It had been an unusually chilly
spring in Tulsa. The grass blades had
grown green again, but greeted most mornings dusted with frosty dew. The air was crisp and light, but the caress
of a strong wind was still rough with late winter calluses. Taylor squinted up at the sun and shivered,
wishing he had worn a jacket. He tapped
his foot and glanced nervously at his wristwatch; it was almost noon and they
had to be to Dr. Kennedy’s by twelve-thirty.
It had been five weeks since
Taylor had left the hospital and he was doing well. There had been no relapses; there had been only progress. Dr. Kennedy and Dr. Turner had been so
supportive, but he knew he could not have even began to recover without Lee,
and that he would not have gotten through these last few weeks without Dawn,
and he really wanted to bring these three life-saving forces together, even if
only for a moment. Taylor knew that
this might be his only chance for such an occasion because, as hard as it was
to face, he knew that Lee died a little more every day. She was weak, and she had a cold that she
just couldn’t shake. Her doctors feared
her cold might progress into pneumonia and that if it did she wouldn’t ever
recover. Taylor was warned of this at
least twice a visit; it became a mantra.
Everyone was afraid for him; afraid he couldn’t handle it; afraid that
he was still strong enough to break.
Dawn raced from her house,
interrupting his thoughts and mumbling apologies. Her faced was washed with watercolor blue sadness; he knew it
took every breath she had to confront his black past and still smile.
“Remember, you don’t have to do
this if you don’t want to,” he whispered, his hand slipping into hers.
She gently squeezed his chilly
hand; “I want to. I don’t ever wish to
be so blind again.”
An encouraging smile spread across
his lips, but his heart sighed; part of her never stopped remembering her early
suspicions, and that part never allowed her to forgive herself. Every time he went to the doctor, or had his
medication adjusted, or found one more plastic surgeon unsure of his ability to
remove completely all of Taylor’s scars she was reminded that if she had spoken
up none of this may have been. Taylor
knew it was nonsense; he told her it was nonsense. He withdrew from life to keep his secrets; he pushed her as far
away as possible because he knew that she would find out if he held her too
close to his soul. The mess was of his
own making and he never expected her to clean it up.
* * * * * * * * * * *
Even from the parking lot Taylor
noticed that the building that had been his safe-haven had taken on a dark and
eerie façade. This was not his first
return to the clinic; in fact he had come back many times since his release,
but never had the walls seemed so forbidding.
Taylor could feel it in his bones; bad news would come at the front
desk.
Inside, the building seemed the
same except that he could feel the tension leaking from the walls. The nurse behind the desk recognized his
face and gave a somber half-smile; she knew why he was here and she knew that,
in a moment, a familiar phrase would roll carelessly off his tongue, and she
knew that her answer would not cause a pretty reaction.
“I’m here to see Lee Carver,”
Taylor said cautiously, as if it were his first time in the building.
The nurse pressed a call-button on
the switchboard at her side; “Please, have a seat,” she said with a gesture
towards a few pale orange chairs at the other end of the room.
“Why do they make her come all the
way out here?” Dawn whispered, “Isn’t it more appropriate for you to go
inside?”
“I don’t know…This hasn’t ever
happened before…”
Silent moments ticked by and
Taylor became restless, fidgeting endlessly in his chair, until a fair-haired
man in a long white jacket entered the room.
He had a rigid look of determination on his face, but his eyes were
melancholy; they were the eyes of a man who knowingly had to break a
heart. Dawn watched as Taylor jumped
out of his chair and ran over to this bleak man who tried to steer Taylor back
to a chair.
“No,” he screamed, “Don’t you
treat me like a fucking porcelain doll!!!
What the hell happened here!?”
“Taylor…she’s slipped, big
time. We couldn’t do anything else for
her…She’s in the hospital; she’s comfortable, but she doesn’t have much time left.”
“I just talked to her last week,”
Taylor whimpered, “What happened; what changed so drastically between then and
now?”
“That simple cold she had spread
to her lungs; we couldn’t do anything to stop it.”
“So, she has pneumonia now?”
“Unfortunately yes,” Dr. Turner
said quietly; he had never hated his job as much as he did this moment.
“That’s a death sentence…” Taylor
stuttered, needing no response to know it was true. The hallway became crowded with unnatural silence. Everyone in the room was waiting for Taylor
to cry, or scream, or break, but he didn’t; he just stood, utterly still. Dawn reached for his hand and his skin was
cold and slick as ice; it slipped from her grasp as she touched it.
“You said she doesn’t have much
time…Is there an approximation we can make?”
“We really don’t know,” Dr. Turner
said carefully, “She is a strong girl, but eventually…”
“Is she coherent? Does she understand…?”
“Yes, she knows what is happening,
and she seems to have accepted it,” Dr Turner added, hoping to ease Taylor’s
heartache, “Nothing in her life has ever been easy, and she…she doesn’t want to
fight anymore.”
