The Forgotten Hours(7)
Behind her, Janet, in the yellow top, was yelling at the boys to hurry up. The party would be starting in a few hours, and only about half the pieces were in place, though the partitions were finally up. Stepping down and taking a few paces back, Zev surveyed his work. He didn’t seem fazed by the hubbub or Janet’s frenetic tone—or Katie’s reaction. When he finally turned around and looked at her with his blue, blue eyes, the washed-out blue of shallow water, his face registered surprise. “You are very pale, Katie. You all right?”
“I’m fine,” she said, and right then it was true. When his attention was focused on her, his calmness was like a breeze on her skin.
“Good. Because I think I should move in with you.” He cracked a smile, and the white of his teeth dazzled her, like the pop of a flash. “I think I should be based in the city and go up to Vassar when I’m teaching, not the other way around. What do you say? You’ve got space. Or we could find somewhere better, put our money together.” He put his arms around her and stuck his face into her neck, his nose in the warm crook, his breath moist on her skin. “I want to be with you. And I think you want to be with me.”
He was waiting for an answer, but he would not push her. And so she nodded her head slightly, bumping against his, and she squeezed him back, hiding her face, while inside there raged a blood-soaked battle between what she wanted, what she deserved, and what she could actually have.
3
Every Sunday evening, the phone in her apartment rang at the same hour, six thirty. Sometimes a few minutes later, but more often than not exactly on time. It never failed to startle her even though she was expecting it. An automated voice came over the line, asking Katie if she would accept the charges from Wallkill Correctional Facility.
Why her father insisted on doing it this way, she wasn’t sure; it was inefficient. He wanted a landline, not a prepaid cell phone account. He claimed he could hear her better. He said it was easier for him. He liked knowing she was home. Maybe he wanted to be able to picture her sitting in the very same spot (on the edge of her couch) every single week, her attention centered solely on him. Maybe he didn’t want to share her with a busy street corner or a rollicking subway train or another person in some friend’s house, a friend he hadn’t had the chance to meet. It was inconvenient to rush home every Sunday no matter what, but as soon as she heard his voice on the end of the line, she’d forget her irritation. The instant comfort she felt settled her down, reminded her what she cared about. Loyalty. Steadfastness. She was proud to be his one steady rock in a sea of shifting allegiances.
Katie stared at the receiver, off its base, the curled cord lying on the wood floor next to the trim board. The phone was still unplugged. In order to receive her father’s call, Katie had to plug it back in, and whether she wanted to or not, she’d hear the beep beep beep of the answering service telling her there were messages waiting for her. It took her a few minutes before she felt ready.
Beep beep beep, she heard.
Her breath tightened, but she was too curious not to dial in. Marjorie O’Hannon had left a message on Friday, then restrained herself and only called twice more on Saturday afternoon.
“I wanted to let you know,” her recording said, “that I covered the Duke case, and now Saint Patrick’s, the boarding school? I, uh, well, I assume you heard about it—the boy was convicted yesterday. Statutory rape.”
When Katie heard that word—rape—she stiffened. It never got easier.
A sigh was audible on the message. “So truly, I understand this . . . this he said/she said thing. Especially now, after the Stanford swimmer case, the extremely light reprimand. It’s easy to get distracted from the truth.”
Then a male voice on another message. Jules Forsythe from the Baltimore Sun. “Your father’s case was under the jurisdiction of New York State, but of course statutory rape’s not regional,” he said. “We’d like to hear your opinion on issues related to consent, the age of consent. The girl in the Saint Patrick’s case was fourteen too.”
Each reporter mentioned having picked up on a reference to her father’s case in the judge’s summation at the Saint Patrick’s rape trial, which had wrapped up the previous week. The last one, Cartwright—clipped tone, all business—paused breathlessly at the end of her message. “I know your community turned out to support your father, big-time,” she said. “I think you should take this chance to stick up for him too.” No one but O’Hannon mentioned anything about having contacted or having spoken to Lulu Henderson.
Katie hung up. As if she hadn’t stuck up for her father! No one could pretend to know him as she did. They hadn’t seen him in the middle of the night, fetching migraine medicine for her mother from the all-night pharmacy. They didn’t know that he tipped the newspaper boy a hundred dollars at Christmas and invited a junior colleague to dinner every Sunday night after his fiancée died in a hit-and-run. That he happily gave his children his sweater when they were caught in the cold or a stubbled kiss when they awoke to a nightmare.
She moved about the room in a daze. Anyway, even if she were to talk to one of these journalists, what would she say? She had nothing to add to everything that had already been said—the jury had decided, and the sentence had been served. People thought whatever they thought. There was no changing people’s minds now. Her father had been wrongly accused, but there was so much more to it than that fact. Though the truth was that all these years later, there were important things she had never come close to understanding: Why had Lulu accused him in the first place? What exactly had led to her father’s conviction? It was beginning to eat away at her again, this realization of everything she didn’t know. There was a part of her that wanted answers.