“Sorry, Trey, I must’ve have left in the bedroom after my shower.”
“I’m on my way to the apartment and should be there in five minutes. Maggie's lucid; this might be the best opportunity you'll have to talk to her.”
I let Jean know that I was leaving and was out the door. Once on the elevator on my way down, I realized that I had no clue how I'd react when I saw Maggie again. I had no idea what emotions would rise to the surface.
Trey had just pulled up to the curb when the doorman opened the door for me and I stepped out onto the sidewalk. “Hi, baby,” he said, as I got in and fastened my seat belt. “Are you ready for this?”
“I’ve been ready for this for a long time. I’m scared and anxious. I’m not sure what to expect.”
“That’s natural, sweetie,” he said. “Let me fill you in, as far as what I know. The chaplain said that Maggie is resting comfortably. She's still on IV antibiotics and some pain meds as well. If they can eradicate the infection from her blood before it kills off her organs, she'll survive.”
“What are the odds of that, Trey?” It was a question that had to be asked.
“Not in her favor from what the doctor conveyed to Sandy Meyers, the chaplain.”
I looked over at my husband, knowing that he was waiting for me to say something.
“I don’t feel anything at all. I mean, I don’t hate her as a person. I hate the things that she's done, but I don’t harbor any hate for her as a human being. I think I pity her and the wasted life that she’s led.”
“I suppose, under the circumstances, you're more compassionate than I would be,” he replied, taking my hand into his and squeezing it gently.
“I’m glad that you'll be there with me, Trey.”
Chapter 31
The ICU at St. Matthews allowed for each patient to have a private glass-walled room. There was a large triage area in the center where nurses constantly monitored the screens overhead for the various patients’ vital signs. Sandy Meyers, the jail chaplain who had accompanied Maggie to the hospital met us in the waiting area just outside of the ICU. She introduced herself to me, still referring to Maggie as my mother. I decided not to press the truth at the moment because I needed my ticket inside. Sandy told us which room she was in and said that my mother was anxious to see me.
Trey held my hand as we went to Maggie’s room. I went into the room first. Seeing her lying in the hospital bed looking frail and small, hooked up to IVs and monitors was surreal for me. She looked over as Trey and I got closer to her bed.
“Well, now look at you, Tylar, all grown-up and married to such a fine looking man.”
Maggie looked as if she'd aged ten years since I'd last seen her. I tried to fake a smile, but it wasn’t coming off very well.
“Hello, Mom,” I said.
“Oh, I expect you know by this time that I'm not your mother,” she said with a slight twinge of a smile on her dry, cracked lips. “Why don’t you just call me Maggie? Where’s your manners, girl? Aren’t you going to introduce me to your rich hubby?”
“Maggie, this is Trey Sinclair, my husband and the father of my baby girl, Preston.” Trey nodded his head at her. He didn’t want to touch her and neither did I.
“What a handsome man you’ve snagged, baby girl. Come to think of it, he looks much better than Daniel even. Oh, I could have had such fun with you, Trey,” she giggled. Her giggle was followed by a fit of coughing. She reached for her cup of water, taking a long sip to quiet her hacking.
“How's Layla?” she asked.
Trey and I exchanged confused glances.
“I named the baby Layla once I got a hold of her. I can’t believe you would name a baby girl your last name. You’re so much like your mama.”
“Preston's fine. No worse off for what you obviously put her through when you had her,” I snapped.
“I took good care of that baby just like I done you when you were a baby,” she snorted.
“Really? Why the bruises on her bottom?"
Maggie didn’t even try to appear repentant. “She constantly wanted to eat. I still had my milk from when I delivered that dead baby. Yep, I kept pumping it so that I'd have it for when I took that baby girl of yours.”
My heart was racing, my adrenaline was pumping. We were getting down to it now. I needed to keep my calm, no matter what. I wanted to let her talk.
“Yeah, I figured I was owed a baby out of the whole deal. I'd always wanted one, you know? Raising you wasn’t the same as having my own. The one that Matthew made me abort was a girl. I saw that when she came out of me, all bloody.”
