John gave Katie back her phone, and she summoned all her willpower not to look at the text he’d just sent. “Got some music? Jazz, maybe?” he asked.
She found some Ella Fitzgerald on the radio. The music seemed to change the composition of the air between them, filling it with a kind of honeyed softness that was lighter than the silences. For hours they talked and laughed, stretched out their limbs and punched each other in the arms, and listened to each other’s stories. Finally, after dusk had passed and the sky hung dark above the streetlights, David headed to the bathroom, and Katie went to her room to change into a dress before heading out for dinner. When she returned, her father was hunched over, his face sunk into his hands.
“Daddy?” she said. “What’s the matter? Are you okay?”
He raised his face to her, and his eyes were small and bloodshot, his cheeks glistening. “Those balloons, Katie.” His voice broke. “I can’t stop thinking about just how—how beautiful they were. Just so crazy, goddamn beautiful.”
32
After a big breakfast of scrambled eggs and bacon the next morning, John Gregory said he had to go. He promised to call as soon as he got his own cell phone.
“Aren’t you staying with me?” Katie said. “I took the morning off.”
“Of course I am,” he said, rising. “But I’ve got to get out there a bit, see what’s going on. Ride the wind a bit. You know? Just let the freedom sink in.”
“Okay, but all alone?” Katie asked. Her father out there wandering the streets on his own didn’t seem like much fun.
“Well, who said anything about being alone?” Her father smiled, hitched his bag to his shoulder, and threw the Falcon keys up in the air, catching them in one hand.
She felt a quick stab of jealousy. Of course he had people in his life she didn’t know about, relationships that were as unknown to her as her relationships were to him. He had his freedom now; who were they to make assumptions or have expectations? He was a grown-up, for God’s sake, and she was not his mother.
“And soon I’ll be settling into the cabin,” he added. “You’ll come see me there, spend weekends, right?”
She asked if he had enough money, and he waved her away. “Your mother and I came to an arrangement. Don’t worry about me.”
She was aware of feeling disappointed, like a child who asked about the constellations and discovered that grown-ups didn’t actually know much of anything; it just seemed as if they had all the answers. John scribbled a number down on a scrap of paper and kissed her on both cheeks, his stubble reminding her of endless nights in her cool sheets, his warm breath on the top of her head as he read to her.
When her father left, she strapped on her trainers and went for a run. Halfway through, her phone started buzzing: yet another text from Jack. To her surprise, her insides turned over, and she wondered why she even cared anymore, why she wasn’t more angry at him. The confusion she’d felt after their kiss in the hallway had not entirely disappeared. Beneath her spiky anger was an undertow of tenderness, as though in the end she would forgive him anything. It was mysterious to her why she felt this way after so much time had passed. Though she sensed that there was something unsteady or untrustworthy about him, at the very same time she held an entirely different version of him in her mind: a boy’s self with a pure-hearted essence. A boy who had shared a timeless moment with her. Those two selves were as real to her as the pavement beneath her feet.
She slowed to a walk and made her way back to her apartment. After showering and dressing for work, she looked up Jack’s number in her contacts and blocked it, then blocked him. A small pang, a goodbye of sorts, pinched at her, and she let it pass. Then she got out her laptop and stared at the screen. Perhaps, with great care and delicacy, she could type out for Zev the story of what had happened. Perhaps black words on a clean white screen would be easier, or at the very least safer, than words from her mouth into the air. Could she explain herself?
Dearest Zev, she started.
She imagined Zev at a podium, his shirtsleeves rolled up, face shadowed by his angular features under slanted lights. She deleted the two words she’d written.
Hi Handsome! Can’t wait till you get back.
Uncertainty buzzed in her ears.
We do have a lot to talk about
No, this was a bad idea. She would have to find the right way to tell him, face-to-face. Then she thought, At least I can write that I love him. But it seemed wrong to send those fragile words on that kind of journey—to an SMTP server where they would wait in an outgoing mail queue, clunky and manifestly inhuman. Instead, she would whisper them into his neck, the heat of her words giving life to possibility. They would stumble toward each other as best they could when he was back.
