Twenty Eight: No More Tears
After ten minutes I eventually convinced myself to get out of the car and go inside. I’d hoped that Brad had decided to sleep past noon, but when I opened the door he was sitting in the living room with his usual beer in his hand. It was only 1 in the afternoon and he was probably already drunk. Things hadn’t changed much.
“Look who decided to come back!” Brad yelled over his shoulder towards my mother’s bedroom when he saw me.
I walked past him quickly, carrying a box at my side and trying to ignore him the best I could.
“They kick you out, Gabrielle?”
When I reached my room, I looked around and noticed Bobby’s stuff everywhere. Even worse, I noticed Bobby sleeping under the blanket I’d had on my bed since I was a toddler. He stirred when I opened the door.
“What the fuck are you doing home, Gabrielle…?” he spat. “You left for good.”
I just stood there wordless. I wasn’t welcome at the Hanson’s and I wasn’t welcome in my childhood home. I felt my eyes pricking with tears that were threatening to spill over, but this was not a group of people you could cry in front of. Crying was weak, and I had to be strong if I wanted to survive around them. They saw crying as bullshit and took advantage of weaknesses.
“What the fuck are you doing home, Gabrielle…?” my mother repeated him, wandering out of her bedroom with broken curlers in her hair. “Did those Hanson’s kick you out? I knew they were up to no good…”
“They didn’t,” I shook my head, since technically only Taylor had. Everyone else seemed to want me to stay.
“Did you and that Taylor Hanson break up?” she asked, referring to him like he has not a person, but some remote celebrity. I hadn’t wanted to tell her about the two of us because I figured she’d get too much enjoyment out of knowing the relationship she envied had failed, but it seemed I had no choice.
“His ex-girlfriend is pregnant,” I muttered.
“His ex-girlfriend is pregnant?” she repeated. “He’s someone’s baby daddy? I thought you said they were a religious family.”
“They are!” I said, confused by it all myself as well. “He is…”
“But he’s sleeping with girls and getting them pregnant? Did you sleep with him?”
“Mom!” I gasped, glancing at Bobby who was sitting up in my bed scratching his head and listening curiously.
“He’s probably a walking STD! You should have known… he’s a rock star. He probably sleeps with one os his fans after every show!”
I had no reason to know he didn’t, really. But even though he’d broken my heart, lied to me, and treated me like shit, I still felt like I knew Taylor better than that.
“You probably have a couple hundred STDs now!”
“He doesn’t… have STDs.”
We all fell silent as we heard a hurried banging on the front door.
“Go see who it is,” I demanded of my mother, who surprised me when she wandered over to it and peered out the window beside it obediently.
“It’s him.”
“Damnit, I knew it! Tell him I’m not here!” I turned to Bobby. “Get out of my room!”
“It’s my room now!”
Seeing no other choice, I raced into the room and slammed the door as my mother swung open the front door. I didn’t want to be alone in my room with Bobby. It brought back nauseating memories… but I didn’t see many other options. I couldn’t handle facing Taylor. At that moment, I hated him with a passion. I’d have been happy to never see his face again. I leaned against my bedroom door and listened to them speaking in the living room.
“Can you please just let me come and talk to her? Please, I need to explain some things.”
“I told you… she’s not here,” my mother said. I appreciated it. She was lying for me and although it wasn’t the most affectionate thing, it proved to me she cared.
“Ma’am… I see her car in the driveway. Please just let me talk to her. Please…”
“She doesn’t want to talk to you. Now you just go home to the ex-girlfriend you knocked up and leave Gabrielle alone.”
I pictured how his face must have looked when she said that. He was always so sensitive and felt guilt more than most people, but I wouldn’t let myself feel bad for him. He deserved to feel like shit. He deserved to feel like world’s scummiest man.
“Ma’am… I know she doesn’t. But I was a complete asshole to her just a little while ago… and I need to tell her some things.”
“I said leave her alone,” she repeated.
Bobby crawled from the bed over to where I was standing so he could hear too. I glared at him as he tried to snake his way around my waist. I didn’t want anyone to touch me… not ever again.
“You can’t come in and she ain’t coming out,” Brad added not because he wanted to defend me, but because I figured he just wanted to join in on bullying my rich ex-boyfriend who he’s resented.
