“Stop—you’ll tip us over,” Katie says, laughing, gripping the sides of the canoe.
“Ugh. And what’s up with our little princeling? I wonder if he’ll even turn up agai—”
“Don’t call him that, Lu.” A little lurch in Katie’s chest.
“But it’s perfect—the prince and the pauper, right? What could be more fitting?”
Katie hates when Lulu talks like this. Her sharpness and hard-edged laughter make her seem so mature, such a wiseass. Katie wishes she could joke around about Jack too—or, better yet, tell her friend about the lost hour in the changing shed, the sudden kisses in the parking lot. That things have moved forward and that Lulu’s being left behind. But she’s tongue tied and oddly lonely, as though Lulu isn’t even there anymore.
The water stretches out inky and unknowable until the girls paddle closer to shore, when it catches the lights, bursting into flame. The string of bulbs that connects the corner of the old building to the railing around the deck casts a yellow glow over the grown-ups sitting outside smoking and drinking.
Heat presses down. Lulu pulls out a lipstick from the pocket of her shorts and deftly swipes it across her lips. “How do you do that?” Katie asks as they clamber out. She’s tried putting lipstick on, peering at herself in the bathroom mirror, but she looked like a specialty act in a circus show.
Rolling her bottom and top lips together in slow motion, Lulu spreads the color around evenly and then puckers her lips. “Let’s go kick some ass,” she says, and although Katie doesn’t know exactly what her friend means, she likes the sound of it.
The rickety building that faces the lake is an old icehouse converted into a place for kids to play Ping-Pong and eat sloppy hot dogs, with a bar area on the side for the grown-ups. Cupping her hands around her eyes, Katie peers in through the clubhouse window, searching the crowd for Jack, who was supposed to be back yesterday but never turned up. The square dance caller stands on a raised platform and drawls into his microphone. A tan cowboy hat covers his eyebrows. Charlie and John Gregory stand at the edge of the crowd, disheveled, skin gleaming. The women wear checkered dresses and big aprons, their hair puffed up, gallons of makeup smeared around their eyes. Katie’s mother doesn’t like these theme nights as much as her father, but she plays along. She can get away with being reserved because she’s foreign. “Your mom’s mysterious,” Lulu once said. “People adore mystery.”
John looks ridiculous but somehow handsome, too, wearing an ascot and a pair of green polyester golf pants. He is a man who moves through the world chest first with a grin on his face. The tiny gaps between his teeth make him seem to be in constant good humor even when he isn’t. When he smiles, his face takes on the quality of a child, mischievous and knowing. It makes you laugh in complicity; you just can’t help it.
Little kids race around, chasing each other—and suddenly there he is, Jack, standing by the makeshift stage, leaning his long body against one of the old speakers. His face deeply tanned, the waves of his too-long hair almost white under the lights. He is all angles and pent-up energy. Long limbed, bony. There is a hole on the breast of his Lacoste T-shirt where he must have snipped out the crocodile logo in a fit of self-consciousness. The fact that he is here, that they have the night ahead of them after all—this almost eclipses the worry that takes root again about how on earth she will tell Lulu that Jack has decided between them, and that he has chosen Katie.
9
Each day after going to see her brother, Katie came to consciousness in the predawn hours, four or five o’clock in the morning. She’d drift in and out of sleep for another hour or two, waking finally in the steely morning light with a feeling in her heart so heavy, stonelike, she was dumbfounded. She dreamed of epic struggles around the smallest, most mundane things. Her father helping her with an untied shoe elicited a torrent of yearning; kissing Jack was a tragedy that made her dream self weep inconsolably. But she also dreamed of murder, the delirious, terrifying thrill of plunging a blade into a young girl’s rib cage. She would live whole lifetimes in a flash.
Her father was calling her more often, with laundry lists of things he wanted her to do. She tried to make sure to plug the phone in only when they prearranged a time to talk. When he called on Thursday, he had to stop twice in the middle of asking her to tell him the ins and outs of social media, his voice breaking a little. “Honey, sometimes I feel like I’ll never catch up,” he said.
