The Forgotten Hours

by Katrin Schumann

  At the club, she thought guiltily about the Duane Reade bag lying on her countertop with the unopened pregnancy test inside it. Her friend Ursula was chatting up the bartender, the bangles on her forearm sliding up and down as she laughed and played with the cardboard coasters. Danielle and Radha went onto the dance floor and joined the crowd that pulsed like gems in sunshine. Radha and Ursula had been at Vassar with Katie, serious girls with jobs in fund-raising, mission driven in both work and play. Radha’s black hair had streaks of cobalt blue in it that shifted like ropes as she moved.

  Thirsty but unwilling to break in on Ursula’s exchange at the bar, Katie leaned with one elbow on the sticky wood and surveyed the crowd. She had ordered a beer but already finished it and was reluctant to drink any more. Things were just getting started on the dance floor. The DJ spun a curious mixture of old-style disco and electronic music, which had people gyrating with jerky hesitancy.

  She felt a jumpy tension in her limbs, the need to move. She’d hoped the noise and sweat and energy would take her away from herself. It had crossed her mind to confide her pregnancy fears to Radha, but saying those words aloud again—I’m worried I might be pregnant—would give even more heft to that possible reality. On the floor, Radha was motioning her over with big circular gestures. Someone tapped her on the back; it was a young man with a pale shaved head and a bushy black beard, carefully tended, as soft looking as mink. He raised a beer and his eyebrows at the same time, making her crack a smile. What would it be like to run her fingers over his smooth head, the egglike roundness of it? She marveled at the way humans tried to connect with one another, everywhere, all the time. In each person she encountered, she detected a whiff of sad-eyed need, the perpetual desire to be noticed and understood.

  But she wasn’t interested in meeting men. Scrunching her face, she shook her head and mimed, Not for me.

  Radha waved again, and Katie joined her to be sure the bearded boy didn’t think she might change her mind about the drink. At first she was stiff, but when the music changed to something slower, a deeper, more drawn-out beat overlaid with staccato drums and a repetitive chorus, her body started to respond. She imagined herself moving, serpentine, along the jungle floor like a snake. The tightness inside her resisted release, making her fingers twitch, distracting her so that she caught herself looking toward the bar again and again—as though she were in fact interested in the guy—until finally the tension surged over the wall of her discomfort and released her.

  31

  Trudging to work, she tried to distract herself by counting the hours and minutes until her father’s release, until Zev returned from Barcelona. Until her hastily planned trip to London to see her grandfather with David the following week. The incessant loops her mind was making were exhausting but effective; she managed to go for minutes at a time without telling herself, Take the goddamn pregnancy test. But she wasn’t sure she could do it on her own. Last night she had talked with Zev for a while, but it seemed wrong to bring it up over the phone. He was in the thick of his presentations, and it wouldn’t be fair to distract him, but also, she wanted to see his face, to know for sure what he was thinking. Besides, she needed to know if she was pregnant or not before it made sense to broach the topic of parenthood with him.

  When she imagined taking the test, she couldn’t picture Radha there with her, or any of the other women she knew, for that matter. And while she loved her brother, he was not the person she would choose for this particular mission.

  Of course, it was Lulu she wanted by her side. Even though she knew, especially after what had happened with Jack, that the idea of her friendship with Lulu was simply that—an idea, long ago extinguished—it was still what she yearned for. So often it had been Lulu who’d comforted her, persuaded her things would be okay. When Katie gouged her leg on a nail and the wound was thick with grit, Lulu kept a cool head even though the grown-ups were all gone. When Katie drank too much whiskey after they’d sneaked out one night, Lulu had given her a piggyback through the darkened woods, not even stopping once. She had a herculean strength, it seemed, the ability to withstand almost anything with a wry smile or a dismissive shrug. Never hysterical, never flippant. Katie thought she’d put all that longing for what she could no longer have behind her, but no. It was hard to accept that this hurdle—finding out if she had a child growing inside her—was one she’d have to figure out on her own.

