Brain Child (19 page)

Marsh put his arms around his wife and pulled her close. “I know,” he said. “I know you’re right, but I just can’t help myself sometimes.” A rueful smile twisted his face. “I guess there’s a good reason why doctors should never treat their own family, isn’t there? Lord knows, my bedside manner deserted me tonight.” His arms fell away from Ellen as he stood up. “I’d better go apologize to him.”

But when he entered Alex’s room, his son was sound asleep. As far as he could see, even his rage hadn’t affected the boy. Still, he laid his hand gently on Alex’s cheek. “I’m sorry, son,” he whispered. “I’m sorry about everything.”

Alex rolled over, unconsciously brushing his father’s hand away.

At a few minutes past nine on Saturday morning, Bob Carey maneuvered his father’s Volvo into the left lane of the Bayshore Freeway, and three minutes later they left Palo Alto behind. Alex sat quietly in the back seat next to Lisa, his ears taking in the chatter of his three friends while his eyes remained glued to the world outside the car. None of it looked familiar, but he studied the road signs carefully as they passed through Redwood City, San Carlos, and San Mateo, then began skirting the edge of the bay. His eyes took in everything, and he was sure that on the return trip that afternoon, even though he would be seeing it all from the other direction, all of it would be familiar.

Then, a little north of the airport, Bob veered off the freeway and started inland.

“Where are we going?” Kate Lewis asked. “We want to go all the way into the City!”

“We’re going to the BART station in Daly City,” Bob told her.

“BART?” Kate groaned. “Who wants to ride the subway?”

“I do,” Bob told her. “I
like
the subway, and besides, I’m not going to drive Dad’s car in the City. All I need is to have to try to explain how I smashed a fender on Nob Hill when I was supposed to be in Santa Cruz. I’d wind up grounded lower than Carolyn Evans was.”

Kate started to protest further, but Lisa backed Bob up. “He’s right,” she said. “I had to argue with my folks for half an hour to keep from having to bring Kim along, and if we get caught now, we’ll all be in trouble. Besides, I like BART too. It’ll be fun!”

Forty minutes later, they emerged from the BART station, and Alex gazed around him, knowing immediately where he was. Yesterday he’d found a tour guide to San Francisco in the La Paloma bookstore, then spent last night studying it. The city around him looked exactly like the pictures in the guidebook. “Let’s ride the cable car out to Fisherman’s Wharf,” he suggested.

Lisa stared at him with surprised eyes. “How did you know it goes there?” she asked.

Alex hesitated, then pointed to the cable car that was just coasting onto the turntable at Powell and Market. On its end was a sign that read “Powell & Mason” and, below that, “Fisherman’s Wharf.”

They wandered around the wharf, then started back toward the downtown area, through North Beach on Columbus, then turning south on Grant to go into Chinatown. People milled around them, and suddenly Alex stopped dead in his tracks. Lisa turned to him, but he seemed unaware of her. His eyes were gazing intently at the faces of the people around him.

“Alex, what is it?” she asked. All morning, he’d seemed fine. He’d asked a few questions, but not nearly as many as usual, and he’d always seemed to know exactly where he was and where they were going. Once, in fact, he’d even told them where a street they were looking for was, then, when asked how he knew, admitted to having memorized all the street signs while they
rode the cable car. But now he seemed totally baffled. “Alex, what’s wrong?” Lisa asked again.

“These people,” Alex said. “What are they? They don’t look like us.”

“Oh, Jeez,” Bob Carey groaned.

“They’re Chinese,” Lisa said, keeping her voice as low as she could, and silencing Bob with a glare. “And stop staring at them, Alex. You’re being rude.”

“Chinese,” Alex repeated. He started walking again, but his eyes kept wandering over the Oriental faces around him. “The Chinese built the railroads,” he suddenly said. Then: “The railroad barons, Collis P. Huntington and Leland Stanford, brought them in by the thousands. Now San Francisco has one of the biggest Chinese populations outside of China.”

Lisa stared at Alex for a moment; then suddenly she knew. “A tour book,” she said. “You read a tour book, didn’t you?”

Alex nodded. “I didn’t want to spend all day asking you questions,” he said. “I know you don’t like that. So I studied.”

Bob Carey’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “You studied? You read a whole guidebook just because we were coming up here for a day?”

