The Presence

PROLOGUE

LOS ANGELES

It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

Everything was supposed to be getting better, not worse.

They’d promised him — everyone had promised him.

First the doctor: “If you take the pills, you’ll feel better.”

Then his coach: “Just try a little harder. No pain, no gain.”

Even his mom: “Just take it one day at a time, and don’t try to do everything at once.”

So he’d taken the pills, and tried harder, but also tried not to do too much. And for a while last week things actually seemed to improve. Although smog had settled over the city so heavily that most of his friends had cut out of school early and headed for the beach, where an offshore wind might bring fresh air in from the ocean, he’d gone to all his classes. After the last bell he’d stripped out of his clothes in the locker room and donned his gym shorts before jogging out to the track to do the four warm-up laps that always preceded the more serious work of the high hurdles.

The event that just might, with a little more work, make him a State Champion on his eighteenth birthday.

One day last week, when he was alone on the field, the pills had at last seemed to kick in. He’d been expecting to lose his wind halfway around the first lap, but even as he rounded the final turn, he felt his body surging with energy, his lungs pumping air easily, his heartbeat barely above normal. On the second and third laps he’d kicked his pace up a notch, but still felt good — really good. So on the fourth lap he’d gone all out, and it was like a few months ago, when he’d still felt great all the time. That day last week, he felt greater than ever: his lungs had been sucking huge volumes of air, and his whole body had responded. Instead of the slow burn of pain he usually felt toward the end of the warm-up mile, his muscles had merely tingled pleasurably, his chest expanding and contracting in an easy rhythm that synched perfectly with his steady heartbeat. His whole body had been functioning in harmony. He’d even taken a couple of extra laps that day, exulting in the strength of his body, euphoric that finally the pills and the exercise were working. He’d set up the hurdles then, spacing them precisely, but setting them a little higher than usual.

He’d soared over them one after the other, clearing the crossbars easily, feeling utterly weightless as his body floated over one barricade after another.

When he’d started back to the locker room two hours after he began, he was barely out of breath, his heart beating easily and his legs feeling as if he’d only been strolling for half an hour instead of running and jumping full-out for two.

The next day it had all crashed in on him.

A quarter of the way around the first lap, he’d felt the familiar constrictions around his lungs, and his heart began pounding as if he were in the last stretch of a 10K run. He kept going, telling himself it was nothing more than a reaction from the day before, when he’d worked far harder than he should have. But by the time he finished the first lap, he knew it wasn’t going to work. Swerving off the hard-packed earth of the track, he flopped down onto the grass, rolling over to stare up into the blue of the sky, squinting against the glare of the afternoon sun. What the hell was wrong? Yesterday he’d felt great! Today he felt like an old man.

He’d refused to give in to the pain in his lungs, the pounding of his heart, the agony in his legs. When his coach had come over to find out if he was all right, he’d tossed it off, claiming he’d just gotten a cramp, then rubbing the muscles of his right calf as if to prove the lie. The coach had bought it — or at least pretended to, which was just as good — and he’d gotten up and gone back to the track.

He made it through the four laps, but by the last one he’d only been able to maintain a pace that was little more than a fast walk.

The coach had told him to try harder or go home.

He’d tried harder, but in the end he’d gone home.

And each day since then it had grown worse.

Each day he’d struggled a little harder against the pain.

The day before yesterday, he’d gone to the doctor for the fourth time since New Year’s, and once again the doctor hadn’t been able to find anything wrong. Once again he’d answered all the questions: Yes, he was fine when he came back from Maui with his mom after New Year’s. No, his father hadn’t been there; he’d gone to Grand Cayman with his new wife and their baby. No, it didn’t bother him that his dad hadn’t gone to Maui with them — in fact, he was glad his mom had dumped his dad, since his dad seemed to like hitting both of them when he got drunk, which had been practically every night the last couple of years before he finally left. No, he didn’t hate his dad. He didn’t like him much, and was glad he was gone, but he didn’t hate him.

What he hated was the way he felt.

The doctor had said maybe he should see a shrink, but he wasn’t about to do that. Only geeks and losers went to shrinks. Whatever was wrong, he’d get over it by himself. But over the last two days the pain had become almost unbearable. He was having nightmares, and waking up unable to breathe, and his whole body had started hurting all the time.

This afternoon, when he started feeling like maybe it might be better just to die if he couldn’t get away from the pain, he’d cut out after school and driven around for a while, until a cop stopped him and gave him a ticket for having a broken muffler. So now what the hell was he going to do? He couldn’t afford to pay for the ticket, let alone get the damn muffler on the car fixed. Besides, what was the big deal? It didn’t make that much noise, and hardly stank up the inside of the car at all. But his mom was going to give him hell for the ticket anyway, and his dad would only launch into an endless lecture about how much it costs to raise two families if he asked to borrow the money to fix the muffler.

What a mess!

Turning into the tree-lined block on which he’d lived all his life, he pressed the button on the sun visor that would activate the garage door opener while he was still two houses away, and turned into the driveway just as the door opened fully. Automatically starting the game he played against himself every afternoon, he pressed the button again, trying to gauge it so the descending garage door would just clear the back end of his car as he pulled it inside.

