"Mark?" she breathed. "Honey, are you all right? Your chest-"
But Mark only grinned at her. When he'd bounded off the sofa, he hadn't felt a thing in his chest. "I'm fine," he said. "Marty gave me something for my ribs, and they don't hurt at all."
Sharon stared at him for almost a full minute. He looked better than she'd imagined possible.
It wasn't until half an hour later, when they were driving back through the village, that a sudden thought came into her mind.
After his morning at Rocky Mountain High, Mark was almost like the town itself.
Perfect.
Too perfect.
Chapter Fifteen
"It doesn't matter what you thought, or what Jerry Harris told you," Sharon insisted. "I'm your wife, and I'm Mark's mother. You had no right simply to make a decision about Mark without even telling me!"
They were in the small sitting room area of the master suite. On the hearth, a fire was slowly dying. Blake had lit it when they'd come upstairs an hour before, for that afternoon a cold front had moved in from the north and a light snow was falling outside. But Sharon was oblivious to both the snowfall and the fire, her eyes fixed angrily on her husband. "Don't you even understand what I'm saying?"
Blake shrugged tiredly. It seemed to him that the argument had long ago become circular, but once more he reiterated what he'd already told her three times: "You've already admitted that nothing terrible happened to him out at the center. In fact, all things considered, he looks pretty damned good. And you were exhausted this morning-you'd been up all night and you wouldn't have been thinking straight."
"But you still-" Sharon began.
"Enough!" Blake said. He'd been pacing the room, finally pausing at the window to watch the snow float to the ground outside. Now he turned to face her, his jaw set firmly in an expression that told her his patience had run out. "For Christ's sake, Sharon, what do you think I intended? It's not like I was trying to do something terrible! Jerry just suggested I have Ames look him over, and it sounded like a good idea! If I was wrong, I was wrong, and I apologize. But I wasn't wrong!"
"Can't you keep your voice down?" Sharon asked, her own dropping to a harsh whisper. "We don't have to tell the whole neighborhood we're having a fight, do we?"
It was a mistake. Sharon knew it was as soon as she'd uttered the words. Blake's jaw tightened and his eyes glinted with anger. "No," he said, "we certainly don't. In fact, we don't have to have a fight at all. I'll see you later."
Before Sharon could say anything else, he was gone. She listened as he stamped down the stairs and the front door slammed. From the curved window of the turret she watched him walk away from the house, his shoulders hunched, his head down. He was walking quickly, and she was certain she knew where he was going.
To theHarrises, where Jerry would assure him that he had indeed done the right thing, whatever his wife might think.
She turned away from the window and added a log to the fire as if the gesture itself would put a period to the fight. She wasn't being fair, she chided herself. If Jerry thought Blake was wrong, he wouldn't hesitate to say so.
She curled herself up in a small chintz-covered chair in front of the fire and tried to sort her thoughts out rationally, firmly putting aside the anger she felt over Blake's failure to consult her before sending Mark out to Marty Ames.
Overall, she had to admit that Blake was right-certainly the doctor had done Mark no harm; indeed, from all appearances, he had done him a lot of good.
And from what Mark had said on the way home, Ames hadn't really done all that much. In fact, in retrospect she found herself chuckling at Mark's exasperation when she'd pressed him for details as to precisely what had happened at the sports center.
It wasn't any different from asking Kelly what had happened at school on a given day.
"Nothing" was her daughter's invariable answer, as it had been Mark's when he was the same age.
Finally, as she'd driven him home that afternoon, he'd turned to her with a teenager's scorn for his mother's silliness clear in his eyes.
"I keep telling you, Mom, nothing happened at all," he insisted. "Dr. Ames checked me over and gave me a shot of codeine for my ribs, and then I did some exercises. That was all."
"Exercises?" Sharon had echoed, glancing at him doubtfully out of the corner of her eye. "My God, Mark, you've got three cracked ribs. It must have hurt like-"
"It didn't hurt at all," Mark interjected, not about to admit to his mother that he'd actually passed out for a minute while working on a rowing machine. She'd go nuts and put him to bed for the rest of the day. Besides, it hadn't been any big deal. He'd just opened his eyes, and one of Marty Ames's assistants had been grinning at him. For a moment he'd wondered what had happened, then his memory had come back to him in bits and pieces.
He had no idea that those memories were only the ones carefully and subliminally planted in his subconscious during his long hours on the metal table in the treatment room. Of that ordeal he had no memory at all.
Sharon had finally dropped the subject as she turned into their driveway and pulled the car into the garage.Chivas, lying sleepily by the back door, had gotten lazily to his feet. As Mark got out of the passenger seat of the car, the retriever barked joyfully at the unexpected appearance of his master. He'd bounded forward, his tail wagging, then suddenly stopped.
His tail dropped and the fur on the nape of his neck had risen slightly as an uncertain growl bubbled in his throat.
"Hey,fella, don't you recognize me?" Mark asked. He squatted down, andChivas, dropping low to the ground, had slunk forward, sniffing warily at Mark's outstretched hand.
"What's wrong with him?" Sharon asked.
Mark reached out and scratched the dog's neck, then grinned up at his mother.
"I'm supposed to be at school, and I bet I smell really weird after a night in the hospital. I probably smell just like the vet's office, and you know how he hates that."
Sharon had all but forgotten the incident until dinnertime, when Mark, who had been closeted in his room most of the afternoon, had come down to the dining room table. Throughout dinner Sharon noticed that Kelly seemed unusually subdued. Several times she caught her daughter eyeing Mark surreptitiously, her expression puzzled. It wasn't until the two of them were alone in the kitchen, washing the dishes, that Sharon finally asked Kelly about it.
"I don't know," Kelly had said, gazing up at her mother through serious-looking eyes. "He just looks sort of different, I guess."
"Well, of course he does," Sharon replied. "He's got a black eye and a bad cut."
"I don't mean that," Kelly protested. "It's just the way he looks. He's just not the same."
That was the real reason behind her argument with Blake, Sharon decided now, as she sat staring into the fire. She'd tried to tell him about it, tried to explain what had happened withChivas and what Kelly had said after dinner, but he'd brushed it all aside.
"Of course Mark's different," he'd said. "He got beat up and bandaged up, and even if the injuries didn't change him, you can bet the fight did. You don't get pounded the way he did without it changing you inside."
"But it's not inside," Sharon had insisted. "Chivassaw it, and Kelly saw it, and I think I can see it, too. He's just not the same as he was."
In the end she hadn't been able to put her finger on just what it was about Mark that had changed, and finally she'd given up trying to make Blake see what she herself couldn't describe. If the truth be known, she finally admitted to herself, perhaps there really was nothing at all. Perhaps she wanted to see something, simply to justify her anger toward Blake for having sent Mark to Ames without talking to her about it first.
She took a deep breath and stood up, making an almost physical effort to shake off the last vestiges of her anger and her vague, indescribable misgivings. Certainly Mark had seemed perfectly happy all day, and not the least concerned about his hours at the sports center. If anything, he had actually enjoyed them. So why should she keep on fretting?