Chapter 80 Taylor
Taylor
One Week Later
Taylor sips her coffee on a bench at Piers Park in East Boston, waiting impatiently for Tara to arrive.
Tx for accepting, Tara immediately messaged. I’ve been wanting to talk with u. You prly have lots of questions?? Can we meet?
While Taylor waits, her gaze travels across the water. The city of Boston looms in the near distance, its tall, stately buildings piercing the sky in a picturesque scene that would normally fill her with awe. But not today.
She hasn’t heard from the others; she was hoping she’d run into them at the police station, when she went a couple of days earlier to give her statement, but no such luck. For a week now she’s been frustratingly waiting for word, for any updates about Vivian.
So to say Taylor has “lots of questions” is an understatement.
She quickly checks her phone, which has been buzzing in her pocket. Aunt Gigi is already at it, suggesting nursing jobs. A position opened in the PACU! No nights and weekends. Or what about a job in dermatology??
Aunt Gigi was beyond relieved that Taylor hadn’t been at the middle-of-the-night fire at the Knox—or so she thought.
“Thank goodness,” Aunt Gigi said, when she called first thing the following morning.
“Can you imagine if the fire had happened during the day, when you were at work? Do they know what caused it yet? It looks like a total loss. Lisa—Phil’s sister’s daughter, who’s dating that cop—she said she heard a few people perished.
All I know is we didn’t get any burn victims on the unit. ”
Taylor slips the phone back into her pocket when she sees Tara approaching.
She moves hesitantly, as if she’s a scared animal.
She’s thin, her small shoulders exposed in the white tank she wears beneath overall shorts.
He hair is plaited in two braids, and on her feet are a pair of black Converse.
If Taylor didn’t know better, she’d think Tara was about fourteen years old.
“Hi,” Tara shyly ventures, and offers a big, crooked smile, the sincerity of which catches Taylor off guard.
Taylor rises, unsmiling. “Hi,” she brusquely replies.
“Thanks for coming.” Tara rummages through her canvas tote. Her profile is a watered-down version of her brother’s. “I brought you a soda. Want it?” She holds out a Coke, her hand shaking slightly.
“No.”
Tara shoves it back in her bag. “You seem kinda pissed.”
“Can’t imagine why.”
“You don’t need to be sarcastic.”
“I kind of do. I’ve been waiting…” A swell of emotions surges inside Taylor, which she quickly checks. “I’ve been waiting to hear what’s happened with everyone.”
“Well, that’s why I’m here, to talk with you.”
“Did someone send you?”
“Nah. I’m here on my own. Sorry, I don’t always have the best way with words. I just want to talk to you. I’m trying to make things right in my life.”
Taylor resists the urge to roll her eyes. “Where’s Vivian? I haven’t heard anything.”
Tara nods. “Jerry said she’s at some private facility, getting the care she needs. I guess she’s doing okay; I heard they think she’s gonna make a full recovery.”
Taylor exhales; it feels like she’s finally set down the sack of worry she’s been lugging around all week—at least, the one about Vivian.
There are still the unresolved feelings Taylor has about her mom—but she can’t get to those.
Not yet. “I’m so glad about Vivian,” she admits, and then scowls at Tara.
“Well, no thanks to you. I came across your Facebook student nurse post.”
“Oh shit. Really?”
“Really.”
“Look, I know I kinda fucked up with Viv—”
“Kind of fucked up?”
Tara’s cheeks color. “Okay, I really fucked up with her. I was following the house doctor’s orders. But I realize now I wasn’t giving good nursing care. I know you probably don’t believe me, but I thought I was helping her.”
“How could holding someone captive be helping them?” Taylor’s voice rises a notch, and a man jogging down the paved walkway gives an alarmed look.
Tara waits until he passes to continue. “Rose said someone at the Knox was trying to harm Vivian and pushed her down the stairs, so we needed to keep her hidden and safe.”
Taylor scoffs. “And you believed that?”
“Yeah. I kinda did at first. And then, when I started to suspect something wasn’t right, I still wanted to believe it…
I was scared. I mean, they knew everything about me and Jerry.
Where our parents lived, where they worked.
Rose was coming and going all the time, back and forth from her room at the Knox to mine next door.
I felt like sometimes I couldn’t breathe, you know? ”
Taylor says nothing.
“And I had the baby to think about,” Tara says, pressing her hand against her belly, which Taylor now notices is slightly rounded.
