Are You Alone on Purpose? Read online

  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 ?

  ALISON

  February

  Alison 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.”

  “So buy another paper,” said Mrs. Shandling, lunging across the table to try to grab the magazine away from her husband, who held it out of her reach. But both of them were watching Alison.

  Next to Alison, Adam was floating pancake pieces in a sea of maple syrup, using a fork to navigate them in an ordered circle around the rim of his plate, totally absorbed. When they were very small, when Adam was simply Adam and not her brother with whom something was wrong, Alison had played games like this with him, giggling hysterically whenever he did. She wondered briefly if Adam had missed her when she stopped playing. He’d never seemed to. He was the same whether she was there in spirit, or just in body.

  “No, it’s okay, I’ll go,” she’d answered her father. She had dealt calmly with her parents’ are-you-sures, because suddenly she was sure. She felt the way she’d felt when she was in elementary school, and the other kids made fun of Adam. She’d realized then she had to defend him, and herself. Walking away would only make it worse.

  She didn’t look back as she got out of the car with Adam. Adam was used to coming to the Roths’ now. He went right up the unswept walk, up the new wooden ramp, leaving sneaker prints in the thin snow for Alison to follow. Rabbi Roth was at the door. He always was. Alison figured he must watch for them. Well, for Adam.

  “Good to see you,” he said. Alison noticed that his blue flannel shirt was misbuttoned, and that his shirttail wasn’t completely tucked in at the back of his pants.

  “Hi,” she replied. Adam didn’t say anything. Alison looked around. The living room was different, emptier. The coffee table was gone, and the newspaper piles had been cleared away. The rug was still there, though, and it had wheel tracks on it. The wall-to-wall carpet had too deep a pile. It ought to go completely, Alison thought.

  The room was also empty of Harry. Somehow she’d expected him to be right there in the living room when she came in, sitting in his wheelchair, ready to spit malice. Ready to attack first.

  She followed the rabbi and Adam into the kitchen for a glass of the orange juice that, ritualistically, Adam always drank before they went off to the study. Also no Harry.

  He’s in his bedroom, Alison thought. He’s hiding from me. She was suddenly certain of it. Why? It wasn’t like him. He wouldn’t be afraid of Alison. Of a bunch of kids, maybe, but not of Alison alone.

  Had he seen any other kids yet? Alison would be scared of that, if she were him.

  “Well, Adam and I are off,” Rabbi Roth was saying to her. “Have a seat somewhere. I see you have books to read. That’s good.”

  Alison nodded. She always had a book. The rabbi seemed even more awkward with her than usual. She decided to be direct. “Where’s Harry?” she asked. “I’d like to say hi.”

  The rabbi blinked. Stuttered. “Uh. In his room. Resting. I didn’t want him to disturb you.”

  You’re worried about me being disturbed? thought Alison. Not him? “It’s okay,” she said aloud, just as she had to her parents earlier. She drained her orange juice and placed the glass carefully in the sink before turning to smile at him. “You go on. I know Adam’s anxious to get started. I’ll just go say hi to Harry.” She slipped past the rabbi, feeling his astonishment and his anxiety, but ignoring it. He was an easy person to ignore. She went down the hall to Harry’s bedroom door. It was an inch ajar.

  So. He’d been listening. Now that was like him. Yes. Smiling grimly to herself, Alison knocked. Then some instinct she hadn’t known she possessed took over. Without waiting for an answer, she pushed the door all the way open, and looked unwaveringly into Harry’s astonished eyes. “Hi,” she said.

  He wasn’t in his wheelchair. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, still in pajamas, with the wheelchair—the folding kind—next to him. Possibly he’d just propelled himself out of the chair and onto the bed. His hair was a mess, way too long, and uncombed. But aside from that he didn’t look too bad. Just pale. Taller, if you could say that about someone sitting down. His cheekbones stuck out, and his nose, and they hadn’t the last time Alison had seen him. Last June. More than eight months ago.

  He recovered quickly from the shock of her intrusion, from her unaccustomed aggression. “Shandling,” he snarled. “Didn’t anyone ever teach you to wait for an invitation? I suppose you’d barge right in on someone taking a piss, too.”
He glared, just as Alison had thought he would.

  “No,” said Alison. She was amazed at her coolness. She stepped into the room and closed the door behind her, still holding the three paperback books. She leaned against the door, looking at Harry. Let his father wonder what was going on. He wouldn’t interfere, not unless she and Harry started shouting. And he had to stay with Adam, anyway. “So,” she said to Harry. “So.” And then suddenly her sangfroid fled. She couldn’t remember any of the things she’d planned to say. She kept her face blank. Her mind whirled.

  “So,” Harry mimicked. “So what the hell are you doing here?”

  Alison found her voice. “I came with my brother.”

  “I meant what the hell are you doing in my bedroom. I can’t believe you’re supposed to be so fucking smart. Are you sure you’re not brain-damaged like your brother? Huh?”

  I am smart enough to handle this, Alison thought. It’s the same old routine, isn’t it? But it was hard to remember that she sympathized with Harry. That maybe she owed him.

  He was looking at her now, taking stock of her as she had of him. She was abruptly conscious of how the ponytail she wore exposed her face, of the stiffness of her new, leggier, jeans, and of her breasts beneath her sweater, cupped by a bra she hadn’t needed last year.

  “I wanted to see if you were still a complete jerk,” she said finally, quietly. “I don’t know why I had any doubts.”

  “Well, there’s nothing different about me,” Harry said. His eyes narrowed. “I still hate your guts, you spoiled little rich bitch. Think you’re so smart. Think you’re better than everybody else.”

  Alison felt all the air leave her lungs.

  “So get out of my face,” Harry finished, his voice barely a whisper. “I’ve had enough. Get out of my room. Get out of my fucking life.”

  Alison’s eyes were drawn to his legs as if mesmerized by them. They looked ordinary enough, thin in the maroon pajama bottoms, bare white feet sticking out at the ends.