The Missing Hours Read online

  And now Edie was against her, too. Her sister’s text was ice cold. A text she’d send to a colleague: we have to be careful about germs. What was she saying? Was she saying Claudia was dirty? Sick? How could she know she was suddenly, possibly, both?

  She considered calling her father. He hadn’t actually been around any more than her mother during her childhood, but he knew how to really listen—as a music producer, that was basically his job. Claudia’s parents met at a party on the Lower East Side in 1993, four years after Gabriel Castro moved three thousand miles away from Fresno to a city he’d only seen in movies. Both sides of his family had been in the San Joaquin Valley for generations: immigrants from Portugal and Armenia mixed with lapsed Mormons and Oklahoma farmers blown west by the Depression. His parents were high school sweethearts: Dad, Robert, was the only son of a widowed recruiter stationed at the naval air base in Lemoore; Mom, Brenda, grew up working the counter and measuring feet at her parents’ shoe store. Vietnam called, and Robert found out Brenda was pregnant when she wrote to him at basic training. When he came home, they got married and Robert got a job as a mechanic at a private airport on the northwest side of town. But his son Freddy didn’t know him and neither did Brenda—not anymore. Their marriage lasted five years; six months after Gabe turned two, Robert moved out.

  The boys didn’t see their dad often—he moved around, taking jobs out of state, living with roommates and sometimes in motels—but when they did, he was sober and kind and he taught Gabe how to play the guitar.

  At school Gabe spent lunchtime in the music room, where he fiddled around on the piano enough that the band teacher agreed to give him formal noontime lessons. He picked up drumming and a little bit of bass. Both Castro boys were popular: They were handsome, polite, and made good grades. Freddy was the athlete—football, baseball, water polo—and Gabe the artist. He played at weddings, birthdays, and graduation parties. Junior year, he and some friends formed a band that played gigs up and down Highway 99, from Sacramento to Bakersfield. They once opened for a band that had opened for the Pixies. A guidance counselor who’d grown up in New Jersey suggested Gabe apply for scholarships back East. NYU and Boston College offered him full rides; Claudia’s dad chose NYU because New York seemed like a better place for a musician.

  And he was right. The school’s music department had state-of-the-art studio equipment, and by the beginning of his junior year, Gabe had a meeting with Russell Simmons, who’d heard him spinning at a party in the SoHo loft of one of his wealthy classmates. For the next nine months, instead of going to class, Gabe spent his days and nights in a Greenwich Village recording studio, writing and playing and mixing and smoking weed and having the time of his life. By twenty-one Gabe had laid most of the tracks that would become his first hit record. At twenty-two the money started pouring in, and at twenty-four he had a girlfriend with a modeling contract and ancestors who had come over on the Mayflower. By twenty-seven he had two Grammys, his own SoHo loft, and a baby on the way. A town house and another daughter came a few years later; more world tours and nights in the studio and awards ceremonies and now he was a single grandfather at fifty. With Edie up in Poughkeepsie and her mom now living in an apartment in the West Village, Claudia was the only one who sometimes stayed in Gramercy with her dad—and he wasn’t doing well.

  Which was why Claudia decided not to call him. She needed someone steady and maybe it made no sense but the steadiest person she’d met in ages was the boy from down the hall with the cross around his neck. So she stayed inside for the next four days while the purple and red faded from her face. Trevor brought her food and they ate together and sometimes they watched something on Netflix. He was easy to talk to, just like her dad.

  On Thursday, Ben texted:

  will I see you saturday?

  are you pissed?

  i don’t want to celebrate without you

  As usual her ex’s texts generated a range of emotions. She felt relief: He still wants me. Annoyance: Why do I still care? And anger: If they’d been together over spring break like they’d planned she wouldn’t have been hammered and wandering around the Village last Friday night. But when Ben—and apparently everyone else in the universe—saw the clip of Rich Kids the previous week, he got moralistic and disinvited her from the protest for immigrant rights he and some friends were going to in D.C.

