The Forgotten Hours(42)
The older policeman reaches out with one of his soft white hands, grasps John’s elbow.
Something is at Katie’s side: David. He puts one arm around her waist and leans into her. He squeezes her hip hard with his hand, and she frowns at him as though to say, I have no idea!
John nods at the older policeman, and this must lead to some agreement, because the man nods back curtly. The two officers follow John onto the front porch. “I’ll call you as soon as I can,” he says over his shoulder to his wife. “No need to worry.”
The door slams shut.
“Mum? Where are they taking Daddy?” David calls out, propelling himself toward the door, his voice high pitched.
Katie grabs him, fights the urge to press him tightly to her chest. He isn’t a baby anymore, but his face betrays an innocence he hasn’t yet outgrown. Why is her father leaving, during dinner, with two policemen? Why is her mother not going with them? David starts to cry.
“Get back into the kitchen, and clear the table,” Charlie says in an uninflected voice. “Everything’s fine. Dad will be back in an hour.” There is a familiar finality in her voice. Her guarded manner warns the children not to ask questions, and they remain silent all that night and many more to come. The questions are powerful—they want to be heard, and they do not stop insisting on it—but the kids tamp them down with force, one after another, like swallowing bitter pills that lodge uncomfortably somewhere in the windpipe, not that far from the heart.
Reasons. Explanations. Logic. What fits where in her mind, or in reality? Katie lies in bed. This is when she begins learning to deflect, to shift to another idea, another image, to head somewhere that feels safe. She tells herself that this probably has to do with some jock from one of the teams her father coaches, some hoodlum who got in trouble. There is always drama going on with those kids. It is no big deal.
But she can’t go to sleep until she hears a car in the driveway, close to two o’clock in the morning. It is the police cruiser, inching its way up the incline. It stops in front of the house, and John Gregory steps out. He heads toward his front door, holding his arms stiffly by his sides. He left without a jacket, and it is still snowing. Katie can see the bald spot on his head but cannot read the expression on his face. The cruiser door slams shut, and her father enters the house without looking back. Katie can do nothing other than crawl back into bed.
When she wakes up the next morning and sits at the breakfast table, everything is so normal that she can’t bring herself to ask a single question—it will tip the balance, bring them bad luck. Her father says offhandedly that it was all a mix-up, and then he gets up to pour himself another cup of coffee to take along on his commute into the city. His navy suit is a little wrinkled at the elbows and the thighs, but he’s got good color. He smiles at his family, tucks the paper under his arm, and grabs his briefcase.
It’s easy to accept his explanation. Asking gives life to fear—it’s better to be silent.
19
It was well after midnight before Katie exhausted herself cleaning the kitchen. She slept only fitfully, dreaming wildly. Nonsensical dreams that ended with her lying in her father’s arms on a prison cot. This image flooded her with a sense of warmth as she woke to the new day, as though she’d opened an oven to check on the bread. Even though the testimony she’d read the day before was shocking, today she was less rattled—after all, it had also been inconclusive. In the end, Jack hadn’t seen much of anything, at least nothing that proved her father’s guilt. He could have simply been mistaken about it seeming “weird.” He’d been upset—hadn’t Katie also been confused that night, uncertain about people’s motivations, about what was actually going on?
In the cabin, the joy and mayhem of golden summers had leached away, leaving an emptiness she couldn’t fill on her own no matter how hard she tried by putting on music or buzzing around cleaning. The place had always been full of people and signs of life—her brother and his friends, damp towels draped over the rattan, Charlie in a caftan, smoking a cigarette and leafing through the New Yorker. Lulu jumping from the bunk, the thud of her feet a minor earthquake, or singing in the bathroom, her voice with its lilting, weightless tone, so different from her speaking voice. And her father always deep into some project.
Hovering at the periphery of all this, just out of sight, was the specter of Lulu. Katie had never allowed herself to be curious about what had happened to her. Was she in LA singing in a lounge, dressed in cheesy red velvet? In Nashville, tucked into some recording studio, having swapped her dirty sneakers for cowboy boots? It would be so easy to find out; it was all just a click away—but the thought of opening that door and letting in that reality made her shrink into herself.
Her phone pinged with a text and an attachment from Zev. He was giving his talk the next day, and he’d been sending her various quotes he was considering using. In quick succession he’d sent her a Nietzsche quote, “We have art in order not to die of the truth,” followed by “All of that art-for-art’s-sake stuff is BS,” from Toni Morrison, and the contrast made her laugh. Now he sent what looked like a pastel drawing. She tapped the image to make it bigger.
It was a rough sketch of a woman in strong colors, a slash of bright yellow for hair, dark-brown eyes that seemed to pop from the page. It was a picture of her, she realized with a start; that was what he’d been drawing on his napkin when they’d been at lunch together. It was fascinating to see how he saw her, this woman with the guarded expression, a strong, sensual mouth, flyaway hair.