They got to the door of the room where the nurse had said they would find Mark. The door had been left slightly open, and the lights were off inside. Liz hesitated for a moment, gave Gregor a look, took a deep breath, and went inside. It turned out that Mark might as well have been in a private room. There was no other patient bunked in with him. The bed closest to the door was empty. Liz went past it to the bed by the windows and motioned Gregor to come along.
Mark was lying in bed, breathing normally, seemingly no worse than asleep. Gregor reminded himself that he had no reason to think that Mark was anything but asleep. It was just that he’d seen the kid in convulsions, and this completereturn to normalcy seemed odd and out of place. Mark actually looked good. He looked a lot better than either of the times Gregor had seen him tonight.
Liz went over to Mark and ran her hand through his hair. “It’s stiff with sweat,” she said. “I wonder if they’ve given him a sedative.”
“I don’t know,” Gregor said.
“You know I’m not one of those mothers who sends her children off to boarding school and then pretends they don’t exist. I hated the idea of his going away to school so soon. I did everything I could to prevent him. And there are a couple of very good places within commuting distance of where we live in Connecticut. He could have stayed home.”
“I take it he didn’t want to.”
“Windsor has a film department,” Liz said. “It’s a very famous one, actually. They’ve got a man running it who’s actually won an Emmy and works in the field. That’s what Mark wants to do in the long run—film. There was that. And this place has a decent record of getting people into USC, too, which is where he wants to go.”
“USC?”
“University of Southern California. That or UCLA, which I think would be the better place. Oh, I don’t know. It’s the kind of thing you think of when you send your child to a school. And he loved this place the minute he laid eyes on it. He completely loved it. Oddly enough, I hated it.”
“And you let him go anyway?”
“He was the one who had to live with it,” Liz said. “And I didn’t hate it because I thought it was full of irresponsible jerks, which apparently it is. I hated it because it was so, so—eh. Who knows what to call it? So smug.”
“I’d think any rich private school would be smug,” Gregor said.
Liz laughed, just a little. “True enough. Self-righteously smug, I guess is what I really want to say. And I should have known he would never have fit here any more than I would have. But I thought it was his life, and it is. And I thought that there was no harm in trying it out for a year. Anybodycould get through a year of anything; and even if you end up hating it, you’ve learned something. And now look.”
“I think it’s going to be all right,” Gregor said. “I wouldn’t insist on that until we’ve heard from the doctor, but I do think it will.”
“He’ll need to take a post-grad year if he wants to get into USC now,” Liz said. “His grades are mediocre at best. Grades. My God. What am I thinking of? My grades sucked most of the way through high school. Tell me what he was like when you found him. Tell me what it was that got you to make them bring him here.”
Gregor was very careful. Liz had a good memory. He knew that if he elided too much, it would come back to haunt him. She would find out what needed to be known. She would bring it back to him. He told her about Mark’s coming to the Windsor Inn to meet him and taking a shower and falling asleep on the bed. He told her about walking through the Windsor Academy campus and going to Mark’s dorm on a whim. He told her about the convulsions.
Liz listened in eerie stillness, only her arm and hand moving as she stroked Mark’s hair. When Gregor was done, she shuddered.
“They’re right,” she said, “it does sound like drugs.”
“It does and it doesn’t,” Gregor said. “I didn’t see him for long, Liz, but the fact is that all it took to make him look almost infinitely better was a shower and some Perrier. That doesn’t sound like any drug I’ve ever heard of. And he went to sleep. He didn’t pass out.”
“But something must be wrong with him,” Liz said. “He was shaking and sweat was pouring off him. That doesn’t sound psychological. I suppose it could be, but—”
“I think it might be a good idea to at least consider the possibility that he’s ill,” Gregor said. “I doubt if he has Huntington’s chorea—”
“What?”