Strapped

by Nina G. Jones

  All of my indignation melts away. I follow Taylor back to the car, trying to grasp this new knowledge. I now understand why he was so familiar. They share subtle traits that one might miss not knowing they are brothers: their crooked smiles, the shape of their jaws, their builds. Side by side, Taylor and Eric are nearly identical in stature. Taylor has dark hair and the slightest olive tone to his skin; his eyes are a blend of green and blues that change depending on what he wears, or the way the sun reflects off of his eyes. Eric is much lighter with a peachy hue, and small patches of freckles spot his nose and cheeks. His eyes are paler, grayer. While they share some features, it’s their expressions and mannerisms that link them as brothers. The way Eric delivered the line about my presumed honesty reminded me of the way Taylor told me he wanted me that morning in St. Petersburg. I see it now. They definitely are brothers.

  The car ride is quiet. This is going to be a private conversation. I watch Taylor looking out of the window. He looks tense, yet void. I wonder what he is thinking about at that very second. I don’t understand why he didn’t just tell me when I first mentioned Eric and much of me is afraid to know. He is so tightly closed, every word he says is so calculated because he is afraid he will be exposed. I want to be the one person that he can just be with: No calculation, no equations, no fear of loss.

  The ride up the elevator is silent. We kick off our shoes, I head to the kitchen and grab him a beer and myself a glass of wine. I sit with my legs crossed facing him as he sits on his side facing me.

  “Taylor, just talk. Once you let it go, you will find it is so easy.”

  He takes a deep breath like someone about to go underwater and slowly releases the air. “Shyla, no one knows everything about me. There are people that know some bits, but each person just has fragments of my life. That is intentional. No one has all of the pieces to put together and make the full picture of me. When no one matters, life is so much easier. When you care about someone, the fear that you will lose them is a constant undercurrent.”

  “Taylor. I will always be here. Haven’t I showed you that I am willing to keep an open mind?”

  “I think about what if you were to be hurt. When you told me he came up to you, that is why I snapped at you. If anything ever happened...”

  “Why would Eric want to hurt me?”

  “He doesn’t. He wants to hurt me, but if that means hurting you, then so be it. That is why I don’t want you talking to him or telling him about us.”

  “But, why?”

  “I’ll have to start from the very beginning. Take a swig.” His last statement lightens the mood just a bit and I offer him a toast, which he accepts. His tone quickly becomes somber again. “Okay, my father married my stepmother in his mid 20’s. From what I can gather, their marriage was good, but he met my mother a few years later. She was young, 16 years old.”

  “How did they meet?”

  “She was the daughter of a business associate and friend, she was a beautiful tall blonde and my dad was instantly in love when he saw her. She worked in my dad’s office one summer and that’s when the affair started. Obviously, she became pregnant with me. She wanted my dad to leave his family and be with her. He refused. She threatened to tell my stepmother and he said he would do so himself, but that he would not respond to threats. Apparently, he loved my stepmother more than he realized. Now, I don’t have my mother’s word, only what I know from my father, but he offered to help raise me. If word was going to get out, he planned to tell my stepmother and pray she would forgive him and he hoped he could either be a part of my life or take me in.”

  “That was assuming that his entire life didn’t fall apart once he told your stepmom.”

  “Yes, but he didn’t have to. My mother ran away. He thinks it was a way to punish him, to know he had a son out there he would never see. He wasn’t wealthy yet. H.I. was in its infancy and in those days between the lack of technology and father’s rights not being appreciated, it was very hard to find us.”

  “And her dad? What did he do?”

  “She told him it was a boy her age and her dad very much wanted to keep it hidden. Her family was conservative and wanted her to hide the pregnancy and give me up for adoption, which she refused.”

  “So she protected your dad by not telling anyone he was the father?”

  “I guess that’s one way of looking at it. When she did that, my dad saw an opportunity to cover up his biological connection with me while still raising me. See, my dad, who was a close friend of her father, offered to adopt me, saying he and his wife desperately wanted another child. This was a lie of course. My dad only told his wife that my mother was pregnant and he wanted to help by adopting the baby. He failed to mention the child was his. My mother was given an ultimatum by her family: hide the pregnancy and give me up for adoption, or leave. She left. They gave her just enough money to barely start over and she ran.”

  “Wow. This is like a soap opera.”

  “I know. I know,” he says, shaking his head in disbelief. “I have never really repeated the story to anyone, it sounds even more bizarre saying it aloud.”

  “So where did she go?”

  “Not much is known as far as details about what happened next because she vanished for years. Most of this comes from my recollection and what my father was able to find out after her death.” The way he says the word “death” weighs so heavy on my heart. I know he is trying to say it like it’s any other word, as if he doesn’t care, but it is because of this that the word holds so much more weight than the others.

  “So the story goes, she took a train all the way to the west coast. She being vulnerable, maybe bitter and alone, made her an easy target. She joined a cult called Children of the Stars. Seven years later she was part of a mass suicide. When her next of kin was notified, my father found out and was able to track me down. He told my stepmother everything. She was livid, but he persuaded her to do the right thing and they took me home.”

