The Forgotten Hours(66)

Those times, those pitch-black moments in which they lost themselves feverishly, they did not use a condom. She tried to remember how long ago they had had one of those episodes. Then she tried to remember when she’d last had her period. And with that calculation she knew that it was a possibility that she was pregnant with Zev’s child.

Doubling over, she sucked air in sharply and huffed it out again. A child. Once in college, she’d had a scare, and it had proven to be nothing but stress and a bit of anemia. She’d gone on the pill and then off again and had planned to get an IUD. But she hadn’t done it—she’d allowed herself to become lazy. Eight months with Zev, only using condoms—what were they thinking?

But it was also possible she was wrong. Her periods had never been all that regular, and she didn’t bother to keep careful track of them. This was a time of high stress, and perhaps her body was reacting in strange ways. She had been running—and that long swim!—and hadn’t been eating very much. What with her father’s release and Zev’s overture about moving in together, she was under a lot of pressure.

And then there was Jack—the fact that she couldn’t deny that she had been so drawn to him that she’d almost launched into an affair, if you could even call it that. It made a mockery of her careful planning and her calibrated reactions. Since Tuesday she’d been ignoring all his efforts to reach her, but the truth was that part of her still missed what might have been if reality hadn’t conspired to get in their way when they were kids. Would she have seen him the following summer? Would they have had the chance to become a real couple?

She put her key in the lock. As soon as she changed out of her work clothes, she was going to call Zev. She longed to hear his raspy, singsong voice, to begin the hard work of opening herself up to him. It was what he deserved, and it was what she wanted. Over the last few days she’d started examining some of the feelings he elicited in her. For instance, why did she often feel a guilty thrill after sex, as though she were doing something she wasn’t really supposed to? Why had she not told her father that they were a couple? She’d thought it was because she wanted something that belonged only to her, but she was beginning to suspect it was more than that. Maybe she worried that her father wouldn’t think it was a good match, that he’d want more for his daughter. But what did she think? It seemed to her now that her feelings for Zev were tangled up with the past in a way that had been holding her back.

Her landline rang when she entered the apartment, and she remembered with sickening clarity the intrusiveness of the reporters, the media’s ghoulish fascination with the relatives of criminals, their unhinged loyalties. She dropped her bag to the floor, snatched the phone off the hook, said, “Fuck you!” and then slammed it down again. Once again she had forgotten to unplug it. The phone rang again, and she stared at it. “What the hell do you want from me?” she hissed into the receiver. “Why can’t you all leave me alone?”

“Katie? What’s going on?”

It was her mother. Relief raced through her like a flush of alcohol, until she realized that something had to be wrong if her mother was calling her. “Mum?” she said, falling back onto the old velvet couch. “Sorry! I thought you were someone else.”

“I’ll say. Everything all right?”

“I don’t know. Depends on what you mean by all right.”

Her mother sighed. It was always like this, a tense, clipped exchange in which every sentence hid behind it another one that flayed at her. They couldn’t seem to talk normally anymore, without hidden accusations blistering under the surface. “Who did you think it was?” Charlie asked. “Have they been calling you too? Those reporters?”

“I’m not going to talk with them.”

“Quite right,” Charlie said. “I’m sorry, it must be awful”—she paused—“with your father getting out so soon, on top of it all.”

“Mum, I’m not sure I want to get into this.”

“No need to be short, Katie. We’re all just doing the best we can with the hand we’ve been dealt,” her mother said. “And this isn’t a social call. I’m in London for a few days. Grumpy isn’t doing well. It took me a while to get it out of him, and finally I called Henrietta. You remember her—the head nurse?”

Katie’s grandfather lived in a nursing home in Ravenscourt, London. Once every year or so, when the airfare was low, he flew Katie and David over there to visit him. “Is he okay? Did she tell you what’s wrong?”

“Age is not for the weak of heart, that’s for sure.”

“Is he sick?”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. He has pneumonia. Started with a cough some months ago, which he ignored, of course. Now it’s settled in, and it’s getting worse. He’s ninety-six years old, you know. All right in the head, hardly a surprise. But the body, it’s fragile. It eventually just gives up the ghost.”

This time the upwelling of tears was less like a wave and more like a punch in the throat. It took a while for Katie to be able to swallow properly as her mother went on and on about the nurses, what they were and weren’t doing. How cruel it was to age and lose your independence. “I have to see him,” Katie said, strangled. “I don’t want him to die.”