Only Alien on the Planet (19 page)

Smitty. Michael. He sighed. And he turned his face away from the wall. Turned it to the ceiling again, but ever so slightly inclined toward me. “Caulder,” he said, “has been patient a long time.”

“He loves you,” I told him. “He really does.”

He made that soft remarking sound in his throat and fell silent. The leaves still danced against the window. When he spoke again, his voice was cold. “The doctor—wants so much. So fast.” His eyes were dark. He ran a hand through his hair. He said more gently, “You once wanted something.” He seemed thoughtful. “It was very hard.” A tiny smile. “But good.” He again rested his hand over his heart. “Now I talk. But I'm here.” He lifted a hand, indicating the room. “This is harder.”

I folded my hands into my lap, clamping my mouth shut.

“I'm damaged.” Now he had his hands crossed loosely over his heart. “You see. Every day.” He looked to the window. “Shame. Is that the word? Uncovered. Ashamed. And you here—for kindness.”

“I'm not,” I said softly.

A heartbeat went by in silence.

“It is difficult,” he said.

“So, you're saying you don't want me here?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

My eyes stung. “Are you sure?” I asked, my throat closing up on me. “I know I don't help much. But I'd like to stay. Not just for kindness. I'm not kind. I'm really not. Ask anybody. It's just—we're friends. Michael. I'm your friend. That means I have you in my heart. I can't help it. Please? Don't tell me not to come? It would make me so sad.”

He closed his eyes.

“If you send me away,” I told him, going for broke, “you'd be totally at Caulder's mercy.”

There was no response for a moment. Then he smiled.

There was suddenly noise in the doorway, the clearing of a male throat. Smitty—Michael and I, we both jumped. It was Caulder, standing in the doorway with his parka on and his books tucked under his arm.

“I've got to go home,” he said apologetically.

Michael opened his eyes and turned his face to Caulder. “Thank you,” he said.

“Sure,” Caulder said, looking a little confused. “See you tomorrow?”

“See you tomorrow,” Michael echoed wearily, looking at me.

Caulder didn't ask me anything as we walked down the hall on the way out. I thought that was brave of him. I wouldn't have known what to tell him if he had.

“At least I got some of my math done,” I said by way of making conversation.

“Actually,” Caulder said, sounding a little stiff—"I want to thank you.”

“For what?”

“For never throwing it up to me what a jerk I am in there.”

“How could I?” I asked him, “When I'm so busy being a jerk myself?”

That night, I told my family about Pete Zabriski. Of course they greeted the news of this impending date with cruel and absolutely not unusual delight. They have always liked nothing better than an opportunity to exercise their mob wit on the innocent and undeserving only daughter.

“You
are
gonna straighten your hair?” James asked me at dinner that night. He'd been chewing real slowly, kind of staring at me, leaning his cheek in one hand. It was not the kind of remark I felt bound to answer.

Charlie, thoughtful as always, warned me, “He might want to kiss you.” My mother has never allowed us to say “shut up” at the dinner table. I smiled at Charlie and batted my eyes.

“Leave her alone, you guys,” my dad said. “You'll get her nervous, and then she'll sweat, and then she'll
never
get married.”

“I can't believe you said that.” I glared at him. My own father.

He smiled at me sweetly. “I'm just concerned about your future, honey,” he said.

“Good Night,
Nurse! “
my mother said. “Knock it off. How often does the girl go out that you should embarrass her like this.” My mother too.

“You are envious,” I said, “because someone
handsome
and
good-looking
—admittedly, unusual traits around here thanks to our genetic drawbacks—wants the benefit of my company. A young man who is
cultured,
no less.” I held up a hand, silencing James, who was—no doubt—about to ask if we were talking salmonella or streptococcus. “
He
plays the French horn.”

Charlie raised his eyebrows. “He must—” he said, leaning forward over the table and looking very sober—"have great lips.”

This was, of course, considered just incredibly humorous.

I considered turning the table over on all of them. I settled for pointed silence.

“I can see up your nostrils,” James said.

Charming. And so appropriate at dinner.

