The Forgotten Hours

by Katrin Schumann

  She rose and unlocked the cabin’s back door to get a breath of fresh air. She was being so stupid, so dramatic—she was neither trapped in some tiny room nor helpless. The need to talk with someone was overpowering, but David didn’t seem ready, and Charlie had already declared her unwillingness to be an emotional touchstone. Katie checked her phone and saw that it was evening in London. She dialed her grandfather’s number in the assisted-living facility. As the roar of an overseas connection came over the line, she felt instant relief.

  When she was little, her grandfather’s dispassionate focus on her, his many cozy rituals, had made her feel cherished. Each night when she stayed over at his house, as she often did in the years before David was born, Grumpy would tuck her into bed and recite “For Want of a Nail.” He loved the singsong cadence that emphasized the poem’s circular mystery. Once she was older and had learned the words by heart, they’d each trade off saying the lines one at a time. Then as they got close to the end—“for want of a message the battle was lost, for want of a battle the kingdom was lost”—they’d both take a deep breath and shout the final line: “and all for the want of a horseshoe nail!” He’d peck her cheek afterward in a cheerfully complicit way that suggested she understood its meaning, but in reality she had no idea what the poem was about. It wasn’t until years later that she even heard about the “butterfly effect,” the idea that failing to anticipate or do something tiny—forgetting some seemingly insignificant thing, like a horseshoe nail, for example—could lead to ever-increasing disasters. But she didn’t need to understand the poem to love the chanting, the way it made her feel part of something bigger than herself, something grown-up and mysterious.

  “Grumpy! Is it too late to call?” she said when she got through to his room. Cradling the phone awkwardly between chin and shoulder, she managed to strike a match and light a cigarette. “They put you to bed right when the sun sets over there, don’t they?”

  “Right after tea, dear,” he said. “They seem to think we need a solid sixteen hours.”

  She took a deep drag.

  “You smoking again?” Grumpy asked.

  “No—well, not much. Not really.”

  “I thought runners don’t smoke.” He chuckled faintly. “You are so like your mother. So stubborn.”

  “Don’t say that. I’m nothing like her.”

  “It’s a compliment, dear. Your mother’s a tough little thing, if ever there was one.”

  “And anyway, Mum quit smoking,” Katie said. She wasn’t hungry, but she felt the need to consume things, to fill herself up in some way. Pacing the flagstones, she picked a fleck of tobacco from her bottom lip. “Grumps, you’ll never guess where I am.” Then, in a falsely bright voice: “I’m at the cabin.”

  The sound of him clearing his throat came over the line, and she held the phone away from her ear.

  “It’s, um, well, it’s in pretty good order here,” she continued. “Have you been back?”

  “What are you doing up there? Your mum send you?”

  “No, actually, not Mum.” A little nauseated, Katie ground the cigarette out against the stones and noticed that the light in the bleached-out sky above the fir trees was already beginning to fade. It had gotten late. “I’m cleaning it up a bit. Dad’s, um, you know he’s getting out soon, right? In a few weeks, actually.”

  “No, sunshine, I was not aware of that.” Another guttural throat clearing. “And for the life of me, I can’t see what that has to do with Eagle Lake.”

  “Mum said he could stay here. Just for a bit, until he gets back on track.” She rooted around in her back pocket for the business card she’d found.

  “Back on track, eh?” Grumpy repeated.

  She decided to ignore whatever it was that he was implying. “So anyway. I found a bunch of stuff from years ago. There’s a card here, a business card. From some guy, in London, Hugo Montague or something? No, Montefiore. I’m wondering if you know anything about it.”

  “Not sure, dear. I’m afraid I don’t remember things sometimes.” Grumpy sounded uneasy, and she thought of how her family had always insisted on marching ahead, never looking back, impatient with too much navel-gazing. Was it a British thing, or had her father played his role in it too?

  “It’s just, with Dad getting out, you know . . .” She tried again. “It’s all beginning to kind of come back.”

