|Chapter 6|
•Alistair Beaufort•
Darkness and quiet meet me as soon as I step into my house, and I breathe a small, barely-audible sigh of relief. A brief glance at my phone tells that Mom won’t be home for at least another three hours. I silently remove my shoes and pad to the living room. Look up, just in case there’s anyone watching me from the hallway upstairs. Deserted. Dumbass, Mom’s out. There’s no one home. Relax. Tentatively, I flip a single light on, even though the sun’s isn’t going to even set for another while and I can see perfectly fine without the light.
Without thinking, I slowly stroll over to the kitchen and grab the first glass I see when I open the top cupboard. Then I take the shaker that’s hidden behind all the cups. Setting those on the countertop, I then throw open the fridge door, rummaging through all the groceries Mom bought yesterday. Muttering obscenities under my breath, I finally come upon the two-liter bottle of Coca-Cola, place it next to the glass. Then I walk over to the trusty sugar bowl next to the toaster with the keys to our little wine cellar in them. But when I peer inside, there’s not a single key in it.
Shit. Somehow it makes me even more thirsty. My hands move over cupboard handles and I wrench them open. They make a loud clanging sound, but I ignore it, rummaging quickly through the neat piles of plates and silverware. Nothing. Slam it shut, move to the next one, search quickly, slam it shut. I repeat those steps for five more minutes, and only come up with Mom’s extra car keys.
I frown, leaning against the counter, thinking. There’s no way Mom would have taken the cellar key. There’s no way she knows about my drinking habits, so she wouldn’t—
A loud jangle interrupts my thoughts and I whirl around, eyes focusing a single, bronze key. “Looking for this?” Mom says.
Oh shit. Never mind.
4:21 p.m.
“Mom, I don’t need a shrink.”
Her grip on the steering wheel tightens significantly. I can see it by how white her knuckles are. Her eyes remained trained on the road, back dead-straight, teeth gritted. Pretending to be so focused on perfecting her parallel parking that she can’t hear a word I’m saying. Or maybe the radio, which is currently blasting Thrift Shop, is too loud for her to hear me. So I turn it down and repeat my words, though maybe not so nicely.
“Mom, I don’t need a fucking shrink.”
“Language, Alistair,” she says through her teeth, grabbing the back of my seat and looking behind her as she slowly eases the car into the parking space.
“Well, I wouldn’t be swearing if you’d actually answered me the first fucking time.”
“Alistair Ryan Beaufort…” Mom says in her dangerous tone, finally looking at me for the first time since we drove off to therapy. We’re in the parking spot, and I hear my mother mutter some obscenity under her breath before pressing her foot on the gas again and moving out of it—again. “Too crooked,” she says, more to herself than me.
The car—a green Buick—that has been patiently waiting for nearly six minutes for us to park properly before it can pass, rolls down its windows and some middle-aged guy glares at us, hanging a flabby tattooed arm out of the window. I see a cigarette hanging between two fingers on that arm. I recognize him as the dad of the guy who sits next to me in English. I saw him and his family sitting front-row at last year’s grade ten performance of Hamlet, which I led, of course. Seatbelt unbuckled, I sink even more in my seat, looking out the window so he won’t recognize me that well. Fuck, I swear, this place knocks down my reputation by at least one hundred points.
“Hey, lady! This ain’t goddamned driving school!” he hollers.
Mom ignores him, only adjust the car’s position a little again before backing up into the parking space. It’s still pretty crooked, but for some reason this time she turns the car off, pulls out the keys and unbuckles her seatbelt, looking at me. “Let’s go,” she says tightly. I nod, throwing on my hood over my head just in case that kid in my English happens to be sitting next to him. We exit the car, I hear the loud beeping sound of the car as Mom locks it and we briskly walk towards the short white building. I stop in front of the entrance and stare up for a moment, just taking a second to take in how much of a prison it looks like.
We arrive just on time. As I flop onto an empty chair in the waiting room, Mom talks to the receptionist for a few seconds. She turns to me and beckons. Reluctantly I get up. A few people look up from their magazines and stare at me pityingly. Wondering why such a young guy needs therapy. Mom awkwardly pats me on the back as the receptionist opens the door.
“I gotta go somewhere real important. I’ll be back around nine, alright? Just head on home by yourself,” Mom says, removing something from her pocket and pressing it into my hand. The extra pair of house keys. “You know you’re way back, right?”
