The Forgotten Hours(65)

“Just say it, Jack,” she said. “Just spit it out.”

“It was Brad. Remember Brad? He—uh, he cornered Lulu. Remember, we hung out with him at the changing sheds for a while a few days earlier. He was a swimmer, a college kid.”

“Yeah, I remember Brad,” she said, fiddling with the buckle of her bag. The vents hummed with cool air at her ankles. “What about him?”

“He told me when I got back to the clubhouse. They’d screwed; he was bragging about it. But she’d said she didn’t want to, and he just—you know, it was kind of one of those things.”

Katie’s insides took a slide over this unexpected precipice. “She didn’t want to? When was this?”

“Earlier, when we went off to the Dolans’. Remember that call? That was her. I think Tommy must have figured out where we’d gone and told her.”

It seemed so obvious now, Brad asking Katie about Lulu. Lulu sitting on the dock, refusing to meet her eyes. Her lipstick smeared. And she had thought Lulu was furious with her about Jack. It struck her now that Katie had been seeing everything from her own narrow perspective—it was awful to think that she might have been completely off base about Lulu being angry at her. “I don’t understand why you didn’t tell the investigators. You didn’t say anything during the trial!”

“Don’t you think I was torn up about that? If it was relevant or not? Of course I was. It was a super confusing time,” he said. “The lawyers, they gave me instructions. Just answer the questions. Don’t ad-lib. Blah blah blah. Christ, I was barely seventeen. I was scared to death.”

Katie saw Lulu in the dark, crying, her breath coming fast, her eyes wild; she was thinking, Where is Katie? Where is she? Later, by the lake, Lulu had told her, “I want to go home.” Things were clicking into place in her mind. Brad was the monster; he had messed with her friend’s mind. And Katie was to blame, too, for being so selfish. “This changes things,” she said. “You should have told the lawyers.”

The whites of Jack’s eyes glinted at her. Whatever electricity had flowed between them was gone. “How does it change anything?” he asked. “Don’t girls always say no at first?”

“Whoa,” she said. “That’s not very evolved, Jack. You don’t really think that way, do you?”

“Look, I just don’t get how it impacts what happened with your dad.”

“She was mad at me, you know? Maybe that’s why she went with him, with Brad, in the first place. And then she said it was Dad, blamed him. She was just really messed up.” Closing her eyes, Katie felt the sting of tears. Until recently, she had never thought of her friend as vulnerable, and now she saw just how wrong she’d been.

All of a sudden, things were happening too fast. A minute ago her insides had been fluid; she’d been in a dream, and Jack was in that dream too. And yet he had never spoken up about this—to her, to the lawyers, to anyone. Maybe it could have made a difference at the trial—who knew? It spoke to Lulu’s state of mind. It threw into question the kinds of choices she might have made. How could Jack have taken the risk and kept quiet about it? Her sorrow for Lulu quickly transformed itself into fury at this man who had dismissed the importance of an appalling incident even though he knew it to be true. How could it not be pivotal?

“He went to jail for rape, Jack. Almost six years of his life. My father can never coach kids again. He has to find something to do, someplace that will hire felons. My mother had to get a shitty job. Our family fucking imploded!” Her voice rose as she spoke, and one by one people sitting near the corridor started craning in their seats to see what was going on. “And all along you knew that boy had done something terrible to her, and you didn’t say a word. I . . . I’m sorry, but I find that kind of sickening.”

Jack seemed to shrink as she swelled with anger. She was glad now that she’d tested the durability of her desire and discovered it to be shallow and sad. She was looking for something that was already right in front of her: a solid mass, something concrete, not ephemeral. A person whose quiet forward motion created a place for her—not to hide in but to be safe enough so she could become herself again.

She grabbed her suit jacket from the booth and stumbled out of the restaurant into the early summer evening, the air so humid it strafed her skin like soaked muslin, cloying.

Jack. Foolish, immature Jack. How she had loved him that summer. Her dream of Jack had hardly even begun before it was over.





30

A few days later, on the way up the stairs to her apartment, she stopped on a riser to catch her breath. She didn’t feel right, and she realized that she hadn’t felt right for weeks. That time in the bar a couple of weeks ago with Zev—she never just threw up like that. Her dizziness, the swooning feeling that often overwhelmed her when she woke up. The constant soreness in her bones, the sour stomach . . . Even when she had been with Jack, she hadn’t felt like herself. She’d attributed it to nerves, to the stress of what was going on, but was it that? Her body just didn’t feel normal.

She began a calculation that ultimately could only end one of two ways, with a positive or a negative. She and Zev had been together since October, and now it was June; that was about eight months. Sometimes, when he stayed over, they would make love two or even three times. Often, in the middle of the night, they reached out in half sleep and slid their hot, searching hands over each other, still mired in the cocoon of their earlier lovemaking. Silently, ferociously, they would fuck in the darkness, keeping their eyes closed. She had never experienced that sensation with anyone before, that kind of out-of-body experience.