The Forgotten Hours(86)

The tick tick tick of the flame of gas being ignited. The clock hanging above the stove reading 4:27. It was warm in the room, stuffy and sweet smelling. Sweat popped up on Katie’s forehead.

“Someone like me takes the stand, and whatever I say is incriminating. You know, if I’m friendly and honest, then they think I’m too casual, not taking it all seriously enough. Heartless. If I fight back, tell it like it is, the jury thinks I’m too aggressive. You’re a rapist in their eyes either way. So you’ve got to shut up and sit back and let the lawyers do the talking for you.”

“And Lulu. And Jack.”

He turned around, spatula in one hand.

“Yeah. I read the transcripts,” she said. “I know he testified.”

“Now why would you go and do that to yourself? Your mother and I went to a lot of trouble to spare you. Why’re you causing yourself all this heartache? It’s time to start fresh! I’m out, and everything is looking good, honey. Everything is good.”

The smell of warming toast and melting cheese was overly rich. “Can you stop that, Dad? Can you stop with the cooking?” She went back into the living room and sat down on the couch. Her breath seemed stuck in her throat. She wasn’t getting anywhere.

He came in behind her, crumbs on the corners of his mouth. Brunch used to be his big thing. On Sundays in the summer, he’d make his family an obscene amount of food: chocolate pancakes, omelets, fruit shakes. Her favorite had always been late in the season, when he sprinkled fat blueberries on top of the pancakes, and they’d swell and burst during cooking, purple juice streaming everywhere. “Honey, you seem really stressed out. Everything okay at work? Want to come up here for a week or two? The season starts soon; it’ll be fun for us.”

The beach in sunshine. Jumping off the diving board. Summer nights in the boathouse, clutching sweating cups in slippery hands. Everyone here knew what had happened, and one of the great disappointments her mother had been unable to hide was that no one at Eagle Lake had stood up for John. And now he was here again, behaving as though nothing had happened; it was astonishing. Katie thought of Lulu, sitting on the dock crying. She remembered the T-shirt David had found in the Falcon: Hawaii. Something had happened that night. It was not true that Lulu had fabricated the whole thing.

“Look, Dad. Since you didn’t testify, why don’t you tell me what happened? Just, like, tell me everything, okay?”

Waving a hand at her dismissively, he took another bite of his sandwich. He wasn’t meeting her eyes. “Nah, let’s not go down that road. Let’s talk about something else, this awesome television, for example. Hell, prices have gone down since I’ve been gone.”

He took a tiny step forward as though he’d lost his balance and closed his eyes for a second too long. Katie wondered whether his glass was really filled with water.

“What happened after the dance, Dad? Why was Lulu’s T-shirt in your car? Can you tell me that?”

“Ack, Lulu’s shirt,” he said. He turned his head toward the front window, where they both heard a buzzing noise, a kind of muted rattling. The sound was rain, pecking at the gravel. “I thought you said you read the transcript. It’s all in her testimony.”

Katie leaned forward. He was most forthcoming, she realized, when she framed the question as a way for him to tell his side of the story. It was possible he could still say something that would help her understand, something that would prove to her he was not a bad man. She wanted to give him that chance. “Why don’t you just tell me? What happened, Daddy?”





39

Charlie was at the piano playing some Joplin tune and called over to John to get her cigarettes, which she’d left in the Falcon. The square dance was over and most people had left. He could tell a storm was brewing; the air was so sticky, yet there was a kind of electricity running through it. When he got to the parking lot behind the club, he discovered that the car wasn’t where he thought he’d left it. He spotted it at the far end of the lot, top down, under the basketball hoop in the pitch black. As he approached, someone jumped up from the back seat, vaulting over the door and running into the woods. He stopped and stood still for a second, listening. There was the rustle of the woods, but something else too.

It was too dark to really see much. A gray shape materialized in the back seat—a dog or something, not a human. It became paler as he neared, until it was the white of bare skin: it was a person on hands and knees, and the sound was the sound of crying.

John took three long gulps from his drink and wiped his hand across his mouth. “Lulu,” he said.

She was almost naked. When she saw him, she screamed, an involuntary animal cry. “She was looking for her T-shirt. She’d been in there with that kid, that Brad guy. They’d been fooling around, and she’d taken off her T-shirt, and she couldn’t find it. She was flipping out, just beside herself.”

He told her don’t worry, he told her to wait, and he ran to the lost and found near the sheds and grabbed an old T-shirt from in there, something dry and not too musty. When Lulu emerged from the car, she was crying so hard she was hiccuping, her whole body jerking back and forth, she was so upset. He put his arms on her shoulders, just her shoulders—nowhere else—and he didn’t know she would do it, but she leaned into him heavily, and he couldn’t push her away, so he hugged her, like he would hug Katie or some other child. He patted her on the back, and she hugged him hard and then calmed down a bit.