Baby Furniture
Taylor couldn’t sleep. That was becoming his norm since arriving back in Tulsa. Once again, Charlotte plagued his dreams during the short periods when he actually managed to fall asleep. In the dreams, he found himself playing the role of her abuser. Even though he knew it was a dream, he could not stop himself – that was the worst part of all. He would startle himself awake, screaming at himself for hurting her, and then fall back into the same dream. It was like he was watching himself from the outside, unable to stop his fists from flying, unable to stop hurling curses he knew he didn’t mean.
By mid-morning, he gave up on ever sleeping enough to feel rested. He pulled himself from his bed, shuffled to the kitchen and turned on the coffee machine. He briefly considered not even bothering with a cup and just drinking it all straight from the pot. It wouldn’t make a difference, he decided. He was just doomed to drift around half-awake and half-asleep, no matter how long he spent in bed or how quickly he consumed the largest amount of caffeine possible.
He paced the kitchen nervously until the machine finished brewing and poured himself a cup, black. Usually he’d add so much sugar and cream that you couldn’t even tell there was coffee in the cup at all, but he just couldn’t be bothered. Treating himself to anything nice just seemed silly. He sipped the bitter drink and continued pacing, eventually finding himself in the living room, staring out the window that faced Shiloh’s apartment.
It was a nice little apartment complex, he thought. The whole thing had originally been a large house, but somewhere along the way it had been converted into apartments with cute little flower boxes on the windows and brightly painted front doors. Not a bad place to raise a kid – his kid, he reminded himself. Shiloh’s car was in the driveway and he could see her struggling to remove a large box from the back. He realized he should go help her with whatever it was.
Taylor was glad that he had once again fallen into bed with his pants still on. That saved him time. He chugged down the rest of his coffee, ran a hand through his hair and hoped he was presentable enough. He barely paused at the door long enough to slip on his shoes before jogging outside and crossing through the small patch of lawn that separated their driveways.
“I’m not sure, but I don’t think pregnant women are supposed to do heavy lifting like that,” Taylor said.
Shiloh rolled her eyes. “In case you hadn’t noticed, I do a lot of things I shouldn’t do.”
“I’m pretty sure you just insulted me,” Taylor replied. “But I’m surprisingly okay with that. I just can’t even be upset about anything else right now. I have reached my depression saturation level. Now, let go of the damn box.”
She jumped back and made a big show of throwing her hands in the air, away from the box. Taylor fought the urge to roll his own eyes. With Shiloh out of the way, he could see that the box contained a baby crib boasting state of the art features.
He gulped and mustered all his strength to lift the box out of her trunk and to the pavement. “Where do you want it?”
“The nursery?” Shiloh said, as though he had asked the stupidest question ever.
“That would be helpful if I knew where that room was,” Taylor replied, deciding he’d be better off pushing the box than trying to carry it the whole way. He could only manage so many shows of strength in one day, and Shiloh had a way of stripping away his masculinity with just a few words.
Without a word, Shiloh turned and motioned for Taylor to follow her. He awkwardly half-pushed, half-rolled the box across her driveway, not lifting it again until he had to take the two steps up into the house. He was struck by the lack of decoration; Shiloh’s home looked about as lived in as his, and he hadn’t lived in it for almost a year. He couldn’t think of any excuse for Shiloh not to decorate with at least a few posters or candles – anything to make it seem like she actually existed in her apartment.
“Here it is,” Shiloh said, flinging open the door and stepping back to allow Taylor room to negotiate the doorway with the box in tow.
Like the rest of her apartment, this room – the one she had called the nursery – was nearly bare. The walls were white and the windows didn’t even have any curtains. Some boxes labeled “Baby Clothes” and a few packages of diapers were the only items in the room.
Shiloh leaned against the door frame and mindlessly ran a hand across her swollen stomach. “You can just leave it in the floor anywhere. I’ll put it together later. I’ve got the changing table in my car too, but I can handle that. You don’t need to keep playing superhero.”
“I’m not playing,” Taylor said. “I mean, I’m not playing and I’m not a superhero. You obviously needed help, whether you’re going to admit it or not. I would have been helping you a lot more, for a lot longer, if I’d had any clue…”
“Well. It’s too late to talk about what you would have done, alright?”
Taylor winced at her harsh words, but didn’t let it stop him. He pulled his keys from his pocket and sliced open the packing tape around the edges of the box. He was putting that damn crib together, whether Shiloh liked it or not. “So, I can’t really tell from the decorations. Is it a boy or a girl?”
“Is what a boy or a girl?”
He looked up at Shiloh’s face, wondering if he had heard her right. She stared at him, arms crossed and one eyebrow raised. It wasn’t a question; it was a dare. Taylor cleared his throat. “Our baby. Are we having a girl or a boy?”
“A girl.”
Taylor decided it was best not to point out that Shiloh didn’t argue with him for calling the child theirs. She had allowed him that one small victory, but he knew she could easily retract the win if he pressed the issue too much. Still, he couldn’t help smiling to himself as he opened the box and began removing pieces. He really had no clue how to assemble baby furniture, but he wasn’t going to let Shiloh know that.
“You’re going to need a screwdriver, you know.”
So much for not letting my cluelessness show, Taylor thought. He turned the instructions over in his hands, but couldn’t make heads or tales of them. “I guess I am. And possibly a translator for these instructions.”
