Now came the hardest part of the story Forrest recounted in his letter to me.
Regina was still breathing at this point,he wrote.Jilly remembers that part. Her mother even spoke to her. She just didn’t make much sense. Regina told Jilly to go away. She told her not to tell anyone what she saw.
“You weren’t supposed to come in here,” she said.
So Jilly left. She picked up the bear and got out of there. When she got back to the water, we were still lining up the boats. She started to cry, and I came over to comfort her. But Jilly never said what had happened at the house.
When she kept crying, and shaking, I thought she was just tired and cold. I said she didn’t have to go in the canoe with her brother if she didn’twant to, but she insisted. I think she wanted to pretend what she saw in her mother’s bedroom never happened.
Later, of course, when the rest of us found out, Jilly felt this terrible guilt that she could have saved her mother, if she’d just told me. She lived with that for years. Right up to the day she came to visit me here. All this time she’s been holding on to that story, not telling anybody.
I knew what that felt like. I’d done the same.
I guess her brother had his story too,Forrest wrote.You must have recognized that Hayward had a thing for you that summer. I knew he was leaving you all those funny presents, but I figured it was just puppy love. Then I got all tangled up in that Brenda business, and I stopped paying attention to anything else.
Hayward must have snuck into your room, Frances. He knew you kept some kind of diary. A journal. He figured out where you hid it.
No doubt he read every word without understanding that sometimes what a person writes in a journal is a far cry from what actually happened. It probably made him nuts, reading what you wrote.
The picture came to me then, of Hayward as he’d been that summer. His body, softened from too many bags of Cheez Doodles. That one blue eye peering in at me through the hole in the boathouse wall as I touched myself.
After Regina died, when the police came, they found your journal in his room.
Writing about the journal, all those years later, Forrest displayed no anger or reproach for the stories I’d made up. That was like him. Judged as he’d been all his life, Forrest Emerson was never one to judge anyone else.
What you wrote should have been kept private,he wrote.Those were your secret thoughts. They should never have been read out loud in a courtroom or taken as proof of some kind of inappropriate relationship going on between you and me. A person should be free to write down anything she wants. You could never have dreamed your words would end up being read out loud at a murder trial.
He was right about that. Not in my worst nightmares.
You were always a special girl to me,he wrote.Of course I loved you, but not the way they made it sound.
I guess I just wished you were my daughter. Or maybe I just wished your father was doing a better job of being your dad.
I sat at my kitchen table, reading the note. I had fixed myself a cup of tea, but I hadn’t taken a sip. I realized I was weeping—the first time I’d done that since the night of Regina’s death.
What I want to tell you is this,Forrest wrote. We all contributed to what happened that night. It wasn’t just you telling Regina what you saw going on between Brenda and me.
It wasn’t Jilly, not letting me know Regina looked like she was in bad shape while we might still have been able to save her, or Hayward stealing your private journal and letting the police get their hands on it. Maybe those things contributed to their ideas about me as some messed-up guy who was putting the moves on a fourteen-year-old, in addition to fooling around with somebody else’s wife. Maybe none of it made any difference.
The truth is that Regina had big problems long before you came to Wonderland that summer. Her sister’s death had something to do with it, for sure. So did the way their parents raised the two of them. A woman who decides to kill herself for the express purpose of sticking her husband with a murder rap—to punish him for having an affair—is not a woman who was OK before that.
Now came the part of the letter where he spoke of the person whose name he had never mentioned before. It seemed to me his handwriting changed at this point. I could almost feel how tightly his hand must have gripped the pencil as he wrote her name.
Regina told me once that all her life she’d wished Camille was dead. Then Camille died—
Camille.He’d finally spoken of her. It was all such a long time ago now.
I can’t tell you to forgive yourself, Frances,he wrote.I can only tell you that I forgive you.
I hadn’t even known it, but I’d been holding my breath as I read his letter. Now my lungs filled with air.
I’ll put it differently. You never needed to be forgiven. None of this was your fault. You just landed in our lives at an unfortunate moment in time. I’m not saying Hubbard, New Jersey, is the greatest place for a girl to spend the summer. But you would have done better sticking around there instead of falling down a rabbit hole called Wonderland.
If anyone needs to apologize,he wrote,it’s me.
He signed his letterLove, Howie.
I read that letter three times. When I was finished, I folded it and put it away. I felt no need to read the words again. I’d taken what I needed from them.
