You Weren’t Supposed to Come in Here
You Weren’t Supposed to Come in Here
Just two times over the years that followed my Wonderland summer, I communicated—briefly—with Forrest Emerson. Sometime around my thirtieth birthday, I sent a letter to the correctional facility in Maine where he was incarcerated.
It was a short note. I wrote to say I was sorry for whatever role I may have played in bringing about his conviction for Regina’s murder. I did not go into the details. I would give anything to change what happened, I wrote. I don’t expect you to forgive me.
Ten more years passed before I heard back from Forrest.
Then one day, a long friendly letter arrived, written in pencil, the return address featuring a string of numbers that identified its origin as a correctional facility.
In his letter, he wrote about his activities at the prison.
As a man who’d always been good at picking up unlikely skills (fly-tying, outrigger construction, harmonica playing, magic tricks, tree house design), he had become intimately acquainted with the contents of the prison library.
I probably know every book in that place by this point, he wrote. I’ve read more of them than you might think. The interesting thing is that, for once in my life, if I start something, I finish.
It took me three years, but I got through Moby Dick.
Though as always, what I love even more than reading is working with my hands.
I’ve gotten pretty good at carpentry. I build stools for the children of some of the guys here.
Every one a little different, with their name carved on the top. They’re always a big hit.
In this letter, Forrest wrote of his sorrow over what had become of Hayward and his regret that he hadn’t been around during some crucial years to guide his son to a better path.
When a kid loses his mother at age twelve, he wrote, and they send his father away, and he spends his teenage years with a couple of stiffs like Suzanne and Colson Cabot supposedly looking out for him, it’s not surprising he loses his way.
My daughter did a lot better. She found herself a nice partner.
A woman! Maybe her old man didn’t leave her with the highest opinion of men.
She and her wife have twins. I guess this makes me a grandfather!
For a long time there, Jilly didn’t want to see me, he wrote. Then just a couple of months ago, she showed up here. Best day I can remember.
She told me something you should know. She’d been keeping it secret all these years. Then her own kids got to be the age she was when everything fell apart, and I guess she decided it was time to stop pretending.
When I got to this point in Forrest’s letter, I took a deep breath. I knew I’d read the rest, but I had to take a moment first. I had done all I could, all those years, to keep from revisiting that night.
You must remember when we were all running around, trying to get the boats lined up for the regatta, and it was taking so much longer than I’d intended, he wrote. What I didn’t know was that in the middle of it all, Jilly had decided to go back up to the house.
Jilly had this habit of going into Regina’s room just to sit on the bed, to be around her mother, even if Regina was sleeping.
It’s funny. Regina always thought the children didn’t care about her, when the truth was, all Jilly ever wanted was for Regina to pay attention.
That Saturday she’d climbed the stairs to her mother’s room to show her the certificate she’d earned for her entry in the Rice Krispies recipe contest. Regina had been sleeping, as usual, so after a while she’d gone downstairs again to join the rest of us down by the water.
I took Forrest’s words in slowly, the way a person does when she’s reading a horror story—Stephen King, maybe.
You know something bad is going to happen.
You’re preparing yourself for it. Part of me wanted to put down the letter, knowing what came next.
But I kept on reading, of course—that neat and oddly still-familiar handwriting. No evidence of spelling errors now.
Evidently Jilly had left one of her toys upstairs in Regina’s room. You probably remember that talking bear of hers that drove us all crazy. She wanted to bring her bear down to the water. She went back in the house, up the stairs to Regina’s bedroom to get it.
The door was closed, but she opened it. Regina was on the bed. Nothing so unusual about that. As you know, Regina spent a lot of time in that bed. But even to Jilly, young as she was, something looked different about her. Also, she was wearing that negligee. This wasn’t usual for her.
So Jilly went up to where her mother was lying. Regina’s arm was dangling off the edge of the bed, she told me. She knew something was wrong.
I guess she said something to Regina. Then she yelled in her ear to wake her up.
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’t want 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 letter Love, 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.