CHAPTER FIFTEEN
On the morning of Martha Lewis’s funeral, Ellen Lonsdale woke early. She lay in bed staring out the window at the cloudless California sky. It was not, she decided, the right kind of day for a funeral. On this, of all mornings, the coastal fog should have been hanging over the hills above La Paloma, reaching with damp fingers down into the village below. Beside her, Marsh stirred, then opened one eye.
“You don’t have to get up yet,” Ellen told him. “It’s still early, but I couldn’t sleep.”
Marsh came fully awake, and propped himself up on one elbow. He reached out a tentative finger to touch the flesh of Ellen’s arm, but she shrank away from him, threw back the covers, and got out of bed.
“Do you want to talk about it?” he asked, though he knew full well that she didn’t. If she wanted to talk to anybody, it would be Raymond Torres. Increasingly he was feeling more and more cut off from both his wife and his son.
As Marsh had expected, Ellen shook her head. “I’m just not sure how much more I can cope with,” she said, then forced a smile. “But I will,” she went on.
“Maybe you shouldn’t,” Marsh suggested. “Maybe you and I should just take off for a while, and see if we can find each other again.”
Ellen stopped dressing to face Marsh with incredulous eyes. “Go away? How on earth can we do that? What about Alex? What about Kate Lewis? Who’s going to take care of them?”
Marsh shrugged; then he, too, got out of bed. “Valerie Benson’s been taking care of Kate, and she can go right on doing it. Hell, at least it gives her something better to do than whine about how she never should have gotten a divorce.”
“That’s a cruel thing to say—”
“It’s not cruel, honey,” Marsh interrupted. “It’s true, and you know it. As for Alex, he’s quite capable of taking care of himself, even if he isn’t like he used to be. But you and I are having a problem, whether we want to face it or not.” For a split second Marsh wondered why it was all going to come out now, and if he should try to hold his feelings in. But he knew he couldn’t. “Did you know you don’t talk to me anymore? For three days now, you’ve barely said a word, and before that, all you were doing was telling me what Raymond Torres had to say about how we should run our lives. Not just Alex’s life, but ours too.”
“There’s no difference,” Ellen said. “Right now, Alex’s life
“Raymond Torres is a brain surgeon, and a damned fine one. But he’s not a shrink or a minister — or even God Almighty — even though he’s trying to act as though he is.”
“He saved Alex’s life—”
“Did he?” Marsh asked. He shook his head sadly. “Sometimes I wonder if he saved Alex, or if he stole him. Can’t you see what’s happening, Ellen? Alex isn’t ours anymore, and neither are you. You both belong to Raymond Torres now, and I’m not sure that isn’t exactly what he wants.”
Ellen sank onto the foot of the bed and put her hands over her ears, as if by shutting out the sound of Marsh’s voice she could shut out the words he’d spoken as well. She looked up at him beseechingly. “Don’t do this to me, Marsh,” she pleaded. “I have to do what I think is best, don’t I?”
She looked so close to tears, so defeated, that Marsh felt his bitterness drain away. He knelt beside his wife and took her hands, cold and limp, in his own. “I don’t know,” he said quietly. “I don’t know what any of us has to do anymore. All I know is that I love you, and I love Alex, and I want us to be a family again.”
Ellen was silent for a moment, then slowly nodded. “I know,” she said at last. “But I just keep wondering what’s coming next.”
“Nothing’s next,” Marsh replied. “There’s no connection between Alex and Marty Lewis. What happened to Alex was an accident. Marty Lewis was murdered, and unless Alan can come up with something better than ‘I don’t remember anything,’ I’d say he’s going to be tried for it, and found guilty.”
Ellen nodded glumly. “But I keep having a feeling that there’s more to it than that. I keep getting this strange feeling that there’s some kind of curse hanging over us.”
“That,” Marsh told her, “is the silliest thing I’ve heard in months. There’s no such thing as curses, Ellen. What’s happening to us is life. It’s as simple as that.”
But it’s not, Ellen thought as she finished dressing, then went downstairs to begin fixing breakfast. In life, you raise your family and enjoy your friends. Everything is ordinary. But Alex isn’t ordinary, and someone killing Marty isn’t ordinary, and getting up every morning and wondering if you’re going to get through the day isn’t ordinary.
She glanced at the clock. In another five minutes Marsh would be down, and a few minutes later, Alex, too, would appear. That, at least, was ordinary, and she would concentrate on that. In her mind, she began to make a list of things she could do that would make her life seem as unexceptional and routine as it once had been, but by the time Marsh and Alex appeared, she had come up with nothing. She poured them each a cup of coffee, and kissed Alex on the cheek.
He made no response, and, as always, a pang of disappointment twisted at her stomach.
She mixed up a can of frozen orange juice and poured a glass for her husband and one for her son. It was then that she noticed that Alex was dressed for school, not for Marty Lewis’s funeral.
“Honey, you’re going to have to change your clothes. You can’t wear those to the funeral.”
“I decided I’m not going,” Alex said, draining his glass of orange juice in one long gulp.
Marsh glanced up from the front page of the paper. “Of course you’re going,” he said.
“Alex, you
“But it’s stupid. I didn’t even know Kate’s mother. Why should I go to her funeral? It doesn’t mean anything to me.”
Ellen, too stunned by Alex’s words to respond, slid the muffins under the broiler, and reminded herself of what Raymond Torres had told her over and over again: Don’t get upset. Deal with Alex on his own level, a level that has nothing to do with feelings. She searched her mind, trying to find something that would reach him.
There was so little, now.
More and more, she was realizing that relationships — Alex’s as well as her own and everyone else’s — were based on feelings: on love, on anger, on pity, on all the emotions that she’d always taken for granted, and that Alex no longer had. And slowly, all his relationships were disappearing. But how could she stop it? Her thoughts were interrupted by Marsh’s voice. She turned to see him staring angrily at Alex.
“Does it make any difference that we’d like you to go?” she heard him ask. “That it would mean a lot to us for you to be there with us?” He sat back, his arms folded across his chest, and Ellen knew he was going to say no more until Alex came up with some kind of answer to his question.
Alex sat still at the table, analyzing what his father had just said.
He’d made a mistake, just as he’d made a mistake with Lisa the other night. He could see from the look on his father’s face that he was angry, and now he had to figure out why.
And yet, in his mind, he knew why.
He was starting to understand feelings, ever since the dream he’d had about Mrs. Lewis. He could still remember how he’d felt in the dream, even though he’d felt nothing since. At least he now had the memory of a feeling. It was a beginning.
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly, knowing the words were what his father wanted to hear. “I guess I wasn’t thinking.”
“I guess you weren’t,” his father agreed. “Now, I suggest you get yourself upstairs and into your suit, and when you go to that funeral — which you will do — I will expect you to act as if you care about what happened to Marty Lewis. Clear?”
“Yes, sir,” Alex said. He rose from the table and left the kitchen. But as he started up the stairs, he could hear his parents’ raised voices, and though the words were indistinct, he knew what they were talking about.
