87
Touched for the Very First Time
Up at the house now, I checked the kitchen first. The ruined chocolate cream pie was gone. Maybe Regina had thrown away what little was left of it.
I climbed the stairs to her room. I tapped lightly on the door and called her name. No answer, but I figured maybe the fireworks—still exploding—drowned out my voice. I called out to her again, louder this time. When there was still no answer, I pushed the door open and stepped inside.
Regina was lying on the bed with her hair fanned out on the pillow, no blanket covering her. Instead of the sweatpants and T-shirt she’d been wearing when I’d seen her earlier that night, she was wearing a negligee—silk, probably—so sheer you could see the outlines of her body underneath, making visible every rib and the dark circles of her nipples on her tiny breasts. One thin arm was draped across her chest. The other hung down over the side of the bed.
Her eyes were open. So was her mouth.
I ran back down the stairs, down the hill, past the crying children and the last of the guests in the remnants of their soaked costumes. I ran straight to Forrest. I could barely breathe.
“It’s Regina,” I said.
The ambulance arrived: flashing lights, men carrying medical equipment, followed afterward by a stretcher with a still form over it, a blanket covering the form underneath. Prudence had taken the children somewhere—to her house, probably—so swiftly that Jilly’s precious American Girls and the rest of her toys remained lined up in their doll-sized chairs along the edge of the dock, facing out to the water as if awaiting the next act in the show.
The few party guests who hadn’t left yet were crying. Mostly they just disappeared as quickly as possible once they got wind of the news. Forrest had gotten into the back of the ambulance with Regina’s body. Through the window in the back of the ambulance, I caught sight of his face for only a moment as he took his place next to the stretcher, still wearing the fake mustache and beard. The ambulance pulled away. I was alone.
Not surprisingly, nobody had remembered about me. I knew I should cry. I wished I could cry. But a terrible feeling of numbness had overtaken me.
Alone now, I went back inside the house. All around were untouched platters of food. Hours since I’d last eaten anything more than a few spoonfuls of Boston cream pie, I reached for a miniature lobster roll. Then another. My favorite food, or one of them, anyway. I tasted nothing.
I did what I’d seen my father do then. For the first time in my life, maybe, I understood why my father did what he did, why he kept pouring himself another drink, knowing it would never lead to anything but trouble, and still unable to stop himself. I poured myself a glass of the only alcoholic drink I knew anything about. Vodka. I hated how it felt on my lips, but I didn’t care. I drank it down.
As much as I can remember, I sat there for a long time, though it’s hard to know how much time passed. I thought about Jacqueline du Pré and Maria Callas and my mother. Every heartbroken woman I’d ever heard of, most particularly Regina. Also my own self.
I put on Madonna.
The pirate hat lay on the floor. Forrest must have thrown it off at some point as he was racing up the stairs to Regina, after I’d come to get him. Now I put the hat on. I guess I was dancing.
Still numb—and drunk, no doubt—I played that CD all through the night. It was still playing when I saw the lights of the taxi pulling up to the house. It must have been early morning by that time. Like a dead man, Forrest walked in, still wearing the pirate costume, though the mustache had come off and at some point he’d buttoned his shirt.
“There was nothing they could do,” he said. He put his arms around me, or maybe it was I who put my arms around him. We were two desperately sad people offering each other whatever comfort we could. Which wasn’t much.
88
Morning After
Imust have fallen asleep at some point. When I woke up—morning now—my head was throbbing. A deep red circle stained my thousand-thread-count sheets. In all this time I still hadn’t managed to locate a sanitary napkin.
There are occasions when something terrible has happened and you wake up the next morning and for a moment you don’t remember what it was that happened the day before. The not-remembering part only lasts a few seconds, and when it passes, and it comes to you what you’d forgotten, it’s as if you have to live through the terrible discovery all over again. For a moment, I thought I’d dreamed the whole thing. Only I knew I hadn’t.
From the stairs, as I approached the kitchen, I heard voices. One was Forrest, who probably hadn’t slept at all that night. The other was my father, who’d just pulled in after driving almost eight hours through the night from New Jersey to pick me up. I could tell from the sound of his voice as he greeted Forrest that he hadn’t heard the news.
He was saying something to Forrest about a tollbooth and a song that came on the radio as he was crossing the border into Maine that reminded him of a time when the two of them had hitchhiked to the Catskills with a couple of girlfriends and someone’s pet bird.
Forrest interrupted him. “Hank,” he said.
Even my father, as absorbed as he generally was in the events of his own life, must have recognized something on Forrest’s face.
“Oh god,” my father said. “Regina?”
The two of them were sitting at the kitchen counter. Forrest had his head in his hands. My father had his arm around him—the kind of gesture I’d been the recipient of from him only once or twice, myself, ever.
“I know you loved her, Howie,” my father said. He was Howie again. He’d never stopped being Howie, was the truth.
89