I’m really missing you and can’t wait till you get back, she wrote instead, and she pressed send and headed out to the office.
What was different when she woke up the next morning, after going to bed far too early and sleeping badly? Nothing and everything. Spinning her feet from bed to floor, she rose, stretched her neck a bit, and headed straight to the kitchen area to get the pregnancy test. It was a basic version: pee here; watch the plus or minus sign emerge. She sat and peed, urged on by the sudden desire for certainty.
Her head was still lost among the night shadows; she stared at the pale-pink tiles, the missing grout. While waiting, she made herself coffee and picked her outfit for work. There was no rush—it was done, the damp plastic indicator lay on the windowsill in her bathroom, and all she had to do was look. Rushing would make no difference. The coffee was strong and gave her a sour kick. Her head began to clear. She checked her email again, but there was still nothing from Zev, even though it was daytime in Spain and he must have finished his speeches already. What a relief that she hadn’t written him an overblown email in a moment of weakness telling him she loved him. In a few days he’d be back, and they would talk this all through sensibly. There was an email from her mother telling her that Grumpy had briefly been in the ICU again but was improving. Katie and David had tickets to London for the following weekend: an eleven-hour flight including two layovers, but she was happy she’d get to see him again.
In the bathroom, the plastic wand waited for her. The seconds before getting the answer were crystalline, perfectly empty. It was strange to know that reality had already happened, that it was a fact—she was or was not with child—but before she entered the bathroom, this reality did not yet exist for her.
She crossed the threshold, picked up the test, saw the sign. Now she knew: she was pregnant.
At work, the ringing of the phones and the susurrant voices formed a soundtrack to the whirling sandstorm in her mind. At this point, she would have paid to be given some real work to do rather than sit there twiddling her thumbs. There was some accounting she was helping a colleague with and a little research to do for Jonas, but other than that she was trapped in her cubicle with only her thoughts. As she pondered the reality that she was indeed carrying the tiny seed of a baby in her body—a child over whom she had the godlike power of life—she kept circling back again and again to her own mother.
Charlie had once told them she’d wanted babies since she understood that she could just cook one up in her belly like one of her own mother’s rhubarb pies (this was before she understood the role men played in the culinary process of baby making). Talking with her kids about her childhood in England, she seemed charged with an almost melancholic energy, as though those days had been magical and real life hadn’t lived up to the dreams she’d concocted for herself. It struck Katie as odd, then, that Charlie seemed to get so little joy from being an actual mother herself. So odd that she’d begun to think motherhood had been disappointing in some way Charlie hadn’t anticipated. It scared her.
Perhaps it was in fact the miscarriages, the steady loss. With each one, Charlie withdrew further. When Charlie finally gave birth to David, Katie had become so accustomed to her mother’s frostiness, how she see
med to close herself off, that she wasn’t sure if she should even show her happiness at having a baby brother.
It was two in the afternoon already, and there were no messages yet from her father. The phone at the cabin rang and rang into the emptiness, and there was no answering machine. She had no earthly idea where he could be. It occurred to her that he might have decided to drive up to Montreal and find her mother, but that was too crazy to be true.
Thank God Zev would be back soon. That night they’d had cocktails, when he’d tried to talk with her about moving in together, seemed as far away as the speck of a freighter on a watery horizon. She had been pregnant then, and she’d run away from him. How much of that was avoidance, and how much was simply because she’d felt sick? If he hadn’t gone to Spain, would things have been different? She could have asked him to go to Eagle Lake with her; they would have had time to talk. Now she feared it might be too late: she’d withheld too much from him for too long. The lack of emails from him had her spinning.
That cold swim in the lake seemed so distant. The courthouse, those transcripts. Could it really have been only a few days ago that she had kissed Jack? Since Zev had been gone, she’d lived an entire life—and he had missed it all.
