“I Regret You, Baby”

“I Regret You, Baby” is a song by Sara Tidwell whose reprise becomes part of a violent supernatural episode at Sara Laughs. Heard first as a recording performed by the Rolling Stones, it reappears in the cacophony surrounding an unseen assault on Mike, connecting the song to Sara’s presence and to the novel’s recurring entanglement of memory, violence, and haunting.

The Song and Its Return

During the disturbance, Mike is struck by an invisible force as objects crash around the kitchen. The kitchen television blares, but the CD player starts and drowns it out with the Rolling Stones’ cover of Sara Tidwell’s song. The music enters a scene already dominated by unexplained movement and noise: Bunter’s bell jingles, a sliding door slams, and smoke alarms and the car alarm join the din. The song is not an isolated musical detail; its sudden arrival belongs to the assault’s escalating sensory confusion.

The cover also carries a memory of Mike’s earlier encounter with Rogette Whitmore. Listening to a tape of a conversation with John Storrow, Mike recognizes Rogette’s smoky, grating laugh and recalls seeing her outside The Sunset Bar in black shorts and a black swimsuit. Her recorded remark that Storrow had turned on his tape recorder brings back the moment she hit Mike in the back of the head: the lake seemed to change from bright orange to dark scarlet, and he began drinking the water. The song’s later eruption therefore sits within a chain of recollection that restores the bodily danger of that attack.

Sara’s Presence in the Haunting

The scene at Sara Laughs turns the recorded cover into one element of a larger, seemingly coordinated supernatural event. A warm draft passes Mike, an uncanny voice repeats a sound he first takes for a farewell, and something knocks him against the table. His hand then moves to a blank page and writes under an apparent external force. The song sounds amid these disturbances, as the house’s ordinary objects and machines become part of the haunting.

Sara is named as the song’s original performer, and its appearance during the attack binds the haunting to her history. Later, after Mike destroys Sara and Kito Tidwell’s remains with lye, Sara’s hatred is described as burned away; the sound of her departure gives way to a bird’s cry. The song’s recurrence thus belongs to a story in which Sara’s influence is not merely remembered but is experienced as an active presence, ultimately confronted and ended.

Memory, Loss, and Narrative Echo

The song’s return is part of a broader pattern in which earlier words and objects acquire new force through repetition. After Johanna Noonan’s death, Mike reads a passage from The Moon and Sixpence and encounters the line “You funny little man,” which makes her absence undeniable. Later, when he completes a difficult passage of writing, he raises a glass of champagne to Jo and says, “I'm done, Jo,” followed by “So that's all right, isn't it?” On a later return to the house, he answers an unseen challenge with “Well, then — that's all right, isn't it?” The changing context makes the repeated phrase register as a movement from grief toward readiness to face what waits there.

After a night of writing, Mike cries on the railroad-tie steps between Sara Laughs and the lake. His tears hold grief for the years without Jo, gratitude that his work may be returning, and fear at realizing that since her death he has been walking a white line, somehow carried out of harm’s way. The episode ends with his descent into the lake, whose cool water feels like a resurrection. These repetitions make the song’s return more than an atmospheric cue: like the remembered phrases, it makes the past intrude into the present, while the song’s association with Sara’s violence gives that intrusion a distinctly threatening edge.

From Haunting to Care

After the final confrontation, Jo appears as a dim figure, exhausted but smiling, while the Outsider is gone. Mike understands her words without hearing them clearly and describes marriage itself as a zone: their bond persists as an intimate connection across absence. The scene places Jo’s posthumous presence beside the ending of Sara’s haunting, distinguishing a sustaining connection from the destructive force that has attached itself to the song and its history.

At the close, Mike says he is haunted, but will not willingly haunt himself; he has closed his book of dreams by his own choice. His attention turns to Kyra, asleep down the hall, whom he calls his little guy and himself her big guy. He has lost his taste for spooks and sees other things as more meaningful than fiction. Against that ending, the song’s recurrence marks the return of a violent past, while the novel’s final movement is toward relinquishing its hold and caring for the living.