The Forgotten Hours

by Katrin Schumann

  The last time Katie had seen her was at the courthouse when Katie had taken the stand. The pouchy, sickly look of her skin was alarming. Katie smiled nervously. Her hands were clammy, and she rubbed them on her thighs. “Yes, Katherine Gregory. Um, Katie.”

  “Thought as much.” Piper’s voice was deep, a smoker’s voice. She smelled of gin and cigarettes. Katie didn’t remember her smoking when she’d stayed over that night. It occurred to her that she should never sneak another cigarette again, no matter how infrequently. “What the hell you doing here?” Piper asked.

  “Uh, I’m back at the cabin for a few days,” Katie said. Her mind was racing ahead to whether Piper might be able to help her in some way. “Cleaning it up. At Eagle Lake, you know?”

  Piper did not feel the need to respond. She seemed like the kind of person who could wait for hours for you to be who she expected you to be. Her eyes were narrow and watery.

  “But, um, I was wondering . . .” Katie continued. “How is Lulu? Have you been in touch with her recently? How is she doing?”

  Piper crushed the cigarette under the toe of her slipper and pulled out a pack of Merits from the sleeve of her sweatshirt. “Yeah, well. She comes around sometimes, always wanting something from me. Like I have the answers. And she expects me to sit around and give them to her? After she went off like that, you know—after that whole mess she started with you all.”

  Katie felt a rush of relief: Piper was on her side. “Do you know how I can reach her?” she asked. They looked at each other as Piper dragged on her fresh cigarette. Her hands were still elegant, the fingernails long and chipped, painted blue.

  “She’s not in witness protection, if that’s what you mean.” Piper laughed, tight lipped, and Katie saw that she would still be pretty if she were happy. “Look her up. She’s in Vermont now, or New Hampshire. Up north.”

  “You’re not, uh—you guys aren’t close?” Katie thought of her own mother, up north, sitting in some pretty house on a lake with a man named Michel.

  Piper inspected the cuticle around her thumb. “My cousin got in deep with this guy, and that pig dumped her as soon as she got pregnant. Me and my husband, we couldn’t have kids. So we thought we’d take her . . .” She trailed off and then shrugged. “I didn’t think I’d be doing it alone.”

  “Oh, wow. I didn’t know. I mean, Lulu was adopted?”

  “Mm-hmm. And the thanks I got. What a lot of trouble she stirred up. You read that stuff about her? After the trial and all?”

  Katie shook her head. Just moments earlier she had been feeling a sense of relief, but now she was sickened. Shouldn’t a mother always be on her daughter’s side, no matter what? There was something horrifying about Piper’s betrayal of her child that stirred up Katie’s pity, even if it seemed to support the idea of her father’s innocence.

  “Well, she’s a pretty piece of work. Her saying my cousin wasn’t looking after her right and all. That Jody’s boyfriends did bad shit to her. That girl would say anything to get her own way.”

  And with that Piper was done. She walked away and did not look back.

  As soon as Katie got back to the cabin, she brewed a pot of coffee and sat down at the kitchen table with her laptop. She wanted to find out right away what Piper had been talking about. First she typed in John Gregory. There were hundreds of entries for such a common name. A preemie and a British author. A skinny middle-aged man posing in the nude. She typed in John F. Gregory. Up came what looked like the title of a master’s thesis, written four years earlier: Dissociative Disorder Arguments in Rape Cases: Bogus Claims or Breakthrough? Her father’s name emerged in bold amid the two-line description.

  Defendant Cannot Present Testimony in Rape Trial

  on Alleged Victim’s Prior Abuse

  By George C. Manta

  A recent ruling by the Supreme Judicial Court stated that a rape defendant may not introduce expert testimony on “dissociation disorder.” In addition, the defendant may not present evidence that the alleged victim was sexually abused as a young child and that, as a result of a possible “dissociation disorder,” she might have fabricated her allegations of rape. The previous district judge had also ruled the expert testimony inadmissible.

