:: chapter seven ::
I shivered as I stepped out onto the footpath and started walking north along Hudson Street, toward the café that Gen had driven past the previous evening. I could feel the chill even through my heavy winter coat, bought on Gen’s advice just before our departure from Tulsa – I had never owned one before now, as it never really got cold enough at home to warrant needing one.
It hadn’t taken me long to decide that I didn’t like New York. It was freezing cold, there were too many people, and everything went by too fast. I was immensely glad that we would only be here for five days, tops, because I didn’t want to stay here any longer than we had to. I was sure that the city had its redeeming qualities, but there were none that I could see.
Aside from Gen’s brother, of course. His name was Zac, and he lived with his wife Kate and their three children in an apartment in Greenwich Village. Gen’s other New York-bound brother, Isaac, along with his wife Nikki and their two daughters, was currently overseas in Germany for some reason. I had immediately taken a shine to Kate, partially because of her musical tastes, and partially because she was just so damn nice. The latter, I attributed to the fact that she was a Southern girl – Gen’s quick-and-dirty lecture during the journey from Wilmington had included the tidbit that Kate was a Georgia girl born and bred. Her lecture had also included a quasi-warning about the fact that there was a decent chance that Zac would not be able to see his brother, though she wouldn’t say why.
I found the café – a glass-fronted, sunshine-yellow joint with the words Sunrise Café painted in bright blue concave letters on the main window – and stepped inside as quickly as I could, shedding my coat as the warmth enveloped me. Quiet conversation and music piped from the speakers in one of the corners filled the café, and I smiled before heading for a table tucked right in the back.
“Fancy finding you here,” I quipped as I sat down opposite Taylor. He looked up from toying with the salt shaker and the pepper mill, the ghost of a small smile playing on his lips. “Gen sent me out to find you,” I explained.
“How’d you know I’d be here?”
I shrugged. “It wasn’t hard. I know you like eating, and you kept staring at this place even after Gen had driven past yesterday. I put two and two together. You hungry?”
He nodded, and I laughed quietly. One of the waitresses came over and I ordered something I knew we both liked to eat, banana cake with cream cheese frosting; the waitress looked momentarily at where Taylor was seated, just a flick of her gaze, before jotting down my order and walking away.
“I think she saw me,” Taylor said softly, his voice barely audible above the hum of music and conversation.
“Well if she did, she didn’t recognise you,” I reasoned. “She doesn’t look any older than twenty, maybe twenty-two at a stretch. You ask any twenty-year-old these days who Hanson is, and you’ll get a blank look. Trust me, I know.”
Taylor remained quiet even after my order arrived, picking at the thick slice of cake with his fingers as I commenced a restrained attack on it with my fork. “What’s up?” I asked him as I licked the cream cheese off the fork and set it down on the plate that held about half of the original slice.
“I never thought this would worry me, but…” He looked up at me. “He can’t see me, Ria. He can’t fucking see me.”
“Maybe…he has to want to see you,” I hedged. Taylor looked at me quizzically, so I elaborated. “You want him to see you, right?” He nodded. “Well, maybe it works both ways. Sort of like how it is in a relationship. You both have to want the same thing for it to work.” I offered him the fork, and he shook his head. “You said you died on his birthday, right? To be honest with you, I wouldn’t want to remember something like that. I’d never be able to deal with it. This might be his way of protecting himself.”
“What, forgetting me?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“No, but you implied it.”
“Okay, so maybe I did. But come on – if you were him, and one of your siblings died on your birthday right in front of you, so to speak, would you want to remember?”
He let out a small sigh. “Oh, I suppose you’re right…”
“Of course I’m right.” I offered him the fork again, and this time he took it and dug into the remainder of the cake.
We returned to Zac and Kate’s apartment about half an hour later to find dinner on the table – it seemed that this evening, we were having pumpkin risotto as our main course, followed by lemon cheesecake, both of which had been cooked by the oldest of the Hanson children, seventeen-year-old Taylor-Kate, who looked uncannily like her long-since-deceased uncle. Though fortunately for her, it seemed that she was likely to reach her eighteenth birthday – something her namesake had never achieved.
After dinner, I excused myself and managed to sneak a fork and a spoon, a bowl of leftover risotto and a slice of cheesecake on a plate down the hall to the room I was sharing with Taylor. He was sitting on the bed that he had claimed, surfing the Internet on my laptop and singing quietly to himself. As I set Taylor’s dinner and dessert down on the bed in front of him, he looked up and smiled.
