The Forgotten Hours(53)

“Something wrong with just calling me back?”

“Yeah, but, you know.” His eyes took her in, shifted to the lake, the ground, back to her face, her mouth. She remembered his nervous energy, the way he always looked as though he were about to propel himself forward. His face had thickened, but his eyes were the same, slightly hooded, with hazel irises surrounded by a dark ring. “Calling just seemed—I don’t know, Katie; that call was so bad. So uncomfortable . . .”

She gave him a rueful smile. “And this is better?”

The tension seeped from his features, and he smiled back. “You said you were up here. Figured I’d check if you were still here and come see the old place again. Thought it’d be better to talk face-to-face.” He stuck his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “And, uh. I guess I wanted to see you again too.”

Katie’s head and shoulders were peeking out from the water, but the rest of her body remained submerged. There was some water in her ear, and it was so cold it hurt the inside of her head. “Throw me that towel, would you?” she asked, pointing toward the wooden deck, empty of its usual tables and umbrellas. A scruffy towel lay where she’d dropped it.

“Uh,” he said, squinting and looking around himself, first in one direction and then in the other, “it’s going to get wet, isn’t it?”

She could see that having him throw her the towel was ludicrous. Her heart clattered as though she were fifteen again, shy and fierce at the same time. Of course it was ludicrous to have him throw her the towel while she was in the water. While his back was turned, she approached the low wall that ran along this part of the lake and put both hands flat onto the concrete, making an awkward little jump to haul herself out. Through the wet cotton bra her nipples stood out, sharp as stone chips. She grabbed the towel. Her jeans stuck to the damp skin of her thighs. Jack kept his back turned to her as she dressed. He flexed his shoulders, and the material on his jacket shone where he stretched. It struck her that she had never seen Zev fidgety like this, that his energy was static compared to Jack’s.

“I just want to say I’m really sorry,” Jack said. “You know? About everything.”

“Don’t know why you should be sorry.”

“There wasn’t even any evidence,” Jack said. “It’s crazy that you can be convicted without evidence. I didn’t think that would ever happen.”

“Yeah, well,” Katie said. “That’s justice for you.” She felt totally unprepared for this conversation, a little resentful, even. The knowledge of what he’d said in court throbbed in her head, but there was no way to go from “How are you?” to “What were you thinking?” How could she ask him what he thought he’d seen? Did he realize that he was probably partially to blame for her father’s conviction?

There was no way to broach the subject, not right now. Damp and chilled, she struggled to get her clothes back on.

“Haven’t been back here since then,” Jack said.

She straightened up and ran her hands over her wet hair, aware that she probably looked pale and thin. “Neither have I.” They walked toward their two cars, parked in the dusty lot behind the clubhouse. His was a small black Mercedes. She glanced at him quickly. A Realtor. It just seemed so incongruous.

“The lake—it’s still so beautiful; it almost hurts,” Jack said. “That summer wasn’t all bad, was it?”

They were in the open, yet it was as though they’d been thrown into a tiny room together. Goose bumps appeared on her damp skin, and she hugged her arms around herself. This was so not what she’d been expecting.





24

Back at the cabin, Katie headed upstairs to warm up under the shower while Jack took a seat in the living room. Under the needles of hot water, her skin was aflame. Her fingers seemed almost to belong to someone else, so alert was her skin to the brush of fingertips slick with soap. It was like covering her body with rubbing alcohol. After she threw on a pair of jeans and a big sweatshirt, she stared at herself in the mirror. Her eyes were bright, clear from her cold swim, her face bleached of color except a vivid pink on her cheeks.

She wondered how much she’d changed or stayed the same over the years. When she knew Jack, her hair had been longer, and then for a few years she had shorn it off completely; now it was shoulder length and wavy. Still blonde, but lacking the glamorous tousle so popular now; it was just sort of plain. She was aware of not being a great beauty, though men often catcalled her in the streets, almost always to tell her to smile, or cheer up! As always, and without intending to, she clung to her deep sense of interiority—it was this, she thought, that made people feel excluded. But not everyone. Those who loved her, understood her like her father did—they could bridge the gap between who she seemed and who she really was. She might appear to be cold or distant, but who could know what was going on in her head? Running a finger over her upper lip, she thought about Jack sitting downstairs in the flesh, wondered whether he felt he knew her the way she felt she knew him.

Their story had taken on a different shape in her mind since she’d discovered that he’d tried to write to her. They had barely even known each other, but it hadn’t felt that way. To her, he was a boy she loved. There was no question of whether it was real love or not—she probably loved him more because she hardly knew him, because the promise of him had been allowed to bloom and live on in her imagination. They’d fallen for each other before all kids had cell phones, before social media existed, and afterward it had been so very easy to lose sight of one another, as though they’d lived on different continents. In the fall, when the memory of his hands on her body and the heat of his tongue in her mouth was still vivid, she carried the knowledge of their intimacy with her like a secret at parties filled with panting, uncertain teenagers. Among them afterward, she’d been infused with a kind of pride; she felt powerful and beautiful in a way no one could even guess at.