Parker
I tried to call her back, but the line was busy.
“What’s the matter?” Zac asked from the breakfast table where he was feeding Zoe some baby food while Mrs. Hanson momentarily checked on something or other she was baking.
“She hung up on me,” I said.
He raised his eyebrows, surprised. “Did you tell her?”
“No,” I said. “She started freaking out before I could. She told me...She thought...”
She thought that they had told me something.
Zoe began to fuss so he turned away when it was obvious that I wasn’t going to finish my answer, making airplane sounds and flying the spoon around before successfully landing most of it in her mouth. She smiled at him and then at me, letting some of the gobbery orange gook slide out of her mouth. Zac wiped her mouth with her bib, laughing a little bit.
I reached my hand into my pocket and felt the picture that I had found in Taylor, Isaac and Zac’s room the day before. Now I was certain I wasn’t going crazy. There was really something I was supposed to be figuring out here.
“Parker?” Mrs. Hanson said. “Are you there, honey?”
I snapped back into reality, looking into Mrs. Hanson’s worried eyes.
“Why don’t you try to eat something? Call Gina again later,” she said, trying to lead me toward the table.
I resisted. I couldn’t eat. I could have thrown up if I wanted to, but I couldn’t eat.
I had things to figure out first.
“I’m not hungry, thanks,” I said, walking out of the kitchen at a quick pace and up the stairs. I knocked on the door to Isaac and Taylor’s room and barely waited for an answer before walking in. Isaac was still laying on his bed, his eyes blinking open as I burst in. Taylor was sitting against his rolled up sleeping bag on the floor, a book in his hand. He looked completely haggard. I think everyone looked that way that particular morning.
He jumped and looked up when I came into the room.
“Parker?” Isaac said, sitting up and rubbing his eyes. “What’s the matter?”
Boy, there was a lot of that question going around these days.
Taylor stood, his eye wide and worried.
“What did Gina say?” he asked.
I took a deep breath. This was a lot harder staring him straight in the face, but I was sick of this. If Gina knew something and I didn’t, there was a serious problem.
But something needed to be said and I was ready to skip over the walking on eggshells phase of dealing with what had happened to Taylor to finally get someone to say it.
“I needed to talk to you,” I said. “Now.”
He nodded and let me drag him out of his room and down the hall to the guestroom. Once he had entered, I closed the door behind us. He stood on the other side of the room, looking absolutely terrified. Later, he told me I was pretty wild-eyed so I can imagine what reason he had to be.
“What happened with Gina?” he asked.
“I didn’t tell her,” I said. “I didn’t get a chance to.”
“Why?”
“Well, I told her I had something important to tell her and then she started to kind of freak out before she, more or less hung up on me,” I said.
He shifted uncomfortably where he was standing.
“I’m sorry,” he offered.
“She was crying and everything,” I said.
“Do you think something happened?”
“No,” I said.
“Oh,” he replied.
“She said something to me before she started freaking out. Something coherent,” I said.
“Oh?”
“Yeah,” I said. “She said ‘They told you, didn’t they.’”
He visibly winced.
“Taylor,” I said. “I’m honestly sorry that this has to come so soon after your confession yesterday. I’m honestly sorry that I’m breaching etiquette by skipping over the whole phase where we’re all really careful around you, but...”
He shifted from one foot to the other.
“But there’s something going on around here,” I said. “Something that everyone, including Gina, knows about except me. Needless to say, I would like to be enlightened.”
He cleared his throat. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
“Fine,” I said. “Then I’ll speak plainly.”
I reached into my pocket and pulled out the picture of the man. I showed it to Taylor and his eyes widened.
“Let’s start with him,” I said. “Who is he?”
“Where did you get that?” he asked me.
“In your room,” I told him. “We were looking for the keys to Isaac’s truck so we could follow you and while we were looking, I found this on the desk. Who is he?”
He sighed and sat on the bed. “Parker, I don’t think I can deal with this right now,” he said. “Please don’t make me do this now.”
I shook my head. “Everyone knows except me,” I said. “And I think I have a right to know what the hell is going on here. Now, who is this man?”
