Regina's Song Read Online Free PDF

visits might be a little shorter.”
    “I’ll be fine, Markie,” she said. Then she gave me one of those wide-eyed, vapid looks. “Have you heard the news? Some terribly clever fellow named Bell came up with the niftiest idea you ever heard of. He calls it the telephone. Isn’t that neat? You can visit me without even driving up the hill to the bughouse.”
    Mary suddenly exploded with laughter.
    “All right, Twink.” I felt a little foolish. “Would it bother you if I gave you a phone call instead of coming up there?”
    “As long as I know that you care, I’ll be fine. I’m a tough little cookie—or hadn’t you noticed?”
    “Maybe you two should clear that with Dr. Fallon,” Inga suggested, sounding worried.
    “I’ll be fine, Inga,” Renata assured her. For some reason, Twink had trouble with “Mom” and “Dad,” so she called her parents by their names instead. I decided to have a talk with Fallon about that.

    After the holidays, I returned to the university and started taking seminars, beginning with Graduate English Studies. That’s when I discovered just how far down into the bowels of the earth the main library building extended. I think there was more of it underground than above the surface. Graduate English Studies concentrated on “how to find stuff in the Lye-berry.”
That
deliberate mispronunciation used to make Dr. Conrad crazy, so I’d drop it on him every now and then just for laughs.
    I was still commuting to Everett, even though the two hours of driving back and forth cut into my study time quite a bit. I had a long talk with Twink, and we sort of worked out a schedule. I’d visit her on weekends, but our weekday conversations were held on the phone. Dr. Fallon wasn’t
too
happy about that, but headshrinkers sometimes lose contact with the real world—occupational hazard, I suppose.
    Renata’s amnesia remained more or less total—except for occasional flashes that didn’t really make much sense to her. Her furloughs from the hospital grew more frequent and lasted for longer periods of time. Dr. Fallon didn’t come right out and say it, but it seemed to me that he’d finally concluded that Twinkie would never regain her memory.
    Inga Greenleaf, with characteristic German efficiency, went through Castle Greenleaf and removed everything even remotely connected to Regina.

    When the fall quarter of 1996 rolled around, Dr. Conrad decided that it was time for me to get my feet wet on the front side of the classroom, so he bullied me into applying for a graduate teaching assistantship, the academic equivalent of slavery. We didn’t pick cotton; we taught freshman English instead. It was called Expository Writing, and it definitely exposed the nearly universal incompetence of college freshmen. I soon reached the point where I was absolutely certain that if I saw, “. . . in my opinion, I think that . . .” one more time, I’d be joining Twinkie in the bughouse.
    I endured two quarters of Expository Writing. But when the spring quarter of 1997 rolled around, I tackled my thesis and I demonstrated—to my own satisfaction, at least—that
Billy Budd
was a seagoing variation of
Paradise Regained
, with Billy and the evil master-at-arms, Mr. Claggart, contending with each other for the soul of Captain Vere. Since Billy was the hands-down winner, Melville’s little parable was
not
the tragedy it’s commonly believed to be. My thesis ruffled a few feathers in the department, and that was enough to get my doctoral candidacy approved and my MA signed, sealed, and delivered.
    When Twink heard that I was now a Master of Arts, she launched into an overdone imitation of Renfield in the original
Dracula
movie. I got a little tired of that “Yes, Master! Yes, Master!” business, but Twinkie had a lot of fun with it, so what the hell?

    I took the summer of ’97 off. I
could
have taken a couple of courses during summer quarter, but I needed a break, and now that Renata was an outpatient