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“No one can help you now,” Cedric whispered, coming up right behind her. “Now I have you where I want you,” he whispered into her ear.
“No! Don’t touch me!” she screeched, squeezing her eyes shut as her whole body started to shake.
“Taylor! Wake up!” Derrick’s voice shouted, and Taylor opened her eyes to find Derrick above her. She was still lying in his bed. Her hands were pushing against his chest, and Derrick’s face was full of bewilderment.
“It was a dream?” Taylor asked softly, the emotion and tears choking out her voice.
“Yeah, Tay, it was just a dream,” he answered her softly, pushing the hair back from her forehead. “Are you okay?”
Taylor nodded and bit her lower lip, but the tears fell anyway. “Do you want to talk about it?” Derrick asked, but all Taylor could do in response was tuck her head into his chest and let Derrick pull her into him.
The nightmares had been horrible right after Taylor had left. She had screamed so loud at one gross motel they had called the police, and she had left there in the middle of the night. But with more time and distance, the dreams got less intense, and then they stopped altogether. She couldn’t remember the last time she had one.
“Tell me something,” she said into Derrick’s neck.
“Okay.”
“Cedric is really dead, right?”
Derrick slid a hand to her face and tilted her head up so she could look at him, “Yes, Taylor. He is dead,” he said as he searched her face. “What did he do to you?”
“Nothing.”
Derrick raised his brows. “Yes, because when people do nothing it often causes their relatives to scream and fight in their sleep,” he responded sarcastically. “You said you were going to be honest with me,” he reminded her softly.
“He was just so crazy,” Taylor whispered.
“How?”
Taylor looked at Derrick. She could see he wanted to help her, but how did she put it into words? Taylor pushed up lightly on Derrick’s shoulders. “Let me up,” she said, and though he set his jaw, Derrick did in fact roll back and let her up.
Taylor scooted out of bed and sat in the chair Derrick had tried to sleep in the night before. She drew her knees to her chest and looked at Derrick. He looked surprised. “What?”
“I thought you were going to leave.”
Taylor wrinkled her forehead in confusion. “Why?”
“Uh, because that is sort of the way you have been handling things.”
Taylor rolled her eyes. “He was super controlling,” she started off. “He came back after my mom died—not right away, but when my Poppy got sick.” It was hard to talk about because Taylor had really tried to forget it. “I was almost eighteen, and when I heard he was coming back I wanted to leave, but I couldn’t leave Poppy behind. I knew he wasn’t going to be around much longer.”
“Why did you want to leave?”
“He had never been right,” Taylor said. She stared at a blank spot across the room and squinted, trying to remember. “Like, my first memory of him is him holding a knife to my dad.”
“What?” Derrick exclaimed. “What the hell happened?”
Taylor shook her head. She was calmer than she thought she would be telling this. “Nothing, my dad talked him down it seemed. I was little, like four maybe. I just remember being petrified and then my father scooping me up, and I didn’t see him for a while after that.
“But the next time, it was really tense. Everyone knew he was coming, there was a big dinner party planned, and there was like this buzz in the house—my house with Mom and Dad, before I moved to the mansion,” Taylor thought back. She could almost see the house, see the staff. “So I was playing, and I could hear my parents talking about how he needed help. My mom was saying something like, ‘We really need to help him. He is on a downward spiral.’ And then Dad was like, ‘I don’t know how to get through to him.’ I was eight, I think, maybe nine. So he comes over and he is sitting in our kitchen, he refused to ever leave the kitchen, I remember that too now, and I see him there and I think I can talk to him. So I go over and say, ‘I want to help you, Uncle Cedric,’ very serious, and he looks at me with that blank look he always had and whispers, “Help me? Why do you want to help me?” I say, ‘Because Mommy and Daddy said you need help.’”
Derrick groaned on the bed, and Taylor turned and met his stare, nodding, “I know. And then he was just quiet, and we just stared at each other, and then he walked over to me and crouched down and said, ‘You are just as fucked up as they are.’ And he walked through the kitchen to the main dining room. It was all set up, and with one hand he took this huge heavy wooden table covered with china and utensils and stuff and just flipped it right on top of itself,” Taylor said, shaking her head. “It was scary. I don’t even know what happened after that. There was yelling and lots of movement, and I ran away to my room.”
“You never said anything,” Derrick said. “All that time we hung out, and played—”
Taylor shrugged, “I don’t know, maybe because I was a kid, and he wasn’t around,” she guessed. “I mean, my parents came and talked to me and said Cedric was not right. I never told them what I said, though, I never told anyone.”
“This is the first time you have ever talked about this?”