‘You’ve got to treat people right. It’s important to be honorable.’”

  “Yes,” she said, smiling. “It’s a lot to live up to.”

  “Man, I think about that a lot,” David continued. “‘There’s nothing more important than being an honorable man.’ How ironic. Everything got so fucked up once he went to prison, didn’t it?”

  “Before then,” she said, “when Lulu started spending summers with us.”

  “Did you ever talk to her again? After?”

  “Hell no,” Katie said, heat pressing against her neck. A small diamond earring winked at her from under David’s dirty-blond hair. His profile was quite sharp, noble, even. There were times when he seemed to shrink in front of her eyes, become her chapped-lipped little brother again, as though trapped in her memories of him. And other times, like now, he seemed to swell, to assume a stature that had little to do with size and more to do with an aura of competence.

  “What about that kid, Jack? You guys were crazy about him,” David said.

  “No, no—I never saw either of them again.” It was surprising how, all these years later, their competition for Jack still felt in some way shameful. This was a boy she’d only known for a few weeks, and still the mention of his name shifted something inside her, set her on edge. Made her yearn for something unnamable.

  “So, I don’t know. Maybe it’s time you looked them up?”

  She let out a puff of air as if to say, Are you kidding? Inside her, always, was the emptiness of having lost her best friend, but she had become accustomed to that. And even Jack had betrayed her, ultimately—even Jack had erased her from his life after that summer.

  “If you ask me, I think you miss her. You wonder about her; you just won’t admit it.” David stood up and ran his hands down the front of his jacket, smoothing his clothing in an endearingly fussy way. “Wait here, okay? I want to show you something. Be right back.”

  A minute later, the sound of the organ emerged—deep, blowsy, reverberating through her—and she was filled with awe. Her little brother had lived almost a whole decade without her around, and there were all sorts of secrets she hadn’t even guessed at, like the fact that he could play the organ. The music was thunderous yet also languid, replete; it gave her a sense of the possibility and surprise of her world. But then, almost as quickly, the character of the sound changed, and among the resonant chords were some real stinkers. When her brother came back, Katie covered her mouth with her hand. He shot her a withering look.

  “Don’t wake the neighbors,” she said, grinning.

  “All right, all right,” he said. “So I’m not that great. Yet.”

  It felt so good to laugh with him. They walked back to his apartment and embraced in the empty streets, under a light that droned above them like a giant insect. As she turned away from him, she felt a slow and steady silencing of the inner voice that nagged at her, telling her to never turn back. There was so much about the past that was good. As she headed back toward Manhattan in a cab, weaving through Carol Gardens and Cobble Hill, over the Brooklyn Bridge now sparkling in the deep blue darkness, she mulled over what David had said in the church: I think you miss her.

  God—I do miss her, Katie thought as she looked into the black water streaming below her and then up into an urban sky punctured with faint stars. Was it possible to know her father was an honorable man and still miss Lulu?

  8

  The lake is calm. The moonlight shimmies over the water, turning it into acres of gray silk. Katie and Lulu slip down onto the spider-riddled bottom of a canoe and lie in the middle of the lake, bored and not bored, staring up at the sky. Tonight it is crisscrossed with highways of sparkling space debris, and they count the shooting stars aloud, one after another—five, ten, thirty flashes. The very next day they are both going home.

  “You know, I’m gonna miss you, Katie Gregory,” Lulu says. When summer is over, Lulu returns to her world, and Katie returns to hers. They talk now and then on the phone, but it’s nothing like when they are together, breathing the same air, egging each other on. “It’s the pits, living upstate,” Lulu adds, grabbing the bottle of Campari from Katie and sitting up so she can take another swig. A dribble of pink liquid creeps down her chin.

