Chapter Thirty-Nine
Isaac

I had made the decision that I was going to do it and I was going to do it today if it killed me. As much as that scared me, there was just no holding it in anymore. Not something this serious. I wanted to ask, and now I was going to.

I probably wouldn’t have even decided something like this if Zac hadn’t told me what he had told me in the bathroom. Not so much that maybe I was right about what I had said. I had grown less and less sure since he had told me originally that he didn’t think Taylor would do something like that. It was more because he had actually come out and told me how scared he was in the bathroom, despite the fact that it was pretty easy to see. When he was scared enough to admit that he was scared, that meant something. I had promised him that I would think of something to do about this, despite my own fear.

And this was what I was going to do. I had decided that morning that I wasn’t going to think about it, I was just going to do it. Somehow.

I spent the entire morning driving around, though, trying to figure out what, exactly, I was going to say anyway. If I didn’t think of what I was going to say, I’d probably do something stupid and Taylor would feel attacked right off. I had to think of a way to initiate the conversation. I had to think of a way to go about asking my brother if he was suicidal and why without making it seem like that was what I was doing or implying the reasons I thought might be behind it.

When it came to the reasons behind it, I began to have what I knew to be unfair thoughts toward Annie. He had only known Annie for maybe a grand total of ten minutes before he had decided to run off with her. Chosen her over us. That didn’t seem right in more ways than one. Had she coerced him in some way? Had she done something? Said something?

I got back from my trip just as my parents were leaving with the kids to go see a movie. I still didn’t know how I was going to do this, but I did know that this was my window of opportunity. I knew the time had come to finally ask. I wanted to ask.

Parker was in the guestroom and Zac was outside when I entered the bedroom where I knew Taylor was going to be. He was sitting on the bottom bunkbed, hunched over a book, obviously totally absorbed in what he was reading, though I couldn’t quite see what it was. At first, I was too struck by the fact that he was sitting on his old bed to say much. It looked so right. Despite the fact that they were Zac’s sheets he was sitting on. That was the way it had been. The way the room was supposed to look, with him sitting on that bed, dead to the world, a book in his hands.

“Taylor?” I said, causing him to look reluctantly away from his page, placing his finger where he had left off.

He waited momentarily for the cloudiness of his far away eyes to pass before verbally acknowledging that I was talking to him.

“Yeah?” he said, not sounding annoyed, just curious.

“Can I talk to you for a minute?” I asked.

He sighed. “I don’t know. This book just got really exciting,” he said. He grinned and I knew he was joking. Something I wouldn’t have figured out with my slightly frayed nerves. I could feel my heart beating fast and loudly in my chest. This was going to be a lot harder than I thought.

I pulled up the desk chair and sat down. He moved to the edge of the bed.

“What book?” I asked.

He showed me.

“Hey, you stole that from me,” I said.

He laughed. “You stole it from Mom,” he pointed out.

“There’s some pretty racy stuff in there,” I said. “I’m not sure you should be reading that.” Actually, there was only one tame love scene in there between the main character and a woman he meets briefly somewhere in the middle of the storyline.

He rolled his eyes at me. “Please,” he said. “I’ve read lots worse than this. You wouldn’t believe how many Danielle Steele books Annie has.”

I raised my eyebrows. “And you’ve read them?”

“I got bored,” he said with a shrug. “Only one and a half.”

“Why only a half?”

“I was enjoying it too much and was so embarrassed that I forced myself to put it down,” he laughed. “Actually, I realized about halfway through the second one that it was pretty much the same story as the first one and I didn’t really need to go any farther.”

“Sure,” I said.

A pause as we each silently enjoyed the fact that we were talking to each other like normal again.

But he had to wreck that after only a minute.

“So, what’s up?” he asked.

I sighed. “I’ve been, uh, worried about you lately,” I said.

“Really?” he said, his brow knitting. He recognized my serious tone and didn’t joke. “Why?”

“You know we all love you, right?” I said. “Me, Mom, Dad, Zac, the kids.”

“Yeah, sure,” he said. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“Well, you know that it’s been pretty tense around here lately,” I said.

“Couldn’t cut through it with a knife,” he said.

At least he was honest.

“Right,” I said.

“There’s more to this somewhere,” he said, teasing slightly, trying to make me more comfortable about saying what I was about to say. I was reminded of the first time he had come to me with a sex question. I had treated him the exact same way.

“Well, I just wanted you to know that,” I said. “And that you can talk to us, you know. About things. You don’t have to...I don’t know...hide them.”

Now his expression was one of confusion.

“Right,” he said slowly. “Ike, what’s this about?”

I sighed and cleared my throat.

“I, uh, found a knife in the bathroom the other day. After you were in there. It was a steak knife from the kitchen,” I said quietly.