I nod.
“Be nice to Dr. Seifert,” she says, giving me an almost-threatening look. Almost. Then she gives me a kiss on the forehead and smoothes out my dark hair. I think I had forgotten to comb and flatten it before we left. “There. Bye, Alistair.”
“Bye, Mom.” My cheeks are enflamed, feeling at least eleven pairs of eyes on me. Mom doesn’t notice though, just turns and walks out of the place, leaving me here. So she’s not going to accompany me. As the receptionist leads me through the small hallway, I feel my lips curl into a grin.
4:41 p.m.
The door swings open and instinctively I swing my feet off of the swivel chair across from me. If only I knew the man would be ten minutes late, I groan to myself. I had just wasted the time relaxing and smoking in his office, just in case Mom waited around a little to see if I would ditch. I watch as a tall man with close-cropped blonde hair walks in. A golden retriever trails him obediently.
“Took you long enough,” I say in a loud and rude voice as the man I’m assuming is my therapist turns, back to me, and fiddles with something on the counter. “I just had half a mind, to leave, you know.” Maybe I can annoy the hell out of him and he’ll just toss me out himself and tell me never to return again. It could work, and I wouldn’t have to practice those fucking monologues anymore. It’s hell memorizing them.
But he doesn’t call on my attitude. Instead he just says, “No smoking.”
I scowl at his back. “Why not? I can damn well smoke wherever and whenever the hell I want.”
“It’s against the rules.” He pauses. “Though your mother tells me that these days you don’t have much regard for the rules, don’t you?”
“Do you?” I retort, crossing my arms over my chest, “I’m pretty sure that bringing pets in is against the rules, too.”
“I’m an exception,” he says quietly. A little too quietly.
Then he turns around, and I immediately want to take my words back. His eyes—they’re just this blank milky white. He’s looking at me, but he can’t see me. He can’t see anything. My therapist is a blind man, and I’ve just fucking insulted him. I want to just run out that door, have a shot of vodka and run back in and start over. Instead, the only thing I do is exhale smoke.
“I’m sorry,” I mumble. It’s the best I can do.
“It’s okay. We’re here to discuss your problems today,” he replies calmly, moving over to his chair with quick, sure movements and sitting down. He must be in this room a lot. “Not mine. I’m Dr. Seifert, by the way. This is my guide dog Seven.” Seven barks at me, wagging his tail. “You must be Alistair Ryan Beaufort.”
I shift uncomfortably at the sound of my full name. “Alistair is fine.”
Seifert’s head is still turned to me, and I awkwardly direct my own towards the ground. “Please don’t smoke, Mister Beaufort. You’re going to stink up my room.”
Even though there’s no point and he can’t see me anyway, I glare at him. “Well I can just leave this room and go smoke because no offense, Doc, but I’d rather go out and have a good smoke than have some therapy session or whatever.”
The therapist sighs. “Predictable. Your mother did say you would present some…attitude problems.”
“Yeah, well, she wasn’t lying.”
Seifert nods, absently petting Seven’s head. “Now will you just toss that cigarette out?”
“No.”
He sighs. “The rebellious spirit of our youth,” he says, more to himself than me.
“Like you weren’t like me when you were young.”
“I wasn’t. No one liked me,” he replies, pointing two fingers at his eyes. “You need accomplices if you want to be bad.”
I take a long drag of my cigarette. “With all due respect, I’m not a bad person, Dr. Seifert.”
The therapist gives a small, weary smile. “We’ll just have to find out if that’s true, won’t we? That’s the only good thing about being blind, I guess,” he sighs again, “That I cannot judge with my eyes, only this.” He taps his left temple gently.
“Don’t say you haven’t made assumptions early on.”
“I won’t lie to you, Mister Beaufort, but I have,” he answers, “Your mother told me a lot of things.”
“My mom did, huh.”
Seifert raises an eyebrow. “I’m assuming the relationship between you and your mother…?”
“Yeah, it isn’t that great,” I say rather bluntly, eyes narrowing, “It never has been, anyway.”
His words are suddenly slow, careful, meticulous. What, did mom feed him some more horseshit about my so-called fucking “explosive anger problems”? My eyebrows furrow, and I stick the cigarette back into my mouth, taking a good draw. It calms me down a little, as the cigarettes always do. “Even… before that… incident with your…father?”
