The two of them were so dazzling, it took me a moment to notice there was another woman in the photograph standing next to the two of them. It took me another moment to understand.
This was also Regina, another Regina, a Regina I recognized. Young, like the other two, and very thin, wearing that same serious expression I knew well. Anxious. A little sad. A little bitter.
There were two of them, then. Happy Regina and Bitter Regina. They had to be sisters.
Twins.
I must have gasped out loud. I knocked the guitar over, which had been leaned against the wall. It made a noise hitting the floor.
“You shouldn’t be in here.” A voice behind me. Prudence. I whirled around to see her in the doorway.
“I left the door open to do a little dusting before we close the house up for the year,” she said. “Regina doesn’t like anybody to come in here besides me.”
“I didn’t know she’s got a sister,” I said.
“She doesn’t.”
“But in the pictures—”
“That was Camille, the younger one. She died in a skiing accident a long time ago. We don’t talk about her.”
Only she did then. I knew, as Prudence told me the story, that she would tell me only once, then never bring it up again. I knew I must never bring it up again either.
“Camille was—oh, Camille was everything,” Prudence said. “Beautiful and funny and always doing crazy things, but you couldn’t ever get mad at her for that. Everyone loved Camille. Even the parentslightened up when she was around, if you can imagine. She could actually make the old man crack a smile.
“Camille and Regina were like this,” Prudence said. She held up two fingers, interlaced. “Regina was the quiet one, but Camille could always make her laugh. When they were little, they’d spend all day up in this tree house their parents had built for them. They would have lived in there if they could.”
“Out in front by the driveway?” I asked her.
“That’s the one Forrest started building for Jilly a few years ago,” she said. “The parents took the old one down years ago.
“You should have seen the two of them out on the tennis court. It was like each one knew just what the other would do and where she’d go before she got there. Their father was so proud. He liked to say those two were unbeatable.”
I said nothing. Asked no questions. I was afraid that if I did, Prudence might realize she was telling me more than she should and stop.
“They were nineteen years old that summer,” she said. “No matter what was going on in their lives, when Fourth of July rolled round, they always came home to Wonderland. Regina was still at Sarah Lawrence. Camille was back from one of her crazy adventures in Spain. She was spending a year abroad, attending a dancing school or something. She had this dress ...
“Regina had been studying physics. That was Regina for you. Always studying. You’d think something happened to those two in the womb. Maybe Regina got the brains, but Camille grabbed every ounce of the fun.
“I was there the night she met Forrest. I’m talking about Camille. The family had dinner at the club that night, and I guess Camille must have taken off her shoes at some point. She got up and started dancing out on the patio.
“When they went home that night, she left her shoes at the club. That was the story. It wouldn’t surprise me if she knew what she was doing. Twenty minutes later, who shows up at the door herebut the dishwasher from the country club. Howie. I’m talking about Mr. Emerson. He wasn’t Forrest yet. He hadn’t ever waited tables before, but that night one of the regular waiters had gotten sick and they’d put him in as a substitute.”
My father had told me about that summer. Their dishwashing job. He just hadn’t mentioned that there were two sisters, not one. He must have promised Forrest he wouldn’t talk about that part.
“We all probably knew that first night what was going to happen between Howie and Camille,” Prudence told me. “I’d gone home by that point, naturally, but I saw it soon enough, when he’d come by the house to pick her up. The way he looked at her. The way she looked back.
“You should have seen those two together,” Prudence said. “You know the expression, ‘sparks flew’? It seemed like they really did.”
After that night, Howie and Camille had been inseparable. They’d go off on walks. Pick blueberries. Who knew where? Together was all. One time Camille got Prudence to fix her a picnic to bring out on the canoe, to the island. They’d stay out there all day. Sometimes they didn’t come home till the next day.
“What about Regina?” I asked. “She must have felt left out.”
“She had to,” Prudence said. “Camille wasn’t all that understanding, being head over heels and all. She practically forgot about Regina. Right before the end of the summer—the Labor Day weekend tennis tournament where they were supposed to compete—the two of them had this terrible fight.”
As Prudence explained it to me, when fall came, Camille had to head back to Spain to finish up her studies. Howie got jobs bartending in town and working at a supermarket. The Cabots hated him, of course. But when they told Camille they’d cut her off if she stayed with him, she said she didn’t care.
The plan was for Howie to save up money all year. When she came back, they were going to take off and get married.