“It’s easy, Dad,” she said. “You haven’t been gone for that long, in the big picture. You’ll pick this stuff up in no time.”
“The whole world has been moving ahead, and I’ve been in here.”
She sucked on her lip, not wanting to give away how moved she was by his fear. “You’ve always taught me to be brave, to just keep going, right? That’s what you’ll do. There’ll be some adjustment, sure, but knowing you, it’ll take you, like, a whole day.”
He laughed on the other end. “Give me two days, okay, sweets?”
Above all, she wanted him to feel strong, to launch into his new life with hope and energy. Of course she didn’t say anything about the renewed interest in his case or the nightmares she was having. At work, the hours dragged by till she could make some excuse to head home. Zev caught a ride with a friend back up to Vassar, and she was alone. She forced herself to run every day when she got home, so weary and spent she wanted to cry. She began biting her nails again. Saturday morning she lay in bed, having slept only a few hours, looking absently out the window onto the apartment building opposite hers. She had been dreaming about drowning, and upon waking, she’d remembered something she hadn’t thought about in years.
It had been a bitter, colorless February day, with winds that could shred skin. Her grandparents were at Eagle Lake for the day to attend the Winter Carnival, and her father had packed her in the car along with her very pregnant mother. Katie was five years old. “We’ve got to get out of this shit hole!” he’d said. At that point they were living in a tiny apartment near the West Mills train station. It would be another year or so before Gram died and Grumpy moved out of the West Mills house, allowing his daughter’s growing family to claim it as their own.
One of the teenagers had strung the rope back up on the maple so the kids could swing over the lake. People were drinking mulled wine and clapping their hands together trying to keep warm. The lake was entirely frozen and covered in a thin layer of snow. Katie grabbed the rope and swung out over the ice, once, twice. Her legs were weightless in the cold air. And then—she never quite knew why—she simply let go. She opened her fingers, released the rope, and fell straight down onto the ice.
Her feet plunged into the water, her flailing arms broke the ice, and a channel sprang up instantly, linking the hole to the water that rushed under the ice toward the dam. As soon as her head dunked under, her small body became as heavy as a sack of concrete. Her father didn’t hesitate: he shucked off his coat—his woolen hat still on his head—and jumped in.
The lake was not deep at the shoreline, and he could stand, though she didn’t know that. He grabbed her so hard that bruises blossomed on her pale arms, and she clung to him so fiercely that his head went under for a second till he found his feet and stood up. He pushed her away from his body, and she shrieked; she could not believe that he was saving her only to push her away again. But he was trying to lift her up to dry land, and to do that, he had to disentangle himself from her grasping arms. She clung to him even harder, and they tussled, and she screamed, “Daddy! Daddy!” Afterward he had joked about it, but she had never learned to find it funny.
In many ways, he’d been doing this all her life—proving his paternal devotion. Sometimes it was an almost literal act (giving her the last peanut crackers at the end of a long car ride, when she was losing her mind with hunger), and sometimes it was through the plain but powerful magic of his trust in her. He’d stand on the sidelines as she passed the lacrosse ball to a teammate, his belief in her abilities making the ball s
ail to its desired destination. Tasked with calling local vendors for a career project, she stuttered into the receiver, but her father’s earnest smile made the words come out with greater intention. She couldn’t explain it, but with her mother she had always felt less than. With her father, she was not merely good enough—she was great. Just the way she was.
Katie rose from her bed, fuzzy headed. She grabbed her jeans and a light cotton sweater from the chair, slipped her feet into a pair of Converse sneakers. The day loomed ahead of her, empty. Standing in her kitchen, unable to eat or read the paper, she tried to think of every excuse she could to avoid heading up to Eagle Lake. Thinking about the lake and the teeming woods made her sick to her stomach with fear: she knew that she’d no longer be able to access those pure feelings of ease and happiness that she used to get from being in the woods. That last summer with Lulu, those moments with Jack—they had been so perfect, until Katie had ruined it. She clamped her jaw together until her teeth began to ring.
But there was so little she had been able to do for her father over the years; she could at least overcome her childish reluctance to go to the cabin. She needed to step up and prove that she was the girl he thought she was.
