The Forgotten Hours(51)

At a table next to Herb and her father, facing the judge, sits a youngish woman in a pale-gray suit with severe blonde hair tied back in a ponytail: the district attorney. A man with a swarthy complexion and ludicrously thick eyelashes sits next to her, taking endless notes.

“Come on up here,” the judge says to Katie, gesturing with a sweep of her bat-winged arm toward the podium. “Right here. That’s it.”

As Katie takes the oath, Herbert Schwartz chews his lip. She promises to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth while Herb works on his bottom lip as though he hasn’t eaten in days.

“Who are you going to look at?” Herb asks her over and over again during their practice sessions in her father’s study.

“Only at you,” she answers. “No one else.”

“Or you can look at the DA. You can look at either of us, all right? Only at the people who are addressing you directly.” While he does not raise his voice, he enunciates each word as though he is talking in caps. “Do not look at the jury.”

“Why?”

“I’m not saying they’re not on your side. You just don’t want to confuse matters. So it’s better just to focus on whoever is talking to you.”

“Okay,” she says.

“Who else are you not going to look at?”

“I won’t look at my father.”

“Do not look at your father. Right. Who else? The plaintiff. You’re not going to look at the plaintiff . . . or at her table or at anyone sitting next to her. Don’t even take a glance.”

“It’s stupid to call her the plaintiff,” Katie says.

In the courtroom, the windowpanes create a latticework of shadows that ripple along the wooden benches in a kind of underwater dance. Katie only moves her eyes fractionally to the left, and there she is, Lulu. It can’t be more than a few seconds that she allows her eyes to rest on her, but it seems to last forever. No detail escapes her. Lulu looks radically different than she looked when they said goodbye on the pavement outside her apartment building years earlier. The wild, curly hair is shorn off and appears to be wet. Her face is round and naked, her complexion surprisingly sallow. She wears a blue shirtdress made with thick, shiny material. The rounded Peter Pan collar is laughably juvenile.

Her gaze is unwavering and flat. Here, in real life, she is not telegraphing Katie that she misses her, that she wishes they had a chance to talk, or that she is sorry and has made a terrible mistake. She is not asking for Katie’s forgiveness, laughing about what a silly misunderstanding all this is, or blaming herself for being a drama queen.

What does it mean, that bare, untextured look? It’s unbearable. Katie’s heart is trapped in her mouth like a thumping animal.

Both Herb and the DA ask Katie almost identical questions. They show her picture upon picture, trying to untie the critical knot in the story: how this alleged violation could have happened with the defendant’s daughter in the same room. They show her a map of the cabin’s footprint. A sketch of where the den was in relation to the kitchen, the main entrance, the stairwell. Questions about the door, whether it was obscured in any way, if she remembers anyone peering into the den. There are disquisitions on the couches and how they were positioned, where she was lying, and whether she ever once turned around and looked behind her.

But everyone is focusing on all the wrong stuff. No one knows what Katie did to set it all in motion. No one knows about her stolen time with Jack at the Dolans’, except whoever called them, and she never says anything to anyone about finding Lulu on the dock, how she had seemed so unlike herself, as though something had happened while Katie and Jack were gone. The confession of her fumbling intimacy with Jack sits on the tip of her tongue, but she tells herself that no one cares, that it isn’t what they want to know about, that it is what happened afterward that is important.

What does she remember about watching TV? At what point did she fall asleep? Can she recall the last scene from the movie? Did she ever turn around to see Lulu and her father behind her? Does she remember talking to her father? How many blankets were in the room? Did she fall asleep?

And she tells them what they expect to hear, what she told Herb: that she was awake the whole time. She says nothing about the vodka earlier that night or the sleepiness that overcame her in the early morning. She looks down at her bleeding cuticles, the dry, ragged skin of her fingertips, and she says what she believes to be true: nothing escaped her. It turns out that no one believes her anyway, and that lack of belief in her festers, infects her through and through—because, in her heart, she wants to be an honest person, and she thought she was. But she is not fully honest with anyone, not even with herself. It turns out she cannot give voice to uncertainty; this is not allowed. She does not need to be told this to know it is true.

So she becomes quiet; she continues her journey inward, a journey she will be on for years, alone, unable to share with anyone, not her family, not her friends, not her lover.





23

Earlier, Katie had driven to Sears and bought two slip-on sofa covers for the den, a set of plush white towels and sheets, and a base for the bed in the master bedroom. The bed frame was very heavy, and she stood for a while at the foot of the steps leading to the second floor, wondering how to get the box up there. She’d just have to drag it behind her. The washing machine rumbled steadily, drying the new sheets; the best she could find, four-hundred-thread-count sateen.