33
The other freshmen see only the person Katie chooses to present to them. It’s been a few hours since her mother dropped her off on campus, and her roommate hasn’t arrived yet. In the mirror of the communal bathroom, Katie is met with a surprise: the person staring back at her feels no relief. Violent furrows tug at her mouth. It’s been a couple of months since her father went to prison. Over 254 more weeks to go! The house will be gone soon, sold. Charlie and David are moving into a small sublet in the city. Her life is a pocked moonscape. A rush of anger comes over her. She grabs the scissors from her toiletry bag, the razor she uses on her legs.
It takes almost an hour, but when she’s done, she likes the face she encounters in the mirror. The shock and newness in the eyes. They declare: Here I am! Look at me! Two girls come in while she is in the process of shaving her scalp, but they don’t pay much attention to her; they smile. It is all in good fun. Fun, fun—that’s what college is about, isn’t it?
The skin on her head is alarmingly white and raw. Katie wears a cap at first but soon becomes accustomed to the garishness of flesh stretched over her skull. This strips away the complications of being a girl; it puts people a little on edge. Asks them how they want to respond to her. Her eyes look enormous, and she starts wearing black eyeliner and lots of mascara. She’s never worn much makeup before, and now she piles it on. The only thing that bothers her is her father’s expression of shock when she visits him. But every time she brushes her teeth and glances at the mirror or catches someone’s startled expression, it is confirmation that the timid girl she once was is being choked off like an unwelcome vine.
Winter, second semester. Too many neon lights hurting her eyes, too many books lining the endless shelves in the library. Katie runs track, running and running until she is so tired she can sleep. It probably isn’t a good idea to go to the party, but she wants to relax, just like everyone else. She and her roommate, Marissa, get a ride to a rental house shared by three boys on the football team. House music blasts from the speakers, and a boy in a black baseball cap and skintight jeans starts handing out Ecstasy. It doesn’t take long for her to decide to take one; after all, she is here to have fun. She pops a tablet in her mouth and swallows it dry.
The beer tastes like liquid heaven. Her body sings along with the music; she has never before been so in sync with the rhythms, so primed to move. With her arms raised above her head, she closes her eyes and sways, and every now and then someone bumps into her, and they let their bodies melt into each other for a while before moving apart again.
When she opens her eyes, the crowd has become dense. The air is tangy—marijuana and beer and sweat. Nudging through with her shoulders, she makes her way to the door. The sweat dries on her instantly as she steps outside. Reaching into the pocket of her cargo pants, she pulls out a pack of cigarettes and taps one out. She’s taken up smoking regularly. It’s her new thing. She can always blame the cigarettes if she fails to win a race or beat her own speed at track. Cigarettes as an insurance policy against feeling failure too keenly.
A bunch of kids mill around on the pavement, smoking, and there is a couple leaning against the aluminum siding, making out. The houses crowd into each other like misaligned teeth. The air around her pulses with noise. She will always remember the feeling of the music in her body, thrumming. One towering streetlight a few blocks down gives the impression of a yellow moon strung up on a sky-high clothesline. The cold feels great. Across the street, an old man walking his dog stares in her direction. She looks down and searches her pockets for matches. When she looks up again, the old man is standing in front of her.
“Hello,” he says. “Here you go.” He holds out a lighter. She leans forward into the flame and pulls back sharply when the heat hits her face. She sucks in and watches with astonishment as the paper catches fire and the tobacco starts to glow and then blacken. The fire seems to travel through the skin of her face, down her neck, and into her back. Her body is melting and liquid, yet she is not hot, nor is she cold. The man lights a cigarette for himself. One arm, thick and hairy at the wrist, has a leash looped around it. The hand itself is covered in paint, with blunt, creamy nails.
“I’m trying to quit and failing miserably,” he says.
