Chapter 14
Taylor stared up at the ceiling feeling nothing, but utterly tired of being examined, poked, and prodded, both physically and emotionally. A doctor by the name of Douglas spoke to him about what he had done. Taylor couldn’t believe they knew so much about his life just by examining him. He had planned to deny everything, the bulimia, the mutilation, the drinking, but they knew before he spoke a word. The doctor told him they were medicating him; giving him drugs to calm the muscles in his stomach that were now trained to vomit, but aside from plastic surgery there was very little that could be done about his scars. He didn’t care; he wanted the scars.
The doctors seemed to think they knew everything, but they were wrong. They did not know he had been raped. He had been asked about bruising on the back of his legs. Taylor didn’t know there was any bruising, but he did know that it could only have come from the rape. He lied about them, said they were from a fall. He believed he was entitled to one secret; one fact that was not a matter of public record; one tragedy to keep from the blinding glare of the media.
His eyelids felt heavy. He was on a lot of medication that made him tired, plus the doctors told him that the Demerol was still not completely out of his system and would probably effect him for the next few days. Sleep was beginning to blanket his body when he heard the creak of the door and a ray of light from the hall crept into the room. He looked up and suddenly everything seemed to glow a hazy shade of periwinkle.
“Dawn?” he asked in a coarse voice, praying that he was not imaging her sad, beautiful face.
“Hi Taylor,” she said and smiled at him softly. She seemed almost afraid to enter the room.
He sat up and smiled hoping to make her feel more comfortable, “Well, are you coming in?”
Carefully she tiptoed in and shut the door behind her, “How are you feeling?”
“Weak…how about yourself?”
“Like someone yanked the rug from under me,” she said with a small laugh, “But also really glad because you’re here. Taylor I want to apologize. I was wrong…”
“It’s okay Dawn. We’re best friends, and things like what happened are forgiven here,” he said placing his hand on his heart, “almost as soon as they happen. This is not the time to say what was wrong, but to go on living as if it had not happened, because a lot of things about life are going to change now and I don’t want you to be one of them.”
Silence grew between them. Taylor had said that magic word, “change”. Dawn did not know if he was ready to, or even wanted to talk about all the things that had happened, had changed, and were about to change, but she had to try.
“Do you know what’s going to happen to you after you leave here?”
“No…I suppose some sort of therapy, maybe medication, but no one has talked about it. I get the feeling I’m not physically out of the woods yet and once that’s settled the rest will follow.”
“Oh…”
“I suppose you want to know why…”
“I do, but you don’t have to tell me that, now or ever. It is not like telling me about a movie you saw, it’s personal, and I imagine very difficult.”
He sighed, “How much do you know already though?”
She bit her lip, “Taylor…”
“Come on, tell me, please, what do you know about already?”
“I wondered, even before we fought, if you were bulimic. I just couldn’t ever bring myself to ask. I wish I had,” she said bravely holding back tears, “But I didn’t know you were cutting, or drinking.”
“No you wouldn’t have been able to know that…” he sighed feeling in his wounds the thing she did not know and wondered, should she know? His lips had not yet learned to form the word ‘raped’ in reference to the body they were attached to. The thought left a searing bad taste on those lips that lingered on his tongue and filled his throat. She couldn’t know. Not yet, maybe not ever.
“Taylor?”
“I’m awake dad. You can come in.”
Walker sighed, “Oh good…we need to talk.”
Taylor sat up in bed, “Okay, what about?”
“Well, a few things. First of all, Dr. Douglas says that you are going to be able to leave here in a few days.”
Taylor gave a half smile, “I get to go home?”
“Not exactly…” Walker sighed, dreading what he had to tell Taylor next, “You don’t need to be in the hospital anymore, but you have a lot of intense recovering to do. You’re going to be checked into a rehabilitation clinic.”
“I have to go to rehab? Why?”
“Taylor, do you really need to ask that?”
“Why can’t I recover in my own bed?”
