Taylor gives me the once over, resisting the urge to debate. “Okay.”
***
I pull away from the group, the steady chorus of their chatting and laughs become a distant backdrop as I find a quiet spot to call Karen. This incident helped squelch a lot of the residual tension between Kristin and me. She served as a familiar face during a time of chaos and tension. We operated like a well-oiled machine, in the way that can only come from two friends who have been through many situations together. It helped throw us back into a familiar rhythm and reminded us that while things change, a few things remain constant. My later rehashing of the incident at the funeral (minus the whole fuck session with Taylor) made her feel included again. Maybe I was being too closed off. I needed that for a while. All the drama was a blur and I feared spilling one thing might lead to the next. But now, I feel in control; I am ready to start living my life in the present.
One thing I am not ready to do: make this phone call. Karen wasn’t exactly pleased to see me at the service, but if anything were to happen to Rick, I would feel responsible. So I figure no matter what she feels about me, she would appreciate the gesture.
The phone rings several times and I begin to feel hopeful that I might get her answering machine, but she answers on the fifth ring.
“Hello?”
“May I speak to Karen?”
“This is Karen.”
“Hi, it’s Shyla.”
There is a distinct pause on the line. “Oh, hi.”
“I just wanted to check and make sure Rick made it back safely. He had a bit too much to drink.”
“Yes, he’s here. He’ll be fine. Thank you for checking.”
"Okay…how are you?” I ask, feeling strange just hanging up after such a brief chat. I had known her for years, stayed at her house, spent holidays with the family. Now it was like talking to a stranger, one who did not like me very much at that.
“I’m managing. I saw you in the paper. They are naming a foundation after you?”
“Oh, yeah. I didn’t know that was in the paper,” I say, feeling embarrassed by my newfound fortune at the expense of her son’s happiness.
“It was. A little article in the business section.”
Neither of us say anything for a few seconds. Just as I am about to close the painfully distant conversation, Karen says something. “Why are you suddenly back?”
I don’t know how to respond. I don’t want to bad mouth her son, I don’t want to explain that it’s him, not me who initiated the reunion. That he has been begging for me to come back. That tonight, he crossed a line by waiting in the stairwell of my apartment building for me, drunk off of his ass. “I…Rick called me when Big Bob passed. I am so sorry by the way.”
“Shyla, I don’t know if you know. Maybe you do, maybe you don’t, but Rick was a mess when you left him. I try not to make it a point to meddle in my children’s relationships, but you are here now and I feel I should take this opportunity. You just left him, you found some rich man and then just walked out on him.”
“That’s not how it happened.”
“Well that’s how we all see it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You hurt him badly. He hasn’t been the same. He’s obsessed with working out, we think he left his job. He doesn’t talk much to us, so I wouldn’t know. He holds all of the pain in. He thinks he is going to get you back. I know it’s not true. We all do. But when you come visit him or talk to him, it puts ideas in his head. So please, do us all a favor and stay out of his life. Cut the ties so he can move on. I want my son back to the way he was before you broke his heart.”
I listen on the other end in stunned silence. Is this how people see me? Are they right? Maybe I am a selfish bitch. Though, staying with Rick and lying to him would have been no better.
“Goodbye Shyla, I wish you the best of luck.” A click. Silence.
Lyla. Marie. Randall. Nan. Eric. Emily. Rick.
People around Taylor and I suffer. They always have.
Chapter 28
As Taylor and I decompress on the couch after everyone has left, he seems to have cooled down from our encounter with Rick. Instead, it’s me who is truly shaken after the call with Rick’s mother.
“Something’s bothering you. Is it Rick coming over?”
“It’s more than that. I didn’t want to bring this up at the party and further put a damper on things, but Rick’s mom sort of snapped at me when I called.”
“What did she say?” Taylor asks sternly, his protectiveness coming to the surface.
“It wasn’t a long conversation. Just that he has been in worse shape than I thought since the break up. She told me everyone thinks I left him for the money. They see me as a traitor who used him until I found someone better. She asked me to never contact him again.”
“Well that makes things easier.” His answer is not the comforting reassurance I expected.
“No, it doesn’t. Taylor, I will always feel guilty about what I did to him. It was inevitable, but that doesn’t mean it feels good to hurt someone who was good to you.”
“Guilt is a useless emotion, Shyla. It specifically focuses on things that cannot be changed. You don’t believe what his mother said, do you? About using me?”
“Of course not.”
“So the only thing that really bothers you is that you left someone you weren’t really in love with to be with someone who you were in love with. What would be the alternative? To stay with him out of pity? Would that have done him any favors?”
“No.”
“So, you did the right thing. People get hurt. He needs to move on and get over it. Your guilt is pointless.”
It’s then I realize something: I don’t think I have ever really heard Taylor feel guilt over anything. And for the first time it dawns on me: I can’t tell if it’s a philosophy, or his true nature.
“Do you not feel guilt or do you push it away?” I ask.
“Why do you ask?”
