Regina's Song (18 page)

“Why don’t you play the tape you cut that morning when Mary called us?” I suggested. “Let Father O hear what she sounds like when she’s full-bore nutso.”

“Good idea,” she agreed, sorting through her miniature tapes.

Father O’Donnell seemed a bit awed by the intensity of Twink’s voice on the tape, and when she switched over to twin-speak, he slapped his hand down onto his desk. “That’s it!” he exclaimed. “
That’s
the language I’ve heard her speaking in the confessional. The lisping is a dead giveaway.”

“They were teething when they invented the language,” I explained.

“Doesn’t that language suggest that Renata
is
aware that she used to have a twin sister?” Father O suggested.

“Only when she’s gone bonkers,” I replied. “She drops twin-speak when she goes back to being a normie.”

“You might want to speak with Dr. Fallon about the possibility that this change in Renata’s voice might precede—or even trigger—her nightmares and the relapses into psychosis,” Father O suggested to Sylvia. “And it probably wouldn’t hurt if you started bringing her to confession regularly. That other voice doesn’t crop up
every
time she comes to confession, but if it
is
an advance warning, we’d better not let it slip past us.”

“Good idea, Father,” Sylvia agreed.

My freshman class on Wednesday afternoon had their heads pretty well turned off, so there wasn’t much point to trying to teach. I took the roll, cautioned them to drive carefully, and turned them loose.

“That was quick,” Twink said, after the classroom had emptied out.

“They weren’t really in there anyway, baby sister,” I told her. “Why waste my breath? Let’s hit the bricks before the traffic starts piling up.”

“Do we really have to spend Thanksgiving with Les and Inga?” She sounded a little plaintive.

“Yup,” I told her.

“They get so antsy when I’m around.”

“Pitch in and help Inga in the kitchen, Twink,” I suggested. “Act like a normie. That might calm her down, and if Inga’s calm, it might settle Les down, too.”

“I don’t know beans about cooking, Markie.”

“Here’s your chance to learn. Your mother’s a good cook, so she’ll clue you in on all the tricks of the trade.”

“You’re going to insist, aren’t you?”

“Yup.”

“I wish you’d get off that ‘yup’ stuff, Markie,” she said crossly.

“Cool down, Twink. We’re going home for Thanksgiving, and that’s final. It’s not going to hurt you to be nice to your parents, so quit trying to weasel out of this.”

“Oh, all right,” she gave up.

There’d been a break in the weather, and it was actually sunny and bright as Twink and I drove north that afternoon. Maybe it was a good omen—or maybe the rain god was just resting up so he could unload on us at Christmastime.

My bullying finally got through to Twinkie, and she was at least civil to Les and Inga. She even took my advice and helped Inga in the kitchen. That gave me the opportunity to fill Les in on how we hoped to use those voice changes as an early warning system, and maybe even head off the nightmares.

“There might be some hope for her after all, then,” he said. “I wasn’t too optimistic about that. To be perfectly honest, Mark, I was right on the verge of pulling her out of Seattle and bringing her back home.”

“I don’t think that’d work out too well, boss. If you did that, she’d stay semibonkers for the rest of her life, and she’d probably end up back in the bughouse. If we keep her in Seattle where Sylvia can stay right on top of her, we’ll have a lot better chance of finding a real cure and turning her into a normie. That’s what we’re really after, isn’t it?”

“You’re probably right, Mark,” he admitted.

I heaved a sigh of relief. That one had been closer than I’d realized. The boss had the key right in his pocket, and he’d been ready to take it out and lock Twink away for the rest of her life.

Classes resumed on Monday, December 1, and now the holiday season was turning into a major distraction. Of course, the holiday season starts right after Labor Day, as far as the stores are concerned. Jumping the gun is a peculiarly American characteristic. Everybody wants to get there first. The Brits can elect a new government in six weeks; it takes us two years.

I coasted through Monday. I guess everybody’s entitled to a goof-off day now and then. I
did
caution my freshman class about the dangers of the season, though. A semiserious student can blow some fairly good grades right out the window if the approach of Christmas shuts down his head. Of course, the ones who’ve been majoring in parties almost always decide at that point that they’ve already blown the fall quarter anyway, so they don’t even bother to come to class after Thanksgiving.