Again Alex nodded.

“But who can remember all that stuff? Who even cares? For Christ’s sake, Alex, all we’re doing is messing around.”

“Well, I think it’s neat,” Kate told her boyfriend. Then she turned to Alex. “Did you really memorize all the streets while we were on the cable car?”

“I didn’t have to,” Alex admitted. “I got a map, too. I memorized it.”

“Bullshit!” Bob’s eyes were suddenly angry. “Where’s the mission?” he demanded.

Alex hesitated a moment; then: “Sixteenth and Dolores. It’s on the corner, and there’s a park in the same block.”

“Well?” Kate asked Bob. “Is he right?”

“I don’t know,” Bob admitted, his face reddening. “Who even cares where the mission is?”

“I do,” Lisa said, reaching out to squeeze Alex’s hand. “How do we get there?”

“Go down to Market, then up to Dolores, and left on Dolores.”

“Then let’s go.”

The little mission with its adjoining cemetery and garden was exactly where Alex had said it would be, crouching on the corner almost defensively, as if it knew it was no more than a relic from the city’s long-forgotten past. The city, indeed, had even taken away its original name—San Francisco de Asís. Now it was called Mission Dolores, and it seemed to have taken on the very sadness its name implied.

“Want to go in?” Lisa asked of no one in particular.

“What for?” Bob groaned. “Haven’t we all seen enough missions? They used to drag us off to one every year!”

“Well, what about Alex?” Lisa argued. “I bet he doesn’t remember ever seeing a mission before. And did you ever see
this
mission? Come on.”

Following Lisa, they went into the little church, then out into the garden, and suddenly the city beyond the garden walls might as well have disappeared, for within the little space occupied by the mission, there was no trace of the modern world.

The garden, still kept neatly trimmed after nearly two hundred years, was in the last stages of its summer bloom. Here and there dead leaves had already fallen to the ground, dotting the pathways with bright gold. Off in the far corner, they could see the old cemetery. “Over there,” Alex said softly. “Let’s go over there.”

The quietness of his voice caught Lisa’s attention, and she turned to look into Alex’s eyes. For the first time since the accident, there seemed to be life in them. “What is it, Alex?” she asked. “You’re remembering something, aren’t you?”

“I don’t know,” Alex whispered. He was walking slowly along one of the paths now, but his eyes remained
fixed on the weathered headstones of the graveyard.

“The graveyard?” Lisa asked. “Do you remember the graveyard?”

Alex’s mind was whirling, and he barely heard Lisa’s question. Images were flickering, and there were sounds. But nothing was clear, except that the images and sounds were connected with this place. Trembling slightly, he kept walking.

“What’s wrong with him?” Kate asked, her voice worried. “He looks weird.”

“I think he’s remembering something,” Lisa replied.

“We’d better go with him,” Bob added, but Lisa shook her head.

“I’ll go,” she told them. “You guys wait for us, okay?”

Kate nodded mutely, and as Alex stepped into the tiny fenced cemetery, Lisa hurried after him.

The images had begun coming into focus as soon as he’d entered the cemetery. His heart was pounding, and he felt out of breath, as if he’d been running for a long time. He scanned the little graveyard, and his eyes came to rest on a small stone near the wall.

In his mind, there were images of people.

Women dressed in black, their faces framed by white cowls, their feet clad in sandals.

Nuns.

In his mind’s eye he saw a group of nuns clustering around a boy, and the boy was himself.

But he was different somehow.

His hair was darker, and his skin had an olive complexion to it.

And he was crying.

Unconsciously Alex moved closer to the headstone that had triggered the strange images, and the images seemed to move with him. Then he was standing at the grave, gazing down at the inscription that was still barely legible in the worn granite

Fernando Meléndez y Ruiz
1802–1850

A word flashed into his mind, and he repeated it out loud.
“¡Tío!”
As he uttered the word, a stab of pain knifed through his brain, then was gone.

And then voices began whispering to him—the voices of the nuns, though the images of them had already faded away.

“Él está muerto.”
He is dead.

And then there was another voice—a man’s voice—whispering to him out of the depths of his memory.
“¡Venganza … venganza!”