  “That’s not the Claudia I know,” he’d said sadly. They were FaceTiming, Ben in his dorm at Bard, Claudia in her Gramercy bedroom where she stayed most weekends. “I just can’t believe you let them put that out there.”

  “I didn’t let them,” she said.

  “You must have signed something.”

  She had, but when she walked into the party and scribbled her name she hadn’t considered that there would be cameras in the fucking bushes. She’d had no idea she’d become a plot point.

  “I didn’t know,” she said.

  “It makes you look like a slut.”

  Claudia felt that word in her stomach. In her knees and her feet. Ben had managed to convince her to “open” their relationship when he left for college the year before. We’re too young to commit sexually, he’d said. We should explore. He insisted it had nothing to do with love. He insisted it would strengthen their bond. They’d come back together because they wanted to, not because they had to. He held her hand as he said all this, looked into her eyes, and stroked her hair. No one can replace you in my heart, he said. What could she do? He gave her a book about polyamory, but it was a bunch of bullshit. What if someone saw her reading it? They were supposed to create ground rules as a couple—radical honesty, no hooking up with mutual friends—but Ben broke them all, and all they did was fight. He told her she’d understand when she got to college. He told her the “mores” were different. And now he was calling her a slut.

  “Fuck you,” she said.

  “I said it made you look like a slut,” said Ben, feigning hurt. Like this was all so painful for him. “Honestly, I thought you’d understand. This trip should be about the kids in cages. We don’t want anything to distract from what’s going on with those families.”

  And now he wanted her at his birthday party. Claudia put down her phone and curled up on the dorm bed. She didn’t have to decide now if she would go. She could ignore him; she could run away. She could buy a plane ticket to Hawaii. Or Iceland. She could sink into hot springs, sleep under an umbrella in the humid shade. She could check into a spa in Arizona. She could take an Uber to the airport and be at the house on the Vineyard by tonight; she could walk down to the docks and feel the salt and wind in her hair. But she’d have to get out of bed. She’d have to gather up her belongings into a bag. She’d have to. Have to.

  Claudia woke up a few hours later. The sun was setting and the room was lit with a hazy pink light. What had she been thinking about when she fell asleep? The reality show. She wanted to be angry, but shame felt more honest. Maybe she was a slut. And who was ever going to believe that the Rich Kids slut did anything but ask for it? Whatever it was. Maybe she did ask for it. Maybe she begged for it. How would she ever know? Dust motes swarmed in the stale air and Claudia suddenly felt that if she didn’t escape they would poison her. They would sink into her skin and sedate her and she would fall asleep and never wake up. Sunglasses, phone, wallet, jacket, shoes. She knocked on Trevor’s door and he answered.

  “Wanna go on a boat ride?” she asked.

  Claudia hailed a cab outside the dorm and Trevor slid in behind her.

  “South Street Seaport, please,” she said into the bulletproof glass. In all her years taking random ferry rides around the city, she’d never seen anyone she knew on the Circle Line. People she knew chartered boats or had their own. Claudia’s mom had grown up sleeping in the cabin and diving off the bow of a fishing yacht named Annabelle. The boat was named after her mother’s grandmother, but after Michelle’s parents died in a plane crash, the lawyers sold it. Connecticut senator Owen Whitehouse and his wife, Helen, died to
gether on Labor Day 1988. They were headed back to D.C. from Martha’s Vineyard in a private plane and there was fog.

  The Whitehouses left their only child, sixteen-year-old Michelle, an enormous fortune. What Claudia’s mother sometimes described as “fuck-you money.” And Michelle was ready to say a lot of fuck-you’s. A young photographer who had seen a photo of her at the funeral reached out through the family attorney—She’d be perfect for a fall spread I’m doing for Vogue—and whisked her away from the sad, empty house and her suddenly tentative friends. A few months later she quit school and for the next five years, as she tells it now, Claudia’s mom went hard. She never divulged details—“way too much drugs and partying” or, if she was in a certain mood, “I was the definition of a hot mess”—but sitting in the cab with the lingering sting in her eye, it occurred to Claudia that underneath those throwaway phrases were probably some horror stories. Had her mom ever woken up like she had on Saturday? How many times?