At supper that evening, James told us that Mrs. Perry’s doctors were certain that they’d caught her cancer in time and that her recovery would probably be total.

James, Charlie, and I were going back upstairs to boy country after supper, and Charlie suggested a quick trip to the Green Lantern to find out if his brother had anything new on the Slasher front. “None of us stayed here in town during that four-day weekend, so we might have missed a few things. If we’re going to keep playing our knights in shining armor game, we’d better stay on top of developments.”

“He’s got a point,” I told James.

“I think I’d better beg off,” James replied. “I’m running a little behind right now.”

“No biggie,” Charlie told him. “Mark and I can fill you in when we come home. Are you up for it, Mark?”

“Sure. I’ll grab a coat and we can go see what Bob’s got to say.”

There weren’t too many people in the tavern when we got there, and Bob West was sitting on a stool at the bar.

“What’s cooking, big brother?” Charlie asked as we joined Bob.

“Leftover turkey, most likely,” Bob replied. “I get so damned sick of turkey after a holiday.”

“Don’t buy the great big ones,” Charlie suggested. “Is there anything new and exciting about our local cut-up?” he asked then. “Did he maybe carve up another junior hoodling on Thanksgiving and then eat him—complete with cranberry sauce?”

“No new carcasses,” Bob replied, “but we got the word on Finley from the Kansas City police department.”

“The Gas Works Park guy, wasn’t he?” Charlie asked.

Bob nodded. “Finley had a police record, right enough, but there weren’t any dope deals or burglaries involved. He was busted several times for sexual molestation and a couple of attempted rapes. He’s listed in their records as a sex offender. He was supposed to register when he came here, but evidently it slipped his mind.”

“Convenient,” I said.

“It happens quite a lot. That sex offender label doesn’t work very well. All the guy has to do is cross a state line and keep his nose fairly clean. The Kansas City cops might have been trying to keep an eye on Finley, but once he got west of Denver, he was home free.”

“That’s one of the drawbacks of a democratic society, isn’t it?” Charlie suggested.

“We can usually work our way around them, kid,” Bob said.

“A thought for the day, huh, Bob?” Charlie said.

I concentrated on my Milton paper for the rest of that week, more to get it off my back than out of any great enthusiasm. Since John-boy and I didn’t see eye to eye on much of anything, my paper was mostly a polite tip of my hat in his general direction as I moved on past him.

Sylvia got a call from Doc Fallon late Thursday afternoon, rescheduling Twinkie’s Friday appointment for ten o’clock in the morning rather than the usual afternoon get-together. Sylvia was a little grumpy about that, so I offered to fill in for her.

“Thanks all the same, Mark,” she replied, “but I’d better take care of it myself. There are some things I need to talk over with him, and I think they’d be better face-to-face than over the phone.”

I shrugged. “You can’t say I didn’t offer,” I told her.

“You’re all heart, Mark,” she said dryly.

I finished up my Milton paper about noon the next day, and my final read-through confirmed my suspicion that it wasn’t going to set the world on fire. It’d have to do, though. It was too late in the quarter to go back to square one.

“Nobody’s perfect,” I muttered, setting the paper aside. Then I went down to cobble a couple of sandwiches together. Erika was there, though, and she intercepted me before I could get into the refrigerator.

“Sit down,” she ordered. “I’ll take care of it.”

“Sure,” I said, “and thanks. Could you clear your books out of the way this afternoon? I’ll take the measurements today and build your bookshelves tomorrow. I should be out from underfoot before suppertime.”

“That’ll be nice,” she said.

After we’d eaten, I took my tape measure into her room and started writing down the numbers.

Sylvia came home about two-thirty.

“How’d it go this morning?” I asked her.

“About the same as always,” she said. “Have you got anything earthshaking on the fire for Monday?” she asked.

“Not that I know of. Why?”

“Dr. Fallon’s going to be attending a conference at the university, and he wants to meet Father O. I think he might have a Renata seminar in mind—you, me, Mary, and Father O’Donnell. We’re all getting bits and pieces of what Renata’s been doing lately, and he’d like to put them all together and see what turns up—I think Fallon’s worried about this voice-change business.”