I was starting to feel nauseous. I'd presumed that if Maggie had undergone an abortion, it had been done at a medical clinic. Her statement had the hint of some back-alley job done with a coat hanger. I wasn’t up for the details.
“I believe you were trying to explain the bruises on Preston?”
Maggie rolled her eyes as if she were already bored with the whole topic. It was reminiscent of how she'd behaved whenever she was faced with explaining her unacceptable behavior while I was growing up.
“Oh, yeah well, she apparently wasn’t satisfied with my milk supply. She fussed the whole time she nursed at my tit. Then five minutes after she'd finish up, she'd puke it all back up and she’d want to latch back onto me. So, yes, I smacked her bare ass a few times. I finally had to make up a sugar-tit for her so she’d leave mine alone.”
I felt Trey stiffen in anger; I felt the same way. Maggie was continuing to rant.
“Just like I had to smack your bare ass when you were a baby. Same damn thing. You kept trying to nurse from me, thinking all tits had breast milk, I suppose; always nuzzling against me and rooting for my tit like I was your mama.”
That was my memory of skin slapping skin; sometimes it had brought me fear and pain; other times it had made me feel disgusted. Trey had his arm around me, peering down at me.
“Who's Marley?” I asked her.
I finally saw some emotion cross over Maggie’s pale, thin face at the mention of the name. “That’s what he called your mama; that was his pet name for Marla.”
“Whose pet name?”
“Why, your daddy’s,” she said, as if it should've been so obvious to me. “Preston Tylar,” she stated.
I looked up at Trey; I knew that I'd been right.
“What can you tell me about him, Aunt Maggie?”
I threw the ‘aunt’ in there, hoping that in some way she'd feel some connection to me that might warrant her telling me the truth.
“I suppose you've a right to know the truth. Maybe I even owe you the truth, after all I've done. I know this is it for me, Tylar. You and your handsome hubby grab a chair and sit down here so that I can see you without straining to look up and I’ll tell you all about it.”
Trey pulled a chair over and sat down, pulling me onto his lap. Maggie took another sip of water and settled back against her pillows.
“I was three years older than your mama; our half-brother, Matthew was seven years older than me. My mama had borne him out of wedlock when she was just seventeen. Then she'd met Carson Renaud and married him; he adopted Matthew as his own. Mama had me five years after they married and then Marla came along. They were good parents to all of us. Matthew though, he had a wild streak in him.”
She paused as a nurse came in to check her I.V.
“When I was fifteen and your mama was just twelve, our parents were killed in an automobile accident in Meridian, Mississippi, about an hour from where we lived. Matthew was twenty-two years old, so he became our legal guardian. He pretty much blew through the inheritance that our parents had left within a couple of years. I was able to finish high school and started working as a secretary in an insurance office in the little town where we lived. Matthew worked nights at a cocktail lounge. We were struggling. Matthew started drinking heavily and got some ideas on how we could make more money. He set out to train me in the ways of pleasing men. I was a very willing student.”
Is she saying what I think she's saying?
“Oh, don’t look so shocked, Tylar. It wasn’t like we were totally brother and sister—only half. Matthew taught me the art of fucking and promised me that we would earn a whole lot more money with the proper clientele. He explained this type of clientele wasn’t in Mississippi. We moved to New Orleans. It was just like Matthew had promised. He found me wealthy gentlemen in prestigious positions who wanted dates. They would wine and dine me; we would go to a fancy hotel room and spend the night. There were weeks that I was bringing in more than $2000. I always practiced safe sex, too.”
She paused to take a long drink of water. The look in her eyes told me that she was reflecting back to a time that didn’t appear to hold bad memories for her.
“I was in love with Matthew; at least I thought I was. We would still sleep together and make love. He needed to make sure I was in top performance for my ‘natural calling’ as he put it. Your mama was seventeen by this time. She'd just graduated from high school. She was naïve, just like you. She hadn’t a clue about me and Matthew; or about me and all of the other men. She thought I worked nights. She always had her head buried in a book, it seemed.”
