“It was the last night of summer, you see,” he said to Zev, as if only a man would understand.
And they watched this old flick he’d seen years before—he forgot now which one—set down in New Orleans, he thought, or somewhere warm. The story was kind of funny, but Lulu started to cry again. He was helping her; she was still upset about Brad, and then she twisted it around, made it seem wrong.
“Helping her how?” Zev asked.
John continued looking right at him, and Katie seemed to disappear entirely—she wasn’t sure either man even knew she was in the room anymore. Part of her wanted to stop this terrible momentum, but there was another part of her that dove right into the undertow.
“What would you know about the—the power of, uh . . . of empathy, huh?” John asked Zev. “Artists. You’re all about yourse—”
“Let’s keep it civil, okay?” Zev’s voice was low but so firm that he could just as easily have been shouting.
“Like you know anything about women. No one understands them. Everyone thinks they know what women want, but no. No way.” John leaned forward, pursing his lips, and tipped the entire glass into his mouth.
Lulu was crying; she’d been treated without respect, he explained. You see, women didn’t even know what they wanted half the time, and when they did, they didn’t know how to ask for it. Lulu hadn’t known that she couldn’t let boys touch her like that boy had touched her. That her own pleasure was important.
Katie recoiled. The immensity of it, the warped logic, hit her.
“So what did you do?” Zev continued. “How did you help her?”
Irritation clamped down on John’s face, and he stood up. “I’m talking to my daughter,” he said. “No one invited you here. In fact, why don’t you just leave?”
“You’re talking to me,” Zev said, a sharp resolve in his eyes. “And I’ll go when your daughter asks me to. Katie, you want me to go?”
“No, don’t. Please stay,” she whispered. “And then, what then, Dad?”
John was swaying, still staring at Zev. His skin shone with a sickly sheen.
“I can tell you this,” he said, trying to talk slowly and clearly. “I can tell you I sure as hell didn’t do anything I deserved to go to jail for.”
Zev and Katie’s eyes locked, confirming what they’d both heard. Tears clouded Katie’s vision so that she saw her father as though he were no longer whole, body parts bobbing in a murky lake. She remembered then that first day of summer as she had watched him make his way through the water while Lulu had raced after him. She imagined gathering her old friend up in her arms, pressing her close: This was wrong, so wrong. You deserved better. I’m so sorry, Lulu.
“Oh my God,” she said. “Let’s go, Zev.”
But her father grabbed her wrist, his fingers sticky against the naked skin, squeezing too hard, and she cried out. Zev pushed himself between them, making John stumble backward into the couch and fall on the carpet. “Just, just who . . . who do you think you are?” he panted, lifting his head, struggling to get up.
Katie yanked open the front door. The sound of the pouring rain was like flies inside her ears. She could barely breathe. She and Zev ran toward the Datsun. As Zev yanked the car into reverse, her father stumbled from the house and came toward them, still in his shirtsleeves. “Wait,” she said, putting a hand on Zev’s, and he pressed on the brakes. She opened her door, the whoosh of cool rain covering her cheeks. “Daddy, what are you doing?” she shouted.
Her father climbed into his car. When the engine roared to life, Katie tumbled from the Datsun and ran over to him, knocking sharply on the pane. He rolled the window down a fraction. “Of all people! I never, ever thought you’d be a turncoat,” he shouted, his eyes blind like glass. “My little Katie!”
Water streamed into the neck of her shirt, down her spine. Underneath her feet the gravel began to shift and swim in the river of rain. “What are you doing? You can’t be driving!”
“Stop telling me what to do,” her father yelled, jamming the car into gear. He jerked forward, but the Datsun was in the way.
Katie ran behind the car, put her hands on the trunk, and screamed, “Wait! Just wait a second!” Banging the trunk with her hands, desperate. Hitting it again and again. “Stop!”
The car trembled beneath her palms as her father yanked it into reverse, and she pushed into it as though through the force of her will she could stop him from moving, and Zev was running toward them and her foot slipped on the tumbling gravel and she flew backward, knocking her head. Her legs shot forward. The car emitted a dreadful, high-pitched shriek and jerked backward, and she screamed as loud as she could, but he didn’t see her—he couldn’t see her—and the Falcon didn’t stop.
