The Forgotten Hours(9)

“Okay, well, sure—of course you can stay here,” she said. Katie was beginning to understand what her father’s freedom would mean: people would be taking sides again. It was easy not to talk about your father when he was in prison, but it would be different once he was out. There were reasons for everything, and at some point people wanted to know what those reasons were. She was sure Alden had had second thoughts, and it pained her. Of course her father could stay over if he wanted; she would figure out the Zev issue later. “Stay as long as you like; it’s fine with me, Dad.”

“Well, I’ll be heading to the cabin, living up there for a while. Just until—”

“Really?” she said, looking up from the scuffed toes of her boots. He wanted to return to Eagle Lake? Her grandfather had bought the Big House and the cabin in the late sixties, back when he and Gram and their only daughter had left London. It was where Charlie and John had spent every summer vacation after getting married. They’d first taken Katie to the cabin when she was two weeks old, still shriveled and mewling. Her childhood had been measured in summers at the lake, until all that had stopped for good. She hadn’t been back, not once, since the summer she was fifteen. “Is that . . . did you talk with Grumpy about that?”

“No, I did not talk to him. Your grandfather has no say in this, Katie. He gave the cabin to your mother when he sold the Big House and moved back to England, and she’s got a bunch of our stuff in there. Your mother is letting me use it.” He paused. “For a while, at least. Just till I get back on my feet.”

So they had talked, her mother and father.

“You surprised?” he asked.

“Um, yeah,” she said. “I guess so. I mean, Mum isn’t exactly—”

“She’s been very generous.” John cleared his throat. “So, short notice, I know, but can you go there for me, check it out? Find out about the Falcon too? Your mother says everything’s been locked up for years.” In the background there was a bell, the sound of another man’s voice. Katie knew exactly where he was, and she imagined him in that space, a man waiting to be released into his life again: He stood in a pale-green corridor with pay phones lining the walls. Fluorescent lights (they gave him headaches). The phones were next to the dining hall (he could guess what was for dinner by the smells saturating the air). When the line of waiting prisoners behind him got too long, he’d sometimes have to ring off abruptly. They had spoken nearly every Sunday, with only a few exceptions, for six years. Over two hundred calls.

“Dad . . . I can’t,” she said. “I don’t want to go back to Eagle Lake.”

“Look it, I’m not asking you for much. I just need the water to be running. Is the roof still up, that kind of stuff. It’ll take you a day, max. It’ll be no big deal.”

“No, it won’t, and that’s not the point.”

“Then what is your point?” he asked. There was silence while they both thought their private thoughts. Then he said, “And the car, it’s in the Nicholses’ garage. That’s what Charlie said.”

“I really don’t want to.” She poured herself a shot of warm tequila and drank it down in two gulps. “And I definitely can’t get the car running.”

“Get over it, hon; you’ll be fine. It’s the start of a new era. I still love that place, whatever happened there. Always will.” They said their goodbyes and hung up.

Katie could not think of the cabin tucked into the feathered ferns without also thinking of her old friend. Did her father ever think about Lulu? she wondered. Did he see her caramel summer face, the electric teeth, and that smile, beguiling and brash? Did it not mess with his head to know that was the very same girl who had put him in prison? But he hadn’t once brought up Lulu’s name since the trial. It was almost as though she had never existed—as though, for him, every memory they shared had been erased or had never even happened in the first place. It wasn’t like that for Katie.

She slipped on her jacket and checked the time. On her way to the subway, she kept thinking about the reporters’ interest in her “perspective” as John Gregory’s daughter. Did she have a perspective to offer them, when she had been in the dark for so long, shielded by others and by her own lack of gumption? It was pitiful, really. She realized it might no longer be possible for her to stay mired in her willful ignorance. If she wanted to understand what her role in all this had actually been, she was going to have to buck up and try to find out more about what had really happened.





4

The boys with their sunburned forearms, sinewy muscles pulsing as they move, each contraction casting shifting shadows on their skin. They are jostling for position. A rope hangs down over the water from an ancient maple at the edge of Eagle Lake, its reflection ribboning over the agitated water. It’s afternoon, the middle of August. Kids, young and old, playing in the water, swinging on the rope, kicking out their feet, toes splayed. With the exception of Jack Benson, the boys at the rope are all a few years older than Katie and Lulu.

Jack. He is fifteen or sixteen, tall, hair bleached from hours on the tennis courts, the son of a Manhattan power couple renting the old McGuire house. Summer renters at the lake come and go, but this is the first time in the seven summers Lulu and Katie have spent together that a new boy around their age is in the mix. He thrills them with his searching eyes, his half smile. He spends every day at the dusty clay courts tucked away deep in the backwoods. At Lulu’s insistence, the girls run past him, staring as he slams the ball against the backboard, again and again. They know his habits, when he practices. Sometimes they’ll pass by twice in one day.