Taylor Hanson
I looked away from the window I had been staring out of for the past three days in a row, trying to clear my mind of any thoughts about my mother and al the pain and heartache she could possibly cause, expecting to see one of my family members and, somewhere in the back of my mind, wondering how they had gotten there so quickly after Isaac had left. But who I saw standing there instead sent a horrible feeling all throughout my body. Perhaps one more horrible than my mother could have brought on had she been the one standing in the doorway.
The man with the gruff voice was dressed in a police officer's uniform. It didn't take much to figure out what he was there for.
"Yeah?" I said reluctantly, crossing my fingers in the hope that he was only going to ask me where he might find some other room he was really looking for.
"Are you Mr. Jordan Hanson?" he asked.
"No," I said. For a moment, I was confused by my answer, knowing that there were several things I could have meant by it. I could have been trying to lie to him to get him to go away. I could have been answering truthfully since it wasn't common for me to be called Jordan. Or I could have been answering truthfully in another way. As if I were taking my mother's side.
He raised his eyebrows at me and checked the pad of paper he had in his hand again, making sure he had the right name.
I decided to take the second of my three options since the first and third were simply too dangerous.
"I usually go by my middle name, Taylor," I told him hesitantly.
"Oh," he said, sighing with impatience. "Well, Taylor, I have to ask you a few questions. Standard procedure."
I shifted nervously as he sat down in the chair next to the bed, notebook and pen poised in his hand. I felt more like someone on a couch in a psychologist's office. I also felt like someone who belonged there.
(AUTHOR'S NOTE: Sorry to interrupt, but I feel the need to tell those of you out there reading this that I have no idea how stuff like this goes in these sorts of situations, so if the dialogue here is totally inaccurate as to what would really happen, I'm sorry in advance.)
"Now, Taylor, can you recall any details about what your attacker looked like?" he asked.
He's about six foot two with short, light brown hair that he normally covers with a cowboy hat or something like that. Maybe about a hundred and sixty to two hundred pounds. Green eyes. Evil green eyes.
"No, I don't."
"None at all?" the policeman asked skeptically.
"None at all," I confirmed.
"Okay...," he said slowly, scribbling something down on his pad of paper. "Um, can you tell me what happened, exactly?"
I had known that question was coming, but I hadn't expected it so soon and it caught me way off guard. I hadn't had time to think of a way out of the question.
"I'm tired," I said abruptly.
He looked at me skeptically. I really didn't like this guy. I shifted uncomfortably, memories of what had happened flying through my head. Only now Lyle's face became the police officer's.
"This won't take long," he assured me.
I shuddered at his words.
"I'm tired," I repeated weakly.
"This won't take that long," he said again, leaning forward.
I slid carefully and subtly over to the other side of the hospital bed. growing afraid.
"Just tell me what happened in as much detail as you can," he said. "It won't take long."
"I don't, I don't, um, I don't remember what, um, what happened," I lied, breaking eye contact with him.
"Taylor...," I heard Lyle's voice say menacingly. I realized that it was the officer who had spoken.
"What?" I said defensively. "I don't remember."
"How can you not remember?" he said. Not to mention he wasn't exactly what I would call tactful. "The doctors told me that you suffered some knifing to the arm. Your head didn't get hurt or anything, right?"
He might have been attempting a joke, but I wasn't in the right frame of mind to take it as a joke and began wodnering what sort of words he would use on me if he knew that had really happened that day. I wasn't gonig to tell him. I couldn't tell him.
"Just tell me and get it over with," he said. "The sooner you get it out, the better."
"Excuse me?" a female voice interrupted the conversation. My frightened eyes raced quckly from the officer and I was surprised to see my mother, my real mother, standing in the door way, hands on her hips. "What's going on?"
"Just some standard questioning, ma'am," he said, standing up. "Are you the mother?"
She hesitated, her eyes quickly darting from the officer to me and back to the officer again. It was obvious that she didn't know how to answer him.
"No," she finally said, avoiding my stare. "I'm just a friend."
"Do you have any idea what happened?" he asked curiously, chewing the eraser of his pencil.
"You're not very tactful, are you?" she said, crossing her arms and looking at him as if she were in a museum looking at a painting that hadn't been done very well.
"This is just standard," he repeated for what must have been the fortieth time. "We have to do this. It helps us catch the person who committed the crime. It's part of the job."
"Yeah, that and vacating the pastry shops of donuts," she returned, a hint of a smile on her lips.
It looked like he was ready to smile back, but decided to keep with his business-like manner instead. "Look, this will only take a few minutes," he said. "If you'd kindly leave."
"No, sir, if you'd kindly leave, I'm sure you could do this some other time. When Taylor feels ready," she said, making room for him to pass her in the doorway and pointing down the hall.
"Ma'am," he started.
"Sir," she interrupted. "Please. I don't think he's ready."
"Fine," he relented. "But keep in mind that this is standard procedure and that he's going to have to answer the questions eventually," he told her as he exited the room.
