The Forgotten Hours

by Katrin Schumann

  There were hundreds of pages of testimony, and Katie began frantically flipping through the pages, looking for something specific. She snagged her lip again with her teeth, then stopped herself before drawing blood.

  She saw her own name on page 114, day six, when she took the witness stand.

  There was Piper’s name, Lulu’s mother, when she took the stand.

  There was some guy from her father’s office, and the new West Mills town soccer coach, speaking on her father’s behalf. In the old pirate box at the cabin, Katie had uncovered a sheet with a list of names on it, and many of those same people were listed in the transcript, called up as character witnesses. On and on with the names, questions, reworded questions, breaks in the narrative, more names, objections, sidebars. Rape crisis counselors. Doctors.

  The image of Lulu on the stand—stuttering and crying as she talked about Katie’s father’s fingers—threatened to blot everything else out, and she shoved it away, yet Lulu hovered alongside her, whispering, and Katie couldn’t tell what she was saying, though she desperately wanted to understand.

  There was one person mentioned on almost every page, at least obliquely, whom she could not find under either Direct Examination or Cross-Examination. One name was missing: the name John Gregory.

  Where was his testimony? How could this document be missing what must surely be among the most important components of the trial—her father’s side of the story? As she flipped back and forth, something dawned on her, and every drop of moisture evaporated from her mouth.

  The reason it was not there was because he had never taken the stand in his own defense. He had never told his own side of the story, either in court or to his family.

  Cross-Examination

  Q. Hi, Loretta. My name is Herbert Schwartz.

  A. Hello. I, um, can you—I mean, call me Lulu, please?

  Q. You don’t need to be nervous. I’m not going to try to trip you up, okay? And I will certainly call you Lulu if you like.

  A. Okay. Thank you.

  Q. So, according to your testimony, you were in the den of the cabin, here on the diagram. Your Honor, I move to admit this evidence as Exhibit #4.

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  Q. Is this a fair depiction, in this diagram, of the layout of the house?

  A. Yes, I think so.

  Q. Well, let’s see. You’ve spent many summers at the cabin with the Gregory family, is that right?

  A. Yes.

  Q. Since you were about six years old?

  A. I’d just turned seven when I first started staying with them.

  Q. You were seven years old. So that is over ten years ago, right? You had been spending every summer with them for about, what, seven years in a row?

  A. Yes.

  Q. So it would be fair to say they are like family to you? Mrs. Gregory, Charlie, is like a mother, and Mr. Gregory, John, is a bit like a father. Perhaps a surrogate family?

  A. I suppose so.

  Q. They took care of you since you were little, fed you, comforted you if you were upset?

  A. Yes. But I, I have a mother, too, a real mom.

  Q. I understand. Your mother, your adoptive mother, she’s here today, right?

  A. No, she’s not here. I mean, not today.

  Q. Okay, I’m sorry. I thought she was here. So, in addition to your mother, your adoptive mother, not that long after you were adopted into her family, you also started staying with the Gregorys for weeks at a time?

  A. Yes.

  Q. Back to my question, then. This diagram, it is an accurate representation of where the den is in relation to the rest of the house? The den is right next to the kitchen? It is not in a basement, down a long hallway, or tucked far away, is that correct?

  A. Yes, it’s next to the kitchen.

  Q. So anyone in the kitchen or the hallway, or even coming out of the living room, could look into the den? It would be right in view of anyone who was in the house?

  A. It was the middle of the night. It was, like, dark. Everyone was asleep.

  Q. Is the den in view of many of the most heavily trafficked places in the house or not?

  A. Yes, it is.

  Q. Okay, thank you. I’d like to play a tape now, from the resource center. Your Honor, could we play the tape, please? Lulu, you’re nervous?

  A. Yes, I, I . . . sort of.

  Q. You don’t have to be nervous.

  A. Okay.

  Q. Just listen to the tape, and you’ll be okay. Just answer my questions.

  A. Okay.

  This is where they would have brought in the expert witness, Katie thought—they would have wanted to follow up Lulu’s devastating direct examination with a cross that questioned her ability to recall events properly. They would have put someone on the stand who testified that if she had been raped as a young child—before she was adopted—Lulu might simply be wrong about what she was remembering. She wasn’t lying, exactly; it was just that her memories were jumbled up.

  Katie’s forehead was covered in a filmy layer of sweat, her hands cold and clammy but her body too hot. A lurch and a tug in her stomach, the need to get air. She hated this. She wanted it to be over.

  Q. So you say on the tape that it just “popped into your mind” that the defendant had touched you, had had sex with you? During class one day, it “popped into my mind,” you said. Correct?

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  Q. Where were you when the assault popped into your mind? Why did you not remember it earlier, say, the day afterward when you were with your own family, your adoptive mother, again?

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  Q. You do not need to be upset. Just answer my questions.

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  THE COURT. Let’s take a break.

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  Q. Could you please speak up?

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  Q. Your Honor, I think we may need to take another break.

