Brain Child (22 page)

He’d be upstairs in a minute, pounding on the door and alternately begging her forgiveness and threatening her. And she’d have to get through it all once more, and try to talk him into letting her drive him to the hospital in Palo Alto to check himself into the alcoholism unit. Or, if worse came to worst, call them herself, and have them come for Alan with an ambulance. That, though, had only happened once, and she prayed it wouldn’t happen again.

She went into the bathroom and washed her face with cold water. Any second now, he’d be at the door, and the argument would begin. Only this time, it wouldn’t be about Kate. Kate, at least, would be out of it. Now it would be the drinking again.

Five minutes went by, and nothing happened.

Finally Marty opened the bedroom door and stepped out to the landing at the top of the stairs. From below, there was only silence. “Alan?” she called.

There was no answer.

She started down the stairs, pausing at the bottom to call her husband once more. When there was still no answer, she headed for the kitchen. Perhaps he’d passed out.

The kitchen was empty.

Oh, God, Marty groaned to herself. Now what? She poured herself a cup of coffee from the pot she always kept hot on the stove in the hopes that Alan would choose it over alcohol, and tried to figure out what to do.

At least he hadn’t taken his car. If he had, she’d have
heard him pulling out of the garage. Still, she checked the garage anyway. Both cars were still there.

Maybe she should call the police. No. If he’d taken his car, she would have, but as long as he was on foot, he couldn’t hurt anyone. In fact, one of the La Paloma police would probably pick him up within the hour anyway.

Would they bring him home, or take him to the hospital? Or maybe even to jail?

Marty decided she didn’t really care. Yesterday, last night, and this morning had been just too exhausting. It was time for Alan to clean up his own messes. She’d call no one, and do nothing about finding him, at least until this evening. Then, if he still wasn’t home, she’d start looking.

Her decision made, she began cleaning up the kitchen, starting with Alan’s liquor. She drained the half tumbler of bourbon into the sink, then began taking the bottles off the cupboard shelf.

One by one, she emptied them, too, into the drain, and threw the bottles in the trash basket by the back door.

Thirty minutes later, when the kitchen was spotless, she started on the rest of the house.

Alex wandered through the village, doing his best to follow Raymond Torres’s instructions to keep his eyes open and his mind clear. But so far, nothing had happened. The village seemed familiar now, and everything seemed to be in the right place, and surrounded by the right things. After an hour, he stopped in a complex of little shops that specialized in the expensive items that so intrigued the computer people in town.

In one window there was a small glass sphere that seemed to have nothing in it but water. Then, when he looked closer, he realized that there were tiny shrimp swimming in the water, and a little bit of seaweed. It was, according to the card next to it, a fully balanced and self-contained ecosystem that would live on in the
sealed globe for years, needing only light to survive. He watched it for a few minutes, fascinated, and then a thought came into his head.

It’s like my brain. Sealed up, with no way to get at what’s inside
. A moment later he turned away and continued up La Paloma Drive until he came to the Square.

He stopped to gaze at the giant oak, and found himself wondering if he’d ever climbed the tree, or carved his initials in its trunk, or tied a swing to its lower branches. But if he had, the memories were gone now.

And then, very slowly, things began to change. His eyes fixed on the base of the tree, and everything around him seemed to fade away, almost as if the coastal fog had drifted down from the hillsides and swallowed up everything except himself and the tree.

Once again, as at the mission in San Francisco, images began to come into his mind, and something he had only vaguely remembered when he came home from the Institute was suddenly clearly visible.

There was a rope hanging from the lowest limb of the tree, and at the end of the rope, a body hung.

Whose body?

Around the body, men on horseback were laughing.

And then a sudden pain lashed through his brain, and the whispering began, as it had begun in the cemetery at the mission in San Francisco.

The words were in Spanish, but he understood them clearly.

“They take our land and our homes. They take our lives
. Venganza … venganza …”

The words droned on and on in his mind, and then, finally, Alex turned away from the ancient oak.

Standing a few yards away, staring at him, was María Torres. His eyes met hers, and then she turned and began walking toward the tiny plaza a few blocks away.

