The Forgotten Hours
Katrin Schumann
For the want of a nail the shoe was lost, For the want of a shoe the horse was lost, For the want of a horse the rider was lost, For the want of a rider the battle was lost, For the want of a battle the kingdom was lost, And all for the want of a horseshoe-nail.
—Benjamin Franklin
PROLOGUE
June 2007
Two girls—almost young women, but not quite—stand side by side on a dock in the shade of an old green boathouse. Their arms and legs prickle with goose bumps. Their skin is winter pale. One has a spray of purpling bruises on her thigh, and the other has forgotten to shave. They are laughing and laughing, their toes curled over the edge of the dock, splintered after months of snow cover. Below them the lake is chilly, not very inviting. The girls are eager to launch into their summer rituals, but neither has the courage to plunge in first.
The taller one, Lulu, is fifteen years old (or so she says). Over the past year, since Katie last saw her, she has grown two inches and let her black hair grow out so that it shifts in the wind, alive. There are hints of blue in it. Her body is soft and curvy; she has gained weight since last summer, and it suits her. When she’s older, standing in dressing rooms blasted by fluorescent lights, she will curse her flaring hips, think they’re ugly. And yet even now, men and boys—girls too—find their eyes drawn to her.
A man comes toward them, whooping loudly, and dares them to jump into the lake. His laugh bounces over the water, off the pines on the opposite bank, and then back at them. He’s wearing faded pink-and-green swimming trunks, musty from being crammed in a drawer. Lulu is almost as tall as he is, and her hair touches his shoulder as he stands next to her, eyeing the spring-fed water. He is stocky and muscular, the hairs on his broad chest darker than the closely cropped hair on his head.
“My beautiful girls,” he says, though only one of them is his child. “Too cold for you?”
The other girl is his daughter, Katie—the slight one with the lank, midlength blonde hair. She feels as though she might burst when her father smiles at her. His approval is oxygen to her. It is always this way. Everyone wants to please him, make him laugh. She’d like to jump in to show him how tough she is, but she can’t.
Her father’s shoulders are hunched against the early summer breeze. He shoots them both a wide smile, the slight gap between his front teeth like an exclamation point on his good humor. Each summer, John Gregory’s the first to swim out to the buoy and back. He’s the one who braves the teeming ShopRite in Blackbrooke to stock up on all the best junk food, with some veggies and oatmeal thrown in for good measure. Early mornings, he’ll take the kids bird watching, and late at night he’ll make hot chocolate after they’ve been playing Marco Polo in the lake beneath the stars, cords of hair sending icy water dripping down their backs.
Now the sun, slowly gathering force, emerges from behind a cloud, and abruptly a thick ray lands on their cool skin. John yowls playfully, like an animal. He grabs Lulu’s hand and propels himself into the water.
She lets out a scream. A second later, Lulu shoots up from the sparkle of the lake, sputtering. John races away from her toward the Big Float, leaving behind a trail of blocky whitecaps that peter out as they near the shore.
Katie watches the two of them. The wind whips her hair into her eyes. Seeing her friend in the flesh again always makes her a little shy. They said goodbye not far from this very spot last September, and now it is June again, an endless cycle. Each year Lulu comes to visit Eagle Lake, and each year they silently catalog the infinitesimal changes that have taken place since they last saw each other. This year the changes in Lulu are more dramatic: longer legs, a rounder face—and her lips are fuller, her dark eyes more angled than before. A new tone to her voice betrays a hint of skepticism, a secret not yet shared.
Though she doesn’t show it, Katie is self-conscious in the red string bikini she’s had forever. Her body has changed, too, in ways she doesn’t like. Heavier breasts, stronger muscles. That slight curve of her belly. She feels old and young at the same time. To her, the world is uncertain and wide open, full of unknown possibility. There is noise around her, and silence too—the silence of the woods, which to her seems almost loud as it hums inside her. Happiness laced with agitation, impatience. Contradictions everywhere.
Lulu is racing after John, though she has no hope in hell of catching him. He has swum into the darkness under the Big Float, which bobs high on eight empty oil barrels. All you can see from the shoreline are the shadows slung underneath the barrels, illuminated briefly by slivers of light, then plunged into darkness again as John tips the float back and forth. It is a dare: Will Lulu swim under there to catch him? When the girls were little, they were too afraid to swim underneath the float with its ropy, glistening spiderwebs hovering just above the shadowed water.
Katie sits on the grass by the pile of clothes they tossed to one side. She tilts her head back and looks up at the sky, inhaling the smell of ferns and mud and a lingering hint of her father’s body odor. Above her, the clouds vanish, and the sky is a flawless blue, full of promise. This summer will be different; she can feel it in her bones.
PART ONE
1
June 2016
Katie had hated the sound of a ringing telephone ever since she was a teenager. Relentless, jarring—the way it broke into the moment, insisting that whatever the caller had in mind was more important than whatever you were doing. Today, when the phone jolted her awake, it wasn’t even eight o’clock yet. A Saturday morning.