Chapter Thirteen
Parker

“I want to go home,” I whispered to myself, falling against the wall and sliding down it until I was sitting on the floor, staring up at all the stark furniture in the musty “guestroom.”

I had never been in a guestroom before and had assumed, while walking down the hall with Taylor, that a guestroom was supposed to be pleasant and inviting and all that other stuff. Something about the aura of a guest room was supposed to encourage the person who was supposed to stay in it to stay forever in the comforting lap of an armchair or stretched out on the soft stomach of a bed.

The guestroom in the Hanson house was none of these things. If anything, it told you that this was your Hell and you would be trapped here forever if you didn’t get out now or maybe it just laughed at you, taunting you about how you were far away from home, in a strange place that you didn’t want to be in.

I looked around the room from my position on the floor and thought about how it reminded me of the room Juliette Lewis is stuck in in the video for Melissa Etheridge’s “Come to My Window.” The funny thing about that is, the person is supposed to be in a mental hospital.

The room was pretty much empty. There was a bed, a small chest of drawers, a very small painting, a small desk and a small night table with a lamp (a small one) sitting on top of it. Not exactly what one would call inviting.

I got up, deciding to try and make the place feel a little bit more...friendly if nothing else. I picked up one of my suitcases and, putting it on the bed, opened it up. I sighed, taking out all the clothes I had packed and putting them into the drawers of the dresser. As I did this, I thought about everyone’s reactions when I had entered the house.

The very first thing I noticed about the house was not the innumerable amount of family photos hanging on the walls of the front hallway or the toys strewn about the floor of the living room or the beautiful centerpiece of multi-colored silk flowers in a waterless vase on the table in the dining room, but the silence. It wasn’t a normal kind of silence. Not the type of silence when you walk into an empty house or something like that. It was heavy. It was almost stifling.

Taylor and Isaac had led me into the kitchen where it turned out the whole family was hiding. Well, maybe they weren’t hiding, but it seemed like they were.

Everyone froze when we entered the room and the scene reminded me of those music videos and commercials that use freeze frame.

No one moved. No one breathed. It was just absolute silence. And I nearly ran out of the house and all the way back to the airport screaming. But I reminded myself that I had to be brave about this. They all had been when they were in New York. I had to be now.

The monotony of nothingness was broken when Zac got up from his seat at the table where he had either been writing or drawing something, to this day I’m not sure which and I never thought to ask (or maybe I just wasn’t brave enough to ask). He walked up to where Taylor and I were standing, his eyes darting from one of us to the other, obviously trying desperately to figure out which one of us was which. After a minute or two of this, his eyes finally focused on me. He squinted, still fairly unsure.

I stood nervously, watching him and wondering what he was going to do. I had visions of screaming and yelling and crying, harsh words and threats. But, I also thought that the time when I told the Hansons that I wasn’t really Taylor. And it hadn’t happened. It wouldn’t happen now either.

“Hey,” he said in a quiet voice that I don’t think anyone in the room had been aware he was capable of. I smiled slightly.

“Hey,” I said back.

Then he did something that was totally unexpected. He wrapped his arms around me in a warm, welcoming hug. I hugged him in return. In the back of my mind, my testosterone kept telling me that this wasn’t a manly thing to do. I decided not to care.

Following that random act of kindness was a chorus of hellos and a few handshakes. I noticed that Zac was the only one who would hug me, but chose to say nothing about it. I understood that they all needed to get used to me as I needed to get used to them.

After all the lukewarm greetings, Taylor led me to the prison cell known as the guestroom where I was now. I dug around in my suitcase for my toothbrush but my hand brushed against something else and I immediately clasped my hand around it. Pulling it out, I saw that it was my journal, as I had suspected.

I looked cautiously around the room as if I thought that the lone mirror was two-way. I flipped through the pages, stopping on the occasional entry, skimming over the pages and pages of my account of what had been happening to me over the past few months. Some of it was bitter, some of it was happy, some of it was sad. I smiled a little to myself, looking through it. Then, I had the realization that if any of the Hansons should find it and read it, they’d probably be offended by it. Because of this, I decided to hide it. Taking out the piece of paper with Theresa’s phone number on it, I stuffed the journal under the mattress of the bed. A rather obvious spot, yes, but I didn’t exactly know all the nooks and crannies of the room as I did my own at home. I had no better place to put it.

Just as I got done straightening up the sheets of the bed again, a knock sounded on the door.

“Uh...Come in?” I said, feeling strange about saying it. Gina never knocked on the door and actually waited for me to answer.

Taylor walked into the room, an air of shyness surrounding him. I stood up from my kneeling position on the floor and we faced each other. He was standing next to the mirror I was standing in front of, making the scene even more strange than usual.

“Hey,” he said. “Um...Are you okay in here?”

I nodded.

“Yup. Everything’s okay,” I said. “There’s just one thing that’s bothering me though.”

