She pulled away a little and caught her breath.
“No, no,” he murmured. “Don’t.”
She met him again in a kiss and pressed her fingers into his back. But the feeling of elation didn’t last; the urgency wasn’t what they’d thought—it wasn’t erotic; it was desperate. In that instant she saw that the dreams she’d had of this man were misplaced. Those memories of the time they’d shared as kids had assumed a significance, a kind of bloated purity, that was all out of proportion with reality; they had been sweet moments she could hang on to, promises of how life could have been. But it wasn’t real. Jack was not the solution. Jack was part of the problem. This was not going to work.
“Hold on—hold on a second,” she cried, recoiling when her phone buzzed with a message. She was heavy lidded with desire. She ran her tongue over her lips. “We have to stop. I’m sorry. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m a mess right now.”
“Shit,” he said. “Katie—”
“I have to deal with my life. Sorry, I’m sorry. I can’t.”
“Fuck,” he said.
Wiping a hand over her mouth, she squeezed her eyes shut. Her lips were raw and swollen. “It’s always going to be the wrong time for us.”
“Don’t . . .” he said, and he drew his breath in sharply. “Don’t think about everyone else, for once. Think about what you want!”
“It’s just wrong. I’m trying to figure things out.” She stepped away, pressing her back against the wall. The black of his pupils was enormous. “We were just teenagers, Jack. Now we’re grown-ups.” But even as she said this, the low-slung excitement was still there in her stomach—the thrill of behaving badly, of breaking the rules. Of sinking recklessly, wanting something that she predicted wouldn’t end well for her. She pulled the strap of her bag up to her shoulder and began to head back toward their table.
“I didn’t tell the whole truth,” Jack called out to her. He was still in the darkened hallway, leaning against the wall. “On the stand.”
“How do you mean?” Katie swiveled to face him. The hair on her arms prickled. “You didn’t see them, through the window?”
“No, no, that was true: I did see them, your dad and her.” He scrubbed at his thick blond hair, pushing it back again and again. The bright blue of his hummingbird tattoo peered out from the edges of his T-shirt sleeve, like an iridescent petal catching the light. “But something else happened. Something pretty bad. Earlier that night.”
“I’ve got to get out of here,” Katie said, feeling faint.
“I knew I should tell someone, but I couldn’t. I wasn’t sure, you know—was it really relevant?”
“Just say it, Jack,” she said. “Just spit it out.”
“It was Brad. Remember Brad? He—uh, he cornered Lulu. Remember, we hung out with him at the changing sheds for a while a few days earlier. He was a swimmer, a college kid.”
“Yeah, I remember Brad,” she said, fiddling with the buckle of her bag. The vents hummed with cool air at her ankles. “What about him?”
“He told me when I got back to the clubhouse. They’d screwed; he was bragging about it. But she’d said she didn’t want to, and he just—you know, it was kind of one of those things.”
Katie’s insides took a slide over this unexpected precipice. “She didn’t want to? When was this?”
“Earlier, when we went off to the Dolans’. Remember that call? That was her. I think Tommy must have figured out where we’d gone and told her.”
It seemed so obvious now, Brad asking Katie about Lulu. Lulu sitting on the dock, refusing to meet her eyes. Her lipstick smeared. And she had thought Lulu was furious with her about Jack. It struck her now that Katie had been seeing everything from her own narrow perspective—it was awful to think that she might have been completely off base about Lulu being angry at her. “I don’t understand why you didn’t tell the investigators. You didn’t say anything during the trial!”
“Don’t you think I was torn up about that? If it was relevant or not? Of course I was. It was a super confusing time,” he said. “The lawyers, they gave me instructions. Just answer the questions. Don’t ad-lib. Blah blah blah. Christ, I was barely seventeen. I was scared to death.”
Katie saw Lulu in the dark, crying, her breath coming fast, her eyes wild; she was thinking, Where is Katie? Where is she? Later, by the lake, Lulu had told her, “I want to go home.” Things were clicking into place in her mind. Brad was the monster; he had messed with her friend’s mind. And Katie was to blame, too, for being so selfish. “This changes things,” she said. “You should have told the lawyers.”
