“I don’t think I’ll ever figure you out,” I say, biting into a pickle.
“Likewise, but that’s what makes us so fucking good, isn’t it?”
“Or so fucking bad.” Taylor cocks his eyebrow at me. “Oh, I brought the shoebox. I haven’t had a chance to look at my baby pics. It’s a big deal for me. Part of the heaping delicious serving of bullshit my mother fed me was that the albums of my childhood were stolen. So I only had one baby photo, everything else from my childhood is from when I was four and older.”
“I don’t have infant pictures either.”
“I guess we were in the same boat. Come look with me. Do you think you would remember how I looked?”
“We were so young. I just remember fragments. Many of which were not the greatest times.”
“I have to say something to you because you need to know it.”
“It’s not about your mom trying to—“
“No. No, It’s about me.”
“Okay,” Taylor says skeptically
“You’re my hero.”
“Oh, come on.” He rolls his eyes.
“No seriously. You were just a boy, up against adults, and you thought of me. You protected me. What a brave little child you were. Really. I’ll love you forever just for that.”
Taylor looks down, sometimes my affection for him is like his glare is to me: too much to take without shrinking away. “Well, I don’t know what to say.”
“Oh my god, have I made Taylor Holden speechless?”
“I guess I knew you were special even then.” I smile at him warmly and walk over to his side of the counter kissing his back, taking in a deep inhale of his scent.
The brown shoebox is old and frayed, the lid nearly useless as its sides have all bent away from the box. Taylor joins me, resting his arm on the back of the sofa and crossing his ankle over his knee. I show him a picture of my mother holding me. “Wow, she did look a lot like you, minus the whole flower child dress. You also have a way better rack.”
“Are you checking out my mom’s boobs? Gross! What is it with cults? They either dress like Little House on the Prairie or flower children?”
“I don’t think they are known for their impeccable fashion sense.” His light mood around this subject matter is a relief.
“Hey, I think this one is us too!” This picture is of me, shirtless in a diaper, a few straggly soft large brown curls springing from my head, my tiny feet in adult shoes, laughing a belly laugh. Taylor is wearing blue long johns and it looks like he is doing something to make me laugh, but the camera angle doesn’t capture it. “I still can’t believe this is us. I guess we had some good times, despite the situation.”
Taylor shrugs. “I don’t remember many times like that. I wish I could, but at that age, it’s the loudest memories that stick.”
I find another picture, of my mother and his mother, standing side by side, so much youth and beauty wasted. I’m not sure if Taylor wants to see it, so I move it to the back of the pile and continue sorting through the photos. I find a solo portrait of me, I would guess that I was two or three, in a red floral dress. “Here’s another one of me,” I say, passing it to Taylor.
“Look at baby Shyla,” he says observing the picture. “Wait, there’s something stuck to the back of this.” The pictures are old and from the looks of it, have remained untouched in the box for years. Many have stuck together over time from moisture. He carefully peels the smaller photo away from the back of my baby photo and his face instantly transforms when he sees it. His hand trembles, his breathing becomes shallow, his eyes full of dread. The look of terror is raw; it’s as though he sees a ghost, yet he remains transfixed on the image in a trance of sorts. Within seconds, his expressions become more intense: his trembling stronger, his breathing heavier, as if he will boil over if he continues at this rate.
“Taylor?”
He doesn’t respond.
“Taylor?” I raise my voice.
He stops abruptly and looks up at me, his eyes much like when he awakes from a night terror.
“What is it?”
“Nothing…I have to make a call. For work.”
“Taylor, I know it’s not nothing.”
“I’m fine, Shyla. Jesus.”
“Alright,” I say softly.
He stacks the two pictures back together, puts them on top of the pile and stands up to walk towards his office. “You should go to bed anyway, otherwise your sleep patterns are going to go crazy.”
“Yeah, I guess, but I’m wide awake.”
He glides down the hallway as I take him in, understanding that even asking him to look at innocent baby pictures allows for variables Taylor cannot control. He turns around. “Shy, I forgot to mention. I’d like you to come with me to visit my father this weekend. It’s his birthday and he wanted me to come for a small dinner.”
“Really?”