Zev’s ancient Datsun was parked just two blocks away, and he’d left the keys with her. So what if David wasn’t going to come with her? She’d better get over it: she had promised her father, and anyway, she couldn’t just mope around, avoiding the inevitable. Who knew—maybe going back was just what she needed. She had wanted to be more resolute, to face things head-on. Here was her opportunity.
Under the looming pines, the cabin was cast in speckled shade. Katie stopped short on the driveway and stared, her breath pressing like a thumb on her windpipe. The place was shabbier and smaller than she remembered. Curtains were pulled shut over the front windows, and a plastic flowerpot on the stoop held a scramble of dead plants. The door was locked. Katie picked her way to the back patio over the clumpy grass and rocks. She had a dizzying sense of a clock’s hands speeding backward, unstoppable.
Peering through the windows into the den, she saw the two old sofas, perpendicular to one another, pushed up against the walls, their stained plaid looking so familiar. She just couldn’t believe nothing had changed, especially in the den, of all places. This was where she used to play with her little brother and clutch his sticky fingers as he learned to walk, tripping over the shag carpet in his eagerness. Later, it was where she lounged with Lulu on long, indolent summer nights with a stolen beer or two, frogs singing outside in the deep backwoods. It was through these windows that she’d caught a glimpse of the rosy flush of dawn on that last day of summer in 2007, the three of them—Lulu, Katie, and her father—sprawled on those very couches, sleeping the agitated sleep of people who were not where they were supposed to be.
The back slider was locked, too, but the window near the kitchen was unlatched, and she hoisted herself over the sill and climbed in. The air inside was close and cool, smelling of something earthy. She groped along the walls and flipped on the light switches, then headed toward the front window and ripped the curtains aside. Diffuse light filtered in. One by one, she opened curtains and blinds and yanked windows up. Dust covered every surface, and there was clutter everywhere. Magazines, a towel on a chair. She sneezed. When Katie was a child, her mother had kept the cabin spotless, but all around her now, familiar objects were thrown into unfamiliar disarray.
So it seemed the electricity worked. It was almost a decade since the house had last been used, and she wondered whether Grumpy was the one who still paid the bills. No water came from the faucet in the kitchen, and the downstairs toilet was dry. She’d have to get the superintendent to turn the water on if her father was really going to move in. It seemed a crazy idea for him to come back here. The local papers had been full of the story when the trial ramped up; surely everyone would know his name, would remember the scandal. Not to mention the people who spent their summers at the lake, all those old friends—there was no way they’d be happy to see John Gregory. A wave of compassion washed over her. He must be really desperate to be willing to come back.
The living room was unchanged, and she sat briefly on the large corduroy couch as memories crowded her head. Learning to dive. Fires in the pit behind the boathouse. The old red bikini. Taking out the canoe. Her father throwing a deflated football with David. She saw these as snapshots, shuffled like a deck of cards. Her mother had loved taking photos and for the longest time kept carefully annotated photo albums: when Katie lost her first tooth, when she attended her first day of kindergarten—all of it, every little milestone. She’d been a patient photographer, never asking for poses and smiles but catching people in action, unaware. Where were all those albums now? she wondered. Katie would clean this place up—it was the very least she could do—but not now. Though . . . maybe she could find those old pictures. Maybe when they’d moved from the house in West Mills, the albums had ended up here, along with the other detritus from their former lives. Those pictures might tell her something about her parents that she’d forgotten: that they’d been happy, once.
Tucked into the corner of the living room was a narrow stairway with a railing made of irregular pine branches that led to a second floor. In the master bedroom, the heavy oak bed frame with the carved headboard was gone, and in its place was a ratty-looking mattress lying on the carpet. She thought of her mother’s trim, compact body stretched out there, her reading light casting an amber glow on her cheek. She’d never been quite like other mothers—and not just because of her accent and her mannerisms. Katie’s parents had married because they’d found themselves unexpectedly pregnant, and then, in a cruel twist, they hadn’t been able to conceive again. Charlie suffered three miscarriages, one of which Katie witnessed: her mother sobbing on the toilet, a fat trail of blood soaking into the plush white bath mat.
