Are You Alone on Purpose? (9 page)

But Zee had already left, and today was Harry's own last day in the hospital. His father would come to get him tomorrow morning, and after that, while he'd be returning on an outpatient basis for physical therapy with Eileen, he wouldn't have to see Dr. Jefferies. Insurance didn't cover psychotherapy after a certain number of sessions, and when his father had asked him if he wanted to continue anyway (“It'll be difficult to afford it, but if you think it would be helpful, then of course . . .”), Harry had said no. He meant it too. He had just barely managed to keep Dr. Jefferies from getting too deeply into the topic of his mother, and then she had started in on his father, and Harry's “relationship” with him. Unbelievable, that woman. Really.

Today would end it.

Retrieving the ball, Harry hesitated, grimacing. He still had forty minutes to kill before he had to go see Eileen, and then, after her, Dr. Jefferies. He could go on practicing foul shots—and chasing the ball all over creation after every one—or he could practice dribbling. He'd gotten better at maneuvering the chair with one hand while dribbling with the other. His father had paid for a special chair that was supposed to be okay for sports. Of course it was pretty pointless without Zee there to guard against.

What we mutants really need, thought Harry bitterly, is computer gaming. He got off another shot quickly, almost without aiming, and watched it teeter, miraculously, on the rim before dropping triumphantly outside the hoop and bouncing away again. Computer gaming, he thought again, starting after the ball. A nice game you play without needing your body—or another human being—at all. Just perfect.

Harry arrived at Dr. Jefferies's office one minute early for his appointment, but her door was open and she was inside, at her desk, writing on a notepad. Something about me? Harry wondered. The desk, unusually, was covered with stuff: stacks of computer paper, files, books.

From the doorway, he watched her for a few seconds, until she looked up and saw him. She smiled and gestured him in, putting aside her notepad but keeping the pencil as usual, getting up and going to close the door and pull up the ugly orange-cushioned chair so that she could sit down near him. She seemed glad to see him, but Harry knew it was just her job. And also she liked prying into his business. Probably everybody's business. She liked knowing things so that she could know them and maybe so that she could write them down somewhere, like on that yellow pad of hers that she had just put away. You owned things you wrote down.

“Do you write things about me?” he asked, abruptly. He knew she'd be surprised; he never started a conversation with her. But today was the last day. He didn't have to be quite so careful.

“Why do you ask, Harry?”

“You do, don't you? Or you wouldn't have asked why I asked. I knew it. I knew it all the time.” He glared at her.

“It makes you angry.”

“No kidding,” Harry drawled out, mocking her. “What makes you think it makes me angry? What makes you think I feel that way?” There. Those were the sorts of things she said all the time. He stared at the wall over her shoulder. There was a little rug hung up there, fringed, red and white with a little bit of green and yellow. What was a rug doing on the wall? Did she think it was pretty? Well, it wasn't. It was stupid.

Dr. Jefferies was leaning forward. “Harry. I think it makes you angry because you feel violated. Do you know what that means? Like you've been invaded, trampled. Is that how you feel? Harry?”

“You bitch,” said Harry.

There was a silence. Harry looked at the rug.

If she knew how it felt when she...
violated
people, then why did she do it? Why did they all do it?

“You're angry,” said Dr. Jefferies. “I can understand that.”

Harry wanted to call her something worse. Many worse things. He controlled himself. It was the last day. If he could just hold on...

“I'm sorry, Harry,” said Dr. Jefferies. “Let me explain to you about writing things down. First, yes, you're right, I do keep notes about you. About everyone I see. It's so that I'll remember what we talked about.”

Harry stared at her. Then slowly, deliberately, he looked away.

“But my notes are just for me,” Dr. Jefferies continued. “Anything that happens between a doctor and a patient is confidential. It's illegal for anyone else to see my notes.

“Anyway, I wouldn't want to show them to anyone else, Harry. The way I see it, it isn't wrong for me to write things down, but it would be wrong if anyone but me saw what I wrote.”

Harry thought about that. He wasn't convinced. “Someone else might see them anyway,” he said.

“Not if I can help it.”

“Why?” said Harry instantly, suspicious. “What's in them?”

Dr. Jefferies laughed. “Nothing awful. You know why, Harry? Because you're not so bad.” She laughed again, shaking her head. Looking at him as if she liked him.

What did she mean? Of course he was awful. Everyone thought so. She ought to think so. He had just called her a bitch, after all. When he had called Mrs. Thompson a bitch last year at school, she had turned purple. And it was only one word; if he wanted, he could say a lot more. He always knew just how to hurt people. Like Alison Shandling at school, last year. Like his father.

Dr. Jefferies was tapping that pencil on her hand again, inches from his knee. He grabbed it and broke it in half, hurling the pieces across the room. They collided with the wall behind Dr. Jefferies's desk and fell feebly to the floor.

“Harry. . .” Dr. Jefferies began.

Harry ignored her. He wheeled himself closer to the desk. He swept out with his arms, knocking the paper stacks and files and books to the floor. He grabbed the notepad that Dr. Jefferies had been writing on when he'd come in and looked at it.

Melissa may have been abused
, he read.
The burn marks on her feet are typical
—

“Give me that,” said Dr. Jefferies. “Right now.”

Somehow, Harry managed to look away from the words blurring on the notepad.

“Harry.”

Still not looking at Dr. Jefferies, Harry reached the notepad in her direction and felt her take it.

There was a pause. Harry looked at the stuff he'd knocked to the floor. Dr. Jefferies looked at him. He closed his eyes. He wondered who Melissa was. He wondered how old she was. He wondered what she thought of her life.

