“Oh?” Meanwhile she’s thinking:Has he received the check I mailed? If not, it should be there by tomorrow.
“Can we FaceTime, please? I’ll call you right back.”
“Okay.” Two seconds later, Taylor’s phone rings. “Hi, Aunt Gigi.”
“That’s much better. I just need to see your face,” her aunt says, bringing the phone closer. She looks tired, eyes sunken, wrinkles pronounced. “T.J., do you remember when I told you I ran into your mom once on the street, here in Boston?”
Taylor feels all of her focus suddenly pulled toward the phone. “Yes?”
“Well, what happened was, it was early afternoon, maybe one o’clock, and I was walking down Columbus Ave., in the South End, and she, well, she must have been coming from home. She was in her pajamas. She was…skinny. So skinny.” Aunt Gigi rubs her forehead.
Taylor shakes her head. “I’m not following, Aunt Gigi.”
“T.J., your mom was strung out—from drugs.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“It’s time you knew, T.J. Your mom got into drugs.”
“Why would you say this?”
Her aunt’s face crinkles, a giant prune. “Because it’s true.”
“No,” Taylor says, more firmly. “No, it’s not.” But as she says this, the world suddenly dips, Taylor faltering along with it.
No.
“I’m so sorry, honey, to be the one to tell you how it really was. Your mother didn’t come to Boston to model. She came hereto follow a guy.” Aunt Gigi’s words sound far away, distorted, as if traveling through water.
No.
“And then she was with another guy. I couldn’t keep track of it. The deeper she got into drugs, the more erratic her life became. I tried to intervene a few times, but…”
Taylor shakes her head, then shakes her body. She feels discombobulated. She tries to respond, but no words form.
“It’s probably why your mom died in the basement fire—she was likely passed out.”
No. No.“No!”
“I really am sorry you’re only finding out now. Your father should have told you years ago, and that’s on him. My brother can be stubborn. Well, I agreed with him that when you were little, it was better to keep it from you, to feed you that story. But once you became an adult, he should have told you the truth.Heshould have. And I told him he should have. T.J.? T?”
No.Taylor drops the phone to her side, briefly closing her eyes. Even as she gradually comes back into her body—feeling the solid, reliable surface beneath her feet, the fabric of her clothes brushing against her skin—nostill hovers. She slowly raises the phone back to her face.
“But you said, the last time we met in the park, that you ran into my mom on the street, and that she was beautiful.”
Aunt Gigi takes a deep breath, and raggedly replies, “Your mother was always very beautiful—like you are. Which is why this is all the more tragic.”
Taylor shakes her head. “She was a model,” she insists. “She wasn’t like that. She was…” Her voice trails off. She wants to say:My mother was one ofthem, like Vivian.
“Shewaslike that,” Aunt Gigi says, gently but firmly. “But you’re not. You’ve always had a good head on your shoulders. Iget it, you’re young, you’re figuring things out. You don’t want to be a nurse? Then don’t. But that Knox place? They send the occasional VIP patients to us. Sometimes they’re drugged up, out of their minds. It’s not the type of place you want to be associated with. And you have to be careful, because clearly you have the gene. Look, you’re an adult, and you need to make your own decisions. But you need to have all the info to make the decision. I know it’s tough love, everything I’m telling you, but someone had to do it. You have a bright future, and I don’t want you to get in with the wrong crowd. I think you should leave that place immediately.”
After they hang up, Taylor slumps down on the curb.
She’s reminded, suddenly, of that woman addict she’d encountered on the street, outside the Knox. Did her mom look more like her than the glamorous woman conquering Boston Taylor had always envisioned?
Thoughts and the absence of thoughts swirl in her like a confused cyclone, rearranging the pieces of the life she once knew.
She starts to call her dad but then hangs up. After a moment, she texts him. She’s never texted him before; she doesn’t even know if he knows how to text. But it’s the only way she can currently muster the strength to communicate with him.
