“Maybe so,” Alex replied, picking up the rat cage and heading toward the door. “And maybe I would have, if you’d been a better teacher.”
Then he was gone, and Paul Landry was left alone, trying to reconcile the Alex he’d just talked to with the Alex he’d known the year before. He couldn’t, for there was simply no comparison. The Alex he’d known last year had disappeared without a trace. In his place was someone else, and Landry was grateful that whoever he was, he wasn’t in his class this year. Before he left that day, he took Alex’s project and threw it into the dumpster.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The kitchen door slammed, and despite herself, Ellen jumped. “Alex?” she called. “Is that you? Do you know what time it—” And then, as Alex came into the living room, she fell silent, her eyes fixed on the cage he held in his right hand. “What on earth have you got there?”
“Rats,” Alex told her. “The ones from my science project last year. Mr. Landry still had them.”
Ellen eyed the little creatures with revulsion. “You’re not going to keep them, are you?”
“I’ve figured out an experiment,” Alex told her. “They’ll be gone in a couple of days.”
“Good. Now, let’s go, or we’ll be late. In fact,” she added, her eyes moving to the clock, “we already are. And you know how Dr. Torres feels about punctuality.”
Alex started toward the stairs. “Dad and I aren’t sure I ought to keep going to Dr. Torres.”
Ellen, in the midst of struggling into a light coat, froze. “Alex, what are you talking about?”
Alex’s face remained impassive as he regarded her. “Dad and I had a talk last night, and we think maybe something’s wrong with me.”
“I don’t understand,” Ellen breathed, although she was afraid she understood all too well. She and Marsh had barely spoken to each other this morning, and today he had, for the first time in her memory, failed to call her even once. And now, apparently, he was going to use Alex as a pawn in their battle. Except that she wasn’t going to tolerate it, particularly when she knew that in the end, the loser would not be her, but Alex himself.
“I’ve been doing some reading,” she heard Alex saying.
“Stop!” Ellen said, her voice sharper than she’d intended. “I don’t care what you’ve been reading, and I don’t care what your father and you have decided. You’re still a patient of Raymond Torres’s, and you have an appointment for this afternoon, which you’re going to keep, whether you want to or not.”
Alex hesitated only a split second before he nodded. “Can I at least take this up to my room?” he asked, raising the cage.
“No. Leave it outside on the patio.”
As they drove down to Palo Alto, neither of them spoke.
“I thought your husband was coming today, Ellen.” Raymond Torres remained seated behind his desk, but gestured to the two chairs that Ellen and Alex normally occupied.
“He’s not,” Ellen replied. “And I think we’d better talk about it.” Her eyes shifted slightly toward Alex. Torres immediately picked up her message.
“I don’t think the lab’s quite ready for you yet,” he told Alex. “Why don’t you wait in Peter’s office while he sets up?”
Wordlessly Alex left Torres’s office, and when he was gone, Ellen finally sat down and began telling the doctor what had happened between herself and her husband the night before. “And now,” she finished, “he’s apparently convinced Alex that something’s wrong, too.”
Torres’s fingers drummed on the desktop for a moment, then began the elaborate ritual of packing and lighting his pipe. Only when the first thick cloud of smoke had begun drifting toward the ceiling did he speak.
“The problem, of course, is that he’s right,” he finally observed. “In fact, today I was going to tell him that I want to check Alex back into the Institute.”
Ellen suddenly felt numb. “What … what do you mean?” she stammered. “I thought … well, I thought everything was going very well.”
“Of course you would,” Torres said. “And for the most part, it is. But there’s something going on that I don’t quite understand.” His head turned slightly, and his gaze fixed on Ellen. “So Alex will come back here until I know what’s happening, and have decided what to do about it.”
Ellen closed her eyes for a moment, as if by the action she could shut out the thoughts that were suddenly crowding in on her. How could she handle Marsh now? If she left Alex at the Institute, as she knew Raymond was going to insist upon, what could she say to Marsh? That he’d been right, that something was, indeed, wrong with Alex, and that she’d left him with a doctor who had apparently made a mistake? But then she realized that that wasn’t what Torres had said. All he’d said was that something was wrong.
“Can you tell me just exactly what’s wrong?” she asked, unable to control the trembling in her voice.
“Nothing too serious,” Torres assured her, his voice soothing while his eyes remained locked to hers. “In fact, perhaps nothing at all. But until I know just what it is, I’ll want Alex here.”
Ellen found herself nervously twisting her wedding ring, knowing that if he insisted, she would inevitably give in. “I don’t know if Alex will agree to that,” she said so softly the words were almost whispered.
“But Alex doesn’t have anything to say about it, does he?” Torres pointed out. “Nor, for that matter, does your husband.” Then, when Ellen still hesitated, he spoke once more. “Ellen, you know that what I’m doing is in Alex’s best interests.”
Ellen hesitated only slightly before nodding. “But can’t it wait a day?” she pleaded. “Can’t I at least have a day to try to convince Marsh? If I go home without Alex this afternoon, I hate even to think what he might do.”
Raymond Torres turned it over in his mind, briefly reviewing once again what his lawyer had told him only that morning: “Yes, in the long run the release will probably hold up. But don’t forget that Marshall Lonsdale is not only the boy’s father, but a doctor as well. He’ll be able to get an injunction, and keep the boy until the issue is decided in the courts. And by then, it’ll be too late. I know you hate it, Raymond, but in this instance, I suggest you try to negotiate. If you don’t try to take the boy, perhaps they’ll give him to you.”
“All right,” he said. “For today, I’ll just take some tests, but tomorrow I want you to bring Alex back. You have twenty-four hours to convince your husband.”
Alex had been in Peter Bloch’s office next door to the test lab for almost five minutes before he saw the stack of orders on the technician’s desk.
On the top of the stack, he found Torres’s neatly typed orders relating to himself. He scanned the single page, trying to translate the various abbreviations in his mind, but none of it meant anything to him.
And then his eyes fell onto a line near the bottom of the page: “Anesthesia: SPTL.”
He stared at the four letters for several seconds, then his eyes moved to the old IBM Selectric II that sat on the desk’s return. The idea formed in his head instantly, and almost as quickly, he made up his mind. He inserted the page into the carriage, and carefully lined up the letters with the red guidemarks on the cardholder. Thirty seconds later he was finished, and the line near the bottom of the page was changed.
“Anesthesia: NONE.”
When Peter Bloch came in a few minutes later, Alex was sitting in a chair next to the door, thumbing through a catalog of lab equipment. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched the technician go to the desk and pick up the thin stack of orders.