An odd little smile flashed across Regina’s face. Not one to smile often, she did this now less with an expression of pleasure than with wry amusement. She looked like a person who’s been on this train before and knows where it’s heading.
Forrest’s eyes remained fixed on Brenda. This was a different gaze from the one with which he looked at Regina as she instructed him on the correct method for barbecuing salmon or the one with which he looked at me when he asked me about school or friends or the music I listened to or my views on the existence of God. The way he looked at Brenda was more like how a dog gets when you take a steak out of the refrigerator and set it next to the grill.
Kyle Barnett seemed oblivious. He was studying the Red Sox game through the window, soundless on the big-screen TV. But Regina hadn’t missed a thing.
“I hate to be rude, but I’m not feeling so well. I need to go lie down,” she said. “Don’t let me break up the party.” She rose slowly from her chair and headed toward the stairs.
The Red Sox must have scored a run just then. From where he sat, Kyle Barnett let out a celebratory yelp.
“I’ll help you clear away the dishes,” Brenda told Forrest. Under normal circumstances, with Prudence off, this would have been my job, but the two of them disappeared into the kitchen. In the TV room, I heard the children arguing about who got to choose the next show. I figured I’d better check on them.
The voices of Forrest and Brenda were still coming from the kitchen. I couldn’t make out what Forrest was saying, but whateverit was, an annoying machine gun sound followed from Brenda. Her version of laughter.
Then silence, and all I heard was the sound of the ball game. A few minutes later, the Barnetts were gathering their things—Brenda’s summer wrap, a bottle of whiskey Kyle had brought over and seemed to feel entitled to bring home with him. (Even I understood this wasn’t how it worked at Lake Catherine.)
I went to the kitchen to finish loading the dishwasher. I could make out Brenda’s voice as she stood in the doorway, gushing over something else. (The doormat maybe. Or the light fixture? The crackers?) “We have to do this again sometime,” she said. “Tell Regina I hope she feels better soon.” Then they were gone.
There seemed to be nothing so unusual in any of it. Except for the look I’d seen on Forrest’s face. As little as I understood about life at that point, it struck me that Regina may have been well acquainted with that one.
20
The Locked Door
It came to me, as I made my way down to breakfast, that there were lots of secrets in this house. Every day when I came down the stairs, I passed the padlocked door at the end of the hall and the forbidden room behind it. I knew that this was not a topic to bring up.
I kept thinking about the look on Prudence’s face when I’d asked her about the room and she’d told me—with unprecedented sharpness—that I should leave that one alone, the same warning Hayward had delivered that first night I’d arrived, when I reached for the doorknob on the mystery room.
There were all those pills, and the care with which Forrest oversaw their use. The look on Regina’s face when, during the Barnetts’ visit, Forrest had brought up a time Regina used to play doubles tennis down at the club. The look on Forrest’s face after he said this. This was a forbidden topic evidently. One of many.
I had my own secrets too, of course—all the things I wrote down in my journal that never exactly happened. I just wished they had. My secret feelings for Forrest, which went beyond the affection a girl feels for an old family friend. And the unopened box of tampons lying in my drawer. What would happen to me if I never became a woman? What would happen to me if I did?
Then there was Forrest’s story, and in some ways, this one felt the most mysterious of them all. The man I had known and loved for as long as I’d been alive, the one with whom I’d always been able to talk about almost anything, had seemed to me like the most loving husband a woman could ask for, devoted to his family, and in particular, to his wife. Then I’d seen what happened to him when Brenda Barnett walked in the house—the way he’d looked at her on the patio, the way his eyes had followed her out the door. I’d seen the way Forrest charmed women at the country club, but this was different. That had felt like a game, a dance. What I’d witnessed, watching Forrest’s behavior when he was with Brenda, felt totally different. As if an unprotected electrical wire dangled down from the ceiling, giving off sparks.
I was up in my room at Wonderland now—eyes fixed on the milkmaid wallpaper, my bluebird rug, my small blue desk. My capacity for constructing stories had been unleashed, and I let myself go to another place. If I couldn’t uncover the secrets in this house, I could make up stories whose resolutions I’d invent.
I pictured myself grown up. Eighteen at least. Possibly twenty. Beautiful at last—slim, but not scrawny like Regina. It would be summertime. No longer a mother’s helper, I was back at Wonderland.
In the story I constructed, Jilly and Hayward were away someplace—boarding school probably, or (this being summer) camp. Prudence was absent. No need for her now.
It was just Forrest and me alone together. Just the two of us on the boat, motoring off toward the sunset, pulling up to the island he’d pointed out to me—the one owned by Regina’s family—only this time, we’d dock the boat and step off onto the land, lay a blanket down for the two of us.
I had a new picture to add to the story I dreamed up now. I imagined the two of us playing tennis. Forrest, tanned and golden. Me in a white tennis outfit, returning every shot he hit. And after our game(unclear who won), the two of us would share some kind of fancy drink together at the clubhouse. Paper umbrellas in the glass. His arm over my shoulders.
You were amazing out there,he’d tell me.
I never knew it could be like this,I’d tell him. (Like what? I didn’t know, actually. As much interest as I possessed in what happened between women and men, when they fell in love with each other, or simply got into bed, I understood just about nothing of what it was they actually did about that.)
Now Forrest is unbuttoning my shirt,I wrote.
I could see him doing this. He would undo the buttons one at a time, slowly and reverently, looking into my eyes as he did so.
He takes his time.
Rewind. I liked the scene better another way.
He rips off my shirt. He can’t keep his hands off me.
“Do you have any idea how long I’ve been waiting for this moment?” he asks me.
