March 17, 1985. A dawn of reckoning.
The day Boyd Taylor was born.
It's funny how, when you delve into the deeper facets of time, you find that a mere day can change a man's entire world. The rising and falling of the everyman's sun, the same we all see when we look up to the heavens and wonder why we're here. Those twenty four hours held such a painstaking significance that I could never dare forget. It was the beginning for a lifetime that, if he had never been born, wouldn't have existed. But it was the end of a Mac Taylor I thought I knew, someone I watched for in the mirror when I would shave, lose myself in unraveling thoughts, and nick the skin.
But after him, I'd look in that same mirror and, instead of losing myself in the flow of shapeless musings, I'd find myself lost altogether – the skeleton of the man I'd used to be. Mac Taylor, the marine, the calm in the storm, the man whose temper would flare one minute and be as cold as ice the next. It was a skin of identity I wore as fundamental aspects of my existence, like the curve of a self-satisfied smirk or the arch of a doubting brow. Character. Proof of life. The skins were shed and the gradual knife of realization sank through so slow.
I didn't know the reflection I found in the mirror and it hit me so hard I thought I would bleed. And sometimes I would.
I curled in on myself, a moth consumed by the same flame he'd been drawn to in the first place – a flame that I had given my namesake.
Mackenna Boyd Taylor the third. And the last.
I can't say I've ever been proud of what he's done. Most fathers distinguish their sons by book smarts or athletic dexterity. Me? Every time the numbness floods through me as I approach another mutilated corpse, an otherworldly entity that I renders me a hollow shell every time – that's my boy. The work of a warped mastermind, a misplaced genius that fell into the wrong hands.
I don't have a trophy with my Boyd's name on it or his Nobel Peace prize for a life devoted to the persistence of another hanging over my fireplace, the same where I dreamed of collecting guests and sing his praises until the willful attack of pride was sated. But I have newspaper clippings scattered across my desk and over a corkboard version of my dreamed up mantelpiece.
Behind every monster there's a man.
I'm that man. And the warm cocoon of my love for Stella gave birth to an atrocity beyond human measures.
It's funny how irony comes back full circle to bite you in the ass and then stay to watch you fall.
I was there when he was born, standing by her side and feeling the same throes of anguish that throttled her to the marrow of her bones. She was squeezing my hand, the force of her strength and the recognition of pain enough to make my head spin and my stomach obediently follow the sickening motions. It was a seasick dance going on behind my face and I wondered, briefly before the pushing started, if the motion sickness was as evident on the exterior as it was inside.
C'mon, Stella. You can do this. You can do it.
You know that feeling you get when you look up at the sky and twirl around, a kaleidoscope world of blue and white the only thing you can see? You're watching as the colors intertwine right before your eyes, merging into one heavenly being, and it doesn't seem like the earth could get any bigger?
That's how I felt when I first heard those cries. They were shrill, a piercing demand to be heard in the epicenter of all that madness. Stella was breathing hard, her curls plastered to her glowing red cheeks, and at last she released my hand from the vice grip. An odd tingling spread throughout the numbed appendages, but I couldn't care any less – I was a father now and the feeling of my hand going to sleep was to be the least of my worries from then on.
It's a boy. Congratulations, Mr. Taylor.
There was heart behind all that callus and stolidity somewhere, a place of sanctuary that only Stella could summon from the depths of its anonymity. There it was again, slamming against my chest and screaming for its release.
I watched with unwavering fascination as the cord was cut and the little figurine, its fervent cries reduced to soft mewling after being cleaned and wrapped up in a blue felt blanket, was handed over to me first. Stella blinked wearily at us, a smile emerging from the haze of the aftermath as I cradled the fragile infant against my chest. Selfish as the thought was, especially considering I hadn't been the one to endure one of the most terrible recognized sufferings known to mankind, I didn't want to let him go. I wanted to hold him forever, even knowing that someday he wouldn't fit into my arms anymore.