  “I am so sorry about your mother.”

  “Don’t be.”

  “I don’t understand why you seem to hate her so much. I mean, don’t you see her as the victim in this? She was only 16.”

  “She is no victim.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “She brought me into a world of hell. She let those vile people control her.”

  “You mean the cult?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you remember what it was like?”

  “Every day.”

  I watch him in silence. After all of this time wanting to know, I am afraid. Afraid to know what happened to him. Those years with the cult have to be what has been haunting him.

  “What did they do to you Taylor?”

  “Everything.” The unmitigated finality of that word makes me sick to my stomach. He swallows, doing his very best to keep any emotion from the surface. I can’t bring myself to ask what that means.

  “You’ve never told anyone?”

  “They think I don’t remember. They took me to therapists and I never told them anything. She let those bastards do whatever they wanted. They were her god and I was the lamb to the slaughter. I was always just a pawn to her.”

  “Do you think she was that evil? That she would intentionally inflict harm on you? She killed herself. Something had to have been haunting her.”

  “She killed herself and left me there surrounded by death. Everything she did was for the cult or to get back at my father. She could have delivered me to my father, or even her family, but she just left me there. I was collateral damage.”

  “You mean, you were there?”

  “Yes, the police found me after a week, hungry and dehydrated. The corpses were already starting to rot.”

  “Oh my god. Did anyone else survive?”

  “I was the only one left that I know of. The other parents took their kids with them.”

  “So she spared you?”

  “Much too late. I don’t understand why you’re
defending her.”

  “Taylor, I am not defending her. It’s just that I can feel the hatred you have for her and it’s hurting you.”

  “I’ve done fine thus far.”

  “Have you?”

  He ponders my last question in silence, the words he spoke begin to become a reality. I imagine a little boy, abused and alone, surrounded by demented, sick people. I imagine how scared he must have been, sitting amongst the dead bodies of all the people he ever knew, the smell of their rotting corpses in the air. Then I see him before me and he is still that boy, so full of rage. He hides it well, but it permeates through the cracks: his anxiety, his detachment, his wavering moods. He works so hard to deliver the appearance of control because he is still scared, scared to become a victim again. The tears pour out of me. This is worse than I ever thought. This cannot be fixed. He is damaged.

  “Please don’t cry.”

  “Taylor, how can I not? What have they done to you?”

  “I’m okay. I’m okay, Shy.” He cups my face in his hands and raises it too look into my eyes. “I’m okay. As long as I have you, I’m okay.”

  “I just feel for you. You were just a child.”

  We sit in silence for a while. I know this is not the entire story, but is draining to both tell and receive. I break the silence.

  “So is this why you don’t allow people to touch you? Why you must dominate them?”

  “I guess it’s psychology 101. I had no control in my early years and I don’t want to lose that ever again. No one ever touched me out of tenderness. The only time I was touched was to be disciplined or controlled in some fashion.”

  “Even your mother didn’t hug you?”

  “Not that I can recall. I was only there until I was seven so there is a lot I can't remember. Certain memories seem to take up all the space.”

  “Then why me? Why can we sit here like this, together?”

  “I don’t know. That is not something I am hiding from you. I truly have no idea. It boggles my mind.”

  “You really should see someone about this. I want to help, but I think this beyond anything I can help with.”

  “Shy, you are helping me more than you can understand.”

  “So things are making a lot more sense, but this still doesn’t answer your issue with Eric. Your new family took you in. They treated you good, didn’t they?”

  “Yea...yeah. By the time I was reunited with my father, H.I. was growing and he was wealthy. He desperately tried for me to have a normal life. He also took a lot of flack from friends after revealing that he was my father, but never took it out on me. My stepmother tolerated me. I don’t blame her, she was asked to raise the product of her husband’s affair. Any veiled resentment from her was a treat compared to what I had come from.”

  “So your relationship with your stepmother was not great?”

  “It was okay. It just wasn’t motherly. By the time they got me, I had already become who I am. I also remember fearing my new surroundings. I had no reason to believe my new family would be any different. I didn’t really speak much at all the first year until I finally started to trust that my new family was not like the cult. It would have been very difficult for her to become attached even if she wanted to.”

  “Understandable.”

  “The real issue was Eric. Eric hated me from the moment I entered that house. He was the only child, the apple of my father’s eye. My father was convinced he would never see me again. Then I came and took all the attention. My father thought I needed him more than Eric did. I think my father felt a lot of guilt about what happened to me, so he doted over me. Eric’s aggression started small, the things little kids do when they’re jealous. He would throw food at me, pull on my hair, call me names...We never bonded the way normal brothers do. If he tried to pick on me physically, because of my issues, I would bite him or claw at him. We were just incompatible. Hell, that instinct hasn’t really changed much in me to this day. We lived under the same roof, but there were very few times we enjoyed each other. I was a handful that first year, and Eric hated me for it.”

  “Your parents didn’t try to make you get along?”

