“Get over it, hon; you’ll be fine. It’s the start of a new era. I still love that place, whatever happened there. Always will.” They said their goodbyes and hung up.
Katie could not think of the cabin tucked into the feathered ferns without also thinking of her old friend. Did her father ever think about Lulu? she wondered. Did he see her caramel summer face, the electric teeth, and that smile, beguiling and brash? Did it not mess with his head to know that was the very same girl who had put him in prison? But he hadn’t once brought up Lulu’s name since the trial. It was almost as though she had never existed—as though, for him, every memory they shared had been erased or had never even happened in the first place. It wasn’t like that for Katie.
She slipped on her jacket and checked the time. On her way to the subway, she kept thinking about the reporters’ interest in her “perspective” as John Gregory’s daughter. Did she have a perspective to offer them, when she had been in the dark for so long, shielded by others and by her own lack of gumption? It was pitiful, really. She realized it might no longer be possible for her to stay mired in her willful ignorance. If she wanted to understand what her role in all this had actually been, she was going to have to buck up and try to find out more about what had really happened.
4
The boys with their sunburned forearms, sinewy muscles pulsing as they move, each contraction casting shifting shadows on their skin. They are jostling for position. A rope hangs down over the water from an ancient maple at the edge of Eagle Lake, its reflection ribboning over the agitated water. It’s afternoon, the middle of August. Kids, young and old, playing in the water, swinging on the rope, kicking out their feet, toes splayed. With the exception of Jack Benson, the boys at the rope are all a few years older than Katie and Lulu.
Jack. He is fifteen or sixteen, tall, hair bleached from hours on the tennis courts, the son of a Manhattan power couple renting the old McGuire house. Summer renters at the lake come and go, but this is the first time in the seven summers Lulu and Katie have spent together that a new boy around their age is in the mix. He thrills them with his searching eyes, his half smile. He spends every day at the dusty clay courts tucked away deep in the backwoods. At Lulu’s insistence, the girls run past him, staring as he slams the ball against the backboard, again and again. They know his habits, when he practices. Sometimes they’ll pass by twice in one day.
Years later, an image of Jack still comes to Katie at unexpected moments: eddies of dust at his shins, the broad swing of his arm as it arcs through the air until his racket meets the ball. The stunning relentlessness of the movement. Is Jack at the root of the problem? She can’t shake the idea that this might be true.
The older boys: Kendrick, a sophomore at Ohio State. He is friends with Tommy, who’s running the snack bar in the clubhouse. Two of the boys Katie doesn’t know very well (she thinks they are the Hartney twins, from Pennsylvania), but the other one has been coming to the lake since he was little. Brad. His jeans are threadbare at the knees. He’s probably eighteen years old, with the build of a backstroke swimmer, his bare shoulders bulging with well-formed muscles, clearly defined under freckly skin.
Brad points to the rope dangling over the water. “You don’t think I can make that? You kidding me?” he asks Lulu.
“Said you were too chicken to jump for it, not that you couldn’t do it,” Lulu answers, not bothering to look up from her perch on the Adirondack chair.
Before she finishes her sentence, Brad stretches his arms out and makes a leap for the rope. His tanned feet drag on the water as he swings, head tilted back, and then he kicks to propel himself back onto the shore. He grabs onto the edge with his toes, and the other boys promptly start pushing him out over the water again.
Lulu refuses to look over at them. Instead, she studies her fingernails. Chipped yet somehow lovely. Her skin is deeply tanned, her arms covered in the finest minky hairs. She’s wearing jean shorts and a tight black T-shirt with a picture of Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas. It seems as though she doesn’t care much what she looks like, as though the boys are of no interest to her. Katie knows this is not true. Earlier in the bunk room at the cabin, Lulu was almost in tears about the summer coming to an end. “I’ll probably never see Jack again,” she said. “This is it—this is my only chance.” She needs to find a way to make him notice her. Katie’s heart sinks, and she thinks, Yes, I know exactly what you mean.
“Hey!” Brad yells at his friends. “Traitors!”
