“No one was in the house, right?…Are you sure it was a false alarm?…Okay, yes, we are due for an overhaul anyway, get the security company out there, no expense spared. Thank you.”
“Is everything okay?” I ask.
“Yes, something happened with the alarm system. It shut down, then it went off and even after Harrison shut it down, it came on again. He’s certain no one was in the house, it just seems to be a glitch in the system. Nothing to worry about. I had it first put in years ago, I am sure it’s due for a major upgrade. And now, that it’s our home and it will become public knowledge that I have a wife, I want the house to be a fortress.”
“I’d have to agree. Especially if we have little Holdens running around some day…”
Taylor looks at me suspiciously.
“Don’t worry, I am on the pill. I want you all to myself for a long time.”
“Likewise.”
“How are you feeling?” I ask, sensing that Taylor is now more talkative.
“I don’t know,” he says genuinely. “And you?”
“Same here. I just want to get it all over with.”
“Are you regretting your insistence on this reunion?”
“No, I still believe it’s important. I just hate the uncertainty. Just promise me whatever happens, remember you have me. You will always have me.”
Taylor sighs and pulls me over to him. “I guess work can hold off for a bit. Talk to me, about what you want to do after the wedding. You said you had some ideas.”
“Well, for one, I want to have an active role in the family foundation, but you already know that. On a personal level, I want to open a multimedia art gallery, not just to display and sell my work, but work from artists all over the country.”
“I had a feeling that’s what you were thinking. I love it.”
“And I want to use my money to start it.”
“Technically we will share everything, so your money is not limited to your current account.”
“Well, you know what I mean.”
“I do. Whatever you want to do, I fully support. I know a lot of wealthy art lovers. If I invite them to your shows, you might be supporting me soon.”
“Doubtful, Mr. Holden.”
***
Just after checking in, we meet my mother in her suite at the Holiday Inn and Suites in Glendive, Montana, a short distance from the town of Terry, where Lyla lives. Admittedly, I am getting used to staying at some really fancy places, thanks to Taylor’s fine tastes, but in this neck of the woods, Holiday Inn is about an fancy as it gets. It’s just after lunch, and we all agree that the tension is just too strong to wait on meeting Lyla. The how is where it gets trickier.
“Mom, you knew her best. What do you think we should do?” I ask, pacing along the narrow space between the love seat and the coffee table.
“Taylor, I think you should have a say in this. Out of all of us, she is your blood relative.”
“I have no opinion on the matter.”
“Well,” my mother says, “my hunch is that if we all show up on her doorstep, that might be too much to take all at once.”
“Agreed,” I say.
“Maybe, I should go first. You are right, I did know her. And yes, she could find a way to avoid you and Taylor, but I know in my heart that is not the case. I know she will want to see you as soon as it all sinks in.”
“So how should we do this?” I ask.
Finally, Taylor brings his leadership skills to the table. “Marie, I will have our driver take you and wait for you as long as you need. We’ll wait here. Please call or text Shyla once you are inside so we know you are okay. From there, based on what Lyla and you decide, you just get in touch with us. We’ll be here. No rush.”
My mother and I nod in tense agreement.
“So according to the files we have, her daughter is married and does not live at home. Her son is in school in another state. Her husband is deceased. She does not work, but lives off of his large life insurance policy. So, she should be home, based on the private detective’s notes of her comings and goings,” Taylor adds.
“He was thorough,” I say of MacAllister.
“I guess. I should go now. The anticipation is killing me, and this could be a long day.”
Mom grabs her purse before embracing me. This mundane ritual: grabbing one’s things, valedictions, exiting a room, they don’t seem to carry the magnitude of where she is headed. Where we all are headed.
“Mom, don’t forget to touch base with us as soon as you are inside. Taylor will be in touch with the driver and he will be instructed to let us know when you are out of sight. Once that happens, if we don’t hear from you within five minutes, he will be instructed to knock on the door.”
“Okay, I’ll make sure. Trust me, I’ll be safe. She’s just a mom like me. She’s living in hiding, just like me. There’s nothing to fear.”
***
Taylor sits on the loveseat of my mother’s suite as I pace back and forth, anxiously waiting to hear from her. She sent the first text fifteen minutes ago to let us know she was fine and I feel like I am going to burst. The room is silent, other than the sound of my footsteps. I feel Taylor’s eyes watching me go from one end of the suite to the other. He doesn’t say anything. There really isn’t anything to say or do but wait.
Finally, my cell phone rings, and I accept the call before the first ring even finishes. I place the call on speaker so we can both hear.
“Mom?” I ask.
“Hi sweetie,” her nose sounds stuffy, like she may have been crying.
“Is everything okay?”
“Yes. I am just outside of the house, on the porch. I told Lyla I wanted to talk to you.”
“So how’d it go?”
“She’s in shock I think. As soon as she saw me, she burst into tears. We haven’t really talked about the past, just how things are now. I think she’s ready to answer some questions, but she wants to see Taylor and you.”
“Okay, we can come,” I say nodding my head nervously while making eye contact at Taylor who simply nods once. “We’ll be over shortly.”