  __

  Q. Lulu, Lulu? We will resume tomorrow. There’s no need to be so upset.

  PART THREE

  28

  Katie drove back to the city, her thoughts so scrambled that she missed her exit and became lost in the confusion of highways by Secaucus, thinking at one point she might have to pull over to blow her nose and look at a map to reorient herself. Every muscle in her body ached as though she were getting the flu. Her stomach clenched in on itself like a fist. The day was heavy with bluish clouds low on the horizon, and the air was shockingly warm, the temperature almost seventy degrees, as though the earth were battling with itself about how spring should unfold.

  When she arrived back at her apartment, she flung the windows open and gulped down a few glasses of water. Jack had texted her earlier that morning, and she’d resisted responding right away. But she looked down at his words now—Can I see you again?—and could not bring her mind to focus on anything else. He wanted to see her, and she wanted to see him. She ignored thoughts of Zev, so far away at just the wrong moment. After all, she and Jack were old friends. Would it be so wrong to meet up with him again so soon? How could she possibly wait longer when it had been so many years since she’d last seen him, and he was the only one who really understood what she and her family had gone through?

  Yes, let’s, she texted back, and she jumped in the shower. By the time she got out, he’d responded with a time and place. The relief and anticipation that flushed through her pushed all other feelings aside, and for the first time that day, she felt almost normal again.

  They met up at an Italian place called Luigi’s in the Village after work the next day. The restaurant was worn out, flattened velvet drapery and ripped banquettes, stuffing bursting out like swollen gums. A cliché of family dining from another era. This was the kind of place her father would have loved: $12.99 all-you-can-eat buffet between 3:00 and 6:00 p.m. Half-price beers and double well drinks. A couple stood at the bar, the woman wearing an orange polyester dress,
the man with a head of bottle-black hair. Jack was already seated in the back corner. He looked very tired, his chin unshaven, sharp creases fanning out from the outer corner of his mouth. A black T-shirt, fitted.

  “I ordered you a martini,” he said without preamble, nodding toward the frosty glass sitting in a small puddle next to a basket of bread. “Figured you could maybe use some fortification after your weekend.”

  Katie slid onto the bench. She’d applied lipstick and brushed her hair before leaving the office, and it fell loosely around her face, clean and wavy, smelling faintly of coconut. She tilted her head toward the empty martini glass and the half-full beer in front of Jack. “Am I late? You’ve been here awhile?”

  “Nah.” He hesitated as though considering whether to address the obvious. “I’m sorta on the wagon with one foot, you know? Sometimes I get off and then jump right back on again.”

  A sensation uncomfortably close to pity pulsed in her chest. “Isn’t that just called ‘drinking’?”

  He studied his hands; his fingers were elegant and articulated like those of a musician. “Some people can do it. It depends.”

  Katie took a sip of her drink. This was no artisanal cocktail made with carefully sourced elderberries or garnished with a sprig of caraway thyme from Majorca. Pure vodka, three fat, briny olives. Jack unsettled her, and yet it was not a bad feeling. They were both known to each other yet utterly unknown. For long minutes at a stretch, they sat without talking at all, and it was just fine. The conversation worked its way around to whom they were dating. Jack had met a girl on vacation in Greece, and they were hanging out, but it wasn’t really going anywhere. She was a student, originally from Alabama, training to be a physical therapist. When Katie told him about Zev, his gaze became pointed, his entire body listening. “So it’s serious?” he asked.

  “I don’t know yet,” she said, which was the truth but not the whole truth. With every half admission, there was a sense of taking a curve too fast in a car, of getting a little winded.

  “I think I should tell you. I’m, uh—Lulu got in touch with me a couple of years ago. I wanted to tell you at the lake, but it somehow, well. Didn’t feel right, or I was nervous or something.”

  Her head was wooly, and she wasn’t entirely sure she’d understood. “Lulu,” she said, like a moron. The hunk of bread she was chewing was like putty in her mouth.

  “Yeah. I got a message from her. It was maybe two years ago? This friend request on Facebook, and I had absolutely no idea who it was. I mean, she looks nothing like how I remember her.” He considered his words. “It was like this glam shot, one of those things they take at the mall. She had on tons of makeup. Her hair was different. She was heavier. She had this look on her face, like, I don’t know. Twinkly.” He raised his brows as though he knew how absurd this sounded. “I definitely don’t remember her as twinkly. And her name was different, too, not Lulu. Loretta, I think.”

  “And you friended her.”

  “Sure. Look, I was trying to get into real estate. I have loads of so-called friends I don’t know. I didn’t think twice about it, and then she sent me this private message, and we started having a conversation. Nothing too important. Just catching up.” Jack motioned to the waitress to bring them each another drink. “We switched to email, and then she started really telling me a lot. You know how email can be. It was wild—she just really opened up. She told me about her life when she was a kid, her relationship with her mom—her real mother, before she was adopted. Did you know that—that she was adopted?”

  The waitress came over with another martini for Katie and a beer for him. He took a long pull from his glass and then sighed. “Guess I’m really off the wagon now, huh?”

  “I read her testimony,” Katie said, “and I can’t get it out of my head. Did you—did she talk about that? What did she tell you?”

