The Forgotten Hours(52)
Her father called her again as she was prying open the cardboard and laying out the metal frame on the carpet of the bedroom. “I’m getting your room ready,” she said. “It’s going to be so nice.”
“You sound tired, hon. Don’t push yourself too hard.”
“You’re one to talk. You’re the slave driver!” She laughed, glad for the break. Her skin was sticky and her muscles shaking. “I couldn’t get David to help me, go figure. Too busy with concerts and the like.”
“Ah, honey,” her father said. “Compassion beats complaints, okay?”
“Yeah, but no one likes a skiver,” she said. “No, really, I guess it’s okay. At first it was weird, up here alone, but I’m getting used to it.”
“Hard for me to even imagine the space. A bed I can actually stretch out in. The smell of trees and grass.”
“You’re not, like . . .” She hesitated. “You’re not worried about coming back? Like, people being weird with you?”
He dismissed her with a grunt. “No, not at all. You get what you project, and I’m all about positivity. Moving on and moving up. I think it’ll be just fine. You don’t need to worry about me.”
“I know. But I do.”
“You’re the best, sweetheart. Don’t know what I’d do without you.”
After the call, she sat on the floor thinking for a while, unmoving. A thick, moted ray of sunlight came in from the open window; the June air outside was far warmer than the air inside the cabin. She stuck her bare foot into the ray of light and let the sun warm her toes. Time for a break. Time to get outside.
The clubhouse was closed, of course; it would be a few weeks before the volunteer committee swept it out, wiping down the floors with Pine-Sol and clearing the mousetraps. It seemed desolate without the cries of children playing in the sand or music coming from the bar. Cupping her hands around her eyes, Katie peered in just as she had the night of the square dance. The shelves, still laden with paperbacks. Speakers in the corner. A pile of chairs stacked high. The old piano, missing some keys. Incredible—a place where nothing ever changed.
Surprisingly, the lake water was not unbearably cold. In the summers her mother used to swim every day unless there was a lightning storm. Charlie often wore a crocheted orange bikini she dug up from the bottom of a musty drawer. Against her skin, the color made her freckles stand out. It always looked as though it might just slip off her, resting so lightly on her delicate bones. When she emerged, it stayed wet for hours, and she would lounge in the sunshine, leaning back on one elbow and dragging on her Pall Mall, waiting and waiting for the threads to dry.
Katie left her clothes in a pile by the maple that leaned over the water’s edge like an elderly man peering into a well. Once she started swimming, she couldn’t seem to stop. The blackness was like a weight over her body, and even though it pressed on her, it could not contain her, and with the movement of her arms she propelled herself through it, on and on. The first gulp of air was painful; her hair streamed free behind her, her scalp numb.
The buoy was gone, but she swam far out to the other side, heading for the imaginary turning point, ignoring the pain that began in her chest and reached down to her knees. She thought of the boy Brad and how he would swim to the buoy and back without ever seeming to stop for breath. Under her feet she felt something every now and then and didn’t know what it was—fish, turtles, snakes?—and she kicked violently, her breath only half-formed. It was both freedom and constriction, joy and pain.
Lifting her head for a gulp of air, she saw that she was about halfway back, the clubhouse crouching on the shore, low and green, the maple tiny and misshapen and—something moving in front of it. An animal or a person? A few strokes more, another gulping breath: yes, it was a man pacing on the flagstones.
He was very tall, his body a familiar S curve, light hair ruffled. My God—it was Jack Benson.
He was as familiar to her as was the shape of her own face, the curve of her brows, the topography of her hands; she would have recognized him in a crowded room or far away at the end of an empty train platform. The pace of her swimming slowed as numbers crowded her head. Almost ten years since she had last seen him. Two unread letters from him. He was the first boy who had seen her completely naked. She was almost twenty-five years old, which made him twenty-six, or perhaps twenty-seven; she wasn’t sure. It was less than forty-eight hours ago that she had read the testimony he’d given at her father’s trial. How many times had she called him since Friday—how many times had he not answered her call?
Jack stopped pacing as she drew closer. She dropped her feet and touched the gooey soil at the bottom of the lake.
“Hey there,” he called out. He wore an army jacket, faded to a pale green with epaulets that might look foolish on a smaller man, the kind of jacket bought at a department store, not a thrift shop. Blunt-cut light-blond hair, longer at the crown. He could be a Swede or a Dane, an elegant Nordic type with defined features. He pushed the hair off his forehead in a self-conscious gesture she recognized immediately, and in an instant, that simple gesture stripped away the last decade.
“Jesus Christ,” Katie said.
“Sorry to surprise you. I thought we should talk?” He bent forward slightly in an effort to camouflage his height; he had done that when he was a kid too.