Chapter Seven - 7. The Family
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Family
They all looked at me as I entered. “Hi,” I said. “Did you have a good lunch?”
“We did, thank you,” said Ben, turning his attention back to Taylor. “We’re here to see you. I don’t understand why you’re being so obstinate about this.”
“You can go find a tour guide,” Taylor said. “I’m not going to drag Hazel around campus. Five minutes in, she’ll say her feet hurt, and five minutes after that, she’ll start crying.”
“She can put up with it,” Ben said.
“I really don’t understand why you don’t want to spend time with your family,” Lucy said, her tone of voice suggesting Taylor was a primary school student who had misbehaved. “We haven’t seen you in months, you haven’t visited —”
“No one invited me,” Taylor snapped. “And you are not my family.”
Hazel, previously lost in her own world, suddenly looked up at Taylor’s cutting tone and the charged silence that followed. I stood frozen by the doorway. My presence was probably making things worse, but I didn’t think disappearing into my room was the right choice.
“Um,” I said, and three sets of angry eyes turned on me. “I can look after Hazel if you want to show them around,” I said to Taylor.
“We’re not leaving our child with a stranger,” Lucy hissed, very audibly, to her husband.
“— a teenage boy,” Ben said at the same time.
And, well. Okay. I mean, I wouldn’t leave my daughter with some random either, but it still hurt.
“He’s not a stranger,” Taylor snapped, voice growing louder. “We went to high school together. I’ve known him for six years, and you would know him too if you ever bothered to give a single fuck about my life.”
“Do not use that language in front of your sister.” Ben didn’t speak loudly, but somehow that made him seem even more terrifying.
I stepped forward, unsure what to do, but knowing I didn’t want to leave Taylor alone. Despite his obvious anger, there was a vulnerability there too, like the slightest breeze would knock him over.
“Fine,” Lucy said. “We’ll show ourselves around. You’ll look after Hazel, won’t you Taylor?”
“Of course,” he said, mouth still etched in a deep frown.
They left soon after that, Lucy slipping on her kitten heels. Ben hadn’t bothered to take his shoes off. Once the door slammed shut behind them, Taylor collapsed on the couch. Hazel looked at him, nibbled on the end of her pencil for a moment, then returned to drawing.
I walked over. “You okay?”
Taylor made a noise and covered his face with his hands. I knelt on the rug next to Hazel.
“What are you drawing there?” I asked her.
She covered the page with her hands.
“What?” I said. “You don’t want to show me?”
She shook her head.
I pointed at her pencil case. “Can I draw something too?”
She nodded hesitantly, then passed me a pencil and tore a page from her sketchbook.
“How about I draw you?” I asked.
She blinked a few times. “Me?” she said quietly.
“Yeah. I’ll draw you. Is that okay?”
She nodded, sat up straight, and pulled her lips up in a prim smile. Ah. So that was her posing.
I drew a circle for her head, but my finger slipped, so the circle was less a circle and more a lump. “Fuck,” I said. “Fudge. I mean fudge.”
In my periphery, Taylor removed his hands from his face.
“It’s going to be a surprise, okay?” I said to Hazel, using my hand to hide the page from her view.
She nodded, still maintaining her smile.
Okay, I had to make this drawing not shit, because I didn’t want her to cry when she saw it.
I got to work on her hair, drawing strands that went down to her shoulders.
“Doing your eyes now,” I said, accidentally making her irises too big.
“Your nose…” I drew a little w-like shape in the centre of the circle. “Your mouth…your ears…”
Taylor was watching properly now, leaning forward on the couch.
I added the finishing touches of her shoulders and shaded in her shirt. It actually didn’t look as bad as I thought. Maybe I did have some art skills. I picked up the page and held it behind me.
“Are you ready?”
Hazel nodded.
I presented it to her with a flourish. She looked down at it, silent.
“What do you say?” Taylor prompted her.
“Thank you, Archie,” she said.
Taylor scooted forward, looking over her shoulder. “Oh, it’s…kind of good actually.”
“What are you trying to say?” I said, giving him a look, and he let out a reluctant laugh.
Hazel continued to stare at it, one of her tiny fingers resting on the side of the ripped page. I couldn’t tell whether she liked it or not.
“I mean, it’s not that bad,” I said. Sure, it looked like a twelve year old had drawn it, but you could tell it was her. Or, at least, a girl.
Hazel tucked it into her notebook — god, she didn’t even want to look at it anymore — and returned to her drawing. I got up and fell onto the couch beside Taylor.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“What I hate,” he said in a low voice, “is that they made me look like the problem.”
“I don’t think you’re the problem.”
“Come on. I’m the one who lost my temper and sure, maybe I should’ve sucked it up and showed them around, but they’re so fucking insufferable.”