As the strange mists gathered closer around him, Alex followed the old woman.

*   *   *

The plaza had changed, but as Alex sat on a rough-hewn bench, María Torres whispering beside him in the Spanish he now clearly understood, it seemed to him that the plaza had always looked this way.

The mission church stood forty yards away, its whitewashed walls glistening brightly in the sunlight. Brown-cassocked priests, their feet clad in sandals, made their way in and out of the sanctuary, and in the shade of the building, three Indians lounged on the ground.

Set at right angles to the church, the little mission school stood with its doors and windows open to the fresh air, and in the schoolyard five children were playing while a black-habited nun looked on, her hands modestly concealed under the voluminous material of her sleeves.

On the other side of the plaza there was a small store, its wood construction in odd contrast to the substantial adobe of the mission buildings. As Alex watched, a woman came out, and though she looked directly at him, seemed not to see him.

He began to listen as María whispered to him of the church and of the brightly painted images of the saints that lined its walls.

Then María began whispering to him of La Paloma and of the people who had built the village and loved it.

“But there were others,” she went on. “Others came, and took it all away. Go, Alejandro. Go into the church and see how it was. See what once was here.”

As if in a dream, he rose from the bench and crossed the plaza, then stepped through the doors of the sanctuary. There was a coolness inside the church, and the light from two stained-glass windows, one above the door, the other above the altar, danced colorfully on the walls. In niches all around the sanctuary stood the saints María had told him of, and he went to one of them and looked up into the martyred eyes of the statue. He lit a candle for the saint, then turned and
once more left the church. Across the plaza, still sitting on the bench, María Torres smiled at him and nodded.

Without a word being spoken, Alex turned, left the plaza, and began walking through the dusty paths of the village, the whispering voices in his head guiding his feet.

Marty Lewis woke up and listened for the normal morning sounds of the house. Then, slowly, she came to the realization that it was not morning at all, and that the house was empty.

A nap.

After Alan had left, and she’d cleaned up the house, she’d decided to take a nap.

She rolled over on the bed and stared at the clock. Two-thirty. She had been asleep for almost three hours. Groaning tiredly, she rose to her feet and went to the window, where she stared out for a moment into the hills behind the house, and wondered if Alan were up there somewhere, sleeping off his bender. Possibly so.

Or he might have walked into the village and be sitting right now at one of the bars, adding fuel to the fires of his rage.

But he wasn’t at the Medical Center. If he were, she would have heard from them by now.

She slipped into a housecoat and went downstairs, wondering once more if she should call the police, and once more deciding against it. Without a car, there was little harm Alan could do.

She poured the last of the morning’s coffee, thick with having been heated too long, down the drain, and began preparing a fresh pot.

When Alan came home—
if
Alan came home—he was going to be in need of coffee.

She was just about to begin measuring the coffee into the filter when she heard the back gate suddenly open, then close again. Relief flooded through her.

He’d come back.

She went on with her measuring, sure that before she was done the door would open and she would hear Alan’s voice apologizing once again for his drunkenness and pleading with her for forgiveness.

But nothing happened.

She finished setting up the coffee maker, turned it on, and, as it began to drip, went to the back door.

Two minutes later, her heart pounding in her throat, she knew what was going to happen to her, and knew there was nothing she could do about it.

Alex blinked, and looked around him. He was sitting on a bench in the plaza, staring across at the village hall and at the black-clad figure of María Torres disappearing down the side street toward the little cemetery and her home.

A thought flitted through his mind:
She looks like a nun. An old Spanish nun
.

Suddenly he became aware of someone waving to him from the steps of the library, and though he wasn’t quite sure who it was, he waved back.

But how had he gotten to the plaza?

The last thing he remembered, he’d been at the Square looking at the old oak tree and trying to remember if he’d ever played in it when he was a boy.

And now he was in the 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.

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 called an ambulance, and went with it,” Bob suggested.

Kate shook her head. “She would have followed it, so she wouldn’t have to call someone for a ride home.”

“You want to stay here while I go see if they’re home?” Bob asked.