Then one day I opened up the newspaper and there he was inThe New York Times, charged with securities fraud. Around this time, women started coming forward, accusing Hayward of drugging themfor the purpose of sexually assaulting them. He was ultimately found guilty on multiple charges of rape and sentenced to prison, though unlike his father, he’d been able to hire an expensive attorney, who had gotten him out on bail, pending appeal.
The Cabots held on to Wonderland, but except for the occasional weekend, Prudence told me, it sat empty nearly every summer after Regina’s death. What was left of the family came up on Memorial Day and the Fourth of July. Never Labor Day, for understandable reasons.
Jonathan Gleason, my beloved tennis coach and friend, died of AIDS at the age of twenty-nine, the year I turned nineteen. By that time, I’d long since put tennis away. I didn’t even know what became of the Bancroft racquet Jonathan had given me—long out of date by this point, but once my most prized possession.
My mother had a stroke at the age of fifty-one and died two weeks later. I think all those years of holding on to so much bitterness ate away at her heart.
My father finished his novel. More surprisingly, he sold it to a small publisher in Berkeley, California. He called the bookWonderland. In it, he told the story of a couple of boys who grew up almost like brothers in a tenement apartment building in a rough New Jersey town, and of the summer they got jobs at a country club in Maine, where one of them fell in love with a beautiful girl from the other side of the tracks—and, much to her parents’ chagrin, married her. In the novel, the boy saves his beautiful, deeply troubled wife from jumping off some rocks in a quarry in Maine. Wishful thinking, you might call it.
Though my father’s novel wasn’t a bestseller, it sold well enough that he was able to get himself a little condo in south Jersey, where he lived—sober, mostly, with only a couple of slipups—for a few good years before his death at age fifty-nine of lung cancer.
I went to college on a full scholarship and earned a degree in physical therapy, all thoughts of playing tennis long evaporated. I got a job right after graduation at a rehabilitation center for veterans of the Gulf War. As much as I had loved making up stories once, I did not pursuethat secret dream of mine. Those pages I wrote that filled my leatherbound journal the summer I was fourteen (quasi-erotic juvenilia, you might call them) represented my one magnum opus. You could say I lost my focus, my hunger maybe—that’s what Jonathan had called it—or simply my faith in myself.
Those ninety-two days at Wonderland—the hours I spent out on the tennis court, and hitting alone against the backboard until close to midnight, refusing to stop until I’d returned five hundred shots in a row without missing one of them—I had known, briefly, what it felt like to be in charge of my own destiny. When I fired a tennis ball over the net, I felt strong and worthy, without needing anyone’s approval, and it didn’t even matter if a girl with a closet full of tennis outfits, whose mother was on the board of the country club, called my shot out when it wasn’t. I knew who I was and what I was capable of. I felt powerful.
But in another way, what I experienced over the course of that Wonderland summer was a terrible abuse of my own power.
You could say that I brought about the ruin of Forrest Emerson’s life. You might even say I’d led Regina Emerson to kill herself as an act of revenge against her husband. He had betrayed her, alright. And I had betrayed him. For that I could never forgive myself. Because of that, I believed I had no right to happiness or joy. For a long time, I lived without much of either.
99
You Weren’t Supposed to Come in Here
Just two times over the years that followed my Wonderland summer, I communicated—briefly—with Forrest Emerson. Sometime around my thirtieth birthday, I sent a letter to the correctional facility in Maine where he was incarcerated.
It was a short note. I wrote to say I was sorry for whatever role I may have played in bringing about his conviction for Regina’s murder. I did not go into the details.I would give anything to change what happened,I wrote.I don’t expect you to forgive me.
Ten more years passed before I heard back from Forrest.
Then one day, a long friendly letter arrived, written in pencil, the return address featuring a string of numbers that identified its origin as a correctional facility. In his letter, he wrote about his activities at the prison. As a man who’d always been good at picking up unlikely skills (fly-tying, outrigger construction, harmonica playing, magic tricks, tree house design), he had become intimately acquainted with the contents of the prison library.
I probably know every book in that place by this point,he wrote.I’ve read more of them than you might think. The interesting thing is that, for once in my life, if I start something, I finish.
It took me three years, but I got throughMoby Dick. Though as always, what I love even more than reading is working with my hands. I’ve gotten pretty good at carpentry. I build stools for the children of some of the guys here. Every one a little different, with their name carved on the top. They’re always a big hit.
In this letter, Forrest wrote of his sorrow over what had become of Hayward and his regret that he hadn’t been around during some crucial years to guide his son to a better path.
When a kid loses his mother at age twelve,he wrote,and they send his father away, and he spends his teenage years with a couple of stiffs like Suzanne and Colson Cabot supposedly looking out for him, it’s not surprising he loses his way. My daughter did a lot better. She found herself a nice partner. A woman! Maybe her old man didn’t leave her with the highest opinion of men. She and her wife have twins.I guess this makes me a grandfather!
For a long time there, Jilly didn’t want to see me,he wrote.Then just a couple of months ago, she showed up here. Best day I can remember.
She told me something you should know. She’d been keeping it secret all these years. Then her own kids got to be the age she was when everything fell apart, and I guess she decided it was time to stop pretending.
When I got to this point in Forrest’s letter, I took a deep breath. I knew I’d read the rest, but I had to take a moment first. I had done all I could, all those years, to keep from revisiting that night.
You must remember when we were all running around, trying to get the boats lined up for the regatta, and it was taking so much longer than I’d intended,he wrote.What I didn’t know was that in the middle of it all, Jilly had decided to go back up to the house.
Jilly had this habit of going into Regina’s room just to sit on the bed, to be around her mother, even if Regina was sleeping. It’s funny. Regina always thought the children didn’t care about her, when the truth was, all Jilly ever wanted was for Regina to pay attention. That Saturday she’d climbed the stairs to her mother’s room to show her the certificate she’d earned for her entry in the Rice Krispies recipe contest. Regina had been sleeping, as usual,so after a while she’d gone downstairs again to join the rest of us down by the water.
I took Forrest’s words in slowly, the way a person does when she’s reading a horror story—Stephen King, maybe. You know something bad is going to happen. You’re preparing yourself for it. Part of me wanted to put down the letter, knowing what came next. But I kept on reading, of course—that neat and oddly still-familiar handwriting. No evidence of spelling errors now.
Evidently Jilly had left one of her toys upstairs in Regina’s room. You probably remember that talking bear of hers that drove us all crazy. She wanted to bring her bear down to the water. She went back in the house, up the stairs to Regina’s bedroom to get it.
The door was closed, but she opened it. Regina was on the bed. Nothing so unusual about that. As you know, Regina spent a lot of time in that bed. But even to Jilly, young as she was, something looked different about her. Also, she was wearing that negligee. This wasn’t usual for her.
So Jilly went up to where her mother was lying. Regina’s arm was dangling off the edge of the bed, she told me. She knew something was wrong.
I guess she said something to Regina. Then she yelled in her ear to wake her up.