  On long afternoons just the previous summer, they were still hanging around the grown-ups, hoping to be taken out for a sail on a Sunfish, or playing with the toddlers in the grass. But this summer the girls have no interest in grown-ups or toddlers. Weeks earlier on the very first night Lulu arrived to stay, they stole an old bottle of Southern Comfort gathering dust at the back of the linen cupboard that doubled as a bar. They drank almost half of it and ate ice cream to mask the disgusting taste. It wasn’t the first time they’d had alcohol, but it was the first time they purposefully drank it in order to get drunk. When Katie threw up in the middle of the night after her parents had tumbled into bed, she and Lulu snorted with laughter, terrified of getting caught but incapable of suppressing the joyous frenzy of discovery. They became more and more daring. At night they smoked Katie’s mother’s stolen Pall Malls under a canopy of hemlocks as the adults drank and chatted on the deck not ten feet away. Once they sneaked out of the cabin in the early morning hours and headed back to the clubhouse, stealing a bottle of wine from behind the bar and then driving the Ford Falcon around the dirt roads with the lights off as dawn began edging its way over the trees.

  And then, of course, they both discovered Jack Benson. And later what Katie remembers most about lying there in the canoe that night is how guilty she felt.

  Jack has been gone for almost a week: tennis camp. The ache inside Katie is unbearable. The feel of his skin on hers, the warmth and slickness of his tongue in her mouth. She thinks: We’ve barely even gotten started, and now summer is over. She thinks: Why don’t I just say something to Lulu, just spit it out? If their bond is so fragile that Lulu would turn against her for this, then what does that mean? But Katie stays quiet not so much because their friendship seems precarious but because of the wild look in Lulu’s eyes as she spins her tales, dreaming up a future for herself. A look of sudden vulnerability that surprises Katie with its fierceness and then just as quickly disappears. Katie just can’t bring herself to hurt her friend’s feelings.

  The last time she saw Jack, he and Katie were again alone, the morning after the first kisses in the shed. They were on the dusty gravel behind the clubhouse saying goodbye, tripping over each other in their eagerness to talk. He was telling her about his father, the unrelenting pressure to please him; the way he only asked his son questions so he could supply the answers himself, after a millisecond’s impatient pause. She’d talked about David, how she worried that he was too quiet. That her brother sometimes hid in his closet and talked or sang to himself. That her mom was always so withdrawn, and she thought maybe it was her fault somehow. She told Jack how she loved numbers, how each number seemed to her to have a color. Without warning and in full view of anyone who might be walking by, he bent his jutting shoulders forward and brushed her lips wi
th his, a whisper of a kiss.

  Then he pulled her close and kissed her again. His body felt good against hers, the promise of something unknown in the light press of his hip bones against her stomach. In that moment, Lulu did not exist.

  Afterward, when Jack is gone, Katie still does not say anything to Lulu about what’s been happening. She doesn’t mention it the next day or the next. Six days and she hasn’t said a word. Yet Lulu talks about Jack every day that he is not there, fretting about when he will return, if he will return. Each time she talks about Jack and Katie doesn’t say anything about the kisses, the door to the truth closes further until it is all but locked. Not telling her friend is no different from lying.

  The Campari is almost finished, and Lulu takes a last sip, letting the final drops fall into her mouth one by one. She smacks her lips together. “I’m supposed to start thinking about, like, vocational shit,” she says. “No one even asks if I want to go to college. Like, literally no one goes to college from Blackbrooke High.”

  “You’re going to move. You’ll join a band,” Katie says, trying to imagine what it’s like to live in this area year round, in a town where there is nothing to do. She’s only once been to Lulu’s apartment, and it was a disaster. Paper-thin walls and a kitchenette with stained plastic counters. Neighbors smoking and drinking on the outside walkway, leaning heavily on the railing that overlooked Mission Street. The stories Lulu told late at night in the safety of the woods seemed exciting, novel, but the reality turned out to be something quite different. “You don’t need college to be a singer, right? Blackbrooke, it’s just, I don’t know. A blip. You’ll be out of here in no time. You’ll be on some stage in some cool place, and I’ll be your roadie.”

  Lulu throws her torso to the right and then the left, wildly jerking the canoe in the water. “I order you to take me back to West Mills with you!” she hisses into the hot darkness. “Stick me in your suitcase, and I promise I won’t be any trouble.”