“Why?”
“She’s been acting strangely since I last saw her. She saw the cuts, but I think it’s more than that. I was worried maybe she relapsed, but I don’t think that’s it.”
“Did you ask?”
“That’s the thing. She just called me to tell me she’s flying in tomorrow and wants to speak with me alone. It was so bizarre, Taylor.”
“Maybe she just misses you.”
“No, that wasn’t it. It feels bad. Really, really bad. I think she might be sick or something.”
“Don’t think the worst. You’ll know tomorrow and building something in your head will only drive you crazy.”
“Taylor. I know something isn’t right. My mom, she’s the type to keep something like that for as long as possible because she wouldn’t want to worry me,” I say, burying my head in my hands.
“It’ll be fine. Whatever it is.”
“God, I hope so. But she has never acted like this before. Mom is usually so open about everything. I’m the one who’s all closed up and private.”
The next day, work seems to never end; the clock moves so slowly, it seems to be moving backwards as I run through all the possible scenarios in my head. Cancer? Liver disease? As soon as the clock strikes five, I grab my purse and dart out of the office. Harrison drives me to my apartment. This was not how I planned being reintroduced to the loft, but it is the best place to meet her. I manically add new sheets to my bed, and clean up any other traces of the last unexpected visitor. She buzzes the intercom at around 6:15. Harrison, who is parked in front of the building, spots her and helps her bring her luggage into my apartment.
“Wow, Shyla, this place is very nice,” she says. Her affect is much flatter than usual, as if she is distracted. I give her a big hug and invite her to get comfortable on the couch.
“Do you want a drink?”
“Whatever you’re having. Was this a gift?”
I wish she hadn’t asked, but she’s not stupid, she knows I can’t afford this place. “It’s Taylor’s. He has a house and he is letting me stay here rent-free.” I can’t tell her the full truth, she’ll get all preachy about accepting gifts from men as if I didn’t already know that’s frowned upon.
I prepare a pot of tea. Like everything else today, it boils in slow motion. I arrive at the couch where my mother is sitting with two cups of piping hot tea and rest them on the coffee table. I settle in to face her and my gut swirls with intuition. The last big news I heard on the couch was from Taylor, the night he first told me about Eric. Maybe I should throw this godforsaken thing away, it could be cursed. The tension in the air is so thick, my stomach feels like a jumbled mess.
“Mom, tell me what’s going on. I know you’re not here just to say hi. I’m not stupid.”
The look on her face, the way it almost melts when she sees that I know something is not right confirms my suspicions. She fights the frown, trying to hold back tears, and grabs her cup of tea. She blows on it a few times, the curvy strands of steam lilting to her breath, and takes a tiny sip, setting it back down on the coaster. She then silently reaches into a large tote bag she has resting by her feet and pulls out a shoebox, placing it between us.
“Go ahead and look inside,” she says from the back of her throat.
I peer at her suspiciously while slowly sliding the lid off of the shoebox. Inside, there are what appears to be dozens of pictures and mementos. I grab the stack of photographs, many of which are yellowed with age. The top one is a picture of a young, pretty brunette wearing a pale yellow sleeveless A-line dress with a boatneck collar. Her hair is long, puffy, and brown as was the style in the late 70s-early 80s. She is small-framed, but taller than me, with large hazel eyes and a full pout. Besides the eye color, we look very much alike.
“That’s you?” I ask.
“Yes.”
I move to the next picture. There is my young mother is again, with a plump, bald baby on her lap. Sitting next to her is a man with wavy shoulder-length light brown hair and a thick beard. His irises are very large and brown, giving him the same sympathetic eyes of a baby deer underneath all the manly scruff.
“Is that…me? Is that…dad?” I choke through the latter question.
She nods.
I thought all these pictures were gone. As far as I could remember, whenever I asked my mother for pictures of my dad or her when she was young, she told me someone had stolen them all in a burglary when I was very little. In fact, I only have one picture of my infancy.
