Regina's Song Read Online Free Page B

you available.”
    “No problem, Doc,” I replied. “If the boss can drop me off at my place, I’ll grab a few things and come right back up the hill.”
    “Good. I’ll want you right there when Renata wakes up. We’ve made a connection, and we don’t want to lose it.”
    Les and Inga took me back to my place when we left the sanitarium. I tossed some clothes and stuff into a suitcase, grabbed some books, and drove my old Dodge back to Lake Stevens. I was as baffled as everybody else had been by Renata’s recognition of me, and it’d caught me completely off guard. There’d been a kind of desperation about the way she’d clung to me—almost like somebody hanging on to a life raft.
    “We don’t necessarily have to mention this to her parents, Mark,” Fallon told me when I reported in, “but I think you’d better be right there in the room when Renata wakes up. Let’s not take any chances and lose this. All the rooms here have surveillance cameras, so I’ll be watching and listening. Don’t push her or say anything about why she’s here. Just be there.”
    “I think I see where you’re going, Doc,” I told him.

    The shot Dr. Fallon had given her kept Twink totally out of it until the next morning, and that gave me time to think my way through the situation. I was still working through my grief at losing my parents, but it was time to put my problems aside and concentrate, here and now, on Twink. If she needed me, I sure as hell wasn’t going to let her down.
    I pushed the reclining chair over beside her bed, pulled the blanket up around my ears, and tapped out.
    When I woke the next morning, Renata was still sound asleep, but she
was
holding my hand. Either she’d come about halfway out of her drug-induced slumber and found something to hold on to, or she’d just groped around for it in her sleep. Then again, it might have been
me
who’d been looking. It was sort of hard to say.
    One of the orderlies brought our breakfast about seven, and I tugged on Twink’s hand a couple of times. “Hey, sack-rat,” I said, “rise and shine. It’s daylight in the swamp.”
    She woke up
smiling
, for God’s sake! That’s sick!
Nobody
smiles that early in the morning!
    “I need a hug,” she said.
    “Not ’til you get up.”
    “Grouch,” she accused me, her face still radiant.

    That first day was a little strange. Twink watched me all the time, and she had a vapid look on her face every minute. I tried to read, but it’s awfully hard to concentrate when you can feel somebody watching you.
    There was also a fair amount of spontaneous hugging.
    I checked in with Dr. Fallon late that afternoon, and he suggested that I should probably let Twink know that I wasn’t going to be a permanent fixture. “Tell her that you’ll have to go back to work before too much longer. Let her know that you’ll visit her often, but you have to earn a living.”
    “That’s not entirely true, Doc,” I told him. “I’ve got a few bucks stashed away.”
    “You don’t need to mention that, Mark. We don’t want her to become totally dependent on your presence here. I think the best course might be to gradually wean her away. Stay here for a few more days, and then find some reason to run back to Everett for an afternoon. We’ll play it by ear and see how she reacts. Sooner or later, she’s going to have to learn how to stand alone.”
    “You’re the expert, Doc. I
won’t
do anything to hurt her, though.”
    “I think she might surprise you, Mark.”

    There was another bout of hugging when I got back to Twink’s room. That seemed just a bit odd. There hadn’t been much physical contact between the twins and me in the past, but now it seemed that every time I turned around, she had her arms wrapped around me. “Renata,” I said finally, “you
do
know that we aren’t alone, don’t you?” I pointed at the surveillance camera.
    “These aren’t those kinds of hugs, Markie.” She shrugged it off. “There