The Forgotten Hours(21)
So it seemed the electricity worked. It was almost a decade since the house had last been used, and she wondered whether Grumpy was the one who still paid the bills. No water came from the faucet in the kitchen, and the downstairs toilet was dry. She’d have to get the superintendent to turn the water on if her father was really going to move in. It seemed a crazy idea for him to come back here. The local papers had been full of the story when the trial ramped up; surely everyone would know his name, would remember the scandal. Not to mention the people who spent their summers at the lake, all those old friends—there was no way they’d be happy to see John Gregory. A wave of compassion washed over her. He must be really desperate to be willing to come back.
The living room was unchanged, and she sat briefly on the large corduroy couch as memories crowded her head. Learning to dive. Fires in the pit behind the boathouse. The old red bikini. Taking out the canoe. Her father throwing a deflated football with David. She saw these as snapshots, shuffled like a deck of cards. Her mother had loved taking photos and for the longest time kept carefully annotated photo albums: when Katie lost her first tooth, when she attended her first day of kindergarten—all of it, every little milestone. She’d been a patient photographer, never asking for poses and smiles but catching people in action, unaware. Where were all those albums now? she wondered. Katie would clean this place up—it was the very least she could do—but not now. Though . . . maybe she could find those old pictures. Maybe when they’d moved from the house in West Mills, the albums had ended up here, along with the other detritus from their former lives. Those pictures might tell her something about her parents that she’d forgotten: that they’d been happy, once.
Tucked into the corner of the living room was a narrow stairway with a railing made of irregular pine branches that led to a second floor. In the master bedroom, the heavy oak bed frame with the carved headboard was gone, and in its place was a ratty-looking mattress lying on the carpet. She thought of her mother’s trim, compact body stretched out there, her reading light casting an amber glow on her cheek. She’d never been quite like other mothers—and not just because of her accent and her mannerisms. Katie’s parents had married because they’d found themselves unexpectedly pregnant, and then, in a cruel twist, they hadn’t been able to conceive again. Charlie suffered three miscarriages, one of which Katie witnessed: her mother sobbing on the toilet, a fat trail of blood soaking into the plush white bath mat.
When Charlie finally got pregnant with David, Katie had been five. The firm, convex mound protruding from under her mother’s breasts was a baby—a brother, for her, coming soon, after they had waited so long—but each night when that strange belly nudged up against her, hard yet soft, it seemed as though a living thing had taken her mother over and turned her into someone else. The sense of unease made Katie clingy, and her mother couldn’t tolerate it. She’d give her a quick good-night kiss, flick off the overhead light, and disappear. Even now, Katie didn’t understand why it had been like this, whether she’d done something wrong or somehow disappointed her mother. Over the years, Katie had yearned to bridge the gap that had widened between them, but they rarely saw each other anymore, not even at Christmas (her mother went to the Bahamas with Michel). It seemed Charlie had simply decided to let the distance grow, and Katie had followed her lead.
On the top shelf of the closet, there was a row of six or seven shoeboxes and a few plastic milk crates that held random relics. A few faded Polaroids of Grumpy and Gram at cocktail parties. A pedometer. A small silver bell. A schedule from one of the theme nights at the clubhouse. No photo albums. It was true: the secret of her father’s conviction and her family’s disintegration had crowded out everything good from the past.
Across the hall, her brother’s old room was crammed with excess furniture, the walls still covered in posters of musicals and old playbills. Lulu and Katie had spent so much time in that room, summer after summer, reenacting shows with David as their little helper, taking turns at playing Sandy in Grease or Tracy and Penny from Hairspray. Lulu had a beautiful voice. Once they’d spent days stitching together costumes and making wigs, singing “You Can’t Stop the Beat” and shrieking so loudly that John came up, red faced with laughter, and told them to pipe down or they’d set off the Cauleys’ dogs.
She went downstairs and stood outside the den. It was just an ordinary room, she told herself. Nothing to be afraid of. She cracked open the door and peered in. It was a small, misshapen room, pine paneled, dominated by a row of large windows facing the woods. Stepping inside, Katie held her breath before letting it out in a burst. Ridiculous to be so timid! And yet Lulu Henderson’s presence was there amid the unchanged dimness. The whites of her eyes seemed to flash at Katie like a feral cat’s. She remembered her musky smell, a combination of soap and skin. She heard the way Lulu spoke, her voice strong and melodious, flattening out when she didn’t get her way. Lulu was imbedded in this place; it made no difference that she’d always remained an outsider at Eagle Lake, a visitor, despite the hours she’d spent in the lake’s shallows or drinking Dr Pepper in the clubhouse. But Katie had never thought of her as someone who didn’t really belong here. For her, Lulu had been a fixture, a given, as permanent as the lake or the pines. Lulu belonged to Katie; Katie belonged to Lulu.
Yet each year by late August, that feeling faded in spite of her ardor. They would drive out of the stone gates and drop Lulu off in front of her apartment complex, and she would not invite them in, and they would not ask to come in. She’d thought she knew so much about her friend’s life, when in reality, she’d known so little.