“Some cousin,” he answered, waving his hand in the air carelessly.
At first, I was a bit put off. It was very possible that the man in the picture was a cousin. But the moment I took to think about it told me that it wasn’t true.
“You have a picture of a cousin you don’t know?” I asked.
“Well, Isaac’s pretty close to him,” he said.
I nodded. “Uncanny family resemblance,” I said. “You look just like him.”
“Well, yeah, we all look like my mom’s side of the family,” he said.
I didn’t want to say what I was about to say next, but I said it anyway.
“Taylor, this man looks exactly like you,” I said. “But if he’s your cousin on your mom’s side, he’s not even related to you.”
Again, he winced slightly.
“Who is he?” I said. “I’m not going to get into one of these back and forth ‘I can’t tell you’ arguments again today. Just tell me who he is. Please.”
He shook his head and kept his mouth shut.
But I had a little more ammunition for this than I had the day before.
“Then maybe Annie can tell me,” I said.
He looked up at me, obviously confused.
“Annie?” he said. “Why would she be able to tell you?”
“In her garage, when she was getting her soccer ball, I saw some pictures on the old desk in there and one or two of them were of this guy,” I said. “That’s why I took this picture from your room in the first place and that’s how I know this guy has something to do with everything that I’ve been kept in the dark about for the past few weeks. Unfortunately, he’s not saying anything, so I’m trying to get you to.”
He sighed. “Maybe Annie should tell you,” he said.
“Annie’s not here right now,” I said, knowing I was contradicting myself. “I want you to tell me.”
He stood up and took the picture from me, turned it around so he could see the back. He held it back up to me and pointed to the writing I hadn’t noticed on the back of the photograph before.
“Collin Windsor,” I read out loud. “September, 1981.”
“That’s who he is,” he said. “Does his name ring any bells?”
I shook my head.
“Nah, it didn’t for me either,” he said.
“So you’re saying you don’t know who the man in the picture is?” I asked. “Even though we both...look like him...a lot.”
“I really don’t think I should be the one to tell you this, Parker,” he said.
“I have a right to know, Taylor,” I said back. “Please tell me.”
He sighed. “Well, if you didn’t hate me after what I told you yesterday, you’re going to hate me now,” he said.
That caught my interest, but I didn’t protest.
“This man,” he said. “This man in the picture is...Collin Windsor. He was a professor at some local university. He taught a poetry class, I think. He died a week or two ago.”
“Of what?” I asked, knowing that even with seventeen years gone by between when the picture had been taken and the present, he would be too young to die of old age.
“Cancer,” he said. “Anyway, I went to the funeral...”
“So that’s why we saw you at the cemetary,” I said.
“Yeah, Ike mentioned something about that,” he said uncomfortably. “Annie’s father was there with you,” I said.
“And so were Annie and Lawrence,” he said.
“Right,” I replied.
“Annie invited me to the funeral because...well,” he said, pausing. “You know, I really don’t think I should be the one to tell you this.”
“You can’t stop now,” I said.
He sighed and took a deep breath. “Collin Windsor...Well, the reason we both look so much like Collin Windsor is because...it’s in our genes to, I guess you could say.”
“In our genes?” I repeated.
“Yeah,” he said. “Collin Windsor’s our biological father.”
Like a child resembles their parent...
I looked from Taylor to the picture he was holding back to Taylor again. I wanted to deny it...but couldn’t. It was just too obvious now that it was put in front of me like that.
Like a child resembles their parent.
“How does Annie know him?” I asked shakily next. “How did she know him?” I corrected myself.
He hesitated.
At this point he could have said anything, I knew it and he knew it. He could have told me Annie was just a close friend or a cousin or even his sister or something like that. There were a thousand different reasons Annie Lawrence would have a picture of Collin Windsor, our biological father, in the garage in her house. Maybe they had gone to school together, maybe he was a patient of Lawrence’s. He could have told me anything and I would have readily believed it.
Instead he told me the truth.
“Annie knew him because...,” he sighed. “Annie Lawrence knew him because Annie Lawrence is a married Andrea Whitney with a shortened first name.”
