The Forgotten Hours

by Katrin Schumann

  But everyone is focusing on all the wrong stuff. No one knows what Katie did to set it all in motion. No one knows about her stolen time with Jack at the Dolans’, except whoever called them, and she never says anything to anyone about finding Lulu on the dock, how she had seemed so unlike herself, as though something had happened while Katie and Jack were gone. The confession of her fumbling intimacy with Jack sits on the tip of her tongue, but she tells herself that no one cares, that it isn’t what they want to know about, that it is what happened afterward that is important.

  What does she remember about watching TV? At what point did she fall asleep? Can she recall the last scene from the movie? Did she ever turn around to see Lulu and her father behind her? Does she remember talking to her father? How many blankets were in the room? Did she fall asleep?

  And she tells them what they expect to hear, what she told Herb: that she was awake the whole time. She says nothing about the vodka earlier that night or the sleepiness that overcame her in the early morning. She looks down at her bleeding cuticles, the dry, ragged skin of her fingertips, and she says what she believes to be true: nothing escaped her. It turns out that no one believes her anyway, and that lack of belief in her festers, infects her through and through—because, in her heart, she wants to be an honest person, and she thought she was. But she is not fully honest with anyone, not even with herself. It turns out she cannot give voice to uncertainty; this is not allowed. She does not need to be told this to know it is true.

  So she becomes quiet; she continues her journey inward, a journey she will be on for years, alone, unable to share with anyone, not her family, not her friends, not her lover.

  23

  Earlier, Katie had driven to Sears and bought two slip-on sofa covers for the den, a set of plush white towels and sheets, and a base for the bed in the master bedroom. The bed frame was very heavy, and she stood for a while at the foot of the steps leading to the second floor, wondering how to get the box up there. She’d just have to drag it behind her. The washing machine rumbled steadily, drying the new sheets; the best she could find, four-hundred-thread-count sateen.

  Her father called her again as she was prying open the cardboard and laying out the metal frame on the carpet of the bedroom. “I’m getting your room ready,” she said. “It’s going to be so nice.”

  “You sound tired, hon. Don’t push yourself too hard.”

  “You’re one to talk. You’re the slave driver!” She laughed, glad for the break. Her skin was sticky and her muscles shaking. “I couldn’t get David to help me, go figure. Too busy with concerts and the like.”

  “Ah, honey,” her father said. “Compassion beats complaints, okay?”

  “Yeah, but no one likes a skiver,” she said. “No, really, I guess it’s okay. At first it was weird, up here alone, but I’m getting used to it.”

  “Hard for me to even imagine the space. A bed I can actually stretch out in. The smell of trees and grass.”

  “You’re not, like . . .” She hesitated. “You’re not worried about coming back? Like, people being weird with you?”

  He dismissed her with a grunt. “No, not at all. You get what you project, and I’m all about positivity. Moving on and moving up. I think it’ll be just fine. You don’t need to worry about me.”

  “I know. But I do.”

  “You’re the best, sweetheart. Don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  After the call, she sat on the floor thinking for a while, unmoving. A thick, moted ray of sunlight came in from the open window; the June air outside was far warmer than the air inside the cabin. She stuck her bare foot into the ray of light and let the sun warm her toes. Time for a break. Time to get outside.

  The clubhouse was closed, of course; it would be a few weeks before the volunteer committee swept it out, wiping down the floors with Pine-Sol and clearing the mousetraps. It seemed desolate without the cries of children playing in the sand or music coming from the bar. Cupping her hands around her eyes, Katie peered in just as she had the night of the square dance. The shelves, still laden with paperbacks. Speakers in the corner. A pile of chairs stacked high. The old piano, missing some keys. Incredible—a place where nothing ever changed.

  Surprisingly, the lake water was not unbearably cold. In the summers her mother used to swim every day unless there was a lightning storm. Charlie often wore a crocheted orange bikini she dug up from the bottom of a musty drawer. Against her skin, the color made her freckles stand out. It always looked as though it might just slip off her, resting so lightly on her delicate bones. When she emerged, it stayed wet for hours, and she would lounge in the sunshine, leaning back on one elbow and dragging on her Pall Mall, waiting and waiting for the threads to dry.

  Katie left her clothes in a pile by the maple that leaned over the water’s edge like an elderly man peering into a well. Once she started swimming, she couldn’t seem to stop. The blackness was like a weight over her body, and even though it pressed on her, it could not contain her, and with the movement of her arms she propelled herself through it, on and on. The first gulp of air was painful; her hair streamed free behind her, her scalp numb.

  The buoy was gone, but she swam far out to the other side, heading for the imaginary turning point, ignoring the pain that began in her chest and reached down to her knees. She thought of the boy Brad and how he would swim to the buoy and back without ever seeming to stop for breath. Under her feet she felt something every now and then and didn’t know what it was—fish, turtles, snakes?—and she kicked violently, her breath only half-formed. It was both freedom and constriction, joy and pain.

  Lifting her head for a gulp of air, she saw that she was about halfway back, the clubhouse crouching on the shore, low and green, the maple tiny and misshapen and—something moving in front of it. An animal or a person? A few strokes more, another gulping breath: yes, it was a man pacing on the flagstones.