  “Well, I mean, she told me tons of stuff. Not much about the trial, though. It was sort of like—I guess she wanted to let me know more about herself. Like, who she was, not so much what had happened. But it was kind of strange ’cause we’d never been like that, talking and sharing things. But the way she—you know how people behave when they’ve been alone for a long time? Isolated, or away somewhere foreign? Like they just can’t stop talking. That’s what it was like.”

  “Is she with anyone?” It was hard to tell if the pit Katie felt growing in her stomach was a bitter coil of pleasure at thinking her old friend might have had to pay in some way for lying or if it was a prickle of empathy. “What’d she end up doing?”

  “She was moving. There was some guy—I can’t really remember. She’d tried singing for a while, but I guess that didn’t work out. I kind of just stopped responding. To be honest, she sort of freaked me out.” He tipped his head back to finish his beer. “I felt like she wanted something from me that I couldn’t give her. She asked a lot about you.”

  Jack’s eyes were resting on Katie as though appraising every inch of her face for some secret sign, something that would tell him what to say next. “She was disappointed I didn’t have anything to tell her. She seemed to think we kept in touch, like, actually dated.”

  Katie took a small sip of her second drink, and the salty bitterness of the olive juice tasted like food to her on her empty stomach. “And all summer long I thought you liked her. Christ, it took us a long time to get anywhere, didn’t it? And then it all went nowhere.”

  He smiled. “I liked you from the minute I saw you the first day, running by the tennis court, and then, oops . . . go figure, your shoelaces come untied . . .”

  “Oh shit. That’s so embarrassing.”

  “Yeah. You guys weren’t exactly subtle.” He held her gaze. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but do you think about the summer—I mean, not about your father or about Lulu, but about the two of us?”

  Heat rose up her neck and seeped into her face. “We were just kids. It was—”

  “Your dad, that business eclipsed everything, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t other things that happened, things that meant something. It’s just, sometimes I think back to what was sort of the simple life, right?” he said. “And there’s a moment—we keep coming back to it, again and again, for whatever reason. It’s not even necessarily a big thing. It’s just this sort of hinge or something, on which everything seems to turn.”

  “Not sure I understand,” she said, buying herself some time. But she did know what he meant; that summer had been full of seemingly innocuous moments that turned out to be indelible, that came back to her in all their strangeness and meant something while also meaning nothing.

  “For me—when you said goodbye at the clubhouse, I remember you were soaking wet. I couldn’t really hear what you were saying. You looked so pretty, so incredibly serious. If I’d just stopped for a minute and asked you what was going on . . .”

  She looked down. “You remember when we stood at the window at the Dolans’, looking out? We’d just gotten there, and it was pitch dark. We couldn’t see a thing. It was like I was blind, but then, slowly . . . slowly things sort of began to take shape. You know, like a picture developing?” Her heart began beating madly. “We hadn’t even done anything yet. We were just sort of hugging.”

  “Yes, I remember that,” Jack said.

  “Right then,” she said, “for me, it felt like everything was possible. It was all going to happen, and there was so much of it. All good. And then, yeah. It all went fucking haywire.”

  They couldn’t hold each other’s eyes anymore. She wondered about the years he hadn’t told her much about—the lost years of drugs and drinking and unhappiness. It wasn’t clear if all that was really over yet.

  “I’ll be back,” she said, sliding over the bench. “Ladies’ room.” When she stood up, the martinis hit her with full force. She tripped a little, lurching toward the bathroom. The cold water on her face was a huge relief. Four, five deep breaths, and she felt better. Her cheeks were deeply flushed. She would ask him more
about Lulu. What she was doing now, whether she seemed happy. A sudden sob clutched her throat. It had been so long since she’d had a friend like Lulu, since she’d felt that kind of complete connection. No one in college or in the city had come close to being an adequate substitute. There had been plenty of nice girls, girls to go out with, to get drunk with, to share stories with. But not the stories that really mattered.

  29

  Emerging from the ladies’ room, Katie squinted to adjust her eyes. Someone bumped into her in the dark hallway. It was Jack.

  “Katie, can I, can I just . . .” he said, as though he were short of breath. He cupped his hands over her shoulders. The tips of his fingers pressing on her bones were like warm stones on her skin, pinpoints of sensation; the pressure was a shock. And then he leaned forward and put his mouth on hers and kissed her, barely, as though asking for permission. He tasted like beer, like summertime; he smelled of warmth and sun. The tension in her body seemed to focus all in one place, at the base of her neck, and her skin began to prickle, rain on water, needles on skin. She couldn’t think. She kissed him back. The release was instant, a swooping sensation that was irresistible and sickening.

  He leaned against her with his full weight then, pressing her to the wall. Soon she was lost in the feeling of weightlessness. It seemed to have its own momentum, a kind of inevitability. The skin of his face was rough against her lips.

  Her phone rang, and she ignored it. A patron walked past them, briskly edging his way down the hall, but they didn’t pause. It was like being submerged in warm water. She was light, yet her limbs were oddly heavy too. A terrible urgency gripped her. They couldn’t hold each other closely enough. Jack slipped his hands under her shirt, and her skin burst into flame. His hip bones dug into her. The phone rang again.