The Forgotten Hours(43)
You’re supposed to be working, she texted back, leaning up in bed on one elbow.
It’s helping me concentrate ?, he wrote.
Katie headed into Blackbrooke to pick up more paper towels and a new broom. It was almost midday on Saturday, and the streets were empty, as though everyone were still sleeping off some epic hangover. It wasn’t hard to see ghostly images of herself and Lulu wandering the deserted streets looking for fun and trouble. Here was where they bought a bottle of Jack Daniels one day with one of the older boys. That alley was where she’d had her first puff of a cigarette. The two of them had spent so much time at the lake and so little in town that she could probably list every single instance they’d set foot in Blackbrooke together. But of course, this was where Lulu had lived—this place had been her home. She’d haunted these streets all her life, and for all Katie knew, she might still be there. At that thought a wave of nausea rolled over her. She climbed back into the Datsun, slinging her purchases onto the back seat.
With both hands, she clutched the steering wheel. She needed to finish cleaning the cabin and setting it up for her father. Find out what Jack was up to, why he wasn’t answering her texts or calls. Maybe she would take Monday off work so she could go back to the courthouse and finish reading the transcripts; she wanted to see what her father had said about that night.
When she peered into the future—into the moment of her father’s release, into the still unknown happinesses and ordinary sadnesses that awaited her as she aged—her vision was obscured in some profound way. It was as though she were wearing blinkers, could only see part of the picture. And that was a sensation she didn’t like, that sensation of partial blindness. Because it was voluntary, and who in their right mind would willingly remain blinded?
No matter how hard it was, she had to keep digging. She was going to have to go to the source. She started the car and headed toward the street where she thought Lulu Henderson had once lived.
A black girl with braids ending in a cascade of plastic baubles drew on the road with chalk, jumping at the sight of Katie’s car. At the corner of Dempsy and Hart Streets, a man wearing a Steelers hat was walking with a pronounced limp, holding a crocheted bag in one hand. An old couple sat on a porch, both wearing ragged slippers and drinking Pabst. So this was where the people were, in the side streets. A sense of life lived in the shadows, away from the eyes of the drivers along Main Street, eyes that calculated and pitied and made assumptions. Katie inched along, driving like an old lady without her glasses. When she reached Mission Street, she pulled into an empty spot.
The old building where Lulu’s place had been was just as Katie remembered it, down to the uneven yellow brickwork at hip height. It was a squat building with an open-air corridor running along the front on both levels. She’d only ever been there once, but she thought Lulu’s apartment might have been the second to the left on the top floor. Katie played out a scenario in her mind: storming up there, rapping on the door. Her stomach was sour and tight, and she told herself to stay calm, to think clearly. The likelihood that Lulu would still be there was incredibly slim. On the second floor of the apartment building, a man emerged to throw a ball down to a kid on the street. A few minutes later, the door of Lulu’s old apartment opened, and a woman came out, leaning over the railing and lighting a cigarette. Languid movements, either relaxed or bored. Puffs of smoke dissipating into the air. The woman had a round face, open. Her hair was brown and slicked back as though she’d just stepped out of the shower. Katie stared at her, astonished. For Chrissake, it couldn’t be, and yet it was; it was Lulu’s mother.
There was a time when Katie was about ten that she had insisted on staying the night at Lulu’s. They’d been spending a few weeks together for the past two summers at Eagle Lake, but Katie had never seen where her friend lived. Like a lovestruck girl, she was infinitely curious about Lulu’s life: the color of her bedspread, the size of her desk, what kind of backpack she used for school. It wasn’t her family she wanted to know about (the lack of a father at home only registered vaguely, partly because, of all the stories she told, Lulu never talked about her father, or her mother’s boyfriends). It was her environment Katie wanted to observe, touch, smell. What did a life like hers look like close up?
When John dropped the girls off that night, a dirty gray area rug was hanging over the railing outside Lulu’s door. “You’ll call me if you need me, okay, honey?” he’d said, his tone alerting Katie that something wasn’t quite right. He started to climb out of the car.
“I’m good,” Katie said in a rush. “I’m fine. You don’t have to come with us.”
Lulu was already on the other side of the street. “He wants to meet my mom,” she said. “He thinks we’re poor.”
“Honey, that is not true,” John said. But he got out of the car all the same and went with them to the door.
Inside the apartment, the curtains were drawn, and The Price Is Right was playing on the television. When Piper Henderson clicked the TV off, the silence afterward felt thin and precarious, as though in a second there’d be a bang on the wall or a car misfiring in the street. Katie and her father hovered on the doorstep. Just a second earlier his face had been drawn and serious, and now as his eyes sharpened, his mouth slackened. Before he even spoke a word, she knew he’d noticed too: Lulu’s mother was beautiful. Katie had only seen her a few times before and always from a distance. Usually it was Charlie who picked Lulu up and dropped her off. Katie’s own mother was lovely in a regal way, wiry and poised, a distant look on her face, her accent a barrier that didn’t invite people in. In contrast, Mrs. Henderson’s face was unformed and round like a young woman’s.