Andrea Whitney.
Our biological mother. The one that they had told us about in the hotel room that day.
I would have readily believed anything Taylor could have told me. But I didn’t believe that.
“I don’t believe you,” I said.
“What?” he said, clearly surprised.
“I don’t believe you.”
“Parker, I’m not lying to you.” he said.
“Yes...Yes you are,” I said. “Why wouldn’t you be? You’ve been lying to me almost the entire time I’ve been here about something. Why wouldn’t you be lying now?”
“Parker, I’m not lying now,” he said, clearly hurt.
I began to pace the room frantically.
I turned to him and was surprised when my voice came out as a yell.
“How could you lie about something like that?” I shouted.
He jumped at the volume of my voice.
“I’m not lying,” he insisted.
He didn’t understand what I was talking about.
“I’ve been here so long,” I said. “How could you lie about something like that to me for so long?”
“I’m so sorry, Parker,” he said.
Apologies weren’t what I wanted to hear right then.
“How could she have told you and not me?” I said. “Why didn’t she tell me? What? Did she want to check me out? Make sure she liked me before she told me she was my...my mother?”
“It wasn’t like that,” he said. “She was scared.”
“Well, she certainly wasn’t scared to tell you,” I said. “How long have you known about this? How does Gina know about this?”
“I’ve known since I was in the hospital in Rochester,” he answered. “She was there. She came to see me.”
“And she told you,” I said. “But she didn’t bother to tell me. And neither did you or Gina or anyone else.”
“She didn’t tell me,” he said. “I figured it out.”
“You figured it out,” I said. “So what? Now I’m stupid because I didn’t figure it out?”
“No, Parker,” he said.
“Because you know what? I feel stupid,” I said. “How could you know all this time and not tell me?”
“I was told not to,” he said. “Everyone told me not to tell you.”
“And you listened?”
“What was I supposed to do?” he said. Now he was raising his voice, too. “I only saw her once or twice. She didn’t come back after my dad pretty much told her she wasn’t welcome. She came to the concert and then I invited her backstage and...”
“And?”
“And there was just no time to tell you,” he said. “No point because I thought she was gone until the concert and I didn’t see you...”
“And you never thought to call me up at my house and say ‘Hey Parker, our biological mother’s come back from the dead. Wanna meet her?’” I said.
“I’m sorry, Parker,” he said. “I know we lied to you and we shouldn’t have. But we did anyway.”
I shook my head. This was a lot of information very fast, but there was still something else. I could feel it.
“What else is there?” I asked. “There’s more, I can tell.”
“More?” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. I thought the clues to myself in my head, but didn’t say them aloud. The empty room, the personal pictures on the desk in that empty room...
The sleeping bag Taylor had been leaning up against on the floor of the bedroom.
My eyes widened.
“There was an empty room in her house,” I said. “When I was looking for the bathroom, I accidentally went into it. I saw the pictures on the desk of you and Isaac and Zac and of your parents...”
He started to wring his hands a little bit, nervous.
“And you’ve been sleeping in a sleeping bag here...” Now I was just thinking out loud.
I looked at him and waited for him to say it first even though he knew I had already figured it out.
“After the concert, I decided that I wanted to go home with her rather than my family. I’ve been living with her pretty much since we got back to Tulsa.”
My jaw must have dropped to the floor.
“Unbelievable!” I said, sitting on the bed.
“Parker, I am so sorry...”
“You keep saying that,” I said. “Stop saying that.”
“We never meant to lie to you,” he said. “It just got out of hand...”
I looked up at him, aware for the first time that my cheeks were wet. When had that happened?
“I can’t believe this,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
I shook my head and started to stare at the wall next to the bed. I knew that whatever I had been expecting him to say, this wasn’t it except maybe on a subconscious level and I didn’t want to hear anything more about it.
He sighed and, getting the hint, walked out of the room.
“Is he okay?” I heard Isaac’s voice murmur through the door.
No, I thought to myself.
I didn’t hear Taylor’s answer.
Why do I get the feeling you didn't like the way this was done?
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Six