Maybe he'd look stern like me. Or beautiful, like Stella. Or both of us combined, some sort of meshed version of our two separate genetic structures to create someone entirely new, foreign to both of our telltale personalities. I looked down at his face to find the colorless eyes, illuminated by the garish light overhead, staring back at me. Cognizant, as he if recognized humanity the moment he looked upon it.
I smiled and greeted the small hand that hovered near my jaw with an olive branch – my finger. He took it and I marveled at how unimaginably small he was against the backdrop of the entire world stretched out for him.
That was when I felt that familiar feeling. Of falling and flying at the same time, twirling in the grass like I had in my distant childhood.
But this time I didn't look up into the sky and uncover the existence of another universe altogether.
I looked down into the face of my son to find this undiscovered place instead.
Mackenna Boyd Taylor the third. Boyd as we called him because two Mac's in the same household was just too much for us. Especially when he became familiar with his name and found he liked the way it sounded. Even though Boyd was the third in a line of Mackenna Taylor's, he was the first of his kind – Stella was the first to discover this.
We found that our boy was not such an everyday occurrence as we'd originally thought the first time he sat up and spoke. You might think that it was just parental satisfaction rearing its ugly head but when we found that only two weeks separated these two monumental progressions in our son's development, it wasn't just pride talking. It was acknowledgement – our son was some sort of prodigy. He learned to sit up at four months and speak at five.
I should have predicted it long before these moments transpired. That moment, when those bright, colorless eyes seemed to flicker with understanding as they stared up at me, drinking the sight of me in with such happy ease.
His first word was mama. At first, I felt a little letdown in knowing that his mother was his first verbalized familiarity, but after dada came, my wounded pride was restored.
Especially as he came to me the first time he every stepped foot on the threshold of his lifetime.
It began to manifest in the little things. The fascination with fire and the cruelty to animals.
Back then I was no seasoned crime investigator, ignorant to the methods of the typical sociopath, and excused my Boyd's behavior as the typical little boy stretching out his feelers to discover new things. Boyd had always been innately curious about everything –fire especially. The way his eyes would focus only on that flickering ignition, drained of all human reflection as if the flame consumed him. I'd come to find it normal for him to be so fond of fire and the effect it seemed to have on him.
Stella had surrendered to concern long before I did. She was young back then, studying criminology while she saved up the cash to attend school the same fall she'd send Boyd into kindergarten. This meant she was home more often, working the night shift so she could be with our son in the day while I was gone.
One particular evening would mark the beginning of a slow deflation in this still-new world of parenthood. I came home, whistling as I walked through the door in my standard issue uniform. Back then I'd been in the Marines; it seemed a whole other life, so detached from the present that it felt like I'd never lived as the man that came home in his blues and kicked off his boots at the door.
Mac, you need to see this. Stella had tears in her eyes.
What? I outstretched a hand to quell the storm that seemed to ravage her lovely face but she turned away, rejecting not me but the fear I knew was welling up inside her. Stella, don't. Don't do that. You can tell me anything.
I don't want to believe it. But I don't think I have a choice.
The confusion I felt obviously ascended through the cracks of careful resistance, skimming the edges of my face so that, if she wanted to, Stella could reach out and graze the surface of it. My fear was tangible; I could even feel it, the ebb and flow of the waves as she led me out into the backyard. I felt like a man drowning.
When she stopped by the door, her arms slowly drifting from their deliberate façade of nonchalance and folding over her chest. Later, I saw it as a defense mechanism, trying to block the reality that came hurling at her like some force to be reckoned with. I didn't feel the collision until later.
A scene of carnage met me there. I stood in the backyard with my wife and was, at first, ignorant to the dangerous potential that had begun to stir behind the angelic eyes of our young son. But there was no going back once I saw it. It will always be embedded into my mind, etched memory that, no matter how hard I try to scratch it out, it will remain the same.
Somehow, Boyd had gotten a hold of the neighbor's pocket-sized dog that would nip and yap well into the night if someone so much as moved without its permission. The fragile creature, once lively and dignified with a personality that overreached the physical boundaries of its size, had been dwarfed by the skins of death. But it wasn't just death that made my stomach lurch and my throat clamp shut behind the walls of flesh – it was the manner of its passing instead.
