The House Across the Lake(23)

First floor.

The kitchen.

I swing the binoculars away from Boone in time to see Katherine dressed in satin pajamas and staggering into the kitchen like she has no idea where she is.

I know the feeling well.

Hands running along walls, floors spinning, reaching for chairs that are only two feet away but feel like twenty.

Watching Katherine throw open kitchen cupboards, searching for something, I’m overwhelmed by a sense of familiarity. This is me on many, many nights. Different person. Different kitchen. Same drunken reeling.

Katherine finds what she’s looking for—a glass tumbler—and drifts to the sink. I nod, pleased to see she also knows the importance of hydration after a night of drinking.

She fills the glass, barely taking a sip before her attention drifts to the window at the sink. Katherine stares straight ahead, and for a sliver of a second, I think she’s looking right at me, even though that’s impossible. Like Boone, she can’t see me. Not from the other side of the lake.

Yet Katherine keeps her gaze fixed in my direction. It’s not until she touches her face, sliding her fingers from cheek to chin, that I understand.

She’s not looking at me.

She’s examining her reflection in the window.

Katherine stays that way a moment, drunkenly fascinated by what she sees, before returning to the glass of water. Tipping it back, she empties the glass and refills it. After a few more thirsty gulps, she sets the glass down and leaves the kitchen, her gait noticeably more assured.

The kitchen light goes out.

I turn once more to the Mitchells’ dock, hoping for another glimpse of Boone. To my disappointment, he’s no longer there. While I was busy watching Katherine, he got out of the water, grabbed his towel, and went back inside.

Bummer.

Now it’s just me and the darkness and the bad thoughts rolling like the mist off the lake.

I tighten the blanket around my shoulders, finish my beer, and get up to fetch another one.





The worst part about drinking too much—other than, you know, drinking too much—is the morning after, when everything you gulped down the night before comes back to haunt you.

The steady drumbeat of a headache.

The churning stomach.

The bladder close to bursting.

I wake with all three, plus a sensitivity to sunlight that borders on the vampiric. It doesn’t matter that the long row of bedroom windows faces west, ignored by the sun until early afternoon. The brightness pouring through them is still enough to make me wince the second I open my eyes.

Rolling over, I squint at the alarm clock on the nightstand.

Nine a.m.

Late for lake life. Early for me.

I want to go back to sleep, but the headache and roiling stomach and gargantuan urge to pee pull me out of bed, into the bathroom, then downstairs to the kitchen. While coffee brews, I wash down an Advil with a glass of tap water and check my phone. There’s a joke text from Marnie—that atrocious poster of a kitten dangling from a tree branch that reads, Hang in there!

I reply with a vomit emoji.

There’s also another text, this one from an unknown number. I open it, surprised to see it’s from Katherine Royce.

Sorry about last night.—K.

So she remembers what happened by the fire. I wonder if she also recalls stumbling into the kitchen at midnight. Probably not.

No worries, I text back. Who among us hasn’t passed out in a stranger’s yard?

Her reply arrives instantly. It was my first time.

Welcome to the club.

On my phone, three dots appear, vanish, reappear. The telltale sign of someone debating what to text next. Katherine’s reply, when it finally arrives, is succinct: I feel like shit. To drive home that point, she includes a poop emoji.

Need some coffee? I text back.

The suggestion earns a heart-eyed emoji and an all-caps YES!!!!!

Come on over.

Katherine arrives in the wood-paneled powerboat, looking like a fifties movie star at the Venice Film Festival as she pulls up to the dock. Cornflower blue sundress. Red sunglasses. Yellow silk scarf tied under her chin. I get a pang of envy as I help her out of the boat and onto the dock. Katherine Royce feeling like shit still looks better than I do on my very best day.

Before I can get too jealous, though, she takes off the sunglasses, and I have to stop myself from flinching. She looks rough. Her eyes are bloodshot. Beneath them, dark purple circles hang like garlands.

“I know,” she says. “It was a bad night.”

“Been there, done that, had the pictures printed in a tabloid.”

She takes my arm, and we stroll up the dock, past the firepit, and up the steps to the back porch. Katherine eases into a rocking chair while I step inside to fetch us two mugs of coffee.

“How do you take it?” I ask through the open French doors.

“Normally with cream and sugar,” Katherine calls back. “But today I think I’ll take it black. The stronger, the better.”

I bring out the coffee and sit in the rocking chair next to hers.

“Bless you,” Katherine says before taking a sip, wincing at its bitterness.

“Too strong?”

“Just right.” She takes another sip, smacks her lips. “Anyway, I’m sorry again about last night.”

“Which part?”

“All of it? I mean, Tom is Tom. He’s constantly putting his foot in his mouth. The thing is, he never means to. He’s just missing that filter the rest of us have. He says what’s on his mind, even if it makes things awkward. As for me—” Katherine jerks her head toward the ground below, where she’d dropped like a sack of flour twelve hours before. “I don’t know what happened.”