  Alleged rape

  In August 2007, fourteen-year-old “Sarah” spent much of the summer with her best friend at a private lake community near the Catskills in New York State. Sarah, who was adopted at age four years and three months, had allegedly suffered sexual abuse by two of her biological mother’s boyfriends as a young child, before being adopted.

  At the end of the summer, defendant John F. Gregory, the father of Sarah’s friend, allegedly had intercourse with Sarah. Four months later, during a discussion of issues pertaining to sexual abuse in her tenth-grade classroom, Sarah brought up the alleged incident. According to her, during class, “it popped into my head, what happened with Mr. Gregory at Eagle Lake.” Shortly thereafter the defendant, John F. Gregory, a resident of West Mills, New York, was indicted in Superior Court in Deloitte County, in the town of Blackbrooke, on two counts of statutory rape.

  At a jury trial before Judge Jemima P. Sonnenheim, Sarah’s testimony revealed major gaps and inconsistencies in her memories of the night the alleged abuse occurred.

  Defense counsel sought to present two theories about why Sarah’s allegations against her friend’s father were not believable. The first theory was that Sarah had been seeking attention and had acted as she did because she believed “this is what all men do.” This belief was based on the fact that she claimed to have previously been raped by two men who were considered to be “close family friends” of her biological mother.

  The second theory was that Sarah’s memory was negatively impacted by a “dissociative memory” disorder, causing her to wrongly attribute early memories of abuse to the defendant. The defendant sought to introduce expert testimony by a psychologist to underpin this theory.

  Judge Sonnenheim excluded testimony from both the expert and Sarah’s biological mother, as well as evidence of Sarah’s alleged abuse before her adoption. The judge found that the prejudicial effect of what she considered “entirely speculative” testimony outweighed its probative value.

  John F. Gregory received a maximum sentence of six years and was denied a stay of his appeal.

  “The error in prohibiting the testimony of his expert witness was prejudicial, and the defendant deserves a new trial,” said defense counsel Herbert L. Schwartz of Schwartz, Danneberg, Weissman, Bein & Johnson in New York. “The state’s case rested wholly on the alleged victim’s credibility. Excluding evidence that could have affected the jury’s evaluation of her credibility was extremely damaging to the defendant’s case.”

  Schwartz explained that in sexual abuse cases, the state always poses the question “Why would the victim say this if it isn’t true?”

  Out on the stone patio, Katie paced back and forth in her socks. Back and forth, back and forth. The legalese in the article turned their story into something inanimate and distant, a cold-blooded argument. But for her, it was as real as a flesh wound. For a while after her father went to jail, she dreamed of bumping into those jurors in the course of her ordinary life. One night she’d dream of the heavyset woman in her pretty red dress, and the next it would be the older man who sat at the end of the second row, taking notes with a fountain pen. In her dreams she would punch these people in the face, her arm shooting out and smashing through skin, bone, cartilage. There was blood, tons of blood. And there was silence, during which she savored the fear in their eyes, their blood staining the webs between her fingers. When she woke up, that delicious satisfaction would disappear, and she’d be back in her bed, an ordinary girl with no special powers, a girl whose father was in prison and who could do nothing about it.

  Now she remembered, too, other dreams she had suppressed, snippets that were just as powerful and that left her drained when she opened her eyes to the reality of another day. In those dreams, she did no
t rail against Lulu but cried for her, for their lost friendship. But when she woke, that pain was subsumed by the avalanche of her anger. She knew what to do with anger but not what she should do about her grief.

  Reading now about Lulu’s past reanimated that chaos. All along she had sensed something was wrong in Lulu’s family, something that no one would confront—not Charlie or John or even Lulu herself. But Katie had felt it, hadn’t she? An indistinct yet disconcerting sense of peril that lay like a scaffold beneath their friendship, giving it strange ballast. It seemed cruel that as close as they had been, they hadn’t really told each other much of anything.

  Now it seemed the jury also hadn’t known about the claims that Lulu suffered trauma before her adoption. Had Piper been telling her earlier that Lulu had lied about the rapes when she was a little girl or that she’d been lying about Katie’s father raping her? The jury had no reason to suspect Lulu’s memory might be distorted. But had her memory been distorted? Was it possible that she wasn’t really lying, just remembering the order of events incorrectly? Getting men and pain and fear mixed up?

