The Forgotten Hours(88)
Katie recoiled. The immensity of it, the warped logic, hit her.
“So what did you do?” Zev continued. “How did you help her?”
Irritation clamped down on John’s face, and he stood up. “I’m talking to my daughter,” he said. “No one invited you here. In fact, why don’t you just leave?”
“You’re talking to me,” Zev said, a sharp resolve in his eyes. “And I’ll go when your daughter asks me to. Katie, you want me to go?”
“No, don’t. Please stay,” she whispered. “And then, what then, Dad?”
John was swaying, still staring at Zev. His skin shone with a sickly sheen.
“I can tell you this,” he said, trying to talk slowly and clearly. “I can tell you I sure as hell didn’t do anything I deserved to go to jail for.”
Zev and Katie’s eyes locked, confirming what they’d both heard. Tears clouded Katie’s vision so that she saw her father as though he were no longer whole, body parts bobbing in a murky lake. She remembered then that first day of summer as she had watched him make his way through the water while Lulu had raced after him. She imagined gathering her old friend up in her arms, pressing her close: This was wrong, so wrong. You deserved better. I’m so sorry, Lulu.
“Oh my God,” she said. “Let’s go, Zev.”
But her father grabbed her wrist, his fingers sticky against the naked skin, squeezing too hard, and she cried out. Zev pushed himself between them, making John stumble backward into the couch and fall on the carpet. “Just, just who . . . who do you think you are?” he panted, lifting his head, struggling to get up.
Katie yanked open the front door. The sound of the pouring rain was like flies inside her ears. She could barely breathe. She and Zev ran toward the Datsun. As Zev yanked the car into reverse, her father stumbled from the house and came toward them, still in his shirtsleeves. “Wait,” she said, putting a hand on Zev’s, and he pressed on the brakes. She opened her door, the whoosh of cool rain covering her cheeks. “Daddy, what are you doing?” she shouted.
Her father climbed into his car. When the engine roared to life, Katie tumbled from the Datsun and ran over to him, knocking sharply on the pane. He rolled the window down a fraction. “Of all people! I never, ever thought you’d be a turncoat,” he shouted, his eyes blind like glass. “My little Katie!”
Water streamed into the neck of her shirt, down her spine. Underneath her feet the gravel began to shift and swim in the river of rain. “What are you doing? You can’t be driving!”
“Stop telling me what to do,” her father yelled, jamming the car into gear. He jerked forward, but the Datsun was in the way.
Katie ran behind the car, put her hands on the trunk, and screamed, “Wait! Just wait a second!” Banging the trunk with her hands, desperate. Hitting it again and again. “Stop!”
The car trembled beneath her palms as her father yanked it into reverse, and she pushed into it as though through the force of her will she could stop him from moving, and Zev was running toward them and her foot slipped on the tumbling gravel and she flew backward, knocking her head. Her legs shot forward. The car emitted a dreadful, high-pitched shriek and jerked backward, and she screamed as loud as she could, but he didn’t see her—he couldn’t see her—and the Falcon didn’t stop.
40
It was warm and wet and there was an ice pick or a knife in her leg and people were everywhere. People touching her. Hands on her body, clothes ripping. A voice she knew, hands she didn’t. Things were happening very fast, but she didn’t understand. How could you bully a body like this and yet be so gentle at the same time? How could it be warm, like being in a bathtub, like being a baby, and yet pain was sparking through her body, a star shower of pain, a whole constellation blowing up?
And she tried, tried so hard to remember: Did he leave? Did he keep driving?
She thought he did. She tried to sit up, to tell someone, but all those people, they were not listening to her.
A man with graying hair was crying. He kept saying, “She’s pregnant!”
The blinking lights were bothering her, but she couldn’t turn away from them. Her shoulder was in some kind of contraption, her head as heavy as a block of granite. Like Morse code, the lights blinked and blinked some secret message she could not decipher. She was supposed to be at work; she had to get up and get dressed! She was never late—they would fire her, they would find someone else, and then what would she do? A hand pressed on her other shoulder, very lightly, a delicate touch that shot her entire body through with pain. “Stay still; you’re not going anywhere. Calm down, honey.”
When her body relaxed, it felt as though someone were lying right next to her, a body stretched out along the edges of her own, defining her and holding her in place. It couldn’t be real (or there would be pain), but it was comforting: the softness of thin cotton, dark, silky hair on warm skin. Deep inside herself a sense of calm spread like syrup, soaking into the recesses, smoothing out the rough corners.
Time became a waterslide and then a stagnant pool. It was feathers in the wind and an airless room. A hare and a toad. Inside her, the life she had had and the life she now lived became steam that scalded her lungs, but it was also cool water that gave her goose bumps. She tasted blueberries and felt the sun on her feet and remembered laughter—so nice! She wanted to stay there, in the laughter, but they wouldn’t let her. People she didn’t know were moving her, pushing her around. Why couldn’t she just stay in that moment in time and be surrounded by that life-sustaining, joyful laughter that made the whole world slip away, that turned time to dust? That made you happy just to be alive?