Only Alien on the Planet

by Kristen D. Randle

  “She called about three more times, looking for us. My mom called Hally's, trying to find us, but we weren't at the party either.”

  I moaned. “So, is he okay now?”

  “Actually he's gone.”

  “Gone? “

  “The last time his mother called, she said they were taking him over to the university clinic.”

  I didn't say anything. I just kept shivering.

  “He wanted them to, Gin,” Caulder said. “He wrote down the name of the psychologist himself, and he handed his mother the phone. My mom is really mad at me. She was just worried for a long time tonight.”

  I felt so cold.

  “I guess I got what I wanted,” he said before he hung up. “I hope he lives through it.”

  It was not an easy night for me.

  I heard my parents come in, heard them messing around in the kitchen. They were louder than usual, laughing a lot. It was comforting, knowing they were there, and I wished I could just get up and go in and talk to them about everything.

  But it was too late for that. I wouldn't even know how to start. What was I going to say—"While you guys were off doing whatever it was you were doing, I got involved with this dysfunctional mentally ill kid, and last night, I made a sexual move on him that finally drove him over the edge and now he's in the mental hospital?”

  I turned over on my side, feeling sick to my stomach. Why did I kiss him? Why did I have to kiss him? At the very least, it had been a bad decision. If it had ever actually been a decision. And, no question, there were going to be terrible consequences. Everybody was going to have to know what finally set him off. They were going to have to know about me and what I'd done.

  This was a nightmare.

  And it was all my fault.

  chapter 11

  Everybody stared at me when I came down for breakfast. I didn't have to look to know my face was swollen and my eyes were still red.

  “You all right?” my father asked me, looking concerned.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “Are you sure?” he asked me. It's actually kind of a coded question. It means I know you're not fine, but I'm willing to respect your privacy—just remember, no matter what, you can talk to me. But I wasn't much comforted, because I wasn't at all sure I deserved that kind of courtesy.

  “You'll be glad to know, at least I hope you will be—” my mother announced, flicking a look at me, and exchanging one with my dad, “that we're finally finished. Christianson Graphic Design is now up and running.”

  “So, now we can buy food?” Charlie asked, grinning.

  “Eat all the pancakes you want,” Mother said generously. “And after you finish, we've got boxes to unpack, and pictures to hang, screens to scrape, and storm windows to get up—”

  James stared at mother, his fork halfway to his mouth.

  “Welcome home,” Dad said, grinning.

  Caulder showed up about halfway through breakfast. We made a place for him, but he wasn't any more hungry than I was. He also looked almost as bad as I did. There were some more quick looks exchanged between my parents.

  “Did something happen?” I asked.

  “Dr. Woodhouse called,” he said, glancing around the table at the rest of my family.

  “They don't know,” I said.

  “Know what?” James asked, then he did a little jump, like somebody'd kicked him under the table.

  “She wants to talk to us,” Caulder went on. “She wanted to know if we could come by later this afternoon.”

  I pushed my plate away.

  “I told her we'd come,” he said.

  “And where is this you're going?” my father asked, carefully disinterested.

  “The university clinic,” I said, looking at Caulder. Now my hands were shaking.

  “The Mental Health Studies Clinic,” Caulder amended.

  “Oh?” my mother said, her voice perfectly casual.

  “It's about Smitty Tibbs,” Caulder said. “He finally went off the deep end last night.” He flicked his eyes across mine. That was all he was going to say.

  My mother had dropped her hands into her lap. Her face cleared a bit. “That's too bad,” she said quietly. “Are you two all right?”

  I nodded. Then I shrugged.

  “We just have to go and talk to his psychologist,” I said. I kept my eyes on my pancakes.

  “Well, maybe you can help him,” Dad said, and I could feel him watching me. You could almost hear what my parents were thinking—Something's very wrong here. Something we should know about. We were wrong to leave them on their own for so long.