Today he missed, and the car jolted sharply as the garage door glanced off the rear bumper. So now there would be scrapes on the car and the garage door, as well as the ticket and the bad muffler.

And he still hurt.

Maybe, instead of going into the house, he’d just sit here awhile.

Sit here and see what happened.

A feeling of warmth began to spread through him, washing away the pain he’d been enduring, and suddenly everything began to seem better.

Maybe he’d finally found the answer to his problems.

Without his mother.

Without his coach.

Even without his doctor.

The boy closed his eyes, breathed deeply, and for the first time in weeks felt no pain.

For the woman, the day had been no better than it had been for her son, starting with an early call from her ex-husband suggesting that they renegotiate his child support payments. Translation: the bimbo he’d run off with wanted more money to spend on herself. Well, she’d disabused him of that idea pretty quickly. At noon she’d discovered that an associate who was a full year junior to her was going to get the partnership slot that should have been hers. So now she was faced with a decision: Sit it out for another year, or start job hunting? But she knew the answer to that one: she wasn’t going to be made a partner, ever, so she might as well start checking with the headhunters.

Then, when she’d decided things couldn’t get any worse, the doctor called to recommend a good psychiatrist for her son. Well, before she sent him off to a shrink, she’d have him checked out by someone else. Except the HMO probably wouldn’t pay for it, and the trip to Maui at New Year’s had strained the budget as far as it would go.

Still, she’d figure out something.

Turning into the driveway, she jabbed the remote on the visor, bringing the car to a complete stop as she waited for the garage door to open.

It was the noise of the engine more than the fumes that poured out of the garage that told her something was wrong. Slamming the gear lever into Park with one hand as she opened the door with the other, she slid out of her car and ran into the garage.

She could see her son slumped inside his car, his legs up on the front passenger seat, his back resting against the driver’s door. His head was lolling on his chest.

Stifling a scream, she grabbed the driver’s door handle.

Locked!

She ran around the car and tried the other door, then called her son’s name.

Nothing!

Wait!

Had something moved inside the car?

She cupped her hands over her eyes and peered into its shadowy interior.

His chest was moving! He was still breathing!

Coughing as the fumes in the garage filled her lungs, she fumbled for the extra key that hung from a nail under the workbench, shoved open the door to the kitchen, and grabbed the phone. “My son!” she cried as soon as the 911 operator answered. “Oh, God, I need an ambulance!”

A carefully measured voice calmly asked for her address.

Her address!

Her mind was suddenly blank. “I can’t — oh, God! It’s—” Then it came back to her and she blurted out a number. “On North Maple, between Dayton and Clifton. Oh, God, hurry! He locked himself in the car in the garage and—”

“It’s all right, ma’am,” the calm voice broke in. “An aid car is already on its way.”

Dropping the phone on the counter, she raced back to the garage. She had to get the car open — she had to! A hammer! There used to be a sledgehammer at the end of the workbench! Squeezing between the front of her son’s car and the wooden bench, she uttered a silent prayer that her ex-husband hadn’t simply helped himself to the big maul. He hadn’t — it was right where she remembered it. Grasping its handle with both hands, she hoisted it up, then slammed its huge metal head into the passenger window of her son’s car. The safety glass shattered into thousands of tiny pieces, and the woman dropped the hammer to the floor, snaked a hand through the broken window, and pulled the door open. Reaching across her son’s body, she switched the ignition off, and the loud rumble of the motor died away, only to be instantly replaced by the wail of a fast-approaching siren. She grasped her son’s ankles and tried to pull him out of the car, but before she’d managed to haul him even halfway through the door, two white-clad medics were taking over, gently easing her aside, pulling the boy out of the car and clamping an oxygen mask over his face. As he stirred, her panic at last began to ease its grip.

“He’s coming around,” one of the medics assured her as they carried him out of the garage and put him on a stretcher. “Looks like he’s going to make it okay.”

Her son began struggling as the medics put him into the ambulance and started to close its rear door.

“I want to come,” the woman begged. “For God’s sake! He’s my son!”

The door to the ambulance reopened, and the woman scrambled inside. With the siren wailing, the ambulance raced toward Cedars-Sinai Hospital, nearly twenty blocks away.

The ride seemed to take forever, and the woman watched helplessly as her son struggled against the two medics, one of whom was trying to hold the boy still while the other kept the oxygen mask pressed firmly over his nose and mouth. Clutching her son’s hand, the woman tried to soothe him, and finally his struggles eased. But just as the ambulance pulled to a stop at the hospital’s emergency entrance, she felt his hand suddenly relax in hers. His whole body went limp on the stretcher.

She heard one of the medics curse softly.

Her body went numb, and when the doors were yanked open from the outside, she climbed out of the ambulance slowly, as if she’d fallen into a trance.

The crew rushed her son into the emergency room, where a team of doctors waited to take over for the medics.

She followed the stretcher into the hospital.

Silently, she watched the doctors work, but already knew what was coming.

And in the end, she heard the same words she’d heard first from her son’s doctor, then from the ambulance crew: “I don’t understand — he should be doing fine!”

But her son — her sweet, handsome only son — wasn’t doing fine.

Her son was dead.