Taylor slept poorly that night, waking up three or four times and having trouble falling back to sleep each time. At one point, when the clock radio on the nightstand between the two beds read 2:11 he awoke thinking that he'd heard something.
He laid in bed, holding his breath, and listening.
Aside from the distant hum of tires on the highway, he heard nothing. It was so quiet, in fact, that when the clock clicked to 2:12 he heard that, the tiny flipping of numbers as the old-fashioned clock ticked away the night.
But he sat up, and then stood up, anyway, and cautiously walked to the door. Without touching anything, in the dim light that seeped in around the edges of the drawn curtain, he examined it. The deadbolt still thrown to the right, the bar-lock closed at the top. He peered through the peephole and saw nothing but the distorted view of the parking lot. He sneaked a glance out the curtain window and saw nothing there, either. Finally, he lay back down on the bed and stared at the ceiling, trying to fall back asleep with little luck, hearing the click every minute as the clock radio ticked away the night.
He must have fallen asleep, though he didn't remember doing so, because he woke up, later, with brighter light pouring around the curtain's edge. Feeling groggy and hung over even though he hadn't drunk anything, he pulled on a pair of jeans and a Coldplay concert t-shirt he'd bought in Dallas and walked to the door. Just before he opened it, though, he thought better and stopped, hand on the doorknob, to peer through the keyhole.
Just the parking lot. He looked out the curtained window, too. Nothing -- a parking lot with 7 or 8 cars, including his rental car, a car that had a rental form signed with a scrawled signature. The rental agent had looked at it and said "Same old handwriting. Shoulda been a doctor" and Taylor had chuckled in a way he knew the rental agent would see as friendly.
He opened the door and then closed it behind him, locking the deadbolt with a room key. Down at the office, the "continental breakfast" advertised by the sign on the road turned out to be an assortment of doughnuts and muffins with two pots of oily-looking, and oily-smelling, coffee next to them. The coffee was lukewarm, and so were the doughnuts. He piled three or four onto a paper plate and poured a cup of the coffee into one of the tiny styrofoam cups that were set out for that purpose. The desk clerk, or manager, or maybe the one person was both, never looked up at him as he walked back out into a day that seemed unusually bright, given what he'd seen the day before and what he knew about the Pacific Northwest, which was cloudy and rainy and cold. The sky was blue and there were a lot of white clouds, puffy white clouds, floating through slowly, the kind of clouds that are so voluminous and low and clear-looking that they almost seem to be movie props at first, a fake background painting.
He squinted and went and leaned against his car, setting the flimsy plate of doughnuts on the hood as he looked at the hotel and thought about what he'd do that day. He had $400 in his pocket, and more that he could get to using his ATM card. He wasn't worried that anyone from Dallas was looking for him. Nobody would be looking for him. They might be looking for Andrea's husband, but they weren't looking for Taylor Christenson. Nobody had ever looked for Taylor Christensen, not since he was a young boy and had figured out why everybody loved him so much.
He remembered, with crystal clarity, when he'd first begun to sense what his mysterious talent was. It had been at his cousin's funeral. His cousin Shane, who he'd never much liked anyway, had died a dumb death, riding his dirtbike down a flight of stairs at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus on a dare. The family hadn't talked about that much in the days leading up to the funeral, but Taylor had heard it from his mom, who told him everything.
"Don't say anything to your aunt about it," she'd warned him.
Taylor didn't plan on talking to his aunt, at all, and had assured Mom he'd keep his mouth shut. They'd gone to the funeral, Taylor, then 15, wearing a pair of black jeans and a white button-up shirt and a tie he'd borrowed from his dad. The casket had been closed, with a picture of Shane on top of it. It was a picture of him on his bike, and Taylor thought that, too, was dumb.
Throughout the service, his aunt had cried and then looked over at Taylor, who was sitting in the second row at the church, on the aisle seat, next to his mom who was next to his dad. His aunt would cry and look at the casket, the picture, the priest, the eulogist, but in between, each time, she looked at Taylor and then blinked and cried and sniffled. It creeped Taylor out, and as soon as the service was over he tried to sneak away.
