Regina's Song

by David Eddings

  “Be nice,” Erika murmured.

  “My sister, Erika,” Trish advised Twink, “the terror of the medical school. The cute teenie-weenie is Sylvia of Abnormality; the shaggy young fellow with greasy fingernails is Top Secret Charlie, who’s not allowed to tell anybody what his major is, and the distinguished gentleman with the silvery beard is James, who thinks all the time—when he’s not busy being the in-house bouncer.”

  Twinkie suddenly giggled.

  “Was it something I said?” Trish asked.

  “This is almost like coming home,” Twink explained. “I just got out of one bughouse, and here I am in another one.”

  “Normal’s out of fashion these days,” Charlie suggested, “maybe because normal’s boring.”

  “I’ve noticed that,” Twink agreed. “Old blabbermouth Mark here tells me that he blew my cover yesterday and started running up and down the halls waving my paper around, so there’s not much point in trying to hide my shady background, is there? I’m moderately crazy, but I don’t eat the furniture or insist that everybody should worship me—even though I am God. That shows up fairly often in the nuthouse. All the nuts there knew that they were God—which is probably why they were there. You’d think that gods would know enough not to brag about it, but a nuthouse might be nothing but a home for dumb gods who aren’t smart enough to keep their mouths shut.”

  “There’s a doctoral dissertation for you, Sylvia,” Erika said with a perfectly straight face. “If you present The Divinity of the Insane, you’d get a chance to study one of the local asylums from the inside.”

  “Go set the table, Erika,” Trish said. “Dinner’s almost ready.”

  We had ham for dinner that evening, and the ladies had gone all out with it, probably in deference to our guest.

  Twink had turned the volume all the way up on her cutesy-pootishness, and she almost sparkled.

  Sylvia, for obvious reasons, dominated the discussion at the dinner table. She had questions for Twink—lots of questions. Sylvia’s major had exposed her to textbooks and learned theorists in her field, but she’d seldom had a chance to talk with a coherent subject. What her somewhat convoluted approach really boiled down to was the single question, “What’s it really like?”

  “Not very nice,” Twink told her. “The keepers always seem to want to treat us like bad people—as if we were doing bad things on purpose. That’s why we cheat a lot. We say things to the keepers that aren’t really true, because it’s fun to watch their eyes bug out, and there isn’t much else to do for entertainment. Mostly, though, we’re able to slip around them. They ask us questions that we don’t want to answer, and there are dozens of ways to avoid them. After a few months in the nuthouse you get good at that. The other nuts give lessons, and you can learn a lot by watching during the little group therapy sessions. The keepers think that talking can cure anything. All you have to do is say what they want to hear, and they’ll wiggle like puppies and leave you alone. If they get too pushy, you can abolish them by putting on a blank face and pretending that they aren’t there at all.”

  “They’re only trying to help,” Sylvia protested.

  “Of course they are,” Twink replied in a voice dripping with sarcasm. “They take lots of notes and wave them around during the keeper meetings to impress the boss. That’s all they’re interested in, isn’t it? If they can’t stay on the good side of the boss, they might have to go out and get an honest job and do real work. That was our advantage. They were afraid, and we weren’t. The worst thing that could ever happen to us had already happened. We all knew that something awful had happened to us; we just weren’t exactly sure what it was.”

  A slightly stricken look came over Sylvia’s face.

  “I’m sorry,” Twink apologized. “I shouldn’t have said that, should I?” She impulsively took Sylvia’s hand. “You’re cute and sweet and awfully sincere. The nuts won’t pick on you when you go to work in the loony bin. They’ll say things that you’ll want to hear, and that’ll make you feel good. The things they’ll tell you won’t be the truth, but who really cares? Nutsos take care of the people they like. We’re a lot more generous than normies.”

  “It’s all a scam then, isn’t it?” Charlie suggested.

  “Of course it is. I thought everybody knew that by now. If somebody really wants to get out of the bughouse, all he has to do is say things the keepers want to hear.”

  “Is that how you got out?” Charlie pressed.

