Strapped Down (16 page)

I speed on the freeway heading North with no destination in mind. Then Eric’s cautionary words pass through my thoughts: “
nothing around Taylor happens by choice.”
Is it possible none of this is real? That this has all been planned? Does Taylor already know who I am? I don’t know who to trust. My own mother has lied to me my entire life and in moments the entire foundation of my identity is shattered. In this flurry of thoughts, I can no longer decipher the rational possibilities from the paranoid ones.

Eventually I end up on a dark road in the middle of nowhere, unable to remember how I arrived, and pull over for a moment to collect my bearings. My phone has been ringing in intervals since I left, but I barely noticed in my fugue. I glance over: 15 missed calls from Taylor.

Ladybug sits on the side of the road on the dirt. I do not know where I am or how I am going to find my way back, but at this moment it seems like an unimportant detail. I think back to the family photo. Alan didn’t look like the big, angry, menacing figure I had conjured in my head. He looked respectable, well-dressed, even kind. His brown eyes were warm, trustworthy.
Those eyes.
I look so much like my mother did, but I have his brown eyes. The sudden urge to claw at them consumes me. I want to tear myself in half, split myself at the cellular level, eliminate every trace of that man inside of me.

Now that my mind is no longer distracted by driving, the car feels cramped and suffocating. My face flushes with heat and I seek the crisp night air to cool my skin. I don’t give a shit about my safety or if Eric is hiding behind the bushes somewhere. I am tired.

I am reaching my limit.

Time passes indefinitely until car lights emerge from a bend in the road a few hundred feet away. I don’t move. I don’t raise my head. I don’t care.

“Shyla!” Taylor slams his car door behind him. He runs towards me, but his brown boots skid in the dirt to a complete stop when he sees me sitting on the side of the road with my arms wrapped around my knees. “Shyla…” he kneels down to my level. “What happened?”

“You’ll never love me again. You’ll hate me,” I murmur inaudibly.

Taylor looks up to someone, and it’s then I realize Harrison is there too. Taylor tilts his head at Harrison to signal he needs some alone time.

“How did you find me here?” I ask.

“Your phone, we can triangulate a singal...nevermind, don’t worry about that.”
I nod. I worked at H.I. long enough to know Taylor has access to vast amounts of technology.
He sits by my side. “Shyla, is your mother sick?”

I shake my head.

“You’ve got to talk to me here.”

I pull out the picture of him and me from my back pocket and hand it over to him.
This is it. He’ll hate me, who I am, who I come from.

“What is this?”

“It’s us.”

He flashes his phone on the picture to get a better look. The genuine look of confusion on his face informs me my earlier theories in the car were just jumbled paranoia.

“What?”

“Taylor. My mother is not sick. She’s fine. I just found out today she has been lying to me for my entire life.” Taylor doesn’t say anything. He just observes the picture, as if it will hold all of the answers, but it doesn’t even begin to tell the story. Taylor doesn’t beg me to tell him, or insist I spill everything. Instead, he waits quietly for me to continue or maybe say nothing at all. “Taylor, I don’t know anymore. I don’t know which way is up.” I pause again. How do I even begin to say the words? He may never again see me as the pure Shyla, his savior; the person who could lay a hand on him without making him shudder. He may finally look into my brown eyes and recognize the familiar devil that haunts his nightmares.

“Taylor, that’s us in the pictures because my mother was in C.O.S. I was born into C.O.S.” He doesn’t say a word. He just stares at me quietly, not revealing a single emotion. “She lied to me about who my father was. It’s Alan, Taylor. He’s my father.”

The look of concentration melts from his face, and he tilts his head back slowly releasing air from his lungs. He looks at the photo again. His silence is haunting.

“How can this be possible?”

“We’ve always known each other. My mother said you protected me,” I say as I reach out to touch his hand. He doesn’t respond.
It’s happening.

“I don’t remember,” he says coldly.