"Don't go far," Mom said. "We'll be going to the cemetary next."
Taylor had waved her off and had gone out the side door of the church. He'd stood there, blinking in the June sun (just as he was blinking in the unexpected Portland sunlight now, remembering that day), hands in pockets and wondering if he could sneak around back and smoke one of the Marlboros he'd stolen from Dad's pack. The side door had opened and his aunt had come out, crying, still.
Taylor had looked at her and then looked down at the ground, not sure what to say. His aunt was his Mom's older sister, and he'd never talked to her much.
His aunt had dropped her handkerchief as she came out and picked it up, flicking a leaf off of it and then dabbing at her eyes before looking at Taylor. When she did look at him, her eyes got wide and her mouth opened wider.
"Is it... you?" she'd asked.
Taylor looked up at her.
"What?" he'd asked.
"It is... it can't be... it is..." his aunt had babbled.
"Um..." Taylor had said, and edged away. His aunt had appeared, then, mad and relieved at the same time.
"Is this some kind of joke? Some kind of trick? What's going on? Why would they do this to me? Did your father put you up to it?" His aunt had asked, and Taylor had looked around for someone to help him. His aunt was going on "They never let me see the body and they told me it was for the best and it's all so sudden but that's why, isn't it? It was a joke, a trick, something ... a ... a prank or something," and she'd rushed at him and wrapped him into her arms and buried his head in her shoulder and hugged him with a strength and ferocity that had scared him.
"Shane, Oh God Oh God I'm so glad it's not for real," she'd said and Taylor had tried to struggle out. His aunt's voice had been so loud that people from the front of the church had walked around the side and now they pried the two apart, saying things like What's going on? and Dorothy, what's gotten into you? and they had to hold her back from him. She kept crying and yelling and saying But he's not dead, it's wrong, he's right there and pointing at Taylor, who had looked nothing like Shane but clearly his aunt thought he was Shane.
They'd taken her to the hospital, sedated her, and kept her there for observation for three days, his Mom told him. The general consensus was that she'd been temporarily nuts. The family kept her away from Taylor after that, though.
Taylor had thought about that a long time that night and in the weeks after. That kind of thing had happened before: People talking to him out of the blue, waving at him, smiling at him, and more often than not, confusing him with someone else. He wondered about it and began paying attention as it happened more and more. When he waited for the bus to take him to school (on those days he didn't skip out) he looked at the old ladies who nodded at him. He tried to see which bus passengers were staring at him and how long they did so. He kept track of girls looking at him in school (and guys, though he paid less attention to them.)
Aunt Dorothy had thought he was Shane. She wasn't confused. He'd felt that hug. She'd been absolutely convinced that he, Taylor, was Shane, even though there wasn't any real similarity between the two. Shane was a big dumb jock of a guy, the kind of jerkface Taylor hated anyway, always roughhousing and playing football and drinking beer when he was 12 and watching basketball games with his dad. Taylor was skinny and a "dirtball," the kind of kid who wore a jean jacket even into class, a jacket that had a Bic lighter and some smokes in the breast pocket, a kid who wore mostly t-shirts and jeans and tried to stay up late and watch the Playboy channel on cable and who didn't take part in gym class and who grew his hair a little too long. Nobody would mix up Shane and Taylor, especially when they'd just walked out of Shane's funeral service.
As he thought about it, he remembered something Mom had said about Aunt Dorothy in the days leading up to the funeral: "Since her divorce, she's really leaned on that kid to be her companion. Do you know she asked him not to go out for baseball so that she could spend more time with him?" Dad hadn't answered, that Taylor remembered.
Shane leaned back against his car, in the rare Portland sunlight, ate the second doughnut off his plate and washed it down with now-cold, still-oily coffee, and looked up at the cloud that was over his head. He remembered what his mom had said, next, though:
"She just needed that kid so much."
That had been the final clue Taylor needed. After that, he watched people who watched him, talked to people who talked to him, and kept track of those who did that -- watched him or talked to him -- more than others. Because he knew, even before he could really put it into words, what he did to people, then. Aunt Dorothy had been the big clue, Aunt Dorothy and what Mom had said.
