The back steps led straight into a large, cluttered kitchen with a potbellied stove in one corner and an enormous plank table with mismatched chairs crowded around it like passengers jostling to board a bus. Under the table was a frail dog that raised its head slightly as they entered and then put it down again on its paws, unimpressed.
“Like your hair,” Lulu said, her back to Katie. She was at the sink, rinsing something. “You color it?”
Katie’s hand reached automatically for her ponytail. “Highlights.”
“Scandinavian,” Lulu said. “Very ice princess. You didn’t tell me you were expecting.”
“I’m still kind of getting used to it myself.”
“Oh yeah?” Lulu raised her dark eyebrows. “Well, it’s sure hard to miss. When’re you due?”
“February. I’m twenty-six weeks. Got a ways to go.”
“Boy or girl?”
“We just found out. Girl,” Katie said. She surprised herself by smiling widely. “That’ll be a handful, huh? Serves me right.”
“No kidding.” Lulu reached up to get a couple of mugs from one of the cupboards and revealed a tattoo of what looked like a long black feather snaking up the left side of her back. “Trev wants kids, but I’m not so sure. Not everyone’s destined that way, you know?”
“Yeah, well, I wasn’t so sure either,” Katie continued. “But I’m excited. I quit my job, and I’m starting my own business. Consulting with nonprofits on media outreach. Just getting going, but it’s great.” Her belly strained against her leggings, hard and taut. She wasn’t yet fully mobile because of the injuries to her leg and foot, but each day she exploded with energy. The doctors had told her after four more months of physical therapy she could start running again.
“You with the guy? The father?”
Katie nodded and looked around.
“That makes a difference,” Lulu said. “You need a village, right?”
Newspapers were piled high in one corner next to a stack of ancient-looking glossy magazines. The cabinets were honey-colored walnut from the seventies, the linoleum from that same era. The walls were entirely covered in postcards held up with tape.
Lulu saw her looking at them. “From the pet owners,” she said. “They send their dogs cards when they board them here. You know, ‘Frisky, we love you! We miss you so bad!’ That type of thing. Feels like they’re rubbing it in my face, their trips and stuff. Corsica and Barbados, when it’s below zero up here.” She was clanging around, picking things out of a drying rack and cleaning something. “Coffee okay? Or you want something cold?”
“You don’t have to bother.”
At this Lulu turned and put one hand on her hip. “You might as well sit down. I’m not gonna bite you.”
Katie chose a chair by the window. Lulu was not at all as she had thought she’d be—neither the way she’d been that summer they were teenagers nor the broken, damaged, vulnerable woman she had been afraid her friend might have turned into. Instead, she was just an older version of the Lulu she had known. Unchanged, and yet also utterly unfamiliar.
“So. Here you are,” Lulu said. “Now what?”
“I’m really glad you picked up. I mean, that you were willing to even listen, you know? Thank you.”
“Yeah, well. You were persuasive. And your dad, I was sorry about that. The accident and all.” Lulu scooped two spoonfuls of instant coffee into the mugs and filled them with boiling water. Taking a seat opposite Katie, she placed the mugs on the table. “You saw Jack again, huh? Boy, did I like him. I mean, really like him.”
“I know,” Katie said. “We were smitten.” It felt as though a tornado were shoving them together, Lulu’s breath on Katie’s face and in her ears and hair.
“We kissed, you know. A couple of times. Well, only once, actually, the week before he left for camp.” Lulu must have seen something on Katie’s face, because she added, “To be honest, I kissed him, really. He didn’t have much of a choice.”
“Oh, okay,” Katie mustered. So that must have been what had given Jack the courage to finally let Katie know that it was her he liked, not Lulu. “You know about the two of us, right? That we were sort of together, by the end?”
“I didn’t really want to know. I always thought I could turn things around, that things would end up how I wanted if I just tried hard enough,” Lulu said, picking at her cuticles.
“I should’ve just told you. I don’t know why I didn’t just tell you.” Katie had been thinking about that for months now: Why had she been so afraid to tell her friend about the kiss? Why hadn’t she been able to claim what she wanted? It seemed so simple now but so impossible then.
“There’s lots of stuff we could’ve said and didn’t,” Lulu said. “You know, the boys in Blackbrooke were such assholes. I’d lost my virginity, earlier—right before summer break. This guy called Tim. A total lug.”
This surprised Katie so much that she took an enormous gulp of her coffee, which scalded the roof of her mouth. All those weeks together, the countless late-night chats, the hours in the canoe and in the woods, and Lulu had never told her that she had already lost her virginity? It felt like a failing on Katie’s part that Lulu hadn’t trusted her or that she had been ashamed.
“You’re awfully quiet,” Lulu said. “Didn’t you want to talk?”
“It’s really hot,” Katie said. “The coffee.”
“A million times I thought of calling you. When I told people about your dad, I had no idea what was gonna happen. I just said it. I wasn’t really trying to unburden my soul or anything. I knew it was pretty fucked up, but I liked your dad. He was a good guy, basically. Like, I know it wasn’t right, but I wasn’t intending to have him put in jail.”
She paused and stared at Katie in a way that was unnervingly direct.