  The taxi TV started its loop, too loud, with a ten-second advertisement for a Broadway show that featured people in bird costumes, their wings and feathers flapping across a stage. It was A MUST SEE! A TRIUMPH! The commercial ended and a male news anchor with a hairline as defined as a freshly poured sidewalk began to speak:

  “The Subway Slasher has struck again. Police say another victim was attacked early Sunday on an F train near the Thirty-Fourth Street station. The twenty-nine-year-old male is in stable condition at Bellevue Hospital.”

  The picture cut to police tape and flashing lights.

  “I can’t believe they haven’t caught him yet,” said Trevor.

  “Will you turn that off, please?”

  “Sorry,” said Trevor, pressing the screen. “It’s hard to get any quiet in this city.”

  “That’s true,” said Claudia. She looked at him. “Where are you from again?”

  “Ohio.”

  “Have you ever been out on the water?”

  “No.”

  “It’s quieter out there.”

  Claudia watched Trevor watch the city as they bumped and stalled their way down Bowery to the edge of the island. He was taking it all in, eyes alive; scanning and inputting sidewalks and skyscrapers and smoke shops and stoplights. He sat at attention while she slumped back.

  “Are we going to the ocean?” he asked.

  “Not quite. The harbor is where the East River and the Hudson meet. You have to go out pretty far to get to the actual Atlantic.”

  “Oh.” He sounded disappointed. “I’ve never seen the ocean.”

  “Really?”

  “I keep meaning to take the subway to Coney Island. That’s the Atlantic Ocean, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Have you ever been there?”

  “To Coney Island? A couple times. The beach is a little gross.”

  “Oh? Some kids from my church went there for a baseball game right at the beginning of the year and said there was a whole amusement park and restaurants and stuff. Anyway, me and my roommate keep trying to go, but our schedules are kind of opposite.”

  “You’re friends with your roommate?”

  Trevor nodded. “He’s different from me but he’s really cool.”

  “You know my roommate, too, right? Whitney?”

  “Yeah.”

  Claudia was pretty sure they were hooking up, but if he wasn’t going to bring it up, she didn’t need to. Not really her business. She got the sense Whitney disliked her; maybe Trevor was being polite, not passing along any gossip she’d shared in their sweaty dorm-bed sessions.

  The driver let them off at Fulton Street. Claudia looked up at the board in the ticket office on Pier 6 and saw that a ninety-minute tour circling the Statue of Liberty left in fifteen minutes. She bought two tickets.

  “I used to come here a lot when I was a kid,” she told Trevor as they walked along the boardwalk. The scent of salt water and rotting seaweed, the squawking gulls, the wind. Did she feel a little bit better? Yes. She did. She breathed in through her nose and let her mind go backward. “Our nanny’s boyfriend sold souvenirs and she used to bring us to visit him. She never wanted to actually go out on a boat, but we’d beg her and sometimes she said okay.”

  She and Trevor presented their tickets to the bored Circle Line employees standing at the entrance to a rope maze that led to the boat.

  “You want a picture?” said one. He held a comically large camera. “It comes with.”

  Almost in unison Trevor and Claudia said, “No, thank you.”

  They walked up the clanging gangway and onto the boat. A fat tour guide was splayed in a folding chair, holding a microphone at the front of a mostly empty row of seats, talking about the currents.

  A horn sounded when they got to the upper deck and the water began to churn beneath them. Claudia put her chin on the railing, its chipped green paint shiny from the grease of a million hands, and watched as the photographer on the pier lit a cigarette. He got smaller and smaller. The temperature dropped and the breeze picked up, tossing her hair across her face. She let it. Trevor said something, but she didn’t catch it.

  “What?” she asked.

  He smiled. “I’m not sure I’d call it quiet out here.”

