Regina's Song Read Online Free

their way home, they encountered what the cops refer to as a “high-speed chase.” A local drunk who’d had his driver’s license revoked after repeated arrests for “driving while intoxicated” got himself all liquored up in a downtown bar, and the cops spotted his car wandering around on both sides of Colby Avenue, one of the main streets in Everett. When the lush heard the siren and saw the red light flashing behind him, he evidently remembered the judge’s warning when his license had been lifted. The prospect of twenty years in the slammer evidently scared the hell out of him, so he stomped on his gas pedal. The cops gave chase, of course, and it was estimated that the drunk was going about ninety when he ran a red light and plowed into my folks. All three of them died in the crash.
    I was completely out of it for a week or so, and Les Greenleaf took over making the funeral arrangements, attending to legal matters, and dealing with a couple of insurance companies.
    I’d already enrolled for my first quarter of grad school that fall, but I called Dr. Conrad and asked him to put me on hold until winter quarter. My dad had been shrewd enough to buy mortgage insurance, so our modest home in north Everett was now mine, free and clear, and the life insurance policies covering both of my parents gave me a chunk of cash. Les Greenleaf suggested some investments, and I suddenly became a capitalist. I don’t imagine that I made Bill Gates very nervous, but at least I’d be able to get through graduate school without working for a living at the same time.
    I’d have really preferred different circumstances, though.
    I kept my job at the door factory—not so much for the wages as for something to keep me busy. Sitting at home wallowing in grief wouldn’t have been a very good idea. I’ve noticed that guys who do that are liable to start hitting the bottle. After what’d happened in August, I wasn’t
too
fond of drunks, or eager to join the ranks of the perpetually sauced-up.
    I made fairly frequent trips to Seattle that fall. I didn’t want the university to slip into past tense in my mind, so I kept it right in front of me. As long as I was there anyway, I did a bit of preliminary work on my Melville-Milton theory. The more I dug into
Paradise Regained
, the more convinced I became that
Billy Budd was
derivative.
    It was in late November, I think, when Mr. and Mrs. Greenleaf and I actually got some
good
news for a change. Renata—we had agreed among ourselves by then that it almost certainly
was
Renata in that private sanitarium—woke up. She stopped talking exclusively in twin-speak and began answering questions in English.
    Our frequent contacts with Dr. Fallon, the chief of staff at the institution, had made us aware that twin-speak was common—so common, in fact, that it had a scientific name—“cryptolalia.” Dr. Fallon told us that it shows up in almost all cases of multiple births. The secret language of twins isn’t all that complicated, but a set of quintuplets can invent a language so complex that its grammar book would run to three volumes.
    When Renata stopped speaking in cryptolalia, though, her first question suggested that she wasn’t out of the woods yet. When a patient wakes up and says, “Who am I?” it usually gets the psychiatrist’s immediate attention.
    The private sanitarium where she was being treated was up at Lake Stevens, and I rode up with Les and Inga on a rainy Sunday afternoon to visit her.
    The rest home was several cuts above a state-supported mental hospital, which is usually built to resemble various other state institutions where people are confined. This one was back among the trees on about five acres near the lakeshore, and there was a long, curving drive leading to a large, enclosed interior court, complete with a gate and a guard. It was obviously an institution of some kind, but a polite one. It was a place where wealthy people could stash relatives whose