“Possibly, but I don’t think it’d be a good idea right now. Her amnesia’s a hiding place, and she needs that for the time being. There’s no way to know how long she’ll need it. There have been cases where an amnesiac never recovers his memory. He lives a normal life—except that he has no memory of his childhood. Sometimes, his memory’s selective. He remembers this, but doesn’t remember that. We’ll have to play it by ear and see just how far she’s ready to go.”
“Let’s go see her,” Inga said abruptly.
Dr. Fallon nodded and led us out of his office and down a hallway.
Renata’s room was quite large and comfortable-looking. Everything about it was obviously designed to suggest a calm stateliness. The carpeting was deep and lush, the furniture was traditional, and the window drapes were a neutral blue. A hotel room in that class would probably cost a hundred dollars a night. Renata was sitting in a comfortable reclining chair by the window, placidly looking out at the rain writhing down to sweep the lake.
“Renata,” Dr. Fallon said gently, “Your parents have come to visit you, and they’ve brought a friend.”
She smiled rather vaguely. “That’s nice,” she replied in a fuzzy sort of voice. Dr. Fallon’s definition of “mildly sedated” might have differed from mine by quite a bit. It looked to me as if Renata was tranked to the eyeballs. She looked rather blankly at her parents with no sign of recognition.
Then she saw me. “Markie!” she squealed. She scrambled to her feet and came running across the room to hurl herself into my arms, laughing and crying at the same time. “Where have you been?” she demanded, clinging to me desperately. “I’ve been lost here without you.” I held her while she cried, and I stared at her parents and Dr. Fallon in absolute bafflement. It was obvious from their expressions that they had no more idea of what was going on than I did.
“What’s happening here?” Les Greenleaf demanded, after Renata had been sedated into a peaceful slumber and we’d returned to Fallon’s office. “I thought you told us that she has total amnesia.”
“Evidently, it’s not quite as total as we thought,” Fallon replied, grinning broadly. “I think this might be a major breakthrough.”
“Why does she recognize Mark and not us?” Inga sounded offended.
“I haven’t got the faintest idea,” Fallon confessed, “but the fact that she recognizes somebody is very significant. It means that her past isn’t a total blank.”
“Then she’ll get her memory back?” Inga asked.
“Some of it, at least. It’s too early to tell how much.” Fallon looked at me then. “Would it be possible for you to stay here for the next few days, Mark?” he asked. “For some reason, you seem to be the key to Renata’s memory, so I’d like to have 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