“You’d better check in with Father O,” I suggested. “If we’re going to set up the kind of meet Doc Fallon seems to want, the church might be the best place for it.”

“I sort of thought so myself,” she agreed.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

After breakfast on Saturday morning I went down to my little workshop in the basement and sawed boards to the measurements I’d taken in Erika’s room Friday afternoon.

“This might be a little noisy,” I warned her when I carried the first load of boards into her room. “If you want to concentrate, maybe you’d better go to the library.”

She shrugged. “I don’t have anything too important to do today, Mark,” she said. “It’ll give me an excuse to goof off—unless having me watch is going to bug you.”

“No problem,” I said. “I’ll try to keep the swearing to a minimum.”

“I’ve heard people swear before. It doesn’t bother me all that much.”

I got the uprights in place first, and as luck had it, the settling of the house hadn’t torqued the studs too far off plumb, so it went fairly fast.

“Speedy,” Erika observed.

“I’ve done this five times before,” I replied. “I’ve pretty much got it down pat now. I’ll give you some extra room on that bottom shelf for any oversize books, and you can put paperbacks on that top shelf—assuming that you even want to use the top one. You’ll need a stepladder if you do.”

“I might at that,” she told me. “I’ve got several boxes of books down in the basement. It’ll be nice having them all here where I can get my hands on them.”

“I take it that you’re not all that hot for computerized books.”

She made an indelicate sound.

“What a thing to say,” I kidded her. “I’m shocked, Erika. Shocked.”

“Computer nerds make me want to throw up.”

“I’ll float my stick with yours on that one.” I banged the side of my fist on the uprights to make sure they were all firmly in place. “Good enough,” I said. “I got lucky for a change. I hit a couple of problems with the uprights in Sylvia’s room.”

“How much further have you got to go on your doctorate, Mark?” she asked me then.

“A couple more years at least. Why?”

“Just curious. We’ve turned into a fairly tight little group here, haven’t we?”

“The kitchen might have something to do with that. People who eat together always seem to get close.”

“The feeding trough, you mean? I think it goes a little deeper than that, Mark.” Her tone seemed almost wistful.

“Are we having some sort of problem, Erika?”

“I’m going to miss this place when we all move on, and I’ll probably miss the group as well.”

“We’ll keep in touch.”

“I’ve heard that before.”

“I don’t know if Trish has mentioned this, but she was telling me that she’s been getting some inquiries about possible vacancies. We seem to be getting quite a reputation on campus. The party boys aren’t very interested, but there
are
people on campus who aren’t majoring in parties. If all six of us come out
cum laude
, you might get a long line of people waiting to sign on.”

“Not until
after
we’ve finished. I don’t want any strangers moving in to mess up what we’ve got going for us here.”

“Sentimentality, Erika? I thought you were the ice cube in the bunch.”

“That’s a pose, Mark. It keeps guys who drool at arm’s length. If I pretend to be Iceberg Erika, they don’t pester me. I get the same urges everybody else does, but I keep them to myself. That’s one of the things I like about our arrangement here. The ‘no hanky-panky’ policy puts the guys here off-limits, and I don’t even
have
those kind of thoughts about you or James or Charlie—well, not
too
many, anyway.”

“Erika!”

She grinned at me. “Gotcha!” she said triumphantly.

“Smart aleck.”

“Why, Mark, how can you say such a thing?” She gave me one of those wide-eyed vapid looks that seemed all too familiar.

“Have you been taking lessons from Twinkie?” I asked her sourly. She’d caught me off guard. I’d almost come to believe that Erika was one of those all business girls with nothing even remotely resembling a sense of humor. I’d obviously been wrong about that. There was a lot more to her than I’d even imagined.

Sylvia’d made all the arrangements for our little get-together at St. Benedict’s, and we homed in on Father O’Donnell about seven-thirty on Monday evening.

Sylvia introduced Doc Fallon and Father O, and they seemed to size each other up right at first. They
did
come from opposite sides of a fairly significant fence, and I guess they both wanted to be sure that they weren’t going to lock horns on certain issues.

“Sylvia mentioned the possibility that certain kinds of repetitive behavior might precede Renata’s psychotic episodes,” Fallon began. “I’d like to hear a few more details. This could be very important.”