“Because if you never feel it, then it’s no work for you. It’s easy for you to tell me not to feel it. It’s like a blind person telling a sighted person not to see.” Taylor squints and contemplates my assertion for a moment. “I am not judging you, I am just trying to understand.”
“If I am being honest. No, I usually don’t feel anything. I can’t feel it. Well, I did feel it once. Maybe regret is the better word. Over not protecting you, over my association with you putting you in harm’s way. But, instead of stewing in it, I eliminated the source.”
Eliminated the source? Taylor just referred to killing his brother as if he was stopping a pipe leak or a termite infestation. He truly feels no remorse.
“I want to ask you something, but I am afraid it will offend you.”
“That’s not how we operate. If you want to ask me something, ask me.”
“Do you know what a sociopath is?”
Taylor’s mouth turns down at the sides, as if he is comprehending where my line of questioning is going.
“Yes, I do.”
“What I am about to ask is not a judgement. I just want to talk to you about it.”
“I understand.”
“Do you think…that maybe…you might…be one?” My heart sinks as soon as I utter the words. I understand, from the research I did when I first found out about Taylor’s inclinations, that sociopathy cannot be helped any more than most other personality traits. But it is the most abhorrent, because it flies in the face of everything we believe makes a good member of society. Someone who doesn’t feel empathy, or guilt, or remorse is the most dangerous person of all. What makes them even more terrifying is that they do not wear a uniform or badge announcing this part of their psychological makeup. They have families, jobs, and hobbies like the rest of us. In fact, they are sometimes the most successful: charming, manipulative, and willing to do whatever it takes to achieve their definition of success. Most aren’t running around collecting bodies in their basement. But they are willing t
o eliminate people who get in their way.
Is this man, whose arms are embracing me, one of those hidden, dangerous, soulless people?
I feel the rise and fall of his throat as he swallows. “Yes. I think so.”
I sit up tall and turn to face him. I expected resistance, anger, denial. Not the unveiled honesty that so smoothly emerges in such a simple response. It leaves me speechless.
“Really?” I ask, more heartbroken than I had expected.
He nods.
“But if you are, how can you say that? I mean, wouldn’t you be denying it?”
“What’s the point? It’s just you and me here. You know everything there is to know about me and you are still here. It’s just a label for what you’ve always known. And why bother asking me if you assume I would just lie?”
“Have you been diagnosed?”
“Of course not. I would never let a therapist see that side of me.” Yup, he is a sociopath.
Panic races through my heart. How can I marry someone who doesn’t possess a conscience, who can turn it on and off like some sort of appliance? But at the same time, I know this man in front of me, and he is so much more than some label affixed to his personality.
I wonder about all the things he might have done throughout his life to get ahead, to win. Isn’t that what his rivalry with Eric was about anyway? Winning the attention of Randall and H.I.?
How many people has Taylor stepped on to build his empire? The acts of kindness that people whisper to me: paying for Marsha’s son’s schooling, plucking Lizzy from obscurity and setting her up on a career path, pulling Henry out of the shadows and into an executive position…Were those things he did from a place of kindness, or were they all calculated moves, like a never-ending game of chess? Carefully, setting up his pieces, building trust, loyalty, a façade of generosity so that he surrounds himself with people willing to go above and beyond for him?
He’s tried to tell me as much: Shyla, I am manipulative, you don’t get where I am without being able to mold people to do what you want.
I could look past that. After all, don’t we all do that to some degree? Ingratiate people, do them favors in order to build trust and acceptance? We do things for others in hopes someone will do the same for us in some karmic way. We may not be as calculated as Taylor, but I am learning from him that it’s the outcome that matters; intentions can be masked.
There is however one thing I know that truly separates him, that cannot be explained away with reasoning or justified through mental gymnastics. And now that I have opened up this line of questioning, now that I have agreed to spend my life with this man, I MUST know everything about who he is, even his most unspeakable actions.
“Was Eric…your first?”
Taylor is silent for a few moments, obviously debating within himself about what to say next. And without saying anything, he is saying so much more than nothing. My stomach lurches up to my throat and I wonder if there is such a thing as knowing too much. Naively, I thought my question would give me peace of mind, that Taylor would reply with immediate assurances that Eric was a fluke. People don’t get away with murder, do they? If Taylor had killed before, he would surely be in prison somewhere, not the respected CEO of a Fortune 500 company.
“No.”
“What?” I say, rising to my knees so that I hover over his seated position.
“Just one.”
“Just one?” As if he stole a cookie from the cookie jar. “Oh god. Why? Who?”
“I don’t know who. You cannot utter a word to anyone. Fuck, I shouldn’t be telling you this…”
“No, tell me. It’s too late to go back.”
“It was self defense. When I was in college, and just figuring things out, I met someone who was a professional. We agreed to meet in a motel in a shady part of town, so that no one would recognize me. When I was leaving, obviously I stuck out like a sore thumb, and someone put a gun to my head and told me to hand over my wallet. I gave it to him and he backed away a few steps and started to run towards the side of the building where it was dark.”
