The Forgotten Hours(13)

Then it is just Jack and Katie. (What happened to the others? How had she not noticed them leaving?) He hoists himself up onto the edge of the shed, his feet in battered leather flip-flops. He doesn’t need to say, Come sit here with me; she knows he wants her to, and so she does. In the shed, everything smells of overturned earth. It is so pungent, this forest smell, primeval. Jack leans toward her, and their lips touch. They begin to kiss. Katie falls into it as though her body is dropping through something viscous.

Her lips become raw. Only their mouths touch, and the kiss is unending. Is he too shy to touch her? At some point, she reaches up and places a hand on his shoulder, feeling the muscles moving under his polo shirt, and she thinks they might stay forever in this dank place, hidden just steps away from everyone.

There is a rumble, a distant clash that could be a plane or a trash can falling or maybe some faraway thunder. Her skin is slick with sweat. She opens her eyes, thinks of the cool lake water. She remembers Lulu, how upset she would be if she knew what was happening now. What Katie’s doing—with Jack—and so she pulls away.





6

The night after Zev’s opening, Katie was thinking about numbers as she rode the subway to her job at the Hamlin Consulting Group offices in Midtown. A single number was a solid, immutable thing; this Katie knew for sure. In and of themselves numbers were indisputable, even though they created new meanings when combined. The trick was making sure you found the right numbers and put them together in the right way: then you could achieve clarity. Then you’d have an answer to a question—not an opinion or a theory but an actual answer. She was turning over numbers in her head, over and over again.

Zev had been triumphant last night. He sold three paintings, which initially didn’t seem like much, until he whispered in her ear that one had sold for almost $100,000, after commissions. Incredible. The Arts reporter from the New York Times had turned up (reeking of booze, accompanied by some wrecked kid wearing a purple bow tie) and promised to write a piece on him. Zev had mentioned to them that he was renting a studio, that he’d be showing his work more often in the city. That’s what started Katie on the math.

If Zev could make more than $100,000 in one night, and she kept doing well at Hamlin (where she earned more than friends like Radha or Ursula—or any of her old college friends, actually, except those who’d gone into banking), then they’d definitely have enough money to get a new place together, maybe somewhere in Brooklyn, somewhere with a fire escape or a shared roof deck, perhaps a garden if they were really lucky. Katie missed the open air, the chance to sit on a stool in the breeze in the evenings or stare at the night sky before going to bed. Zev’s finances were a mystery to her: he drove an old brown Datsun and dressed in jeans and T-shirts, a scuffed motorcycle jacket when it got cold. But he pulled out his wallet with no hesitation, chose restaurants impulsively, seemingly unworried about prices. It would be nice to have space to live, to have company, a life that added up to more than days piled on top of one another without accruing the additional freight of meaning or purpose.

If her father got out in nineteen days, then she had less than that amount of time to figure out how to explain to Zev why her dad might be staying in the loft. Maybe she had a week or two, maybe less. How many days would it take for him to absorb this news, make up his mind whether it mattered to him? Zev knew her parents were divorced, of course, that her mother was up in Montreal. She suspected he knew that her father was somehow banished, that he had done something to distance himself from them all. But Zev hadn’t pried. He didn’t know about Lulu, about the accusations and the trial and the conviction. It was a wound held together with dangerously loose stitches, but this was a problem that Katie wasn’t especially eager to solve. It hadn’t seemed all that urgent, at least not up till now. Somehow the two of them had avoided wading through the messy, confessional stage of new relationships—the endless admissions of weaknesses, the litany of regrets and bad behavior. They’d talked about old lovers; they’d talked a lot about work. But neither of them had dwelled on family—she didn’t even know whether Zev’s parents still lived in Israel. And what was she going to say to him: Hey, we don’t know each other all that well . . . but my father was convicted of raping my best friend? There never seemed a good time to say those words, in any combination. She had a finite amount of time to solve that little problem. And who knew when Zev would bring up the idea of moving in with her again.

If she had seven messages from four different reporters, did that mean they’d keep coming after her until she gave in? Her sweaty palm gripped the steel pole as the subway car lurched, and she did another kind of math too. Almost nine years since she’d been back at the cabin. Six since she’d last seen Lulu. More than two years for them to bring her father to trial and six years in Wallkill after that. What did those numbers mean? They did not add up to something logical, manageable. Shouldn’t they, in the heft of their accumulated reality, mean an end to this uncertainty and shame? Surely it was time to start the clock from zero again, nice and neat, to begin counting forward in a linear way that would lead somewhere logical.

Hamlin Consulting Group was located in an unassuming block on Sixth Avenue. The lobby was spacious, decked out in stained marble and high ceilings that spoke of an earlier era, when gilded trim and gold elevators meant high class. Drasko sat behind the small reception desk. He smiled and raised a pudgy hand in greeting when Katie walked in.