I swung my racquet case over my shoulder then and headed out to my bike.My last ride,I said out loud, only to myself. My last everything at Wonderland. As I made my way to the rack of bikes, Regina called out to me. “I have something for you!”
I turned around. She stood there in her little print dress, skinny as ever, of course, but alert in a way I had never seen her before. She didn’t appear happy, exactly, but she definitely looked excited. A person might even have described her as wired. Now she was running toward me.
Regina running. I’d never seen her do this.
“I don’t want this to be our big goodbye,” she said. “But we’ll have so much going on tonight, and then there’s your father’s arrival ...”
Don’t remind me,I wanted to tell her.
“So I thought I’d give you this now.” She handed me a small package, wrapped in tissue paper that I recognized as having been recycled from a gift someone had given Jilly recently.
“I finished it last night,” she said. “Knowing you were leaving this weekend. Something to remember me by.”
As if I’d forget.
The moment she put the package in my hands, she turned around, heading back to the house. I got the impression Regina would prefer that I open her present when she wasn’t around. Expressions of emotion were never easy for her.
After she left, I stood there for a moment. I remembered the small folded-up item Hayward had placed in my bike basket. He’d placed it there and then disappeared. Like his mother, it appeared he preferred that I open whatever it was he’d put in the basket at a time when he wasn’t around. Maybe he didn’t even want me to know he was the one who’d left it there for me.
Two unknown offerings awaited my discovery that morning. Which to examine first?
I reached for the paper Hayward had set in my bike basket and unfolded it.
It was a page ripped fromThe Joy of Sex—an illustration featuring one of the more surprising positions in the entire book.
The image had been altered. In the place where the faces were—the woman and the bearded man—Hayward had glued a couple of pictures around the same size, but cut out from a magazine. I recognized which one: my July issue ofSeventeen. For the man’s face, he’d substituted the smiling, clean-shaven face of Michael J. Fox.
For the woman, he’d chosen the picture of a girl also featured in the magazine. From my close examination of this issue (I’d basically memorized it), I recognized this girl. She was not one of the models. She’dwritten an essay they published about why she didn’t smoke marijuana. The least cool girl in the entire issue.
You could have said this girl bore a passing resemblance to me. He’d glued this picture onto the body of a woman on all fours, with large full breasts and thighs, rear end jutting out to meet the penis of the man now bearing the face of Michael J. Fox.
Written across their bodies in marker, four words:
You want toFuck?
I couldn’t move. I was still holding Regina’s package. Assuming whatever it was she’d made for me carried a more benign message, I felt glad I’d saved this one for last. I thought of that scene in theSleeping Beautymovie I’d loved as a child—the Disney version that Forrest and Regina had taken me to at a drive-in when I was little (my parents not being the type to take me to the movies, let alone a drive-in). It was the scene where the evil fairy bursts into the christening of the baby princess and puts a curse on her. The good news being that one more fairy remained at the christening that day, who had yet to offer her gift. She’d chosen to cancel out—or lessen, anyway—the harshness of the curse with a benevolent gift of her own. This would be what saved Sleeping Beauty. This was how I viewed the still unopened package from Regina now—as my one chance at undoing the curse of Hayward’s terrible offering.
I unwrapped Regina’s package. It took me a moment to understand what this was, though I recognized what it was made of. Mohair.
It was a piece of knitting, roughly five inches square, made from the yarn I’d seen looped over her knitting needles all that summer. At first I thought it was some kind of a hat maybe, or a scarf, but this item was smaller than that. Regina’s gift to me was more along the lines of a pot holder. If pot holders were made from white mohair yarn.
I stuffed it in my racquet bag and set out for the court.
80
Secret Admirer
Igave little thought to Regina’s gift. She had made me something odd, but all her gifts to me over the years had been strange. There should be no surprise that of all the things Regina might give me, she chose a white mohair pot holder.
It was that morning’s other offering that occupied my mind. Then it came to me as I was pedaling up the hill, the truth that Hayward’s sickening collage revealed.
All those weeks I’d been finding little presents next to my cereal bowl. Heart-shaped rocks. Flowers. The tiny beautiful body of the dead hummingbird. All that time I’d believed it was Forrest who’d left them for me, and that they served as proof that in spite of everything, Forrest still thought about me. Forrest still held me in his heart.
Now I knew: It wasn’t Forrest who’d been thinking about me on all those mornings, or Forrest who’d left me the strange little gifts. It was Hayward. The heart-shaped rock, the butterfly wing, the shell, the dead hummingbird; they weren’t love offerings after all, or if they were, the love was being offered by a person whose interest and affection I considered completely unwelcome.
Those gifts weren’t a testament to anyone’s love for me. Maybe it was more accurate to say that those little gifts I’d looked forward to—and found—over most of the summer were just evidence of a sick obsession. Nobody needed to explain to me what an obsession looked like, or the things it made a person do.
81
