“Nobody’s blaming you for anything,” the police officer told me. For a few minutes there, he had sounded like the principal at my school when you got called in for detention. Now he was nice again. He sounded like someone who felt genuinely bad about all I’d been through. He passed me a box of Kleenex. They’d probably taught him to do this at police school.
“I’ve got a daughter about your age,” he said. “We all know you’re young. We just need you to help us. Concerning this Brenda, for instance.”
“She’s a terrible person,” I said. “She said some awful things. I thought Regina should know about it. To protect her.”
“It won’t be difficult to locate Brenda,” he said. “We’ll be speaking with her, I have no doubt.”
This was the moment I could feel myself giving up. There was no way of figuring out anymore which things to say to help Forrest and which ones would only get him in more trouble. By this point, I’d already observed how some of the things I’d said, hoping to make him look better in the eyes of the police officer, ended up having the opposite effect.
Maybe it would be better to lay it all out. The main thing was that Forrest hadn’t killed Regina. It seemed to me at the time that maybe the best strategy was to explain the whole story so the police officer would understand.
“Brenda told Forrest that Regina would probably kill herself someday anyway,” I told him. “She told Forrest they should encourage her to do that.”
“And you told Mrs. Emerson about this?” Officer Reynolds said.
I nodded. “But Forrest wasn’t ever part of that,” I told the officer. “When Brenda said she wanted to kill Regina and make it look like she killed herself, Forrest didn’t go along with it. He got mad at her.”
“So Brenda and Mr. Emerson were carrying on some kind of relationship?” he asked me.
“I guess you could say that.”
“And where did this take place?”
“There was this patch of moss,” I said. Among other locations.
A deep wave of weariness came over me. More than that, exhaustion. I’d barely slept the night before. I had a hangover. Nothing I told Officer Reynolds came out the way I meant it to. Everything I said made it worse. I was still bleeding. Regina was dead.
I couldn’t try anymore. Didn’t care.
Officer Reynolds placed his hand on my shoulder. “You must be hungry,” he told me. “Have some M&M’s.
“And when you told Mrs. Emerson about Brenda’s idea that she and Mr. Emerson should ‘encourage’ Mrs. Emerson to take her own life, what did Mrs. Emerson have to say?” he asked me.
I had no response to offer him. The blood had soaked through the wad of toilet paper. My blue jeans would have a stain in the back now. Out in the hallway, my father, who always said the wrong thing even when he hadn’t had a drink, was probably telling one of the other officers about the time he and Howie stole their high school mascot, a stuffed bobcat, and set it on some railroad tracks. For some crazy reason, I heard the voice of Teddy Ruxpin repeating that one dumb sentence, over and over.Can you be my special friend?Jonathan, beside me on the service line, reminding me to breathe. Madonna, singing about being touched for the first time.
“Just because Forrest and Brenda had sex,” I said, “that didn’t mean he wanted Regina to die.”
I’d said it now. Maybe I hoped that once the words were out, Officer Reynolds would stop asking all these questions. Maybe I thought I’d feel better to have it out and finished. But I only felt sicker.
“I think I have to throw up,” I told him.
91
Somewhere in Maine. A Diner.
It was hours later when they finished with us at the police station. On our way out of town, I asked my father to stop at a drugstore so I could buy sanitary napkins. I didn’t care anymore that they weren’t as cool as tampons. I didn’t care if the person at the cash register looked at my face as I bought them and knew what it meant that I was doing this. Even if the cashier was a boy, or a man, I didn’t care about that either.
We were heading back to New Jersey now. It occurred to my father that we hadn’t eaten anything for a long time. Before hitting the Maine Turnpike, we pulled into a diner in some little town. Not a town like Lake Catherine. The kind of town we were more familiar with, where people drove old cars and played bingo at the VFW hall. Or went nowhere, more likely. The kind of place where people like us would live if we lived in Maine instead of New Jersey.
There was a family at the next booth over: a father and a mother and three kids—a couple of them were teenagers, one who looked close to my age. I noticed them because they looked happy. They looked like one of those normal families that go out for pancakes on a Sunday afternoon, and afterward, go to a ball game or something. Or they just hang out and don’t worry about much.
There was something about this family that made it hard for me to take my eyes off them. Even at a moment like this one—after spending three hours being interviewed by a police officer in the aftermath of Regina showing up dead—I couldn’t help looking at them.
It sounded like they were talking about an exhibition Red Sox game in which one of the New York Mets had hit five balls over the wall in a single night. I didn’t understand what they meant when they called it the Green Monster, or any of the rest of what the son and the father were talking about in the booth next to ours. I just liked the sound of their voices, the easy, comfortable way they talked to each other. The parents’ backs were facing me, but the way the mother had her hand on the father’s arm made me know these two people liked each other.
Across from them, the younger son was making a stack out of sugar packets and trying to knock them down by blowing on them with his straw—just the kind of dumb, pointless thing a kid his age would do. He looked happy and normal too. Not like some boy who’d stick a picture of Michael J. Fox over the drawing of a naked man that he’d ripped out of a sex book and put it in the bike basket of somebody who didn’t even like him.
I tried to imagine I was sitting in that other booth instead of the one with my father. Now he was lighting a cigarette.