“Part of it has to do with cryptolalia—what I always called ‘twin-speak’ before Sylvia gave me the scientific term,” I told him. “Since Twink has no memory of her childhood with Regina, that shouldn’t be showing up at all—at least not when she’s functioning as a normie. Mary tells us that there’s always twin-speak involved in the ravings that come pouring out after Renata has those nightmares. If we’re reading this right, the nightmares are a re-creation of the night when Regina was murdered.”

“That might be a slight oversimplification,” Fallon told me, “but let it go for now.”

“The point is that the private language
also
crops up when Twink goes to confession. Father O’Donnell mentioned it to me quite sometime back, but I guess I spaced it out. I’d gotten so used to hearing the twins lisping at each other when they were kids that it didn’t even occur to me that there was anything peculiar about its reappearance—I mean, if Twink has no memory at all about Regina, who’s she talking to?”

“Then the matter of the two different voices surfaced,” Father O picked it up. “There have been times when I couldn’t be positive how many young ladies were in the confessional with me.”

“That’s been bothering me as well,” Sylvia added. “It shows up very obviously when I’m editing the tapes. I was just about to resurrect my multiple personality theory, but the reappearance of cryptolalia shoots that full of holes, doesn’t it?”

“Let’s not dismiss anything just yet,” Fallon told her.

“Anyway,” I picked it up again, “Father O came up with the idea that the different voices and the reappearance of twin-speak might be something on the order of an early warning. Once those show up, the nightmares and the day of psychotic raving are almost certain to come along again. Does that make sense?”

“What if it’s Ren’s way to cry for help?” Mary suggested. “She might feel the bad day coming, and she’s begging us to step in and stop it—but she’s begging in a language nobody can understand.”

“It’s possible, I suppose,” Fallon conceded. “Does she have any memory of these incidents on the following day?”

“She doesn’t seem to. The first few times they showed up, I’d ask her the next day if she was feeling better, and she didn’t seem to know what I was talking about. Of course, she’s always a little silly on the day after one of the bad ones.”

“Could we possibly be dealing with a fugue here?” Sylvia asked Fallon. “At least a personal variation of the fugue state? Once she lapses into cryptolalia, she seems to blot everything out.”

“Now we might be getting somewhere,” Fallon said.

“Fugue?” I asked. “Isn’t that a musical term?”

“It has a slightly different meaning in the field of abnormal psychology, Mark,” Sylvia told me. “It’s a reaction to something that’s so terrible that the patient can’t bear even to think about it. It usually involves a loss of personal identity. Sometimes the patient will wander off and seem to be perfectly normal. It can go on for hours—or even for days—and when the patient recovers, he has absolutely no memory of anything that happened during that period.”

“It does sound like it fits what’s going on when Ren flips out,” Mary said.

“And it
might
just be going on for a lot longer than we’d realized,” I added. “Maybe it starts when her voice keeps changing back and forth and words or phrases from that private language crop up—usually in the confessional. Then she has that nightmare again; then she wakes up talking about wolves and blood and cold until she can’t stand it anymore. At that point, she shuts down and talks exclusively in twin. Then the next day comes along, and she has no memory of anything that happened.” I looked at Fallon. “Does that come anywhere close to what this fugue state is all about?”

“Very close, I think,” he agreed. “Basically, a fugue is a flight from reality, and the patient will even flee from her own identity to get away from a reality she can’t face. In this case, Renata seems to be taking refuge in the private language—in the same way she did during the six months after her sister’s death. Once she starts speaking English again, the incident is over, and everything connected to it has been erased from her memory.”

“What is it about going to confession that sets her off?” Mary asked.

“It happens more often than you’d think, Mary,” Father O told her. “The act of confession seems to lower certain defenses. We stress the importance of full confession, and it’s not uncommon for things to come out during confession that the penitent has completely forgotten.”

“What this finally boils down to is that Renata’s quite probably working her way toward another breakdown and another stay in the sanitarium,” Fallon told us. “It’s regrettable, but it’s not that uncommon.”

“And then my idiot brother will use that as an excuse to take her home and never let her out of his sight again,” Mary added.

Fallon smiled faintly. “Just leave that to me, Mary,” he said. “I can probably stop him short if it’s necessary.”

