Reese Lawrence
"I dreamed that the world was crumbling down. We sat on my back porch and watched it."
--Matchbox20, "Busted"
I stared at the cup of coffee I was holding, my hands wrapped around it, trying to feel its warmth as if I were cold. I was really only trying to feel the warmth for a sense of familiarity. Something I could relate to in this time where everything had so suddenly
fallen out of place.
I don't know when her obsession with finding Parker and Jordan (or Taylor, as she had told me he was called now) started, but it wasn't right away at all. At first, she was completely numb. She acted as if she had never heard of such an absurd thing when you tried to talk about them to her. Right then she couldn't concentrate on them, she had to concentrate on herself. Trying to make things better than they were at the time, trying to fix everything that she had broken.
For probably a good five years or so, she never mentioned them, she never looked at all the pictures we had taken of them. You would have thought that they had
never even existed.
Then, it started. When and why are pretty vague. All I know is that apathy changed to staying up all night and crying until she literally made herself sick. The lack of conversation about them turned into common dinner conversation. She went from not even looking at the box that she had stored all their pictures in to buying expensive picture albums and framing them so that everywhere you looked, at least one of two little babies
stared back at you.
I can't even find the right words to describe to you what it was like for me the day she first saw an article on Hanson in a magazine because none that exist in the English language are affective enough to convey all the emotions she went through and their intensity.
Oddly enough, until only a few weeks ago, she never tried to contact either the Hansons or Gina. She never went to any Hanson concerts, never bought any of their CDs, never listened to their music at all. I don't know why that is.
Now, here I was, sitting in a hospital in New York. How I actually got there is a blur. All I remember is something about nine o'clock and then before I knew it, we were in Rochester and she had confessed to me that she had told Taylor that she was, in fact, his real mother.
"Lawrence?" I heard a voice say from behind me.
I turned to see who it was, the cup of coffee still in my hands.
The coffee was cold.
Okay, so this chapter was pretty short. You have my permission to move on to the next chapter before I make another plead for e-mail.
Index
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-Two