Only Alien on the Planet (12 page)

“You're going to have to tell me,” Caulder said. “I had to haul your purse all the way from chemistry to choir—and don't think I'm not going to hear about it for the rest of my life—”

“I
thought
she was being pretty weird,” James said, looking at me appraisingly. Actually, they were all sitting around the dining room table, looking at me appraisingly.

“Hally wouldn't tell me anything,” Caulder said severely. “So I know it's got to be something cataclysmic.” He sighed. That sigh was just one thing too many.

“Sorry I'm such a trial to you,” I said, my voice gone all throaty.

“Come on,” Caulder said with a disgust that did nothing but make things worse. “Are you going to tell me what happened, or not?”

“Not,” I said. Then I started to cry.

He groaned. “Ginny,” he said, and he took my hands down from my face. “Come on.” He dragged me out of the dining room, down the hall to the den, stood there while I dropped myself on the good old couch and cried some more. He sat down beside me, perched on the edge of the cushions. “What did you do?” he asked, gently now, but still with an edge of weariness. Enough of an edge to light me a nice little flare of righteous indignation.

“Where did you get that paper?” I asked him.

He sat up straight. “Which paper?” I gave him this disbelieving look, and he gratified me by looking a little ashamed. He got up and went over to sit in my mother's chair.

“I got it out of Leviaton's trash,” he said.

“
Caul
der.”

“Well, I saw Smitty chuck it, and I was curious.”

I just looked at him.

“So, okay,” he said. “It was an immoral thing to do.”

I was glaring at him.

“I'm
sorry
,” he said.

“It was sneaky as sin,” I said, sniffling.

“I know,” he said.

“He didn't expect you to do that,” I said, wiping at my cheeks with the butt of my palm. “It was a violation of his privacy. It was a violation of his
trust.
”

“I know,” Caulder said again, beginning to sound appropriately miserable. “So,” he said warily. “What happened?”

I had to tell him. I started slowly, and I told him a lot of it, leaving out things I couldn't have said if I'd known how—about Smitty's eyes and my own final conclusions. I didn't do a very good job with any of it; I'm not that good with words, so the story came out sort of dry and plain, and left me feeling unfinished.

Caulder had closed his eyes.

“I was afraid he was going to die, Caulder,” I said. “You should have heard it.”

He shook his head.

“You know how you said we ought to push him?” I said softly. “Caulder, listen to me. He's a real person. I'm really scared. Whatever this is, I don't think we have a right to be messing with it.”

He was studying me in silence. “May I see the poem?” he asked after a minute. I didn't want him to ask that.

“I know,” he said, not knowing. “But, please?”

In the end, I got it out for him. He handled it very gently, read it through—first quickly, then again slowly, and again, working out the words. He looked up at me. “Where do you think he got this?”

“What do you think?” I said, sidestepping him.

He frowned. “I don't recognize any of it.”

“Maybe he copied it. Maybe he found it. Maybe somebody gave it to him. Maybe his
mother
wrote it.”

“Maybe not,” Caulder said wryly. He looked over the poem once more, his face changing, and then he looked up at me wonderingly. “You think he wrote this himself don't you?”

I didn't answer.

“Which would explain why he came so unglued when he found out you had it. Except not. Why? Why would he write something like this and then throw it away? If he does stuff like this, why haven't I ever seen any? Why hasn't his mother ever said anything about it? Seems like, the way she is, she'd have had this published in the
New Yorker
by now.” He looked at me again. “If she'd known about it. Which she evidently doesn't.”

He sighed, looking down at the poem. Then he handed it back to me, reluctantly, I thought. “We're over our heads,” he said, for once agreeing with me. “So…maybe we ought to go talk to that shrink.”

Now he'd gone way beyond agreeing. “It's none of her business,” I said.

“What if she just wants to help him?”

“Maybe he doesn't want help.”

“Maybe he
needs
it,” Caulder said. “Geez, Ginny.”

I folded my arms and stared at the rug.

“What's wrong?” he asked. “I mean, what's really wrong? He's sick, Gin. There's something wrong with him. He writes stuff like that, but he never talks to anybody. He needs help.”