  “Maybe we can help,” I said, but my voice didn't sound right. Maybe if my parents had been around more, I might have been talking to them all along, and things might have been different. Maybe they could've helped me to see things more clearly. Maybe not. Maybe this was just something I had to work through on my own. Except it wasn't like I was in this all alone.

  Charlie was watching my face. He smiled me forgiveness—and he didn't even know what was wrong.

  The clinic was a big, impressive, modern building—lots of dark glass and red brick. The trees out front softened the institutional face of it a little, but I was still sick, going up the walk to the door. I took Caulder's hand. I know mine was cold and damp. I couldn't feel his at all.

  We stopped at the front desk, and I let Caulder talk to the woman behind it. She directed us to Dr. Woodhouse's office. I wondered if she'd been told to watch for us. I wondered where Smitty was, if he was okay. My hands felt like they were going to sleep.

  I should have been home with my family, doing family things and finally settling in. I'd waited a long time for that. But here I was, walking down a corridor in a place that was as cold to me as the moon, as cold as a trap.

  “We don't have to do this,” I said to Caulder.

  “For Smitty,” he said.

  “For Smitty,” I echoed, feeling the trap close.

  The psychologist's office door had no window. It was just a plain wooden door with a nameplate hung on it. Caulder knocked. I didn't hear an answer, but he opened the door and waited, politely, for me to go first. In my heart, I cursed his manners.

  It was a warm-looking office; my father would have called it country appointed: chair railing, dark wallpaper with a tiny light print, plants, old prints, unhospital-like comfortable chairs.

  The doctor was seated behind a large oak desk. The Tibbses were sitting in two of the chairs, off to the side. When I saw them there, I wanted to back out the door and run. Another two chairs were pulled up more or less in front of the desk so that they faced both Dr. Woodhouse and the Tibbses. These chairs were for us. Not a comfortable situation.

  The doctor looked tired. Mrs. Tibbs's face was as swollen as mine, and it was hard looking. Mr. Tibbs was angry; it was in his eyes, and all over his body. They hadn't looked at us when we came in, and they still weren't looking at me. My hands were hard on the arms of my chair, and I kept my eyes fixed on the desk.

  “Thank you for coming,” the doctor said. Her voice was low and calm. I was thinking, she's a psychologist—she can probably see right through me.

  “How's Smitty?” Caulder asked. I glanced up at the doctor. She had a nice face.

  “I think he'll probably be just fine,” she said. It was a careful answer. I wanted to ask her where Smitty was, if we could see him—but with the Tibbses there, I couldn't speak.

  “If you'll forgive me,” she said, “I'm going to get down to business.” She looked at me, and I dropped my eyes. “I need to understand,” she said, “how you two view your relationships with Smitty.”

  “We're friends,” Caulder said.

  Mrs. Tibbs made this wry little noise. I knew what she meant by it. She didn't believe anybody could really be Smitty's friend.

  “Okay,” Dr. Woodhouse said. Then she turned to me. “What about you, Ginny?” she asked. Her voice hadn't nailed me to the wall—but the question itself had.

  �
�This is all my fault,” I said. There wasn't any point in prolonging things. But I couldn't say any more.

  The doctor was studying my face. I couldn't stand it. “Is there something wrong with me?” The question burst out of me. “Does the way I feel about him mean that I'm—is it wrong?”

  Mrs. Tibbs drew in her breath.

  But I was looking at the doctor. I needed an answer. Because I hadn't understood my feelings for a long time now, not from the beginning—not about last night, or if I felt the same way now, or about what was going to happen after this.

  “Do you care about him, Ginny?” the doctor asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “I mean, I care about what happens to him. Is that the same thing?” There was a box of Kleenex on her desk. She gave it a little push in my direction.

  “I think it's good to care about people, don't you, Ginny?” she asked. She smiled at me. “I guess, what I need to know is,” she said, “if you two are willing to help him.”

  “Absolutely,” Caulder said, answering so certainly for both of us.

  But I was still sitting there, shocked; she'd moved right past me. I'd been so certain I was the crux of the whole thing, and she'd passed me right by.

