Sharon's brows arched. "Who doesn't?"
A moment later the lights dimmed in the gymnasium and the screen in front of Sharon lit up with a bright image of Market Street. She felt as if she were on the right side of the street, facing Twin Peaks, and cars were streaming in both directions. "Start pedaling," she heard Ames tell her.
Her feet began slowly turning the pedals, and to her surprise, the picture on the screen changed.
It was as if she were moving along the street itself.
"Speed up a little and move out into traffic," Ames instructed her. Frowning, Sharon increased the speed of her pedaling, then twisted the handlebars to the left.
The picture shifted, and she felt as if she were in the center of the right lane. She kept pedaling, then heard Ames telling her to turn right up Van Ness Avenue. As the handlebars turned in her hands, the image swung around and she could see the vista of the broad avenue stretching northward. She kept pedaling, watching the familiar scenery of the city unfold before her. She made several more turns, then finally brought the bike to a stop, feeling silly as she realized she had actually pulled it over to the curb again. When the screen went blank and the lights came up, she looked at Ames with awe.
"What is it?" she asked. "How does it work?"
"It's all done with computers," Ames explained. "Practically the whole city north of Market Street and east ofDivisidero is on a laser disk, and the handlebars control it. You can ride all over San Francisco, looking at anything you want. And it simulates the hills, too, so you never have to change the tension on the wheel yourself." He grinned at her. "Now I ask you, was that boring?"
Sharon shook her head. "It's great. I could have kept at that for a couple of hours."
"You and everybody else," Ames observed wryly. "Out here, the problem isn't getting the kids to exercise. It's getting them to stop." He glanced at his watch. "Well, that's about it. Let's go see how Mark's doing."
They started back toward the offices, but as they came into the main lobby, Mark jumped up from a sofa he'd been sprawling on.
"Hi, Mom," he said, grinning at her.
Sharon stared at him.
The bruises on his face looked much better, and where this morning his face had been pale, almost pasty, his cheeks were now tinged a healthy pink. His right eye was still a bit swollen, but he was able to open it, and the shiner glowing darkly beneath it seemed to be healing.
"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.