“Me neither.”

“So your mother was one of those sick fucks too?”

“Excuse me?”

“So that’s it? That’s why you ran out here to the middle of nowhere like a mad woman?” he says.

“What do you mean ‘that’s it?’” I know what he’s doing. He’s shutting down on me.

“What fucking difference does it make Shyla? You’re sitting on the side of the road, about to become roadkill over something that changes nothing. You could have just come to me instead of running out like that.”

“Why are you being like this?”

“What do you want me to do? It’s done. Your parents fucked and they made you. You thought he was a drug addict, and now you know was a homicidal cult leader,” he says standing up.

“You’re being cruel. You know this means more than that.” He looks up indignantly, biting his lip. “Taylor, my mother and your mother were best friends. My mother was the lady with the brown hair, the one who saved you.” He looks down at me, and for the first time I sense an emotional reaction. “In the pictures, she looked just like me.”

He smirks mockingly, nodding his head. “So let me guess, your psychological theory is that I let you touch me because you look like her?”

“Well, that, or because we were close friends a long time ago. I don’t know, but it’s definitely something along those lines.” He condescendingly laughs to himself, pacing away from me. “Taylor, there’s something else you need to know that is important. My mother says that your mother loved you very much, and she was doing everything in her —“

“No! No!” He turns and yells, pointing a finger at me. “That’s enough!”

The rage in his voice silences me for several minutes, but eventually I have to say something.

“Don’t you want to meet her? You told me how much she meant to you, what she did. And she said she loved you dearly, like a son.”

“Shyla, that was a story, an idealization. People are never as perfect as we remember them.”

“They’re hardly ever as bad either.”

“That’s where you’re mistaken. I’ll take you back to your place so you can be with your mother. I don’t care if Eric is in fucking Africa, no woman should ever be sitting on the side of a deserted road.” he says.

He’ll never love me like he did before.

He drives me back in the SUV while Harrison follows with Ladybug. We sit in dark silence for the duration of the drive. I expected sympathy, shock, tears, disbelief, anything but his cold dismissal. Sometimes that’s too much to ask of Taylor.
I’ve been spoiled
.
T
hings have been so good lately, I almost forgot who I was dealing with, but tonight he made sure I remembered.
He won’t let her hurt him again.
Throughout his entire life he has learned that when he cares, when he shows love, it will backfire with greater pain. Even falling in love with me has caused him hurt and devastation. I try my best to recall that night in the study, when we stole away for some quiet time. He asked me to remember that he loves me and always will, but that seems so distant, so hard for me to hold onto. What is here now is the pain of knowing my beautiful Taylor is sitting just inches away from me, but is miles away emotionally.

He pulls up to the front of the building. I grab the photo of the two of us that rests on the dashboard. Taylor looks straight ahead, but watches me from the corner of his eyes. “Shyla, this won’t fix anything,” he says. “I’ve learned to look ahead and not back. Looking back only stirs up problems.”

He turns to meet my gaze and I nod before closing the door to the SUV. When I return, my mother is asleep on the couch, waiting for me like she did when I was a teenager. I grab a blanket and cover her. “Mom, I’m here. I’m going to bed. I don’t want to to talk,” I whisper. She tiredly opens her eyes to acknowledge me and insist on conversation. “Mom, don’t worry. I am too tired to talk anymore. You should go to a bed,” I say before she can utter a word. Of course, she ignores my suggestion and lies on the couch. Such a martyr she is.

Instinctually, I sneak to check the wine cooler and the wastebasket for empty bottles, and am relieved to see no evidence of a relapse.