“I wish you could…but physically and mentally we are not going to be able to give you everything you need at home. It won’t be long Taylor, I promise, but you have to do this. You can’t go on living the way you were.”
Taylor was not sure why that statement shocked him. He never expected to be released and go home and be allowed to go on living the life he tried to leave behind, but the thought of recovering never occurred to him. The thought of a foreign bed in a place filled with foreign people treating him with foreign medications and therapies for his familiar illness frightened him. It frightened him so much that he could not respond to the idea, and sat in silence, praying that his father would leave him alone to grieve on his own.
Walker knew that Taylor was hurting now, and every part of him ached to make it better. His mind told him to leave the room and give the boy some time to adjust, but his heart told him otherwise; “Taylor, there’s one more thing I want to say…”
Taylor looked up at him, his blue eyes interested and somehow hopeful, “Alright dad, I think I can handle one more news flash tonight.”
“I know that we have not had the perfect relationship, and that is entirely my fault,” Walker began, but Taylor interrupted.
“Dad, you don’t have to do this…”
“I want to. It should have been done a long time ago,” he smiled, “You and I have never been close, and I am sorry for that, but the reason is one I only fully admitted to myself not too long before…before you took all those pills. To see someone you love so much in so much pain is a horrible experience to endure. I know, because I lived through that twice.”
“Twice?”
“Yes…you see, not too long before you were born,” Walker began, but Taylor interrupted again.
“Jordan,” Taylor said in breathy awe, “I remember…Until now I thought that was a drug-induced dream, but I remember. You told me his story while I was unconscious, just in case I died, you wanted me to know, just in case, didn’t you?”
Walker could not believe what he was hearing; “You remember all that?”
“I do…I didn’t believe it until just now though, I couldn’t believe that it was true, that after eighteen years I finally knew the origin of my name.”
“I’m sorry I kept it from you for so long…I guess I was just trying to forget what it felt like to lose him.”
“I understand,” Taylor nodded, “But, we can talk about him now, right?”
“Of course…I’ve been trying to think of a way to explain him to you for some time. In fact the night you,” Walker tried not to choke on the words, “The night you took all those pills I tried to tell you, but I never got the chance…”
Taylor was not sure if he was supposed to apologize for that, if he needed to be sorry for something that was out of his hands. He didn’t want to think of it now. Taylor felt he was seeing his father for the first time tonight. It was finally time to understand the years of rejection and emptiness that they shared. Finally time to know the story of the one single person who changed Taylor’s life with his death.
“Rehab?”
“Yeah…I’m going to leave the hospital in a couple of days and enter the vast and mysterious world of rehab,” Taylor explained to Dawn on the phone the next morning.
Dawn swallowed hard; “Do you know where you are going? Like is it a clinic…or a…”
“A mental institution?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I’m not really sure, but I don’t think I’m being institutionalized,” he said softly not knowing whether to laugh at such a thought or cry because it was a possibility, “I think it’s some kind of clinic, but honestly I have no idea.”
“Are you scared?”
“I would like to pretend to you that I’m not. I would like to make you believe I was brave and ready to face everything that now looms in front of me, but I am not the brave Dawn. I am terrified,” he said as tears silently slid down his cheeks, “In the few days I have been here everything I never wanted to know about myself, let alone have all of you know, has been revealed and given a diagnosis. It is one of the most frightening things that ever happened to me, and now, they hope to make better something they can never, ever fix by pumping me full of drugs and making me lay down on a leather couch and spill my soul to a stranger. They can’t make me better Dawnee, no one can, and they are going to invade everything scared that I kept secret and break me down until they find out for themselves that some people are just born broken.”
“Tay, please, don’t cry,” she said, crying herself, “You are not broken babe; you’re hurt. All that hurt is suffocating you, and I know how scared you are, but you are going to see that they are not going to try to fix you honey. They are just going to show you that you were never broken to begin with.”
He felt broken though, and that was enough. All that matters is what you think, because in the end that’s what you become. The only question left is, was this the end?