The Forgotten Hours

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The Forgotten Hours Page 11

by Katrin Schumann


  Katie grabs Lulu and steers her toward the clubhouse, running, clutching her arm. Their feet slip on the wet flagstones. White flanks and breasts flash as swimmers snatch up their clothes and run under the awning to shelter from the driving rain. Not everyone is out of the water yet, and as another crack of lightning shoots across the sky, one man stands next to the water and screams, “Get the hell out! There’s lightning!”

  They run around to the back of the clubhouse. A few people are struggling with the Falcon in the parking lot, trying to get the roof up. “I’ll be right back,” Katie says, motioning for Lulu to wait there under the overhang.

  Jack is so surprised when Katie says goodbye that his body barely yields to her quick embrace. She can’t explain that she needs to take care of Lulu now, that, in a way, she’s already betrayed her. He looks down at her soaking clothes and laughs, at first, until he realizes what she is telling him. She tries to let him know she is sorry without actually saying so. Their limbs jangle against one another as they teeter forward into each other’s arms. He is confused, holding back, as though she’s changed the rules of the night on him without notice.

  Katie runs upstairs and grabs some random dry clothes for them and brings them down to the den after checking that David is tucked in his bed. Turning her back to Katie, Lulu slips off the boxer shorts and T-shirt and puts on a thin cotton dress. She wraps her hair in a towel Katie has brought from the bathroom.

  The front door slams. “Girls?” Charlie’s voice rings out. “David?” The thunder has abated, but every now and then a crack as loud as a gunshot makes them jump.

  “In here,” Katie calls.

  “Christ almighty,” comes John’s voice.

  Charlie pokes her head into the room. “Thank heavens you weren’t in the water,” she says. “David here? Do you know?”

  “He’s in bed. I checked.”

  Her mother yawns. “That Patterson girl refused to get out of the lake. Her father dove back in to get her. What idiots. They could both be dead.”

  In the den, a long brown plaid couch is pressed up against one wall, with a comfortable two-seater at right angles to it against the back wall. End tables made of rattan are covered in spent Coke cans and an empty bag of Doritos. Lulu sits down on the bigger couch and rubs her eyes. The rain pelting the roof sounds like the drone of a motor. Katie turns on the TV to drown it out. Sitting next to Lulu, she pulls a fleece blanket over their bare legs. Lulu’s body begins to relax into the cushions.

  “I’m going to bed,” Charlie says. “Up bright and early tomorrow, girls. Back to the real world.”

  If they stay awake long enough, Katie thinks, maybe Lulu will soften up again. Maybe they can fix things before they have to say goodbye in the morning. They stare blankly at the bald man on the screen, who juices carrot after carrot and then adds eggplant and parsley. Katie yawns enormously. The soft skin of Lulu’s thigh presses against hers.

  John comes in. “What’s this crap you’re watching?” he asks. He’s changed out of the green polyester pants into a pair of sweats. He looks wide awake, invigorated, even. He stares at the girls for an extra beat.

  “Your car okay?” Lulu asks him.

  “Sure, honey,” he says, his voice thick. “A little water won’t do the old girl any harm.”

  “I’d think it would be bad,” Lulu says. “Getting water on the leather and stuff.”

  “Ah, that car’s been through a lot worse.” They look at each other without saying anything, and then he walks over to the DVD player and starts rooting around in a pile of old discs collected in a basket. Picking one, he unclips the plastic housing and slips it into the machine. Static, followed by jazzy music, and then the title Body Heat scrolls across the screen.

  “Oh, my mom loves this movie,” Lulu says, sitting up, alert.

  On screen William Hurt smokes a cigarette and gazes out over a hazy skyline. Katie’s eyes are so heavy. If the phone hadn’t rung earlier, she would have stayed with Jack at the Dolans’ all night long. Eventually she and Jack would have fallen asleep, his skinny limbs entangled in hers. She would have woken up in the early morning, stiff and cold, with his skin still touching hers, his eyes ever so slightly open in sleep, his hair a mass of lake-dried curls. She would have started kissing him again, and he would have kissed her back, and neither of them would have cared about morning breath or needing to go to the bathroom or the fact that they had not gone home and were going to be in serious trouble.