The boys’ energy pummels Katie. They are raucous, their laughter full bellied. The way they play with each other makes them seem younger than they really are. Jack sits on a chair nearby, watching them. It’s hard to tell what he might be thinking. Is he one of them or not? To Katie, the college boys are like zoo animals: intriguing yet alien. Now as she watches them, she notices their big hands, the way their mouths open too wide when they laugh. The playful punching that is, at the same time, vaguely aggressive. For the first time ever, Katie feels part of the action, as though they are all the same species after all, recognizable to one another.
Lulu sits on the arm of the chair, one ankle angled over her knee. Suddenly she looks up. “Let’s show them,” she says to Katie, jumping up. “Round-robins! Okay, y’all, let the girls show you how it’s done.” She runs to the tree and beckons her friend, Come on!
The Adirondack chairs that line the lakeside are full of people sunning themselves. John and Charlie Gregory sit side by side reading paperbacks with water-stained pages. Katie’s brother, David, just ten years old, is playing with much younger kids over by the sand. His hair is too long for his age, an affectation his parents can’t get him to shed. He likes to let it hang over his eyes, thinking this makes him less visible. He’s one of the in-betweeners, a kid who has no playmates his age, but this summer he’s had fun ordering the little guys around, discovering his inner dictator.
The bigger boys start hooting at Lulu, as though playing with the rope is in some way daring or dramatic, when really it’s totally run of the mill. Katie understands this is because of the heat, because of the late-summer energy; they all feel time running out. Each minute brings them closer to the end of the season. Each day that passes marks a win for winter, a loss for freedom.
The girls pretend to be warming up, stretching their slender arms above their heads, rolling their shoulders back and forth one at a time, touching their toes. They keep poker faces; Katie looks to see whether Jack is watching them and catches his eye. She’s too scared to smile, in case Lulu notices.
Lulu lassoes the bigger rope that now dangles, inert, and pulls it toward her. After grabbing it, she takes a deep breath and begins running along the concrete lip of the lake. When she can’t go farther without letting go, she holds on tight and flings herself out in a wide arc over the water, heading back in a half circle under the overhanging branches till she reaches the water’s edge again and lands nimbly on the concrete where she started, completing the circle. Barely breaking stride, she slips the rope to Katie, who grabs it and runs, just as Lulu did, to the edge, swinging herself out over the water before landing again on the concrete.
Each time Lulu throws herself out over the water, her T-shirt lifts up and her tan belly flashes above her shorts. Again and again. All eyes are on them now—everyone’s, even Jack’s.
The girls are itching for more. Itching to do something, but what does that even mean? Katie and Lulu steal a bottle of Southern Comfort from the Big House. It’s disgusting, but the warmth firing through their bellies is good. Katie is upset with her mother (years later, she won’t remember why—isn’t she always upset with her mother for one reason or another?), and Lulu has been listening to her, nodding with great intent. “I read somewhere about filial cannibalism,” she says. “Heard of that?”
“You mean, like, parents eating their kids?”
“Yeah, animals, like fish and voles and spiders and things.”
Katie laughs. Sometimes she wishes she could s
tep into her friend’s shoes and see the world through her eyes. The whiskey is creating a glow inside her, a growing ember that makes her want to run or shout or swim. She’s lying on the grass near the boathouse. “So what are you trying to say? My mom hates me so much she wants to eat me?”
Lulu lies down on the ground next to her. “No, I’m saying parents are weird; everyone’s parents are weird. I’m saying you’re perfectly delicious. And I’m saying, let’s go have some fun and forget about everything else!” She always knows what to say, Lulu, and what she says always makes Katie feel better.
The sky is covered in stars like powdered sugar. A few of the teenagers are lingering around the dock. It’s a boring night, a weeknight. The minutes are ticking by steadily, but no one knows what to do. Katie can hear the bats swooping blindly overhead.
“Hey, listen,” Brad says finally, running his hands through his reddish hair. “Let’s take a ride in the Falcon. That’s yours, uh . . . right?” He looks at Katie but seems to have forgotten her name.
“Hands off, big guy. That’s her dad’s car,” Lulu says.
“Dibs on driving,” some other boy shouts.
“Wait—he’ll kill me,” Katie says, sitting up straighter. Her father keeps the keys in the glove compartment, but there is no way she can let anyone drive it. He adores that car.
“Don’t rain on my parade, man,” Brad says.