The whites of Jack’s eyes glinted at her. Whatever electricity had flowed between them was gone. “How does it change anything?” he asked. “Don’t girls always say no at first?”
“Whoa,” she said. “That’s not very evolved, Jack. You don’t really think that way, do you?”
“Look, I just don’t get how it impacts what happened with your dad.”
“She was mad at me, you know? Maybe that’s why she went with him, with Brad, in the first place. And then she said it was Dad, blamed him. She was just really messed up.” Closing her eyes, Katie felt the sting of tears. Until recently, she had never thought of her friend as vulnerable, and now she saw just how wrong she’d been.
All of a sudden, things were happening too fast. A minute ago her insides had been fluid; she’d been in a dream, and Jack was in that dream too. And yet he had never spoken up about this—to her, to the lawyers, to anyone. Maybe it could have made a difference at the trial—who knew? It spoke to Lulu’s state of mind. It threw into question the kinds of choices she might have made. How could Jack have taken the risk and kept quiet about it? Her sorrow for Lulu quickly transformed itself into fury at this man who had dismissed the importance of an appalling incident even though he knew it to be true. How could it not be pivotal?
“He went to jail for rape, Jack. Almost six years of his life. My father can never coach kids again. He has to find something to do, someplace that will hire felons. My mother had to get a shitty job. Our family fucking imploded!” Her voice rose as she spoke, and one by one people sitting near the corridor started craning in their seats to see what was going on. “And all along you knew that boy had done something terrible to her, and you didn’t say a word. I . . . I’m sorry, but I find that kind of sickening.”
Jack seemed to shrink as she swelled with anger. She was glad now that she’d tested the durability of her desire and discovered it to be shallow and sad. She was looking for something that was already right in front of her: a solid mass, something concrete, not ephemeral. A person whose quiet forward motion created a place for her—not to hide in but to be safe enough so she could become herself again.
She grabbed her suit jacket from the booth and stumbled out of the restaurant into the early summer evening, the air so humid it strafed her skin like soaked muslin, cloying.
Jack. Foolish, immature Jack. How she had loved him that summer. Her dream of Jack had hardly even begun before it was over.
30
A few days later, on the way up the stairs to her apartment, she stopped on a riser to catch her breath. She didn’t feel right, and she realized that she hadn’t felt right for weeks. That time in the bar a couple of weeks ago with Zev—she never just threw up like that. Her dizziness, the swooning feeling that often overwhelmed her when she woke up. The constant soreness in her bones, the sour stomach . . . Even when she had been with Jack, she hadn’t felt like herself. She’d attributed it to nerves, to the stress of what was going on, but was it that? Her body just didn’t feel normal.
She began a calculation that ultimately could only end one of two ways, with a positive or a negative. She and Zev had been together since October, and now it was June; that was about eight months. Sometimes, when he stayed over, they would make love two or even three times. Often, in the middle of the night, they reached out in half sleep and slid their hot, searching hands over each ot
her, still mired in the cocoon of their earlier lovemaking. Silently, ferociously, they would fuck in the darkness, keeping their eyes closed. She had never experienced that sensation with anyone before, that kind of out-of-body experience.
Those times, those pitch-black moments in which they lost themselves feverishly, they did not use a condom. She tried to remember how long ago they had had one of those episodes. Then she tried to remember when she’d last had her period. And with that calculation she knew that it was a possibility that she was pregnant with Zev’s child.
Doubling over, she sucked air in sharply and huffed it out again. A child. Once in college, she’d had a scare, and it had proven to be nothing but stress and a bit of anemia. She’d gone on the pill and then off again and had planned to get an IUD. But she hadn’t done it—she’d allowed herself to become lazy. Eight months with Zev, only using condoms—what were they thinking?