40
It was warm and wet and there was an ice pick or a knife in her leg and people were everywhere. People touching her. Hands on her body, clothes ripping. A voice she knew, hands she didn’t. Things were happening very fast, but she didn’t understand. How could you bully a body like this and yet be so gentle at the same time? How could it be warm, like being in a bathtub, like being a baby, and yet pain was sparking through her body, a star shower of pain, a whole constellation blowing up?
And she tried, tried so hard to remember: Did he leave? Did he keep driving?
She thought he did. She tried to sit up, to tell someone, but all those people, they were not listening to her.
A man with graying hair was crying. He kept saying, “She’s pregnant!”
The blinking lights were bothering her, but she couldn’t turn away from them. Her shoulder was in some kind of contraption, her head as heavy as a block of granite. Like Morse code, the lights blinked and blinked some secret message she could not decipher. She was supposed to be at work; she had to get up and get dressed! She was never late—they would fire her, they would find someone else, and then what would she do? A hand pressed on her other shoulder, very lightly, a delicate touch that shot her entire body through with pain. “Stay still; you’re not going anywhere. Calm down, honey.”
When her body relaxed, it felt as though someone were lying right next to her, a body stretched out along the edges of her own, defining her and holding her in place. It couldn’t be real (or there would be pain), but it was comforting: the softness of thin cotton, dark, silky hair on warm skin. Deep inside herself a sense of calm spread like syrup, soaking into the recesses, smoothing out the rough corners.
Time became a waterslide and then a stagnant pool. It was feathers in the wind and an airless room. A hare and a toad. Inside her, the life she had had and the life she now lived became steam that scalded her lungs, but it was also cool water that gave her goose bumps. She tasted blueberries and felt the sun on her feet and remembered laughter—so nice! She wanted to stay there, in the laughter, but they wouldn’t let her. People she didn’t know were moving her, pushing her around. Why couldn’t she just stay in that moment in time and be surrounded by that life-sustaining, joyful laughter that made the whole world slip away, that turned time to dust? That made you happy just to be alive?
David was there when Katie woke up. He was sitting in the corner, in a chair by a large window, leafing through a paperback. The reading light struck him at an angle, dividing his face into knife edges. “Davey,” she whispered. He jumped up and tapped furiously into his cell phone.
“Katie, Katie!” he said, leaning over her. His cheeks were sunken, bearded. He looked ten years older. “Promise me you’ll never do that crazy-ass shit ever again.”
“What did I do?” she said, but he only shook his head.
Her mother came rushing in, a gauzy scarf unraveling from her neck. She took Katie’s head gently in her hands and brought her face close. Pale ginger freckles softened the wrinkles that crisscrossed her skin. “Sweetheart, we were so worried,” she said. “How do you feel? Are you okay?”
“I’m okay,” Katie said. “I think.”
“Honey, do you know . . .” Her mother looked at David, a
nd he shrugged.
Katie screwed her eyes shut. The baby! She had been pregnant. Now she was in a hospital, and everyone’s face was racked with pain. “Is Zev here?” she whispered. “I want Zev.”
“He’s coming,” David said. “He’s just showering. He’s been here four days straight.”
She opened her eyes and gazed, stunned, around the hospital room. “Where am I?”
“Mount Sinai,” Charlie said. “We’re in New York.”
“Mum,” she said, hot tears spilling onto her cheeks. “What happened?”
“You were in an accident,” David said. “Your leg was . . . you got run over.”
“Oh God . . .”
“Honey, I’m so sorry about everything. I want to tell you—David and I’ve been talking. I thought I was doing the right thing! Protecting you. It’s how I was brought up, to keep quiet, you see? To keep moving. And . . . and I thought—I just really couldn’t see how talking about it would help.”
Katie’s head hurt. “I don’t understand.”
“He wasn’t a bad man, not really,” her mother said.