He has a strange accent. She looks into his face dreamily. Close up she sees that he isn’t really old at all, in his thirties, perhaps. In the mixture of darkness and artificial light coming from the house, his skin looks creased, like a shirt left in the dryer too long, and tanned, even though it is wintertime.
“You shouldn’t be smoking,” he says after a while. “Bad habit.”
She is busy studying his dog, a fluffy brown bundle who has curled up next to his foot. The intimacy between the man and the dog is palpable.
“This little one,” the man says, tipping his head, “he’s tired. And lazy.” His eyes, hidden behind a squint, are trained on her. “I should take him home, but I’m trying not to smoke in the studio.” He gestures toward a large building a few houses down that looks like a warehouse.
Katie throws her cigarette into the gutter, careful to clear the dog, whose sides are lifting and sinking like miniature bellows.
“May I ask,” the man says, the cloud of smoke swirling in the air between them, “do you speak?” When he smiles, his eyes disappear entirely, and his teeth gleam as though illuminated from inside. They are pulsing at her. She wants to lick them.
“Yes,” she says, as he turns to go, “I do.”
Inside, the floorboards vibrate with music, and the reverberations travel through the soles of her feet, through her pelvis, and to her neck bones. Trudging up the stairs, she looks for her roommate in the bedrooms. One of the boys who lives in the house, Damian, is leaning against the wall in the hallway talking to an Asian girl. Their eyes meet as Katie passes. She knows who he is; she’s been watching him from afar since orientation. Sometimes in the mornings he gets bagels—always plain—at Francesco’s near Blodgett Hall, where she’s taking an econ class. There’s a cubicle in the library where he often sits, wearing big black headphones. His eyes, overhung with thick, pale eyebrows, are wary, as though he too keeps himself hidden just on the other side of his expression.
He shoots her that quizzical look she is now so familiar with: Something wrong with you, or are you bald on purpose? She brushes past, her body infused with sudden desire that tingles in her neck and between her thighs. In the bathroom, she puts her arm onto the wall to steady herself. The wallpaper is a garish pink and turquoise, a floral pattern only a grandmother or absentee landlord would choose. Toothbrushes with splayed bristles crowd the sink.
The bathroom door opens behind her. “Oh—” a boy says. But instead of stepping away and shutting the door, he steps forward.
It is the boy she likes, Damian. Katie jumps up and makes to yank up her panties, but he is next to her in a flash, grabbing her wrist. “I saw you looking at me out there,” he says.
“So what?” she answers. In that second she thinks of Lulu and what she would do—then she turns away from that thought. Who does Katie want to be right then? Blood pounds in her ears from excitement or fear. They stare at each other for longer than seems possible. Close up, the boy’s eyes are small, his face chapped looking.
“Fuck,” he says, his breath stinking of beer and smoke, “you’re some kind of freak, aren’t you?”
“You are too,” she says. “You just won’t admit it.”
He takes her hand and puts it on his crotch. He flips her around so she is leaning over the toilet, bracing against the wall with the palm of her hand. Her throat is tight; she didn’t expect things to go so fast, but his hand is between her legs, and she is wet, and her disgust melts away, and she stops wondering how he knew that she would let him do this to her, even though she doesn’t really want to, not this way.
A hand on her head. The air smells of something faintly tart. Her chin lifts, propped up by two stubby fingers. “You all right?” a voice asks.
She opens her eyes a bit and through the cracks sees that she is outside on the street. The sky has turned from black to blue and is brightening. Something wet is on her hand. It lies beside her on the pavement, and she turns, very slowly, to look down, and there is a small brown dog licking her knuckles.
“You need to go home.” It is the old man who isn’t old, crouched back on his heels. He wears painter’s pants and scuffed suede trainers. “I came back. The music is still so loud. I’m usually up late, but even so.” She wants him to cradle her face in both his huge, warm hands. With the pad of his thumb, he wipes her cheeks. “Where is home? I will take you.”
The Forgotten Hours Page 23