“Whose help?” I flashed. “And once it starts, is anybody going to remember to ask him how he feels about any of it? He doesn't
want
to talk to her. Don't you think he's been very clear about that? If he wanted her to know anything, he could write it down like this and
send
it to her. But he doesn't, does he?” I just couldn't bear it. “Look at him. What if she hurts him?”

“Why would anybody hurt him?” Caulder asked me softly.

“We did. We have. I have. Me, personally.” I was crying again, but it was different this time, strange. Tears were just welling up in my eyes and spilling over and there wasn't anything I could do about it.

“Just keep in mind,” I told him, “we shouldn't have known about this in the first place. I mean, do you think he expected somebody to go around resurrecting his trash?”

“I said I was sorry,” Caulder pointed out.

“What I'm saying is—I don't even know what I'm saying.”

Caulder shrugged unhappily, maybe agreeing.

“He's not going to get over this one,” I finished miserably.

Caulder sighed. “He gets over it, Ginny,” he reminded me.

I shook my head. “Not this time. If you'd been there, you'd know. Caulder, I thought he was going to die.” I shrugged, and did this little laugh that had absolutely no humor in it. “So, I guess it's
no big thing about the doctor anyway, since he'll never let me get within miles of him after this.”

Caulder cocked his head. “This is all my fault,” he said.

“You're right about that.”

He nodded slowly. “Okay,” he said. He stood up. “See you in a few minutes.” He started off down the hall.

“Wait a minute,” I said, starting up off the couch.

He stopped and turned to me.

“What are you going to do?”

He shrugged. “I'm going to talk to him.”

“Oh. Uh-huh.”

“Fine,” he said. “I'll be back.”

“Caulder,” I said, following him halfway down the hall. “And just what do you think you're going to say to him?”

He shrugged again and grinned at me, pulling on his coat. “What does it matter?” he said. “You know he's not even going to let me in the house.”

As it turned out, we were both wrong.

C
aulder would never be quite sure what it was he'd said right. But then, if it hadn't been for Mr. Tibbs, Caulder might never have had a chance to say anything. As it turns out, Mr. Tibbs has no problem with letting kids run around his house unescorted— as long as the wife is out on business—so Caulder had surprised Smitty in his upstairs inner sanctum, and said whatever it was that he said. “Now we'll just have to see what happens,” Caulder told me afterward. And then promptly forgot about the whole thing in a fit of lovesick nerves, enduring the hours until Hally's party.

I was thinking about Hally's party too. About how I wouldn't know anybody there. About how I'd been spending all my time and energy on Caulder's world without building anything of my own. Not that I was sorry about being with Caulder. It's just I missed having friends—our parties back home, tame as they might have seemed to some people, had been pure adventure: you never knew who you'd meet there or what might happen. Maybe something wonderful.

They only give you a little time to live,
Paul used to say to me.
I don't know about you, but if I'm going to be going somewhere, I want to be driving the bus.

I sat out on my lawn that afternoon, looking up at my trees, thinking the whole thing over. The trees had finally gone completely yellow. Their trunks were still damp and dark with last night's chilly rain, black against those clear yellow leaves. I looked up at them, feeling like I was seeing reality, distorted through ultraviolet eyes.
It all depends on the spectrum,
I thought.
On what you're used to—what you expect.
I hadn't expected anything good for a long time. And I had to admit, these trees were a kind of beauty I'd never have been able to imagine on my own.

“They're almost done,” James said. He jumped the fence into Caulder's yard, a cheese sandwich in one hand, sweater over his arm.

“Who?” I asked him, squinting into the late afternoon light.

“The folks. Dad told me, this morning. Have fun tonight. We're not going to be late.” He gave me a wave and disappeared up Caulder's front steps.

Almost done.

Now there was an idea—parents and children in the same house again. People to talk to. Normal life.

Suddenly I was tired of sitting there. I was tired of just sitting around, waiting for my life to happen to me. I had a party to go to. I didn't even know who I was anymore—I hadn't even seriously looked in a mirror for months.