A shot of alarm buzzed through Katie’s clouded brain. “What are you saying?”
“Did anyone tell you about your father, darling?” Charlie asked.
“No,” Katie said. “What?” One leg was in a cast from her ankle to above her knee. Her right hand was purple and red, the skin of her palm shredded, covered in a glistening ointment. Her head was pounding from the drugs.
“Do you remember being at the cabin?” her mother asked.
The cabin . . . the car. Her father getting into the Falcon. “Where is Dad?” Katie asked, struggling to sit up, her heart galloping.
The New York State troopers chased John Gregory from Blackbrooke up toward 209 North and then onto the highway. Their lights were flashing, but he didn’t appear to notice them. He wove in and out of the traffic in a way that would not have raised suspicion had they not been notified about the accident. Around mile marker 47 at exit 19, the Ford Falcon was in the middle lane, and just as he was about to pass the exit, he swerved violently to the right and took the off-ramp, bumping over the grass. The troopers were going too fast to take the turn and were forced to take the next exit instead. It was still raining heavily. They called in that they had lost him; another unit was on its way.
The second cruiser came up from the south and took the exit. It drove carefully because of the poor conditions. The sumac at the side of the highway was towering, and the first time the police drove along the bend, which merged rather sharply with the local road, they did not see anything amiss. The second police vehicle lost him too; it drove aimlessly until a call came in from dispatch. A local resident said she’d seen smoke ten minutes earlier as she was driving to pick up groceries.
They scoured the area. Visibility was poor, and the rain would not let up. There were no brake marks along the road and no visible signs that they could detect from their vehicles. Now there were three cruisers on scene. They parked, lights flashing like a carnival, and six officers began walking along the curling edge of the road. Up close like that you could more easily see the tire dent in the sodden grass, the split in the wall of feathery sumac that had opened and closed and now provided a shield hiding the woods beyond from view. Officer Latcham flicked on his flashlight and saw instantly the broken twigs and branches.
About ten feet farther on had lain the Falcon, trunk high in the air on a berm of pine needles and rocks, nose accordioned into the trunk of a midsize pine tree, shearing off the left door, crumpling the body. The car made a faint hissing noise as water from the radiator leaked and evaporated on the warm metal. Inside the car was a man, badly injured. It was suspected he had been driving in excess of eighty-five miles an hour as he took the curve. Later they discovered that his alcohol level was three times the legal limit. It took considerable time for the emergency vehicles to reach the site, and the paramedics had trouble accessing the injured party. He was still alive but not responsive as they strapped him onto the gurney and wheeled him toward the waiting ambulance. It was a twenty-minute drive to the nearest trauma unit. The man had serious intra-abdominal injuries.
They did everything in their power to save him, but they were not successful.
What she remembered best months later, when she was finally fully healed, was that when Zev came into the hospital room, the world seemed to slow down—not as though it were stuck or stuttering but as though it had found its own unique rhythm and was slipping into a groove it could sustain. Life was chaotic, and there was pain and anger, but with Zev there, regarding her with the vastness of his pale, oceanic eyes, it seemed she could survive it. “The baby? What happened to the baby?” she breathed in his ear.
“The baby is good.” Zev put a cool hand onto her burning cheeks. Her mother brought over a damp washcloth, and he pulled it over Katie’s forehead.
“We’re going to have a baby,” she said, incredulous, realizing she had already decided this was what she wanted.
One life for another. Why there had to be this blistering reckoning, she didn’t know, and she wasn’t sure how she would accept it. There was so much to figure out about her father, her past, but she wanted to look forward. She wanted to look toward Zev and their baby. The past was inextricably linked to the present—she understood that—but for now she wanted to think about building her own future.
Zev smiled, creases springing from eyes to mouth. “We’re going to be a family, yakirati.”
“You’ll have to teach me Hebrew,” she whispered, spent.
“Precious,” he said. “It means my precious.”
Her body was broken in multiple places, her mind too weary and drugged up to think straight, but she’d held on; her life was not totally undone. She had not lost all agency, she thought, closing her eyes against the keen bite of her tears.
