The Forgotten Hours(17)

“I was just pretending. It was Dad’s voice I liked,” she said. “You know I couldn’t actually read till I was like eight, right?”

“Really? They didn’t know?”

“Did a great job hiding it, I guess.” When she was six, seven, even eight years old, making sense of the string of words on a page was a monstrous task. Her confusion was like a hideous scab she managed to hide from everyone, even her teachers. But before any of the grown-ups fully understood what was going on, Lulu figured it out. Though she told Katie that she didn’t like books either—too long! too slow! too boring!—that very first summer, she would read to her aloud in the den at the cabin, helping her sound out the words. When they got frustrated, Lulu would goof around, using funny voices, stretching and scrunching her face to act out the story. Eventually Katie switched schools, got special tutoring. Learned that she was not in fact stupid, just dyslexic.

“You know what I think of, when you tell me things like reporters are hounding you, or when I think about Mum and the divorce?” David said. “I remember when Dad took me with him to go visit this woman at Eagle Lake—Constance, remember? Constance Nichols?”

“Yeah, sure. The one who used to wear kimonos to the beach.”

“Right. Well, she was sick or something. We went over there, Dad and I, and took her this pile of cupcakes. Orange cupcakes. And he was so nice; he felt so bad for her. Her face just lit up, and she ate one right away. It was a small thing to do, but it mattered.” David ran a hand through his hair. “On the way back to the lake, he was all emotional. I remember his eyes welled up, like he was going to cry. And I was scared for a bit, thinking, like, something was wrong and maybe she was dying, but then he told me that her husband didn’t take good care of her, he’d cheated on her, and how he was so dishonorable. That’s what he said: ‘You’ve got to treat people right. It’s important to be honorable.’”

“Yes,” she said, smiling. “It’s a lot to live up to.”

“Man, I think about that a lot,” David continued. “‘There’s nothing more important than being an honorable man.’ How ironic. Everything got so fucked up once he went to prison, didn’t it?”

“Before then,” she said, “when Lulu started spending summers with us.”

“Did you ever talk to her again? After?”

“Hell no,” Katie said, heat pressing against her neck. A small diamond earring winked at her from under David’s dirty-blond hair. His profile was quite sharp, noble, even. There were times when he seemed to shrink in front of her eyes, become her chapped-lipped little brother again, as though trapped in her memories of him. And other times, like now, he seemed to swell, to assume a stature that had little to do with size and more to do with an aura of competence.

“What about that kid, Jack? You guys were crazy about him,” David said.

“No, no—I never saw either of them again.” It was surprising how, all these years later, their competition for Jack still felt in some way shameful. This was a boy she’d only known for a few weeks, and still the mention of his name shifted something inside her, set her on edge. Made her yearn for something unnamable.

“So, I don’t know. Maybe it’s time you looked them up?”

She let out a puff of air as if to say, Are you kidding? Inside her, always, was the emptiness of having lost her best friend, but she had become accustomed to that. And even Jack had betrayed her, ultimately—even Jack had erased her from his life after that summer.

“If you ask me, I think you miss her. You wonder about her; you just won’t admit it.” David stood up and ran his hands down the front of his jacket, smoothing his clothing in an endearingly fussy way. “Wait here, okay? I want to show you something. Be right back.”

A minute later, the sound of the organ emerged—deep, blowsy, reverberating through her—and she was filled with awe. Her little brother had lived almost a whole decade without her around, and there were all sorts of secrets she hadn’t even guessed at, like the fact that he could play the organ. The music was thunderous yet also languid, replete; it gave her a sense of the possibility and surprise of her world. But then, almost as quickly, the character of the sound changed, and among the resonant chords were some real stinkers. When her brother came back, Katie covered her mouth with her hand. He shot her a withering look.

“Don’t wake the neighbors,” she said, grinning.

“All right, all right,” he said. “So I’m not that great. Yet.”

It felt so good to laugh with him. They walked back to his apartment and embraced in the empty streets, under a light that droned above them like a giant insect. As she turned away from him, she felt a slow and steady silencing of the inner voice that nagged at her, telling her to never turn back. There was so much about the past that was good. As she headed back toward Manhattan in a cab, weaving through Carol Gardens and Cobble Hill, over the Brooklyn Bridge now sparkling in the deep blue darkness, she mulled over what David had said in the church: I think you miss her.

God—I do miss her, Katie thought as she looked into the black water streaming below her and then up into an urban sky punctured with faint stars. Was it possible to know her father was an honorable man and still miss Lulu?