  “Now, understand,” the doctor said. “If you get involved with this, you're going to have to consider it an absolute commitment. We have to keep Smitty's emotional environment as stable as we can for the next little while. I can't have you jumping in and out on me.”

  “No problem,” Caulder said. “What do we need to do?”

  I looked at him blankly. That word she'd said—commitment. It had kind of disconnected my brain.

  The doctor looked at the Tibbses. Mr. Tibbs glanced at his wife and then nodded at the doctor. Mrs. Tibbs got up and left the room.

  “Well, first you need to understand some things.” Dr. Woodhouse folded her hands on the desk top. “We had a long talk with Smitty last night. I know that sounds pretty incredible, and no, it wasn't easy for any of us.”

  She rubbed the tips of her fingers over her eyes. “He told us a lot of things, including his own version of what happened at the swimming pool—I understand you're acquainted with the story.”

  Caulder nodded, staring at her.

  “We can't tell at this point how close Smitty's perceptions come to reality. So, let me caution you that what I'm going to tell you is his side of the last fifteen years. I don't yet know how accurate any of this actually is.” She looked at us, waiting for a sign we understood.

  “Okay,” Caulder said slowly. We were moving a little bit too fast for him too.

  “Okay,” the doctor said, and she placed her two hands flat on the top of her desk. “I don't know how much you know about abuse.”

  I didn't want to hear this.

  More than anything in the world, I didn't want to have to hear this.

  But she went right ahead and told us. She told us all about how Russell drowned two-year-old Smitty in the pool when nobody was looking. About how Smitty never told anybody because Russell had hung over his bed in the hospital and told him he'd kill him again if Smitty ever said another word to anybody. Dying once had evidently been enough. And Russell had said all that—done all that—right under his parents' noses. He didn't stop there either. He punished Smitty every day of his life; little miseries, tiny tortures, making himself Smitty's only envoy to the rest of the world. He'd even made Smitty believe he'd put a bomb in Smitty's brain, a bomb that would go off if Smitty ever said a word or touched anybody when Russell wasn't around. All this mixed with such brotherly love—just enough patting to keep a little boy completely enslaved.

  “Why didn't he tell somebody?” I asked very quietly, but feeling like I had screamed it.

  “Because he believed,” the doctor said.

  She spread her hands slightly, a kind of shrug. “Little children have a very tenuous relationship with the world,” she went on sadly. “They're just learning how things work, what the rules are. Russell started teaching Smitty the rules when Smitty was very young. Why would Smitty have questioned them?”

  “But what about his parents? “ Caulder spat, and then took a quick, embarrassed look at Mr. Tibbs.

  Mrs. Tibbs had come back into the room and was standing by the door.

  Mr. Tibbs spoke, his voice quiet, as if he were holding his feelings in very hard. “Russell told Smitty he was an orphan. He said we bought him at a garage sale, along with an old set of tires. He said he didn't want him touching his mother or me. And so, he never could.”

  “Russell was a good babysitter,” Mrs. Tibbs said, her voice stiff. “We saw no sign of any of this. It's not as if we didn't pay attention to our children. I'm a good mother. I've always worked hard to balance my work and my domestic roles. I could have been working full time—I could have had a good job. But I chose to stay home with my children…”

  “Okay, Maggy. Okay—everybody knows you're a good mother,” Mr. Tibbs said, not looking around at her.

  She stopped. She stared at the back of his head and color came up into her cheeks. Then she lifted her chin and went on in this quiet, controlled voice. “We had good doctors; they were certain Smitty had brain damage. We tried to work with him, but the harder we pressed, the further away he went. He has not been an easy child. It's strange to me that this story should be coming out now, after all these years. If there was any truth to it at all, we would have noticed something. And it would have come out long before this.”

  Mr. Tibbs turned around heavily in his chair and looked at his wife. “Just don't forget. You've got two sons,” he said. She looked like he'd slapped her. And they held a glare between them like they were trading fire.

  Caulder and I traded a quick glance. I really wanted to go home.