  “I lost my stomach for it,” her grandfather said. “As soon as your friend, that child, took the stand. For me it was all over right then and there.”

  “You mean Lulu?” Katie asked.

  “No, no—Lulu, I missed her testimony,” he explained. “And your mother didn’t hear it either. Charlie wasn’t allowed in—something about being called as a witness.”

  “I don’t understand. Which friend are you talking about?”

  “The one who saw them, the two of them. That boy you spent the summer with.”

  Her back stiffened. “You mean Jack? He, what—he saw my father with Lulu?”

  “Yes, that’s right, Jack. Handsome bloke. So tall. Was he already over six feet then? Awfully nervous, poor fellow. But, dear, I don’t see how any of this is in the least bit helpful. Your father was convicted. Guilty or not is rather beside the point now, isn’t it?”

  Everything around her seemed unsteady and fragile in light of this news—the incredible news that Jack had been involved in this whole mess in a tangible way. Now the letters she’d just read made more sense to her; he had testified at the trial! His testimony may well have affected the outcome, and somehow she had never known this. She tried to swallow over the hard lump in her throat. It couldn’t be true that he had seen anything—she remembered that night. There had been nothing to see, nothing.

  “It’s not beside the point to me,” she said to her grandfather.

  “Don’t be so romantic. These things are never black and white. You must know that,” he said, his voice scratchy, and then he coughed so loudly and in such a prolonged way she had to hold the phone away from her ear again.

  “You all right, Grumpy?” she asked, standing very still. “You don’t sound very good.”

  “I’ve seen better days, sunshine,” he said.

  12

  The phone in her apartment remained unplugged, and as she left to meet up with Zev for an early drink, she decided not to plug it back in, even though it was Sunday. She sat sipping a cocktail and talking about work-related disaster stories, noting out of the corner of her eye that the hands of the clock above the bar were steadily inching forward. Dread rose inside her until it reached her throat, but still she sat there, forcing herself to wait it out. To let the minutes tick by. To make him wait. Right up until six—which was when she would need to jump on the subway in order to make it back in time to get her father’s call—she thought she might change her mind and head back, as she always did. But as the longer hand inched toward the twelve and she did not get up to leave, Zev became more and more garrulous, as though somehow realizing he was on borrowed time. He was telling her about his first year teaching at Vassar, when he was twenty-six. He’d been a waiter in New York for three years and had a bad breakup with a girl he’d met in London at design school. “The world’s worst waiter,” he said, twisting his beer glass in his fingers, leaving damp circles on the wooden table. “Twice I spilled an actual meal on someone. But—I don’t know why—I always got great tips.”

  “It’s the eyes,” Katie said.

  “Well, they did not help me with the teaching. Those kids were so bored, looking at me with these blank stares, waiting for something. As though I could light the fire for them. So I did it, literally. Burned the homework and made them work with the paper, the wood, soot, yes?” He grinned at her. “They were very confused, but it worked. Shook them up.”

  They laughed, and when he ordered another drink, she did not say no. She was drinking something called the Shitkicker—one of those artisan gin cocktails that took ten minutes to prepare—and it was delicious. T
he clock ticked, time shifted and flickered uncertainly, and just like that she missed her weekly call.

  She didn’t want to make small talk with her father. He shouldn’t have asked her to go back to the cabin. But was that really it? She plucked the tarragon leaf from the rim of her glass and thought about the letters from Jack and all that paperwork, and she tried to remember if her father had ever clearly told her what had happened that night. Had he given her any sort of logical explanation? He must have, but she couldn’t remember. His voice had become mixed up with everyone else’s over the years—the lawyers, the judge, her mother and grandfather. Her brother. Everyone with an opinion, everyone taking sides. Now she felt a sudden, sharp confusion that stalled her.