After a long pause I heard Taylor say quietly, “I’ll just wait outside till she comes out.”
“You’ll be waiting all night!”
“Then I’ll wait all night.”
When I heard the front door slam, I was grateful to be able to leave my room and escape Bobby’s roaming hands.
“Is he gone?” I said to my mother as I stepped into the living room.
“He’s outside,” she said from where she was standing by the window peering out at him. “He’s just sitting there on the trunk of his car. He said he’d stay all night.”
“Taylor doesn’t like the dark,” I sighed, standing next to her and peeking around the shades with her. Sure enough, there he was sitting on the trunk of his BMW staring at the road wearing his usual dark sunglasses. “And he doesn’t know the meaning of patience. He’ll be gone soon.”
For the rest of the afternoon I tried to ignore him. I couldn’t get my boxes to bring inside and unpack because they were outside in my car, so I just sat next to Brad in the living room watching television for most of the afternoon. He was gross and loud though and would tell me every 10 minutes that I didn’t live there anymore, so eventually I just retreated to the bedroom Bobby had finally left and worked on homework. I checked every hour or so- expecting Taylor to have left, but each and every time he was still out there. For awhile he was laying back against the back window of his car, gazing up at the sky. At one point I looked out to see him pacing along side the road, kicking at rocks and pushing dirt around with his sneaker.
The sun went down at 6 and I figured he’d pack up and go home, but he just resumed his spot sitting on the trunk waiting. I figured he was hungry or cold or something, but an hour later he was still there- just stubbornly sitting in the dark.
“He’s still out there,” I reported to my mother at one point. She was standing in the kitchen fixing a scrambled egg in the microwave for Brad’s dinner.
“You want Brad to go out with his gun?”
“What! No!”
“I’ll go out with my gun,” Brad leapt up from the couch eagerly. It wasn’t everyday he got to get his gun out.
“You’ll scare the shit out of him! Leave him alone. He’ll go home eventually. He’s not bothering anyone,” I said, protecting him. I shouldn’t have. I should have let Brad go out there and scare him to death with the gun, but I think my true fear was that Brad was drunk as usual and he would actually fire a shot and it would get dangerous.
“He’s sitting on our property. I don’t want him on our property. I’m making him leave,” he said, heading towards the bedroom where I knew he kept his gun.
“It’s…” I began to tell him that it wasn’t his property, but I suppose it wasn’t mine anymore either. In fact, I was virtually homeless. I didn’t know where I was going to sleep or where I was going to go, but although it shouldn’t have been, it was the least of my worries. I’d sleep in my car if I had to… the car he’d given me.
“Brad, no! Mom, tell him to stop!”
“If Brad wants him gone, then Brad can make him leave. That boy has no right on our property if we asked him to leave.”
I widened my eyes as Brad emerged from the bedroom drunkenly fiddling with his shot gun.
“I’ll make him leave! I’ll go out and talk to him, just put that thing back.”
“You want me to shoot ‘im?”
“No! I’ll talk to him. Put that away before you hurt someone with it,” I muttered, tentatively moving towards the front door. What was I supposed to say to him? I hadn’t planned on actually going out and talking to him, but it seemed I had no other option. Things would just get ugly if Brad went out with the shotgun. I pulled open the front door and looked out. Taylor was laying back on the trunk of his car, but he sat up nervously when he heard me open the front door.
“Taylor, you need to leave,” I called out to him.
“I need to talk to you,” he squeaked.
“Just go home. Brad’s threatening to come out with his gun if you don’t leave soon.”
“Then let him… because I’m not leaving until you talk to me.” I knew he was pretending to be braver than he really was. He’d told me before that Brad scared him. I could only imagine how he’d feel about Brad and a gun. “Come home with me.”
“I’m not going back to your house,” I said, keeping my distance and standing on the front steps. He slid down from the trunk of the car and began walking over to me, but I held my hand out protectively to stop him. “Don’t come over here. I meant it when I said I hated you. Leave me alone.”
He paused and despite the dark I could see him nervously wringing his hands out at his sides, trying to figure out what to say and what to do.
“I’m so sorry,” came his throaty, almost silent response. “I never meant to hurt you.”
