What Felt Real
That night, for the first time all summer, I couldn’t sleep.
I lay there in my little bed under the eaves, thinking about Regina’s dead sister.
Outside my window, I could hear the sound of the loons calling out to each other.
And in the room below mine, the low, steady sound of Forrest Emerson snoring.
I wondered if he ever dreamed of Camille.
A handful of days remained before Labor Day weekend and all the events that would take place at Lake Catherine then.
A handful of days before my big tennis tournament.
Though ever since I’d learned the story of Regina’s dead sister, I couldn’t stop thinking about her.
When I stepped out onto the court that afternoon, the picture kept coming to me of the two of them, when they were young.
I pictured them in matching tennis outfits—Regina at the service line, Camille at the net.
And Forrest watching on the sidelines, his eyes full of love. But for Camille, not Regina.
Then Forrest, after. Bringing Camille’s body back on the plane from France. The Cabots at the airport to meet the plane. Hating him for being alive. Regina standing next to them. Had she already begun to imagine herself taking her sister’s place?
In the middle of the night, I took out my red suitcase. Packing wouldn’t take long. One drawer’s worth of clothes. The unopened box of tampons.
A few days after my departure, the Emersons would be packing up too, for their return to Boston—school for the children, and the same endless expanse of time for Regina and Forrest to carry on with their own comfortable, distant lives, uninterrupted by jobs, housework, money worries, girlfriends.
Just three months earlier, it had all seemed so glamourous and wonderful. It didn’t anymore.
Meanwhile life at Wonderland went on as it had, though after that day with Brenda, I detected in Forrest a new level of attentiveness to Regina—one that did not seem to extend to me as it once had.
It occurred to me then that things had played out between Forrest and Brenda just as Regina first predicted they would.
They’d started their affair around Fourth of July weekend.
Just before Labor Day, Forrest had ended it.
In the weeks between the two holidays, things might have appeared more serious, but in the end, nothing had turned out any differently from how it did in previous summers, though his lover this summer had displayed an unprecedented capacity for plotting criminal activity, and due to this, no doubt, Forrest had displayed an above-average level of remorse for his actions this time around.
Now I observed how, when Regina stretched out on her chaise lounge with the knitting project that never progressed, or a book she never finished, he’d come up behind her and massage her shoulders or bury his face in her hair.
He brought her things. Tea, of course, and her pills—though, strangely, she seemed to be rejecting these—but he brought her other things now too.
Her slippers, when she’d left them upstairs.
A cookie from the French bakery in town, small enough that he might have supposed she’d be willing to consume the calories it contained, which she was not.
From the moment Forrest delivered his farewell speech to Brenda Barnett, he seemed to discontinue his triathlon preparation.
The event was coming up soon, but he no longer showed any sign of taking those thirty-mile training rides, the five-mile swims, his runs.
He explained this by telling us that in the final days before a triathlon, it was recommended that a person cut down on the exercise, to store up energy.
This meant that he was around in the early mornings again.
We could have resumed our morning breakfasts together. Only we didn’t.
Now I was the person who left the house at sunup.
With so little time remaining before the juniors’ match, I headed to the tennis court as soon as it was light to hit against the backboard and stayed there for as much time as my job responsibilities allowed.
But in truth, my choice to leave the house early had to do with more than tennis.
Though I couldn’t help loving Forrest still and yearning for his company, something had been broken that summer, and there was no fixing it.
So there were no more pancake breakfasts or talks with Forrest over orange juice.
For whatever reason—I had no idea why—the funny little gifts (a rock, a bar of soap, a ladybug) stopped showing up next to my cereal bowl.
I told myself that none of that had been real anyway.
What was real was my racquet. The muscles in my calves. My backhand. The ball.
Sometime that week a message came from the pharmacy. Mrs. Emerson’s prescriptions were ready for pickup.
“Didn’t we just fill most of these a couple of weeks ago?” Forrest asked her.
“It’s good to have some reserves on hand for when we head back to Boston,” Regina told him. “I just want to be sure I don’t run out.”
She turned her cheek in his direction for the kiss she knew he’d deliver. “On your way home, why don’t you pick us up some fried clams?” she said. Not that she’d be eating any herself.
Forrest would fulfill any request from Regina now. I could tell from the look on his face. He was ready to spend the rest of his life making it up to her.