The Forgotten Hours(19)
Lulu throws her torso to the right and then the left, wildly jerking the canoe in the water. “I order you to take me back to West Mills with you!” she hisses into the hot darkness. “Stick me in your suitcase, and I promise I won’t be any trouble.”
“Stop—you’ll tip us over,” Katie says, laughing, gripping the sides of the canoe.
“Ugh. And what’s up with our little princeling? I wonder if he’ll even turn up agai—”
“Don’t call him that, Lu.” A little lurch in Katie’s chest.
“But it’s perfect—the prince and the pauper, right? What could be more fitting?”
Katie hates when Lulu talks like this. Her sharpness and hard-edged laughter make her seem so mature, such a wiseass. Katie wishes she could joke around about Jack too—or, better yet, tell her friend about the lost hour in the changing shed, the sudden kisses in the parking lot. That things have moved forward and that Lulu’s being left behind. But she’s tongue tied and oddly lonely, as though Lulu isn’t even there anymore.
The water stretches out inky and unknowable until the girls paddle closer to shore, when it catches the lights, bursting into flame. The string of bulbs that connects the corner of the old building to the railing around the deck casts a yellow glow over the grown-ups sitting outside smoking and drinking.
Heat presses down. Lulu pulls out a lipstick from the pocket of her shorts and deftly swipes it across her lips. “How do you do that?” Katie asks as they clamber out. She’s tried putting lipstick on, peering at herself in the bathroom mirror, but she looked like a specialty act in a circus show.
Rolling her bottom and top lips together in slow motion, Lulu spreads the color around evenly and then puckers her lips. “Let’s go kick some ass,” she says, and although Katie doesn’t know exactly what her friend means, she likes the sound of it.
The rickety building that faces the lake is an old icehouse converted into a place for kids to play Ping-Pong and eat sloppy hot dogs, with a bar area on the side for the grown-ups. Cupping her hands around her eyes, Katie peers in through the clubhouse window, searching the crowd for Jack, who was supposed to be back yesterday but never turned up. The square dance caller stands on a raised platform and drawls into his microphone. A tan cowboy hat covers his eyebrows. Charlie and John Gregory stand at the edge of the crowd, disheveled, skin gleaming. The women wear checkered dresses and big aprons, their hair puffed up, gallons of makeup smeared around their eyes. Katie’s mother doesn’t like these theme nights as much as her father, but she plays along. She can get away with being reserved because she’s foreign. “Your mom’s mysterious,” Lulu once said. “People adore mystery.”
John looks ridiculous but somehow handsome, too, wearing an ascot and a pair of green polyester golf pants. He is a man who moves through the world chest first with a grin on his face. The tiny gaps between his teeth make him seem to be in constant good humor even when he isn’t. When he smiles, his face takes on the quality of a child, mischievous and knowing. It makes you laugh in complicity; you just can’t help it.
Little kids race around, chasing each other—and suddenly there he is, Jack, standing by the makeshift stage, leaning his long body against one of the old speakers. His face deeply tanned, the waves of his too-long hair almost white under the lights. He is all angles and pent-up energy. Long limbed, bony. There is a hole on the breast of his Lacoste T-shirt where he must have snipped out the crocodile logo in a fit of self-consciousness. The fact that he is here, that they have the night ahead of them after all—this almost eclipses the worry that takes root again about how on earth she will tell Lulu that Jack has decided between them, and that he has chosen Katie.
9
Each day after going to see her brother, Katie came to consciousness in the predawn hours, four or five o’clock in the morning. She’d drift in and out of sleep for another hour or two, waking finally in the steely morning light with a feeling in her heart so heavy, stonelike, she was dumbfounded. She dreamed of epic struggles around the smallest, most mundane things. Her father helping her with an untied shoe elicited a torrent of yearning; kissing Jack was a tragedy that made her dream self weep inconsolably. But she also dreamed of murder, the delirious, terrifying thrill of plunging a blade into a young girl’s rib cage. She would live whole lifetimes in a flash.
Her father was calling her more often, with laundry lists of things he wanted her to do. She tried to make sure to plug the phone in only when they prearranged a time to talk. When he called on Thursday, he had to stop twice in the middle of asking her to tell him the ins and outs of social media, his voice breaking a little. “Honey, sometimes I feel like I’ll never catch up,” he said.
“It’s easy, Dad,” she said. “You haven’t been gone for that long, in the big picture. You’ll pick this stuff up in no time.”
“The whole world has been moving ahead, and I’ve been in here.”
She sucked on her lip, not wanting to give away how moved she was by his fear. “You’ve always taught me to be brave, to just keep going, right? That’s what you’ll do. There’ll be some adjustment, sure, but knowing you, it’ll take you, like, a whole day.”
He laughed on the other end. “Give me two days, okay, sweets?”
Above all, she wanted him to feel strong, to launch into his new life with hope and energy. Of course she didn’t say anything about the renewed interest in his case or the nightmares she was having. At work, the hours dragged by till she could make some excuse to head home. Zev caught a ride with a friend back up to Vassar, and she was alone. She forced herself to run every day when she got home, so weary and spent she wanted to cry. She began biting her nails again. Saturday morning she lay in bed, having slept only a few hours, looking absently out the window onto the apartment building opposite hers. She had been dreaming about drowning, and upon waking, she’d remembered something she hadn’t thought about in years.