:: chapter six ::
I couldn’t sleep.
I lay in my borrowed bed in the second guest bedroom at Jessica and Chris’s house, staring through the darkness at the ceiling, listening to the sounds of the Jacksonville night – Gen mumbling in her sleep, cars driving past the house, the house’s foundations settling, water rushing through the pipes as someone flushed the toilet, someone crying.
Wait a second.
I frowned as I heard the unmistakeable sound of someone trying desperately to keep their crying quiet filtering through the wall of the room. I knew it wasn’t Gen, because she was right across the room, fast asleep, and I was pretty sure it wasn’t Taylor, because to my best recollection he wasn’t a crier. He had been quite stressed out since our arrival, which I attributed to the two-day journey and being in the company of not only two of his sisters, both of whom he hadn’t seen in many years, but also people he didn’t even know. He’d never met his two brothers-in-law, nor had he met any of his nieces and nephews.
However, stress – as far as I knew – did not give him cause to break down in tears.
I kicked off my covers and left the room, knocking on the door of the other guest bedroom; I carefully pushed the door open when I didn’t get a response.
To my surprise, sitting on the floor inside next to the bed was Jessica. She had tears streaming down her face, and was gently running her fingers through her brother’s hair. Even despite the night’s warmth, Taylor was buried beneath a mound of blankets right up to his nose.
“Oh, Jessica, sorry,” I apologised quietly. “I heard someone crying, and I thought it might have been him.” I nodded at Taylor.
“Rosaria, please, call me Jess.” She sighed. “I’m sorry if I woke you.”
“It’s all right. I can’t sleep anyway.” I curled my fingers around the hem of my T-shirt. “Do…do you want to talk?” I asked tentatively. “I don’t mind, really; anything’s better than not being able to sleep.”
“Are you sure?” Jessica asked dubiously.
“I’m positive.”
She sighed again. “All right then. Come on.”
We went downstairs to the kitchen and sat down on opposite sides of the table. I kept my mouth shut, not wanting to press Jessica to talk if she didn’t want to. She stared at her hands for a good five minutes before she spoke.
“I didn’t want to believe it,” she said finally. “When I saw the three of you get out of Zoë’s car, I told myself that it couldn’t possibly be him. But then I heard him speak for the first time, and then I knew…it was him.”
She shook her head. “I honestly thought I’d never see him again.”
“How old were you?” I asked.
“Twelve.” She let out a bitter laugh. “I was twelve years old, and I was experiencing my worst nightmare – that I was going to outlive one of my brothers. And the worst thing about it was that I never got to say goodbye.” She traced a pattern on the wooden tabletop with the tip of her left index finger. “Zoë really doesn’t know how lucky she is. She doesn’t remember him – she has no idea of the hell we all went through when we lost him.”
I decided to keep my mouth shut. It wasn’t my place to correct Jessica and what she believed – actually, I was surprised that Gen hadn’t told her sister the truth, but I supposed that she had her reasons for doing so.
“So where are you headed to next?” Jessica asked after a few minutes of quiet.
I shrugged. “I honestly have no idea. Gen probably does, though.”
“You should head up to New York – it’s really nice there this time of year, if a little cold. Gen promised her brother a visit, anyway.”
“Really?” I asked, and Jessica nodded. “I’ve always wanted to go to New York. Maybe I’ll ask Gen if we can head there next.”
“Sounds like a plan to me.” She gave me a small smile as she stood. “I should probably get some sleep. Thanks for listening.”
On Christmas Day, I was woken by someone throwing something at my head. I opened my eyes to see Taylor standing at the end of my bed, pelting me with popcorn, a cheeky grin on his face.
“What the fuck are you doing?” I asked through a curtain of hair, my voice sleep-roughened and sleepy. “And I hope you realise that I am not cleaning that up.”
“Waking you up, what’s it look like?” he replied.
I let out a mock growl and threw my covers off. He threw the bowl of popcorn at me and bolted from the room, laughing the whole way. I shook my head, chuckling to myself, before picking the popcorn out of my hair and heading downstairs.
While Jessica and Chris’s kids tore into the stack of gifts beneath the living room Christmas tree with wild abandon, Gen, Taylor and I retreated to the dining room and exchanged gifts. I had bought a new scarf for Gen and a necklace for Taylor – Gen’s new scarf was dark green, her favourite colour, and had small silver stars dotted all over it; Taylor’s necklace was a black leather cord with a silver Celtic cross threaded onto it.
When Taylor had unwrapped the gift that Gen and I had bought for him, he nearly dropped it on the table.
He just stared at it for what seemed like ages, until Gen broke the silence.
“Do you like it?” she asked.
“That depends on what it is,” Taylor replied, his voice shaking a little.
“It’s an iPod,” Gen replied. “It’s a bit like a Discman, but it’s much better.” She quickly explained the various features and how to make the thing actually work, before telling him to stick the earphones in his ears and turn it on.
The look on his face as the first song began playing – going by the display on the front of the iPod, it was Hysteria by Muse; Gen had taken the liberty of loading her entire iTunes library onto it – was absolutely priceless.