“Ready?” I ask Taylor after I end the call.
He nods, slaps his palms to his knees and stands.
“Wait,” I say. I walk towards him and cup his large hands in my small ones, smoothing soft circles with my thumbs in his palms. “Are you okay? I mean really okay?”
“You’re the one pacing around the room like you’re on bath salts,” he says flatly with the slightest hint of jest. “Don’t worry about me.”
“Smartass,” I say, relieved he has a sense of humor about him during this heavy time.
Chapter 31
The pale blue bungalow sits behind a small dirt path off of a quiet road, hidden behind several snow-covered barren trees. From what I could tell of the town during our drive from the nearest city, it is tiny, with a main street that consists of a general store, a doctor’s office, an ice cream parlor, a gift shop, a diner, and a hardware store. It is the perfect place to go unnoticed by the rest of the world. Yes, I am sure everyone in the town knows who she is, but they only know Elizabeth Murrow, the widow and mother of two, active in the PTA, and a volunteer organizer for the town’s annual fourth of July parade.
We had a car service drop us off at the beginning of the path so we could go back to the hotel with my mother in the car that had driven her earlier. The walk to the end of the path feels like I am trudging up a hill, despite it being flat and well-plowed. As I observe the white patio and the American flag moving listlessly in the breeze, I see the curtains in a lower level window shift to one side, but it is too dark behind the window to catch a glimpse of the person behind it.
Taylor and I stop at the base of the stairs. I give him one last look, reach for his hand, and give it a firm squeeze before releasing it. “Let’s fucking do this,” I whisper resolutely.
The slightest grin breaks through his lips.
Before we can knock on the doo
r, my mother opens it. She is the only person on the other side. “Come, she’s nervous,” mom whispers. “Are we all good?”
Taylor and I both nod. Mom leads us from the foyer to a living area, I stand a little bit behind Taylor, understanding my place in this whole thing. And there she is, a ghost. Lyla Bordeau is standing, eagerly facing the entrance, a weak, nervous smile on her face. Her hair is still long and thick, most of the blonde faded to streaks of white and gray. The color of her eyes is only brighter against her mane, and for a second, I think one day when Taylor is much older, his eyes will pop against the gray just like hers. Despite the color of her hair, her skin still glows, making her appear young for her age. She has aged with grace and beauty, and I can see glimmers of Taylor in her posture and poise.
Taylor stands stoic, his body language and face completely unreadable, and I wonder if Lyla finds her son’s powerful presence intimidating, or if she still sees a troubled little boy.
I don’t how long we are silent, but the room freezes for a bit as we all wait for someone to say the first words. I think we all know it should be Lyla.
She motions to to hug Taylor and he puts his hand up to stop her. The tense interaction is painfully awkward, but Taylor is immune to those things. She immediately bows her chin down in acknowledgement and puts her hands down to her sides. “Of course. You still don’t like people touching you.”
“You don’t know me.” Taylor says.
“We could go, Taylor, leave the two of you,” I whisper to him, but loud enough so the room can hear.
“No, you don’t go anywhere. You are my family,” he says without looking at me, keeping his eyes on Lyla.
Lyla’s gaze breaks off of Taylor to me, and the welling in her eyes builds further. “Little Shyla. You have grown up to be so beautiful. You were just a tiny little thing when I last saw you. May I?” Her eyes go between Taylor and I as if she’s asking us both for permission. But Taylor knows this is my call.
“Sure,” I say, extending my arms to her for a hug. It is a nice hug, not overly familiar or tight, but not awkward and clunky.
“Can we sit down somewhere? So we can talk?” she asks.
“Of course,” I say, getting the feeling Taylor won’t be saying much for a while. We follow her to a nook in the kitchen with a round table and four chairs. I notice Taylor takes the seat closest to the exit. Four cups with tea bags are already waiting, and she pours hot water into each of the cups without asking.
“You are so handsome, but I already knew that. There isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t think of you Taylor. Any of you for that matter.”
Taylor maintains his silence. I know his strategy. It makes people talk to fill the air. It’s amazing how much he can get people to say by not saying anything at all.
“Shyla, I spoke to your mother a little bit, there is so much I wanted to say to all of you though, so that’s why I wanted to wait for you all to be here. But she told me how you went to college, how brilliant you are.”
I muster up a smile. “Mom is always showing me off. It’s no big deal.”
“Where you came from, it is.” She means C.O.S, not the neighborhood I grew up in. She plays with the teabag, pulling it just out of the water and letting it drop back in a few times. Then she leans forward into the table, while cupping the mug, and looks at Taylor.
“I know I owe you all an explanation, but most of all you, Taylor. I have rehearsed what I would say to you thousands of times if you ever found me. There were times I was certain this day would come and other days where I was certain I would die without ever seeing you face to face. You must know that leaving you was the hardest decision I have ever made, and I have had to make a lot of hard decisions throughout my life. I know it may not seem like the case, but I did what I thought was the best for you at the time.”
Lyla pauses for a reaction of any sort from Taylor, but he simply waits in silence for her to carry on.