  Zev secured her a fresh drink; it was ice cold and should have tasted good, but there was a hint of something musty or maybe slightly off in it. He had started talking about his huge family, cousins and aunts and a million uncles on his mother’s side. There was one uncle in particular, his mother’s oldest brother, whom Zev had loved as a little boy. He was called Menashe: a huge man with a head of black hair that he could shift forward and backward on his scalp like a wig, using some magic alchemy that made kids go crazy with joy. Zev smiled, but his eyes were sad. “We adored him. Then one day I just never saw him again.”

  Feeling suddenly dizzy and sick, Katie clamped her jaws together and took a small breath through her nose. “What happened?”

  Zev twisted his mouth into a grimace. “Ah, there was a huge political scandal. He was the minister of housing in the seventies. Turns out he was embezzling money from the Labor Party and using it for gambling. But all I remember is that hair. How we all laughed so much we would choke on our own spit.”

  She took another sip of her drink, but something was very wrong with her. She jumped up, wild eyed. “Be right back,” she said. “Sorry.”

  Shouldering her way through the early evening crowd, she made it to the bathroom and managed to yank her scarf away from her face and lift up the yellowing toilet seat before throwing up.

  Zev rode with her on the subway back to her apartment and walked her to her door. “Are you going to be all right?” he asked. “Do you want me to stay?”

  “No, I’m okay. I don’t think so,” she said. “Thanks, though.” He released her elbow and kissed her on the cheek. Katie’s stomach turned again. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize I was sick—I should have just stayed at home.”

  “Call me, okay? Let me know how you are.” He began to walk away but then turned back to her. “We should talk, Katie, okay? Find some time to talk about, well, my studio and so on. Maybe after I’m back from Spain.”

  “Yes, right, I forgot about your trip,” she said, forcing a smile. He was heading to Barcelona for a week to attend some symposium. “Of course.”

  Once upstairs, Katie pulled back her hair from her face and brushed her teeth. After almost twenty years of being part of the art scene in and around New York, Zev had a huge network of friends and connections to stay with when he came to the city. Months earlier, when they first started sleeping together, he would often leave very late at night, and she didn’t ask him where he was going. He wove in and out of her life without creating a sense of obligation in her; she’d loved that about him from the very beginning.

  Now things were changing. First he’d turned up at her apartment that night without any notice. She knew it was supposed to be a nice surprise—and it was; they’d both been swept up in it—but it also meant he’d crossed a kind of boundary. Now he wanted to move in. The fact that she hadn’t told her father they were a couple (let alone told Zev anything about her father) must be proof of some sort of resistance or fear. She couldn’t quite shake the idea that Zev was the wrong man for her in the long run. That their easy intimacy was not enough to build a life on.

  After sitting at her small kitchen table for a while, her hands wrapped around a mug of mint tea, she booted up her computer. When she had come to the city and begun working full time, she would come home at night to her first apartment (a tiny studio sublet), wired from the excitement of her day, and she’d lie on her bed and think of Jack. He was in the city somewhere, she’d felt certain of it, and she had liked the idea that she wasn’t really alone, that there was someone not that far away who knew her the way she had been during the first half of her life, the part that had unspooled without a snag. Over the years in college she had kept a distance from her family, but she had new friends; she had her studies. In her first six months in the city, her school friends hadn’t graduated yet, and she had seen almost no one outside work. It had been comforting to imagine Jack, his hair still thick and very blond, his long, lean body filled out. She’d wonder idly if he still played tennis, where he’d gone to college.

  But she had not been tempted to look him up back then. She’d become accustomed to the sense of herself as separate from all others, and there was something comforting about that. It was best to keep the past just out of reach, hovering a little more than arm’s length away. While she knew it was there, could sense it, she carefully kept those memories out of her grasp, and she sometimes seemed to forget the past entirely. But that was an illusion. Her memories of Jack, of Lulu—of life before—were not actually gone and forgotten; they lived on inside her, shadows of a bleached-out stain.