Maggie laughed and started coughing again. A nurse came back into her room and administered some codeine to her for the cough. She said it may make her drowsy. I was determined to get the rest of the story before that happened.
“Matthew was determined to get Marla into the business of pleasing men. He said he needed to start personally training her real soon. I didn’t want him to touch her. I'd like to say it was because I was protective of her, but the truth was, I was jealous. I was jealous at the thought of Matthew fucking her—or any other woman, for that matter. He was mine.”
She gazed over at me as if she was really seeing me for the very first time ever. “You look just like Marla, you know? Well, except that she had green eyes,” she stated out of the blue, staring at me.
“I was able to stall Matthew on the training bit with Marla. I told him that I wanted better for her. I promised him that I'd service more clients, if only he would spare her. I then went off of my birth control pill on purpose. I wanted him to get me pregnant. I figured if Matthew knew I was having his child, he'd forget about wanting to fuck Marla and love me like the wife I practically was to him. He knew I always used condoms with my clients. That was our golden rule. So when I got pregnant, he'd know the baby was mine and his. It would be our love child.”
I laid my head against Trey’s shoulder, listening to her. I felt pity for what she'd endured. I was sickened by the relationship she'd had with her half-brother. How could Maggie have possibly thought it was natural to have sex with a blood relative? Yet, she'd done that and more. She'd fallen in love with him and wanted to be his wife?
“It didn’t take me long to get pregnant. Matthew and I generally fucked on a daily basis. I hid it from him for as long as I could because I didn’t want him to make me get an abortion. He finally noticed that I had a baby bump one night when he was going down on me. I had to tell him the truth. He was furious with me. He claimed that because we were related, the baby would be born a Mongoloid idiot. The next day, he went to a bayou gypsy and got some roots and herbs and made a nasty brew. He forced me to drink it. Within hours, I was in excruciating pain. I delivered a dead baby girl. She looked perfectly formed. There wouldn’t have been anything wrong with her,” she sobbed.
Maggie was crying now and they were real tears. It was the first time that I'd ever seen her genuinely sad. I wanted to reach out to her, but I couldn’t bring myself to move. Trey stroked my hair and kissed the top of my head.
“Go on, Aunt Maggie, please. Tell me what happened after that.”
“I hated Matthew after that. I realized what a sick bastard he was. I knew that I needed out of his sick and perverted life. He didn’t care about anything or anyone. It was just about the money. Naturally, I was laid up for a while after the miscarriage. Matthew was more driven than ever to get Marla involved as a whore in his money-making scheme. She was clueless where men were concerned. She was still a virgin at eighteen. Matthew instructed me to get her dressed and made up for an evening out. He'd been invited to a high-rent bachelor party. Some connections he had told him that some circuit judge from Baton Rouge was marrying a very wealthy girl from New Orleans. The party was to be hosted at a very exclusive hotel in the French Quarter.”
Maggie was starting to get groggy. I needed her to finish this story.
“Please, Aunt Maggie—just get to the part about my mother.”
“Matthew took Marla to this party, telling her he wanted to introduce her to some young wealthy attorneys and professional men. Of course, other ‘prostitutes’ were there, but the young judge took a shine to your mama. She didn’t realize he'd paid Matthew a great deal of money for her to spend the night with him in his hotel room. When Marla got home the next morning, she was furious with me for setting her up like that. She claimed the man had taken her virginity and then apologized afterwards, telling her that he had no idea she’d been a virgin, and how sorry he was. He said that he'd been under an entirely different impression.”
Maggie chuckled weakly at the memory.
“Well, over the next couple of weeks, Marla kept getting flowers from him delivered almost daily. He kept calling her on the phone wanting to talk to her. He finally showed up at our duplex. He told Matthew he needed to see Marla. Matthew let him in and called Marla down to talk to him. When Marla came back upstairs later, she had the two blue velvet boxes that had those antique earrings and the necklace in them.”
