The Forgotten Hours(93)

Katie could barely breathe. She had been fast asleep, and this had happened. And Lulu still felt it was in some way her own fault. “You don’t have to explain. It wasn’t for you to say yes or no. You didn’t do anything wrong, Lu.”

“When he was convicted, that was a fucking shock if ever there was one. That the jury—all those people—they believed me.”

“I believe you,” Katie said, clamping her hands together in her lap to stop them from shaking. She had come to listen, and she was going to hear Lulu out, as awful as it was. “And I’m really sorry about it, all of it.”

Lulu looked at her levelly, and there was no triumph in her eyes, no relief or gratitude. It was the same look she’d given Katie in the courtroom: stripped bare, untextured. “For a while, I thought it was right that your dad should be punished,” Lulu said. “They sent me to this therapist . . . and she made me see it all differently. And I started to think he was a sicko—that being nice to me like that, it was all so he could get what he wanted, not because he actually liked me. She made me realize that it wasn’t really about me at all.”

“I get it,” Katie said. She flexed her fingers and clenched them tight again. “Everything was always all about him. Right up until the very end. Kind of incredible.”

Lulu’s face fell. “I can’t believe he’s actually dead, Katie. I feel like it’s my fault.”

“Lu, no. Really. This is something I’ve thought long and hard about. My dad brought all of it on himself. Nothing made him get in that car.” She paused. The violence of her anger was tempered by grief that the man she’d loved was gone, and she’d learned that she had to hold those two feelings inside her at once. “You know how much I loved you, right? I thought you were perfect—I wanted to be you. Good things happened too.”

Lulu brought her hand up to her mouth again and pulled at the nail of her thumb with her teeth. “Mom told me a million times she wished you and I’d never met, but I don’t,” she said. “I didn’t wish for that, not once.”

Just a week after the accident, when Katie was still in the hospital, the Boston Globe had run a huge story on the way individual states handled the issue of consent, in particular the varied length of sentences that convicted rapists ended up serving. Her father was cited as having been given one of the longer sentences in the Northeast in the past decade, due to the age difference of thirty-one years between him and the victim. Anonymously, Lulu was quoted as saying, “I didn’t even know it was rape till I told a grown-up.” And then, as a side note, the article mentioned that shortly after his release, John Gregory had been killed while driving intoxicated.

After her mother showed her the clip, Katie had known Lulu would probably read it, and when she felt a little better, she’d tried calling her again. That time, the pall of a death hung over them as they stuttered into their receivers, and they had been more willing to sit with the silences. Now here they were, finally breathing the same air, and Katie had the sudden sensation of aging a year for every second that passed, as though she were morphing into an old woman, the same way the woman outside had shrunk and aged as she’d approached.

“Do you ever wonder about how things could have been different?” Katie asked as she got up to leave. “If we’d done just one thing differently that night? Like made one decision that would’ve changed everything?”

“I don’t know,” Lulu said, frowning. “I think I’d have ended up in the same place no matter what. But I guess it’s different for you.”

There was nothing Katie could say to that. In a way it was different for her. She had lost her way without doing anything. She’d always been convinced that she was to blame, and in a way she was, but not in the way she’d thought.

For years the Gregorys and Lulu had been like a series of interlocking concentric circles, all shifting and jostling against each other, and everywhere they turned led to the same place. It wasn’t like that just for Lulu; it was like that for Katie too: there was no going back and straightening it all out, creating a beginning and an end, a path that led somewhere different. All she knew was that since her accident and her father’s death, she saw the world in a different way, through a wider lens. Before, she’d been running so fast that the edges of her vision were blurred; now life was rendered in sharp detail, its crisp outlines sometimes nicking the tips of her fingers as she felt her way through. But it was a good kind of pain, one she was learning to bear.

As she drove back to the city, to the apartment in Bushwick that she shared with Zev (the one they’d finally decided on, because he could make a studio out of the enormous concrete block garage out back), she fiddled with the dial on the radio until she found a classic-rock station. She rested a hand on the mound of her belly. It would be the last time she saw Lulu, and that was all right. She rolled down the window, cranked up the music, and began to sing, quietly at first, then louder. Her voice was far from perfect, but she discovered that she knew all the words to the songs, and that felt good.





EPILOGUE





2024


The sea is calm after days of wind-whipped waves, and the turquoise waters are so clear she can see there are no rocks below, no hidden outcrops that will injure her. But the will it takes her to allow herself to fall is almost more than she can summon. She stands at the cliff’s edge, her tanned toes curling over the rock, for a very long time. At first Zev encourages her, and then, seeing that she will do it—she will jump—he falls silent and watches.