  From the outside, her life looked pretty ordinary, but the revelations of the past few weeks had shifted her self-perception. She wanted agency over herself, the freedom to make her own mistakes and to be her own person—the irony was that this was the life she thought she’d already been living. Now she was realizing that she had been in thrall to the past, allowing it to define her every move. Keeping new friends at arm’s length, minimizing her relationship with Zev, awaiting her father’s release like a child eager for the comfort of being tucked in at night. She even felt differently about her mother, who had revealed a tender side on that call that she’d previously kept hidden—or that, perhaps, Katie hadn’t been able to see.

  Upon waking each day she slipped a finger between her legs and searched her bedsheets for a drop of blood. Every time she got up from her cubicle to go to the ladies’ room at HCG, she prayed to see a splash of red on her underpants. Knowing whether she was actually pregnant was complicated by Zev being away all this time: as long as he was physically absent, she could trick herself into staying in this false limbo. Last night after they’d spoken, she had almost cried with relief at having heard his mellifluous voice again. But at the very same time, she dreaded his return and all that it would mean for them.

  If she were actually pregnant, how would he react? She really had no idea. What did he even think about children? The only clue she had to go on was watching how he reacted as they walked around the city together—watching out for a child amid the crowd jostling to board a subway carriage, grinning at a baby peeking out from a blanket-stuffed stroller as they waited in line at the supermarket. But it wasn’t clear what any of that might mean in terms of how he felt about becoming a father himself. And what did she think? Could she consider becoming a mother at such a young age—could she do it?

  John Gregory had taught his daughter to drive in the back streets of West Mills, where the spiky fruit of the sycamores would batter the car bonnet like hail, startling her. But mostly she had learned on the dirt-packed roads of Eagle Lake, starting when her feet could barely reach the pedals. At dusk you had to keep your eyes peeled for deer, invisible but for their wild eyes and the flash of a white tail. They’d lunge out at her as she drove by, sometimes four, five of them on one short ride. She quickly learned to keep her cool. By the time she was ten years old, she knew how to navigate the clutch. Sitting next to her in the Falcon, John had been patient, slow to startle, always ready with a word of encouragement. He’d place his hand over the birdlike bones of hers as she yanked the gearshift around, the car bucking in protest underneath her.

  A few days after meeting up with Jack came the day of her father’s release. The Falcon was in decent running order again, after an $853 tune-up at Ricky’s in Blackbrooke (Katie used money from her savings account). David had offered to fetch it, and she let him. He’d parked it in a vacant lot behind a friend’s restaurant down in Red Hook, then drove into Manhattan to pick her up in the morning. She thought then, in the car, of telling him that she might possibly be pregnant, but it seemed wrong to complicate the day in that way.

  Wallkill prison was a long drive up 95 from the city, and she’d usually gone up there alone, always by Greyhound bus. This time they drove the Falcon with the top down, David at the wheel, keeping it steady at sixty miles per hour. The silence between them existed in a neutral sort of place, as though they both hadn’t quite decided how they should be acting toward one another. It was a good day, good things were happening, but a sense of something unsettled, off kilter, made it seem precarious.

  They pulled up the
wide, buckled driveway, past the giant plastic marker reading WALLKILL CORRECTIONAL FACILITY, and swung around toward the main entrance—and there he was, just like that. Standing with his hands stuffed into the pockets of an unfamiliar black anorak, wearing a pair of aviator glasses. The sun bounced off his forehead, the glass in his lenses blasted into shining discs. He was pale, unsmiling. As they pulled up, he remained stiff, his face unmoving. For a second Katie thought maybe it wasn’t him after all. She and David left the car idling and climbed out, neither of them making a sound—and that’s when John raised his fists to the air, lifted his head to the sky, and shouted, “Waaaahooooo!”

  He hugged them each so hard their breath caught tight in their chests. Katie could not control the grin that took over her face. It was happening—her father was free, finally free!

  “Scared ya,” he said. “Suckers!”

  “Dad.” David pulled away, smiling. “I see prison hasn’t sobered you up.”