When Charlie finally got pregnant with David, Katie had been five. The firm, convex mound protruding from under her mother’s breasts was a baby—a brother, for her, coming soon, after they had waited so long—but each night when that strange belly nudged up against her, hard yet soft, it seemed as though a living thing had taken her mother over and turned her into someone else. The sense of unease made Katie clingy, and her mother couldn’t tolerate it. She’d give her a quick good-night kiss, flick off the overhead light, and disappear. Even now, Katie didn’t understand why it had been like this, whether she’d done something wrong or somehow disappointed her mother. Over the years, Katie had yearned to bridge the gap that had widened between them, but they rarely saw each other anymore, not even at Christmas (her mother went to the Bahamas with Michel). It seemed Charlie had simply decided to let the distance grow, and Katie had followed her lead.
On the top shelf of the closet, there was a row of six or seven shoeboxes and a few plastic milk crates that held random relics. A few faded Polaroids of Grumpy and Gram at cocktail parties. A pedometer. A small silver bell. A schedule from one of the theme nights at the clubhouse. No photo albums. It was true: the secret of her father’s conviction and her family’s disintegration had crowded out everything good from the past.
Across the hall, her brother’s old room was crammed with excess furniture, the walls still covered in posters of musicals and old playbills. Lulu and Katie had spent so much time in that room, summer after summer, reenacting shows with David as their little helper, taking turns at playing Sandy in Grease or Tracy and Penny from Hairspray. Lulu had a beautiful voice. Once they’d spent days stitching together costumes and making wigs, singing “You Can’t Stop the Beat” and shrieking so loudly that John came up, red faced with laughter, and told them to pipe down or they’d set off the Cauleys’ dogs.
She went downstairs and stood outside the den. It was just an ordinary room, she told herself. Nothing to be afraid of. She cracked open the door and peered in. It was a small, misshapen room, pine paneled, dominated by a row of large windows facing the woods. Stepping inside, Katie held her br
eath before letting it out in a burst. Ridiculous to be so timid! And yet Lulu Henderson’s presence was there amid the unchanged dimness. The whites of her eyes seemed to flash at Katie like a feral cat’s. She remembered her musky smell, a combination of soap and skin. She heard the way Lulu spoke, her voice strong and melodious, flattening out when she didn’t get her way. Lulu was imbedded in this place; it made no difference that she’d always remained an outsider at Eagle Lake, a visitor, despite the hours she’d spent in the lake’s shallows or drinking Dr Pepper in the clubhouse. But Katie had never thought of her as someone who didn’t really belong here. For her, Lulu had been a fixture, a given, as permanent as the lake or the pines. Lulu belonged to Katie; Katie belonged to Lulu.
Yet each year by late August, that feeling faded in spite of her ardor. They would drive out of the stone gates and drop Lulu off in front of her apartment complex, and she would not invite them in, and they would not ask to come in. She’d thought she knew so much about her friend’s life, when in reality, she’d known so little.
For example, Katie hadn’t known that Lulu played hooky a lot, that she was often in trouble for unauthorized absences. That she already played in a folk band or that she saw a court-ordered psychotherapist every week. Katie certainly didn’t know that, just a few months after they said goodbye to each other for the last time, Lulu would tell a teacher at her school some outrageous story about crazy things happening to her in the den—in this very room—as Katie slept on the couch nearby.
That she’d say things had happened that were unthinkable, impossible—that Katie’s father touched her late that night. More than that, more.
From the den, Katie could see out the window to the perimeter of the woods where the patio petered out. The forest was a mysterious, tangled place, full of mixed oak, fir, and red spruce. She caught sight of the old shed, where her father used to store their bikes over the winter. A compact wooden structure, it had a tiled roof that was almost entirely obscured by a layer of luminous green moss. Her mother kept brooms and buckets there, cleaning supplies. Katie hadn’t been thinking ahead; she should have stopped in Blackbrooke and bought supplies so she could start in on getting the place tidied up. She picked her way over the loosened stone, shivering in the spring breeze.
The Forgotten Hours Page 7