CounterProbe

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Jane walked in, circling the knotty pine cocktail table, memorizing the shabby sofa and carefully angled chairs. She walked finally to the opposite wall and paused before a photograph of herself—the standard out-of-focus high school graduation picture that looked as if the mists of time webbed its surface the moment its subject was captured.

  Kevin edged closer, watching Jane absorb her own image in an alien environment. She had virtually no personal vanity—yet, but her eyes studied every detail of that photographic image: the Peter Pan collar, the curled hair, the barrette caught awkwardly near one temple.

  The late Lynn Volker had been a fresh, attractive but unspectacular girl. Jane was her spitting image.

  Kevin and Volker, linked by a begrudging, unspoken mutual awe, regarded Jane as raptly as she studied her own likeness. Jane stared so intently at the photo behind its shield of glass, within its cheap metallic frame, that Kevin feared it would melt, shatter, slip off the wall.

  A crash made both men jump. Jane was unmoved. In the oblong of kitchen light, a shadow froze. Mrs. Volker stepped over the shattered water glass at her feet and edged into the room, her expression obscured by the light behind her.

  “Jane-Lynn—?”

  Jane’s shoulders stiffened. Her profile tensed further, if that was possible. Kevin foresaw a repetition of her earlier rejection of the Volkers. He fumbled for some conversational double-talk to derail it, mask it, mute it.

  Jane turned from the photograph before he could unlatch his tongue. She looked from woman to man, father to mother, from Volker to Volker, stranger to stranger.

  Volker looked the same as when Jane had last seen him a few months ago, but his wife had faded—the permanent wave and color rinse had slipped from her once- meticulously done hair, leaving her ghost-gray.

  “You must have been really dark-haired once.” Jane addressed the woman, who seemed to need to stop and remember before nodding dazed agreement. “I have your coloring, but his features, if he were thinner.”

  Mrs. Volker gasped and pressed the corner of a cotton dishcloth to her mouth. Volker made an odd sound, half admission, half denial.

  Kevin went to Jane. “Can we sit down?” he asked gently.

  The Volkers’ quick glances consulted each other.

  “Adelle, I don’t want your heart broken again… ,” Volker began. “Remember what happened in the Cities.”

  “She’s our girl, I always knew it,” the woman pled.

  “Our girl is dead. We know that now, thanks to all the publicity and those dental records from Montana. Our Lynn died on that camping trip in Montana years ago. I guess us being made the fools of the whole state for claiming this one at least got that much clear.”

  “Sit down,” Mrs. Volker breathlessly urged Jane, ignoring her husband.

  Kevin guided Jane to the sofa and sat with her. Mrs. Volker hesitated, then perched on the other side of Jane, her hands smoothing the print apron over her knees. Volker stood in the center of the room watching them.

  “Would you… like something to eat, Jane-Lynn?” Mrs. Volker’s voice was timorous.

  Jane looked at Kevin.

  “Some hot coffee would be great, Mrs. Volker. If you’ve got it on,” he amended politely with a quick smile, thus ensuring that any motherly woman would make it anyway.

  “Of course, Doctor. We’re old-fashioned. Coffee’s always on. Does she… drink coffee?”

  “I don’t know, Mrs. Volker. Let’s find out.”

  “Jane… anything you want?”

  “Bread,” Jane blurted. “Zucchini bread; it was good.”

  “Oh.” The older woman’s face fell. She looked like the drawing of a conventional mother from a first-grade primer. Kevin expected Mrs. Volker to put up her hands and say, “Run, Spot, run.” Instead, she apologized. “That was frozen from last summer’s crop. We used it all up. What I brought you in the Cities last fall was the last loaf.”

  “Anything would be fine, Mrs. Volker,” Kevin put in. “We’ve been on the road, eating at fast-food joints. Anything homemade would be an improvement.”

  The woman stood and practically backed away, unwilling to take her eyes off Jane. Volker didn’t move to help his wife in the kitchen. Kevin’s mouth quirked to think of the conventional parents fate had chosen for his wildly unconventional Jane.

  “You been on the road,” Volker repeated. “How come?”

  “Tracing Jane’s past. I think I’ve solved it. The what and why, anyway—if not the how.”

  “It help her any?”