“Holy shit,” he whispered as he hit the pause button after the song finished. “I think you can have your Discman back now…”
Gen and I laughed. Taylor turned the iPod off and removed the earphones from his ears, setting it aside, and bent down to the side of his chair. He picked up two neatly-wrapped parcels and straightened up, placing the parcels on the table. He passed one to me and the other to Gen. “It’s not much,” he said with a shrug.
‘Not much’ was one hell of an understatement. Gen’s gift was a new watch, one with a black leather band and a silver-edged face. I, on the other hand, unwrapped a copy of the Odyssey – my copy had been destroyed after I had left it out on the fire escape a couple of weeks earlier, and it had started bucketing down with rain. There had been no point in trying to salvage the sodden mess, and so I had thrown it in the kitchen recycling bin and covered it with a few newspapers. Somehow, Taylor had known that my copy had been ruined – I’d never told anyone that I had been so stupid as to destroy one of the things my father had left to me before he had died.
It was then that I did something unbelievably stupid. Instead of thanking him, like I should have done, I asked, rather bluntly in fact, “You didn’t steal this, did you?”
Gen, Taylor and I left for New York City a couple of days before New Year’s Eve. Gen had called her brother the morning after Christmas Day and, using the same story she had used on her sister, had asked if it would be all right for the three of us to pay a short visit. Gen’s brother had given his consent, and so it was on the twenty-eighth of December that we piled ourselves and our gear into Gen’s Honda and left the city of Jacksonville.
It wasn’t until we made an overnight stop in Wilmington that I was finally able to apologise to Taylor. He had made it a point of avoiding me ever since Christmas Day, even going so far as to leave the room as soon as I entered. In addition, he had spent the car ride between Jacksonville and Wilmington – all seven hours and twenty-five minutes of it – in the back of Gen’s car, the earphones to his iPod jammed in his ears, staring out of the car window. I knew him well enough by now to know that he was extremely pissed off at the world and everyone in it.
“You have to apologise to him, Ria,” Gen told me. We had arrived in Wilmington only a few hours earlier, and almost as soon as we had checked into a motel Taylor had taken off to parts unknown.
“How?” I asked. I sank down onto one of the two double beds in the motel room and looked up at Gen. She was perched on the room’s writing desk, feet on the desk’s matching chair, staring at me. “He won’t even look at me, let alone speak to me.”
“I’ll corner him somehow. Lord only knows where he is right now. But after I’ve managed to convince him to be in the same room as you, you’d better do the right thing. He can hold a grudge for so long you wouldn’t believe it.”
Gen was true to her word. She somehow managed to track Taylor down and brought him back to our room, ignoring his rather vocal protestations as she dragged him through the door.
“Now sit,” she ordered him. “I’m not going to listen to you anymore. You two need to work this out before we get to New York, because I am not going to put up with this any longer. That drive was the longest seven hours of my life.” She pointed at the bed I was sitting on. “I’m not letting you leave until the two of you deal with this.” With that, she resumed her seat on the writing desk and eyed the two of us unblinkingly, arms crossed over her chest.
Over an hour passed before either of us spoke. I was tracing a pattern on the leg of my jeans when I heard Taylor speak.
“I really don’t understand you sometimes, Rosaria.”
I looked up. He sat opposite me on the bed, cross-legged, his hair pulled back into a messy but functional ponytail. His eyes were darker than usual, and rather stormy.
“Why the hell did you ask me if I’d stolen that book?” he asked.
“What else am I supposed to think?” I shot back. “You don’t exactly have money lying around. You don’t even carry a wallet with you.”
Instead of answering my question, Taylor got up from the bed, stood up and bent down to where his shins were covered by his cargo pants. He unzipped a pocket near his ankle and pulled out a black leather wallet. He flipped it open and pulled out a credit card. “This is how I bought it,” he told me as he handed it to me. The name on the front read Jordan T. Hanson. “I use it only when I need to. My bank account isn’t exactly limitless.”
“How can your bank account still be open?” I asked as I gave it back to him. He slipped it back in his wallet, returning it to his pocket and rezipping it. “Especially seeing as you’ve been out of the picture for twenty-five years.”
“I asked my aunt Catherine to keep an eye on it for me,” he replied. “I think I knew that something was going to happen that night, but I didn’t think it would be as serious as it was. So that morning, I called my aunt and asked if she would be willing to look after it for me; she was the only person aside from my parents I ever really trusted.” He shrugged. “It’s lucky that I asked her to look after things when I did, really.”
He resumed his place on the bed and stared at his shoelaces. “I do steal,” he admitted. “Y’know, like food and clothes. But it’s only out of necessity. Anything else, I buy online.”
He levelled a steely gaze at me. “I believe you owe me an apology,” he said evenly.
That I did. I drew in a deep breath and closed my eyes. “Taylor…I’m sorry. I was out of line – I should have known you didn’t steal it.” I opened my eyes and looked at him. “Forgive?”
He smiled for maybe the first time in days. “Of course I do.”
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