Green Goop
Earlier in the summer, I wouldn’t have dared to approach Regina’s room this way. But we were on the same team now. I was her most trusted confidante, her only friend. I knocked on her door, then opened it.
I pulled my chair up alongside the bed. “They did it,” I told her. “On the moss.”
“You have pictures this time?”
I took the Polaroids from my pocket. Three of them.
In one, Brenda and Forrest had their arms around each other, her face buried in his shoulder, one of his hands cupping her buttocks.
In the next one, they were naked on the ground, stretched out on that amazing moss, and he was kissing her on her stomach.
In the third photograph, Brenda was kneeling on the ground in front of Forrest. His back was to the camera.
He seemed to have placed his hands on her head.
The sounds that came out of them at this point had been loud enough to drown out the clicking of the camera.
Regina took a long time studying the photographs.
Her mouth was drawn tight as a rubber band.
This was more than a frown. It was like the kind of mask you’d see at a museum that a tribal warrior might wear when going off to confront an enemy soldier, knowing only one of the two of them would survive.
The fact that she had that green goop on created an even more shocking image.
“Did you make a tape?” she asked me. I took the recorder out of my pocket and rewound. Pushed “Play.”
Now came Brenda’s voice.
“She was probably always going to do it sooner or later,” Brenda was saying. “What if we . . . you know . . . sort of helped her along with things.”
Now came the place on the tape where Brenda was trying to convince Forrest that killing Regina might actually be viewed as doing everyone a favor. Including Regina. Bringing an end to her suffering was how Brenda put it.
This was where Regina stopped the tape. She pressed “Rewind” again, to the place where Brenda said what she did about helping Regina along.
“Suppose she showed up dead one day. Considering her past history, nobody would bat an eye.”
I studied Regina’s face as she took in the words.
Now Brenda was laying out her idea about constructing the fake suicide note.
By the time she heard this, Regina was gripping the tape recorder so hard I thought it might break in two.
Through the slick green goop, her eyes looked almost yellow.
A scene came to me from one of Stephen King’s novels: This was how I imagined Cujo might have looked just before he sank his teeth into the neighbor’s arm.
And then his face. But Cujo was a dog. Regina was a person.
At this point on the tape, their voices turned fuzzy and indistinct. I hadn’t noticed this at the time, but a plane had flown overhead right about then, drowning out their voices.
“Where’s my husband while she’s saying this?” Regina wanted to know. Whispering now. She hissed, “What was Forrest doing while this was going on?”
“He didn’t say much.”
This wasn’t a hundred percent accurate and I knew it.
Now comes the hardest part of the story. In fact, I knew the truth. I could have told it to Regina. If I had done that, everything might have gone differently.
I didn’t lie, exactly. But in my recapping of the crucial exchange, I left out one thing. It wasn’t anything either of them said as they stood there together on the moss. It was the look on Forrest’s face.
This was one thing a cassette tape couldn’t record. All Regina took in, when I played the tape for her, were Brenda’s words. Then Forrest’s silence.
I was there when Brenda had put forth her plan. I’d seen his horrified expression when she’d said it. Never mind that he had just finished having sex with this woman. I knew that Forrest would never go along with what Brenda was suggesting.
Forrest was not a murderer. He could never kill his wife, or anybody else for that matter. That’s what he had been trying to say to Brenda. He just hadn’t finished his sentence.
I didn’t tell Regina the most important thing Forrest had said when Brenda laid out her plan.
I love my wife.
All Regina had to go on was the recording. And for Regina, the recording told a whole other story.
That day, as I stood in Regina’s bedroom, presenting my detailed but dangerously incomplete report on what transpired on the island earlier that afternoon, I couldn’t have known the consequences of my omission.
I just knew that Regina was angrier than I’d ever seen anybody, ever—and this was me, a girl who’d seen her mother throw a pot of spaghetti at her father.
All I knew was that something major had been set in motion, and I was the one responsible for making that happen.
I let Regina believe that her husband was conspiring with his lover to kill her and make it look like a suicide, because doing this contributed to my sense of power.
I—a girl who’d never gotten to call the shots—was now a key player in a big drama.
People were paying attention to me now. I wasn’t going to be invisible anymore. I felt important and powerful, like I was the one driving the train for a change. I felt big.
Then I just felt sick.
Does it make any difference that as swiftly as I made the decision to leave out Forrest’s horror at Brenda’s words, I realized what a huge mistake I’d made?
Is it any less terrible knowing I tried to correct the impression I’d allowed Regina to buy into, that her husband was ready to go along with the murder plan?
I knew I had to correct the false impression I’d left her with. But it was too late now. Regina was no longer listening. She was off in another world now, like a person struck by a big wave and sucked into the undertow.
“It’s not what you think,” I told her. “He didn’t go along with her idea.”
It was too late to undo what I’d done. Regina’s face was twisted into a mask of so much rage that even without the green goop she would have been unrecognizable.
She was wailing. She was writhing on the bed, so there was green goop on her linen sheets and her silk bolsters and all the rest of it.
She was raking her goop-covered fingers through her hair, so there was goop there now too.
She was moaning. Not the way Brenda had moaned earlier that day on the island, on the moss with Forrest. This was more like a loon witnessing an eagle swooping down to attack.
The green goop was all over the place now—her hair, her sheets, her arms, her neck.
It was as if a whole class of kindergarteners had come over and decided to do finger painting in the bed, as if Regina’s brain had been overtaken by some kind of weird virus, like rabies, that made people go into fits where they stopped making sense anymore.
“Regina,” I said. “I need to explain it better.
“He said some nice things about you,” I said, but she wasn’t listening. She couldn’t take in anything. “He said he loved you.”
But Regina was in some other place now. She kept shaking her head back and forth and writhing on the bed as if she were having a seizure. She buried her face in her hands. Never mind the green goop. Never mind any of it. She had buried her face in the pillow. Goop was everywhere.
I wanted to lean over and touch her head. I wanted to put my arms around her. I wanted to do something to stop her, but she didn’t seem to know I was even there anymore.
She couldn’t take in my words. She couldn’t take in anything. She was wailing too loud.
“Forrest didn’t agree with her idea,” I said. I was yelling, just so she’d hear me, but it didn’t matter at this point. “It was just Brenda that said those things. Not Forrest.”
“Go away,” Regina screamed. “I don’t want to hear anything anymore.”
I tried one more time. “Please,” I said to her. “If I could just play you the tape another time. You can tell he didn’t go along with her.”
“The tape? This tape? You think I want to hear that fucking tape ever again?” She yanked the cassette out of the machine and stuck her knitting needle into the place where a thin strip of brown recording tape was exposed.
Stabbing it with the needle, she yanked it from its plastic housing.
She threw the tape recorder across the room.
She lay there very still for at least a minute while I knelt on the floor to retrieve it. When she finally spoke, her voice was soft but deadly. Her eyes were so dark it was as if she had no pupils.
“Well, there’s one good thing,” she said. “At least now I know where I stand.”
Seeing her as she was at that moment, I wouldn’t have wanted to be on the wrong side of Regina for anything in the world. Her voice was a low whisper.
“I will destroy him,” she said.