The Forgotten Hours(15)
Too often, people who suffered trauma let themselves be defined by it, and she had been determined to avoid that fate. When she became Katie Amplethwaite—a name so alien, so liberating—she thought she’d freed herself from the past. She’d never told her first real boyfriend, Nate, about her father—or the next or the next, or now Zev. There was no reason for them to suspect anything. Her two closest girlfriends from college, Radha and Nicole, knew about it and had been sworn to secrecy, but even telling them had made her feel as though she were free-falling. Sometimes they would look at her and she could read the questions in their eyes like a data programmer reads code: the curiosity, the doubt, the desire to support her competing with the inherent pity they felt for Lulu.
Katie looked at the list of names and phone numbers she’d accumulated over the past few days: the Baltimore Sun, the Milwaukee Current, the Providence Journal, the Boston Globe, the Arizona Republic, the Guardian. Websites she knew and others she didn’t. She wondered—with a genuine sense of curiosity but also some disdain—about the journalists trying to reach her, the ones who had now called her employer and would soon be calling her brother, no doubt, and maybe even her boyfriend. They’d probably already called her mother in Montreal, or maybe that was an old story not worth telling. Were they just in it for the scoop, or did they ever feel compelled by the stories they reported? Did they think about the people they were talking to, really think about them—the actual human lives they were disrupting with their intrusions and innuendoes? In times of quiet contemplation, did they ever wonder what it might be like if one of their own parents had been accused of some unthinkable crime?
Perhaps she was being cynical and these reporters believed in facts, the way people believed in what happened when you added chemical elements together, because they knew it to be true: hydrogen and oxygen made water. In this way one fact plus another equaled something new. As though the truth were some sort of pure, golden place that emitted an angelic chorus upon discovery, where everything had an order and a luster that could not be tarnished. But for Katie, that kind of thinking was treacherous: feelings were not facts, memories lied, and people were not who you thought they were.
7
“David? You there?” Katie called out, holding the buzzer down. It was early evening, and she’d trekked down to Red Hook after work, first a subway, then a bus, and then a ten-minute walk. The lights were on inside the apartment, and a vinyl jacket lay on a bench, some shoes thrown, helter-skelter, underneath. A sleeping cat stirred ever so slightly. She knocked on the window.
Finally, the door opened, and her brother stood in front of her. The nubs of his shoulders stuck out from his T-shirt, and a pair of white briefs hung from his hips. David shared a rent-controlled apartment in the basement of a brownstone next to a Con Edison power-exchange yard that took up two city blocks. His skin was sallow and drawn, his thick blond hair darkened as though he hadn’t washed it recently.
“What the hell? I’ve been trying to call you,” Katie blurted out.
“Ack,” he said, yawning widely. His angular face was striking, with high cheekbones and a full, curving mouth. “Lost my cell. Sorry, sis. Come in.”
She followed him into the apartment, watching his saggy briefs shift around as his muscles contracted. The catatonic cat opened one eye and shut it again. “Why don’t you get a new one?” she said. “I’ve called you like a hundred times.”
He raised his pale brows at her. “Something wrong?” He rubbed his eyes, digging at the sockets. “Just took a nap. I’m so beat.”
“Are you going to school anymore?” Katie asked. Her brother was studying to be an actor, but she didn’t really know what he did with his time. Whenever she called him, he seemed to have just woken up.
“Ha, you think I’m living la vida loca?” He flopped onto a beige couch and took a long slug from a glass that held an amber liquid and two small ice cubes. “I’ve got a job as an understudy at the Broadmore. Show starts in, like, two months. It’s a ton of work.”
The apartment was subterranean and dark, trade magazines and carryout cartons littering the floor and a dead spider plant sitting in a saucer of brown water. “You okay, Davey?” she asked. “I’m worried about you.”
“Is that why you came? Sorry. I’m just tired is all. Kyle and I broke up, but it was a long time coming. I’m actually super happy.”
“Okay,” she said, stalling for time. “Sorry to hear about Kyle—I guess that’s good, if you’re all right about it.”
“Yeah. I feel like I’ve been working so hard for years, you know? I want to just focus. It’s all finally starting to make sense.”
“That’s a big deal—an understudy.” Katie put down her leather satchel. Her brother had always been the odd one out, the quiet kid who’d stare at you with big, serious eyes. Once he took up acting, he’d still been the silent observer when among other teens, but when onstage, he became someone utterly different. It was amazing to her that he was capable of such total yet fleeting transformation. She pointed at his drink. “Is that whiskey? I’m going to get some, okay?”
She went to the sink in the galley kitchen and fished out a glass. The place was dingy but not too dreadful. There were dishes everywhere and the trash was overfull, but the counters were clean, and there were notes tacked up on the fridge with colorful magnets. After their parents had lawyered up, they’d been tight on money, and she and her brother had reacted in radically different ways. The summer Katie was sixteen—when, for the first time in her living memory, they hadn’t returned to Eagle Lake—she took a full-time job at KB Toys in the mall. Everything around her was going to hell, but she could at least bring in a steady paycheck. It didn’t really matter what the work was; what mattered was staying occupied. She was the youngest employee there, and she knew it made her father proud when she handed over her paycheck at the end of each week. It seemed that as David grew up, he’d had the opposite reaction: He learned that he could survive on almost nothing. He cultivated an appreciation for dollar pizza slices and musty vintage clothing. He was an expert at tracking down free events and never said no if you offered to buy him a drink or a meal. It came across as insouciant, though she suspected it was designed to camouflage the zeal with which he pursued acting. It was hard for her to imagine living that way, never sure what the next day would bring. But perhaps she envied David just a bit too. Her path was razor straight; it led right to the horizon, and then what? No turns, no hills, nothing that filled her heart with insane joy? David lived hand to mouth, but at least he felt things fully.