  “Hell no,” John answered. “Let me look at you, son. It’s been a while . . .”

  “I know, but—”

  “Nah, just joshing you. It doesn’t matter. Man,” John said, slinging a small sack into the back of the Falcon, “will you look at this baby. Let me have her for a minute, will you?”

  He jumped into the driver’s seat, and as David and Katie stood side by side watching, he raced down the driveway, tooted the horn a few times, revved the engine, and then did a spectacularly brazen U-turn in the intersection—one hand on the wheel, the other raised high—and returned to them. Watching him move through the free air, unimpeded, Katie was ecstatic one second, jumpy the next. She looked at David to see if he was as unsettled as she, but his face gave nothing away.

  “Rides like a dream,” her father said. “Thanks, kids. This makes my heart sing. Climb in.”

  The car rumbled, a deep, throaty murmur, as it cruised along the back roads. The sky and trees whizzed over their heads like a too-fast movie reel. “Where are we going?” Katie asked.

  “Where do you want to go?” her father said.

  David pulled his baseball hat lower over his forehead against the wind. “Your call, Dad!”

  The car barreled toward the Hudson River. When the trees swallowed them in their stippled embrace, John slowed down. He tapped on the car door with his left hand, his right hand loosely clasped around the steering wheel. The Falcon nosed out of the shadows onto the open road again, and the vista unfolded in front of them for miles in every direction. In the distance a few tiny round dots hovered in the sky, but they didn’t seem to be moving. They were pink and green, some striped with blue.

  “Hey, no kidding,” John said. “Hot-air balloons!”

  They looked like M&M’S, gaudy and bright, and there were at least ten of them, floating effortlessly, creating no noise, and leaving no wake. As the Falcon approached, the balloons loomed along the road to their right, dancing ever so slightly. Katie grinned to herself. The muscles in her shoulders began to loosen up; the world was complicated, yes, but also full of beauty, and now they could all move forward and embrace it.

  “Always wanted to go up in one of those things,” John said. “But your mother was too damn scared.”

  “No surprise there,” said Katie.

  “Ach,” her father said, dismissing her with a wave of his hand. “Not a word you say will change the fact that I think she’s damn near perfect.”

  It was sad, his enduring dedication to her mother. How much sweeter his release would have been if Charlie had pulled up today in the Falcon with his children.

  They left the balloons behind them. “Get ready,” John said when they reached the crest of the hill. “You guys ready?”

  No time to fret over what came next. John floored it. Katie’s stomach turned over as they swooped down the hill. The speedometer topped eighty miles per hour, and the car shuddered with effort.

  “Hot damn!” John Gregory shouted. “Fly like a bird!”

  They stopped at a diner outside Walden, even though it was a cliché because every newly released prisoner headed straight there to get his hands on some home-style cooking. John ordered a beer as they sat down and then another as they perused the menu. They chatted about the upcoming election and the deaths of Pat Summitt, the basketball coach, and Muhammad Ali. He folded his glasses carefully and slipped them into the breast pocket of his plaid shirt. It was such a comfort to see him in this setting, a normal man doing normal things; Katie pushed aside the unnerving questions that scuttled into her thoughts from time to time. The past was the past, no? He was happy, and she was too. They all were—by God, they deserved it.

  The food came quickly, brought by a waitress in pigtails with thin coral lips who must have been approaching sixty. Two specials (lasagna and meatloaf), a stack of pancakes, a side of curly paprika fries, and a piece of apple pie—far too much for the three of them. The men dug in, as though in competition with one another for which one could eat the most, lips glistening with juices and syrup. Katie tried to keep up, but she couldn’t eat much, shreds of mozzarella sticking to her palate like cardboard. A delirious mood set in, as though they’d rolled back time and were little again. David burped, holding his hand in front of his mouth like a teenager. Katie pulled out her cell phone to show her father the latest model, giving him a tutorial on how the apps worked. He pressed the keys with the thick pads of his fingers, clumsily, leaving behind a thin, oily residue.