“No way, José,” Lulu interrupts. The smoke from her cigarette is gauzelike, diffusing around her lips. She won’t let them bulldoze her, and she won’t let Katie be bulldozed either. How many times has Lulu lightly placed an arm around her friend’s shoulders, not in a possessive or domineering way but so that Katie becomes infused with a stronger sense of self, as though by osmosis? Over the years, Lulu’s protectiveness has been both shield and sword. “That car’s a stick shift, and I’ll bet not a single one of you knows how to drive a stick. Am I right?”
Jack drains a water bottle filled with vodka and Gatorade. He chucks it on the ground by his feet. “Don’t you wish summer would never end?” he asks no one in particular. “Like, what the hell good is winter?”
“You go skiing and stuff, don’t you?” Lulu tugs on her T-shirt, stretching it over her rounded breasts. All summer she’s been trying to trap Jack into admitting how rich he is. She pretends to sniff at it, but she’s impressed. It’s her way of flirting. Katie, on the other hand, flirts by ignoring him. Her face has eagerness written all over it, she’s sure, whereas Lulu is so damn cool. “Don’t you hit the slopes in Aspen or wherever?”
“Sugarbush,” Kendrick says.
“That place sucks,” Brad says. “You gotta go out west.”
Lulu turns her head toward Katie. “You hear that? We gotta go ‘west.’” She pantomimes quotation marks with her fingers. “Once we’ve got our pad in Manhattan and our big jobs, we’ll take a ski vacation every winter. What d’you say? Head to Vale or Vancouver or wherever it is the rich and famous hang out.”
“Nah, the Bahamas,” Katie says, falling into her friend’s reveries with ease. “We’ll go somewhere warm.” They’ve talked about their lives until their eyes were heavy and their throats dry. Katie’s life is boring—what excitements have ever befallen her? But Lulu is full of stories she spins idly as they lie side by side in the woods or stacked on bunks in the cabin. She has a great-uncle who lives in Paris and cousins in the Deep South. Friends from school who hunt all winter long and clean and mount their own prey. She recounts high school intrigues that leave Katie short of breath, as though she’s devouring the end of a romance novel. When Lulu talks, it’s best to let her tales unwind uninterrupted. Her voice is a cashmere blanket of multihued scraps. And they talk about the future too. In Lulu’s telling, the future assumes a promising pellucid shine: she knows exactly what she wants. To get out of Blackbrooke. To be a famous singer. To have a pair of shoes named after her. But she also listens as Katie half-heartedly tries on the various possibilities her future holds, showing no impatience with her friend’s lack of certainty. Whatever Katie dreams up, Lulu believes it can come true.
“Tahiti,” Jack says. “Or Bora-Bora.”
Katie looks over at him and thinks he might be smiling at her. He kissed her a few nights ago—quickly, badly, in the boathouse. No one saw, and it almost seems as if it never even happened. The grass prickles her thighs. It is so hot, even at night. “Saint John’s . . .” she says. She stands up and pats her backside to get rid of the itchy shreds. There’s music coming from the clubhouse, some terrible eighties tune.
“We can take a yacht to Corfu. I’ll be captain,” says Lulu, standing up as well. “You and me, girl. You and me.”
5
Katie is eight years old. There’s a girl in the aisles at Walmart wearing a pair of dirty dungarees that drag on the floor behind her, trailing threads. But it isn’t her clothing that catches Katie’s eye; it’s that she seems so completely happy all by herself, surrounded by teens with violet rashes on their cheekbones and old ladies dimpled with fat, leaning heavily on their shopping carts. Katie is both bored and anxious. Her mother is supposed to be buying conditioner, but she’s gotten caught up looking for something else. This happens a lot. Her mother will often linger blankly while doing a chore, her open eyes strangely shuttered. For once she’s taken Katie out to run errands in Blackbrooke, just the two of them, and yet where is she?
There is a long mirror in the cosmetics section near the hairnets and eyeliner, and this girl—with a solid, propulsive body, wearing this strangely boyish outfit—is looking hard at herself. She is wearing huge, sparkling rhinestone earrings and making faces in the mirror. When she finally notices Katie, the child puts her fingers to her lips as though they already share some sort of secret. The two of them stare at each other for a while, assessing each other in that frank way children do. There is something about not saying hi that makes it seem as though they already know one another. Then the girl yanks off her earrings, clip-ons, and comes close to Katie. Instead of handing the earrings over, she forces them on her clumsily, one by one, and Katie lets her.