She sighed, watching him go down the hall before looking back at me. I knew I probably had a strange look on my face that was somewhere in between fear and that look that women always get on their faces in old movies before they exclaim, "My hero!"
"Are you all right?" she asked, coming the rest of the way into the room and closing the door behind her. She bit her lip when I didn't answer her, choosing just to stare at her instead. "Taylor? Are you all right?"
"I don't think so," I said, my eyes suddenly welling up with tears. For a moment, she looked like she didn't know what to do, but then quickly came over and sat on the edge of the bed, wrapping me in a warm, comforting hug, rocking me back and forth slightly as if I were a little kid who had just woken up from a nightmare. I wished it had only been a nightmare.
"Do you know how long I've waited to do something like this?" she asked quietly into my ear. Her warm breath tickled my ear and it was a pleasant feeling. I didn't answer. I just cried quietly into her shoulder, wanting the horrible event that had taken place just a few days before to vanish from memory, if not from history.
It was a long time before I calmed down enough to let her pull away from my grasp.
She sighed, staring into my eyes. She smiled tearfully and tucked my hair behind my ear.
"Look," she said, sighing and taking her hand away from me. I almost reached over and brought it back, but decided against it. "I want to get one thing cleared up before I leave."
Leave?
"What's that?" I asked quietly when she didn't go on.
"That's that I'm not here to start a fight with Walk-, uh, your, um, parents, over you and Parker or anything like that," she said. "I was the one who you answered the phone to and I was worried, so, since I knew where Gina lived, I came here to make sure you were all right. You weren't even supposed to find out who I was. I'm sorry." She was looking at her hands now instead of me.
"Okay...," I said slowly, not sure where to go next, much like the day Parker and I had really gotten to converse for the first time in his hotel room. So, I went the route that I thought Parker might have gone if he were in the same situation. "There's a few questions I'd like to ask you. If you don't mind."
She smiled. Parker's smile, too. I was a little jealous that Parker seemed to be so much like her and I could hardly find any of me in her expressions or small features on her face. Maybe her nose...
"Of course," she said. "But, just to warn you, I'm not too good with the hard questions. You might want to start off easy."
"Okay," I agreed. "I think Gina and my parents already pretty much covered a lot of the hard stuff anyway."
"Oh," she said. I couldn't figure out her tone. "Okay. Go ahead."
"Where do you live?" I asked.
"Near Tulsa," she said. "Coincidence of coincidences."
"You didn't know we were in Tulsa?"
"Do I look like I read Bop?" she asked jokingly. "Actually, we did, but Reese--that's my husband's name--got transferred and we're going to have to move there."
I nodded.
"Reese...Is he my father?" I asked next, knowing that it might have been one of the hard questions, but that depended on how she chose to answer.
She simply smiled wistfully, even a little regretffully and said, "No. He was a good friend of mine in high school and he was kind of the one that helped me through...everything. I don't know, we just sort of fell in love somewhere along the line and got married about five years ago."
"Oh," I said, choosing not to pursue the question of who my father was.
A long silence fell over us as I couldn't figure out what to ask next. There was so much I wanted to ask, not so much for my benefit, but for Parker's, who had been the one who had probably thought so much about everything he wanted to say to her. I had only known about her for three weeks.
She was the one who broke the silence.
"Taylor," she said, sitting back and shaking her head. "Where did they come up with a name like that?"
"What? You think Taylor is stupid?" I asked, suddenly realizing that I had no idea what to call her.
"Not stupid, just, um, very Walker and Diana-esque," she said. "Your real name, in case you were wondering and I doubt you were, but I'm going to tell you anyway, is Jordan Emerson Whitney."
I scrunched up my nose. "And you think Taylor is a dumb name?"
"Jordan is after my uncle and Emerson is after my father. Your grandfather," she told me.
"Oh," I said, instantly humbled. "Well, if it makes you feel any better, my, um, parents, call me Jordan Taylor Hanson."
She nodded, not seeming to be comforted too much by the fact that my parents had kept my first name. Even if that wasn't what they called me most of the time.
"What about Parker?" I asked. "What's his real name?"
"Parker Lawrence Whitney. Gina pretty much kept his name," she replied. "Parker after my older brother and Lawrence after my husband."
"I thought you said his name was Reese," I said.
"Reese Lawrence. Most people call him Lawrence, but he lets me call him Reese," she said, shrugging again.
"So when you got married," I said slowly, trying to clue her in that I had no idea what to call her, "your name changed from Andrea Whitney to Andrea Lawrence, right?"
"I prefer Annie," she said.
"Oh," I said. "Well, I prefer Tay."
She smiled at me. It was kind of like a weird bond, telling the names that we preferred to be called.
"Well, hello, Tay. I'm Annie," she said, sticking out her right hand.
I smiled slightly and took her hand. It felt calloused and pleasantly rough in mine.
"Hi, Annie," I said as our hands moved up and down together in a grasp that would, from that day on, never end.
And of course that ended up being the exact moment my parents chose to walk into the room.
Dun dun dun dun....
Index
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Nine