“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 have to go,” Ellen protested. “Marty was one of my best friends, and Kate’s always been a friend of yours.”
“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’d hurt his mothers feelings, so his father was angry.
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.
They were talking about him, about how strange he was.
That, he knew, was what a lot of people talked about now.
He knew what happened when he came into a room.
People who had been talking suddenly stopped, and their eyes fixed on him.
Other people simply looked away.
Not, of course, that it bothered him. The only thing that bothered him was the dream he’d had, but he still hadn’t figured out what it meant, except that it seemed that if he had feelings in his dreams, he should, sooner or later, have them when he was awake, too. And when he did, he’d be like everyone else.
Unless, of course, he really had killed Mrs. Lewis.
Maybe, after all, there was a reason to go to the funeral. Maybe if he actually saw her body, he’d remember whether or not he had killed her.
Alex stepped through the gate of the little cemetery, and immediately knew that something was wrong.
It was happening again.
He had a clear memory of this place, and now it no longer looked as it should have.
The walls were old and worn, and the lawn — the soft grass that the priests always tended so well — was gone. In its place was barren earth, covered only in small patches by tiny clumps of crabgrass.
The tombstones, too, didn’t look right. There were too many of them, and they, like the walls, seemed to have worn away so he could barely read the names on them. Nor were there flowers on the graves, as there always had been before.
He gazed at the faces of the people around him. None of them were familiar.
All of them were strangers, and none of them belonged here.
Then the now-familiar pain slashed through his brain, and the voices started, whispering in his ears.
“Ladrones … asesinos …”
Suddenly he had an urge to turn around and run away. Run from the pain in his head, and the voices, and the memories.
He felt a hand on his arm, and tried to pull away, but the grip tightened, and the touch of strong fingers gouging into his flesh suddenly cut through the voices.
“Alex,” he heard his father whisper. “Alex, what’s wrong?”
Alex shook his head, and glanced around. His mother was looking at him worriedly. A few feet away he recognized Lisa Cochran with her parents. He scanned the rest of the crowd: Kate Lewis stood next to the flower-covered coffin, with Valerie Benson at her side. Over by the wall, he recognized the Evanses.
“Alex?” he heard his father say again.
“Nothing, Dad,” Alex whispered back. “I’m okay.”
“You’re sure?”
Alex nodded. “I just … I just thought I remembered something, that’s all. But it’s gone now.”
His father’s grip relaxed, and once more Alex let his eyes wander over the cemetery.
The voices were silent now, and the cemetery suddenly seemed right again.
And why had he thought about priests?
He gazed up at the village hall that had once been a mission, and wondered how long it had been since there had been priests here. Certainly there hadn’t been any since he was born.