He stood very still, his eyes brimming with unfamiliar tears, his pulse throbbing. The voice went on, whispering to him in Spanish, but only the one word registered on his mind:
“Venganza.”

His tears overflowed, and a sob choked his throat. Then, as the strange words pounded in his head, he gave in to the sudden unfamiliar rush of emotion.

Time seemed to stand still, and he felt a kind of pain he couldn’t remember having ever felt before. Pain of the heart, and of the soul.

The pain seared at him, and then he became aware of a hand tugging at him, slowly penetrating the chaos in his mind.

“Alex?” a voice said. “Alex, what’s wrong? What is it?”

Alex pointed to the grave, sobbing brokenly, and Lisa, after a moment of utter confusion, began to understand what must have happened. She had listened carefully that day last month before Alex came home from the hospital, and she could still remember the words.

“He could start laughing or crying at any time,” Alex’s mother had told her. “Dr. Torres says it won’t matter if something is funny or sad. It’s just that it’s possible that there will be misconnections in his brain,
and he could react inappropriately to something. Or he could simply overreact.”

And that, Lisa was certain, was exactly what was happening now. Alex was overreacting to an ancient grave.

But why?

He had remembered something, she had been sure of it. And now he was staring at the grave, tears streaming down his face, uncontrollable sobs racking his body. Gently she tried to pull him away as a priest appeared from the back of the church and looked at them quizzically.

“Something wrong?”

“No,” Lisa quickly replied. “Everything’s all right. It …” She floundered for a moment, trying to think of an explanation for Alex’s behavior, but her mind had suddenly gone blank. “Come
on
, Alex,” she whispered. “Let’s get out of here.”

Half-dragging Alex, she edged her way past the priest, then out of the graveyard. Once back in the garden, she put her arms around Alex and squeezed him. “It’s all right, Alex,” she whispered. “It was only an old grave. Nothing to cry about.”

Slowly Alex’s sobs began to subside, and he made himself listen to Lisa’s words.

Only a grave
. But it hadn’t been only a grave. He had recognized the grave, as he had recognized the cemetery itself. What he had just experienced, he had experienced before.

The memories were clear in his mind now. He could remember having been in that cemetery, having looked down at the grave, having listened to the nuns telling him his uncle was dead.

His uncle.

As far as Alex knew, he had no uncle.

And certainly he wouldn’t remember an uncle who had died in 1850.

But it was all so clear, just as clear as the memory he’d had at school last week. Clear, but impossible.

He took a deep breath, and his last sob released its grip on his throat. Lisa found a handkerchief in her bag and handed it to him. He blew his nose. “What happened?” she asked.

Alex shrugged, but his mind was whirling. It didn’t make any sense, and if he told her what had happened, she would think he was crazy. But he had to tell her something. “I’m not sure,” he said. “I … I remembered something, but I’m not sure what. But it was like I was here before, and something terrible happened. But I can’t remember what.”

Lisa frowned.
“Were
you ever here before? Maybe something did happen here.”

Then, before Alex could say anything else, Bob and Kate moved toward them, their expressions a mixture of worry and uneasiness.

“What happened?” Kate asked. “Are you okay, Alex?”

Alex nodded. “I just remembered something, and it made me cry. Dr. Torres said it might happen, but I didn’t really think it would.” Lisa looked at him sharply, but said nothing. If he didn’t want to tell them what had really happened, she wouldn’t either. “Maybe it’s a good sign,” he said, making himself smile. “Maybe it means I’m getting better.”

Kate and Lisa exchanged a glance, each of them realizing what might have to happen. Finally Kate voiced the thought.

“Are you going to tell your folks about it?”

“He can’t,” Bob said. “If he does, then all our folks will find out what we did, and we’ll
all
be in trouble.”

“But what if it’s important?” Lisa asked. “What if it means something?”

“Why can’t he just say it happened at the beach?” Bob suggested. “Besides, what’s the big deal about crying in a graveyard? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?”

“I didn’t say it was a big deal,” Lisa replied. “All I said was that it might mean something, and if it does,
none of us should worry about getting into trouble. I just think Alex should tell his folks exactly what happened.”

“Well, I think we should vote on it,” Bob said. “And I vote he doesn’t tell.” He looked expectantly at Kate Lewis, whose eyes reflected her uncertainty. Finally she made up her mind, looking away from Bob.