“So the threat was gone?”
“Shyla, he had my wallet with my identity and my home address. Do you understand what would have happened if someone realized who I was? How much money my family has? What I was doing there? I could not let him get away with my wallet.”
“So what happened?”
The idiot was hiding in the bushes looking through my wallet. He didn’t even get thirty feet away. I snuck up on him and hit him in the head. I kept hitting him, and hitting him. And then I grabbed his gun, and I shot him. I grabbed my wallet and left calmly, got rid of the gun where it will never be found, and that was that. I never did anything that stupid again.
“How old were you?”
“Nineteen.”
I slump back into a seated position, overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of Taylor’s confession. I take a few deep breaths to center myself. Taylor watches me patiently, allowing me to digest all of this information. “What was going through your mind? Weren’t you freaking out?”
Taylor exhales and adjusts his position. “That’s when I realized I was different. When he had the gun to my head, I wasn’t scared, I didn’t panic. I only felt anger, but not an uncontrolled rage, at least at that moment. I knew if he didn’t kill me, I was going to get him somehow. And when he left with my wallet, I knew what I had to do, I wasn’t shaky, my mind was clear. It’s only when I started hitting him, when I started thinking about how that idiot would have destroyed the life I was so carefully crafting, that I lost my temper. The plan was one hit, grab the gun, shoot, and run. But I hit him a lot more than once.”
“Was his death on the news?”
“No. I am sure he was a career-criminal drug addict. Bodies like his are found all the time in those neighborhoods, they don’t make it into the news.”
“You have to promise me this is it. Taylor, you can’t take everything into your own hands.”
“I don’t. I only do when I know it’s the only option. Shyla, I am almost thirty-three and it’s happened twice and I think we can agree the circumstances were extreme in both cases. I promise I will do everything not to find myself in those situations. I don’t see how it can happen again. Are you upset?”
I sit back down next to him. “I am shocked…sad…I don’t know. I am trying to understand how this person you are describing to me is you. How can you be my Taylor and then someone who can do these things and sleep at night?”
“How can you eat steak or wear leather and sleep at night? It’s all degrees of tolerance to death, I suppose.”
“This is not eating steak!”
“I know a few PETA members who would argue differently…”
“I know there is some logical fallacy in your argument, I just can’t figure out which…”
“Shyla, it’s not complicated. If someone doesn’t put a gun to my head, or your head, then I have no reason to do anything.”
“I don’t want you to go to jail…”
“I won’t. You are the only person who can make that happen, and I trust you won’t betray me.”
I bury my face in my palms and sigh. “What does this mean?” I ask.
“Nothing. I am still the person you first sat on this couch with ten minutes ago. I am still good to you. You have to understand something. I don’t like hurting people, I don’t get my rocks off doing things to people. If see a car accident, I will stop and help the people in it. If someone needs my help, I’ll help. All it means is that, if I have to do something, I will. If someone wrongs me, I will make it right. And I won’t think twice about it once it’s done.”
“What do you define as ‘having to do something?’”
“If someone threatens you, me, or my business. Their lives will be hell. And I don’t mean uncomfortable like most people do. I mean they will wish they were dead. It’s simple, really. And yes, I’ll admit, I generally feel flat about things that are supposed to stir my emoti
ons, like sad movies, or true-life sob stories. But I still know the world requires order and justice, that it is a better place for me and the ones who are important to me if there is order and people are kind to each other. So, I want the same things as most people, but the reasons are different. Or maybe they aren’t when you think about it.”
“But how can you love me?”
“I don’t know. I really don’t. But I do. No arbitrary label can fit all people. Maybe it’s a spectrum. At least that’s what I am starting to think. I can still love. I can still care. Unlike most people who have a list of five or ten people they love, my list is only one person long. And maybe I wasn’t always this way. I knew you when I was an innocent child. Perhaps you trigger whatever is left of that still.”
“What if it’s not love you feel for me? What if it’s just an attachment to our circumstances, our common past?”
“Maybe love is inadequate. It’s an overused term. But our shared circumstances only make our bond stronger, they don’t invalidate it. People who claim to ‘love’ people would never do the things I am willing to do for you. We exist for each other. We’ve bonded like some sort of chemical reaction. We can no longer be whole without the other.”
He’s right, we didn’t just fall in love. We have infected and invaded each other. The infection has made us do things we never would have had we not met each other, but it has also healed us in ways we never could have on our own. We are now carriers of the other, and we can never be cured.
“What about your dad? Henry? Lizzy? Is it all an act?”
“They matter to me. I enjoy them. I would protect them. But you matter more. If they threatened you in anyway, I suppose my feelings towards them would change drastically. But that won’t happen, so I don’t worry. They are good people.” His flat delivery is like a mask lifted for me to see what truly lies inside of him. His relationships, no matter how deeply rooted they may seem, are one betrayal away from his wrath.
“And if I betray you? What happens to me?”
“You won’t.”
“I am human.”
unStrapped Page 24