  “Well, okay,” the doctor said quickly. “We don't know exactly where the truth lies. We're hoping to get to that point, eventually. What we have to concentrate on now is helping Smitty to integrate what's inside of him with what's outside.”

  “Well,” Smitty's father said, shifting in the chair. “We should have brought that boy in here years ago and gotten this out into the open—”

  “The only reason we're here now,” Dr. Woodhouse said, getting things straight, “and the only reason why we're having any success with him at all is because Smitty decided himself to come to me. Because he decided it was time. If he hadn't been willing, there might have been serious damage done. I can't tell you how deep these things go.”

  She unfolded her hands and folded them again the other way. She looked at us. “His relationship with you two—especially with you, Ginny—has been eroding his distance from the world. So, yes, in a way, it is your 'fault' that he's here. Because of whatever it is that exists between you, he finally had the courage, or the desire, to come in here. The decision he made last night, coming here, was more significant than you understand. He took a tremendous risk. The moment he began to talk to us, Russell's bomb went off; we very nearly lost him.”

  “What are you saying? He nearly died? Last night?” The color had drained out of Caulder's face. I knew well enough what she was talking about. I'd nearly seen it happen out behind the school.

  “I don't understand this,” Caulder said. “You can't die from talking. Are we talking about voodoo here? Are you saying Russell has some kind of parakinetic powers or something?”

  “Not Russell,” Dr. Woodhouse said. “Smitty did it himself. The body is very obedient. What the mind believes, the body will often make reality. People who are sick, if they believe they're going to die, often do—on the other hand, if they believe they'll live, that can change conditions in their bodies dramatically. We're working with a group of patients now on reconstructive imaging as one of the approaches to healing their cancers.

  “Being alive is a very complex thing. My science is not an exact one. But I'll tell you, I'm convinced that each human being more or less builds his own reality. You are what you believe you are. We make images in our minds of what will be—bas
ed on what we believe or want, what we're afraid of—”

  “So, what you're saying is Smitty nearly killed himself so Russell wouldn't be wrong?” Caulder asked.

  “Yes, more or less. What Russell had taught him got built right into the hardware, so to speak, and when he triggered it, his body did what he believed it would or should do. Does that make sense?”

  Caulder nodded slowly, frowning, and sat back.

  “Okay,” the doctor said. “That's the background. Your job has nothing to do with Russell. Your job will be to teach Smitty that he doesn't have to die just because he wants to be alive. Okay?”

  Caulder nodded. But I couldn't imagine what she thought we were going to be able to do. And I was not at all sure I wanted anything more to do with this.

  “Where is he?” Caulder asked quietly.

  “I'll take you down there in a minute. Give me a minute, and then we'll talk some specifics.”

  She shooed us out of the office with orders to wait for her down at the end of the hall, and then she closed herself in again with the Tibbses.

  “Come on,” Caulder said, tugging at the back of my jacket.

  I stumbled around and followed him. “So, this doesn't scare you?” I asked, numbly skipping a few steps to catch up.

  “What I want to do to Russell scares me, if that's what you mean.”

  That's not what I meant.

  I'd almost killed Smitty once—maybe twice—doing the wrong thing. It could happen again—it probably would happen again. And that scared me. And I absolutely didn't want to have anything to do with the Tibbses' ugly secrets. I just wanted to live my life and do my math and write notes to Hally.

  But it was more than that. More basic. More selfish. I'd had some of these feelings before—you go out with a guy because you think he's nice, and maybe, after a little while, you let him kiss you—or maybe you kiss him, and then, all of a sudden, everything changes. All of a sudden, he thinks he owns you, he thinks he's got these rights to your life and your thoughts and everything you do. The chances are, you didn't mean that much by it in the first place, or maybe it turned out, after you got to know him, you didn't really even like him all that much. Maybe he's even repulsive to you now—but it's too late. Because he thinks what he thinks. Because you let him think it, at least for that one moment. And now feelings are going to get hurt, and it could be very ugly. And when you get down to the truth, you're the one who made the mess.