He nods. For some reason, despite proclamations of his feelings for me, I never expected to meet his father. Not because his feelings for me are not real, but because he has a tendency to compartmentalize so many different parts of his life, and I thought that his father and I might never overlap.
“But…are you going to tell him who I am? He’s going to hate me.”
“I don’t see the point in hiding it. I plan on keeping you around, you know. He is a reasonable person and he also knows I make my own decisions. To hate you for where you came from would mean he would have to hate his own son.”
“Of course.”
When I hear the door to his office close, I reach for the pictures he set down. The one on top is him and me, of course, but the one he reacted to is tucked underneath. Hesitantly, I pull it out from the stack, and I understand his visceral reaction.
It is a candid picture of Taylor, maybe five or six year old, fiddling through a children’s book on the floor. Sitting in a wooden chair hovering over him, watching him, is Alan Peters, intensely glaring at the little boy, his usual deceivingly friendly eyes holding something sinister.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
We rise early on Saturday morning for the three and a half hour drive to Randall Holden’s estate. Taylor insists we stay there the entire weekend as the property is vast and the area a beautiful place for outdoor activities. The fall chill is beginning to set in and there is a slight mist in the air, so Taylor wears a navy anorak with worn-in jeans and brown boots. I opt for a army-green canvas jacket with a thick cable knit grey scarf, and a pair of jeans tucked into navy Le Chameau rain boots. We look straight out of a fashion magazine fall editorial spread.
“Taylor, I have to tell you, I am kind of nervous.” Taylor did tell his father, who was shocked as the rest of us. He claims he never knew what became of my mother, or that she had ended up moving to the same state as them. Taylor swears his father holds no ill feelings towards me or my mother. “Nothing to worry about, he’s okay. Nan is okay too. They’re really boring actually.”
“Haha! Well I guess I have that to look forward to. It’s just all the baggage that comes with me before I have even met him, it makes me a little tense.”
“There’s no pressure. Just be yourself. You’re not here to impress anyone, I just don’t want to leave you alone when I come visit my father. I love your company. Plus, it’s beautiful and quiet up there.”
Taylor takes our cognac-colored leather overnight bags, loads them into the back of the SUV, and we begin our journey. The view is haunting, a heavy fog settles into the surrounding barren trees, not a glimmer of sunlight breaking through the overcast sky.
“So you haven’t spoken to your mother yet?” Taylor asks.
“No. She’s called twice, but, I don’t know. I don’t know what to say to her. Am I supposed to just go back to the way things were? If not, am I supposed to dwell on it? I mean, how many things can I ask her before it’s enough, ya know?”
“I do. All I know is asking questions only opens up more questions. I don’t think once you open up Pandora’s box it ever ends until you decide to shut it completely.”
“Is that why you prefer not to know more?”
“Like I have told you before, I know everything I need to know. Anything else would be extraneous. I know what happened to me. I was there.”
“It’s just…I am struggling with who my father was. My mother says he adored me, and I have trouble reconciling that with the person everyone says he was. Maybe there was another side to him.” Taylor remains silent. I saw his reaction to Alan’s photo. This man has been dead for 25 years and his image alone still makes Taylor tremble. “Can I ask you something?”
Taylor nods.
“Can you tell me what he was like? I’m sorry to ask you, but I need to know. Even if it’s bad.” Taylor swallows hard, his Adam’s apple rising and falling like a cresting wave. “Nevermind. Forget it. That was a really stupid question. It’s not fair of me to ask that. It’s just that I had this image of a pathetic drug addict my whole life and now…”
“You have the image of a megalomaniacal sadistic psychopath?”
His question is sharp like a dagger.
How can he love me when he hates my father so strongly?
“I know it, intellectually, but it’s so abstract. I know he was terrible, but only in a very distant way, like a story on the news. I guess I can look him up, I am sure there are articles and stuff.”
“I know you’ve already looked up C.O.S. You’re way too curious not to have once I told you about my childhood.”
“Yes, but not specifically into him. Most of the stuff I found spoke about what happened in the general sense. I know he was the ringleader, but still I can’t conjure up an image of him.”
Taylor nods, but says nothing. We sit in silence for about fifteen minutes. I lean my head against the window into the foggy mist, counting the trees as they pass.