  “Hey, Lu, move over a bit, will you?” she says, yawning again.

  “Sorry, Princess,” Lulu mutters. Absorbed by the movie, she adjusts herself a bit to make room. “You’re too heavy,” she whines when Katie lays her legs on Lulu’s lap.

  “Who’s the princess now?” Katie asks, feeling as though a warm blanket is descending over her head. Her yawn threatens to pull apart the muscles in her face.

  “Mr. Gregory, tell your gargantuan daughter to make some room for me on this couch, will you please?” Lulu says.

  “Mr. Gregory? What’s that about?” John asks. “I think you’re old enough to call me John. Don’t you already call Katie’s mom ‘Charlie’?”

  “Yeah, but that’s different.” Lulu doesn’t sound sleepy, nor does she sound angry or sad, like she did back when they were at the boathouse. “John,” she adds.

  “There’s plenty of room over here, if you want.”

  Lulu moves to the other couch, and Katie pulls the throw over herself. Lulu is acting so weird: hot and cold. Let her go sit with Dad if she wants to; Katie doesn’t care. The movie is clearly supposed to be sultry, but it seems awkward and dated to her. She closes her eyes and sinks into her dream like a swimmer sinking into wet sand. It covers her completely and weighs her down until she is cocooned. In her sleep, her throat is parched, and as the room turns a lighter and lighter shade of gray, she wakes up a few times to take a sip of her Coke. The sound of the movie seems endless until there is silence. Even the rain stops.

  Outside the windows, the edges of the night sky burn with the palest mauve and then, later, a fierce orange. At one point, she thinks she sees someone at the window; she is sure it is a face, darkened in shadow, faintly rosy from the dawn light. There is rustling and sighing, and the screen is fuzzy, and before long she falls back into the quicksand of awakened desire.

  That is what happens. At least, that’s the way she remembers it.

  PART TWO

  15

  Next time, Katie was sure to be better prepared for going back up to the cabin. She scheduled a couple of days off work; the superintendent turned the water on and confirmed that the heat was still functioning. Verizon reconnected the cable, and the internet was up again. Her father was thrilled. She felt awful about avoiding his call on Sunday, so she plugged her home phone back in and hoped he’d call her spontaneously.

  “I guess our routines are changing, huh,” he said when they spoke a few days later, “and that’s all good, right? A whole new paradigm.”

  They agreed he’d start calling her on her cell, which would allow them to be in touch when she went to Eagle Lake. She told him about some websites she’d found that were geared toward helping released prisoners get acclimated to freedom. “So apparently, if you want a successful reentry, you have to be sure and go talk with your pastor,” she said. As far as she knew, her father had never attended church, not even when they all used to go with Grumpy and Gram. “Oh, and humility. You need that. I read on one blog that it’s the number one thing you have to have.”

  “Oh dear,” John said, chuckling. “That doesn’t bode well for me, then, does it?”

  Before Zev left for Spain, he and Katie grabbed lunch at a small Thai place around the corner from the Hamlin Group. He was excited; the deal for his paintings had already gone through, and two of them had been shipped off to San Francisco. He was giving a talk and teaching some workshops at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona on the intersection between politics and art, and he’d stayed
up all night writing. With the US election coming up in November, everyone wanted to talk about the insanity of the nomination process, but Zev was less interested in the mechanics of politics and more interested in its cultural implications. A few recent paintings of his that made veiled references to celebrity influence were generating serious buzz.

  As they talked, he sketched on his napkin with a pen, light lines she couldn’t decipher from upside down. They were so wrapped up in their conversation that it didn’t occur to her until it was time to get back to work that they hadn’t touched on the topic of moving in together.

  “Hey, one thing,” she said after they’d paid the bill, rising. She only had a few minutes, but she at least had to tell him that she was also headed out of town. “Um, I’m leaving for a few days. Going up to my grandfather’s cabin.”

