She doesn’t seem to have noticed that this knowledge is spurting effortlessly out of her mouth as if she’s recalling it from university. Perhaps it’s her memory starting to surface.
“Anderson is saying, ‘blond-haired, young, clever boy.’ That’s wrong.”
“You were always such a geek for this stuff,” Bree says. “Do you think your memory is coming back?”
“Nobody speaks like this,” she repeats. She doesn’t seem to care about her amnesia right now.
“Yeah, but it’s not a federal offense,” I argue. “Are you going to turn that up?”
She just lets it run, muted while she paces the room, whispering the phrase under her breath, over and over. It’s an extreme reaction to incorrect sentence structure and I’m starting to worry she’s snapped.
“‘Blond-haired, young, clever boy. Blond-haired, young, clever boy.’ Where have I heard this before?” she asks herself.
“At the wedding,” I remind her. “You were there.”
That said, at the wedding she looked like she was a million miles away. I doubt she took in a single word. She looked like she’d disassociated from her own fairy tale.
“‘Blond-haired, young, clever boy …’”
She stops pacing. Bree and I are both staring at her, probably both wondering the same thing.Should we call the psych team?
“‘I love you, my brown-eyed, creative, tall boy.’” She says the line and stares at me. Suddenly, this is far more than a memory fragment. Her fascination and all the pacing and racking of her brain makes sense as everything inside me drops through the floor in realization. I feel like all the water from the ocean has suddenly been drawn away, revealing the entire seabed, just as we’re about to be hit by an incoming tsunami.
She may not remember yet, but I know exactly where she read that line.
71
Evie
Drew looks like he’s going to throw up. All the color has drained from his face, and he seems at once younger and more vulnerable, but also like he’s aged a decade in seconds.
“What is it?” I cross the room and sit beside him on the couch.
“That speech pattern,” he says quietly, his voice strangely gruff and laden with concern. “How likely is it that two well-educated English speakers would use it?”
I shake my head. “They almost certainly wouldn’t. Most people might not be able to tell youwhyit’s wrong, but they’d know it was. It’s a universal rule. Virtually inviolable.”
Suddenly, I remember that notebook in my podcast studio. The words I’d written down and then crossed out hard.Adjective order.Who was I hiding that from? Was I already onto this before the accident?
“That can’t be right,” he mutters.
I take my phone and googleorder of adjectives. “See, it says it here. You don’t say someone is wearing a green striking coat. It’s a striking green coat. It’s a specific order—the more abstract property first. We don’t say a hot nice cup of tea. It’s a nice hot cup. It’s a quick brown fox, not a brown quick fox …”
I’m getting mildly excited that maybe Iamrecalling information from my linguistics degree. And excited just by linguistics itself. The enchantment of words and how cultures build languages. That someone’s way with words can be so particular and unique that it’s like a verbal fingerprint.Thisis what I loved. The mysteries of language. The secrets of communication, unlocked in little phrases and accents, in how we play with words and shuffle them to make meaning. Maybe my memory will start to domino back as I connect with things that mean this much to me.
Drew is not so excited. It looks like he’s shattering into some kind of private hell. “Evie, we once had a conversation about the Unabomber.”
I don’t remember.
“You told me they cracked that case because he used a specific phrase?”
That sounds right. I think that’s a lot of what forensic linguists do—look for patterns and quirky language uses to tie to crimes.
“He said ‘You can’t eat your cake and have it too,’” Drew says.
“Isn’t it ‘You can’t have your cake and eat it too’?” Bree interrupts.
“No, that’s what we all think, but, Evie, you told me he’d used the original version of the phrase, the way it used to be said in Middle English, which almost nobody ever uses now. That’s what tipped off the FBI, because he’d used it somewhere else too …”