“When I was a child in C.O.S,” Taylor starts out of thin air, “in the middle of the night, sometimes he would punish me for things I did earlier in the day.” I sit up and turn to face him. “So if I did something disobedient, or sometimes I wouldn’t even know what I did to piss him off, I guess I just existed, instead of punishing me on the spot, he would wait. That way, I would be on edge all day, a form of mental warfare, I suppose.” My stomach tightens, and I regret asking him about Alan Peters. Taylor’s hands clench the steering wheel. “He would give me this look; I knew that look that signaled to me I would get it later. So when I went to bed I would try really hard not to sleep so I could hear his footsteps when he was coming, not that I had anywhere to hide. But it was like he had this uncanny ability to wait until I couldn’t stay awake any longer. I used to slide a chair in front of the door so I could hear him open it, but when he figured that out, he took the chair away.” I attempt to hide the look of horror on my face. “Then when I was finally asleep, in peace, so exhausted from fighting and fear, he would come into the bedroom and cover my mouth and carry me outside where no one could hear me. Sometimes he would wake me up by choking me so I couldn’t cry out. Then he would use his belt, or a switch, or his fists, and he would beat me. He would finally tell me what the beating was for. Maybe I looked at him in a certain way, or my mother looked at me in a certain way, or I spilled a cup of milk, or I told him to stop when he was choking my mother, or accidentally bumped into you when we were playing. There was no rhyme or reason, I could never tell what would set him off. And so, everyday I lived in terror, afraid to be kind, or to laugh, or to hug someone, or to defend myself, because any of those things could get me dragged out in the middle of the night to a vicious beating. Those nightmares I have, sometimes I am that kid again and he’s coming to get me in my sleep. Other times, it’s me as an adult who finds him and I choke him to death in his bedroom, but when he finally dies and I get a better look at his face, it’s me lying there, not him. Sometimes it’s other things.” I catch myself holding my breath, clutching the sides of my seat. I understand why he doesn’t talk about it; I don’t know if it could help, the damage is too deep. “If he had never committed suicide, I would have killed him myself eventually. So, that’s the kind of person your father was.”
I sink into my seat, ashamed. Ashamed I had the nerve to ask him that question so selfishly, that I could be so thoughtless. I’ve seen the night terrors, I’ve seen his anxiety about being touched, his intimacy issues, and yet, I asked him to relive his most painful memories to satisfy a curiosity about my father. When he screamed “no!” in his sleep, when he swung wildly, or tried to choke me, he always said he thought I was someone else. Now I know who that person is: my father. And in a very warped way, he
was
choking a piece of him, through his only living descendant. If he wanted to destroy the memory of Alan Peters, all he would have had to do was finish the job when he started choking me that night.
Whenever I feel a moment of self-pity, I must remember:
I was spared. Taylor was sacrificed.
There will be no kind words, no assurances of Alan Peters being a
nice guy, just misunderstood
. No, it will always be stories of abuse, of control, megalomania, murder, manipulation, and obsession. Even his adoration of me was just another manifestation of his narcissism. I so desperately craved the father I couldn’t remember that I almost felt special about how he loved me over everyone else, but it wasn’t me that he loved, he looked at me and saw not an individual, but an extension of himself. I was proof that he was not impotent or half a man; he could produce, he could create. He could be immortal. And now I cannot decide if I am angry at my mother for lying to me all of these years, or for finally telling me the truth.
***
We pull through the gate of Mr. Holden’s estate and drive down a long path past small guest houses and tall trees, finally pulling up to his sprawling red brick mansion. It looks old and established, like it belongs in these woods just as much as the aged oak trees that surround it. It stands upon the backdrop of a large lake, which is completely engulfed in low-lying fog.
We pull right up to the house. I become stricken with that swirly feeling in my gut when entering completely new and intimidating surroundings. “Come on, he’s probably inside.” Taylor pulls open the unlocked front door, letting me in first, and then he wipes his feet on the doormat and I follow suit. The sound of frantic footsteps and heaving comes closer as a huge fawn Mastiff comes barreling towards us and jumps up placing both of his huge paws on my shoulders, flailing his tongue at my face as I lean back to avoid the bath.
“Robert, down!” Taylor commands.
“The dog’s name is Robert?” I laugh.
