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TAYLOR
I’m crying and running and running and crying. At this point, I’m mostly just curious to see which one will give out first: my tears or my legs.
Sixty minutes into my run, though, both are going strong. Turns out it’s easy to run when you’re putting your whole sordid, nasty, terrifying past behind you. When you’re turning your back on your family and your sins, running actually comes kinda naturally.
As for the tears?
Well, those come naturally, too.
My dad’s handprint on my cheek burns like he branded me there. He’s never hit me before, but he sure didn’t hold anything back from this one. And for a first timer, he did a damn good job. He slapped me right across the face as if he’s been waiting my whole life to do exactly that.
He regretted it as soon as it happened, of course. I could see that much in his eyes: fear, hot shame, the instant surge of self-hatred.
But no matter how much he regretted it, the damage was already done.
It’s kind of ironic that it’s a beautiful evening in Chicago. Shouldn’t terrible things happen on terrible days? It ought to be pouring buckets down from the gray heavens so that fat raindrops mix with my tears. Locusts should be descending on the suburbs like Moses and the Pharaoh just got into their little tiff. Someone I love should cut their own bangs.
None of that is happening, though. The sun is shining, the birds are chirping, and the park I’m circling on my broad running loop is full of children and mothers laughing.
It’s not just Dad’s slap that’s seared on my skin—it’s also the things I said to him right before that. Things that crossed the line, that broke the thin ice we’ve been living on for the two long years since Mom’s diagnosis.
I wish I could take those words back, just like Dad wishes he could undo the slap. But like I said: the damage is done.
No turning back now.
So I parrot the words I said out loud to myself between painful gasps of breath. Why? Maybe because I’m a masochist and I like it. Or maybe because I just think I deserve to be punished. But not even punished in a cool, cosmic,God-strike-me-with-a-bolt-of-righteous-lightningkind of way. Just a petty, cruel kind of way.
“‘If only Mom’s cancer were contagious. Then all of us could be trapped at home, too. Miserable just like you are.’”
That’s what I said to him.
Even now, I can’t help but cringe. I’ve repeated my own words back to myself a thousand times since I ran out of the front door of the home I grew up in, and they aren’t getting any easier to hear.
My sister Celine didn’t know what to do when she heard me say that. She came downstairs in the middle of the fight, trying to play the peacekeeper as always.
“Stop!” she screamed. “Both of you, please, stop!”
But there wasn’t any stopping after that. I said what I said, Dad slapped me, and from that point forward, we were all stuck on the same nightmarish rollercoaster with no way off.
I wonder what Celine is doing right now, as I begin my third lap of the track encircling the neighborhood park. She’s probably still slack-jawed and staring at the door I ran through like I’ll come back any moment bearing flowers and cake and apologies.
Old Taylor might’ve done exactly that.
New Taylor just can’t.
Two years of watching your mother wither to a husk of herself will do that to a woman. She’s the one dying, but I feel like I’m losing parts of myself, too, with every pound that evaporates from her too-thin frame.
We almost avoided this fate. One year in, we were told that the treatments were taking. The chemo was working. The tumors were shrinking from golf balls to pinheads to nothing at all.
Then—Whoops,the doctors said.Scans were wrong. We made a mistake. Looks like you’re dying after all.
Thosetears were some I’ll never forget.
It got worse after that. Mom shrank faster; her skin grew pale and thin like tissue paper. Her eyes were the most haunting bit of all: gray and almost unseeing, like one of those cave fish at the Shedd Aquarium she used to take us to on rainy days when Celine and I were little.
She’s still here. For how much longer, none of us really know. I wonder how much of tonight’s fight she heard from her bed upstairs.
