The Happy One
It was late afternoon, a day or two after the big Forrest-and-Brenda breakup.
The family had gone out on the Chris-Craft together.
Forrest wanted to scope out the route the boats would take for the regatta that weekend and assess the sound system he’d installed on board: a pair of portable speakers he’d set up along the bow.
He was going to blast an endless loop of a song called “Yo Ho (A Pirate’s Life for Me)” out over the water.
I gathered this was the theme song of a ride at Disney World, not that I’d ever been there.
So I was alone in the house again. By this time I figured I was finished with my responsibilities as Regina’s detective, so I was just planning to head upstairs to read a little or maybe write what would probably be the final entry in my journal.
But as I made my way down the hall to the stairs to my room, I noticed something surprising.
The door to the room at the end of the hall—the forbidden room that had remained locked all summer—was ajar.
I could make out a stream of light coming from inside.
Even with no one there to see me, I understood what it meant to enter this room. Hayward had explained it the first night I arrived at Wonderland.
Don’t even think about going in there, he’d told me.
I stood there for a moment, just outside the slightly open door. Then I stepped in.
At first it seemed like no big deal. The room was filled with a lot of boxes, mostly.
A bunch of dresses hung from a portable metal clothes rack.
These appeared to be clothes from a different fashion era.
Very short skirts, long slinky dresses made out of some kind of synthetic material with wild prints and plunging necklines—a kind of dress I couldn’t imagine Regina wearing, even long ago.
There was an embroidered coat with real fur trim around the neck and cuffs.
It looked like the kind of coat someone had loved and worn a whole lot.
The lining was matted and dirty, and when I touched the fabric, I could smell cigarettes.
It might have been marijuana, though that wasn’t a smell I knew.
There were so many boxes. Every one had been neatly labeled: Books. Jewelry. Records. Art supplies. Scarves. Dolls. Minerals. There were three whole boxes labeled simply Hats, and another labeled Purple hats. So many of those, they needed their own box.
Along one wall, there was a box of photographs, a few in frames. I pulled one out.
At first I thought it was a picture of Regina, though if so, this was Regina as I’d never seen her: shapelier (maybe even carrying a few extra pounds), with white-blonde hair. The biggest difference was her expression. She looked so happy.
I pulled out another picture. Here was Happy Regina again—her blonde hair flying in all directions—running along a beach and laughing. And another of Happy Regina playing a flute.
And another of Happy Regina—Ecstatic Regina, you might have called her—with a very young version of a man whose face I knew well.
Forrest. Happy Regina was looking at the camera but Happy Forrest was looking only at her, with a look that was almost too much to bear, knowing what I did of their lives now.
This is what love looks like, I thought. I had not seen much of it. Ever. Also desire.
I pulled another photograph from the box. This one confused me. There was Happy Regina again—wearing the very same coat I’d noticed hanging on the rack. In the photograph, Madly-in-Love Forrest had his arms around her. (One arm over her shoulder, actually. The other on her breast.)
The two of them were so dazzling, it took me a moment to notice there was another woman in the photograph standing next to the two of them. It took me another moment to understand.
This was also Regina, another Regina, a Regina I recognized. Young, like the other two, and very thin, wearing that same serious expression I knew well. Anxious. A little sad. A little bitter.
There were two of them, then. Happy Regina and Bitter Regina. They had to be sisters.
Twins.
I must have gasped out loud. I knocked the guitar over, which had been leaned against the wall. It made a noise hitting the floor.
“You shouldn’t be in here.” A voice behind me. Prudence. I whirled around to see her in the doorway.
“I left the door open to do a little dusting before we close the house up for the year,” she said. “Regina doesn’t like anybody to come in here besides me.”
“I didn’t know she’s got a sister,” I said.
“She doesn’t.”
“But in the pictures—”
“That was Camille, the younger one. She died in a skiing accident a long time ago. We don’t talk about her.”
Only she did then. I knew, as Prudence told me the story, that she would tell me only once, then never bring it up again. I knew I must never bring it up again either.
“Camille was—oh, Camille was everything,” Prudence said.
“Beautiful and funny and always doing crazy things, but you couldn’t ever get mad at her for that.
Everyone loved Camille. Even the parents lightened up when she was around, if you can imagine.
She could actually make the old man crack a smile.
“Camille and Regina were like this,” Prudence said.
She held up two fingers, interlaced. “Regina was the quiet one, but Camille could always make her laugh. When they were little, they’d spend all day up in this tree house their parents had built for them.
They would have lived in there if they could. ”
“Out in front by the driveway?” I asked her.
“That’s the one Forrest started building for Jilly a few years ago,” she said. “The parents took the old one down years ago.
