Chapter Forty-Four

Isaac Hanson

Walking around the Lowell household was a lot like walking into an alternate universe where your younger brother is a part of another family complete with photographs and stories.

It was hard not to notice all the photographs placed in various locations around the house from the professional one of Parker and Gina sitting in front of a garden that Parker told me was taken by one of her boyfriends a few years ago to the one next to the computer on the desk where Gina and Parker had their arms draped across each other's shoulders, Parker holding up a trophy of some sort. And a recent school picture sitting on top of the television set which Parker scrunched his nose up at when he noticed me staring at it. There were so many, despite the fact that Gina didn't seem like the obsessive type of parent who had pictures of their kids everywhere (i.e. my parents), but she did nevertheless. But so much in those photos was so familiar. The way Parker smiled, the way he stood in some pictures, the look in his eyes, all similar to the way Taylor smiled and stood and expressed so much through his eyes. It sent shiveres up my spine and I began to half-expect a portal of some kind to open up in a random section of the house as we walked through it that I could jump into and I would be back home and Taylor would be waking me up, complaining about my snoring again.

But by that point, I had figured out I couldn't go home anymore. Not like it used to be anyway. But if I couldn't go back home, I at least wanted to go see Taylor. It had been insisted that I stayed behind, saying that someone familiar needed to stay behind to comfort the kids if they needed it. That was always my job. Sometimes I wondered if anyone stopped to think if I needed any comforting myself.

"Um, this is my room," Parker said, sounding a little embarrassed as he opened a door that led to a room off of the living room. He had posters of the Beatles and Star Wars as well as a few more photos that I chose to skip over although Parker gestured to them in passing saying something about his friends, the Drews. He had a dresser with a mirror and a bed that had gone unmade since the last time he had slept in it. The room seemed too large for all that it contained, but that's coming from a guy who has to share his room with his two younger brothers. Or something like that.

It was when I wandered over to the dresser and I saw the framed picture set carelessly on top that I realized my mistake in agreeing to come into the room right away. There were two babies. I knew who they were without asking. But I felt the need to ask anyway.

"You and Taylor?" I inquired, holding it up.

He turned to see what I was holding up and nodded, saying nothing. The expression on his face was almost guilty or apologetic. That was the first moment that I realized that Parker was aware of what kind of pain his sudden arrival was causing my family and myself and that he felt bad for it. I suddenly felt like an idiot and, though I felt the need to say something comforting, to let him know that it wasn't his fault, I couldn't get the words out. Despite the fact that I kept trying to push it out of my mind, I couldn't help but wonder if, perhaps, he should feel guilty. Thanks to him just suddenly traisping into our life the way he had, our family would never be the same again.

"How does that make you feel?" I asked suddenly. I figured before I blamed him for too much, I had to know his side of the story.

"About what?" he said, coming out of his closet, his hair tousled from his struggle with whatever was stuffed in there.

"About Taylor being your twin," I clarified, looking down at the photograph again, finding that I couldn't find a way of disproving that one of the babies in the picture was Taylor. I had seen pictures of Taylor as a baby and one of them was definitely him. It had just never occured to me that most of those baby picture hadn't been taken by my parents.

He shrugged. "I haven't figured out how to feel yet," he said. "I'm finding that my emotions about it aren't the same from one minute to the next. It's mostly disbelief, though."

I had to admire his honestly about it. If it had been me, I would have shrugged and said some generic adjective like, "happy."

"And you know, it's not even so much disbelief that he's this huge pop star that I used to despise because everyone told me that I looked so much like him and that was mostly an insult because a lot of people said he looked like a girl," he went on after a short pause and I knew that he was no longer trying to explain it to me so much as himself. "It's more disbelief that I actually found my twin brother after all this time. That I've been wondering about him at least once a year every year on our birthday, for so much time, and he just sort of shows up. I'm just afraid I'm going to wake up any second now."

"I know the feeling," I said, glad that I wasn't the onloy one who felt like he was walking through a dream.

He looked at me in such a way that almost made me believe that it was actually Taylor standing there in front of me and not Parker. The seriousness of his eyes was one that I often saw in Taylor's, despite the fact that Taylor usually made an effort to make it a little less blunt.

"Except you're not afraid to wake up from a dream," he said. "You're hoping you do."

I looked to my feet, unable to keep my eyes to his anymore. It seemed like every minute brought a new word to describe him as. This minute brought on the word "perceptive."

"It's okay," he assured me quickly. "I mean, trust me, I know this all takes more than a little getting used to. I was just a little more well prepared than you, I guess."

"Not that it's exactly possible to be prepared for something like this," I said. "No matter which side you're on," he added.

I'll lick the stamp for you, if that's what it takes!
(Well, even though there aren't any stamps required in sending e-mail...)

Index
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Five