  “Oh, your family has a cabin? That’s great,” Zev said, pocketing his change and standing up. He wore a white T-shirt and a navy blazer with black jeans. His face was drawn from lack of sleep but animated. “Somewhere in the country?”

  Already this conversation was veering off into territory so banal she didn’t know how to bring it back. “Near Poughkeepsie, the Hudson River Valley area?” she said. She badly wanted to be more open, but she couldn’t think of how to start. It was part of a much longer conversation. As she looked at him, readying herself for the coming two weeks, she wondered what he thought about love. Did he believe in it? Was he the kind of guy who, once he said “I love you,” would say it all the time, or was he someone who thought the whole idea was outdated? He must have been in love before, but what about now—did he call what they had “love”? It was a first for her, this feeling, this strange combination of intensity and fear. She had always assumed that real love was about feeling no fear.

  “That’s good. You’ll get some rest,” he said. “You can use my car, if you like; it’s still in that lot not far from you. I left you a set of keys, right?” He didn’t realize she’d already driven up to the cabin in his car once before, just the previous week.

  Of course he suspected nothing; he was so kind. “I’ll miss you,” she said.

  He reached out and touched her chin lightly with his calloused fingertips. “I’m excited about the trip, but I’m more interested in what happens when I get back.”

  She nodded, rattled. She hated this dance of deception she was perpetuating: I’m heading out of town for the weekend. As though this were a spa break or a girls’ getaway weekend. It was astonishing how you could be telling the truth and lying at the very same time.

  Blackbrooke’s main drag was a wide, stately avenue built for horse-drawn carriages in the early 1800s by two brothers who had been counting on the arrival of major roads and the railroad. A jumble of highways passed close to town, shaving off the southwest corner into a forlorn wasteland of gas stations, Qwik Stops, and discount liquor stores. But the men had been wrong about the railroad; engineers had picked Port Leicester instead, twenty-five miles to the north, and that slight miss had spelled a slow and certain death for the grand old town.

  Katie stopped at the A&P on Main Street to buy some food and cleaning supplies. It was impossible to avoid sleeping at the cabin—theoretically, Motel 6 was an option, but she was afraid to stay there, with the Trans Ams in the parking lot, the broken windows, and the black-rimmed aboveground pool. She’d left work early and made it to Blackbrooke in record time so she could get settled in before nightfall. There was a lot to do. Tomorrow was Friday, and she’d convinced David to come by for a few hours before driving over to Bethel Woods to see the Goo Goo Dolls. She was going to need help trying to get the Falcon going again.

  Before heading to the lake, Katie took a detour past the Blackbrooke courthouse, pulling the Datsun over to the side of the road and idling. People were milling around the wide granite steps. Girls in tiny shorts, hands clutching naked elbows. Lawyers in rumpled suits, distracted looking, cutting their way through the loiterers, papers tucked under their armpits. Stolid granite walls rose toward the sky, flanked by Greek-temple porticos and topped with a golden dome that winked as the clouds flitted past. It made sense, she thought, to try to find the trial transcripts, which were part of the public record. She got out of the car and stood on the pavement opposite, taking in the courthouse’s incongruous vastness. Every federal crime in the county was tried here, in this dying town. She herself had climbed these steps to give her testimony, nudged on by her father and his lawyer.

  It was four thirty in the afternoon, and the courthouse was still open. Katie resolved to move, but she couldn’t quite do it. The muscles all along the length of her body were rigid with fear. The option to turn around and get back into the car was there; it was a viable choice. But if she wanted to be a person who was not afraid of the truth, then she had to grab opportunity, stop being passive. She no longer wanted to let things happen to her. Shifting her weight forward, creating a slip of momentum, she put one foot in front of the other, climbing the stairs before yanking at the heavy glass-paneled door.

  The woman at the front desk barely glanced up at Katie as she put her bag through the x-ray machine. To the left was the clerk’s office, behind oak doors with scratched glass panels. A piece of A4 paper was tacked onto each pane with yellowing Scotch tape: NO CELL PHONES OR CAMERAS IN THE COURTHOUSE. No one had worried much about cell phones during her dad’s trial. Back then, she had kept her eyes on the floor until they’d reached the courtroom itself. The day had been stiflingly hot, the air-conditioning broken. She tried to shove those thoughts aside. Her damp cotton shirt stuck to her ribs, chilly against her hot skin. She took one deep breath to steady herself.