41
The leaves that fall were incredible: the brightest of yellows and oranges, red thrown in like splashes of blood. Katie turned off the highway at Winnisquam Lake, near Laconia. She passed Lake Kanasatka, and then, finally, after driving between two large ponds, she was in Moultonborough, a small town that lay beneath the White Mountain National Forest. The area was sparsely populated, the occasional wood-sided farmhouse and smaller suburban houses lining the roads. Number 89 Hartley Way came up on her right, and she pulled over.
There was an enormous yellow house with a sign jutting out from the roof: LULU’S DOG CARE, GROOMING AND SPA.
A large basket filled with muddy boots lay next to the front door. Dog toys were strewn over the painted floorboards of the porch. Two wicker rocking chairs looked as though they’d weathered severe winters, and an ashtray on a side table was filled with crushed cigarette filters. The front door had a sign tacked up on the top windowpane: “Back in ten!” The yellow paint on the side of the house was pale and peeling, stripped by the summer sun. Air conditioners hung from the windows.
Two crisp barks in the distance and a whistle. Katie stopped short.
At the back of the house, a meadow with soggy brown grass led to the edge of yet another pond. To the left was a collection of smaller houses, sheds that might have once belonged to a barn. Three people had their backs to her, looking out over the rippling water. One appeared to be a man, a giant, his broad back encased in a tan-colored Carhartt jacket with patches on the elbows. He must have been six five or even taller. His shoulders were vast, hunched against the wind. Next to him was a woman throwing something into the pond, a ball, maybe, or a stick. She appeared tiny in comparison, narrow and short, a child or perhaps a teenager. Her hair was cropped and blonde. Another woman was playing with a small yellow Labrador, a cloud of black curls bouncing around her head as she moved.
Katie pressed against the siding and caught her breath. Her nerves were live wires thrumming in her neck. It could only be Lulu. The man put his hands up to his face and let out a hoot. Three dogs emerged from the water, spraying droplets from their coats, causing e
veryone to step backward, laughing. The woman with the black curls hurled a ball, and the yellow Lab chased after it. She pushed the hair aside and called out, “Thatta boy!”
The blonde woman turned toward Katie and waved. She was older than she initially appeared, her hair more gray than blonde, her face lined like a piece of crumpled paper. The closer Katie got, the older she became. “Hi there,” she said in a friendly, businesslike tone. “Can I help you?”
“I’m here to see Lulu. I’m a . . .” She didn’t finish the sentence, but she didn’t need to, because Lulu was staring at her, stock still.
“Katie,” she said. “Holy fuck. You came.”
“I thought we said today, didn’t we? When we talked?”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. I just didn’t think you’d actually turn up.”
“All right, let’s get these fellows dried off,” the older lady said. There was sly curiosity in her eyes, but she pressed her lips together and didn’t say more. When she headed toward the sheds, the dogs followed her.
“Give them dog food, and they’ll follow you to the ends of the earth,” said the giant.
“Trev, this is an old friend of mine. Katie Gregory,” Lulu said. “This is Trevor. My husband.”
They shook hands, and it was clear that Trevor knew exactly who Katie was. He crushed her hand in his as though to warn her to be careful with his wife. He’d have been the kind of boy who would hurt other kids by accident on the playground. Now he was a man who looked like he could knock you out with just a quick jab of his meaty fist, though he would never actually do it. His eyes, limpid and dark, settled on her. “Well, I’ll never,” he said. “Did not imagine her like this, Lu. Not one bit.”
Lulu’s face was more settled than when she was a child, her round cheeks flatter, her lips a little more compressed. In tight dark jeans, she was voluptuous in the way a model from the fifties would have been. When Lulu headed toward the house, Katie followed her. Now that she was here with her old friend, her breath slowed to a reasonable rhythm, and she could think more clearly. She’d never be able to make up for what had happened to Lulu, and she certainly didn’t expect them to become friends again. But at the very least Katie could break into the silence, let her know that Lulu had not, in fact, lost her silvery voice; she had it still, and it rang in Katie’s ears like a gong.
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