“Well you did. Please go home.”
“Gabrielle… I am so incredibly sorry. Let me explain why I said what I did. Let me say what I should have said.”
“You’re just doing this because your mom told you to.”
“Since when do I obey my mother willingly? If anything, her telling me to do this almost stopped me because I’m so stubborn. I’m here because you mean too much to me. Come and talk to me,” he said, his voice fading out. “I know how badly I hurt you…”
There’s something about Taylor that causes me to do things I never planned on doing in the first place. He is intoxicating… and he clouds my mind and sometimes I can’t help but be drawn to him. I didn’t want to, but my feet started moving and I found myself standing in front of him in the driveway.
He’d put on the orange sweatshirt I’d given him when it got dark, but then he took it off and laid it on the driveway, sitting down next to me and nodding at me to sit on his sweatshirt at his side. He felt so much like the Taylor I knew, and yet I felt I was looking at whole different guy at the same time. I couldn’t trust anything he did. Suddenly nothing he did seemed genuine… it all seemed manipulative even. I hesitantly sat down on the sweatshirt and rubbed at my cold arms. He must have been cold too. It was a cold night.
“Gabrielle…” he started, taking an uneven breath of air. “First of all, I only lied about one thing. I lied about my virginity because… I don’t know why I did it. We were just sitting on the church steps and I was feeling innocent… regretful of having sex with Natalie… I just… I wasn’t really trying to hide anything… I just got stupid and it slipped out of my mouth before I could even think about what I was saying. I never said it to hurt you and I didn’t say it to convince you to have sex with me. That didn’t even cross my mind. I don’t know why I said that.”
I refused to give him so much as a nod. I just sat there staring out at the road as he spoke, trying to digest it all and trying to believe him.
“I can’t help that she’s pregnant… I’m sorry that she is… God, I’m so sorry that she is… but I can’t do anything about it. I’m sorry if that huts you, but it happened before I ever knew you… I promise. It must have happened the last time I was in Georgia but I promise you that from the day I met you, I never thought about sex with Natalie again. I wasn’t expecting this either… and I kept thinking about asking her to get rid of it. I thought about that after I got off the phone with her. I got done crying and I sat and decided I’d ask her to… you know… get rid of it. But I couldn’t do it. I know it wouldn’t be right.”
“It wouldn’t be,” I replied coldly.
“I know… but it seemed so easy. I could just end all this mess in one doctor’s appointment… I could go on loving you and she could go on to Georgia State like she was planning… it would just end like that. It’d be so simple. But I know in my heart it wouldn’t be right, and she wouldn’t be open to it either.”
“I don’t understand why you’re marrying her… do you love her?”
“No!” he paused and then added, “I used to. She’s been really… important to me for a long time now… so I care about her a lot… I do. But I don’t love her… like that.”
“Are you marrying her to do the right thing?”
“That’s what I have to tell you. When I told Mom and Dad, they were really upset. They didn’t know I wasn’t a virgin either and so they were really shocked. Mom ran into her bedroom crying… said she couldn’t even look at me. Dad just got really angry… started yelling at me about how when you play with fire you’re going to get burned… and I shouldn’t have messed with sex in the first place. He asked me what exactly I planned to do about the situation and I just stood there… crying, trying to figure it out. He figured it out for me… told me I was going to marry her and do the right thing. But how can I commit my life to someone… who I don’t love like that?”
“You have to,” I blurted out. “You love her in other ways and you know it will be better for the baby and…”
“Will it? Is it fair of me to love someone who I’m not in love with? I love her, yeah, but I’m not in love with her. Is that good enough reason to marry someone?”
“No, but your child is.”
He paused as he took in the statement. It sounded foreign on my lips too- his child.
“I’m in love with you. We had so much going… and… I don’t want to lose what we had because of this…”
“Taylor! This is a baby! You don’t have a choice here! You had sex, she got pregnant, and you’re going to be a father! You have to grow up now whether you like it or not and you have to own up to this!”
“I’ll be its father! I’m not saying I won’t… you know me and you know I will do it. I might be a lousy father because I’m hardly old enough to even look after myself, but I’m not going to ignore my God-given responsibility. But can’t I be with you… and still let Natalie have this baby?”