He gave me a questioning look.

“How is it that you, Zac, and Isaac have to share a room, Jessica, Avery, and Mackenzie have to share a room, and your parents have to share a room with Zoe that there’s space for a guestroom?” I asked.

He laughed.

“I don’t know,” he said honestly, with a shrug. “I guess that they figured that it’s all split up evenly so they didn’t bother giving this room to any of us even though there’s about as much elbow space in our room as there is in a closet.”

I nodded.

“Sorry, that was just bothering the heck out of me. I couldn’t figure out the logic,” I said.

He nodded.

“So,” he said, sitting on the bed as I continued unpacking. “What do you think of Annie?”

“Annie?” I said, already having forgotten the stranger from the kitchen.

“Yeah. You know, the woman in the kitchen,” he said, nodding his head in the general direction of the kitchen.

“Oh! Yeah, her,” I said. “I don’t know. It’s not like I’ve really talked to her or anything. I mean, all she did was say hello to me from afar as she fed Zoe.”

He nodded again. “That’s true.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why did you want to know what I thought of Annie?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Just thought I’d ask.”

I gave him a strange look which he pretended not to see by turning his attention to what was outside the window.

“By the way, is it all right if I call Gina tonight? She wanted me to, but, you know, if it’s not okay...,” I said nervously.

“No, that’s fine,” he said. “Time difference affecting you any?”

“Not yet,” I said. “I’ll probably be dozing off by nine, but right now it’s not bugging me all that much. I mean it’s not that much of a difference.”

“Cool,” he said, probably to fill up empty space.

“Uh, do you know where the Stevenson cemetary is?”

“I think so,” he answered. “Why?”

“There’s someone I have to visit,” I said, smiling sadly.

“Who?” he asked curiously.

“Uh, my, um, grandmother,” I said. “Gina’s mom. She died a couple years ago and she was buried there.”

“Oh,” he said, nodding knowingly. “Did you know her well?”

I shrugged. “We met a couple times. I mean, she didn’t really approve of Gina having an adopted son for some reason but she was always nice to me. Gina was really close with her, though.”

Again, he nodded. His lack of contribution to the conversation made me feel like I was carrying on a useless monologue. I decided to shut up and see if he would carry on the conversation.

“You’re uncomfortable about this, aren’t you?” he asked after a moment.

“Honestly?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m nervous as hell,” I told him. “When you found me in the airport, I was looking in my pocket for a quarter to use in a pay phone so I could call Gina and tell her I wanted to come home. When we first came into the house and everyone was staring at me like I had rabbit ears growing out of my butt, I just about ran out of the house and back to the airport screaming.”

He looked at me attentively, waiting for me to go on as he seemed to know I would.

“But I know all I have to do is give it some time,” I said. “I’ve been told that about a thousand and one times over, give it time, be brave, blah blah blah. But for right now, yeah I’m a little uncomfortable.”

“I understand,” he said. “I felt the same way when I first came to your house.”

He rested his chin on in the palm of his hand, exposing his arm. For the first time, I noticed the long scar that ran down it from just below his wrist to the back of his elbow. He noticed me staring at it and quickly tried to hide it by picking up my pillow and setting it on his lap, hiding his arm under it.

“Does it still hurt?” I asked, knowing I was probably venturing into dangerous waters. Every time anyone had tried to ask Taylor what happened when they were still in New York, he had been adamant about not answering the question. He hadn’t even answered any of the police’s questions. One couldn’t help but be worried.

“Not as much as it did,” he answered quietly, looking down toward the pillow.

I remembered back to the day when he had accidentally banged his arm on the counter doing something and his face turned all shades of red from the effort it took to not cry out in pain.

I nodded. “It doesn’t look as bad as it did.”

He shook his head.

I also remembered his reaction to the bathroom when we brought him home. We practically had to use a crowbar to get him to stop clinging to the doorway when we had finally started to force him to use the bathroom after an incident I’ll refrain from mentioning for Taylor’s sake.

Not that I could really blame him. I still have trouble going in there. The stain on the floor where a literal puddle of his blood had been when I had come home had been covered up by a bathroom throw rug and the door had been painted over. But I still couldn’t get the vision of all the blood that was in there that day out of my head whenever I went in there. It was terrible.

“Do-,” I began but he quickly interrupted me.

“Can we not talk about it?” he asked. “Please?” He looked up at me with pleading eyes.

I nodded.

“Yeah. Sorry. I didn’t mean to force you into talking about it,” I told him.

“No one ever does,” he said, a bit of bitter sarcasm evident in his voice.

I cleared my throat and shifted uncomfortably. I was off to a great start, wasn’t I? Not only did I let on that I didn’t like it here, but I had also already tread into dark waters. And I had been there barely an hour.

Oh wait! Oh...nope. Sorry. Mail? Please?
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Fourteen