Snap, snap; her fingers are tiny, pudgy things.
Charlie Gregory comes back before the girls have even said one word to each other. Katie notices her mother hesitate when she sees them together, but she doesn’t realize till much later that it’s because of the grimy pants, the air of neglect. Katie is entranced: when her mother asks the child what her name is and she replies, “Lulu Henderson,” Katie thinks it sounds like a song—soft and pretty, not like Katie Gregory, with its hard angles. She asks if the girl can come play with her at the cabin, just a short ride from town. She often has to play alone or with her baby brother, who still pitches furious tantrums and tires almost instantly of her games.
They pick Lulu up the very next day, and in a way, she never really leaves Eagle Lake again.
That summer Katie treasures those earrings, wearing them over and over; she imagines being beautiful like her new friend. She keeps waiting for Lulu to ask her to give them back, but she never does. Summers come; summers go. Lulu often arrives at the lake with something special, something a little unusual. One year it’s a rock she’s painted black and covered in red hearts. Eyes big, the girls name it “the sacred stone.” Another year it’s a stack of old Cosmopolitans they pore over (the sex tips as incomprehensible as Chinese). A thick macramé bracelet Katie wears for seven months straight until it rots against her moist skin. A pair of neon-orange hand-knit fingerless gloves. But the best gift of all is that she keeps coming back, as though she just can’t get enough of Katie. As though she thinks Katie is someone special, worthy of devotion, and doesn’t realize that Katie sees it the other way around.
About a dozen cars are still in the parking lot at the lake, including the red Falcon. The night is thick like coffee. Amber swaths of light from the clubhouse windows slice into the dark. The smell of rain. Only a few days of summer left now. Tick tick tick.
Lulu is playing Ping-Pong. K
atie has stumbled outside to get some fresh air—and to get away from her mother, who is at the piano banging out a rendition of “Downtown.” A few of the grown-ups are trying to sing along. Charlie is so embarrassing. Most often in the summertime, she’s holed up somewhere with a book, sometimes not saying more than a few words in a whole day. Give her a few glasses of wine, and she turns into Petula Clark.
Oh, the cool rush of air on Katie’s face! The boys are hanging out by the changing sheds, some perched on trash barrels, jumping up and down, trying to grab the branches of an overhanging tree. They are tireless, these boys, unable to stop moving, their laughter loud and possessive, as if they own the woods. Glowing cigarettes move erratically in the darkness. The air pulses with sounds—trancelike house music and shrieks from the lakeside, the high-pitched cries of grown-ups drinking and laughing.
It is hard to see much in the darkness, and it’s Jack’s voice Katie hears first; she strains to see where he is. Jack—she can’t get him out of her mind.
“Hey, where’s your friend Lulu?” Brad asks as Katie approaches the sheds. Last year, he’d barely said a word to her, but now he stares at her in a way that is both disconcerting and exhilarating. Suddenly she’s become visible to him, and she likes it. On his wrists he wears a stack of thick string bracelets, like those braided together in craft sessions at summer camp. Kendrick climbs into one of the trees and dangles from a branch while Jack watches him, hands sunk in his pockets.
“Looking for you, duh,” Katie answers. As soon as the words come out, she flushes. Stupid! It’s as though she’s trying on different jackets to see which one fits; she hasn’t found the right one yet. She feels strangely like another person whenever Jack is around.
“That girl’s turned into a total babe,” Brad says. He has the bottled-up energy of a tiger or a pit bull. When he holds out a smoldering joint in her direction, Katie only hesitates for a second. She knows he’ll tease her if she doesn’t take it. The smoke is thick and spicy in her throat, and she suppresses a sharp cough. Peppery and exotic. Smelling slightly of decay. Earlier in the summer she’d tried pot and nothing happened, but now, after just a few minutes, she feels the sudden molten sensation of floating limbs, of a drifting mind. Her thoughts like dice bumping into each other. She is untethered from her body, and her limbs no longer seem so stubborn and gawky. A liquid sense of freedom courses through her, and she hands the joint back to Brad; he inhales deeply before passing it on to Jack and unleashing an enormous cloud of smoke that wraps itself around their faces and necks and makes them all burst out laughing as though at a secret joke.
The Forgotten Hours Page 4