I knew the ones she was talking about very well.
“He told her they'd belonged to his grandmother and that he wanted her to have them. He said he was sorry that he'd ruined her and that if he could get out of marrying his fiancé, he would. He said that Marla fascinated him and intrigued him. He told her if she ever needed anything, she should contact him. He gave her his card and said he was to be married the following week, but that he'd never forget her. She said he leaned down and gave her the sweetest kiss ever and held her to him tightly. She said he whispered ‘I love you, sweet Marley’ in her ear. I think she actually fell in love with him, right then and there.”
I got tears in my eyes, finally knowing that my mother wasn't cut from the same cloth as Maggie.
“A few months later, Marla discovered that she was pregnant with you. I figured Matthew would make her get an abortion like he did me, but he saw an opportunity."
"He paid a visit to the newly wed Mrs. Tylar with the news and some supporting photos that he'd arranged to be taken of your mama and the judge’s night together. Marla never knew about any of this. She was content just to be carrying his child, even though he was married to someone else. She didn’t want to cause any problems for him. In the meantime, Matthew was getting the funds he needed from Mrs. Tylar. He told her that the funding needed to continue because DNA testing was all that was needed to confirm her husband’s infidelity. It was rumored that Preston Tylar was on a short list for appointment to a federal judgeship. Mrs. Tylar wasn't going to let a scandal get in the way of that.”
Maggie’s voice was getting weaker and she was getting groggier.
“When you were born, your mama named you Tylar Jamie Renaud. She loved you like there was no tomorrow. She breast fed you; she said she wanted you to be healthy and strong. She was never apart from you. When you were about six or seven months old, she told Matthew that she was going to take you and move back up to Mississippi. I wanted to go with her to get the hell away from him. Matthew wasn’t going to allow that to happen. You were his golden goose. She and I were almost to Mississippi on the Greyhound bus with you when Matthew caught up with us.”
Maggie visibly shuddered at that particular memory. “After Marla passed away, you became my responsibility. I resented that I'd been given no choice in the matter. I hated Matthew and the control he had over me and my life. You just wanted
a mama. You tried to make me your mama, but that just wasn’t in the cards, don’t you see?”
“Aunt Maggie, did Matthew ever see me when we lived in Kentucky?”
“Yes, a couple of times when you were very young.”
The man from my first memory with the swing set!
“How did my mother die?”
“Poisoning; it was poisoning," Maggie whispered weakly before slipping into unconsciousness.
Chapter 32
Trey received a call Sunday evening from Sandy Meyers. She'd been keeping in touch with us daily letting us know Maggie’s condition. There'd been no change since Friday afternoon when we'd been there with her. She was still in a coma, but holding her own. The doctor said part of the coma had been induced because of the heavy duty pain-killers she was being given.
Right after Trey got off of the phone with Sandy, Tristan called him. He let Trey know that he would be in Atlanta the following day, staying for the week to get the transition of ownership taken care of with Gina. I'd kept my BFF promise to Gina and not mentioned anything to Trey about Tristan coming in or where he was staying. My ears perked up when I heard Trey ask him if he was staying here with us.
“You aren’t serious, Tristan. What the fuck?”
I couldn’t hear Tristan’s response, but pretty much figured it out with Trey’s next line.
“Yeah, right, platonic my ass! What’s your deal, bro?”
There was silence while Trey listened to Tristan explain his deal. “I realize that, Tristan. I just hope that you're a bit more cautious before jumping into another relationship so quickly.”
Another pause.
“Whatever you say, Tristan. It’s one thing to be in business with Gina; just take my advice and don’t hop into bed with her.”
Excuse me?
“Okay, okay. I'll butt out. See you in a couple of days then. Don’t forget to come up for air.” Trey was chuckling now, so it appeared as if the brothers were still on good terms.
Shadows and Dreams (Dream Series Book 2) Page 24