“What? And fly the baby back and forth from Oklahoma to Georgia every week? It’s not that easy. This has complicated everything… and it’s not going to be that simple.”
“Don’t you love me? You still love me, and I still love you, and I want to be with you Gabrielle. I don’t want to get married to her… I want to be with you.”
“Well, you’ve got bigger responsibilities now. You’ve got to put the welfare of this baby and the woman you got pregnant before what you want. Following what you wanted got you into this situation… didn’t it?”
“Yes,” he whispered.
“I love you Taylor… I’m not gong to pretend I don’t, but I don’t want to be with you anymore. This has complicated things too much… and you made too many mistakes. Mistakes that can’t be fixed easily.”
“I lied! I just lied and I had sex with her before I even met you! I’m not trying to say I’m innocent, but I could have done worse things…”
How could he possibly think that was all he’d done? He’d broken my heart. He’d made me think he was committing himself to me and only me, and then he broke my heart to pieces.
“And you kicked me out of your house, you treated me with zero respect when you told me about this, and you broke my heart! And as far as I’m concerned, that’s enough for me.”
“It doesn’t have to be this way. We can still be together… your heart doesn’t have to be broken.”
“It’s too late for that. You can’t honestly expect me to take you back after all of this…”
“I know,” he nodded. “But I had to try… will you come home?”
I glanced back at the dysfunctional shack behind me and could only feel an intense longing to return home to the Hanson house- a house of people I’d come to love and care for. I wanted to spend the night in my peach-colored bedroom. It stung when I remembered I wouldn’t be kissing him before bed… how could I go back to that?
“I don’t think I can look at you everyday…” I said quietly.
“You don’t have to much longer,” he said, his voice even quieter than my own. “If I get married…”
“When you get married…”
He cleared his throat, “When I get married… we decided Natalie and I would move into the pool house. It’s only got one bedroom right now but Dad was saying we could add a small addition… another bedroom or two and then connect it to the main house by adding a covering over the walkway. He thinks it would be a good idea if I had everyone to help us out… he said taking care of a baby is a big responsibility and if I’m on tour, Natalie is going to need help with the baby.”
“What do you think…? Do you think it’s a good idea?”
He shrugged, “I don’t know what to think of anything. My entire life has turned upside down with one phone call. I’ve lost the woman I love, I’ve broken your heart, I’ve found out I’m going to be a father… and I’ve decided I’m getting married.”
“Did you… did you propose?” The question was hard to ask. I hated the thought of him proposing to her. I suddenly despised her more than I’d despised anyone else in my entire life. More than Melissa… more than Brad.
“Not yet,” he sighed. “I called her back that night and told her we’d figure something out… we’d be okay and that… that we should probably commit to each other for the baby. She agreed… but I haven’t officially asked her. I’m flying out there on Tuesday to see her, you know.”
“Skipping your classes?”
He shrugged, “I guess this is more important right now… I’m so scared for all of this, Gabrielle.”
I looked over at him and met his eyes only to notice for the first time that they were wet with tears. “I’m so scared… and I feel so horrible about what I’ve done to you. I can’t say that enough… I would do anything to take this all back… and make it all disappear,” he said, his voice shaking with tears. I’d never seen him cry before. I’d seen him close to tears once or twice after getting off the phone with his record company, but then he’d pulled himself together and handled his rejection by being angry for the rest of the day. His anger I could handle… I didn’t know what to do with him crying. I wanted him to hold him but at the same time I felt still felt so devastated by everything. I was angry at him… his apology could only do so much.
“Taylor… it’ll be okay,” I tried to comfort.
“It won’t be,” he shook his head, wiping frantically at the tears on his cheeks. “I’m 19 years old… 19 fucking years old! What is God thinking giving me a baby!? I don’t belong with a baby! I have too much going on in my life! I’m trying to record a fucking record and I don’t have… this isn’t the right time for this! I was feeling so happy with you and Natalie was just a part of history… and now everything is being flipped around on me! I know I caused this myself but I never expected this to happen… I just… I just had sex, Gabrielle… and look where it got me,” He paused nervously and then quickly mumbled, “What if you’re pregnant?”
“We used protection. I’m not.”