  It was true. The roar of the motor and the rush of the wind created a high-decibel ambient noise.

  “You’re right.”

  “I see what you mean, though,” he shouted. “It’s a different kind of loud.”

  The boat slowed as they passed the Statue of Liberty. On the island, tourists milled around the pedestal like ants. Trevor snapped a few photos.

  “Doesn’t really do it justice,” he said, looking at the pictures he’d taken. “But my dad will think it’s cool.”

  He was trying to be friendly; trying to draw her out. She should allow herself to be drawn.

  “So,” she said, “you go to church?”

  “Yeah. Everybody at home was sure I’d get ‘distracted’ in New York and end up partying all the time, so my dad made me promise I’d join a church when I got here. Kind of a ready-made group of friends.”

  “Like a fraternity,” she said.

  “But coed. And they take anybody.”

  On the way back to the dorm, in a cab again, Claudia asked Trevor if he’d go with her to Ben’s party on Saturday night. He agreed, and the next morning she realized that she didn’t have a dress or pair of heels at the dorm. She Googled Prada’s Spring Runway, clicked through, and found the rose-colored romper with bell sleeves she’d tried on a few weeks ago at the store on lower Broadway. Hopefully it was still in stock in her size. A few more clicks and she had two shoe options, a bag, a jacket, and three possible necklaces.

  A man answered the phone at the store: Yes, of course, Miss Castro My pleasure, Miss Castro. We’ll messenger them over right away. Thank you so much.

  On Saturday night, she showered and put on the new outfit. She doubted anyone would comment on an especially heavy makeup job, and Trevor had come up with the idea to say she had an allergic reaction to mascara if anyone asked about the redness in her eye. I can pull this off, she thought. What could be more normal than Claudia bringing a new guy to make Ben jealous? But when Trevor showed up at her door he looked like a waiter from Chili’s. Cheap plaid shirt, tan pants, and tassled loafers. Her friends were going to eat him alive.

  TREVOR

  A couple hours before he was supposed to meet Claudia for her ex’s party, Trevor came back from the library to nap and shower. As he walked from the elevator to his room he saw a kid with a guitar strapped to his back knocking on Claudia’s door.

  “Hey, you know Claudia, right?” asked the kid.

  “Yeah.”

  “Is she around?”

  “I guess not if she isn’t answering.” Trevor had seen him on their floor but didn’t know his name. “Did you text her?”

  “Yeah.” He looked frustrated.

  “You okay?” asked Trevor.

  “Your friend’s kind of a bitch, du
de.”

  Trevor narrowed his eyes, an unfamiliar, and uncomfortable, aggravation flaring inside him. “Fuck you,” he said.

  In the shower, he wondered what it was going to be like when everybody else came back from spring break. What was he to her? What did she need from him? Was he going to tell every dude who called her a name to fuck off? Trevor put on the best shirt and pants he had. Claudia had stressed the club had a no-sneakers policy, which didn’t leave him much choice. Still, his wavy hair was cooperating, his fingernails were trimmed, his face was shaved and smooth. He even smelled good: soapy clean and just a dab of the cologne his high-school girlfriend had given him for his birthday last year. All his life he’d been told he was good-looking, and he knocked at Claudia’s suite feeling confident. But when she opened the door Trevor knew he’d made a mistake agreeing to tag along. Claudia Castro was so far out of his league he might as well have been playing a different sport. She was his height now, standing in the dorm room doorway in the kind of high heels there were entire genres of porn dedicated to. Her long tan legs literally gleamed beneath a miniscule silk dress. She looked like a movie star; she practically was a movie star. If they hadn’t literally collided in the hallway last weekend she’d have graduated without ever knowing his name.

  “You look great,” he said.

  “Thanks.” She touched her hair. “I think this is the first time I’ve worn a bra in a week.”

  Outside the dorm, Claudia hailed a cab.

  “Didn’t you say the party was on Ninth Street?” asked Trevor. “That’s only six blocks.”