Taylor’s eyes squinted shut, as if
the words alone caused him a searing blindness; he could feel tears stinging
his irises, and what followed seemed later to be only a water-washed
dream. In his mind’s eye he could see
himself sobbing, the realizations of life hitting him like a stone wall. Words around him were garbled like the words
of a drowning man. The world was hot
and cold all at once, for while every inch of his skin burned with the
prickling heat of a desert sun, his blood kissed every part of his inner being
with arctic fire. Through his veil of
tears, Taylor saw Dr. Turner say something to Dawn, but he couldn’t hear the
words. Dawn shook her head defiantly,
pushing the fear as far behind her eyes as she could, but the truth was there;
this was not a part of Taylor she had ever known.
“No, you can’t do that to
him. He will be fine; he just needs
time to let this settle.”
Dr. Turner looked skeptical, “Take
him home and put him to bed,” he said pressing a card into her hand, “And call
me if he doesn’t calm down.”
Dawn nodded again and stretched
her hand out to Taylor; until she pulled him off the floor he hadn’t even known
he was on his knees.
* * * * * * * * * * *
Walker spied Taylor’s lanky body,
sprawled across the bed, through a crack in the door. Dawn had brought him home two and a half-hours ago; he was a
mess, far from the boy who had left the house.
His doctors had been reluctant to allow him to return home; Dawn said
they had wanted to readmit him and sedate him for the night. They didn’t believe he was capable of
handling his newest tragedy in the outside world. They wanted to prevent his emotions from raging out of control by
allowing him to have none, forcing him into a peaceful, dreamless sleep. Dawn had refused them at the hospital, and
Walker refused them on the phone; he would not condemn his son to one more
night of straining against hospital restraints in a drug-induced slumber. Walker, instead, kept a silent vigil over
his son, watching his chest expand and collapse with every shallow,
sorrow-filled breath he took.
Taylor had regressed to the
pre-hospital mouse he had been for so long; quiet, hurt, and melancholy. He didn’t want to speak, or eat, or move; he
simply wanted to lie very still and pretend he had died. He felt his father’s eyes on him since Dawn
and Isaac had dragged him from the porch up into his room and put him to
bed. He wondered how long he would
stand there before he came into the room.
Walker had been this silent and still before Taylor had tried to kill
himself, and vowed after that he would change; Taylor wanted him to change, he
wanted to hear words of comfort from a voice he always longed to hear.
Taylor turned to the door, his
eyes weak and pleading; “Are you going to come in?”
“I wasn’t sure if you would be
anxious for company…”
“I don’t know that I’d call myself
anxious…I just know that I don’t want to be alone.”
Walker smiled, “And you won’t be.”
A long pause stretched out between
them before Taylor spoke; “I can’t believe this is happening.”
“You knew it would, eventually.”
“Eventually is the key word
there…It is completely non-specific; you can make it as far away as you
want. Eventually she’ll get weak;
eventually she’ll have to go to the hospital; eventually she is going to
die. Eventually…not next month, or next
week, or tomorrow, just eventually.
Eventually something will happen to shock you out of this state of
constant torment; the better I felt the farther away I pushed eventually. The better I felt the less I even wanted to
consider that all things set to happen ‘eventually’ will someday truly happen.”
“It’s an awful word, and honestly
I don’t think anyone could last without doing what you did; how could you live
with some unknown time sneaking up behind you?”
“You can’t.”
“And you have to live so you did
the only thing you could, and that is all you can ever do. You just have to go on living.”
Taylor’s lips formed a half smile;
“It’s kind of funny that the times you really need to live are the times it is
hardest to feel alive.”
“I know what you mean; that
feeling is pretty universal, but trust me you will find that spark, that one
thing that kicks your ass out of bed one morning and says ‘Get up; everything
is okay.’”
“I can not imagine that…”
“No one can, but that doesn’t stop
it from happening.”
“How can you be so damn certain?”
Taylor spat, his stomach knotting with frustration.
“Because I found it myself the day
you were born,” Walker whispered, and Taylor’s features lost their angry edge,
“You can’t avoid loss Taylor. People
are always going to leave, in one way or another; the important thing is to
remember that you haven’t gone with them.
My world had stopped when…when Jordan died. I took a leave from work; I spent a week of it in bed. Your mother was almost full term with you,
and taking care of Isaac and the house completely on her own while she dealt
with her own grief. She went on living,
and I acted as if I had died; nothing had ever hurt so much, and all I could
think about was what I had lost. Than
one day you were born, and when they put you in my arms and, gosh, here was
this little person looking up at me smiling with these happy, innocent, blue
eyes; a person with his whole life ahead of him; a person who I had helped
bring into this world; a person who gave me back the life I had lost. Suddenly I had a reason not only to live,
but to want to. I can’t promise that ‘eventually’
is never going to catch up with you, or that it won’t feel like hell when it
does, but I promise that it won’t last forever, and that you aren’t alone.”