The Forgotten Hours(20)

It had been a bitter, colorless February day, with winds that could shred skin. Her grandparents were at Eagle Lake for the day to attend the Winter Carnival, and her father had packed her in the car along with her very pregnant mother. Katie was five years old. “We’ve got to get out of this shit hole!” he’d said. At that point they were living in a tiny apartment near the West Mills train station. It would be another year or so before Gram died and Grumpy moved out of the West Mills house, allowing his daughter’s growing family to claim it as their own.

One of the teenagers had strung the rope back up on the maple so the kids could swing over the lake. People were drinking mulled wine and clapping their hands together trying to keep warm. The lake was entirely frozen and covered in a thin layer of snow. Katie grabbed the rope and swung out over the ice, once, twice. Her legs were weightless in the cold air. And then—she never quite knew why—she simply let go. She opened her fingers, released the rope, and fell straight down onto the ice.

Her feet plunged into the water, her flailing arms broke the ice, and a channel sprang up instantly, linking the hole to the water that rushed under the ice toward the dam. As soon as her head dunked under, her small body became as heavy as a sack of concrete. Her father didn’t hesitate: he shucked off his coat—his woolen hat still on his head—and jumped in.

The lake was not deep at the shoreline, and he could stand, though she didn’t know that. He grabbed her so hard that bruises blossomed on her pale arms, and she clung to him so fiercely that his head went under for a second till he found his feet and stood up. He pushed her away from his body, and she shrieked; she could not believe that he was saving her only to push her away again. But he was trying to lift her up to dry land, and to do that, he had to disentangle himself from her grasping arms. She clung to him even harder, and they tussled, and she screamed, “Daddy! Daddy!” Afterward he had joked about it, but she had never learned to find it funny.

In many ways, he’d been doing this all her life—proving his paternal devotion. Sometimes it was an almost literal act (giving her the last peanut crackers at the end of a long car ride, when she was losing her mind with hunger), and sometimes it was through the plain but powerful magic of his trust in her. He’d stand on the sidelines as she passed the lacrosse ball to a teammate, his belief in her abilities making the ball sail to its desired destination. Tasked with calling local vendors for a career project, she stuttered into the receiver, but her father’s earnest smile made the words come out with greater intention. She couldn’t explain it, but with her mother she had always felt less than. With her father, she was not merely good enough—she was great. Just the way she was.

Katie rose from her bed, fuzzy headed. She grabbed her jeans and a light cotton sweater from the chair, slipped her feet into a pair of Converse sneakers. The day loomed ahead of her, empty. Standing in her kitchen, unable to eat or read the paper, she tried to think of every excuse she could to avoid heading up to Eagle Lake. Thinking about the lake and the teeming woods made her sick to her stomach with fear: she knew that she’d no longer be able to access those pure feelings of ease and happiness that she used to get from being in the woods. That last summer with Lulu, those moments with Jack—they had been so perfect, until Katie had ruined it. She clamped her jaw together until her teeth began to ring.

But there was so little she had been able to do for her father over the years; she could at least overcome her childish reluctance to go to the cabin. She needed to step up and prove that she was the girl he thought she was.

Zev’s ancient Datsun was parked just two blocks away, and he’d left the keys with her. So what if David wasn’t going to come with her? She’d better get over it: she had promised her father, and anyway, she couldn’t just mope around, avoiding the inevitable. Who knew—maybe going back was just what she needed. She had wanted to be more resolute, to face things head-on. Here was her opportunity.

Under the looming pines, the cabin was cast in speckled shade. Katie stopped short on the driveway and stared, her breath pressing like a thumb on her windpipe. The place was shabbier and smaller than she remembered. Curtains were pulled shut over the front windows, and a plastic flowerpot on the stoop held a scramble of dead plants. The door was locked. Katie picked her way to the back patio over the clumpy grass and rocks. She had a dizzying sense of a clock’s hands speeding backward, unstoppable.

Peering through the windows into the den, she saw the two old sofas, perpendicular to one another, pushed up against the walls, their stained plaid looking so familiar. She just couldn’t believe nothing had changed, especially in the den, of all places. This was where she used to play with her little brother and clutch his sticky fingers as he learned to walk, tripping over the shag carpet in his eagerness. Later, it was where she lounged with Lulu on long, indolent summer nights with a stolen beer or two, frogs singing outside in the deep backwoods. It was through these windows that she’d caught a glimpse of the rosy flush of dawn on that last day of summer in 2007, the three of them—Lulu, Katie, and her father—sprawled on those very couches, sleeping the agitated sleep of people who were not where they were supposed to be.

The back slider was locked, too, but the window near the kitchen was unlatched, and she hoisted herself over the sill and climbed in. The air inside was close and cool, smelling of something earthy. She groped along the walls and flipped on the light switches, then headed toward the front window and ripped the curtains aside. Diffuse light filtered in. One by one, she opened curtains and blinds and yanked windows up. Dust covered every surface, and there was clutter everywhere. Magazines, a towel on a chair. She sneezed. When Katie was a child, her mother had kept the cabin spotless, but all around her now, familiar objects were thrown into unfamiliar disarray.