  He was very tall, his body a familiar S curve, light hair ruffled. My God—it was Jack Benson.

  He was as familiar to her as was the shape of her own face, the curve of her brows, the topography of her hands; she would have recognized him in a crowded room or far away at the end of an empty train platform. The pace of her swimming slowed as numbers crowded her head. Almost ten years since she had last seen him. Two unread letters from him. He was the first boy who had seen her completely naked. She was almost twenty-five years old, which made him twenty-six, or perhaps twenty-seven; she wasn’t sure. It was less than forty-eight hours ago that she had read the testimony he’d given at her father’s trial. How many times had she called him since Friday—how many times had he not answered her call?

  Jack stopped pacing as she drew closer. She dropped her feet and touched the gooey soil at the bottom of the lake.

  “Hey there,” he called out. He wore an army jacket, faded to a pale green with epaulets that might look foolish on a smaller man, the kind of jacket bought at a department store, not a thrift shop. Blunt-cut light-blond hair, longer at the crown. He could be a Swede or a Dane, an elegant Nordic type with defined features. He pushed the hair off his forehead in a self-conscious gesture she recognized immediately, and in an instant, that simple gesture stripped away the last decade.

  “Jesus Christ,” Katie said.

  “Sorry to surprise you. I thought we should talk?” He bent forward slightly in an effort to camouflage his height; he had done that when he was a kid too.

  “Something wrong with just calling me back?”

  “Yeah, but, you know.” His eyes took her in, shifted to the lake, the ground, back to her face, her mouth. She remembered his nervous energy, the way he always looked as though he were about to propel himself forward. His face had thickened, but his eyes were the same, slightly hooded, with hazel irises surrounded by a dark ring. “Calling just seemed—I don’t know, Katie; that call was so bad. So uncomfortable . . .”

  She gave him a rueful smile. “And this is better?”

  The tension seep
ed from his features, and he smiled back. “You said you were up here. Figured I’d check if you were still here and come see the old place again. Thought it’d be better to talk face-to-face.” He stuck his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “And, uh. I guess I wanted to see you again too.”

  Katie’s head and shoulders were peeking out from the water, but the rest of her body remained submerged. There was some water in her ear, and it was so cold it hurt the inside of her head. “Throw me that towel, would you?” she asked, pointing toward the wooden deck, empty of its usual tables and umbrellas. A scruffy towel lay where she’d dropped it.

  “Uh,” he said, squinting and looking around himself, first in one direction and then in the other, “it’s going to get wet, isn’t it?”

  She could see that having him throw her the towel was ludicrous. Her heart clattered as though she were fifteen again, shy and fierce at the same time. Of course it was ludicrous to have him throw her the towel while she was in the water. While his back was turned, she approached the low wall that ran along this part of the lake and put both hands flat onto the concrete, making an awkward little jump to haul herself out. Through the wet cotton bra her nipples stood out, sharp as stone chips. She grabbed the towel. Her jeans stuck to the damp skin of her thighs. Jack kept his back turned to her as she dressed. He flexed his shoulders, and the material on his jacket shone where he stretched. It struck her that she had never seen Zev fidgety like this, that his energy was static compared to Jack’s.

  “I just want to say I’m really sorry,” Jack said. “You know? About everything.”

  “Don’t know why you should be sorry.”

  “There wasn’t even any evidence,” Jack said. “It’s crazy that you can be convicted without evidence. I didn’t think that would ever happen.”

  “Yeah, well,” Katie said. “That’s justice for you.” She felt totally unprepared for this conversation, a little resentful, even. The knowledge of what he’d said in court throbbed in her head, but there was no way to go from “How are you?” to “What were you thinking?” How could she ask him what he thought he’d seen? Did he realize that he was probably partially to blame for her father’s conviction?

  There was no way to broach the subject, not right now. Damp and chilled, she struggled to get her clothes back on.

  “Haven’t been back here since then,” Jack said.

  She straightened up and ran her hands over her wet hair, aware that she probably looked pale and thin. “Neither have I.” They walked toward their two cars, parked in the dusty lot behind the clubhouse. His was a small black Mercedes. She glanced at him quickly. A Realtor. It just seemed so incongruous.

  “The lake—it’s still so beautiful; it almost hurts,” Jack said. “That summer wasn’t all bad, was it?”

  They were in the open, yet it was as though they’d been thrown into a tiny room together. Goose bumps appeared on her damp skin, and she hugged her arms around herself. This was so not what she’d been expecting.

  24

  Back at the cabin, Katie headed upstairs to warm up under the shower while Jack took a seat in the living room. Under the needles of hot water, her skin was aflame. Her fingers seemed almost to belong to someone else, so alert was her skin to the brush of fingertips slick with soap. It was like covering her body with rubbing alcohol. After she threw on a pair of jeans and a big sweatshirt, she stared at herself in the mirror. Her eyes were bright, clear from her cold swim, her face bleached of color except a vivid pink on her cheeks.