“What was that you were singing?” I asked.
“Just something I wrote,” he replied. He shoved a spoonful of risotto into his mouth and let out a quiet groan of what sounded like pure delight. “Who made this?”
“That would be your niece. She’s quite the cook. I think she’s planning on going to cookery school when she finishes her senior year.”
“Well, she definitely should. She’d be fantastic at it.”
I went to where I had stowed my backpack and unzipped it, digging out my computer microphone headset and a blank CD. “What are you doing?” Taylor asked, sounding wary.
“I want you to record that song you were singing. And I want your brother to hear it. It might be the only way he’s going to be able to see you.”
“You have to be kidding me.”
I shook my head and sat down on the other bed, and held out my hand for my laptop. He closed the lid and passed it to me one-handed, and I hooked up the microphone and loaded the blank CD into the disc drive. “Now, I want you to put this on” I held up the headset “and sing that song.”
He shook his head stubbornly.
“Jordan Taylor Hanson-”
“Don’t call me that. You’re not my mother.”
“Technically,” I continued as if he hadn’t even interrupted me, “I am eight years older than you. You’re still a seventeen-year-old boy, in case you had forgotten.”
“I haven’t forgotten,” he muttered.
I sighed. Taylor’s eternal age was one of his sore points. “Look, just do this for me, all right? I won’t ask you to do this again if you don’t want to – I know this is sort of a painful reminder for you. But please…that song is amazing. He deserves to hear it.”
He let out a sigh of his own. “Fine. But you ask me to do it ever again and I’ll kick your ass.”
“Agreed.” I loaded up Audacity and waited for him to put the headset on, and hit record. And as he started to sing, I closed my eyes and let the words wash over me.
“Hello, goodbye my friend…feels like the start all over again…but I’d rather not pretend…there aren’t things still left to mend…somebody break my fall…I’m slipping down all over again…
“I’ll do it all over…taking my own sweet time…I may make it slower…but I’m taking my own sweet time…I’m taking my own sweet…
“Tell me where I begin…you can’t deny what’s already been…I won’t break but I can bend…shaping the scars that I can’t mend…feel your fingers around my throat…there’s nothing but bones beneath my skin…somebody break my fall…I’m slipping down all over again…
“I’ll do it all over…taking my own sweet time…I may make it slower…but I’m taking my own sweet time…I’m taking my own sweet…I’ll do it all over…taking my own sweet time…I’m taking my own sweet time…
“I’d do it all over again, my friend…my friend, you know I’d do it all over again…hello, goodbye my friend…until we start all over again…somebody break my fall…I’m slipping down all over again…
“I’ll do it all over…taking my own sweet time…I may make it slower…but I’m taking my own sweet time…I’m taking my own sweet…I’ll do it all over…taking my own sweet time…I’m taking my own sweet…I may make it slower…but I’m taking my own sweet time…I’m taking my own sweet time…
“Do it all over…hello, goodbye my friend…until we start all over, start all over again…do it all over…hello, goodbye my friend…until we start all over, start all over…I’ll do it all over again…I’ll do it all over again…”
As the final echoes of Taylor’s voice echoed around the room, I opened my eyes and stopped the recording. “Ask me to do that again and I am so kicking your ass,” Taylor muttered as he pulled the headset off and tossed it across to me.
“Threats don’t have as much of an impact the second time around,” I informed him. “And really, you’re a stick. If anyone’s kicking ass, it’s going to be me.”
I quickly burned Taylor’s song to the blank CD and fished around in my backpack for the permanent marker I always carried with me for vandalisation purposes. I always felt a urge to leave my mark in public toilets for some reason, and then to take a photo for evidence purposes. “What do you want to name your song?” I asked, and Taylor shrugged. “Fine, I’ll name it for you.” I uncapped the marker, thought for a little while, and wrote My Own Sweet Time – Taylor Hanson on the upper side of the disc. “Come on, I want you to be out there with me when he hears it.” I snapped the disc back in its case and extended a hand to Taylor.
“Nice to have you grace us with your presence once more, Rosaria,” Kate said as I walked into the living room, Taylor trailing along behind me like a lost child.
I smiled. “Could I put a CD on?” I asked. “I just recorded it now.”
“I didn’t know you were a singer,” Zac said.