Shiloh chuckled. “Alright, here’s the plan. I’ll get you all the tools you need, and I’ll read the directions. You just do what I say.”
“I can handle that.”
They fell into an easy, if not comfortable, routine. Shiloh read the directions and Taylor did his best to follow them. A few times he had to stop and study the illustrations before he understood where he had gone wrong. Shiloh wasn’t exactly slow to point out all the ways that his crib did not resemble the one on the box, either.
By the time he reached the last piece of his construction project, Taylor could keep quiet no more. He screwed in the final screw, then turned to Shiloh. He stared her down for a moment before speaking.
“Shy. I need to ask you something, and you better answer me. You owe me after this.”
She rolled her eyes. “Yes, Taylor. I’m forever indebted to your for putting together a baby crib. What’s your question?”
“Why… why didn’t you tell me about Charlotte? Why didn’t she tell me what was wrong?”
“That’s two questions,” Shiloh replied. “And you’re going to have to be more specific than that.”
Taylor could tell by the look in Shiloh’s eyes, the way they clouded over at his question, that she knew exactly what he was referring to, but she was going to be stubborn. He would have to spell it all out before she said a word. “I found Charlotte’s diary yesterday. So don’t play dumb, Shy. I know you knew exactly what she had been through, but neither of you ever felt the need to tell me, it seems.”
“It was her life. It wasn’t my job to tell you.”
Shiloh’s calm demeanor only angered Taylor. He practically growled, “Well, she can’t tell me now. She’s dead. And apparently you were content to let me go on never knowing why. Jesus, the police even thought I was involved and you kept your mouth shut the whole time!”
Shiloh stepped in close to Taylor, staring at him, daring him to look away from her eyes. “I don’t know what her diary says, alright? But I do know what she went through and I know it was killing her that she felt she couldn’t trust you when you hadn’t actually given her a reason not to. It was tearing her up inside, but she thought it would only make things worse if she told you about her past. About that bastard.”
“You were her friend through all of that,” Taylor said. It wasn’t a question. He knew it was the truth. “You didn’t do a damn thing to stop him? You just let that happen to her?”
“Oh, don’t you dare blame for that too. You think she didn’t try to hide it from me, too? People keep secrets, Taylor. People lie. It’s what we do. If I had known sooner, maybe I could have stopped it. Maybe not. But I’ll end up like Charlotte if I spent all my time thinking about what I might have done.”
Taylor backed away, feeling defeated. “I just wish that for once in my life, people would tell me everything. Everyone leaves me in the dark all the time and I’m fucking sick of it.”
“Poor, pitiful Taylor.” Shiloh spat the words at him. “Maybe we’re trying to spare you. You’re not in the dark. You’re living in the light while the rest of us are stuck with the dark, awful truths that you really don’t seem capable of dealing with. You should be thanking us.”
Taylor threw drown the screwdriver and stormed out of the room. He wanted to look like he wasn’t thoroughly defeated, like he was storming away in anger at how wrong Shiloh was. But he had a feeling he looked more like a pouting child who hadn’t gotten their way. Maybe that’s exactly what he was.
He didn’t look back at Shiloh, because he knew that if he did, she would see that his facade of anger was fading away. He wanted to look angry. He did not want to admit to her that she had a point. But he knew that she did. Still, he couldn’t resist slamming the front door to his house, even though he doubted she was even watching or listening.
People lie.
There were fewer true statements to be made. Taylor knew that. He wanted to believe better of the few people he let into his life, the few people he trusted enough to get close to and care about. People like Zac, Charlotte and even Shiloh. But everyone had something to hide.
Charlotte’s secret had been what killed her. It had been eating her up inside with guilt for years, and Taylor had been blissfully unaware the entire time. He couldn’t go back and change that now. He could only accept what had had happened. Charlotte couldn’t live with her secret, but she couldn’t tell it either. Her solution hadn’t been ideal, and he would never be able to forgive the circumstances that forced her to it, but maybe someday he would be able to forgive her.
Shiloh’s secret was, in a way, his own secret too. They had come together because of the guilt and responsibility they felt over Charlotte’s death. Now that both had to live with the consequences of that. But Shiloh hadn’t told anyone the truth. She had held inside, for seven months, the truth of what she and Taylor had done.
Was it her secret that had driven Zac away?
Taylor didn’t want to answer that question. He was so tired of guilt and blame. Maybe things just happened, and no one was really to blame. They just made their choice, good or bad, and that was all there was to it.
He couldn’t help wondering what Zac’s secret might have been. Might have been… Taylor hated that he was already beginning to think of Zac in the past tense. He wasn’t dead. He couldn’t be dead. Taylor refused to believe it. If he was dead, Taylor would never know what lie Zac was telling.
The biggest question Taylor was left with, however, was about himself. What lie was he telling? What secret was he holding in? He had spent too long blaming others and hating others to think about himself. His thoughts might have been consumed with his own pain, but that wasn’t the same. Everything he did and felt was just a reaction to others. Nothing was really his own.
Somewhere along the way, Taylor had lost himself. He was nothing but a bundle of reactions, without a personality of his own, without thoughts of his own. He would never be able to figure out what his own deep, dark secret was if he didn’t find himself first.