“As it happens,” I said primly, shaking out my napkin and placing it carefully onto my lap, “I haven't even told him yet that I would go.” I looked up, daring anybody to say anything. Evidently, I was looking a little dangerous. I smiled, smoothing the napkin. “It's so nice to have the family all together,” I said. When I looked up again, it seemed to me my mother had taken that comment just a little more to heart than I'd expected.

“Yes,” Charlie agreed with great relish—"it
is
wonderful.”

A
s it happened, the date with Pete Zabriski turned out to be a complicated matter. We couldn't seem to settle on a day that was good for both of us. Mostly, I couldn't seem to settle. Couldn't seem to want to commit myself. Of course I had a lot on my mind, and maybe that was the trouble; I'd finally decided to take a little independent affirmative action, so that Saturday, all on my own, I took Charlie to meet the person I now knew as Michael Tibbs.

The visit started out quietly enough. Charlie was very civilized and decorous while I was introducing them. Michael had never in this world expected me to be bringing casual visitors by, and he kept looking at me like he wondered what, under heaven, I thought I was doing.

Then Charlie suddenly whipped something out of his pocket. “Cards,” he announced. He fanned them against his palm a couple of times, grinning at Michael. “I bet you have a terrific poker face.”

Michael raised his eyebrows. I'd never seen him do that before. I suspected he must have been practicing it.

“You're on your own,” I told them, neatly sidestepping any pitiful, pleading shots that might have come from the Tibbs eyes. And it worked out. They took to each other pretty much immediately. I
spent the afternoon in a chair by the window, reading a book and feeling guilty about sneaking in here without Caulder, while Charlie taught Michael how to play canasta. And then rummy. And then five-card stud.

I think that afternoon did more for Michael than all of the sessions and visits and general torture he'd been through, put together. By the end of the day, Michael finally seemed to have lost all awareness of himself. He wanted to beat Charlie. And he thought Charlie was funny. They sat there insulting each other— after Charlie'd shown Michael how to do it. It was just two kids playing together. It was magic, and it was really beautiful.

I tried to explain the whole thing to Caulder that evening. I told him we need to bring the light into that room, not fix on the darkness. And I don't know, I guess Friday's incident had finally humbled him up a little, because he listened to me without taking any offense.

Over the next couple of days, Caulder really worked on forgetting where we were, who we were with and what that person had been through. And as the pressure from him came off, so did the medication. We all started breathing a little easier, and Michael got more and more clear-eyed every day.

Like I said, he would always be a quiet kind of person. But as the days went on, he retreated less and less into isolation. The shadows around his eyes disappeared. His sense of humor started popping up.

He still wouldn't let me tell anybody but Charlie his name. I guess he had to keep something where he felt like it was safe.

And then came the day, weeks and weeks after that fateful party, when we finally found him sitting up in the bed. He was wearing sweats, his hair clean and rumpled up. He was reading out of a
Reader's Digest
which he closed as we came in, and dropped on the night table.

“Whatcha reading?” I asked him. I put my books down and pulled off my coat.

“'Drama in Real Life,'” he said. I looked up. I had heard irony.

“You look good,” Caulder said. This was a nonthreatening version of the old question.

“I'm vertical,” Michael said. “No drip,” he added, holding up his left hand so that we could see there was no needle stuck in it.

“Sweet,” Caulder said, swinging his chair into place. He pulled out his World History text. “Chapter Twelve,” he announced, and started reading. I slipped down in my chair and let my eyes wander. There wasn't a lot to see in that room. For all the homespun wallpaper and prints on the walls, there was nothing in the room that could have told you it was Michael's—not a picture, not a keepsake of any kind, nothing on the dresser but that
Reader's Digest
and a new box of light blue Kleenex. A soulless place.

While I was looking around the room, Michael was looking at Caulder, studying him, one finger absently pressed against his lips. Caulder finally felt it. He forged ahead with the reading for a time, but in the end, he couldn't stand it anymore. He closed the book and put it down on his lap. “What?” he said.

Michael blinked once. Caulder waited. Michael repositioned himself, folding his hands into his lap.

“What is it?” Caulder asked again.

“Ginny said you love me,” Michael ventured at last.