The cleansing calm of a shower calls for me, so I sit in the tub with the shower on, letting the water cascade over my body. The medicine cabinet looks so inviting as it tempts me to collect one of its contents, the razor
that
has always been there for me, but I resist. I made a promise to Taylor that I wouldn’t
give in
, but he made one to me too. He was supposed to be with me, to help me work through the pain, but when I really needed him, he shut me out. It’s easier to shut it all off than to think about the lies, I get it. I just found out much of the story of my life was a fabrication, but I wasn’t haunted the way he was. I was spared. Unlike Taylor, I didn’t think I was abandoned or sacrificed by my mom.
But he
has held onto that belief, that image of a cold, uncaring mother for so long. To think of her as someone else, even a loving figure, would be to kill his image of her all over again.

The picture of the little bright-eyed boy who was so terrified of the world around him, beaten and abused by the people who were supposed to nurture him
,
remains imprinted in my mind’s eye. What did Taylor do when he looked in the face of fear? He didn’t think only of himself; he protected me. He says he doesn’t care, that he’s broken, but he does. He was a little boy, just six or seven years old, dragging a clueless toddler into a dark closet so that she wouldn’t have to hear the screaming or see the abuse. He was brave. He was scared, but he was brave. And I don’t need the blade to center me. Just thinking of the man I love more than anyone in the world as a helpless child, using what little power he had to protect me
,
overwhelms me with emotion. I won’t dishonor his bravery by breaking my promise to him.

I sit in the shower until the water turns icy. Slowly, as if weighed down, I pull myself out and put on a plush robe. Sleep evades me; my racing thoughts will not rest. I am not ready to talk to my mother again so I tread lightly through the condo so as not to wake her. I understand why she did what she did, but I can’t rid myself of the feelings of betrayal.
I don’t know what to do with this new knowledge. Like Taylor said, nothing has changed, but at the same time, everything has. The only thing I can do is work on my laptop. 1:43am.
Fuck me.
Between each task I look at my phone, hoping I’ll get a call or a text from Taylor, but there’s nothing. Taylor is the one I can share my pain with and he has left me alone, spinning out of orbit, into the vast darkness.

Shortly after, there is the faint sound of footsteps echoing from the stairwell that leads directly to one of the condo entrances. I glance at the clock again, holding my breath.
2:15am
. Harrison has been parked out front and would never let anyone come up to my apartment on his watch, but I no longer trust my world or the things that I once held to be true. I slowly wait at the door as the footsteps approach, peeping through the peephole. And while I have no way of knowing who it is, I can feel the air around me become alive with his energy. A pair of distressed dark brown boots under denim lands on the top step. Then the figure emerges.
It’s him
.

I quietly slide the door open and his eyes widen when he sees me. Putting my finger up to my pursed lips, I slide out the door.

“I was just about to—How’d you know I was here?” He whispers, sliding his phone into his pocket.

“I could feel you coming,” I say closing the door behind me so that we are alone at the top of the stairwell.

“Listen, I’m not here to see your mother. I’m here for you.”

“I know. It’s okay, she’s asleep.”

“I shouldn’t have reacted the way that I did. It’s just that ever since I met you, everything I knew about my world has slowly disintegrated. And it’s amazing to feel what I feel because of you, but it is forcing everything to the surface in ways I could never imagine. Shyla, there is so much rage inside of me, in my core, and I have kept it all trapped deep for 25 years. And I have to guard everything because if I let anything out, the rage comes with it too, and it’s dangerous. So I lash out, because I want to protect you from seeing what’s really there. It’s ugly, it’s dark, and you may think you have seen it all, but you have only seen pieces of it. But, I don’t know what to do because the things I have told myself to make sense of my world, to move ahead, to keep everything locked down deep inside of me…I don’t know what the truth is any longer. I’m afraid I’ll burst wide open.”

“I understand. It doesn’t seem real,” I say looking down. “It feels like this is all happening to some other person. Maybe that’s my brain protecting me from losing it.”

“But I remember you,” he whispers in a raspy voice into my ear as he leans over me. “I remember my little friend who I never spoke of because I thought I would never see her again. I thought she had died with the rest of them.” And he buries his face into my neck, like a lost boy.