proudly.
“Assembled,” he said, taking the beer she offered. He smiled at her and said, “Builders make the parts — including the lenses.” He bent to the eyepiece again. “This is a Maksutov-Cassegrain telescope,” he said. “It’s a reflector. Not as much resolution as a refractor, but better for deep sky objects.”
Deep sky. Maybe Regina was hearing poetry after all.
He beckoned to me. “Take a look, Irene.”
My eyes now adjusted to the darkness, I moved back to the telescope and bent to look through the L-shaped portion of the eyepiece. I saw what appeared to be a bright mound of light, concentrated at the center, blurring at the edges. Other, single round objects — stars — were nearby.
“What is it?” I asked.
“A spiral galaxy in the constellation Virgo. It’s called the Sombrero galaxy.”
I smiled, now seeing its resemblance to a hat.
“Didn’t expect to come out here and get a science lesson, did you?” Regina asked.
“No,” I said, straightening, “but I appreciate it all the same. Thanks, Bernard.”
“You’re welcome,” he said, already back to watching the sky.
I moved back to my chair, picked at the label on the beer. How to begin?
Regina began it for me. “How are Bret and Sam these days?”
“I’m not exactly sure how to answer that question,” I said. “Why don’t you tell me about them — back when you first met them?”
She tilted her head to one side as she studied me, then shrugged, as if deciding I could have things my way.
“Do you know how they came to be my clients?”
“I know what happened to their fathers, yes. And I’ve read the article in the
“The one about elective mutism?”
“Yes.”
“So you know that I tried to get them to talk again, with the help of a team of people that were concerned about them. A school psychologist, a doctor, the boys’ teachers, their mothers, and so on.”
“When did they begin speaking again?”
“Not for a long time.”
“How long?”
“Three years.”
“Three years?” I repeated.
“The boys were — are — very bright. We tested their IQs. Sam’s scores were much higher than average — he’s definitely gifted. Bret scored even higher, very gifted. I rarely see scores as high as Bret’s. Kids who are as bright as Sam and Bret can be a handful. Given the severe emotional trauma they had experienced, their intelligence, their closeness as friends, it’s not too hard to see how they could sustain elective mutism over that period of time.”
“So how did they communicate?”
“With others?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Pointing, signs….”
“Formal signing? Like ASL?”
“No, these were very crude by comparison to American Sign Language, which really is a complex language of its own, with its own idioms and so forth. I’m not speaking of signs or language in that sense. But the boys had a secret code, we’ll say. Signs and a spoken secret code they used with one another — words they made up and understood perfectly.”
“Something like pig Latin?”
“Beyond that. Not just rhyming or mixing syllables. Out-and-out new words.”
“Didn’t other people grow frustrated with this?”
“Oh, they drove everyone nuts at first. Eva Ryan had no patience at all with it, and neither did Sam’s stepfather.”
“Stepfather?”
“Yes, didn’t you know? She remarried not long after Gene Ryan’s death. Another doctor. Gene left her with a pile of debts, so I guess she was lucky to land on her feet.”
“Was the stepfather… cruel to Sam?” I asked.
“Not at all. Sam basically left the family, joined the Neukirks.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You might say the boys decided it. They didn’t want to be separated. No one could blame them, especially in
