The Forgotten Hours(54)

Of course, after she found out about her father’s arrest, her life was recast. At those weekend parties, she became desperate to make some kind of concrete connection. She needed to feel real, alive. She would start off eager, ready to be daring, to prove that she could do whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted, to hell with it all—but as soon as a boy started breathing too hard, or she felt the dull thrust of his hard-on against her thigh, she’d back away.

She went into the kitchen and poured two glasses of wine, wishing she had a bottle of tequila or some ice-cold vodka or something strong that would smudge the sharp edges of her apprehension. Jack sat with his back to her, and she stood quietly at the lintel, a glass in each hand, knowing that this was one of those before-and-after moments. Life was lurching forward in a direction she hadn’t anticipated. Her numbers were not adding up, and her trajectory was changing.

She held out a glass to Jack, but he shook his head. “On the wagon, two years already,” he said. He smiled, but it looked pained, as though he’d practiced in front of a mirror and decided that it might do the trick but wasn’t entirely sure.

“Oh. Right,” she said, putting his glass on the old side table and taking an inadvertently enormous gulp from hers. She coughed. “Sorry to hear that. Want something else?”

“Ah, it’s okay,” he said. “Long story.”

She was curious but didn’t want to ask. “So my dad gets out soon”—she studied him to gauge his reaction—“from Wallkill. He got six years.”

“They didn’t let him out for good behavior? You’re shitting me.”

She shrugged, her neck stiff. “There’s no such thing as good behavior,” she said. Maybe she could get to the bottom of what he thought he saw. But something held her back: fear, perhaps, or propriety. “And I guess, I don’t know. I guess he got in some trouble, helping out some of the other guys in there he wasn’t supposed to fraternize with. You know my dad, always trying to teach someone something.”

“Christ,” Jack said, knitting his silky brows. “When’s the last time you saw him?”

“I go up there once a month, something like that. He counts on me.” A pause hung between them until it became bloated and burst. “It feels really weird that you’re here, Jack. How come you never called me back? On Friday?”

“I—you gave me the scare of my life, Katie. I mean, I hadn’t heard from you in like ten years. When you never answered my letters, I figured you—”

“I never got them,” she broke in. “I mean, not until just now. I found them last week. I’ve been clearing the place out because Dad’s coming.”

“You never got them?” he asked, straightening up.

“Nope.” Her collarbones flared with heat, sweat prickling at the base of her neck. “I mean, I didn’t even know you testified at the trial, Jack. Did you realize that? That I had no idea?”

“Look, I didn’t know anything. I was, like, totally in the dark about everything! I knew he was convicted. I knew what I read in the papers.”

“Yeah, the fucking newspapers,” Katie said, taking another sip of her wine. “That’s been fun.” As they talked, they began to assess each other more openly. His cheeks were covered in stubble, light and soft, concentrated around the chin. If it weren’t for his expression, the serious look in his eyes, he could have passed as much younger. “What happened to your parents?” she asked. She’d only met his father once; she remembered him as a huge man with shins as big as dolphins. His mother was a beauty, friendly in a noncommittal sort of way. Always checking her reflection in the clubhouse windows.

“Nothing, really,” Jack said. “Don’t see them all that much.” They began catching each other up, and she started to relax—he told her he had gone to UVA on a tennis scholarship and then lost his spot on the team after a hazing incident at his fraternity. For two years after graduating, Jack moved into his parents’ Upper West Side apartment. His “forgotten years,” he called them, during which his parents ignored him so effectively that he got away with snorting cocaine in the marble-tiled bathroom, leaving white dust and empty baggies on the countertops that the housekeeper cleaned up without complaint or comment.

“Ugh,” Katie said. “Sounds bad.”

“What about you, after the conviction?” he asked. “Didn’t you freak? How does someone even deal with that?”

Briefly, she thought about Zev and how she dealt with the whole thing by never talking about it, but then she tucked that thought away. After draining her wine, she held it up, the pinkish stain on the glass viscous in the dying light from the window. “This stuff helped, though it was mostly tequila back then,” she said, choosing to wrap it all up in a neat package, when it had been anything but neat. She had logged so many miles, sometimes in the middle of the night, running and running. Yes, there had been booze and boys—pitiful, fumbling attempts at intimacy and rage-filled, drunken fucks that had left her reeling. But there had been so much else: time within herself, unpredictable, dissipating and then clumping like chalk in water. “Forgotten years,” she said. “Yeah. I know what you mean.”

“To think of how much time I wasted.” Jack pulled his mouth into an exaggerated frown. “And you never get any of it back.”