The Forgotten Hours(55)
She was disappointed with herself for not being able to open up, as she knew she should, but she felt so weary. “Hey, can you help me for a second?” she asked him, standing, stretching, her thigh muscles igniting with fatigue. “Set up this thing upstairs?”
The narrow staircase to the second floor was awash in cooling shadows that swallowed her as she ascended. Jack almost bumped into her at the top of the stairs, and she jumped, as skittish as a deer. She remembered the Dolans’ house, the absence of moonlight on the woods.
“In here,” she said, going into the master bedroom, the only room left that she hadn’t yet finished. “No one’s been here in a long-ass time. What a sorry, sad little place. But not when I’m done with it,” she said, pushing her sleeves up to her elbows.
“What’s that?” he asked, pointing to her arm. “Noticed it earlier, at the lake.”
A few inches above her a wrist, a tattoo of a sprig of blueberries surrounded by leaves circled her forearm. The blueberries were larger than life, saturated in light and shade, dark powder blue, ciel and Egyptian blue, the leaves a bright pop of green.
“We used to go blueberry picking together,” she said, “me and my dad.” Under the intensity of his gaze, Katie began to falter. She discovered that she couldn’t tell the story, so she didn’t.
Jack folded his body into three long sections, bending at the waist and knees. They knelt to dismantle and then reassemble the pieces of the bed frame one by one. They danced around each other, careful not to touch, his smell—Old Spice, soap?—filling the air. Lying on his back, he inched his head under the rails and tightened the metal screws laboriously, his legs thrust out, endless dark-blue jeans. They slowly resumed their conversation, small talk about work, and Katie ribbed him about being a Realtor.
He would have none of it. “Pays the bills,” he said, “and I have a decent apartment on the East Side.” She felt a kind of guilty pleasure staring at him, watching his eyes light up and become subdued, noticing the creases by his eyebrows, the shadow under his cheekbones, the shift of muscle over bone. His boyishness, a reminder of how things were, moved her.
“So, um, Jack,” she said as they sat, finally, on the floor on either side of the enormous frame. Over the last hour she’d managed to relax a bit, but now that she had stopped moving, she felt jumpy and uncomfortable again. She had to ask—she had to finally hear him say, in his own words, what he’d glimpsed through the window. Had he been telling the truth when he’d claimed he didn’t really know what he’d seen? Was he protecting her? “I didn’t know you came back to the cabin that night. After the storm.”
“The lawyers, those guys scared the living daylights out of me,” he said, his eyes with their strange ring of darkness considering her carefully. “I was so immature—people thought because I was tall, I was, like, a man already. But I was just a kid. They said, you know, I wasn’t supposed to tell you anything. Call or write or anything.”
“They told me the exact same thing,” she said. “But I, uh. I really need to know what you think you saw.”
“I told them everything I saw, on the stand. I wasn’t holding anything back.”
“So you still don’t know if you saw . . . if they were . . . ?” Her breath caught in her throat. It seemed that so much was riding on this moment, on his answer. She so badly wanted him to have seen nothing.
He shook his head. “Sorry. I wanted to be the one who could fix everything, make it all go away. But I couldn’t.”
“I tried that too.” For a long moment, they looked at each other, unblinking. “Told them I’d been awake all night long, that I hadn’t slept a wink,” she admitted. “And the thing is, it wasn’t really true. I don’t think so at least.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. I know.” She had to move. She jumped up and leaned over, and together they hauled the mattress onto the frame and pushed the whole contraption back against the wall. “I’ll get the bedding,” she said.
As they stretched the cotton sheets onto the bed, neatly tucking in the corners, he kept talking. He told her he’d wanted to say goodbye again, that he’d freaked out after she left the clubhouse, thinking he’d miss seeing her the next morning for sure. Once the top sheet was smoothed down, she dragged the comforter over, and they spread it out, neatly folding the top down to reveal the two plumped pillows.
“Okay,” she said. “Done. Thanks.”
They each drank two enormous glasses of water in the kitchen, their gulps loud and vulnerable against the steady whir of the electric clock on the wall. All this time, and that clock had never stopped running. It marked the passage of every second, every minute. It was past six o’clock, when she usually spoke with her father, but they’d agreed not to talk tonight. It hardly seemed possible he’d be getting out next week. There was so much more she wanted to know, but she could sense that Jack was pulling away, that he would tell her in a minute that he had to get back to the city, that he had a dinner or some kind of appointment, an engagement he couldn’t break. And she was tired to the bone, reeling from the day.
She put her glass in the sink. There was one more question she wanted to ask, but her hand was shaking. “Do you think she was lying, Jack? You think Lulu actually made the whole thing up?”