The Forgotten Hours(84)
You were supposed to be able to recognize bad people. When she was little and her mother told her not to talk to strangers, she’d had an image in her mind of what this meant: a stranger was a man with a scruffy beard wearing a greasy raincoat. It was like that with monsters too: they looked and acted like monsters. Even once she was older, Katie was invested in believing that she could distinguish good people from bad. Surely that was what human instinct and intuition were for.
It wasn’t until she and David were back on the plane heading home that she told her brother about what she’d learned. It felt like a cop-out, stuffed in their seats surrounded by strangers, movies playing silently on tiny overhead screens, but her need to release the information was overpowering; she could not wait. Each second she held it inside her brought her closer to a tearing of her soul she didn’t think she would recover from. No more secrets. David listened quietly, as she knew he would, wrecked. His face went rigid, and he looked down into his lap, her words violently readjusting his world. He didn’t ask her a single question, in just the same way she had learned to suppress her curiosity until it became scar tissue, ugly but easy enough to overlook.
The skin around his pinched lips whitened, and tears fell; she forced herself to face him, to acknowledge his pain, accept it. She was hurting David by telling him, but it was her father who had caused the pain in the first place. It wasn’t right that these truths remained unspoken.
“But he was so adamant—he made such a point,” David said, flicking his eyes at her. “Talking about . . . what honor means! And yet, I don’t know. There was always something. Something . . . off.”
“I’m not sure Dad knows what honesty actually is,” she said. She was beginning to see that truth could be multidimensional and that it was possible for those various dimensions to clash without canceling one another out.
She called Zev as soon as she landed at Kennedy, and once again the call went straight to voice mail. He was clearly avoiding her. But later that night, he texted that he was up at Vassar, where a few of the arts honors students were getting ready to ship their year-end projects to a gallery in Detroit for an exhibition. He was helping them select their best work. He didn’t want to talk over the phone and hoped that was all right with her. We have some big things to sort out, he said. In person, and alone, I think. His words were so unadorned. Did that mean he felt as cold toward her as he sounded? Was he angry that she hadn’t insisted he stay over that last night, when her father was with her? She was dying to tell him about what she’d learned in London, how it changed the way she understood her past, how she needed the courage to confront her father, but instead, this. These words, devoid of emotion.
Her phone also coughed out alerts about incoming texts from her father, one after another, released upon touchdown. He must have gotten himself a phone while she was away before heading up to Eagle Lake. That first night she was back, he texted her four times while at Walmart, telling her about the changes he was planning on making to the cabin. He had found a great new wine store on Route 28. The new sheets on the bed were amazing. Could she bring him some kimchi from one of those Korean places in the city. And on and on. His favorite emojis were the pink heart with the yellow sparks and the smiley face with the quizzical expression and tongue stuck out, and he sent them to her randomly. He didn’t understand texting etiquette and didn’t seem to expect a reply. Each text was an affront, part of a game he thought she was still playing.
She did not respond. The morning after she returned home, she could not get out of bed and spent the day vomiting into a bowl. She called into work sick and slept. She didn’t care. It seemed to her that life could not simply go on the way it had before.
All these years she’d absorbed the lessons her father had taught her, only to discover they were flimsy and false. She slept, chased by dream snippets that made no sense. Her sheets were soaked with the tang of misery. When morning came, she looked at herself in the mirror and saw someone unrecognizable. She asked herself what this woman wanted, and the answer was so simple: she wanted to live her life with integrity. No one could do that for her.
She kept thinking of Lulu as she had been that last summer, brazen and lovely—and deeply and continuously disappointed by life. Surely things would have been different if Katie had had even an inkling of what her friend had gone through? She rested a hand on her roiling stomach and thought of mothers and daughters, of Piper and her ugly dismissiveness, of her own mother and her corrosive secrets. She wondered what Lulu felt about children, being one and having one. Katie knew she needed to do something, take a step toward living the life she wanted. She would go see Lulu. But first, she had to talk to her father face-to-face.
She texted Zev that she was coming up to Poughkeepsie later that day to see him, after going up to Eagle Lake to see her dad. Then she got online and looked up the Greyhound bus schedule to Blackbrooke.
John Gregory was in shirtsleeves hauling trash when Katie’s taxi pulled up to the cabin. The barrels were already full, and he was crushing cardboard under his boots and stuffing it into the sides of the one container that had space. It was late June now, and the ferns of Eagle Lake had lost some of their pungent smell. The trees above them swayed, silver-backed leaves trembling. Pine needles spun in the steady rain. The purr of the cab doing a U-turn and heading back to Blackbrooke was accompanied by the crunch of John’s boots on gravel.
“Baby girl, what a treat,” he said, wiping his hands on his jeans. His hair was damp, cut very short. “I thought you were still in London!”