“I thought they were stolen.”
She shakes her head. “No honey. I kept them from you, and for that I am sorry.”
“But, why?”
“Because I was trying to protect you.”
“I don’t understand. Mom, you’re freaking me out.”
“I haven’t been completely honest with you about your father. He did die, but it wasn’t under the circumstances that I told you.”
“So then what happened?”
“He was poisoned.”
“What? He was murdered? By who?”
“No, he committed suicide.”
“What? I don’t understand. Why would you lie about that? Why would you lie about the pictures?”
“Because I hoped you would never learn who he really was. I thought you could go your whole life not knowing, but I was foolish and I was wrong. It’s time you knew.”
“Knew what?”
“Your father’s name was not Desmond Ball.”
“Well then what was it?”
“His name was Alan Peters.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
I stare at her, frozen, trying to make sense of the words she has just uttered.
“Alan Peters? Who is…” And like a tsunami, the realization nearly knocks me off of the couch. I know exactly who Alan Peters is. I know why he poisoned himself and hundreds of other people. I know he is the man who held Lyla prisoner, who may have even murdered her.
He is the man who has damaged Taylor beyond repair.
It’s too unbelievable to comprehend and for a fraction of a second, I think this all might be a prank. I whip my head around to see if Taylor is hiding somewhere, but just as quickly the reality encases me like cement.
“You mean Alan Peters of C.O.S?”
“So you know who he is?”
“Yes!” I stand up, with no intent to exit, but unable to contain myself on the couch. “This doesn’t make any sense mom. How can I be his daughter? You weren’t in the cult.”
“Shyla, I was. I was in C.O.S for years. I just never told anyone once I escaped.” My face turns hot and flushed, my breathing becomes heavy. My lungs won’t fill; I am drowning out of water. “I am so sorry I lied to you, but I had to,” she says through tears.
“What difference did it make, mom? Was telling me my father was a worthless drug addict any better?” I shout.
“Better than a murderer. I knew you would ask less about him if I just wrote him off. If I created some amazing character for you that story would be much harder to keep. We started over again. I couldn’t risk telling you the truth.”
“Why? You thought I would tell someone?”
“Maybe, at least when you were younger. It would have been a lot for you to keep to yourself. I was afraid knowing would damage you somehow.”
“You are so backwards…Why did you hide? If he was already dead, why did it matter?”
“Honey, at the time, this thing was all over the press. We were demonized. People thought we were all child abusers, but we weren’t. Many of the adults were also abused or brainwashed. We were made to believe that we would fail if we tried to leave or even worse, we would be killed or beaten. We all just wanted to go on with our lives and it was impossible with people threatening us, or the press calling us. I had you to think about. You were the daughter of a famous cult leader. I didn’t want you to live with that cloud over you. I had a chance to start over and I took it.”
I sit in silence for I don’t know h
ow long, my mind racing with so many questions, I don’t know what to ask next.
“Taylor,” I say pensively, “You felt you had to tell me because of Taylor.”
“Yes. His mother was my best friend. I loved that boy like he was my son.”
The look in her eyes when she says this, as if it is another confession, sends my thoughts into an irrational tail spin. “Wait. Taylor isn’t my brother, is he?”
“No! No! Not at all. I didn’t mean to imply that.”
“Thank god. Oh my god…were you the one…were you the person who found him?”
I glance down at the picture of her, young and beautiful, in a pale yellow dress framed by a bright blue sky. She was the angel with the long brown hair. Her crying elevates from a subdued sob to uncontrolled weeping. The rotting bodies of her friends, the stench of death; the crying, starving boy she loved as a son who she would never see again: Taylor wasn’t the only one who was damaged.
“That wasn’t the way things were supposed to happen. They weren’t supposed to even be there,” she cries.
“What do you mean?”