  “The situation was impossible for them. I’ll admit, taking me in threw their household off balance. I was fucked up, which in turn, made Eric fucked up too.

  After the first year or so, I quickly learned that if I excelled in school and acted normal, people would get off of my back and they wouldn’t keep sending me to therapists. So that’s what I did, I worked hard in school and sports and was rewarded with personal space and approval. Eric on the other hand, continued to rebel, out of anger I presume, which only put a bigger wedge between him and our father. We would fight all the time; when we got into our teenage years, it got really bad. We would have vicious fist fights. I didn’t want to fight him, but I wasn’t going to take his shit either. He would get dirty, call me Charles Manson, Jim Jones, a bastard, son of a whore, shit like that.”

  “What about your anxiety about touch? They just let it go?”

  “My father understood and respected that. He hoped the therapy would cure it, but he gave up after a while.”

  “Your stepmother? What did she think about Eric?”

  “She defended Eric, but eventually he got so out of control he wasn’t defensible. Especially when he started experimenting with drugs. So they sent him to military school. We didn’t talk once he left. I didn’t miss him at all. Then we both went to college. It was as if we didn’t exist to each other. That is, until my father got sick and had to retire. Eric expected to inherit the company because he was older, even though he really is only six months older. Yes, my philandering dad got my mother pregnant while Nan, my stepmom, was pregnant with Eric. My dad thought I was better prepared to handle the load of H.I.; Eric was...is...too emotional.”

  “Oh wow. What was your mom’s name?”

  “Lyla.”

  “That’s pretty.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you remember her?”

  “Yes. I have some vague memories of what she looked like. My father stuck a picture on the mirror in my bedroom. I left it up there.”

  “You said she was tall and blond?”

  “Yeah...very thin, long wavy blond hair, tanned. She kind of looked like a hippy, always wore flowers in her hair. From what I am told, I have her eyes. The rest of me is a spitting image of my father.”

  “So you hate each other? You and Eric.”

  “Yes.”

  “Fine. I understand you hate each other, but that doesn’t mean he wants to hurt us. He was a teenager, maybe he is trying to reach out to you.”

  “I wasn’t finished about him.”

  “Oh lord, the plot thickens.”

  “I have reason to believe he wanted to have me killed.” I jump up off the couch onto my feet and pull on my hair. I can’t believe what I am hearing.

  “Reason to believe? Why is he not in jail?”

  “Someone approached me telling me that my brother propositioned him to kill me for a fee. He thought with me gone, he would be the only person in line for H.I.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “I went nuts. I went to my dad’s house, where he was, and I beat the shit out of him. My father, wracked with guilt about how he turned out, begged me not to press charges. He would’ve gotten Eric the best lawyers. In all honesty, all I had was hearsay. The guy who told me was a shady character, but Eric didn’t deny it. He had multiple opportunities to look me in the eyes and say the guy was a liar, but he never did. I agreed not to go to the police only under the condition that I would never see him again. I did it because of my father. He was a mess about it.”

  “I just can’t reconcile this with the guy I met. He was so nice and friendly.”

  “Most sociopaths are.”

  “Why do you think he’s back?”

  “I don’t know, probably to fuck with me or maybe because he wants to come back home.”

  “Does he reall
y work in security?”

  “It’s possible, I heard he was in the military for a while and my dad gave him plenty of money to play with. He could have opened up a security firm. Here’s the thing: I don’t know if he met you by coincidence or if he set up all of that on purpose. The latter is entirely possible with him, especially if he is a security specialist. He is calculated and yet he is capable of being very charming. How did you get to talking to him anyway?”

  “I was eating at the bar and he came up to me.”

  “So he tried to pick you up?”

  “I guess you could put it that way.”

  “And you entertained him? Interesting...”

  “Taylor, it wasn’t like that! Like you said, he can be friendly. There was no clear way to shoot him down without looking like a bitch. Honestly, we had some nice conversation. That is why I just can’t wrap my mind around this.”

  “Do not believe a word he says. He is up to something. I’m concerned about your safety.”

  “If he wanted to do something, wouldn’t he have done so by now?”

  “I don’t know. I only know he cannot be trusted. He tried to have me killed. Do you understand? He tried to have me killed.”

  “So what now?”

  “We watch our backs. Other than running into him a couple of times, has anything else unusual happened?”

  “Such as?”

  “I don’t know, just anything out of the ordinary?”

  The texts.

  “No, nothing I can recall.” I’m not ready to bring them up. I know he will be upset I didn’t mention them earlier.

  “We should really get you security.”

  “I’m not sure that’s necessary.”

  “It would make me feel better.”

  “If anything fishy happens again, fine. Let’s just meet before and after work. I’ll be safe at the office.”

  “I’ll have Harrison wait outside of your office instead of mine.”

  “Fine, but only Harrison. Taylor, thank you for sharing this with me. Whenever you are having a bad night, whenever you think about those times, just talk to me.”

  ***

  We lay in bed, lying on our sides, looking into each other’s eyes.