“That's right,” Caulder agreed.

Michael looked down at his hands thoughtfully, and then up at Caulder again. “I don't understand,” he said.

And then Caulder was mulling it over, trying to figure it out himself.

“You want control over me?” Michael asked.

“No,” Caulder said, looking shocked.

Michael nodded thoughtfully.

“It means…” I started. But Michael held up one finger, cutting me off.

“Love,” he said slowly. “So. I owe you—whatever you want?” Caulder shook his head. “I have to forgive you? Always and at any time?” Michael, asking these things in that delicately shaded way he had, was almost eloquent now that the drugs were out of his system. And these were obviously questions he had worked out before this moment. “Does it mean—you deserve unlimited access to my mind and my body?”

“No,” Caulder said again and again, looking appalled. “None of those things. How did you come up with that? That's not what I want from you. Geez. What brought all this on?”

Michael leaned over and picked up the
Reader's Digest
again. “My mother visited me this morning,” he said, riffling through the pages. “She also said that she loved me. You evidently mean a different thing.” He sighed, closed the magazine and dropped it on the bed.

Caulder's face tightened. “Yeah. I mean a different thing.”

Michael gave him one slow, silent nod. “You said, 'That's not what I want.'” Then, “What
do
you want?”

“Nothing,” Caulder said.

Michael waited.

“Caulder,” I said. “You think about it for a minute. You want him to answer your questions. You want him to care about you. You want to share things. You want to be able to joke around with him, talk about stuff—real stuff. Stuff that means something. You want Mich—Smitty—” I glanced up apologetically. “You want to be friends. I think that's a lot to want from anybody.”

“That's true,” Caulder said quietly after a moment. “I do want all that.”

“But you have friends. Normal friends. Why—” Michael parted his hands.

Caulder had no answer for him.

“Friendship,” Michael said, tasting the word. “Desire? Keeping? Holding? Ownership? Control?”

“
No
,” Caulder said. He turned to me. “I don't own you, do I?” he demanded. “Just because we're friends?” But then he got confused. “We do kind of own each other. And we owe each other. I mean— we're responsible for each other. We
are
committed.”

“How contractual,” I said.

“Shut up,” Caulder said. “This isn't easy.” He frowned down at his hands. “What do I want? I want Ginny to respect me. I want her to care about me even when I don't deserve it.”

“Which happens all too often these days,” I pointed out.

“Please?” Caulder said to me. “It's not like I think I have a right to know every little thing Ginny has in her mind. Just because I love her, doesn't mean she has to
give
me herself—I don't
own
her.”

Michael blinked and looked away. “I just wondered,” he said. And then, “I don't understand your interest in me.”

“I don't either,” Caulder said finally. “And I'm getting the feeling it bothers you.” Caulder looked at him closely. “Are you afraid of me?” he asked.

Michael's eyes met Caulder's. “I have been loved before,” he said. Caulder's eyes darkened. Michael moved his hand, maybe warding off further discussion.

“You don't have to be afraid of me or Ginny,” Caulder said firmly, almost with anger.

Michael smiled. “Ginny doesn't scare me,” he said. “Ginny doesn't love me.”

“You don't?” Caulder asked, turning to me.

I dropped my pencil.

“I don't know,” I said. I bent over to pick up the pencil.

“Well, do you love
me? “
Caulder asked.

“Of course I do.” That was easy enough.

“You are often angry with him,” Michael observed.

“That doesn't mean I don't love him,” I said.

“That's what I mean by commitment,” Caulder said. “If you love somebody, you're loyal. You hang on to them through the bad parts, the hard parts. You stick by them.”

“Do you love Pete Zabriski?” Michael asked me, those blue eyes suddenly plain, flat disks.

“No,” I said. “I don't even know him.”

“Then why do you want him?”

“I don't
want
him,” I said. “I just think he's kind of cute.”

“You want to be with him,” Michael said.

“Maybe,” I said. “Depends on what you mean by 'with.'”

“Never try to get a girl to tell you the truth about love,” Caulder advised.

“Ah,” Michael said. “And when you go out with him, this person who is kind of cute. If he wants your kiss. Would you give it to him?”