Tara’s eyes start watering. “Sorry,” she says, wiping them.
“Jerry says I cry at the drop of a hat these days. Must be the hormones, right? Once I have the baby and get them all outta me, then I’ll be better.
” She gives a little laugh. “Well, not better, but better. You don’t have a tissue, do you? ”
“No, sorry.”
“It’s okay.” Tara smiles half-heartedly. Her teeth are big, taking up a lot of real estate.
“So they threatened you?” Taylor leads; she’s desperate to know more.
“Well…not exactly. We had an agreement. Rose said I could keep living at the servants’ quarters and going to nursing school if we kept our mouths shut.
If we all did—Jerry, Eduardo, and me. Tell no one.
They were paying for my school, and Rose even arranged for me to do my clinical rotation with the house doctor. ”
“Wow,” Taylor manages.
“It was supposed to be temporary. Jerry was figuring out a plan to get us out of there. He hated what was going on. My brother can be kind of a pain sometimes, but it’s just because he’s looking out for me, you know?” She looks earnestly at Taylor, who nods.
As an only child Taylor doesn’t know, but she wants to hear more. “What about Eduardo?”
“Eduardo? He just looked the other way—you know how he is. He never wants to make trouble. But I don’t blame him.
It was just a such weird situation we were all in, you know?
It’s like…like when you watch a movie, and you think, ‘Oh, that person’s so dumb, I’d never do that.
’ But guess what? You don’t know. You don’t know what you’d do.
” She takes a shaky breath, then continues.
“And by the time I realized everything, the whole shebang, it felt like it was too late to do anything about it. I was in it, you know? But trust me—if you can,” Tara says, her eyes welling again, and her lower lip now trembling, “when I say if I thought they were gonna hurt Vivian I would’ve stopped them. I don’t know how, but I would’ve.”
“If they were going to hurt her? What do you consider ‘the sacrifice’?”
“Sacrifice? What do you mean?” Tara looks genuinely puzzled.
“The initiation sacrifice, and Vivian?”
Tara frowns. “I don’t know what the hell they get up to on initiation night—apart from burning entire buildings down, I guess—but it didn’t have anything to do with Vivian.”
Taylor feels her face heating, embarrassed over the potential misunderstanding. Is Taylor somehow wrong about the sacrifice? Or maybe Tara just doesn’t know the truth herself. But a suspicion lingers.
“Then why did you say Vivian wouldn’t need nursing care in a few days’ time? Back in the nurses’ Facebook group?”
“Did I say that? I guess that was me just wishful thinking that Jerry would figure shit out for us soon. I know he was looking at one place, but then it fell through.”
Taylor swallows this information; some of it goes down easily, but some sticks to her insides. She’s not sure what to totally believe—or who. “And Liam? Was he in on this, too?”
“I don’t think Liam knew anything, but you’d have to ask him.”
“Well, I’d love to, but I don’t have anyone’s contact info,” Taylor coolly replies.
“Oh yeah. Jerry wanted me to pass along his number to you, if that’s okay?” Tara scrunches her nose, as if just remembering.
“Yes, of course. Did they—did you—talk to the police?”
“Nah, I didn’t. But Jerry did. Or tried to, I think. They didn’t want to hear anything he had to say.”
“Yeah, me neither,” Taylor admits. She’d realized that about ten seconds in, when the detective immediately brought up how she’d told the paramedics that night that the cat was talking to her—implying she was not credible.
“We shouldn’t be surprised, right? These people are powerful. They’re like kings and queens, and we’re like the little pheasants to them.”
“You mean, peasants?”
“Oops, yeah. Little peasants.” She grins; she doesn’t seem to be bothered in the slightest by her less-than-perfect teeth like Taylor often is.
What would it be like to smile with abandon? Taylor wonders.
“If you’re asking me, the real villain here is Oliver,” Tara continues, kicking at the ground with the toe of her Converse.
“And not just because he was a shitty boyfriend and a druggie. I mean, I know what I did with Vivian wasn’t right, that I was in on it, too.
And I gotta live with it. But we were all doing Oliver’s dirty work.
He was like the head king. When I found out I was pregnant, Oliver sent Peter to try to convince me to get rid of it.
Peter put me up at a hotel, set me up with a doctor and everything.
But then Rose stepped in. She wanted me to keep the baby.
Everyone but Rose thought I got the abortion.