“Thank God for Trevor,” she continued. “He’s the one who brought me up here. Not that I love it in the middle of the freakin’ wilderness, but I’m out a lot, moving around. My shrink says that’s good for me.” She took a sip from her mug. “Don’t you want to ask me anything?”
“Brad, what happened with him?”
Lulu tilted her head, looking suddenly like a cat. Her eyes were a little wild, and her knee began tapping up and down. “What about him?”
“Is it true that—”
“Yes, if you mean, did we have sex. Who told you about him?”
Footsteps on the back stairs made them both turn their heads toward the door. Trevor came in, arms filled with firewood. He stamped his boots on the mat once, twice, then went over to the stove and dumped the wood on the ground. “Everything okay in here, girls?” he asked as though expecting them to be giggling over their drinks, swapping stories and secrets. But when he turned, still crouching, a look of concern crossed his face.
Lulu was shaking her head. “What happened with Brad, it was sort of an accident, nothing more. I was stupid; I let it go too far. And Jack’s not totally reliable; you know that, right? He’s kind of a pleaser type of guy, kind of weak.”
“I, yeah . . . I think I made him into someone he’s not, in my mind,” Katie said. “I don’t think we really knew each other at all.”
“Well, me neither. Sometimes we only see what we want to see.”
“Amazing, isn’t it? We can be so sure, when we’re kids, and we can be so wrong.”
Lulu laughed, stretching out her long neck. For the first time that afternoon, Katie saw a glimpse of who she really was: still herself. She had not lost the ability to electrify when she connected, to make you feel right and solid, a better you.
It was hard to believe how much she had endured. “I read the transcripts of the trial,” Katie said. “And that report, about what could be admitted at trial? I’m so sorry about what happened to you then. I mean, I had no idea. Your mother’s boyfriends. I’m really sorry.”
“Yeah. I was pretty good at talking without saying much,” Lulu said, watching as her husband fussed with the wood. He got up, patted his hands
together to rub off the wood dust, and then gave Lulu a peck on the cheek. “You don’t have a cigarette, do you?” she asked Katie when he’d left again.
“No,” Katie said, “sorry.”
“That’s what I figured, pregnant and all.” Lulu’s eyes were unblinking. She was still stunning, more so, even, than when they’d been teenagers. Although her skin had good color, there were bags under her eyes, but her weariness had something sensual to it.
“I quit,” Katie said. “Smoking, I mean.”
“You quit,” Lulu repeated. “Did you ever really smoke in the first place?”
Her tone was so accusatory, as though she thought Katie was pretending to be someone she wasn’t. “I’m not sure what you’re getting at.”
“You sound angry,” Lulu said. She bit at the skin around her thumb. “You know, I stopped being angry at you so long ago.”
“Angry about what?” Katie asked. “About Jack?”
“It’s not what you did. You didn’t do anything. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t, you know, hard. Being your friend. And your parents never liked me,” she said, “but I really, really wanted them to. I would have done anything to have them like me, love me, even. The way they loved you.”
“They were my parents. Of course they loved me.”
“Your mother, she felt sorry for me. She was nice that way. Your dad, he liked me one minute and then not the next. Hot and cold. I could never figure that out. And all I wanted was for him to look at me the way he looked at you. I was so excited when we were watching TV, and he, well . . . He asked me to get that lipstick I’d been wearing. He did that thing where he kind of crinkled his eyes, like he was going to tell a hilarious joke or thought you were funny or something? I loved that.” Lulu mimicked a grin, and then her face fell. “Remember the red lipstick? He hadn’t liked it at first, but then turns out he did.”
Katie’s stomach tightened. At the clubhouse, during the prize giving . . . she was remembering now. Hadn’t her father—had he wiped the red off Lulu’s lips? “Christ. I didn’t realize. I just . . .”
“I was so happy—I figured it meant he thought I was pretty.”
Katie stared at her, horrified. Her mind scrambled, then fixed on the fact of Lulu’s bewildering vulnerability. She was not “pretty”; she was beautiful—didn’t she know that?
“So I went and got another one from that bag we got at the dime store. You were sleeping, just totally out. He put it on me, and his hand was trembling so much, like he was nervous. He was sweet with me, like he was the kid.” She rubbed her lips together, remembering. A look crossed her face, and she seemed like a girl again, uncertain. “You know, Katie, I should tell you—I never said no. I could have said no, and he would have stopped. I know he would have stopped if I’d told him to.”
Katie could barely breathe. She had been fast asleep, and this had happened. And Lulu still felt it was in some way her own fault. “You don’t have to explain. It wasn’t for you to say yes or no. You didn’t do anything wrong, Lu.”
“When he was convicted, that was a fucking shock if ever there was one. That the jury—all those people—they believed me.”
“I believe you,” Katie said, clamping her hands together in her lap to stop them from shaking. She had come to listen, and she was going to hear Lulu out, as awful as it was. “And I’m really sorry about it, all of it.”
