The Forgotten Hours(31)
“Dude,” Jack says. “Raccoon come at you in the forest or what?”
Brad ignores him. Katie wonders whether one of the boys told Lulu where they might be and whether she was the one who tried to call them. She bites her nails and looks around at the laughing people, searching for her friend’s face. When the blender starts, nothing can be heard above the grinding.
She nudges Jack. “Let’s go back outside,” she says. The noise is intrusive. Time keeps stretching out, thinning, and it feels as though an infinity has passed since they were listening to the square dance caller, watching as the prizes were handed out. When she thinks back to the Jack who’d been in the guest room with her, that memory is already fading.
“Huh?” Jack asks, screwing up his face. “Can’t hear you.”
“Okay. Lulu—I’m gonna go find her. All right? I’ll be back,” Katie yells.
Outside, a rusted tin can full of cigarette butts lies tipped over on the flagstones, leaving a trail of stained filters. A few people are on the Big Float, trying to rock it from side to side on its enormous oil barrels. The Adirondack chairs beneath the maple are empty. She looks through the picture window into the bar; her mother is at one of the low tables talking with Mr. Davidson, gesturing with her hands. Dad is at a table drawing something on a paper napkin.
No sounds come from the changing sheds, and she heads toward the boathouse. The air seems to hum as though the currents are rubbing each other like a bow on a string. Above her the sky appears purple, swelling, and the stars have mostly disappeared. From the woods the faint sound of rumbling emerges, but when she turns her head, it disappears.
Even with no lights on, Katie sees Lulu before Lulu sees her. A curtain of fog hangs over the lake, pulsing dimly in the intermittent moonlight, and it envelops Lulu almost completely, so Katie can only see a white block that she recognizes as a T-shirt. Her back toward Katie, Lulu is sitting on the dock that extends from the boathouse into the water.
Among the old canoes and kayaks, the strings from the sails suspended from the ceiling rafters hang down like lichen. Until Katie steps onto the wooden platform, Lulu doesn’t realize anyone is behind her. She whips around. “Who is it?”
“It’s me,” Katie says. “Where’ve you been? I’ve been looking for you.”
“Go away.”
“Did you just try to call me?”
“Leave me alone,” Lulu says in a voice so soft it makes the hair on Katie’s arms stand up.
“What’s wrong?” she asks, though she knows Lulu must be angry at her for the kiss, for disappearing. Her flip-flops are obscenely loud on the dock. Katie squints at her friend: she isn’t wearing the same clothes as before. Instead of the old pink T-shirt with the blue bubble letters on it, she has on a huge white one and a pair of boxer shorts. “Lulu? Everything okay? What have you been up to? I’m really sorry about earlier.”
Katie is afraid Lulu will ask where the hell she’s been, and in telling her about the Dolans’—as she thinks she must—she’ll ruin everything. But Lulu doesn’t answer her.
“Did you go swimming?” Katie tries again. The sky seems to press down on them. There is that strange rumble again, making itself felt on her skin.
Briefly Lulu raises her head, and a trace of lipstick is still smeared on her mouth. She sees Katie noticing and draws the back of her hand over her lips.
“We just went on a ride. A bike ride. It was no big deal,” Katie says.
Lulu’s T-shirt is cold under Katie’s fingers, damp around her shoulders. Her bones feel solid, but Lulu is shivering as she pulls away from her friend. “Christ, I really, really wanna go home,” Lulu says.
The slight chill of the early morning, tinged with a promise of fall, is mixed with an undercurrent of heat or electricity, something oppressive, and Katie shivers too. The sky seems to contract, sucking energy into itself, and then in an instant it is bloated, pressing down on them, and it lights up like the flash of a thousand bulbs, and there is the deafening sound of total silence as they are bathed in frozen light, and then the crack of thunder, a splitting open of the sky like a white wound.
And then chaos over by the clubhouse. A scream followed by another scream, shouting, splashes, the sound of someone falling onto wood, cursing, and high above the other sounds, a child crying. The swimmers head to shore like panicked rats. With the next lightning bolt comes the rain. So soft at first, just the faintest touch of raindrops on skin, and then a deluge. The noise of it drowns everything out. They are instantly soaked.
Katie grabs Lulu and steers her toward the clubhouse, running, clutching her arm. Their feet slip on the wet flagstones. White flanks and breasts flash as swimmers snatch up their clothes and run under the awning to shelter from the driving rain. Not everyone is out of the water yet, and as another crack of lightning shoots across the sky, one man stands next to the water and screams, “Get the hell out! There’s lightning!”
They run around to the back of the clubhouse. A few people are struggling with the Falcon in the parking lot, trying to get the roof up. “I’ll be right back,” Katie says, motioning for Lulu to wait there under the overhang.
Jack is so surprised when Katie says goodbye that his body barely yields to her quick embrace. She can’t explain that she needs to take care of Lulu now, that, in a way, she’s already betrayed her. He looks down at her soaking clothes and laughs, at first, until he realizes what she is telling him. She tries to let him know she is sorry without actually saying so. Their limbs jangle against one another as they teeter forward into each other’s arms. He is confused, holding back, as though she’s changed the rules of the night on him without notice.