“We ran away a couple of weeks before the incident. Lyla and Taylor were supposed to come with us, but she had to distract Alan at the last minute. She sacrificed herself so we could leave. She made me promise not to worry, and that she would run away with Taylor the next week. She said she would find a way to call me at the safe house where we all went. But then a week passed, and then another without hearing from her. Finally, I risked it all to go back and find her…and that’s…that’s when I realized they were all dead.”
“Oh, mom.”
“It was terrible. The building was so dark, and the smell…the smell.” Her nose scrunches as if she could still sense it. “I was in shock, I tripped over some of the bodies and panicked. They were everywhere. My friends, people I had lived with for years, so many of them gone. I thought I was going to break. Then I heard him, a tiny whimper across the room. When I found him, I squeezed him so tight. He became my mission. It was a miracle. That was all Lyla ever wanted, was to get him out of there.”
“If you loved him like a son, why didn’t you stay in touch? Why did you disappear?”
“His father wanted nothing to do with us and I don’t blame him. In his eyes, we were all Alan Peters. He wanted Taylor to start over just as I wanted you to start over. They told me to say my goodbyes right there in the hospital.”
“Taylor believes his mother never loved him.”
My mother wipes her tears on her sleeve and I begrudgingly pass her a box of tissues. “I feared that the most and I know she did too. There is so much he was far too young to understand. I tried to tell him that his mother loved him, I tried so hard to ingrain that in him when I said goodbye, but he was so young.”
“Mom, he remembers you. He doesn’t remember who you were, but he remembers you saving him. He remembers what you said.”
She lets out a faint smile.
“When I saw the bruises and the cuts, and then you told me you were dating him…My soul was crushed. I thought we had saved him, my worst fear was that it was all for nothing. That he would become like the person who terrorized him and that you had become a victim like Lyla and me.” I don’t say a word. He’s not like my father but he is not unscathed. “You know, I named you after her.”
“Lyla?”
“Yes, a variation of her name.”
I cup my hands to my face. How have I been so oblivious? I should be crying, but I feel numb. I’m not even sure if this is all real. Maybe this is like one of those vivid nightmares that Taylor has, where no matter how hard he kicks, or chokes, or screams, he can’t seem to wake.
“Mom, I’m safe with him. He’s not like Alan Peters.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes!” I say defensively.
She sits back a bit, knowing she is no position to ask for my trust or to insist upon anything at this moment. It is my world that is crumbling here in this room.
“Mom…I know what they did to the kids there. Did they…did they do that to me?” I can barely get the question out.
“No. I got you out of there before that could happen. I will never know if you would have been subject to it, but I couldn’t take my chances. What you need to understand is that you were special in your father’s eyes. It was a little known secret that he had trouble making children. He would take up women, and when they wouldn’t conceive, he would cast them from his bedroom, saying they were unfit, but really, he was ashamed of his inability to produce. You were his only child and as a result, I was never banished. I, along with Lyla, were forced to stay close with him.”
“So he was trying to impregnate Lyla?”
“I guess, but truly, he was obsessed with her. He just fixated on her. He didn’t love me like he loved Lyla. I think he had always wished she had given him the child and not me. He’s not someone you want loving you though. It’s a dangerous love.” I sit back in my original spot on the couch. I am very upset with my mother, but too curious to lash out at her. “You two would be too young to remember, especially you, but you and Taylor were once friends.” I think back to the note with the Bradbury quote that he had slipped to me in St. Petersburg that I found in my closet months later: “Why is it,” he said, one time, at the subway entrance, “I feel I’ve known you for so many years?”
“We were?”
She reaches for the pile of pictures and flips through them until she finds the one she is looking for and slowly hands it over to me. It is a picture of a beautiful boy with piercing eyes, wild, dark hair in a navy and white striped t-shirt and a pair of red shorts. Posed on his lap is a toddler with big brown eyes and a few straggly tendrils in a short purple sundress with a diaper peeking out from underneath.
