I could have said,Like everything.
“The usual,” I told him. Why say more?
45
Stakeout
Here was our plan. Regina’s plan. I was simply the one implementing it.
Recognizing that it would be impossible for me to follow Forrest when he set out on his bicycle, or swam—least of all times he took off in the Porsche—I would not attempt to follow him. I’d stake out places he was likely to turn up and wait there in the hope that he and Brenda would turn up eventually.
I wouldn’t run the risk of having them notice me as I followed him. I’d already be there when they showed up.
Because she knew her husband so well, Regina had drawn a map for me, laying out the places that seemed to her the most likely spots where he and his lover might meet up for their rendezvous.
“Check out all the places on the map,” she told me, as if doing this were no different than carrying out any of the other instructions she typed up on her daily list for me.
This felt like a tall order. There was a lot of outdoors to explore with only my yellow bicycle to get me there.
“One thing you should know,” she said. “You’ll probably need to do some bushwhacking. Try not to poke your eye out.”
I didn’t say anything, but something in my expression must have revealed to Regina how unhappy I was about my assignment.
“It won’t be that bad,” she said. “Spending a little time in nature will probably be a good idea for a New Jersey girl.”
She thought I was just worried about mosquitoes and prickers, but it wasn’t that. Maybe I worried that I wouldn’t ever manage to find the two of them together. Maybe I worried more that I would.
46
The Good Kind of Obsession
Meanwhile, I kept working with Jonathan. I was getting better every day. The passion I brought to the sport probably had something to do with how totally unrelated it was to the mess going on at Wonderland, and the deep uneasiness I felt in my role to secretly spy on a man I’d loved all my life. What happened on the tennis court took me away from all that. That was the thing I loved best, probably. When you were trying to hit a ball, you couldn’t think about anything else. With a racquet in my hand, my mind was like a stretch of open water on a windless day—no waves, no boats even, no swimmers. It was all about me and the ball.
I believed him when he told me I was a natural. I felt it. When I thought back to those times when I used to sit on the edge of the court, watching Olivia drag herself lackadaisically through her lesson, chewing her gum, taking ten-minute Coke breaks and giggling every time the ball went into the net—I had to smile. She had missed out on so much. She just didn’t get the beauty of the game. I almost felt sorry for her.
It was right around this point in the summer—just at the moment when Regina laid out my new job, performing detective work—that Jonathan laid out his own plan for me.
“I want you to play in the Junior Girls’ Tournament at the club, Labor Day weekend,” he told me. “I wouldn’t have believed a player so new to the game would be ready, but you are. There’s no way to move forward without challenging yourself in a real match.”
I’d never played in a competitive match. Then again, I’d never performed surveillance on the father of the children I was babysitting, on behalf of their mother. I felt equally unprepared for both assignments.
“You’re ready for this,” Jonathan told me. “You may be a little rough around the edges, but if you bring your best game, you can beat any one of those girls. The way you serve, it’s like you put everything that ever happened to you into that swing. You’ve got the best junior serve in the club.”
“Those girls have been playing for years,” I told him.
“That’s true,” he said. “But they’re just country club girls. They don’t have your hunger.”
I could have told him no. If I’d said that, he would not have made me play in the tournament.
But I wanted to play. More than that, I wanted to win.
I made a calendar on the back of one of Regina’s notes to me and circled the date. My first tennis tournament. My last weekend at Wonderland.
47
Getting to Five Hundred
It was one of those days in which I had no time to get to the court, between my responsibilities at Wonderland and (more so) my new role as a private eye. All afternoon, I’d kept my eye on the clock, hoping an hour would open up when I could bike over to the club and hit balls against the backboard—maybe Forrest would take the kids out to play mini golf with him, or one of their friends would call up to invite them over—but the hours crawled along without a break. I could feel my body getting restless. I longed to move my feet, stretch my arm over my head for a serve, race to the net to return a shot, then back to the baseline to receive whatever Jonathan sent my way next.