I had looked away from him while I said that, but I could still feel his eyes on me.

“Pardon?” he said.

“I found a steak knife in the bathroom,” I said. “I put it away and everything so that none of the kids saw it. Not even Mom and Dad know about it.”

“Only you?”

“And Zac,” I said. “I had to tell someone.”

“But you didn’t come to me?” he said.

“No,” I said back.

A pause.

“Isaac, what, exactly, do you think this knife was for?” he asked. I cleared my throat.

“I have my theories,” I said. “But I’d like you to tell me what it was really in there for instead of me voicing any of those.”

He shook his head. “No,” he said. “I want to hear your theories first. I mean, if you didn’t come to me right away about this, they must be something pretty awful. I want to hear them.”

I sighed. “Zac told me about the way you were talking in the garage the other day. When you told him about your father...”

“What?” he half-shouted. “He told you about my father?”

I nodded. “He said you were saying things. Like you couldn’t handle it anymore. Like you weren’t sure what you were going to do. Things like that.”

He was up and pacing the length of the room now. I turned in my chair to face him.

“And?” he said.

“And I think that what conclusion I came to about the knife in the bathroom should be pretty obvious,” I said.

He shook his head. “I’m not even hearing this,” he said.

“Yeah, Taylor, you are,” I said. “If that’s not the way it is, then just tell me. Tell me why I found that knife in the bathroom. What it was doing there.”

He shook his head again. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

“Maybe not,” I agreed. “But Taylor if you have problems, we can help you with them, you know. We love you. You’re our brother...”

“Oh yeah, that fact has really been reinforced to me a lot lately,” he said, his voice bitter. “God, Isaac, how could you think something like that?”

“What else am I supposed to think?” I said, standing up. We were both starting to raise our voices, though I had tried to keep mine calm up until that point.

“What makes you think I would do something like that?” he said.

“The way you were talking to Zac,” I said.

“I was on edge,” he said. “My...,” he quickly lowered his voice, remembering that Parker was just down the hall. “My father had just died. It was pretty upsetting going to the funeral.”

“I can imagine,” I said.

“So is that it? Is that the only reason you think I would do something that stupid?” he said.

“No,” I replied. “There’s also the fact that the doctors at the hospital you were in in Rochester told Gina and Parker that they thought it might have been a suicide attempt. They told us, too. We just never thought anything of it.”

His eyes turned very dark when I said that.

“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said. “Neither did they.”

“Then tell me the truth,” I said. “If it wasn’t a suicide attempt, then what the hell happened because none of the rest of us have any clue why you’ve been waking up in the middle of the night, screaming your head off, why you’ve been disappearing every morning after those dreams, why you take abnormally long showers, why you leave knives in the bathroom...”

The expression he wore on his face now made me stop in the middle of my sentence. His eyes had filled with tears and he was struggling to hold them back. Struggling with something else, too. And it really showed on his facial features.

“Do you even care that we’re all worried about you?” I asked.

He nodded, silently.

“Then tell me,” I said. “Tell me what happened. Just say it.”

“Why?” he said. “So you can hate me? So I can never look you in the eye again? So you never have to talk to me again because you’ll be so disgusted by what I tell you?”

“Taylor, you know that’s not why,” I said. “I won’t hate you.”

“How can you say that?” he said. “How can you say that when for the past month or more, you’ve done nothing but give me the cold shoulder and talk to my in monosyllables when you talked at all?”

That stung.

“Please tell me,” I said. “I promise I don’t and won’t hate you.”

He shook his head. “I can’t tell you.”

I walked closer to him. “Tell me, Taylor.”

He shook his head again, more forcefully.

I moved to wrap him in my arms the way I did when we were little and he skinned his knee while Zac went to go find our mom and tell her what happened so she could come to the rescue with Batman band-aids. But there were no band-aids that were going to rescue us in this situation and he just struggled away, accidentally knocking some papers off the desk behind him in doing so.

“Stop, Isaac,” he said. “Don’t make me do this.”

“I don’t know what else to do,” I said.

“You wouldn’t understand,” he said.

“How do you know that?”

“You wouldn’t understand,” he repeated, his voice raising.

“How do you know that?” I repeated in return.

He opened his mouth to say something else, but just then Parker and Zac entered the room together, both looking confused and afraid. But Zac didn’t look quite as afraid as he had in the bathroom that day.

“Guys?” he spoke. “What’s going on?”

I looked at Taylor and he looked at me.

“Ask Ike,” he said before pushing past both of them.

I heard him clomp down the stairs and the door slam. I stared at Parker and Zac, knowing my shock showed on my face.

“What was that about?” Parker asked.

Danielle Steele fans please don't beat me up.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Forty