Countdown
It was the middle of August when I paddled the canoe out to the island and delivered the news to Regina of what had happened there.
Twenty-three days remained in my Wonderland summer.
It would all draw to a close with the Labor Day weekend triathlon and the Emersons’ annual end-of-summer party with the famous fireworks display Forrest personally orchestrated every year—no expense spared.
Though nobody but Jonathan and I knew the next part, this would also be the weekend of my first-ever participation in a juniors’ tennis match at the club.
Just a little more than three weeks until I had to go home to New Jersey. I dreaded this.
You might have thought the drama swirling around Forrest and Brenda, and Regina’s response to their affair, would have cast a shadow over everything else going on in my life that summer.
No doubt it should have had this effect.
Chalk it up to my being not quite fifteen years old, or naive, or simply too involved in my own situation to understand fully anyone else’s.
But after that time with Regina—the green goop incident, as I thought of it—I carried on with my life.
I was accustomed to drama, for one thing.
More than once, my father had smashed a wine bottle on the counter or thrown a glass against the wall.
An entire shelf-full of bottles, one time.
The year I was seven, the only time we ever got a Christmas tree—an event that thrilled me—he’d lifted it up off its stand on Christmas morning (who knew why?
Was there ever a good reason for a father to upend a Christmas tree in front of his seven-year-old daughter?) and threw it out the window.
Many times, my mother had gotten in the car, tearing down the street so fast I could hear the tires screaming all the way down the block.
She always came back, but I had considered the possibility that one of these days she might not.
If so, left with only my father, I would have had to be in charge. Then what?
One time when I was home alone with him, my father got so drunk he fell down the stairs and I thought he was dead. One time my mother put a gun up to her head and told us she was going to kill herself.
So for me, the idea of Regina and Forrest’s marriage falling apart and the two of them going to war (or Regina going to war with Forrest, anyway; Forrest wasn’t the war-making type) wasn’t all that out of keeping with the rest of my life.
The hardest part had been recognizing how little a role I played in the family that had meant the world to me.
I had a new role now. A crucial one.
In my role as a detective, the aspect of my life I’d most struggled to overcome—namely, that nobody noticed me—was serving me well.
I could hide in the bushes, lurk in seldom-frequented corners of the library, or conceal myself behind a rock and bear witness to the sight of two people making love on a patch of moss on a secluded island.
As Regina had reminded me on more than one occasion, I seemed to be invisible.
Even at the country club, the place where I spent hours every day, bringing Jilly and Hayward to their lessons and taking my own, I came and went as if I didn’t exist. Maybe a Chris Evert–brand tennis skirt and matching top would have been enough to allow me entry into the world of the club, but I doubted this, and anyway, I didn’t own a Chris Evert tennis skirt, or any tennis skirt.
In those moments when I made my way along the row of courts to the one where Jonathan would be waiting for me with a basket of balls, the only person who ever greeted me was the janitor.
And Jonathan himself, of course. But even with Jonathan, I was known strictly by what took place on the tennis court.
Now, though, at least one adult had a keen interest in everything I had to say. One person paid close attention. This person was Regina.
If I could have chosen the person with whom I would find the deepest connection over my time at Wonderland, that person would have been Forrest. I would have loved more of the kinds of conversations we used to have—about books I loved, things I loved, things I worried about.
But in the absence of that, I felt proud and happy that I was playing a meaningful role in Regina’s life.
To Regina, I was not invisible now. I was important.
I wished certain other aspects of my life at Wonderland could be different, of course—that Jilly would clear away her own dishes instead of getting up from the table every day after lunch, knowing I’d take care of them, and that Hayward would stop staring at my chest. I wished that Forrest would invite me out on the boat again.
I wished that I still got to share breakfast with him instead of eating my cereal alone, with nothing but one of those odd, wordless notes left by my place to keep me company.
I wished we could go back to how it had all been—how it seemed, anyway—at the beginning of the summer, back when I had ninety-two days ahead of me at Wonderland and everything seemed simple and beautiful.
As for Regina, you couldn’t call her attitude toward me warm or tender.
Maybe it would have been nice if what she offered me had fallen into the realm of motherly affection.
But the truth was, I might not have known what to do with motherly affection if I’d received some.
For the girl I was, coming from the place I did, getting to be Regina’s coconspirator probably worked better.
Some girls my age might’ve gotten a little shaken up, hearing of a potential plot in which the girlfriend of the father of the family she worked for wanted to kill the mother.
I wasn’t one of those girls. What I felt first, telling Regina about Brenda’s plan, was power.
What I felt after, when I saw what this had done to her, was regret.
But when it became clear to me that there was nothing I could do to disabuse Regina of her belief that Forrest wanted her dead, I gave up. I had a tennis match to think about, and my dreaded return to New Jersey, which I tried not to think about—which meant I thought about it a whole lot.
I put the rest away.