“I did with Natalie too! Well… she was on the pill and she said we were fine… I guess it didn’t work for some reason.”
In my mind I was questioning that. Since when did the pill not work? The only time the pill failed was when it wasn’t taken on schedule, as far as I knew from my mother who’d been on it for years. I wanted to ask him if he thought she could have lied to him, but I figured it was the last thing he needed to hear.
“Please… don’t let anyone know what you and I did last weekend. Don’t tell my brothers we… you know.”
“You’re having a baby and you can’t even seem to say the word sex,” I sighed. He was too young. He was right. He was still a baby himself. “I don’t want them to know anymore than you do.”
“I don’t even what to know what they’d think of me if they knew I’d had sex with you too…” he sighed. “The entire family is like rejecting me right now. Zac and Isaac won’t look me… they just keep shaking their heads when I enter a room… wondering what’s going to happen to our career. They don’t believe that we can still make music even though I’m going to be a father. Even Zoe knows I did something wrong. When you left, she raced upstairs yelling at me.”
I remembered the image of her standing there on the front step of the Hanson’s house… what I’d known as home for the last month. I remembered her crying and begging me not to go. I wanted to return to her and hug her little body in my arms again. I wanted it all to disappear too… but I knew it wasn’t that easy.
“Why did this happen to us…?” Taylor asked quietly.
“Sometimes you don’t know the answers to questions like that until a long time after things happen. I’m sure it will make sense when… when… when you’re holding your baby for the first time,” I tried to assure him, but it only caused my eyes to prick with tears. He would be holding the baby he had with Natalie… they were going to be happy together… and I was going to be alone. She was getting the man I loved and there was nothing I could do about it… nothing that would be right.
“What if I drop it…” he said quietly.
“You won’t.”
He suddenly turned to me and took my hands in his, looking me over carefully to see if I would flinch or push him away. I didn’t. It seemed innocent enough.
“Gabrielle, just because we can’t be together anymore… it doesn’t mean I don’t want you in my life. I don’t know how I lived without you earlier, but now I can’t imagine living without having you to talk to… having you around.”
“Taylor, you’re getting married now. You’ve got to stop giving me these… monologues about how much I mean to you,” I pulled my hands away. “But you mean as much as you did before this weekend!”
“Well you’ll have to keep your thoughts inside your head from now on,” I said, wanting him to keep talking about how much he loved me but knowing if he did we’d never be able to move on.
“I… okay…” he said tentatively. “Promise me you’ll be around. Promise me we can be friends… close friends… I can’t lose you completely. I made so many mistakes… I fucked up more than I think it was humanly possible and I’m so sorry that I broke the news to you the way I did… I wasn’t myself. Something was seriously fucked up with me this afternoon and I’m sorry… but if you could find it in your heart to forgive me… please forgive me, Gab.”
“I can forgive you,” I said quietly. I think I already did. I loved him too much to hold so much against him. “But I can’t trust you how I used to.”
“Are you going to move back in?”
I nodded. “I don’t know where else to go…”
“Thank god…” he muttered, “I was so scared… we were all so scared you’d never come back.”
“And Taylor?”
“Hm?”
“I can’t love you either. I can’t do it… I can’t go on loving someone who is getting married and starting a life with another woman. Loving you hurt me too much already… I won’t let myself continue to love you.”
“But you can’t just stop loving me… you can’t help it if you-”
“I can,” I nodded. “It won’t be easy, but I have to teach myself how not to love you.”
“And what about me…? What am I supposed to do?”
“You… you teach yourself to love her.”
“I can’t…” He leaned in towards me and I could tell he was seconds away from kissing me despite our conversation. I pushed him away and stood up immediately.
“You can’t do shit like that!” I screamed at him. “We’re over! You broke up with me! You’re getting married! And if you expect me to ever forgive you completely…if you expect me to be your friend and want to be around you… well you can’t be doing stuff like that!”
“I know!” he gasped, rising to his feet too. “I’m sorry. I really am.”
I pointed at him and gave him glaring eyes. I wouldn’t let him mess with my mind. The situation was going to be sticky enough… me living under the same roof as him again but without him. Me listening to him making wedding plans but knowing I couldn’t have him. The last thing I needed was him trying and making it harder on me. If he expected me to stay sane, he couldn’t do shit like that because it only fucked things up more than they already wore.