  “Hold on a minute,” John said, digging into his sack and pulling out an envelope. He studied the piece of paper and typed into Katie’s iMessage. “This right, hon?”

  “Who’re you texting?” David asked, using his hand to wipe his mouth. Katie passed him a napkin.

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?” John laughed and handed the phone back to Katie. “Let me know when you get an answer.” He scooped out a big spoonful of pie and rolled his eyes in bliss as it went down. His face was slim, the skin sagging at the jawbones. There was stubble near his lips that hadn’t been shaved off completely. He stretched out his back and sighed. “We’ll have to get me one of those phones, okay, hunbun?”

  The trip back to Manhattan was quiet, each of them wrapped up in the noisy embrace of the wind. A sense of calm had settled over Katie as they rose from the leatherette seats to begin the journey into the city, to her little place, her home. She turned to David to smile at him and was pleased that he smiled back. John drove all the way, one arm dangling over the door. At Katie’s apartment, he traced his fingers along the ridge of the old couch and along the top of the wooden coffee table as though eager to feel with his own fingers the varied texture of her life.

  “Love this place,” he said. “So proud of what you’re doing.”

  “Thanks, Dad, but you’re giving me way too much credit, really. My life’s not that exciting.”

  “Yeah, but look at all this.”

  David sat down and took off his baseball cap, his hair flattened underneath. His eyes were big as he followed his father’s frenetic movements around the apartment. “That all you’ve got, Dad?” he asked, nodding toward the one small sack.

  “Yep. Except for the things your mother kept for me. She’s got some stuff in storage.”

  “Want me to do some shopping with you? Those pants are from the last century.”

  John smiled. “I think I might prefer to go shopping with this fashionista here,” he said. “Though you didn’t exactly dress up for the occasion, did you?”

  Katie looked down at her clothes: worn cutoffs and a deep V-necked T-shirt. All the many times she’d visited him in prison, she’d been forced to wear slacks (no jeans) and cover herself up (no cleavage) in order to be allowed in, and today it had been liberating to grab whatever she wanted to wear. He was right—she should have made a bit of an effort. “We’ll have dinner out somewhere later,” she said. “Maybe I’ll put on a pretty dress, okay?”

  John headed toward the kitchen area and started looking around. When he leaned over the counte
r and reached toward a cabinet above the fridge, his plaid shirt rose up and showed a stretch of white belly, almost concave, hip bones sharp above the loose band of his pants. He had always been somewhat stout, wearing his muscles from years of teenage football like an extra layer of padding. Now he was lean, thin, even. Right there on the counter, next to him, was her bag from the drugstore. She was still dithering, hoping against all hope she wouldn’t need to use it. But the truth was that physically she felt dreadful. The little she’d been able to eat at the diner earlier sat heavily in her stomach. She shoved aside thoughts of what that might mean.

  Katie’s phone buzzed in her back pocket. It was a text from a number she didn’t recognize; the first message read, It’s John and I’ve got wheels, and the incoming one said, Come on over.

  “Sweetheart,” he said, “don’t you keep any beer in this place?”

  “Shit, sorry, forgot to get any. I’ve got tequila?” Katie said, getting up to grab the bottle from the credenza.

  “I’ll take a glass too,” her brother said.

  “You got a text, Dad.” She handed her father her phone. As he read, the creases in his forehead smoothed out; his jaw relaxed. He took the glass she handed him and drank it down slowly.

  “I press here?” he asked, pointing to the space bar with his thumb.

  Katie nodded. It was the strangest thing, having her father move around in space next to her. For so many years she had seen him in only one fixed place: the visiting room at Wallkill, sitting on the same stool. Only in her memories had he walked, stood, sat, eaten. Only in scenes from long ago had he interacted with the world of people and objects. Now, in her apartment—where she had lived so many hours invisible to him, where she had made love to men and cried out in Zev’s embrace—he moved just the way she remembered: with a kind of automatic fatherly authority. She was the child; he was the adult. It was familiar, but it wasn’t like she had imagined it would be.