Jerry found out, eventually. But at first it was just me and Rose’s secret. ”
Rose. The image of her body crumpled on the basement stairs flashes across Taylor’s mind. “You know Rose never made it out of the fire, right?”
Tara puffs up her cheeks and then expels the air, like she’s blowing out a candle.
“I figured. I heard they’re still identifying the bodies, but since I didn’t hear from her…
I thought that might be why. I’m kinda relieved, but I’m also kinda sad, which I know sounds weird.
” Then she shakes her head. “That probably doesn’t make sense to you. ”
“Are you going to tell Oliver that you’re still pregnant?”
“Nah—and please don’t say anything to anyone. I mean, I don’t know who you’d talk to anyway, but if you do, please don’t say anything. I don’t want trouble with the Knox. I just want to have my baby. Oliver wouldn’t care, anyway. He ditched me real quick for the next girl, or guy.”
Taylor nods. “Okay, I won’t say anything.”
“Huh.” Tara squints at her. “I actually believe you. Thanks.” She’s continuing to squint, as if trying to not tear up again. “Hey, did you ever find that note I put in your wallet?”
“The ‘go back to nursing’ note?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Yeah, I got it. You know, you’re not what I expected,” Taylor admits.
“What did you expect?”
“I don’t know. Someone more…calculating, maybe?”
Tara snorts. “I wish I was more calculating. Maybe I wouldn’t have gotten myself into this mess. Half the time, I feel like a chewed-up bone a dog left behind.”
Taylor stifles a laugh. There’s a rawness, an individuality—an imperfection—to Tara that is endearing.
“Why’d you leave me that note, anyway?”
“I wanted to warn you to stay away.”
“Why?” Taylor presses.
“ ’Cause I didn’t want you to end up like me.” Tara says it so simply, like it makes all the sense in the world.
Tara and Taylor, you’re like flip sides of the same coin, Sam had joked earlier. Taylor had finally come clean to him about a lot. But not everything. For some reason, she’d still held a few things back.
We are not remotely alike, Taylor had shot back to Sam, but now, looking at this girl before her—and hearing her story—Taylor wonders if he is right after all.
Tara’s like a cautionary tale of what could have happened to Taylor, of what may have happened to many other girls.
And yet Taylor still feels tendrils of envy creeping up through her mind and coloring the way she’s hearing the story, the way she’s viewing Tara.
And what’s that envy for? Taylor forces herself to ask the question, and to answer it, even though she doesn’t want to.
This is a woman who was used and manipulated and lied to; whose pregnancy was dealt with by the Knox like the trash they so carefully remove; who almost lost everything, and yet—here she is meeting the world with a forthrightness, a comfort with herself, that Taylor utterly lacks.
Taylor thinks of all the time she’s spent agonizing over who she is; how she appears to people; how much effort she’s spent fitting herself into other people’s expectations in the least obtrusive way she can.
Then she looks at Tara’s smile, and she understands what a waste of time it’s all been.
Something suddenly occurs to Taylor. “What would’ve happened to Vivian, if you left?” she asks. “You said you’d step in if you thought anything bad was going to happen to her, but if you left, then who would have looked out for her?”
“Vivian was getting better,” Tara declares, with a hopeful lilt. “And I think they were kinda giving up on trying to track down her friend Xavier. They tried, like, everything. I figured at some point, they had to just let Vivian go, right?”
Xavier. That was who Rachel had mentioned in the bookstore. The friend one who went AWOL.
Taylor remembers what Rachel said about Vivian’s fake email: She asked me where Xavier is…
which felt like the real reason for the email.
And then there was that offhand comment Rose had uttered, the night of the fire: To hell with her little friend.
Is Tara insinuating that the real reason Vivian had been kidnapped was to find Xavier? But why?
“I thought they abducted Vivian because of her ancestry,” Taylor finally says, once she’s let the conversation hang longer than she should.
“Huh?” Tara says, her eyebrows knitting together. For someone their age, she has the beginning of some deep forehead lines. It might be because she’s always contorting her face in various expressions.
“You know, how Vivian is a descendant of the Knox and stands to inherit money? Where does that piece fit in?”
Tara starts grinning. Then she raises her small hand to her mouth as if trying to hide an erupting giggle, lest she offend Taylor. “That’s a plotline for a different book, Taylor. Not this one.”
She doesn’t actually know about Vivian’s ancestry, Taylor realizes.
“You’d be surprised,” she replies.