At the mention of my father, I’m suddenly up and out of my seat. The plush chair I had been reclining on is drawn back across the tiled floor with a loud squeal of complaint. Hearing that, Seifert rises to his feet as well. Even Seven’s changed from his sitting position to a standing one, ready to go as soon as his fucking owner says so.
The man’s smiling. Smiling. “Ah, so we’ve hit a nerve.”
We weren’t just having some idle conversation after all. He was just reaching, searching, looking for some place to hold on to. Someplace he could get me at, to unnerve me, just like he had said. No wonder. No—fucking—wonder. He probably requested for my mom to write up some biography or crap about me so he would know every single thing there is to know about me. My mom didn’t volunteer the info on her own. That much I know.
My voice shaking a little—the thought of Dad’s still got me—I say to Seifert, “With all due respect, doc, you don’t know fucking shit about me. Me or my dad.”
“Now, Mister Beaufort,” he begins calmly, “I know that you and your father were as close as you could get, but what he did was completely and utterly his own fault—”
“No!” I shout, so loudly and with such a forceful tone that I can hear Seven whimper at the sound. I ignore the dog though. I couldn’t care less, in this moment, about some dog. I just don’t want to hear anymore of this about Dad. “It wasn’t his fault. It was yours. People like you, all educated pricks and know-it-alls, telling him what to do and why this and that happens and shit. It was all their wrongdoings. Dad didn’t bring it upon himself. The only ones who are to blame are all—you—arrogant—smartass—little—fucks!”
For the first time in the entire session, Seifert looks taken aback by my sudden outburst. I feel a bit smug seeing his expression. If—if!—I’m ever forced to come back, I should just resort to shouting. That should shut him up. The man doesn’t know a damn, he doesn’t know crap. I try to stare him down, even though he doesn’t know we’re having a fucking stare-down. Still, neither of us divert our attention from each other, until after a full minute of silence, he slowly sits back down. Ha.
Sick of this already, I say wearily, “Sorry about that. I need to cool down. Lemme go to the restrooms for a sec.”
Seifert nods. “Very well. Ask my assistant outside for the keys.”
Not waiting a single second, I leave the room, slamming the door behind me loudly—on purpose, throwing my hood back on so it covers most of my face while I’m at it. But when I reach the front desk, I just stick my Marlboro in my mouth, shove my hands into my pockets and storm out, head down, without asking for the keys to the restroom. I can’t believe the doc fell for it.
The elevators take too long, and, not wanting to stay in this fucking building any longer than I have to, I walk all the way to the end of the hall and run down the stairs. I throw out my cigarette along the way. Then I continue on my way home, without even stopping to think that maybe—just maybe—that arrogant little fuck of a therapist is right.
Present
“Dr. Seifert’s offices called,” Mom says with a pinched, angry face. She stomps over to the answering machine. I tentatively follow her, at a five-feet distance. I watch as her finger literally stabs the fucking play button.
“One new message. Tuesday, five fifteen p.m.,” the machine says in a monotone. Then there’s a soft whir and the message plays.
“Hello, this is Maria Benitez from Dr. Seifert’s office calling,” a smooth female voice says, “I’d just like to report that Mister Alistair Ryan Beaufort, whose therapy session was scheduled at four thirty p.m. today, did in fact appear at the session. However, at approximately four fifty five he requested to go to the restrooms and was granted permission, though he did not return. Nonetheless, Dr. Seifert wishes to see Mister Beaufort next Tuesday at the same time as scheduled today. If any one of Mister Beaufort’s guardians can respond to this message, please call me as soon as possible at eight six—”
My mother presses the stop button and looks at me, arms crossed tightly over her chest, eyes flashing. Oh fuck, she’s real pissed.
“Alistair Ryan Beaufort,” she says, “Explain that.”
Oh fuck.
*~*~*~*
A/N: Might seem like a boring chapter, but the therapist man will play an important role in Alistair's story...
I hate to sound immature, but I can't look at the word "therapist" without thinking "the rapist'....
Starting on Monday, I'll only have weekly updates from now on, since spring break's gonna be over -.-
Dedicated to Tithi, because she's my bitch. I miss you so much xxxxx
And...ciao~ xx