“Are you?” I knew I was avoiding the question and so did she. I was nervous as hell and too scared to admit it in my own voice. It was something I had turned over many times in my own mind and saying it out loud would only make it all the more worse. To me it felt wrong to be nervous. How strange it can be to be afraid of going home to your own family.
How cold they can get when you decide to leave home to do what felt like going home for the first time. When you finally take the leap off of what you know so that you can understand what you don’t know better. So you can understand what was never told to you better.
My thoughts were mostly with my brothers. At the time of my offical departure, Zac was still dwelling in a numb hurt state as he had been since I had announced I wanted to go home to Annie after the concert in Darien Lake. He wouldn’t look me in the eye and wouldn’t stay in the same room with me if he didn’t have to. Every time I tried to talk to him, the only thing that was conveyed to me in response was something along the lines of hurt betrayal.
Isaac was much worse, though. Where Zac was hurt, Isaac was angry. Angry and simply beyond understanding. He didn’t get it and I really couldn’t expect him to when I wasn’t sure I got it myself. Not at first. When I tried to say good-bye to him one last time before I left, he didn’t respond. He only walked away, shaking his head, mumbling to himself something none of us could really hear.
So much for swearing that we were always brothers, no matter what the bloodline.
“Let it go,” my mother had said after Isaac’s good-bye, putting a hand on my tense shoulder. I turned to her, tears in my eyes. But as I looked into her face, they turned from tears of my own anger and hurt to tears of sadness that spilled over the edges and ran down my cheeks. Suddenly, I was without voice.
She smiled and ran her fingers through my hair. The hair that I had thought came from her until an accidental mix of identity had come about and the truth had to be told to me. I tried to smile back, but my smile faltered and I bit my bottom lip, the tears running down my cheeks.
“Be good,” she said, wrapping her arms around me.
“I love you,” I whispered into her ear.
“Me too,” she said, patting my back and turning me over to my father, whose expression was one of nothing more than complete perplexion.
“Take care,” he said, holding onto my shoulder and trying to look me in the eye but finding he could not hold my gaze. He would glance at me briefly and then blink as if the sun were in his eyes and look away. “We’ll miss you,” he added.
“I’ll miss you, too. But I’ll see you in a few weeks, right?” I said.
“Unless you’re planning on breaking all this to Parker before that,” he said.
I detected a note of bitterness in his voice, but dismissed it as I pulled away. Annie came up behind me and put both hands on my shoulders, something my family read as a gesture of possession but was only meant as one of comfort and a non-verbal signal that it was time to go.
We piled into her car and I was waving out the back window until my family was out of sight. The tears flowed freely down my cheeks now. I had pretty much grown used to them since, over the past few weeks, I had been crying more than was probably considered my fair share as a fifteen year old guy. But this time it became particularly violent as the realization of what I was doing came over me. After a few minutes, Annie stopped the car and leaned over to take me in her arms as I sobbed into her shoulder for only the second time ever.
Over the weeks, things between me and my family did not ease up as I had expected it to. Well, maybe I didn’t expect it, but I did hope for it. Between most of us, it only tensed more. Zac was the only one who would make actual conversation with me, but other than that strained phone conversations were the highlight of my contact with them. Really, my only contact with them even though I wasn’t actually that far away, physically.
That particular morning I was packing to go back “home” for a few weeks while Parker--my twin brother who still had no idea about Annie, our real mother-- was staying with us. Normally, when I was a nervous wreck, it didn’t show quite as much (or at least I like to think so). Today it did. Obviously.
“Need some help?” Annie inquired, interrupting my thoughts.
“No,” I replied stubbornly. “Where the hell is my sleeping bag?” I mumbled to myself, throwing random things out of my small closet.
“Language,” she reminded me, but only jokingly since she had her own library of colorful language that she liked to pull out every once in a while.
“You don’t happen to know where my sleeping bag is, do you?” I asked her, surfacing from the depths of the closet.
“No clue. Did you leave it at your old house?” she asked.
My old house. Huh.
“Probably not,” I said back.
