Chapter 9
“Taylor?”
Taylor
whirled around to see Harry standing in the doorway of the living room.
“What
are you doing?” Harry asked, peering over her shoulder at the open photo album
that rested in her lap.
“Harry,
who’s this boy?” Taylor asked, ignoring his question. She motioned to the little boy in the
picture.
Harry’s
eyes widened as he looked at the picture.
“Where did you find that?” he asked.
“The
album was lying here on the couch,” Taylor said. “I’d never seen it before, so I was wondering
what it was.”
He
was silent, his gaze fixed on the picture.
“Harry,
I woke up in the middle of the night and came down here to get a drink, and I
saw Mom in here looking at this and crying,” Taylor confessed. “Why was she crying? What have you guys been hiding from me?”
Harry
took a deep breath and sat beside her on the couch. “Taylor, that little boy is your brother,
Brian,” he said.
Her
blue eyes widened. “He is? Well, what happened to him? Where is he?”
Her last question came out in nothing more than a whisper.
“He’s
dead, Tay,” Harry said softly.
She
stared at him in horror, shocked that in all her thirteen years, she had never
been told this. “What happened?” she
whispered.
“It
happened the night you were born,” Harry started. Sadly, he told her the story of what had
happened to her other brother the night of her birth.
“So
you think he’s dead?” Taylor asked when he had finished.
Harry
nodded solemnly. “He was never
found. The police gave up, and they told
us he was most likely dead.
“So
that’s why Mom always seems sad on my birthday,” Taylor said softly.
Harry
nodded regretfully. “Yeah, that’s
why. She can’t help it. Part of her is happy because she remembers
you being born, but another part of her is sad because she remembers Brian and
what happened to him.”
Taylor
nodded, struggling to hold back tears.
It was all so horrible.
“Look,
Tay, I don’t think you should let Mom and Dad know that you know about
this. When you started to get older,
they made me promise never to tell you.
They didn’t want you to know about it, and I wasn’t supposed to tell
you.”
Taylor
nodded again, hesitantly. “Okay,
Harry,” she said. “I won’t tell them.”
Harry
smiled sadly at her and suddenly pulled her into his arms, hugging her
tightly. Taylor hugged her brother
back, and suddenly, her eyes filled with tears, as she thought about her lost
brother and the tragedy that had happened to her family so many years ago.
***
The
next day at school, Taylor found herself unable to concentrate. She was lost in her own thoughts, her
thoughts of Brian, the secret that had been kept from her her whole life.
“Taylor?”
Taylor
looked up from her lunch tray into the face of her best friend, Jaime
Hubert. “Huh?”
“Something
wrong? You’re spacing out,” Jaime
laughed.
Taylor
smiled sheepishly. “Nah, nothing’s
wrong. I’m just out of it today,” she
replied.
Jaime
nodded. “Don’t worry about it. I get like that too sometimes.”
Taylor
nodded, returning to picking at her lunch.
She wanted to tell Jaime what Harry had told her, but she knew she
couldn’t. It was a family secret, and
if her parents couldn’t even know that she knew the truth, neither could
Jaime.
***
Taylor
was glad when the school day was over, glad that the weekend had finally
arrived. She came home to an empty
house, but was not surprised, for she knew her father was working, her mother
was probably out running errands, and Harry had driven back to his dorm room
earlier that day.
As
Taylor prepared herself an after school snack, her thoughts once again drifted
to Brian. She wondered what things
would be like if he was still with them, what it would be like to have another
big brother around. From Harry’s
retelling of what had happened, she knew that Brian had been five, almost six,
when she was born. That meant that he
would have been almost nineteen now. He
would have probably been in college too, and would have come to visit her on
her birthday.
She
imagined what it would be like to have five people gathered around the kitchen
table for dinner, rather than just the four of them that she was used to. But she would never know. She had never experienced having another
member of the family around, never known Brian. And now she never would.
The
thought saddened her. She felt like she
had missed out on something great. She
had missed out on knowing her other brother, even if it were just for the brief
time he had lived, which was not even six years. He had missed out on a lot too. He hadn’t been able to grow up or do any of
the things that Taylor took for granted.
As
she thought about this, her sadness turned to anger. What had happened to Brian that night? It seemed obvious that he had been
kidnapped. But who would do such a
thing? It was too horrible to understand. Why would anyone take a little boy away from
his family and end his life? Why would
another human being put other people through so much pain?
Taylor’s
bitter thoughts were interrupted by the sound of the garage door opening,
signaling that her mother was coming home.
Quickly wiping her eyes, Taylor went back to slicing an apple for her
snack and tried to act as if she knew nothing.
Suddenly,
she wished she didn’t know the truth.
Maybe her family had been right in hiding it from her. She had felt betrayed at first, but maybe
their secrecy had been for the best.
Now that she knew, she could not forget, could not get rid of the troubling
thoughts that barged through her mind.
It was a burden to her, and there was nothing she could do about it
except feel sad and angry. And she did
not want that. She wished she could be
a carefree twelve year old again, like she had been just days earlier, innocent
to the turmoil her family had been thrown into the night of her birth.
But
she could not be. In just days, she had
matured greatly by gaining this knowledge which her parents had tried to
protect her from. And she knew her once
normal-seeming life and family would never be the same to her again.
***