So I went inside and I looked, and I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to bring the image back up to standard. When Caulder finally showed at my door, he had on a new sweater, deep green, with a plaid shirt under it, and his hair was all perfect; he was
radiating joy and nerves. But in the midst of all that, he looked at me and dropped his jaw. “Geez, Ginny,” he said. “I never saw you wear
that
before.”

“It's just a dress, Caulder,” I told him. I cinched up the belt another notch and did a little turn to make the skirt ripple. “See? Nothing exciting.”

“But you look like you did it on purpose. I mean, you look—I mean, your hair—”

I smiled at him. “Same to you, Caulder,” I said. And then I turned him around, gave him a push and followed him out to the car.

He held the door for me, still staring. “I want you to watch who you talk to tonight,” he instructed me. “I mean, you never know who's going to show up there—” Now I was grinning. This was doing me a lot of good. “What about Smitty?” I asked him, though tonight, for the first time in weeks, it was not my consuming concern.

“Don't know,” he said, belting himself in. “I told him we'd stop. I guess we'll have to see.”

Smitty wasn't waiting on the walk. “Oh well,” Caulder said, and tapped the horn a couple of times, just for the heck of it. The door opened, and Smitty came out. Caulder looked at me, giving me a silent
well-what-do-you-know?
I got out of the car, pulled the front seat over for Smitty the way I always did, and he slipped into the back. But he was not as he always had been—his face was the same beautiful blank, but he had lost balance somehow. The air was crackling with it all the way up into the hills; I could feel the kinetics in the hair at the back of my neck. Caulder didn't seem to notice a thing.

It was a longish drive up to Hally's. The house was perched up on the shoulder of the hills, surrounded by trees, tucked back away from the street. As you started down the long driveway, you could see how huge the place actually was. For the second time that night, Caulder's mouth was hanging open, and he was looking distinctly uncomfortable. The party was downstairs in the back, where the bottom floor opened onto a patio and a bunch of little decks. The door stood open, light pouring out of it onto the patio, and the windows glowed like Christmas. We could feel the music when we got out of the car.

“Oh my grace,” Caulder said soberly, taking a look around. “It didn't look that big from the front.” There was a deep yard behind the house. Toward the back, the lawn rolled gently down the hill; the tiny lights of the town blazed up beyond and just below through a lacing of trees, cold and twinkling. Hally'd told me her father kept horses in the meadow down below the yard.

Caulder took a deep breath and blew it all out in a single stream. “Well,” he sighed, tugging at my hair, “come on.”

We crossed the deck, Smitty trailing along behind us, and passed through the open door into the warmth of Hally's house. I still wasn't ready for the size of that room. We stood uncertainly in the doorway, staring at a massive fireplace that took up one entire wall, the kind of thing you'd have hung with iron pots when they used to roast an entire ox for lunch. All the furniture had been pushed back against the walls, and the middle of the room stood empty, ready for dancing. There were chairs and love seats tucked judiciously into shadowy corners, and a whole banquet table full of obviously catered refreshments.

“Hello-hello-
hello! “
Hally said, sweeping us up. She pulled us into the room and introduced us to her brother, who was hovering over the stereo system. Then she dumped us at the refreshment table with an admonition to make ourselves at home and eat a lot.

Caulder drooped. I wanted to explain that he should be patient and let Hally get things going, but the music was too loud for talking. So I just grinned at him and started filling my plate. The table was like a gastronomic Disneyland—silver trays draped with doilies and mounded with little sandwiches, tarts, bits of fruit, and fancy things that bore only a faint resemblance to food as we know it—tiny pastel rolls, stacked triangles, and layered shapes, stabbed through with surreal, plastic-fletched toothpicks.

There must have been a hundred people invited to that party. They came in twos and threes and they kept coming—the boys gravitating toward the table or the stereo, the girls very pointedly and cheerfully not noticing them. All of a sudden, for the first time in months, I felt completely comfortable in my skin. When I caught a wink from across the room—a kid I recognized from my chemistry class—I laughed out loud.

From that moment on, I left Caulder and Smitty on their own; tonight was not my night for babysitting. Hally finally rescued Caulder, who instantly perked right up. Smitty was sitting in a chair across the room from me, tipped back against the chair rail, drinking punch out of a little crystal cup. He was almost faceless in the half-light.