  “I thought I just said that. I’m probably still as wacky as I was when they locked me up, but once they stopped pumping me full of pills, I saw right away what I had to do. The only real problem I had was that I couldn’t remember very much of what had gone on before I woke up. I can remember Markie here, but I didn’t even recognize my parents. I guess I used to have a sister, but you couldn’t prove it by me. Every so often I have little flashes about the past, but they don’t make very much sense. I’ve learned not to worry about them. There’s no point in worrying about the past, because it isn’t going to come back. As soon as I realized that, I was ready to leave the bughouse. It took a while to persuade Dockie-poo, but I kept snowing him until he finally gave up and let me go.” She looked fondly at Sylvia again. “That’s the way things really are in the bughouse, small person. We say what we have to say to get the things we want and need.”

  “And just exactly what is it that you need?” Sylvia asked.

  “What I need more than anything else is to have people stop asking me that question. The past—whatever it might have been—is all over now. Something happened back then that made me go bonkers. If I go back and look at it the way everybody seems to want me to, I’ll probably turn right around and go bonkers all over again. I need to bury it and never try to dig it up. The nut-keepers can’t stand that, so I made up some interesting lies to make them happy, and that’s all it took to get me out of the bughouse.”

  “You do know that the awful-awful’s likely to come sneaking back, don’t you?” Sylvia suggested.

  “No, it won’t. I’ve closed that door and bricked it shut. From here on, my past began in the nuthouse when I was twenty years old. Nothing that happened before that—except for Markie—has any real importance. I’m going to pretend that I’m a normie, and I’ll keep on doing that until I get it right. Now why don’t we talk about the weather or something else that might mean something? The past is dead, and I’m going to make sure it stays that way.”

  Sylvia’s face took on a stricken look. Renata had just effectively slammed a door in her face, and Sylvia wasn’t the least bit happy about that.

  To be honest about it, Twink’s declaration of independence from the past caused me some problems as well. It seemed sensible, but once I dipped below that surface I got into a bucketful of worms. Those periodic nightmares of hers strongly suggested that the door to her past wasn’t quite as tightly closed as she wanted to believe it was, and something kept sneaking through to claw at her mind while she was asleep. She could pretend to be a normie when she was awake, but I knew in my bones that she wasn’t out of the woods yet.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Saturday being national fix-up day at the boardinghouse, I persuaded Charlie that we should take a run on up to Everett in his pickup truck so that we could plunder the scrap heap at Greenleaf Sash and Door for bookshelf material. Then I put in a call to Les Greenleaf to let him know that we were coming and to ask him to alert the watchman.

  “I really got a kick out of that screwball friend of yours the other night,” Charlie said as we went north on Interstate 5. “She sure cut the ground out from under Sylvia, didn’t she?”

  “Twink’s good at that,” I told him. “She’ll only let snoopy people go so far, and then she jerks them up short. It was probably good for Sylvia, though. A quick dose of humility might tone down that know-it-all attitude of hers.”

  “Fat chance,” Charlie snorted. “That whole department’s stuck on that ‘do you want to talk about it’ rout
ine. The Twinkie girl probably ruined the whole quarter for Sylvia when she said that the nutsos make up fairy tales to tell the keepers.”

  “What a dirty, rotten shame,” I said. “Have you talked with Bob lately? If the cops have come up with something new on the local cut-up artist, we probably ought to know about it.”

  “About all they’re sure of is that it’s gang stuff,” Charlie replied. “Burpee’s still frothing at the mouth about Cheetah, but the rest of the cops aren’t buying it. The north end cops are fairly sure that there’s a new gang moving into the area, and they’re using this butcher-shop approach to scare off the other gangs.”

  “Doing autopsies on guys who are still alive and kicking probably gets the message across. ‘Get out of town or I’ll gut you’ is nice and simple.”

  There was a grizzled old watchman at the gate of the door factory, and he waved us through when he saw me. I recognized him, but I couldn’t remember his name. “Hook a right at the far end of the yard,” I told Charlie. “The scrap heap’s on the other side of that long shed.”

  “Got it,” he replied.