Ben and Lucy hadn’t seemed particularly terrible, but to be fair, I’d only been in their presence for a few minutes tops.
“It’s nice they’ve come to visit you,” I tried. “Oh — are they here to watch your game tomorrow?”
Hazel turned around. “Are you playing soccer tomorrow, Taylor?”
“I am,” Taylor said to her. To me he said, “no, they’re not. Dad’s visiting the city for a business meeting, and they’re here so they can pretend they care about me.”
“I’m sure they care about you,” I said, automatically.
“They couldn’t wait to get rid of me.” He didn’t sound sad about it — just resigned. Like it was a cold hard fact.
“What about your mum?” I asked.
“What about her?”
“Well, do you see her?”
“Yeah,” Taylor said. “I mean, they have fifty-fifty custody. Well, they did, before I turned eighteen. As soon as I moved out, she turned my old bedroom into a ‘crystal room’. As in a room for displaying her gemstone collection. Not to do meth.”
I laughed. “Does she have any other children?”
“Nah, she’s childfree. That’s what she tells people, despite the tiny inconvenient fact I exist.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
I felt a wave of sadness, which was stupid and self-indulgent. It wasn’t my family. “Hazel’s cute,” I said finally, searching for something positive.
“She’s the only normal one.” Taylor leaned forward and ruffled her hair. “What are you drawing there?” he asked.
Immediately, she hunched over her notebook, then, deciding that wasn’t enough, moved to the other side of the coffee table, so she was facing us. Her eyes lingered on my face.
“You don’t want us to see?” Taylor asked.
“It’s a surprise.” She used her pencil case to cover the page and went back to drawing.
“What did you do while we were out?” Taylor asked, adjusting his legs. The side of his knee brushed mine.
I didn’t pull away. “Studied, then went to the gym. How was lunch?”
“Ben snapped at Hazel because she couldn’t finish her nuggets.
So I ate them and Lucy told me that if I kept eating like that, I’d get fat.
Then she asked me how I was getting on money wise.
Ben told me it’s time for me to be self-sufficient like I didn’t spend all of high school parenting myself and Hazel.
Then he started complaining about the couple renting one of his investment properties because the air conditioner broke and they want him to fix it because it’s one of their ‘tenant rights.’”
I laughed in spite of myself, and Taylor’s lips quirked up.
“At least you now know where I got my dickheadishness from,” he said.
“I’m pretty sure dickheadishness isn’t genetic,” I said. “Also, you’re not a dickhead.” I touched his hand.
Hazel jumped up and attacked me with a piece of paper and I bit back a shriek because she was either trying to defend her brother’s honour, or I had really offended her with my crappy drawing.
But she wasn’t trying to give me a paper cut. She was just enthusiastically handing me a drawing.
Taylor leaned in close to see and he made a noise that hastily turned into a coughing fit.
I took in the square-shaped head, the zig-zags for my hair, and the huge eyes — coloured in blue crayon — with massive eyelashes. More interesting was the fact that the head was tiny compared to the massive torso, which took up half the page.
“Is this…me?” I asked.
Hazel nodded quickly. Taylor sounded like he was choking on his spit.
“Holy shit. I mean, shite. I mean, ship,” I said. “Is this really what I look like? You’ve made me jacked.” I laughed. “My eyes too. Are they really that blue?”
She nodded. “Your eyes are like Elsa’s!”
Taylor had finally stopped laughing. “Are you saying Archie’s pretty like a Disney princess?” he asked, sounding sly.
Hazel nodded. “Yeah!”
Taylor giggled. I’d never heard him giggle in my life.
“I love it,” I told Hazel.“You know what? I’m gonna display it on the fridge, so everyone can see it.”
Hazel followed me to the kitchenette, watching as I used a magnet to stick the drawing to the centre of the fridge. I bent down and offered her a hand. “Thank you,” I said. “High-five.”
She returned my high-five, then hugged one of my legs so fast I hadn’t realised it happened until she was running back to Taylor.
Wow. It had been incredibly easy to make her like me. If only it was that simple for her brother.
Ben and Lucy were out for a few hours, but Hazel was more than content to sit at the coffee table, drawing. Later, she crawled onto the couch, wedged between Taylor and I, watching as we played video games.
“Time to go, Hazel,” Ben said when he and Lucy had returned, not bothering to come in properly as they stood by the door.
Hazel didn’t move. “I don’t want to go,” she said.
“It’s time for dinner,” Ben said. “Come on.”
“Is Taylor coming?”
“No. We’re eating at the hotel. Come on.”
“I want to stay with Taylor.” She glanced at me. “And…you.”
She’d forgotten my name, hadn’t she.