“Well, why don’t you call and ask?”
I let the suggestion sink in. I had been calling them a lot over the past couple of days, checking to see what was going on, making arrangements, setting times and then changing them. Did I really want to call them again?
“Okay,” I said unenthusiastically, making my way out of the room and to the phone. I somehow doubted I had left my sleeping bag there as she had suggested, but my mind was in too much of a whirl to think where else it could be.
The phone on the other end rang twice.
“I bet it’s Annie saying that...,” said a voice in the background, who was quickly hushed by the person with the receiver.
“What do you want this time?” said the person into the phone. It was Zac. Thank God.
“Whoa. Nice,” I said sarcastically.
“Yeah, well, you only called a thousand and a half times yesterday, so I figured there was one more thing you needed to know. Now what is it, we’re burning daylight here,” Zac said.
“Okay, um, do you guys still have my sleeping bag over there?” I inquired.
“If my memory serves me correctly, and it usually doesn’t so don’t quote me on this one, I believe you left with it because Annie and what’s-his-face, Reese or Lawrence or whatever he likes to be called these days, had a bed for you but no blankets, am I correct?” he said.
I thought for a moment.
“Oh. Yeah. I guess you are. Thanks,” I said.
“That’s what I’m here for; to help the more absent-minded of the, uh, human race--and I use that term loosely,” he said.
“Hey, you’re the one who looks like a rabbit,” I retorted.
There was silence for a minute while he thought of a reply.
“Yeah, but at least I don’t look like a girl! Mwhahahahaha!” he said and then there was a click as he hung up before I could say anything back to him.
“What was that all about? Who looks like a rabbit?” Annie said, coming into the kitchen carrying two of my rather large, rather heavy, suitcases.
“Zac,” I said, rolling my eyes.
“Oh. I was going to say that if you were talking to Isaac, chimp would’ve been a better word for it,” she said with a smirk.
“Hey hey hey, that’s my brother you’re talking about there,” I said. “Although it’s kind of true.”
She smiled, seeing that some of my humor was back in place.
“What’d Zac have to say?” she inquired, setting the bags down near the door.
“He just said that I probably brought it with me because you guys didn’t have a bed for me when I first got here,” I informed her.
“Oh,” she said, a puzzled expression crossing over her face. “Then what the hell did we do with it?”
I shrugged.
“What the hell did you do with what?” Lawrence asked, wandering into the kitchen, his daily newspaper in his hand as always.
“Taylor’s sleeping bag,” she said.
“Oh. Yeah. That. It’s in the attic,” he said. “Sorry, I assumed you knew that,” he added when he saw the exasperated look Annie was giving him.
Annie rolled her eyes and dashed up the stairs to get my sleeping bag.
“Nervous?” Lawrence asked as he sat down on one of the kitchen chairs.
I rolled my eyes and put my arm dramatically over my forehead and directing my eyes heavenward with a sigh. “Will it never end?”
“Not until you answer the question,” he said.
Sometimes I really hate built-in psychologists.
“I thought the sarcasm in the no would’ve made it obvious,” I said truthfully, sitting down across from him.
“Mmm,” he said, nodding. “We all are, Taylor. You don’t have to be afraid to admit it,” he said, reaching across the table and putting a hand over mine. It took a little bit for me not to pull away from him, not wanting to conjure any memories I had purposely shoved into the back of my mind.
I nodded, understanding his answer.
“Eureka! I found it!” Annie called from the attic.
“It’s alive!” Lawrence called back.
Pretty soon Annie came back down the stairs. She handed me my old sleeping bag.
After a moment of silence, we all sighed collectively, knowing we couldn’t put it off any longer. We’d have to leave some time.
“I guess we should start heading out,” Annie said, swinging her arms and clapping her hands once they got to the front much the way a young kid would do when they were getting impatient.
“Yup,” Lawrence said, standing up and grabbing the keys off of the spice rack above the stove where they kept them.
We each grabbed something and headed out toward the car. Once that was loaded, we all got in and started to drive away from my home to my...home.