Sylvia and I were feeling pretty upbeat after the Twinkie conference at St. Benedict’s Church. We hadn’t quite solved
all
the problems yet, but we felt we’d definitely made some progress.

Our good feeling lasted all the way through Tuesday, but then Wednesday rolled around, and Twink went bonkers again.

I was attending my Milton seminar when Mary called the boardinghouse. As luck had it, Sylvia hadn’t left yet, so she grabbed her tape recorder and hustled over to Mary’s place.

Twink had already gone through the business of wolves, blood, and cold water, though, so all Sylvia got on tape was an extended oration in twin-speak.

Sylvia wasn’t
too
happy about that, and she was using some very colorful language when I came home around ten that morning. “If I’d
only
got there a bit earlier!” she fumed.

“You don’t have to be there in person, Sylvia,” I told her. “I’ve been thinking about that, and a tape recorder that uses standard-sized tapes only costs about twenty-five bucks. I’ll pick one up and show Mary how to use it. She’ll be able to get everything on tape as soon as she walks in and finds Twink climbing the walls. That way, she won’t have to call you and wait around until you get there.”

She glared at me for a moment, then she suddenly looked a little sheepish. “Why didn’t I think of that?” she said.

“You don’t really want me to answer that, do you, Toots?” I asked her. “This
does
shoot down Father O’s theory about the confessional, though, doesn’t it? Twink hasn’t been to confession for quite some time now, and she went bonkers anyhow.”

“Maybe it’s been percolating in the back of her mind for a few weeks,” she suggested. “I don’t think there’s any kind of time limit, do you?”

“It’s your field, Sylvia. Half the time you and Fallon are talking to each other in a foreign language as far as I can tell. Did Mary zap Twink out with a pill again?”

She nodded. “About a half hour after I got there. Renata dozed off almost immediately.”

“Whatever works, I guess,” I said.

As usual, Twink bounced right back after she’d shaken off the horrors that’d wiped her out on Wednesday—she showed up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for my class on Thursday. It seemed peculiar to me that Twink was always superhyped on the day following one of her bad ones, but it was obvious that today’s ebullience fit the pattern.

It was a little noisy in the classroom when I entered that afternoon. “All right, people,” I said from the front of the room, “settle down. We’ve got something to take care of today. Next week’s the last one of the fall quarter, so I guess we’d better start thinking about a final examination. I suppose we could all compose hymns of praise to conjunctions or prepositions, but that might be a little tedious, huh? I don’t know about you, but it’d probably bore my socks off. Why don’t we do something a little more exciting instead?”

I paused—for effect, of course. Then I snapped my fingers. “Why don’t we write another paper?” I said as if the idea had just come at me from out of the blue. “You’ve been college students for twelve whole weeks now, and the reason we come to college is to learn stuff, right? OK, why don’t you tell me about it? This’ll be your last paper,
and
it’ll be your final exam at the same time. You’ll whip in here next Tuesday, dump your paper on the desk, and then split—unless you’d like some kind of farewell oration from old superteacher!”

“Don’t you mean next Thursday, Mr. Austin?” one of them asked me.

“I’ll need a little time to grade them. Superteacher is
not
faster than a speeding bullet.”

“What’s the topic supposed to be?” another one asked.

“How about ‘What I Have Learned This Quarter’?”

“About English, you mean?”

“Why limit it to something that pedestrian? If the biggest thing you’ve picked up here this quarter is how long it takes the signal light at Forty-third and University to change, write a paper about it. I
hope
that some of you’ve picked up a few things a bit more interesting, but that’s up to you. I’m looking for thought content, gang. You’re supposed to be here to learn how to think, and I’m supposed to teach you how to think on paper. Let’s find out if we’ve all done what we’re here for.”

“That’s awfully unspecific, Mr. Austin,” a girl near the front objected.

“I know,” I agreed. “I’m leaving it wide-open on purpose. That puts the ball in your court. Go for it, and give it your best shot—and about five hundred of your best words. You might want to think it over
before
ten-thirty next Monday evening. I don’t want to spoil any of your plans, but you should probably know that a half hour paper’s likely to get you a half hour grade—if you get my drift? Take a little time with this one. Let’s bump up the old grade-point average, shall we?”