  It was still drizzling, naturally, and pawing through wet lumber brought back not-so-fond memories of the green chain. It took Charlie and me about an hour to rummage through and pick out the boards that might work for us. There was quite a bit of good lumber in that scrap heap, but that’s par for the course. Doors are right out where people can see them, so boards with visible flaws are usually discarded. My general plan was to use good lumber for the eye-level shelves and junk lumber near the bottom where all anybody could see would be the outside edge.

  There are lots of ways to cut corners if you know how.

  When we got back to Wallingford, we unloaded Charlie’s pickup and stacked the boards in my basement lumber room. After lunch, I started taking measurements in James’s room while Charlie worked on Trish’s car.

  “That Greenleaf girl’s kind of evasive, isn’t she?” James observed while I was writing down measurements. “She sidestepped just about every one of Sylvia’s questions. And that paper she wrote opened some doors I didn’t even know existed.”

  “It was a doozie, wasn’t it?” I agreed.

  Just then, Trish yelled up the stairs. “You’ve got a phone call, Mark.”

  “Be right there,” I called back. I went down the stairs two at a time and picked up the phone in the living room. “Yeah?” I said.

  “It’s me, Mark,” Mary’s voice came over the phone. “Ren and I went up to Lake Stevens yesterday, and when we were on our way back, she told me that she’d like to go to church tomorrow. I have to work tonight, so I’ll be pretty tired, come morning. I was wondering if you could take her? It’ll only be about an hour.”

  “Sure,” I told her.

  “Good. I’ll take her to confession this afternoon, and she’ll be all set to go.”

  “What’s she got to confess? Even if she did something wrong way back when, she won’t remember it.”

  “It’s tradition, Mark. You go to confession before you take the sacraments.”

  “Even if you don’t have anything to confess? That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Religion doesn’t have to make sense, Mark. When you get right down to it, I don’t think it’s supposed to. Do you know where St. Benedict’s Church is?”

  “Up by Woodland Park, isn’t it?”

  “Right. It’s on Fiftieth Street. The priest there is Father O’Donnell.”

  “Swedish guy?”

  “Quit clowning around, Mark. Ren wants to go to the nine o’clock Mass, so be here at eight tomorrow morning. Wear a necktie.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  After I hung up the phone, I went looking for Sylvia. The only time I’d ever been inside a Catholic church had been at Regina’s funeral, so I wasn’t all that familiar with the procedures during a regular service. I was fairly sure Sylvia could fill me in. You don’t come across very many Italian Presbyterians.

  “Nobody’s going to get too excited if you miss a few things, Mark,” she assured me. “They’ll know you’re not Catholic as soon as you walk in.”

  “Oh?”

  “There are things we do automatically, right from when we enter a church. Even if you tried to fake it, they’d spot you. Don’t worry, nobody’s going to scold you.”

  “Good. Churches make me a little nervous. I go to weddings and funerals, and that’s about the extent of my involvement. Did you happen to call Dr. Fallon and fill him in on Twink’s performance Thursday?”

  She nodded. “He told me that we shouldn’t take her too seriously when she goes running off through the weeds like that. I guess she’s turned evasion into an art form. We’ve got a fairly unique situation here, Mark. Usually the patient’s the one who has the deep, dark secret, and the therapist has to go digging for it. This time, we all know exactly what’s troubling Renata, and she doesn’t. We have the answer, but Renata doesn’t want any part of it.”

  “Well, the ball’s in your court now, Sylvia. I’d better get back to work. If Trish catches me goofing off, I’ll get yelled at.”

  At dinner that evening, though, Trish came up with something that had nothing to do with bookshelves. She’d caught her foot on the edge of one of those worn places in the linoleum while the girls had been preparing supper. She hadn’t fallen, but I gather that some dinner rolls made a break for freedom “How big a project would it be to resurface the kitchen floor, Mark?” she asked me.