  Finally, she typed Lulu Henderson into the search field.

  Lulu Henderson, Profile & History, Ancestry.com

  Harriet Lulu Henderson, records

  Lulu Fifi Dog Care, New Hampshire

  Lulu Henderson, underwear, CafeMom

  She clicked on the images tab. There was a gravestone, a puppy, comic books, a puppet wearing office clothes. And then there she was: Lulu’s hair formed a black halo around a soft face. Her expression was wary, her eyes squinting slightly as though she were asking the photographer, And who exactly are you? She was carrying a stack of books and wearing an enormous black sweater that dwarfed her upper body. Under the thick wool the swell of her breasts was unmistakable, but her shoulders were pulled forward, and Katie was hit with the realization that this woman, this grown-up Lulu, was trying to hide herself. She did not look like the person Katie had thought she would become.

  There wasn’t much she could glean from Facebook because of the privacy settings, though there were some pictures of Lulu with a bunch of dogs and various dog paraphernalia, which was curious. All along she’d assumed that Lulu would have become a singer, but there was no sign of that from what little she could see. Back then, Lulu’s energy had thrown a shadow over Katie’s—she hadn’t minded, because she’d instinctively known how much Lulu had needed her. Katie had watched and admired, wondering in an almost abstract way what she herself wanted for her future. Lulu’s longings had been enough for the two of them.

  She worried at the skin around her fingernails with her teeth. Her father’s lawyer had forbidden Katie to contact Lulu, but she’d ignored him. After the verdict had come in, she’d created a new email account—eaglehaslanded@yahoo.com—and sent her a note. No holding back, a torrent of hateful language. She’d said everything in that email that she had dreamed of saying to Lulu’s face. Days of careful crafting, not a word wasted. Each sentence a punch in the gut. It had been an incredible release, and she hadn’t regretted it. Afterward, she’d disabled the email to be sure that she wouldn’t get some sickening, self-righteous response.

  She had never admitted to anyone, not even to herself, that her anger hadn’t been as pure as she had wanted it to be. Now she thought of the article and the expert witness who hadn’t taken the stand. She wondered about this issue of dissociative memory, whether it could be true. With those thoughts, a tug of pity pulled at her. Lulu may have lied, and she may have destroyed their lives, but she’d been just a kid. Katie should never have sent her that email.

  After a little more sleuthing, she found a phone number. There it was, just like that, a bridge she could walk across. She jumped up from the table as though it were on fire. Was it betraying her father to call? In the bathroom, she stared at her face in the mirror and saw a girl who was still afraid to make a move. It wasn’t the person in the picture Zev had sent her. That picture had been of a woman with a backbone. Someone who wasn’t derailed by a messy life.

  Screwing her eyes shut, she thought about the reporters who had been calling, claiming that Lulu had spoken to them. It wasn’t fair that they knew more than Katie did. She had given Jack the upper hand by approaching tentatively, allowing him to back away from her, and she didn’t want to do that again. The old rules about who you could and couldn’t contact didn’t count anymore. But she felt nauseated, so utterly drained that her body shook as though she were standing outside half-clothed. Opening her eyes, she grimaced into her reflection: she was going to call. Now. If she hesitated for another second, she would never do it.

  The phone was slippery in her fingers as she dialed. A woman picked up, her voice loose and distracted.

  “Hi, I’m looking for Lulu Henderson,” Katie said, going back to the kitchen, heart hammering, and pouring herself a glass of water. “Is this the right number?”

  “Yeah, this is Lulu. How can I help you?”

  It seemed an absolute miracle that at this very minute, Lulu stood in some room in some house in New Hampshire, holding a phone to her ear, and that she was about to have a conversation with Katie. All these years she had calcified in Katie’s memory as the girl from that last summer—billowing, frizzy hair, a light rash of pimples on her chin, full lips pulled into a mischievous smile. It was impossible to believe she existed now, an adult, a changed woman.

  “It’s Katie Gregory.”