He was what people needed.
People looked at him and saw what they needed, saw the person they needed to see.
That thought occurred to him one day as he walked home from the bus stop. I'm what they need, he thought, and he was so stunned by the clarity of that concept that he'd stopped for a second. I'm what people need, he thought. He had been, so far as Aunt Dorothy was concerned, Shane, because Aunt Dorothy had needed her son more than anything right then, needed him to be alive.
And Aunt Dorothy had died within a year. She'd committed suicide, Taylor remembered now. She'd taken all of the anti-depressant medications she'd saved up for months, taken them all at once and been found dead.
Before that had happend, though, Taylor had already started figuring out how to use his peculiar trait. He'd begun figuring out how to use it with Jenni Stewart, the hot senior girl who'd had to retake Algebra II, sitting in class with a bunch of juniors like Taylor.
Jenni Stewart, the girl who'd also been dumped by her college-age boyfriend a month after Shane's funeral, was Taylor's first project. He came into class one day, Algebra II, and took his seat midway back in the class -- not up front where the smart kids sat, and not in the back where the real punks sat. Jenni Stewart was near the back, with the other kids who didn't really care, and she was sad-looking that day. Taylor had heard, through a couple of kids he'd known, what had happened: Jenni had dated the same guy (Todd) for four years, and Todd had gone off to college, was just finishing up his first year of college, and had emailed Jenni to say he wasn't going to see her anymore.
Taylor had wondered, as he peered at her out of the corner of his eye, how much she'd loved Todd.
How much she'd needed Todd.
Now, biting into the third doughnut and deciding to go for a drive, Taylor remembered how much Jenni had needed Todd.
"Quite a lot," he said. "Quite a lot." He opened the door to his car and sat down. He dumped the coffee out on the parking lot and dropped the styrofoam cup. He tossed the third doughnut off into the parking lot and started up his car. As he backed up, the now-empty plate blew off in the breeze to flutter down onto the ground, and Taylor pulled onto the road and drove off to scout around for someone to support him here in Portland for a while.
He would be gone all day, spending the day cruising around a few shopping malls and finding the hot bar spots and eating a fast-food lunch. He would not know that George had pulled into the parking lot about twenty minutes after he'd left, that George would drive into the parking lot and look around, trying to remember what car Taylor had been driving, before parking his own car and getting out.
Taylor wouldn't see it, but George would go up to the door of Taylor's room, and would knock on it. George would nervously hitch up his pants and tuck his sweatshirt around the bulge in the back of his pants, the place where George had hidden the gun that he would later use to abduct Taylor.
George would not abduct Taylor from the hotel room and would not abduct him that day. He would catch Taylor coming out one evening, a week or two later, to get away from Tasha for a few minutes. Taylor would step outside the door of the townhouse and close it quietly behind him, thinking to himself God, that woman never stops talking, no wonder her husband left. He would lean back and think Maybe I should take up smoking again and look up at the cloudy gray dark sky and the streetlights near the condo, and then he would see stars and be dizzy as George would hit him in the head with the butt of the pistol -- the same pistol that was tucked into the back of his pants that day at the hotel, the first time George had gone to abduct Taylor.
George would hit Taylor as hard as he could on the head, coming out of the garage where he'd been hiding, quietly and quickly moving up behind Taylor and smacking him with the butt of the pistol. It would make a sickening crunch sound and Taylor would, just like on TV, drop to his knees, but he wouldn't be out cold. He would grab at his head and yell "What in the hell" before George would put a hand around his neck and switch the gun around, inexpertly but rapidly enough, to hold it with the muzzle pressed up against Taylor's nose, where Taylor would be able to look, cross-eyed, at it.
"You sick asshole," George would mutter. "You shut up."
George would have to wait to do that, because he'd missed Taylor that day at the hotel. After a few minutes, he'd looked in the window and then hitched up his pants (and the gun) again and left. George missed Taylor, that day, and Taylor missed George.
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