  “Maybe. I was hoping you would help her more.”

  He shrugged, the old man, and, wheezing, shuffled over to find his pipe. Jane was right, he could use a diet.

  “We kind of gave up on her, Dr. Blake, for our own sakes, after that news story by that Bowman woman came out, about how deluded we were and our real daughter was so many bones and teeth out there in the wildwoods. It kind of took the heart out of us, the scandal and all. They still try to call us from those national rags, looking for a new angle—a new way to make fools of us on their front pages.”

  “People send us the clippings,” Mrs. Volker said. She had paused in the doorway again, an enigmatic figure bearing a tray. “Like it was an honor.”

  “Why are you here?” Volker asked.

  “To tell you that you weren’t crazy,” Kevin said, “to say that everything you thought happened to you years ago did happen.”

  This bombshell should have had both Volkers shouting hallelujah and eating out of Kevin’s hand. Instead, silence greeted his announcement.

  “Well, that’s something,” Volker said at last. “A big Twin Cities psychiatrist saying we’re not crazy. You acted like we weren’t much better than slugs when we came down to the Cities to say”—he glanced at Jane—“she was our daughter. You just sat back and waited while everyone else proved we weren’t—the reporters, the police. Now you show up again. Now we’re her long-lost parents. What’s the matter, Dr. Blake, you gone off your rocker?”

  “Some people might say that, if I told them what I had seen two nights ago.”

  “Then keep your mouth shut,” Volker advised tersely, “like we should have twenty-five years ago.”

  Mrs. Volker’s hand had stolen across her lap to rest feather light on Jane’s jacket sleeve. She tugged on the material. “Lynn, honey… Jane. You remember us any?”

  “She can’t, Mother!” Volker’s voice held a twang of agony. “This one never saw us, never knew us, and even if she did, she’s still got no memory worth worrying about. She’s still an amnesiac, isn’t that right, Doc? She doesn’t know shit from shinola about anything—!”

  Jane glanced to Kevin, confused. “Shinola?”

  He shook his head. “That is Jane’s particular… malady, Mr. Volker. She knows a lot of things she shouldn’t, and doesn’t know some rather simple things she should. Shinola’s one of them.”

  “Don’t cuss in front of the girl, Jack,” Mrs. Volker put in by rote. Her hand slid down to take Jane’s hand in her puckered palm and absently stroke it with her fingers.

  Jane accepted the familiarity with taut tolerance, her eyes sliding first to the photograph of herself on the wall, then to Kevin.

  “I know,” Mrs. Volker mused to herself, “that if we let Lynn… let Jane… see her old room—Lynn’s, that is—I know she’d remember something. Remember us. She can’t look this much like Lynn and not remember.”

  Kevin’s mouth opened to explain why Jane most certainly could, but Mrs. Volker’s sad eyes pinned his lips shut before he could speak.

  “You said you came back, you brought her back, because she really is our daughter, didn’t you, Doctor?” Volker asked.

  “Yes, she is, but—”

  “Then let’s do what Mother wants. Let’s take her upstairs, show her where she grew up.”

  His wife didn’t wait for agreement. “Come along, dear, I know you’ll remember something if you only see—”

  Docile, Jane allo
wed Mrs. Volker’s hand to tug her to her feet.

  “And take your jacket off—heavens, you’re going to stay awhile. Make yourself to home.”

  Mrs. Volker’s fingers unzipped the down jacket with maternal presumption. Kevin tensed, as he had when the clerk had gone snipping at Jane with scissors, but Jane seemed subdued, perhaps by her encounter with her own image on this unpretentious wall.

  They stood awkwardly around the coffee table, four dark circles of untasted coffee steaming like a campfire in their midst. Gently, Mrs. Volker teased Jane toward the dining room, step by step. Kevin and her husband let themselves be drawn into the women’s wake by default.

  “She’s not—” Kevin began, crossing glances with Volker, then subsided.

  No one wanted to hear what he thought. All their emotions revolved around the centerpiece of Jane now. Around Jane, and what Jane would do, say, remember. Or not remember, Kevin reminded himself. She was good at not remembering.

  The dark wood door at one side of a built-in dining room buffet opened on dim stairs suspended between plain, beige-painted walls. At the top a tiny window squeezed into the apex of the roof. A half wall topside kept anyone from falling down the stairwell.