  She wondered how much she’d changed or stayed the same over the years. When she knew Jack, her hair had been longer, and then for a few years she had shorn it off completely; now it was shoulder length and wavy. Still blonde, but lacking the glamorous tousle so popular now; it was just sort of plain. She was aware of not being a great beauty, though men often catcalled her in the streets, almost always to tell her to smile, or cheer up! As always, and without intending to, she clung to her deep sense of interiority—it was this, she thought, that made people feel excluded. But not everyone. Those who loved her, understood her like her father did—they could bridge the gap between who she seemed and who she really was. She might appear to be cold or distant, but who could know what was going on in her head? Running a finger over her upper lip, she thought about Jack sitting downstairs in the flesh, wondered whether he felt he knew her the way she felt she knew him.

  Their story had taken on a different shape in her mind since she’d discovered that he’d tried to write to her. They had barely even known each other, but it hadn’t felt that way. To her, he was a boy she loved. There was no question of whether it was real love or not—she probably loved him more because she hardly knew him, because the promise of him had been allowed to bloom and live on in her imagination. They’d fallen for each other before all kids had cell phones, before social media existed, and afterward it had been so very easy to lose sight of one another, as though they’d lived on different continents. In the fall, when the memory of his hands on her body and the heat of his tongue in her mouth was still vivid, she carried the knowledge of their intimacy with her like a secret at parties filled with panting, uncertain teenagers. Among them afterward, she’d been infused with a kind of pride; she felt powerful and beautiful in a way no one could even guess at.

  Of course, after she found out about her father’s arrest, her life was recast. At those weekend parties, she became desperate to make some kind of concrete connection. She needed to feel real, alive. She would start off eager, ready to be daring, to prove that she could do whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted, to hell with it all—but as soon as a boy started breathing too hard, or she felt the dull thrust of his hard-on against her thigh, she’d back away.

  She went into the kitchen and poured two glasses of wine, wishing she had a bottle of tequila or some ice-cold vodka or something strong that would smudge the sharp edges of her apprehension. Jack sat with his back to her, and she stood quietly at the lintel, a glass in each hand, knowing that this was one of those before-and-after moments. Life was lurching forward in a direction she hadn’t anticipated. Her numbers were not adding up, and her trajectory was changing.

  She held out a glass to Jack, but he shook his head. “On the wagon, two years already,” he said. He smiled, but it looked pained, as though he’d practiced in front of a mirror and decided that it might do the trick but wasn’t entirely sure.

  “Oh. Right,” she said, putting his glass on the old side table and taking an inadvertently enormous gulp from hers. She coughed. “Sorry to hear that. Want something else?”

  “Ah, it’s okay,” he said. “Long story.”

  She was curious but didn’t want to ask. “So my dad gets out soon”—she studied him to gauge his reaction—“from Wallkill. He got six years.”

  “They didn’t let him out for good behavior? You’re shitting me.”

  She shrugged, her neck stiff. “There’s no such thing as good behavior,” she said. Maybe she could get to the bottom of what he thought he saw. But something held her back: fear, perhaps, or propriety. “And I guess, I don’t know. I guess he got in some trouble, helping out some of the other guys in there he wasn’t supposed to fraternize with. You know my dad, always trying to teach someone something.”

  “Christ,” Jack said, knitting his silky brows. “When’s the last time you saw him?”

  “I go up there once a month, something like that. He counts on me.” A pause hung between them until it became bloated and burst. “It feels really weird that you’re here, Jack. How come you never called me back? On Friday?”

  “I—you gave me the scare of my life, Katie. I mean, I hadn’t heard from you in like ten years. When you never answered my letters, I figured you—”

  “I never got them,” she broke in. “I mean, not until just now. I found them last week. I’ve been clearing the place out because Dad’s coming.”

  “You never got them?” he asked, straightening up.

  “Nope.
” Her collarbones flared with heat, sweat prickling at the base of her neck. “I mean, I didn’t even know you testified at the trial, Jack. Did you realize that? That I had no idea?”

  “Look, I didn’t know anything. I was, like, totally in the dark about everything! I knew he was convicted. I knew what I read in the papers.”

  “Yeah, the fucking newspapers,” Katie said, taking another sip of her wine. “That’s been fun.” As they talked, they began to assess each other more openly. His cheeks were covered in stubble, light and soft, concentrated around the chin. If it weren’t for his expression, the serious look in his eyes, he could have passed as much younger. “What happened to your parents?” she asked. She’d only met his father once; she remembered him as a huge man with shins as big as dolphins. His mother was a beauty, friendly in a noncommittal sort of way. Always checking her reflection in the clubhouse windows.

  “Nothing, really,” Jack said. “Don’t see them all that much.” They began catching each other up, and she started to relax—he told her he had gone to UVA on a tennis scholarship and then lost his spot on the team after a hazing incident at his fraternity. For two years after graduating, Jack moved into his parents’ Upper West Side apartment. His “forgotten years,” he called them, during which his parents ignored him so effectively that he got away with snorting cocaine in the marble-tiled bathroom, leaving white dust and empty baggies on the countertops that the housekeeper cleaned up without complaint or comment.