Lulu looked at her levelly, and there was no triumph in her eyes, no relief or gratitude. It was the same look she’d given Katie in the courtroom: stripped bare, untextured. “For a while, I thought it was right that your dad should be punished,” Lulu said. “They sent me to this therapist . . . and she made me see it all differently. And I started to think he was a sicko—that being nice to me like that, it was all so he could get what he wanted, not because he actually liked me. She made me realize that it wasn’t really about me at all.”
“I get it,” Katie said. She flexed her fingers and clenched them tight again. “Everything was always all about him. Right up until the very end. Kind of incredible.”
Lulu’s face fell. “I can’t believe he’s actually dead, Katie. I feel like it’s my fault.”
“Lu, no. Really. This is something I’ve thought long and hard about. My dad brought all of it on himself. Nothing made him get in that car.” She paused. The violence of her anger was tempered by grief that the man she’d loved was gone, and she’d learned that she had to hold those two feelings inside her at once. “You know how much I loved you, right? I thought you were perfect—I wanted to be you. Good things happened too.”
Lulu brought her hand up to her mouth again and pulled at the nail of her thumb with her teeth. “Mom told me a million times she wished you and I’d never met, but I don’t,” she said. “I didn’t wish for that, not once.”
Just a week after the accident, when Katie was still in the hospital, the Boston Globe had run a huge story on the way individual states handled the issue of consent, in particular the varied length of sentences that convicted rapists ended up serving. Her father was cited as having been given one of the longer sentences in the Northeast in the past decade, due to the age difference of thirty-one years between him and the victim. Anonymously, Lulu was quoted as saying, “I didn’t even know it was rape till I told a grown-up.” And then, as a side note, the article mentioned that shortly after his release, John Gregory had been killed while driving intoxicated.
After her mother showed her the clip, Katie had known Lulu would probably read it, and when she felt a little better, she’d tried calling her again. That time, the pall of a death hung over them as they stuttered into their receivers, and they had been more willing to sit with the silences. Now here they were, finally breathing the same air, and Katie had the sudden sensation of aging a year for every second that passed, as though she were morphing into an old woman, the same way the woman outside had shrunk and aged as she’d approached.
“Do you ever wonder about how things could have been different?” Katie asked as she got up to leave. “If we’d done just one thing differently that night? Like made one decision that would’ve changed everything?”
“I don’t know,” Lulu said, frowning. “I think I’d have ended up in the same place no matter what. But I guess it’s different for you.”
There was nothing Katie could say to that. In a way it was different for her. She had lost her way without doing anything. She’d always been convinced that she was to blame, and in a way she was, but not in the way she’d thought.
For years the Gregorys and Lulu had been like a series of interlocking concentric circles, all shifting and jostling against each other, and everywhere they turned led to the same place. It wasn’t like that just for Lulu; it was like that for Katie too: there was no going back and straightening it all out, creating a beginning and an end, a path that led somewhere different. All she knew was that since her accident and her father’s death, she saw the world in a different way, through a wider lens. Before, she’d been running so fast that the edges of her vision were blurred; now life was rendered in sharp detail, its crisp outlines sometimes nicking the tips of her fingers as she felt her way through. But it was a good kind of pain, one she was learning to bear.
As she drove back to the city, to the apartment in Bushwick that she shared with Zev (the one they’d finally decided on, because he could make a studio out of the enormous concrete block garage out back), she fiddled with the dial on the radio until she found a classic-rock station. She rested a hand on the mound of her belly. It would be the last time she saw Lulu, and that was all right. She rolled down the window, cranked up the music, and began to sing, quietly at first, then louder. Her voice was far from perfect, but she discovered that she knew all the words to the songs, and that felt good.
EPILOGUE
2024
The sea is calm after days of wind-whipped waves, and the turquoise waters are so clear she can see there are no rocks below, no hidden outcrops that will injure her. But th
e will it takes her to allow herself to fall is almost more than she can summon. She stands at the cliff’s edge, her tanned toes curling over the rock, for a very long time. At first Zev encourages her, and then, seeing that she will do it—she will jump—he falls silent and watches.
Katie likes his eyes on her. He can’t keep her safe, he can’t help her jump, but he can watch her, and being seen in this way gives her the push she needs to launch her body forward and fall through space.
We have known each other almost a third of my life! she thinks as she kicks her feet and bursts through the surface, emerging into the air. Time seems immense; it is seconds and minutes and hours; it accumulates, heals, and hurts. Six months earlier, she turned thirty-two. She and Zev are celebrating their fourth wedding anniversary. Sasha is seven years old. It has only been a year since ovarian cancer killed her mother and two months since David had his second child. He lives near them in Brooklyn with his husband Markus, little Ella with the ginger curls, and a newborn named Cassius who rarely opens his pale hazel eyes. Her brother and his family come over often, the adults drinking red wine from oversize tumblers while their children make memories. Since Charlie died, Michel has already driven down from Montreal three times; these children are his only family—his chosen family. Their friends visit often: Tanisha and Radha and Frankie and many of Zev’s old students. Soon Katie will stop traveling so much (she’s gone two weeks out of four); she’s selling her consulting business, which has taken off in recent years, and going back to school. Maybe she’ll study to become a nurse. It took eight months for her leg to fully recover, and she came to love the people whose job it was to help her become whole again.
The Forgotten Hours Page 29