  It had been an attic originally, the space. Maybe fifteen years ago, Papa Volker or some local handyman had paneled it with walnut veneer and installed built-in bookshelves. Mrs. Volker had sprinkled the linoleum floor with rag rugs and festooned the undereave windows with yellow curtains. They’d installed a couple of single beds for girlish sleepovers, and a stereo, and called it a teenager’s room.

  Kevin turned around in the big, unheated space. A Rolling Stones poster on one wall brought a brief, rueful memory of the one in his office back at the University of Minnesota Hospitals, back at the Probe unit. Record albums kept packed company on the lowest bookshelves. Cheerleading pom-poms—orange and purple—decorated one wall like crossed swords. A slightly shabby chorus line of stuffed toys paraded along one bed pushed against the murky wall.

  Mrs. Volker went to an undersized door and jerked it open. “She had plenty of closet space. I had Father build in lots of that under the eaves. Girls always need room for things… Do you remember, honey? Do you remember any of this?”

  God, I hope not, Kevin thought unkindly. Jane was silent.

  “Maybe this was a mistake,” Kevin admitted. “You don’t understand, Mrs. Volker. I never said that Jane lived here with you, as your daughter. Only that she was your daughter.”

  “Ain’t that the same thing?” Volker asked truculently.

  “Not… in this case. Jane is… unique. I don’t think you understand how unique—”

  “Me!” Jane burst out. She pulled the closet door further open, drawing a mirror image of herself full-face into their midst.

  It was as if a ghost of the dead girl—Lynn Elizabeth Volker—had materialized in the echoing room with them.

  Mrs. Volker choked on a sob. Her husband pushed his hands deep into his pockets and turned to the window, leaving his broad, red-plaid back drawn on the rest of them like a shade.

  Kevin felt an odd jolt of precognitive déjà vu, as if a scene never enacted in this room, and never to be enacted here, had laid its fuzzy outlines over an image from the past burned into the mirror.

  Jane reached out to something wedged under a corner of the full-length mirror—a faded prom memoir, a dance card dangling a tassel.

  “Me?” Jane asked this time, less certain.

  No one answered, and before anyone could try, Jane turned back to the room, studying it with a frowning intensity that brought new hope to Mrs. Volker’s hopelessly ordinary features.

  “Yes, it’s yours, dear. You lived here. I sewed the curtains at the window with some material I ordered from Sears. We put the half bath in for you”—her eyes flickered to another door—“everything for you, even the music you liked to play so loud, that Father always complained about over his head—”

  “I didn’t complain. I just said it was loud, and it was. For God’s sake, Mother, the girl isn’t a saint just because she’s dead!”

  “She’s not dead! She’s here! Dr. Blake brought her back to us. She may not remember… oh, try, try,” she begged Jane. “Try to remember.”

  A poignant silence dominated them all. Kevin Blake, psychiatrist, wished he were an honest exorcist capable of banishing all the ghosts called into this room—ghosts of what once was, what never was and what never would be.

  “Try to remember,” came a clear, plaintive soprano.

  Music faint as a radiator hiss chimed into the room. Kevin jerked his head toward the stereo setup. The sound was too weak to pinpoint, but the familiar lyrics and music from The Fantasticks, typical teenage girl fare, unwound verse by cloying verse.

  Jane was standing in the middle of the room, looking normal as north woods apple pie in her jeans and shirt and boots, her eyes closed, her head lifted, her arms and fingers spread slightly, as though she was contemplating engraving an upright snow angel on the air.

  “Try to remember when—”

  Mrs. Volker inhaled a hiccough of air and then folded her hands over her mouth. Volker had turned from the window and froze, watching Jane and listening.

  _“Try to remember—”

  The repetition was beginning to wear on all of them.

  “Where on earth—?” Volker began hoarsely, looking at Kevin.

  Kevin stared at the stereo, then hurled himself to it, kneeling to the row of record albums. He kinked his head sideways and read through Steely Dan/Michael Jackson/ Joni Mitchell/the Beach Boys to… Cats! and Chorus Line and—Eureka!