  There was a pause, a sharp inhalation. “Well, fuck me. No kidding. To what do I owe this pleasure?”

  Anger and confusion had been backed up inside Katie for so long that she’d forgotten that Lulu would be angry too. It was impossible now to launch in as she’d thought she would: It’s been so long, I wanted to say sorry for the email I sent you, I know you’ve had some really awful experiences, awful, I understand better now, I think. Nothing is as straightforward as I thought . . . Instead there rose within her a hot tide of defensiveness, automatic, entirely out of her control.

  “You talked to a bunch of reporters,” Katie said. Her will met Lulu’s aggression, and the two instantly were at war. “How you could perpetuate this, this horror show, after my father spent six years of his life in jail! I want to—”

  “You’ve got some nerve. Why shouldn’t I talk to whoever the hell I want to talk to? At least they take me seriously.”

  “You don’t think we took you seriously? You kidding? Didn’t you already get what you wanted, Lulu?”

  “What I wanted? I didn’t want any of this.”

  There was a pause, during which it felt as though the conversation could go in several very different directions, and then in the background, Katie heard an odd noise, a sort of snuffling or hiccup. She stilled her breathing to listen more closely and realized that it was the sound of a hand over the receiver, and behind that, the sound of a person crying.

  “Hold on—we started out wrong. That isn’t what I meant to say.” Katie held her breath, waiting, shocked that Lulu carried her emotions so close to the surface. “Lulu? You still there?”

  There were more muffled, choking sounds, and then the line went dead.

  21

  A constant dripping in the hallway. Buckets in the kitchen, in the basement. Her parents cursing the winter storms, the ice dams. The weather creeps its way inside the West Mills house, transforming itself into icy rivulets, gathering quietly, a secret army bent on invasion. New York State experiences record snowfall, and the house groans under the pressure: waterfalls pooling in the cracking windowsills, water dribbling through kitchen light fixtures, seeping through the bedroom walls. Bloated plaster and grim mouths.

  By April, the skies clear, a sudden pulling back of the offensive; yellow crocuses pop on the lawn. But something isn’t right. John brings the Falcon out of the garage to give it its first waxing in the weak sunshine. There is a forced quality to his joviality. When Katie is in bed, just before falling asleep, she can hear him fighting with her mother behind closed doors. There is
talk of money, voices snapping and stinging.

  Katie has things on her mind. She is working so hard, driven by a desire she’s never felt before. She has started to notice the interconnectedness of all things, how history and science and philosophy and mathematics are all linked in a complex and infinite web in which she can lose herself for hours. She discovers that she is exceptionally good at algebra. The juniors in her advanced class are standoffish, a year above her, but she is cool under pressure, tests well. At times, while poring over a textbook or writing an essay, she feels a sense of excitement overtake her, and she can barely keep still. The energy is all directed back inside her, like blood rushing to her brain, feeding her curiosity. It is this discovery—the deep energy of engagement—that teaches her how to shut off those things she does not want to know about.

  She is a master of focus. A deep diver, but only in certain waters.

  John sits behind his desk in his study, wearing his reading glasses. A polo shirt is tucked into a pair of ironed khakis. He stands up as Katie enters. Next to her father is a man she has seen a few times to whom she hasn’t yet been introduced. He has a wild head of curly gray hair and wears glasses with light wire frames. His face is broad and textured, as though he suffered from acne as a child. The pants of his blue suit are unfashionably wide.

  The man throws a magnetic smile in her direction, and she is instantly on edge. “Hello,” he says, extending his hand. “Pleased to meet you. I’m Herb Schwartz.”

  “Nice to meet you too . . . I’m, uh, Katie.”

  He motions her over to an armchair. “So, Katie, great. There’s nothing to be worried about, but we do need to talk.”

  “Sorry, but you’re who exactly?” she asks, looking over at her father.

  Her father gives her a half smile. “Herb is a lawyer. See, we’ve got a bit of a problem. Has your mother told you anything?”

  “Okay, folks,” Herb says, raising a hand to stop them. “Let me deal with this. Why don’t you let Katie and me talk for a bit, and we’ll get the facts straightened out.”