“I’m not,” I said with a shrug. “But the person who recorded this is – and before you ask who it is, you know them pretty damn well.” I opened the CD case and popped it into the stereo, and hit play. And for the first time in, I guessed, over twenty-five years, Taylor’s somewhat rusty voice came rolling out of the speakers. I couldn’t help but smile – it was a little sneaky, and if there was another option open I would have taken it, but if anything was going to make Taylor visible to the one person who probably would have preferred to forget him, this was it.
The song ended, and we sat in silence for a little while. It was, of all people, Zac and Kate’s son Riley, who finally spoke.
“Who was that?” he asked.
All eyes swivelled to Zac.
“He was my brother – your uncle,” Zac replied finally.
“What happened to him?” Taylor-Kate asked.
When Zac didn’t answer, Kate took up the thread. “He died, honey,” she told her daughter. “Long before I met your father, or even before you were born.”
“How did he die?” the youngest Hanson kid, Elise, asked.
“Nobody knows,” Kate said. “It’s just one of those mysteries that can’t be solved.”
A couple of weeks after we had returned from our road trip – which from Taylor’s perspective had been a total bust, being that no matter how hard he tried or what he did, he remained invisible to Zac – Gen turned twenty-eight, and ended up dragging me to her mother’s house for the evening. Well, she and Taylor both did. All I wanted to do was crash out on the living room couch with the remote for the DVD player in hand, the first DVD of my Season One box set of Sex And The City playing, and an untouched tub of Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia all to myself. I wasn’t particularly in the mood to spend an evening with Gen’s mother.
But honestly, the fact that Taylor had told me the evening before that he was ‘ready’ for his mother to see him had been enough to let myself be packed into Gen’s car. Apparently, Taylor was able to ‘shield’ himself, as he called it, from those who he didn’t want to see him – and it seemed that his mother was one of those people. His rationale was that he wanted to protect her, but I didn’t believe him for a second. Why he had chosen today of all days to let his mother see him, I really didn’t know. I only hoped he knew what he was doing.
“Hello Rosaria,” Diana said as Gen dragged me into the kitchen behind her.
“Hi Diana,” I replied. “Gen, for God’s sake, you’re going to yank my arm out of its socket in a minute, let go!”
“Zoë, how old are you exactly?” Diana asked her daughter as she turned back to the cooktop.
Gen rolled her eyes. “Mother, please, not in front of Ria.”
“Then I would kindly ask you to act your age for once in your life – it really isn’t all that hard.”
Gen sighed. “Sorry Mom.”
Diana nodded. “Thank you. Now, why don’t you go and make yourself comfortable in the living room, and let Rosaria and I do the cooking.” It was a thinly-veiled order, not a request, and Gen headed off to watch TV.
“How have you been, Rosaria?” Diana asked as she stirred something in a large pot. “Oh, I hope you like pumpkin soup.”
“Like it? Diana, I was raised on it. I love it. Ma makes the best homemade pumpkin soup – I think it’s a family recipe.”
In response, Diana ladled the equivalent of a mouthful of soup out of the pot and held the ladle out to me. I took the handle of the ladle in hand and tasted the soup. “Ohhhhhhh, that is divine,” I said as my tatebuds reacted. “It’s even better than Ma’s. I’d better not tell her that, though.” I grinned and handled the ladle back, then answered her original question. “I’ve been…” I shrugged. “I suppose I can’t complain. I have a good job, I have my own place that I get to share with my best friend, and I don’t have my sisters ripping on me every day. Things could be worse.”
“Indeed.”
After dinner – the aforementioned pumpkin soup, followed a chaser of tiramisu, Gen’s favourite dessert – I helped rinse the dishes and load the dishwasher while Gen spoke to Taylor in the living room. Taylor had thankfully made himself scarce during dinner (I figured he had gone up to his old room), but had come downstairs just as we had finished dessert. And as I entered the living room, I decided to leave it up to Gen to do the talking. She knew her mother better than I did, and I knew I’d probably fuck it up. Besides, Gen had already practiced on her sisters – if anyone knew how to handle Diana, it would be Gen.
“Mom…” Gen started. “God, I don’t know how to put this.”
“Just take your time, Zoë.”
Gen drew in a deep breath. “I know this is going to sound stupid, but…you remember Taylor, right?”
Diana just looked at her daughter, before sighing sadly. “How can I forget him, Zo? He was my son. And it’s not every day you lose one of your children.”
“Maybe I should go,” I said.
“No, you’re fine,” Gen told me. She flashed me a quick smile, before she continued. “Mom, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but…” She sighed. “He’s here, Mom. I’m serious. He’s been living with Gen and I since November, and he tagged along with us this evening.” She then delivered a sharp jab to Taylor’s ribs with her elbow, and he let out a yelp – one that I could plainly tell that his mother heard loud and clear. “Show yourself,” Gen told him.