“That’s the two of you.” Taylor and I felt as though we had always known each other, and it’s because we have. I grip the picture so hard I might crush it; this one will stay with me forever. “Shyla, he was very protective of you. When Alan got angry or violent towards me or Lyla, he would take you and hide in the closet or wherever he could. When he would beat us, you would scream, just as any baby would, and Taylor would take you away. Despite it all, your father favored you, you were his little Shy. Alan never hit you, but he was very hard on Taylor. He was jealous of Taylor because of his obsession with Lyla and in a sick way he competed with that little boy. And then, when he saw Taylor getting attached to you, he was even harder on him. The only reason he allowed Taylor around at all was because he knew he could use him to control Lyla. If he took Taylor away from Lyla, there would be no chance she would ever love Alan back. There is so much Taylor doesn’t know, so much he doesn’t understand about what happened.”
I stand in silence, slowly shaking my head in disbelief. There are no words. Taylor got the beatings, Taylor got the abuse, Taylor lost his mother. I was the favorite, the apple of Alan’s eye. I was spared the horrors, I escaped while Taylor stayed behind and sacrificed everything. Taylor suffered more to protect me.
“I should have told you earlier. Not just to be honest with you, but for my health, for my sobriety. It was the one thing I didn’t follow through AA. I couldn’t call you then to tell you the real reason why I drank. The guilt for joining the cult, for allowing myself to be brainwashed, for leaving my friends to die, for having to hide the truth from my own daughter, for letting Lyla stay behind…”
“So that’s why you drank?”
“Yes. I was so alone in my world of secrets. I didn’t want to bury you with the burden. I didn’t want you growing up with the guilt of what your father did.”
All these years I had assumed her loneliness stemmed from an obligation to raise me on her own, her struggling to make ends meet to make a better life for me, for secretly resenting having me with my deadbeat father.
“I thought it was me.”
“What?”
“All this time, I thought you drank because of me.”
“What? No! I love you
. I would do anything for you. I risked my life to spare you the terrible things that were happening there!”
“How was I to know, mom? How could I possibly know that?” The guilt, the cutting, the solitude I felt as I watched her passed out on the couch, thinking it was me who drove her to her alcoholism, thinking she only stayed with my druggie father as long as she did because of me, thinking that it would be better if I didn’t exist. I felt like I was invisible, that the world had forgotten me. Sometimes I felt like I wasn’t even real.
“I never blamed you, ever. Shyla, you were are my world. You still are.”
“I know you never said anything mom, but that’s what I thought! I saw how sad you were, and the only person standing in your way of starting over was me!” I stand up from the couch and grab my purse. “I have to go mom. I’ll be back in a little bit.”
“What? You’re in no condition to go out,” she grabs my arm.
“No,” I say, pulling my arm away from her grip. “I need some time to process this. I want to be left alone.”
“Then I’ll go.”
“No, we’re not done. You don’t even know the area. And I need some air. Please, just let me go. I’ll be back, I promise,” I say, storming to the elevator.
I jam the button frantically about a dozen times before impatiently running to the staircase, all the while feeling my mother’s silent tearful gaze on me until I am out of her sight. My footsteps create a distracting rhythm as I wind down each flight of stairs. I erupt out of the lobby and keel over, resting my hands on my knees, gasping the cool night air. The weight of this knowledge is too much, it crushes my chest. Harrison runs over to me, his normally stoic face flooded with concern.
“Shyla? Shyla? Are you okay?”
I put up my hand to him and slowly rise. “I have to go. Alone. I need to be alone. Please don’t follow me. I just have to go.”
I make my way to Ladybug, good old Ladybug, who I haven’t driven in a while. I kneel on the sidewalk, and spill the contents of my purse on the street, looking for the keys. When I find them, I only shove back in what I need and leave the random contents of my purse on the sidewalk. My hands shakily slide the keys into the ignition and I peel out onto the street checking in the rearview mirror to make sure I am not being followed.
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