“You should have seen the two of them out on the tennis court. It was like each one knew just what the other would do and where she’d go before she got there. Their father was so proud. He liked to say those two were unbeatable.”
I said nothing. Asked no questions. I was afraid that if I did, Prudence might realize she was telling me more than she should and stop.
“They were nineteen years old that summer,” she said.
“No matter what was going on in their lives, when Fourth of July rolled round, they always came home to Wonderland.
Regina was still at Sarah Lawrence. Camille was back from one of her crazy adventures in Spain.
She was spending a year abroad, attending a dancing school or something. She had this dress . . .
“Regina had been studying physics. That was Regina for you. Always studying. You’d think something happened to those two in the womb. Maybe Regina got the brains, but Camille grabbed every ounce of the fun.
“I was there the night she met Forrest. I’m talking about Camille. The family had dinner at the club that night, and I guess Camille must have taken off her shoes at some point. She got up and started dancing out on the patio.
“When they went home that night, she left her shoes at the club. That was the story. It wouldn’t surprise me if she knew what she was doing.
Twenty minutes later, who shows up at the door here but the dishwasher from the country club.
Howie. I’m talking about Mr. Emerson. He wasn’t Forrest yet.
He hadn’t ever waited tables before, but that night one of the regular waiters had gotten sick and they’d put him in as a substitute. ”
My father had told me about that summer. Their dishwashing job. He just hadn’t mentioned that there were two sisters, not one. He must have promised Forrest he wouldn’t talk about that part.
“We all probably knew that first night what was going to happen between Howie and Camille,” Prudence told me. “I’d gone home by that point, naturally, but I saw it soon enough, when he’d come by the house to pick her up. The way he looked at her. The way she looked back.
“You should have seen those two together,” Prudence said. “You know the expression, ‘sparks flew’? It seemed like they really did.”
After that night, Howie and Camille had been inseparable.
They’d go off on walks. Pick blueberries.
Who knew where? Together was all. One time Camille got Prudence to fix her a picnic to bring out on the canoe, to the island.
They’d stay out there all day. Sometimes they didn’t come home till the next day.
“What about Regina?” I asked. “She must have felt left out.”
“She had to,” Prudence said. “Camille wasn’t all that understanding, being head over heels and all. She practically forgot about Regina. Right before the end of the summer—the Labor Day weekend tennis tournament where they were supposed to compete—the two of them had this terrible fight.”
As Prudence explained it to me, when fall came, Camille had to head back to Spain to finish up her studies.
Howie got jobs bartending in town and working at a supermarket.
The Cabots hated him, of course. But when they told Camille they’d cut her off if she stayed with him, she said she didn’t care.
The plan was for Howie to save up money all year. When she came back, they were going to take off and get married.
“Only she missed him so badly, she sent him a ticket to join her over Christmas. They rented a car and drove to some mountains in France to go skiing. She could handle black diamonds, and he’d never been on skis, but never mind. He’d follow that girl anywhere.
“We were in Boston when we got the call. Christmas morning. There was an accident on the mountain. Camille hit a tree.
“He was the one who brought her body home. You’ve never seen a more heartbroken man than Howie.”
“What about Regina?” I asked. “She’d lost her sister.”
“The strange thing was, I never saw her cry,” Prudence said. “She just went to her room and didn’t come out for a long time.”
What happened next surprised everyone. Not long after Camille’s funeral, Howie started spending time with Regina.
By the next summer, they were married. No big Cabot wedding.
They found a justice of the peace, and afterward they took off in Howie’s old VW.
He’d changed his name to Forrest by this point.
“They lived in a cabin somewhere in Vermont for a few years, until we heard she had a baby,” Prudence told me. “Once Hayward was born, that’s when her parents decided to let them come back to Wonderland. Not that they were ever happy about the two of them being together.”
“What about Regina?” I asked Prudence. I figured Forrest probably never really stopped loving Camille. “Didn’t she end up feeling like she was Forrest’s second choice?”
“Who knows what Regina thinks?” Prudence said. “She keeps most things to herself. All I know is that man takes good care of her. It isn’t easy living with a person like Regina.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” Prudence said to me. “Nobody ever mentions Camille’s name around here. But Regina can’t get rid of her things. She keeps them locked up in this room.”
“What about Forrest?” I asked her.
“He never talks about it either. Though there was this one time. I guess he didn’t think anyone was around. I found Forrest in here, standing by the rack of clothes. He loved that coat.”
The fur-lined one with the embroidery.
“You’d better get up to your room,” she told me. “Don’t ever mention to either of them that I told you this. Don’t let them know you were here.”
I stepped back out in the hall. She locked the door again.