“Yeah,” he rolls his eyes. “Sorry I forgot to warn you. He’s 150 pounds, I’m glad he didn’t knock you over. He’s really a huge baby. Come here Bobby.” Taylor kneels on one knee and rubs Robert behind the ear. It’s the most tender I have seen him with anyone (or thing) besides me.
Then footsteps approach and finally a man turns into the entryway.
He is tall, with an abundance of salt and pepper hair. His face is weathered like a smoker’s, but I can tell he was once very handsome as he still has that strong jawline and crooked smile his sons inherited. He walks with a slight limp and a cane, Taylor told me he has a painful autoimmune disease that has made it difficult for him to walk, which is why he retired and passed H.I. to his son. Taylor blames it on his chain smoking and stress-riddled life.
“Son!” He says, his face glows with love in a way that I know Taylor is unable to return to him.
“Hi Randall. Happy Birthday.” There will be no hug, no pat on the back, not even a handshake, but his father already knows this. Mr. Holden looks over to me. I smile so hard I think I almost dislocate my jaw.
Shyla, calm down, don’t try so fucking hard.
“This is Shyla, the woman I told you about.”
I love that he called me a woman.
“Nice to meet you.”
“It’s so great to finally meet you, Mr. Holden. Happy birthday.”
“They aren’t so happy when you’re as broken as I am,” he says jokingly, but with a sprinkle of truth. “Come on in. Taylor can show you around, this is his house too. Call me Randall, by the way.”
He limps in and we follow him to the kitchen. “Drinks?”
“I got it, dad.” Taylor goes to the fridge and grabs us bottled waters. I am so touched to hear him say “dad.” Maybe because this is his way of showing affection.
“I decided to push everything up to make it a Linner. You don’t mind, do you?”
We both inform him we are famished.
“Where’s Nan?” Taylor asks taking a gulp from his bottle.
“She went riding, she should be back in time to join us. Why don’t you two get settled and I’ll meet you in the dining room?”
As Taylor carries our bags down the second floor hallway, I mouth to him. “How did I do?”
Taylor disapprovingly shakes his head. “You’re fine. Just relax.”
“He seems very reserved. I should probably not drop any f-bombs.”
“Really? He was being warm. He’s kind of a badass. He built H.I. from nothing. Raised two difficult sons. I think you being a pretty little woman brings out the softer side of him.”
“Well I’m glad I could do that, but then I would hate to piss him off.”
“You’re like Holden kryptonite. You’ll be fine.”
“He loves you a lot. I could see his eyes light up when you walked in.”
Taylor shrugs, innocently, like he can’t help how lovable he is. We enter a large bedroom decorated to match the colonial style of the house, with dark greens and maroons; the aroma of pinecones wafts in the air. Taylor settles the bags on the floor.
“I’m sorry about what I asked. In the car.” I have to bring it up, I know he’s not holding it against me, but I feel sick about it.
“Forget about it. Let’s go eat before I dine on one of these potpourri bowls.”
We head into the dining room where we there is an unbelievable spread. It’s like a high-end restaurant buffet, and in the center is a beautiful white cake, adorned with glossed strawberries.
Small dinner my ass.
“Have a seat,” Randall says from the head of the table. “I hope you are as hungry as you claim.”
Just then, a woman with short whitish-blond hair in riding gear walks in. She is ghostly pale, with some of the clearest blue eyes I have ever seen, almost freakishly so. It occurs to me that this is the mother of the man who raped me. I have to share a meal with this woman, not that any of it’s her fault, it’s just so bizarre. I wonder if she knows where her son is, if he has reached out to her since leaving town, but I think it’s more likely she is just another lonely Holden.
“Hello Taylor, how are you?” She says with the warmness of a stale coffee.
“Well, Nan, and you?”
“Just had a wonderful ride on Strider.” She turns her gaze to me with her icy blue eyes. “Hello.”
“Yes, Nan this is Shyla. Shyla, this is Nan.”
She smiles politely and shakes my hand. “ Yes, I’m Randall’s wife. You all get started, I need to shower. I don’t want to sit at the table like this. There’s enough food for a week out here.”
We sit at our place settings and Taylor and Randall start to dig in, so I follow their lead. Taylor loads his plate with one of everything it seems.
“So Shyla, what do you do?”