Someone Moved the BBs
The plan was for Forrest to pick the children up from Prudence’s house later that morning, once he pulled himself together. He’d need to explain what happened. As if anyone could.
The celebration dinner for my last night at Wonderland was canceled, of course. “Frances and I should get out of your hair, Howie,” my father told Forrest. He didn’t argue. Regina’s parents were driving up from Hilton Head. Having to deal with the presence of one low-life from New Jersey was probably enough for them.
Forrest headed out to get Jilly and Hayward. No time for goodbyes. My red Samsonite suitcase was packed. My father carried it down to the car.
“Take one more look around the house in case you forgot anything,” he said.
I considered theJoy of Sexbook I’d stolen the night before from the boathouse, which I hadn’t placed in my suitcase yet. I thought about Hayward, but not the Hayward who’d ripped out the page of the book, just one day earlier—how was this possible?—and left it for me with that sickening note. For a moment there, to me, Hayward was just a little kid whose mother was dead, and a big wave of feeling sorry for him came over me. Then I saw Hayward’s blue eye, looking in at methat day as I studied one of the illustrations of the now familiar couple making love and touched myself.
What came to me, remembering this, was not anger toward Hayward so much as sadness for him. Like me, he was probably still struggling to figure out sex, and bodies, and what people were supposed to do with each other—besides roll around on poison ivy with someone else’s wife. Only now, in case that wasn’t enough, his mother had killed herself.
Hayward wasn’t a bad person. Like me, Hayward was just trying to figure sex out. Sex and everything else. No big surprise, he hadn’t found any answers. Neither had I.
I put the stolen copy ofThe Joy of Sexback on the boathouse shelf. One summer, a few years from now, Hayward might go looking for it himself. Jilly too, though at this point that was harder to imagine. Jilly was just a little girl. It occurred to me that those were the same words Forrest had used just one day earlier to describe me.
I would have liked to say goodbye to the children, but the truth was, they weren’t going to be thinking about their babysitter at this point. I would have liked to say goodbye to Jonathan too, but my father wanted to get on the road.
I left my tennis trophy in the closet of my room. But I took my racquet.
I was out the door already when I remembered one more thing: the journal with the birds hand-tooled into the leather, where I’d written my most secret and thrilling stories in those first weeks of summer.
After I’d learned about Forrest and Brenda, I’d been unable to write stories like those anymore. Since placing it in that hiding spot under my mattress with the row of BBs alongside the edge to alert me if anyone touched it, I hadn’t written a single one of the crazy sexual scenarios that had filled the pages of the book during those first weeks of summer, back when Forrest Emerson had seemed like the most perfect man in the world. I’d written one rant about how crazy Regina was, and a few entries about tennis. Nothing more.
“I’ll be right back,” I told my father. “I forgot one other thing.”
Upstairs in my little room, I lifted the mattress off the slats of the bed. I reached in to retrieve the beautiful leatherbound book Regina had given me back in June to memorialize what it felt like to be me that summer.
It wasn’t there.
I lifted the mattress higher. Maybe the journal got pushed further back, scrunched up against the wall. But no.
My journal was gone.
90
The Pane Is Unbarable
We couldn’t leave town yet after all. The police wanted to talk with me. Because I was the person who’d found Regina’s body, and because, other than her husband, I was the one who’d spent the most time with her in the weeks leading up to her death, they had a few questions for me.
Sitting in the front seat of our Pontiac, next to my father, I looked out the window at the now familiar landscape: Red, white, and blue begonias lining the drive. My yellow bike parked in its spot. For once my father had turned the music off in the car. No cassette playing. Neither of us spoke.
It seemed pretty obvious to everyone at that point that Regina’s death was a suicide. Everyone knew she’d been depressed for years. Everyone knew there had been pills and doctors and a hospitalization or two. For years they’d heard Regina talk about killing herself.
“It’s just a formality, but we’d like your daughter to answer a few questions,” one of the police officers who stopped by the house that morning had told my father. “Stop by the station on your way out of town.”
They’d found a typewritten note next to Regina’s body. In it, she’d expressed her love for her husband and children, and her parents, and Prudence—even me. The note said how sorry she was. The pain of living had just become too great.
There was just one problem with this note.
The investigator who’d come down from Augusta to assist the local police led me into a small room then. We were alone, just the two of us.
“I know this has got to be hard on you,” he said. “At your age, a girl should be thinking about hanging out with her friends and getting on the cheering squad.”
Not exactly, but never mind. No need to elaborate.
“We understand that Mrs. Emerson chose to use a typewriter when she wrote her daily reminders to the family,” he said. “I get that part. But the spelling in the final note we found next to her body struck us all as pretty unusual. Particularly for a college graduate. I gather she went to one of those Ivy League schools.”
