Brain Child Page 0,70

plaza, two blocks away.

But he was tired, as if he’d walked a couple of miles, much of it uphill.

He glanced at his watch. It was a quarter past three. The last time he had looked, only a few minutes ago, it was one-thirty.

Almost two hours had gone by, and he had no memory of it. As he started home, his mind began working at the problem. Hours, he knew, didn’t simply disappear. If he thought about it long enough, he knew, he would figure out what had happened during those hours, and know why he didn’t remember them.

* * *

The back door slammed, and Marsh looked up from the medical journal he was reading in time to see Alex come in from the kitchen. “Hi!”

Alex stopped, then turned toward Marsh. “Hi,” he replied.

“Where you been?”

Alex shrugged. “Nowhere.”

Marsh offered his son a smile. “Funny, that’s exactly where I always was when I was your age.”

Alex made no response, and slowly the smile faded away from Marsh’s face as Alex silently left the room, drifting upstairs toward his own room. A few months ago, before the accident, Alex’s eyes would have lit up, and he would have asked where, exactly, nowhere was, and then they would have been off, the conversation quickly devolving into total nonsense on the subject of the exact location of nowhere and just precisely what one was doing when one was doing nothing in the middle of nowhere.

Now there was nothing in his eyes.

For Marsh, Alex’s eyes had become symbolic of all the changes that had come over him since the accident.

The old Alex had had eyes full of life, and Marsh had always been able to read his son’s mood with one glance.

But now his eyes showed nothing. When he looked into them, all he saw was a reflection of himself. And yet, he had no sense that Alex was trying to hide anything. Rather, it was as if there was nothing there; as if the flatness of his personality had become visible in his eyes.

The eyes, Marsh remembered, had sometimes been referred to as the windows to the soul. And if that was true, then Alex had no soul. Marsh felt chilled by the thought, then tried to banish it from his mind.

But all afternoon, the thought kept coming back to him.

Perhaps Ellen’s feeling on that awful night in May had been right after all. Perhaps Raymond Torres had not saved him at all.

Perhaps in a way Alex was truly dead.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Kate Lewis listened to the hollow ringing of the phone long past the time when she knew it was going to go unanswered. For the fourth time in the last hour, she told herself that her mother must have taken her father to the hospital. But if she had, why hadn’t she left a message on the answering machine? Why hadn’t the answering machine even been turned on? Worried, she hung up the phone at the back of Jake’s and returned to the table she and Bob Carey had been occupying throughout the long Sunday afternoon.

“Still nothing?” Bob asked as Kate slid back into the booth.

Kate tried to force a casual shrug, but failed. “I don’t know what to do. I want to go home, but Mom said to call first.”

“You’ve been calling all afternoon,” Bob pointed out. “Why don’t we go up there, and if they’re still fighting, we can leave again. We don’t even have to go in. But I’ll bet she took him to the hospital.” He reached across the table and squeezed Kate’s hand reassuringly. “Look, if he was as drunk as you said he was, she was probably so busy getting him out of the house and into the car that she didn’t have time to turn on the machine.”

Kate nodded reluctantly, though she was still unconvinced. Always before, her mother had left a message for her, or if her father was really bad, not even tried to take him to the hospital. Instead, she’d called an ambulance.

And this morning, her father had been really bad. Still, she couldn’t just go on sitting around Jake’s. “Okay,” she said at last.

Ten minutes later they pulled into the Lewises’ driveway, and Bob shut off the engine of his Porsche. They stared first at the open garage door and the two cars that still sat inside it. Then they turned their attention toward the house.

“Well, at least they’re not fighting,” Kate said, but made no move to get out of the car.

“Maybe she