  Really, she wanted to type Lulu Henderson into Google, but she could not bring herself to do it. To warm up, she started with Herb Schwartz, her father’s lawyer. Up came a series of entries, a few from lawyerly sites, but she was not actually interested in what had happened to Herb. Yesterday, she’d left David’s old pirate box in the kitchen at the cabin, knowing she would have to go back there soon, but she kept thinking about Jack’s letters to her—the fact that he had tried to contact her. It changed the way she thought about him. She’d never understood why he hadn’t found some way to reach out after the trial. It hurt to think he hadn’t bothered to show her any sympathy. To know, now, that Jack had cared about her—had, in fact, tried to contact her—softened her memories of him. She remembered how he’d observed her while they had all horsed around at the lake, too shy to butt in. That he’d watched out for her when they had all drunk too much. It was all coming back.

  She massaged the stiff muscles in her neck, trying to relax. Mixed in with her tenderness toward Jack was a bubbling anger that she couldn’t quite place. Her fingertips were cold against the skin of her neck, and she dug them in as deeply as she could tolerate. Maybe she was infuriated with her father because of Jack’s letters, because he hadn’t let her see them or hadn’t stood up to Charlie. Either way, her parents had denied her something that was hers, that was private—something that would have been meaningful to her in ways they must have suspected. And Jack had written that he’d seen something; it was unnerving. Had her parents been afraid of what he might have seen? What had he seen?

  Anger was more galvanizing than fear, so she typed in Jack Benson. Up came a Wikipedia entry for a poet from the sixties and an obituary for a journalist from Florida. She clicked on the images tab, and a series of pictures showed an old man named Jackson Benson with thinning orange hair; a boy with a soccer ball; a teen with a green mohawk. And then there he was among the imposters—Jack, with his disarming smile. Snapshots of Jack lounging on a settee, playing bass in a crowded bar, wearing a mask at some Mardi Gras festival. One picture showed him without a shirt on, unabashed in front of the camera. There was a large tattoo on his upper arm, a hummingbird in motion. Not the typical tattoo with crisp black lines, filled in, cartoonlike, but a bird flying, fluid and colorful. Blurred like a watercolor. Oh, she thought, that’s new. Instantly, she understood just how much must have happened in the ten years since they had last seen each other. There was so much about him that she couldn’t possibly know.

  She tried finding him on Facebook, but no one matched Jack’s description. She clicked through to the Exeter Academy website and tried to find an alumni page but wasn’t allowed in without a us
ername and password. LinkedIn offered her ten different Jack Bensons, and a quick scan revealed they were from Illinois and Mississippi, Virginia and Washington State. He could have moved, of course; he could be living anywhere in the world. One Jack Benson was a technology audit and risk strategist, another a high school teacher. The accompanying thumbnail sketches were tiny, and at first glance she didn’t see anyone she recognized.

  Slow down, she thought. There’s no rush. She took a deep breath before scanning the images again. One looked as though it could possibly be him, and she clicked on it.

  It was Jack. His hair was far darker, slicked back, and his forehead was wider than she remembered. Green eyes, a direct gaze. A small smile playing on his lips and two-day stubble. Next to his name it said “Realtor.” Jack had become a real estate agent? That seemed highly unlikely. Scrolling down, she checked his credentials and saw that, yes, this Jack Benson had attended Exeter Academy and then UVA.

  A blue button offered: “Send a message.”

  Her memories of him were suddenly so close, right within her grasp, and she wanted to reach out and grab them. But it was like jumping off a ledge into a tide pool when she wasn’t exactly sure how deep the water was.

  The letters. She needed to know about what he had seen. What he had testified about in court. She clicked on the blue button and typed into the space: jack it’s katie gregory.

  That was all. Quickly, before she changed her mind, she hit send.

  13

  Katie cannot smell fern without thinking instantly—like the burst of those old-fashioned camera flashes—of the dirt path that leads from the cabin through the woods to the lake. Ferns speckled with black dots like peppercorns, frilly and luminous in the summer light.