The Forgotten Hours(4)
Her father’s hair had been longer then, darkened with sweat, sticking to his forehead. He must have been almost forty—a little younger than Zev was now. After they filled their buckets with blueberries, he sat down on the moss and Katie perched on a rock, the gore of berries staining her lips, gnats buzzing around her drunkenly. Her thin brown shins were covered in scratches. She glanced over at her father after asking a question and getting no response.
Though Katie couldn’t remember now what she’d asked, but she could feel the grit of the fruit’s skin on her teeth, the pulpy burst on her tongue.
Katie asked her question again, and it took her father a long time to raise his face to her, and still he didn’t answer. The look he cast her way was so distant, so alien, it was as though he were looking at someone he had never met before. Katie’s white T-shirt was reflected in the blackness of his pupils, and she understood for the first time that her father, and therefore every grown-up, had an inner life. Hidden by default. She understood then that she was truly alone inside herself, as were all human beings on earth.
On and on she ran along the Hudson River now, one foot in front of the other, sweating with effort. How she missed him. For as long as she could remember, she’d been driven by the desire to be worthy of him, her choices calculated on a metric of his approval: Would his eyes light up—would she make him proud? She hadn’t known it then, but when Lulu entered their lives, the family dynamic had shifted, slowly, until everything went belly-up. Why had her friend lied when Katie’s father had taken such good care of her, when they all had? What the hell had happened?
All of a sudden, the sidewalk tilted upward under Katie’s feet. She took a quick breath in—the sensation was like rocking on a swing, and yet she was no longer moving. Prickles began to form at the edge of her vision, and her stomach flopped; she thought she might throw up. Leaning against a lamppost, she squeezed her eyes shut and waited. When she opened them again, a woman and a young girl were staring at her, mildly curious. Two graying dachshunds were attached to a frayed leash on the woman’s wrist, and another child, a boy, had stopped a few steps ahead of them to wait. Katie felt the urge to cry out: I was a normal girl too—a girl with a father who took me blueberry picking and told me stories, a mother I could count on.
I had a best friend I adored, and she betrayed us.
Was this true, this statement that had calcified in Katie’s mind—had Lulu really betrayed them? Katie bent over and put her hands on her knees. She had believed this for so long, but the possibility that she had it all wrong insinuated itself into her mind. The possibility that, in fact, it was Katie who had been the betrayer, who had set everything off that last night of summer almost a decade earlier. After all, she’d been the one to screw around with the order of things, to mess with the unspoken rules between girls. She raised her head, pale and sweaty, and looked straight at the mother with her children. But the woman was just a stranger, and she walked away, yanking on the leash, heading off toward her separate life. Just like that, gone, and once again Katie was alone.
2
The thing about Lulu was this: she was brave and unabashed, and Katie was neither. When they were kids, Lulu stole eyeliner and pens from the five-and-ten in Blackbrooke and then managed to charm the Polish man with the stained teeth who caught her, while Katie cringed in the corner, cheeks flushed in shame. Lulu was unrepentant; she was always stepping out of bounds and being forgiven for it. When she was still a brand-new friend—could it have been the very first summer she spent at the lake, when she was just eight years old?—Lulu would get up before the sun even rose and pad from the bunk room the girls shared down to the kitchen. Hours later when the others started appearing, sleepy eyed and incoherent, there’d be flour all over the countertops, a dropped knife under the kitchen table among the dust motes. The smell of something burning coming from the oven. Lulu would be sitting at the counter, bright eyed, the corners of her mouth glistening with grease, her bony knees jiggling up and down. Smiling when you entered the room, happy for the company. But even though she had her own centrifugal force, she made space for Katie’s brand of quiet. She would listen to her deeply, the bloom of unfettered curiosity on her face. The intensity of that kind of focus was an unexpected gift from a child with such energy.
These memories—they seemed to come and go, when in reality they were always a part of Katie’s consciousness, simmering just under the surface at a constant, rolling boil. All it took was a smell, a refrain from some old pop song, or even the texture of something Katie brushed up against, and bang, they would return, fully present and in Technicolor. Gripping at her throat with meaty fingers. But Katie had become adept at distracting herself from them over the years. She could will her mind to move toward one thought and away from another, shutting out distractions. She used this skill in her adult life too: she’d become a dependable, focused, punctual woman. You could even call her predictable, though she wasn’t sure that was anything to be especially proud of.
“You’re not like any kid I’ve ever met,” Tanisha from the office had once told her. They’d been at a bar in Chelsea during happy hour after working together for a year or so. It was funny to still be called a kid when she was almost twenty-five years old, but Tanisha was probably pushing forty. “You got that laser thing going on, that crazy-bitch focus.” Tanisha laughed out loud, throaty and lighthearted, and Katie understood it was supposed to be a compliment.