“You have to understand, there wasn’t much time to think. Those last two weeks, before the suicides, things were chaotic. I was still so young, and scared. I had to think quickly and we barely made it out alive. We shouldn’t have. We should have died there. And I truly thought you would be better off if I had just died. I was the only surviving witness to one of the largest mass suicides ever. You would have always lived in that shadow, you would never be able to move away from that. I ruined my chance with you. I thought—no, I knew—that living with your father, someone who had no association with C.O.S. whatsoever, would protect you from the memories. You could truly start fresh. If I had stayed around you would never be able to move forward. To forget.”
Move forward. Look forward. Taylor’s philosophy. But I know the truth, he has never truly forgotten that time in his life. It’s like a permanent tattoo on his psyche.
“How?”
“Excuse me?” she asked, stunned by Taylor’s sudden decision to speak.
“How did you make it out alive? How did we survive?”
“I made a fake version of the drink for us that put us to sleep, but it didn’t have cyanide.”
“And then how did you disappear?”
“I stole money from Alan, I knew where he kept it. I bought a bus ticket, changed my hair color, hopped around for a few months until I stumbled into a small town in Nevada, where I met Chris. He was a single dad of a small boy. A nice man. He treated me well, unlike Alan. We stayed together ever since. We moved here seventeen years ago when he got a really good job working in the oil industry. He died two years ago of colon cancer.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” I say.
“Thank you.”
“Did he know about your past?” I ask.
“Not at first, but eventually, I told him and he took it with him to the grave.”
There is a lull in the conversation for a bit. We started off with the facts and who knows what, but it doesn’t seem to fill the void. We came to this meeting for answers, but the answers we are looking for aren’t in the facts, they are in the spaces between them.
“Taylor, I thought about you all the time. I never forgot you. I sent postcards to Marie, breaking my promise to myself that I would leave no trace. I realized what I was doing wasn’t safe so I stopped. I hoped that by some miracle you would find me. I wanted to give you the choice, not impose on your new life. I knew if you really wanted to find me, you would find a way.”
“It was Shyla who found you. I never looked,” Taylor says coldly.
Lyla nods and pulls a scrapbook from the baker’s rack behind her, opening it up to reveal newspaper clippings and articles printed from the internet.
Local Swimmer Achieves Three Time All-American
Taylor Holden, 25, Announced as New CEO of Holden Industries After Father’s Sudden Retirement
Can Taylor Holden Bring Holden Industries into the Modern Age?
Holden Foundation Announces New Arts & Technology fund in Honor of CEO’s Fiancée
That last small article must have been the one Karen saw.
“I followed you, Taylor. I knew about the swimming, the tennis, the honors society. I am so proud of the man you have become and I truly believe that would not be the case if I was there. Whatever it was, whatever you channeled, maybe it was your anger against me, or maybe you never even thought of me, you did great things. I understand and I deserve your anger. But I truly believe if I was around you would not be who you are today.”
I watch Taylor as those powerful words come out of Lyla. I watch him as he slowly seethes. Because while she may be right, Taylor never had a say in the matter; he never had a choice. And Taylor always has to be in control. When it came to her, she took that away from him.
“I am supposed to believe this was all some great act of selflessness? Where the fuck where you when your boyfriend beat the shit out of me? Choked me in my sleep? Put me in that fucking school? You think you can just take credit for the fact that I turned out the way I did? No, I am who I am despite you, not becau
se of you or any decision that you made. You wanted to start over, you fucked me up and then you left your mess for Randall to clean up.” Taylor slams his palm on the table and rises to his feet.
My mother motions to stand to try and ease the situation.
“It’s okay. It’s okay…” Lyla says.
I don’t say anything, but I softly grab Taylor’s wrist and I feel his tense muscles ease. His heaving chest slows, and he sits back down.
“Shyla is good for you.”
“You don’t know us. You don’t know what’s good for me.”
Lyla nods. “I deserve this. I brought you into that mess. I was young and stupid and I used you as a pawn to get back at your father. I was sixteen and I was scared and angry and abandoned. I loved your father at the time, I thought he loved me back. Now I am old enough to understand that my expectations of him leaving your stepmother to marry me were childish delusions, but I was a child. A stubborn, strong-willed child, but a child nonetheless. That being said, I don’t expect your love or your forgiveness. I just thought you should have your answers. And selfishly, I just…” her next words barely make it out, “I just wanted to see you.”
Then Taylor says something so restrained, yet intimate. Something only I understood up until this point might have hurt him more than anything.
“You left me with no mother and then started another family. Like you could just erase me and get a do-over with new children. None of this was ever about me. It was about getting your life back.” While his response seems cold compared to her words, they are the most vulnerable words he could have uttered.
A single tear shimmers in Lyla’s eye. “That’s not true. You don’t understand.”
I sense Taylor’s rage building up again, so I squeeze his thigh under the table, but he shoots up and storms out of the kitchen.
I look over to our mothers. “I am going to talk to him. This is a lot to take.”
I follow Taylor back into the living room. Taylor has completely lost his cool, now he’s the one pacing. “Shyla, she’s lying about something. I know it. I know these things. Something is off. It doesn’t make sense.”
unStrapped Page 26
