Regina was upstairs now. “Those doctor visits always wear her out,” Prudence told me.
“I need to talk to her,” I said.
58
Green Goop
Earlier in the summer, I wouldn’t have dared to approach Regina’s room this way. But we were on the same team now. I was her most trusted confidante, her only friend. I knocked on her door, then opened it.
Regina was sitting on the bed, propped on her special cushion as usual. Her face was covered with thick green goop—some kind of beauty masque, I figured, designed to improve a person’s complexion. The stuff covered her whole face, leaving only her eyes and mouth showing through.
I pulled my chair up alongside the bed. “They did it,” I told her. “On the moss.”
“You have pictures this time?”
I took the Polaroids from my pocket. Three of them. In one, Brenda and Forrest had their arms around each other, her face buried in his shoulder, one of his hands cupping her buttocks. In the next one, they were naked on the ground, stretched out on that amazing moss, and he was kissing her on her stomach. In the third photograph, Brenda was kneeling on the ground in front of Forrest. His back was to the camera. He seemed to have placed his hands on her head. The soundsthat came out of them at this point had been loud enough to drown out the clicking of the camera.
Regina took a long time studying the photographs. Her mouth was drawn tight as a rubber band. This was more than a frown. It was like the kind of mask you’d see at a museum that a tribal warrior might wear when going off to confront an enemy soldier, knowing only one of the two of them would survive. The fact that she had that green goop on created an even more shocking image.
“Did you make a tape?” she asked me. I took the recorder out of my pocket and rewound. Pushed “Play.”
Now came Brenda’s voice.
“She was probably always going to do it sooner or later,” Brenda was saying. “What if we ... you know ... sort of helped her along with things.”
Now came the place on the tape where Brenda was trying to convince Forrest that killing Regina might actually be viewed as doing everyone a favor. Including Regina.Bringing an end to her sufferingwas how Brenda put it.
This was where Regina stopped the tape. She pressed “Rewind” again, to the place where Brenda said what she did about helping Regina along.
“Suppose she showed up dead one day. Considering her past history, nobody would bat an eye.”
I studied Regina’s face as she took in the words.
Now Brenda was laying out her idea about constructing the fake suicide note.
By the time she heard this, Regina was gripping the tape recorder so hard I thought it might break in two. Through the slick green goop, her eyes looked almost yellow. A scene came to me from one of Stephen King’s novels: This was how I imagined Cujo might have looked just before he sank his teeth into the neighbor’s arm. And then his face. But Cujo was a dog. Regina was a person.
At this point on the tape, their voices turned fuzzy and indistinct. I hadn’t noticed this at the time, but a plane had flown overhead right about then, drowning out their voices.
“Where’s my husband while she’s saying this?” Regina wanted to know. Whispering now. She hissed, “What was Forrest doing while this was going on?”
“He didn’t say much.”
This wasn’t a hundred percent accurate and I knew it.
Now comes the hardest part of the story. In fact, I knew the truth. I could have told it to Regina. If I had done that, everything might have gone differently.
I didn’t lie, exactly. But in my recapping of the crucial exchange, I left out one thing. It wasn’t anything either of them said as they stood there together on the moss. It was the look on Forrest’s face.
This was one thing a cassette tape couldn’t record. All Regina took in, when I played the tape for her, were Brenda’s words. Then Forrest’s silence.
I was there when Brenda had put forth her plan. I’d seen his horrified expression when she’d said it. Never mind that he had just finished having sex with this woman. I knew that Forrest would never go along with what Brenda was suggesting.
Forrest was not a murderer. He could never kill his wife, or anybody else for that matter. That’s what he had been trying to say to Brenda. He just hadn’t finished his sentence.
I didn’t tell Regina the most important thing Forrest had said when Brenda laid out her plan.
I love my wife.