But it was also possible she was wrong. Her periods had never been all that regular, and she didn’t bother to keep careful track of them. This was a time of high stress, and perhaps her body was reacting in strange ways. She had been running—and that long swim!—and hadn’t been eating very much. What with her father’s release and Zev’s overture about moving in together, she was under a lot of pressure.
And then there was Jack—the fact that she couldn’t deny that she had been so drawn to him that she’d almost launched into an affair, if you could even call it that. It made a mockery of her careful planning and her calibrated reactions. Since Tuesday she’d been ignoring all his efforts to reach her, but the truth was that part of her still missed what might have been if reality hadn’t conspired to get in their way when they were kids. Would she have seen him the following summer? Would they have had the chance to become a real couple?
She put her key in the lock. As soon as she changed out of her work clothes, she was going to call Zev. She longed to hear his raspy, singsong voice, to begin the hard work of opening herself up to him. It was what he deserved, and it was what she wanted. Over the last few days she’d started examining some of the feelings he elicited in her. For instance, why did she often feel a guilty thrill after sex, as though she were doing something she wasn’t really supposed to? Why had she not told her father that they were a couple? She’d thought it was because she wanted something that belonged only to her, but she was beginning to suspect it was more than that. Maybe she worried that her father wouldn’t think it was a good match, that he’d want more for his daughter. But what did she think? It seemed to her now that her feelings for Zev were tangled up with the past in a way that had been holding her back.
Her landline rang when she entered the apartment, and she remembered with sickening clarity the intrusiveness of the reporters, the media’s ghoulish fascination with the relatives of criminals, their unhinged loyalties. She dropped her bag to the floor, snatched the phone off the hook, said, “Fuck you!” and then slammed it down again. Once again she had forgotten to unplug it. The phone rang again, and she stared at it. “What the hell do you want from me?” she hissed into the receiver. “Why can’t you all leave me alone?”
“Katie? What’s going on?”
It was her mother. Relief raced through her like a flush of alcohol, until she realized that something had to be wrong if her mother was calling her. “Mum?” she said, falling back onto the old velvet couch. “Sorry! I thought you were someone else.”
“I’ll say. Everything all right?”
“I don’t know. Depends on what you mean by all right.”
Her mother sighed. It was always like this, a tense, clipped exchange in which every sentence hid behind it another one that flayed at her. They couldn’t seem to talk normally anymore, without hidden accusations blistering under the surface. “Who did you think it was?” Charlie asked. “Have they been calling you too? Those reporters?”
“I’m not going to talk with them.”
“Quite right,” Charlie said. “I’m sorry, it must be awful”—she paused—“with your father getting out so soon, on top of it all.”
“Mum, I’m not sure I want to get into this.”
“No need to be short, Katie. We’re all just doing the best we can with the hand we’ve been dealt,” her mother said. “And this isn’t a social call. I’m in London for a few days. Grumpy isn’t doing well. It took me a while to get it out of him, and finally I called Henrietta. You remember her—the head nurse?”
Katie’s grandfather lived in a nursing home in Ravenscourt, London. Once every year or so, when the airfare was low, he flew Katie and David over there to visit him. “Is he okay? Did she tell you what’s wrong?”
“Age is not for the weak of heart, that’s for sure.”
“Is he sick?”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. He has pneumonia. Started with a cough some months ago, which he ignored, of course. Now it’s settled in, and it’s getting worse. He’s ninety-six years old, you know. All right in the head, hardly a surprise. But the body, it’s fragile. It eventually just gives up the ghost.”
This time the upwelling of tears was less like a wave and more like a punch in the throat. It took a while for Katie to be able to swallow properly as her mother went on and on about the nurses, what they were and weren’t doing. How cruel it was to age and lose your independence. “I have to see him,” Katie said, strangled. “I don’t want him to die.”
“Of course, darling. That’s why I was calling. You must come visit very soon.”
The softness of her mother’s tone, the quiet hesitation before she said darling, unleashed something inside Katie. How she missed the mother she wished she’d had. Why had it always been so very hard between the two of them? Was it because she was English and had so fully bought into the stiff-upper-lip approach to life? She tried to think back to when it had started. Maybe when Katie had found her crying on the toilet, bloody panties at her ankles, yet another baby unrealized. Children weren’t supposed to know a parent could be so helpless and vulnerable. Maybe her mother had been trying to protect herself in some way. Or maybe that hadn’t been it at all.