“Do you understand me? Never again! I don’t want you to EVER, ever try and kiss me again for as long as I live. Do you get that? You’ll kiss your fiancé and that’s it… because I don’t trust you enough to let you kiss me and because I won’t let you be a child. That’s childish, Taylor Hanson! You accept your responsibilities and respect my wishes!”
He nodded hard and swallowed, staring back at me and muttering, “You’re right.”
“It’s time to grow up. Whether you like it or not.”
“I know…”
I sighed and shook my head, stepping away from him. Somehow I didn’t believe him. I knew Taylor well enough to know he was persistent and he often had little control of the things he did. He could swear up and down he’d control himself, but the passion in his eyes that I knew was reserved for me told me that that control would only last so long.
“I can’t move in with you!” I gasped. “What am I thinking!? This will never work! I can’t live under a roof with you and expect things to not get messy! You’re only going to play games with me and I’m only going to keep you from accepting your responsibilities and being mature. You’re going to spend all your time doing stupid shit like that!”
“I won’t!” he shouted. “Gabrielle, I won’t! I know you don’t trust me anymore, but trust this one thing. You’ve made it clear to me that I’m never to come on to you again… I know that. You’ve made it clear to me that I’ve got to grow up and you’ve got to move on, and Gabrielle, I care enough about you to respect that. I promise. I never break promises. It’ll work… we’ll make it work.”
“Any feeling you have for me will be suppressed from this day forward. I don’t want to hear about how much you love me, I don’t want to see how much you love me… you’re going to treat me like you treat your sisters.”
“But…”
“Or I’m gone. I’m out of your life for good.”
He paused a really long time and sighed, looking up at my childhood home and thinking. I knew at least by the fact that he was thinking that he was taking my request seriously instead of blowing it off. When Taylor spoke on a whim he usually ate his words and regretted what he’d said. I knew if he thought about it, he’d say something he meant.
Finally he nodded and stepped away from me so we weren’t so close. “Then I promise you… I guarantee that I’ll never show you ever again how I feel about you. I might want you like crazy… but you’ll never know. For your sake, I can promise you that… and I won’t go back on my word.”
“And if you do…”
“And if I do, I’ll understand if you move out and never so much as speak a word to me again.”
I nodded, believing him although part of me felt I shouldn’t. He’d only lied to me once. That one time had destroyed most of my trust in him… but all of the genuine things he’d done before preserved just a bit of my trust in him.
“Growing up starts now,” I mumbled, turning and walking up the steps to my house. “For both of us. I’m getting my keys. I’ll follow you home.”
“Gabrielle,” he said after me as I swung open the screen door to the house. “Why… why didn’t you cry? I know how much I hurt you… I saw how upset you were back at my house… but you didn’t shed a tear while we were talking.”
In a few hours, I’d built the brick wall I’d had up before Taylor came into my life. Before Taylor, I’d been emotionally cold. I’d put off emotions and followed the steps in life without trying to let myself feel anything at all. Taylor introduced me to love and trust and vulnerability, and in the end it had hurt me. It was my own fault, really. I should have known better than to let him convince me to let my guard down. My guard was what kept me safe. My guard was what protected me from ever getting hurt. I should have trusted my instincts.
I never did make a conscious decision to build that wall again- but the second he told me he was getting married and he wanted me to leave his house it automatically reassembled. I didn’t even think about it… it just reappeared. And it was stronger than before. It had to be. Taylor had broken my first wall down so easily with his charm and affection, I knew if I wanted to protect myself from then on my wall had to be twice as durable. I wouldn’t let anyone break it down again. I needed to look out for myself and just survive. I needed to make money, get through school, and go through the motions without emotions getting in my way and stopping me. If I wanted to make it in life, I couldn’t let anyone else break down the wall like Taylor had. I guess that wall had clogged the tears as well. I’d sobbed about Taylor once, and I vowed to myself I’d never let him make me cry again. Crying weakened me, and strength was what I valued most in life. Nothing, not even Taylor Hanson, would ever jeopardize my inner-strength again.
“Because I’ve already cried enough for a life time today alone,” I told him. “I have no more tears to cry.”