  A warren of mismatched desks and file cabinets filled the clerk’s office. “Hi,” Katie said, putting her bag down on the floor between her legs, her hands trembling. The office was a throwback, no gleaming laptops, frosted cubicles, or halogen desk lamps. The strip of fluorescents overhead buzzed.

  When no one looked up, she cleared her throat. “Hello? Um, I’d like to see a court transcript, if I may.”

  Three sets of eyes rose simultaneously, only mildly curious. “Transcripts?” a lady at the back said. “We don’t keep complete transcripts here.”

  “Oh, all right,” Katie said. For a second she was deeply relieved, but then a kind of stubbornness seeped into her bones, and she stayed rooted. It was her right to see those transcripts, to know what had happened in court. They couldn’t deny her this right. All three women remained rooted behind their desks. “But so, okay, where are they kept, then? The transcripts?”

  The woman closest to her checked her watch, then turned her eyes back to her computer. A thin, middle-aged woman in a fitted green T-shirt regarded her through thick glasses. “You need the case number, all right?” Her voice had the ring of finality to it. She was definitely giving Katie the runaround. “Without the case number, we can’t help you.”

  “What type of case was it?” the woman at the back called out.

  Katie swallowed. “Statutory rape.”

  The two women exchanged glances. The one who told her they didn’t keep transcripts leaned into her chair and flipped a pencil back and forth between two fingers. “You want to see the transcripts of a rape trial? Is it over?”

  “Yes, it was a while ago. In 2009, uh, sorry, summer of 2010.”

  “Was there a conviction? Did it go to appeal?”

  “He was convicted and then appealed. It went to the New York Supreme Court.”

  “You a journalist or a lawyer?” the woman in green asked.

  Katie’s shirt clung to her shoulders, and she tried to resist fiddling with it. “The defendant, I’m his daughter. And, he’s, um. He’s getting out of prison,” she said. “I have a right to know what happened. Those court documents, they’re in the public record. And I’m his daughter.”

  There was a long silence, and the woman in green sighed. “Get hold of the case number, and we’ll see what we can do.”

  It was almost dus
k by the time Katie arrived at the cabin and unloaded everything. Stripping the sheets in the bunk room, she stuffed them in the washing machine and ran the old vacuum cleaner over the matted carpet. It would have to do for now.

  She went for a long run around the lake, earbuds in, music blasting. The drumbeat of her heart was constricting her throat, and she wheezed as she ran. It took almost two miles before her breath became regular again. The sun was cooling, and she wondered whether the old fireplace still worked. Her playlist ended, but she wanted to keep moving, so she started it again from the beginning and went around the lake two more times. Her body thrummed with a shredded, lingering sort of energy.

  By the time she arrived back at the cabin, she felt truly resolute, almost calm, for the first time since the reporters began calling her. She was going to do this. No one was going to give her answers unless she asked for them—and she wanted answers. She began to make a to-do list in her mind. The first thing on her list was to find the case number. And the second was to call Jack Benson.

  Jack’s email had read, in its entirety:

  Katie Gregory! Good to hear from you! Call me any time on 2129956732.

  She sat in the living room, the air smoky from her attempt at making a fire, drinking a bottle of wine she’d picked up at the discount liquor store. The first glass had gone down quickly, and even though she felt queasy, she filled her second glass to the brim. So they were neighbors—this news was both unsettling and a thrill. She’d been right, after all; they had probably been circling each other from a distance for the past few years. Finishing that second glass of wine did not make her feel more courageous, so she picked up her phone and dialed anyway.

  “Benson,” he said.

  “Jack!” Katie said, then hesitated, trying to get control of her voice. “Hi. It’s Katie. Katie Gregory?”

  “Whoa,” he said. She could hear that he had not expected it to be her. “Christ, you surprised me. How’ve you been?”

 

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