“Pumpkin?” Charlie said. “You there?”
Katie couldn’t remember the last time her mother had called her pumpkin; it was as though Katie were deep inside a cave and ahead of her she glimpsed the wavering glow of open air. “Mum, I’m really having a hard time,” she said. And when her mother murmured something, Katie burst out: “I think—I don’t know—I think it’s possible I could be pregnant.”
Her mother let out a startled cry.
“This wouldn’t be good news, Mum.”
“You’re not considering . . . ?” Charlie asked.
“I haven’t even bought a test yet,” Katie said. She would never have expected this—her mother, so sentimental. “Ugh. I shouldn’t have said anything. It might be a false alarm, anyway.”
“Who is the fellow? Is it serious?”
Katie told her about Zev, and her mother’s mmmms and ahhhhs in the background encouraged her to keep talking. Their relationship still felt so new, so full of possibility, both good and bad. She wasn’t sure how to feel about him—this was different from anything she’d experienced before, undefined, vertiginous.
“That’s called love, dear,” her mother said.
But how could Katie know for sure? And the prospect of a child, especially now, was not something she’d ever considered. She didn’t know how she felt about becoming a mother. And it was such bad timing, with Dad about to—
“You’re getting ahead of yourself,” her mother interrupted. “Go to the pharmacy and buy a test. All right? And, Katie. Don’t let your father consume you. You know how he can be. Protect yourself.”
“It’s not like that—”
“I’m just saying. Take care of yourself. Because the man can take care of himself. Trust me on this.”
As the bodega owners started packing away their sidewalk wares and locking up their grills that night, Katie walked down the b
linking streets in the Meatpacking District. It had been warm again all day, and the night air brought out crowds, women in stretched-out tube tops and short skirts, teetering over the cobbles, men in ironic T-shirts without jackets. At the corner of Gansevoort and Hudson, a gaggle of teenage girls—too young to get into the clubs—shivered in cutoff jeans, faces lit blue as they huddled over their cell phones, giggling.
A strange tension infused Katie’s body, and in the night air it seemed that her muscles were taut and twangy, as though the descent into darkness were filling her with an energy that couldn’t find a way out. She had been too tired to go running, but she had badly needed some company, and Zev hadn’t picked up the phone earlier. When Ursula texted her that she and a few others were going dancing, Katie jumped at the chance to get out. She rarely went to clubs, but she did love to dance. It occurred to her that she should go dancing more often. Zev had taken her once to a salsa bar up in Spanish Harlem, and they’d danced together, arms clasped around each other and feet clacking and stomping beneath them, the drumbeat sending shivers through her. He had led her with his great flat palms pressed against her skin. Lulu used to love dancing, and whenever there were theme nights at Eagle Lake, the two of them would throw themselves around like missiles. But they’d outgrown that quickly, suffering from self-consciousness, preferring to watch from the sidelines and cast judgment on others.
Each step she took toward the club, her body loosened in anticipation. A group of men were gathered around a lamppost, dressed in black like crows glistening under the light, smoking. Cigarettes crunched between thumb and forefinger, eyes darting. One of them, wearing overdesigned glasses, called out to her as she passed, but it was half-hearted. They were not young anymore and not yet old—like her, really, stuck between being hopeful and careless and the alluring tug of orderliness that was their future. Some would insist on living out the dregs of their youthful freedom; some would throw themselves into domesticity, by choice or necessity. But now they hovered, quivering with eagerness that was as fragile as it was obvious. Katie took it all in as she strode past in her heels and summer dress: the jockeying, the foot shuffling, the smell of inexpertly applied lotions. Her birthday was in just a few months—she was halfway through her twenties already!—and she shared the same feeling of precariousness that she sensed in these young men.
The Forgotten Hours Page 21