“That hurt,” Taylor told her, sounding wounded, but he did as he was told, getting up off the couch and going to kneel before his mother. Gen directed her mother to close her eyes, and then nodded to Taylor. He dropped his chin onto his chest, and the air around him seemed to shimmer slightly. “You can look now, Mom,” he said quietly as he looked up; I could hear the faintest hint of tears in his voice.
“Oh my Lord,” I heard Diana say faintly once she had opened her eyes. “Taylor?”
Taylor nodded. “Yeah, it’s me.” And then I watched him break down for the first time. “Mom I’m so sorry,” he cried. “I should have listened to you…”
“Oh my baby,” Diana whispered; she was crying now, as she gathered her long-lost son into a tight embrace. “You couldn’t have known what was going to happen…”
As Gen and I watched the long-overdue reunion between mother and son taking place right before our eyes, I realised that this was what Taylor had been searching for all these years, what he had so desperately wanted and needed. His mother.
Two months later, in the middle of March, Gen, Taylor and I holed ourselves up in the apartment and celebrated one long-since-overdue birthday – Taylor’s eighteenth. Gen and I both felt that he deserved it. He had never made it to his eighteenth while he had still been alive, and while our party couldn’t really make up for all those years as a seventeen-year-old – nothing could, to be honest – it was the next best thing.
But something had put a bit of a dampener on the festivities. For the whole day and most of the evening, Taylor had locked himself in his room, claiming a headache. It was actually a little worrying – before now, he had never shown any inkling of being able to feel pain. And yet here he was, laid up in his room in the dark with the headache from hell, while Gen and I cooked up a storm in our poky little kitchen. Well, I cooked up a storm – as usual, I’d limited Gen to the simplest task possible. I had set out the ingredients for nachos, and had watched Gen like a hawk as she made them. She had, fortunately, managed to complete her task without incident.
I knocked gently on the closed door with my elbow, as my hands were full – a glass of water in one hand, and an unopened packet of Advil liquid capsules in the other. Neither Gen nor I had anything more heavyduty in the apartment, purely because we didn’t need it. I only hoped it was enough to deaden the pain.
“Tay?” I called quietly as I opened the door, letting a small sliver of light into the darkened room. Through the dark I saw Taylor raise his head off of his pillow and squint at me.
“What?” he asked.
“Want something for that headache?” I asked. I held up the painkillers. “I don’t know if it will be enough, but it’s worth a shot, right?” He nodded his answer, and I went to switch the light on. “Watch your eyes,” I warned, and I flicked the switch.
“Oh my head,” he moaned as he opened his eyes. “I haven’t felt this bad in the past two-and-a-half decades. I’m not shitting you.”
I believed him. It had been an aneurysm that had killed him all those years ago – though how that had been missed, I had no idea. And the worst part was that his family would never know for sure how he had died.
I tossed him the painkillers and set the glass on his night table. “You know, if you just want to sit around and talk tonight, I’m game,” I said. “The food’ll keep.”
“No, s’all right,” he assured me. “I’ll be fine once this headache fucks off.” He popped two pills and swallowed them with a couple of mouthfuls of water.
He was right – once the painkillers kicked in, he was fine. For the rest of the night, we cranked the music up to maximum and pigged out on nachos, hot dogs, Doritos, ice cream, and more chocolate than I think any of us knew what to do with. Gen spent most of the evening taking photos of Taylor and I, though I did manage to wrestle her camera away from her momentarily so that I could get a few photos of she and Taylor together. We had no idea if he would even show up in any of the photographs, but I supposed it was lucky that Gen’s camera was a digital – we wouldn’t be wasting any film if that was the case.
It was nearly midnight when we finally wound down the celebrations. I was heading off to my room when
Gen called me back. “Gen, I’m tired,” I protested. “No more photos, please. I think you’ve taken enough.”
“I just want one more. You can go to bed when I’m done – I promise.”
I sighed. “Fine.” I headed back to the living room couch and collapsed onto it next to Taylor; he pulled me close and wrapped an arm around me.
“Okay, hold it there,” Gen said. But just as I heard Gen press down on the shutter, Taylor leaned over and planted a kiss squarely on my lips, and I closed my eyes as the flash went off, digitally preserving the moment for all time.
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Lyric credit:
My Own Sweet Time - Hanson