The Forgotten Hours(82)

Then Grumpy’s words from earlier hit her in the stomach, and she felt sick all over again. He was a runner, your father.

The other images came, and they were revolting. Her father’s face pulled into a grimace of ecstasy. Having sex with women in cars and in sheds and probably in his own marital bed. In his office. In hotels. She began to imagine him with Lulu, and she ran harder, trying to exorcise the image from her head.

He had lied to her mother, to her, to David—he had lied to himself. He was a man with no integrity. It all connected somehow, surely. But did it mean her father was guilty of rape? Did it mean that he could do the unthinkable, take advantage of a child? Underneath her feet, the ground was yawning open, ready to swallow her whole. All along she had believed that he was a man of honor. That his love and dedication to his family were larger and stronger than anything else in the world. That belief had defined her life, guided her in so many of her decisions. Where she went to college (she had briefly toyed with the idea of UCLA, but he thought Los Angeles was full of airheads). What she studied (he believed in practical majors, like accounting or economics). Her eventual job (the offer of an internship at a fashion magazine had made him laugh out loud during one visit, as though being interested in something so flighty was ludicrous). It had led her to be wary of friends like Janice or even Radha if he so much as hinted they weren’t good enough for her—and to hold back a part of herself from Zev, which could so easily have ended in disaster. It seemed almost farcical now. All along she had been chasing shadows.

It was almost ten o’clock, and she didn’t know what to do with herself, so she kept running. She could run all the way to Kensington Gardens, jumping the fence and racing in the moonlight through Hyde Park to Soho, accompanying the lumbering night buses along Piccadilly, on into the city, on and on, next to the silent black muscle of the Thames. The private garden squares hidden away between terraced houses crouched like black beasts around every corner; behind their locked gates were tennis courts and fountains and sheds that held gardening tools. During the day they were filled with nannies jostling their strollers and toddlers tripping on the gravel, but at night it was different. The silence was like a quiet death.

In that suspended darkness, the image of Lulu came to her—not as she was as a child, but as she must be now, a woman. That voice on the end of the phone line, faltering. Hurt because she had been doubted, was still being doubted all these years later. When they were younger, Lulu’s private world had been like a railroad track you failed to notice running alongside the train you were on: always there but invisible until another train came barreling along in the opposite direction. She’d existed in a whirl of self-contained energy, this child who had created around her a sense of possibility, of adventure and immediacy. Katie had only been able to see her in one way, had needed Lulu to be that way so that Katie could figure out who she herself wanted to be. She had thought of Lulu as invulnerable, a person who barged ahead no matter what, who did not care about the fallout—and in opposition to that, Katie believed herself to be meticulous, observant, empathetic.

But she had also been cautious and uncertain. She had lacked a voice, and now she asked herself if she even liked who she had become. A woman apparently unable to deal with having a child. A woman struggling to commit to a man who was patient and fascinating and creative, with whom she felt a deep, instinctive connection—because why exactly? Because she’d accepted without question that she wanted someone like her father, or the person she’d thought him to be, and she’d assumed he wouldn’t think Zev was right for her. Katie had proven herself an unreliable judge of character . . . it was all a mess.

But she had been happy, hadn’t she? Her job paid the bills, and she had friends in the city she could drink and dance with, a lover she could hook up with. Her future had looked promising, and she had worked hard for it. Now that seemed a sign that she had gotten things upside down. What she thought was security was actually a chain wrapped around her ankles, keeping her in place. She’d been on hold, waiting, waiting—but for what? For a father who turned out not to have been real.

All those nights she’d lain awake before the trial, full of questions, and she had never insisted on getting answers. Grumpy had said so himself, that she had been curious once. Why hadn’t she confronted her father, asked him outright what had happened? It seemed inconceivable to her that she’d so readily given in to her family’s culture of silence. First during the trial and then during the divorce. Her brain had been waterlogged with neglected questions. She’d had every right to be afraid, to be full of doubt—she’d had the right to voice those questions and to have them answered. But having a right was not the same as exercising it.

She slowed her pace, remembering a pillow, a vast bed, her mother staring up at the ceiling. It was the middle of the night, they were both awake, and sleep was finally weighing down Katie’s eyelids. They’d been to see her father that day in Wallkill. It was the day he told her to buck up, to sleep in her own bed, to be brave, and there she was again, lying where he used to lie next to her mother. She imagined she could smell him, that slightly soapy scent mixed with the vanilla smell of her mother’s hair. Charlie had turned to her daughter and whispered, “Did Daddy ever touch you, Katie? You can tell me,” and she was so sleepy, she was finally there at the brink, and she whispered, “No, no . . . ,” and when she woke up, Charlie was gone, the words swallowed up by the night. She never thought of it again.