  “It’s nothing too major, Trish,” I told her. “That linoleum in there probably dates back to the fifties. In those days, linoleum was pretty much like carpeting. You’d buy it in big rolls—along with a couple gallons of glue and a linoleum knife. Then you got to spend a week or so on your knees inventing new swear words. Now it comes in boxes. They refer to them as tiles, which isn’t very accurate, but people know what it means. The tiles are a foot square, they’re made of no-wax vinyl, and they’re peel and stick. You peel the paper off the back, put the tile in place, and then stomp on it. It goes fairly fast, and the great part is that you can stop whenever you feel like it—you don’t have that cumbersome roll of linoleum stretching across the middle of the floor. The only tricky part is cutting the tiles to fit around doorframes and along the edge.”

  “Is it very expensive?”

  “Not really—twenty, maybe twenty-five dollars for a box of thirty. They’ve got sample books they’ll lend you, so you can pick the one you like.”

  “Let’s look into it—that floor’s starting to get dangerous.”

  “I’ll check it out on Monday,” I promised her.

  It wasn’t raining on Sunday morning, and I thought that might be a good sign—if there really are such things as signs. I shaved carefully and put on my best dress-up jacket and pants. It took me a while to get the knot right in my necktie, but I finally got it even. I made a mental note to pick up one of those clip-on ties. I don’t dress up often enough to be very good at tying my own.

  Mary was just pulling into her driveway when I got to her place. I’d never seen her in uniform before, and she looked very official. The gun on her hip may have had something to do with that. She gave me a quick inspection before we went inside. “Don’t you have a suit?” she demanded.

  “I never got around to buying one. I don’t run with the suit-and-tie crowd all that often.”

  “Well, it’ll have to do, I guess,” she said. “Let’s see how Ren’s holding up. She was a little nervous about this before I went to work last night. She hasn’t been to church for several years now, and she seems to be afraid that she might forget a few things.”

  “I’ll be surprised if she remembers any of the things she’s supposed to do. Isn’t that what the word ‘amnesia’ means?”

  “You obviously haven’t been around very many Catholics, Mark. The rituals are ingrained in early childhood. You never forget them, no matter what’s happened to you.”

  “If you say so,” I said, holding the door for her.
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br />   We found Twink in the kitchen, obviously agitated. “Where have you been?” she demanded, glaring at me.

  “It’s only quarter after eight, Twink, and it’s no more than a mile to the church. We’ll get there in plenty of time.”

  “Everything’s going just fine, Ren,” Mary assured her. “Don’t get all worked up.”

  “Could we go now?” Twink asked me. She seemed on edge.

  “Scoot,” Mary commanded, “and don’t make too much noise when you come home. I’m going to take a hot bath and crash.”

  “Sleep lots,” I told her. “I’ll take Twink out to brunch after church.”

  Twink shot me a nervous grin. “Isn’t he just the nicest boy?” she said to her aunt.

  “He’ll do,” Mary said with a yawn. “Go. Now.”

  Twink and I went back out to my car. “I wish she wouldn’t worry so much about me,” Twink said. “She hasn’t been sleeping very well lately.”

  “We’ll putter around this afternoon,” I told her, as we pulled away from the curb. “If we stay away, maybe she can catch up on her sleep.”

  “That’d be nice,” she said.

  St. Benedict’s Church sits on Fiftieth Street at the southern end of Woodland Park and, as I understand it, the building has a fairly conventional Catholic church layout. “New” is nice, I suppose, but “old” still has a lot going for it.

  I assumed that I’d just stay at the back of the church during the Mass, but Twink wasn’t having any of that. She got a death grip on my arm as we went inside and hauled me forward. I don’t know which of us felt more awkward as we took our seats near the front, but when the organ began playing, Twink relaxed, and gave me a gentle smile.

  There were several rituals that I didn’t understand, but Renata moved effortlessly through the ceremony. I heard some people sitting nearby refer to the priest as “Father O,” and I wasn’t quite sure how to take that. Maybe it was a variation of “Daddy-O.” They used it affectionately—sort of like a pet name. Maybe it had something to do with the lilting Irish brogue in which he spoke. I’d heard people fake a brogue before—usually on St. Patrick’s Day, when everybody pretends to be Irish—but the real thing has a flow to it that you can’t really imitate.