All Regina had to go on was the recording. And for Regina, the recording told a whole other story.
That day, as I stood in Regina’s bedroom, presenting my detailed but dangerously incomplete report on what transpired on the island earlier that afternoon, I couldn’t have known the consequences of my omission. I just knew that Regina was angrier than I’d ever seen anybody, ever—and this was me, a girl who’d seen her mother throw a potof spaghetti at her father. All I knew was that something major had been set in motion, and I was the one responsible for making that happen. I let Regina believe that her husband was conspiring with his lover to kill her and make it look like a suicide, because doing this contributed to my sense of power. I—a girl who’d never gotten to call the shots—was now a key player in a big drama.
People were paying attention to me now. I wasn’t going to be invisible anymore. I felt important and powerful, like I was the one driving the train for a change. I felt big.
Then I just felt sick.
Does it make any difference that as swiftly as I made the decision to leave out Forrest’s horror at Brenda’s words, I realized what a huge mistake I’d made? Is it any less terrible knowing I tried to correct the impression I’d allowed Regina to buy into, that her husband was ready to go along with the murder plan?
I knew I had to correct the false impression I’d left her with. But it was too late now. Regina was no longer listening. She was off in another world now, like a person struck by a big wave and sucked into the undertow.
“It’s not what you think,” I told her. “He didn’t go along with her idea.”
It was too late to undo what I’d done. Regina’s face was twisted into a mask of so much rage that even without the green goop she would have been unrecognizable. She was wailing. She was writhing on the bed, so there was green goop on her linen sheets and her silk bolsters and all the rest of it. She was raking her goop-covered fingers through her hair, so there was goop there now too. She was moaning. Not the way Brenda had moaned earlier that day on the island, on the moss with Forrest. This was more like a loon witnessing an eagle swooping down to attack.
The green goop was all over the place now—her hair, her sheets, her arms, her neck. It was as if a whole class of kindergarteners had come over and decided to do finger painting in the bed, as if Regina’s brain had been overtaken by some kind of weird virus, like rabies, that made people go into fits where they stopped making sense anymore.
“Regina,” I said. “I need to explain it better.
“He said some nice things about you,” I said, but she wasn’t listening. She couldn’t take in anything. “He said he loved you.”
But Regina was in some other place now. She kept shaking her head back and forth and writhing on the bed as if she were having a seizure. She buried her face in her hands. Never mind the green goop. Never mind any of it. She had buried her face in the pillow. Goop was everywhere.
I wanted to lean over and touch her head. I wanted to put my arms around her. I wanted to do something to stop her, but she didn’t seem to know I was even there anymore.
She couldn’t take in my words. She couldn’t take in anything. She was wailing too loud.
“Forrest didn’t agree with her idea,” I said. I was yelling, just so she’d hear me, but it didn’t matter at this point. “It was just Brenda that said those things. Not Forrest.”
“Go away,” Regina screamed. “I don’t want to hear anything anymore.”
I tried one more time. “Please,” I said to her. “If I could just play you the tape another time. You can tell he didn’t go along with her.”
“The tape? This tape? You think I want to hear that fucking tape ever again?” She yanked the cassette out of the machine and stuck her knitting needle into the place where a thin strip of brown recording tape was exposed. Stabbing it with the needle, she yanked it from its plastic housing. She threw the tape recorder across the room.
She lay there very still for at least a minute while I knelt on the floor to retrieve it. When she finally spoke, her voice was soft but deadly. Her eyes were so dark it was as if she had no pupils.
“Well, there’s one good thing,” she said. “At least now I know where I stand.”
Seeing her as she was at that moment, I wouldn’t have wanted to be on the wrong side of Regina for anything in the world. Her voice was a low whisper.
“I will destroy him,” she said.
59
Countdown
It was the middle of August when I paddled the canoe out to the island and delivered the news to Regina of what had happened there. Twenty-three days remained in my Wonderland summer. It would all draw to a close with the Labor Day weekend triathlon and the Emersons’ annual end-of-summer party with the famous fireworks display Forrest personally orchestrated every year—no expense spared. Though nobody but Jonathan and I knew the next part, this would also be the weekend of my first-ever participation in a juniors’ tennis match at the club. Just a little more than three weeks until I had to go home to New Jersey. I dreaded this.
You might have thought the drama swirling around Forrest and Brenda, and Regina’s response to their affair, would have cast a shadow over everything else going on in my life that summer. No doubt it should have had this effect. Chalk it up to my being not quite fifteen years old, or naive, or simply too involved in my own situation to understand fully anyone else’s. But after that time with Regina—the green goop incident, as I thought of it—I carried on with my life.
I was accustomed to drama, for one thing. More than once, my father had smashed a wine bottle on the counter or thrown a glass against the wall. An entire shelf-full of bottles, one time. The year I wasseven, the only time we ever got a Christmas tree—an event that thrilled me—he’d lifted it up off its stand on Christmas morning (who knew why? Was there ever a good reason for a father to upend a Christmas tree in front of his seven-year-old daughter?) and threw it out the window.
Many times, my mother had gotten in the car, tearing down the street so fast I could hear the tires screaming all the way down the block. She always came back, but I had considered the possibility that one of these days she might not. If so, left with only my father, I would have had to be in charge. Then what?
One time when I was home alone with him, my father got so drunk he fell down the stairs and I thought he was dead. One time my mother put a gun up to her head and told us she was going to kill herself.
So for me, the idea of Regina and Forrest’s marriage falling apart and the two of them going to war (or Regina going to war with Forrest, anyway; Forrest wasn’t the war-making type) wasn’t all that out of keeping with the rest of my life. The hardest part had been recognizing how little a role I played in the family that had meant the world to me.