“Harry,” said Dr. Jefferies. Unexpectedly, her voice was gentle. “Suppose I promised you that I won't keep notes for a while, until you say it's okay.”

Harry opened his eyes. He looked at her. What was she talking about? “It doesn't matter what you promise,” he said. “Today's the last time I'm seeing you. I go home tomorrow.”

“I'd like to go on seeing you. Once a week, maybe, on a day that you come here anyway to see Eileen for physical therapy. I spoke with your father about it, and he said it was okay with him if it's okay with you.”

“It's not okay with me.” Weakly, he added: “I really don't like you.”

“Well, I do like you.”

“No, you don't. You're always poking into what isn't your business. Pretending it's your job, pretending you like me—”

“I'm not pretending anything.” Dr. Jefferies sighed. “Look. You don't have to make a final decision now about coming back. I'll talk to you about it again, maybe in a couple of days when you come for your next appointment with Eileen.”

“I won't change my mind,” Harry said defiantly.

“Maybe not,” said Dr. Jefferies. “But I hope you will. And remember—no notes. I promise.”

“Yeah, right,” said Harry.

His last appointment with Dr. Jefferies. Ha. He should have known she wouldn't let him off the hook that easily.

Why was it that he felt—just the tiniest bit—relieved ?

A
lison awoke very early the Sunday after Harry came home from the hospital. She and Adam were due at the rabbi's at eleven o'clock that morning for Adam's lesson, and this time Harry would be there. It would be the first time Alison had seen him since the accident.

Would she have to talk to him? Would he want to talk to her?

She lay curled up in bed, on her side facing the wall, one hand cupped beneath her cheek, eyes open, thinking, afraid. It was still nearly completely dark outside her quilt, but with that strange dark gray light that came before dawn. Alison wished she could stay in bed, wrapped in flannel and wool, forever.

Down by her foot she could feel something large and soft and lumpy. Josephine, who had somehow slipped down there during the night. She reached under the covers and pulled the old, stuffed cotton crab up into her arms. Josephine was in bad shape—faded from red to a mottled pink, stuffing escaping from a seam, an antenna missing—but Alison loved her and had kept her through last month's purge, when she had packed up all of her other stuffed animals for charity. “Maybe I'll keep Josephine,” she had told her mother, who had looked on for a few minutes from the doorway while Alison ruthlessly threw her childhood into a single cardboard box. “As a bed decoration. I don't really need her anymore. I'm too old for that. I'm going to be fifteen this year, you know.”

“I do know,” Mrs. Shandling had said. “Listen, Alison, is it okay if I keep Victoria?” She fished down in the box for a small porcelain doll dressed in nineteenth-century period costume. “I'm a little more sentimental than you are.”

“Sure, Mom,” Alison had answered, tolerantly. “Whatever you want.”

It was true, Alison thought, hugging Josephine to her chest, that she was too old for stuffed animals. But sometimes, like last night, well, it didn't do any harm, did it? And no one needed to know.

Alison rested her chin on top of her crab. With her index finger, she pushed in some of the leaky stuffing. Josephine had always been special. Not everybody liked crabs, but Alison felt there was something trustworthy and secure about them. Okay, so they were a little alien. But a crab would keep secrets. When she was little, and believed that all the dolls and stuffed animals came alive at night when the rest of the house slept, Alison had known that her own secrets, no matter how horrible, were safe with Josephine. Josephine would never tell Adam's toys—which Adam never played with, but kept perfectly lined up on a shelf in his room—that sometimes Alison hated her brother.

And now, even though she was a teenager and practically grown up, Alison still felt safe with Josephine.

There was a little more light in the room, enough to see the clock. Six. Alison got out of bed and went barefoot over to the window, bringing Josephine. It had snowed the night before, lightly blanketing the grass and the pool cover in the backyard. There wasn't enough snow to force a cancellation of Adam's lesson with Rabbi Roth. Alison knew her father would have the driveway and the car swept clean in only a few minutes.

Maybe, since they had to go, she could bring something with her for Harry. As a peace offering. Even if Harry didn't know what her mother had said or what his own father had thought, it might make Alison feel better. Not that there was any guarantee Harry would accept a gift.

She wondered if he had changed. She wondered how it felt, to know you'd never walk again.

And what about sex? Was Harry's penis paralyzed too? Would Harry be like one of the eunuchs in the days of the Ottoman Empire, who could be trusted to guard the harem of beautiful women because they couldn't make love? Alison had thought of asking her mother these things, but hadn't dared. And Paulina wouldn't know any more than Alison. Anyway, she didn't like to talk to Paulina about Harry. Paulina didn't understand why Alison cared.

Alison herself didn't quite understand.

Maybe she would look it up at the library. She could do a computer search to find the right books. Why not? She wanted to know.

She turned back into the room, switched on her bedside light, and climbed back into bed. She considered the books piled on her nightstand. Then she reached for one.

She could always forget herself in a book.

 

In the end Alison brought the Tolkien books with her for Harry. Maybe he had already read them, maybe not. It wouldn't be too conspicuous a present, anyway, since they weren't new.

She kept all three of them stacked on her lap in the backseat of the car as her father drove to Harry's house. She hadn't needed to come. At breakfast, after her father polished off the last bit of maple syrup from his plate with a pancake and picked up the magazine section of the Sunday
New York Times
, he had looked directly at Alison and said, “Harry's home now. So if you don't want to go with Adam today, I will. I'll bring the crossword and do it there.” He opened the magazine to expose the crossword and waved it at Alison as if he thought she'd never seen it before. “I never get to do the crossword. Your mother always grabs it first and does it in ink.”