Kelly brightened immediately, and she instantly slithered out of the bed, stripped off her pajamas, and began pulling on her clothes.
"A shower first," Sharon reminded the little girl. As Kelly headed for the bathroom, she went downstairs and started a pot of coffee. But even after Kelly joined her a few minutes later, Sharon found herself not saying much, her mind still occupied with what Kelly had said about Mark.
For Sharon, too, had been acutely aware of the changes taking place in her son. She'd tried to attribute them to the hormonal imbalances of adolescence, and yet even as she'd insisted to herself that nothing was wrong, she knew she was lying to herself.
The changes were coming too fast and were too marked to be anything normal.
Indeed, she'd even tried to talk to Blake about it the night before, but he'd put her off, as he seemed to lately about anything but the most banal of topics. "Be happy," he'd advised her. "He's finally growing up."
Growing up into what?
She opened the freezer and reached for a can of frozen orange juice, her eyes resting for a second on the small package, wrapped in butcher's paper, that was tucked away at the back of the freezer. Though it looked for all the world like nothing more than a small steak ready to be thrown away, she knew it wasn't.
Wrapped inside the butcher paper were the corpses of the two rodents she'd retrieved from the trash atTarrenTech.
She'd told nobody about them yet, hadn't even looked at them again herself. And yet she was certain they were very important, and that until she'd decided exactly what to do with them, she shouldn't even mention them to her husband.
An hour later, when Blake and Mark came down for breakfast, Sharon found herself surreptitiously watching her son, searching his face for signs of change.
This morning she thought she saw them.
There was a hardness about Mark's gentle features that she didn't remember seeing before.
Three hours later Mark trotted into the locker room to strip down for his P.E. class and realized that this week, for the first time in his life, he had actually begun to look forward to the hour on the practice field. He was still among the last to be chosen as the class was split up into teams, but yesterday there were still four guys standing unhappily, waiting to see which of them would be the "stuck-with" for the day (an honor that had, until this week, invariably been Mark's), when to Mark's surprise one of the team captains had actually called out his name.
Nor had he played football badly yesterday. He'd caught two passes, one of which had developed into a touchdown when he'd successfully evaded the two opponents who'd attempted to bring him down.
So today he put on his shorts and T-shirt eagerly, then trotted out onto the field with the others. Again to his surprise, immediately after he'd fallen in for the ten minutes of calisthenics that began each hour, the teacher called him out of the ranks and sent him to the gym.
His heart sank as he saw Phil Collins waiting for him, and he wondered what he might have done wrong that called for a dressing-down from the football coach. But to his surprise, Collins was smiling amiably at him.
"I've been hearing good things about you, Tanner," Collins called to him. The coach was at the far end of the gym, idly hefting a large leather-covered medicine ball. "Marty Ames tells me you're putting on a lot of muscle."
Mark grinned bashfully. "I guess so," he admitted.
"So let's see what you can do," Collins went on. Without warning he hurled the ball toward Mark, and Mark found that instead of giving in to his usual instinct to duck away from the heavy object, he stepped forward, caught it, and immediately shot it back toward the coach with enough force that Collins staggered slightly as it hurtled into his hands.
"Not bad," the coach observed, his right eyebrow arching appreciatively. "Want to try the rope?" He nodded toward a heavy strand of twisted nylon, its length studded with large knots at regular intervals, which was suspended from a heavy hook in the ceiling.
Mark said nothing, but walked over to the rope and gave it an experimental tug. Then, grasping it with both hands, he lifted his weight off the floor. He released his left hand and quickly moved it to the knot above, then repeated the process with his right hand. Without even thinking about it, he automatically bent his body at the hips so that as he moved steadily toward the ceiling his legs were nearly parallel to the floor. He paused at the top for a second, then slapped the ceiling with his right hand. A moment later, on a sudden whim, he released the rope completely, dropping nearly fifteen feet to the floor. His knees bent gracefully and he tumbled to one side, then scrambled back to his feet.
"Careful there," Collins said after whistling admiringly at the maneuver. "If you don't know what you're doing, you can break an ankle that way."
"But I didn't, did I?" Mark replied, grinning.
For the next thirty minutes Collins put Mark through a rigorous set of exercises, but even when he was finished, Mark's breathing was only a little heavier than normal. Though a sheen of sweat showed on his forehead, his shirt was still dry and his muscles felt as if he could have gone on for another hour.
"Definitely not bad," Collins commented when it was over. He signaled Mark to follow him, and went into his office. Flopping down in the chair behind his desk, he eyed Mark speculatively. "Ever thought about going out for football?"
Mark licked his lips nervously. "N-Not until a couple of weeks ago," he said finally. His eyes fixed on the floor a few feet in front of the coach's desk. "I'm kind of small, aren't I?"
Collins wiggled his right hand indifferently. "A lot of guys make up for small size with other things," he observed. "Speed, agility, all kinds of things can make the difference. And there's the basic will to win," he added. "If you have that, it can make up for a lot."
Mark turned the coach's words over in his mind. He knew it was true-knew it if only from the rowing exercises he'd been doing at the sports center, where the sight of other rowers overtaking him had been enough to send adrenaline streaming into his blood, giving him that extra surge of power he needed to catch up.
"I think I'd like to try it," he said finally, and Collins grinned at him, standing up.
"Then I'll see you after school today," he said. "Talk to Toby Miller about a practice uniform."
Mark's eager expression faded. "I'm supposed to go see Dr. Ames today," he began, but Collins silenced him with a gesture.
"It's okay," he said, winking at Mark. "I thought you might want to take a shot at it, so I already fixed it with him. You're rescheduled for later, after practice."
Mark stared at the coach in surprise, then a slow smile spread across his face. "Hey, thanks," he said. "Thanks a lot. See you later."
He trotted out to the locker room, stripped off his gym clothes, and hit the showers. As the hot needle spray stung his skin, he felt a sharp surge of joy run through him.
It was going to be great, he thought. He was going to make the team, and his father would finally be proud of him.
And then, unbidden, an image of his mother came into his mind. His joy was suddenly blunted. He could already hear her telling him he was too small for football, that all that would happen would be that he'd get hurt.
Even as he began dressing, the tiny germ of anger toward his mother that had sprouted in the shower was already beginning to grow.
Chapter Twenty
Sharon Tanner stared dolefully at the list of Colorado mental hospitals she'd copied at the library on Monday. Since then she'd called every one of them, and yesterday had even driven over to Canon City to inquire after CharlotteLaConner personally. But of course she'd gotten nowhere. Although most of the private hospitals had simply denied that they had a patient namedLaConner at all, others had simply refused to answer her questions, citing policies and confidentiality laws.