  “The Fantasticks!” he announced, pulling out the album and edging the record from the jacket. “‘Try to Remember,’” he read off the label.

  “It was… her favorite,” Mrs. Volker said.

  Kevin frowned at her, momentarily disconnected.

  “Lynn’s. Lynn’s favorite song. They even mentioned it in the yearbook. The Crookston Excelsior. Under her picture. They listed all their favorite songs. That was Lynn’s.”

  It still played in the room.

  “The record’s here,” Kevin said, shaking it a little in his clammy hands. He glanced to the motionless turntable under its dust-blanketed smoke-colored Plexiglas cover. “It’s impossible to hear it.”

  Nothing moved or spoke in the room. Only the music unspun regularly, and it came from nowhere. Was it real, Kevin wondered—or Memorex?

  Then something caught Kevin’s eye, a subtle, quick, mechanical movement, right where he should have looked for it. Close-up. The tape deck, of course. And the almost undetectable motion of a tiny cassette reeling past hidden heads, playing “Try to Remember.”

  “Jane,” Kevin began.

  “Me,” sang Jane back. “Me, me, me.”

  He turned. She looked like an actress playing Helen Keller, head thrown back now, eyes closed, mouth open, limbs splayed as if they were principal sensors in her body.

  “Jane, stop it!”

  But she was deaf to him, blind to the Volkers. The room was pouring into her and she was funneling it back at itself. “Try to Remember” found its full volume, the plaintive song reverberating in the dead space.

  Kevin pushed the Eject button. The mechanism jammed. He clawed at the thin plastic window. Behind it, the music, untouched, rolled on and on, trying to remember.

  A new motion caught his eye. Above him, the record turntable noiselessly began spinning under its dust cover. He reached to stop it, but at his knees record albums began spilling from the shelf, spinning across the floor as if the linoleum were a giant turntable, spinning—and playing.

  Rock beats, folk ballads, surf rhythms, blues—they all mingled, ghosting over each other, the slick album covers spinning at the same inexorable rate, perfectly, mechanically. Thirty-three and a third revolutions per minute.

  “All me,” Jane was announcing over the cacophony. “Me, me, me, meeeee!”

  Dresser drawers slid open, strewing p
ieces of Lynn Volker’s lost life across the rag rugs and matching chintz floral bedspreads—limp underwear and faded blue jeans, shapeless sweaters and socks, a red leather clutch purse, beads, a long-forgotten stack of wallet-size high school graduation photos—dead ringers for the portrait downstairs—unfurling like a pack of cards and stuttering across the floor in a ragged chorus line.

  Mrs. Volker was screaming, her apron thrown over her head. Volker had spread-eagled himself against the window, as if defying anything to pass him.

  Kevin forced himself upright amid a blizzard of clothes and stationery. A lead pencil made a pass at his left eye. Crepe paper swagged his arm. Lynn Volker’s life— memorialized in this room—fell apart all around him.

  There was no wind, nothing except the moving things and the motionless people and the raucous music. He skidded over the slick, spinning albums, tripping, losing his balance, then recapturing it, until he got to Jane.

  Once there, he froze like the others. He’d seen mental illness take a lot of strange physical forms; he’d never seen anyone so transported as Jane.

  “Is she… possessed?” Volker ground out over the screaming music.

  Superstition snapped Kevin’s awe. He reached out and touched Jane’s wrist. The flannel shirt puckered to her arm, as if infected with a massive shot of static. He felt his fingertips tingle, then reached to touch her other arm. This time the phenomenon didn’t surprise him. Nothing would surprise him.

  “Jane. Open your eyes. Your eyes—open them!”

  Beneath her closed eyelids he could see the tremor of REMs, rapid eye movements that signal dreaming. She wasn’t dreaming now, he knew, but perhaps her neurons were. “Wake up. Open your eyes!”

  The dark eyelashes spasmed, but her eyes remained closed.

  “Jane, it’s Dr. Blake, and when I say the word, you’ll open your eyes and your ears and your mind and you’ll be in the room with me and the Volkers.”

  The confidence in his tone was pure reflex. He wasn’t sure, but he was going to try to produce a waking state by resorting to a hypnosis-inducing codeword. An old word from their first sessions, before Jane had so much as repaired a broken fingernail with her telekinetic powers.