Boyd was four then, only a year away from entering an entirely new place filled to the brim with frail bones and easily fractured feelings. What lay before me was malevolence and it frightened me beyond belief, a sort of cold dread that seeped and slithered through my coiled insides.
Boyd had set a trap for the small animal, leading it into our yard with a piece of raw meat that he'd more than likely stolen from the fridge. Lying beside the mutilated carcass was a steak knife drenched in blood and trace remnants of the atrocity riddled the grass with scarlet. The throat was slit, all four legs severed at the haunches and on the small span of belly flesh there was four messily scrawled letters– MINE.
Stella couldn't do it. She couldn't face the little boy who played so innocently with his toys in the living room as if nothing had ever happened. As if everything was okay. As if life was just another nameless toy at his disposal.
Suddenly the patchwork life we'd built was falling apart at the seams so fast that she couldn't keep up with it anymore. I was given the task of confronting him.
I stood at the edge of the carpet as if it would serve as the boundaries of sanctuary that the monster in him wouldn't dare cross. My hands slid into my pockets and I bit back the deep-threaded sorrow that ached in me so deeply that I couldn't tell where this desolation ended and where I began.
I cleared my throat to regain composure and Boyd looked up at me – a withering gaze slid easily from the yellow truck to me and that I recognized the windows of blue-gray soul immediately. My eyes. My face. But that self-satisfied smirk I had come to call my own seemed foreign to me.
Boyd, what did you do to that dog out there?
His head inclined to the side. What dog, daddy?
Don't you lie to me, alright? You can tell me. I know what you did. Just…tell me why and I promise I won't be angry.
Why? I was just practicing.
My eyes narrowed. Practicing what, Boyd?
I swore I saw the devil grin that day and a fluid darkness, one that I had never known, crept into the placid waters of those eyes. My calligraphy. Mommy says I'm getting better, if only I'd…practice.
He offered a placating smile. But behind the face of poise I'd set as I stared at my son, I was being dismantled. One piece of humanity at a time.
The years passed slowly and with them so did my expectations that things would change. Stella still clung to the disfigured remnants of her hope as a safeguard, stubborn as always in the face of defeat. I couldn't hold on any longer – I fell in love with that boy the day he was born. To know he was only an intelligent animal decimated every aspiration I'd ever had as a father.
By the time Boyd was fifteen years old he'd been through various behavioral treatments almost as long as both he and I could remember. Every single time they'd claim him as a success story he'd turn around and prove them wrong, just to see if he could do it one more time. That feeling that pooled in me when Boyd had been born was long since scattered to the winds – a mere wistful shard of memory.
I could remember the day they 'diagnosed' him. It was raining outside that window, the long one that served as some sort of wall from the rest of the world. Stella and I were too nervous to sit so we paced the room and every once and a while I'd catch a glimpse of the distorted image unfurling like gray petals outside the panes. The water trickled down the glass and the city was rendered a shapeless brush of careless color – green there for shrubs and trees and a little black there for what had once been buildings. Gray served as the backdrop.
I wondered if that was how it was, being Boyd – seeing the world in such an ambiguous way that it was unrecognizable when anyone else stared through it. No morals or values to make it concrete, just an abstract version of what we knew as normalcy.
But what Boyd saw was the truth – his version of it anyway.
The woman who walked out of that room an hour later was the portrait of pity. I'd never liked pity, always thought it was some condescending way of saying sorry for something you couldn't control. But this woman had an abundance of it. She looked at us and sighed, leafing through her papers as if it made her seem important. I started to wonder if this was about Boyd or some dance of superiority.
Before I could make a comment, the woman spoke.
I'm afraid that I don't have any good news for you. What Boyd has is called Antisocial Personality Disorder, also known as a Sociopath…
The rest of what she said just faded into the background. More information that I couldn't understand but had heard as regurgitated psychological garbage for years from different people. It wasn't because I had never been informed of Boyd's condition, but that I just didn't know.
I was a fairly intelligent man and could learn from a book better than I could from any distinguished teacher, but Boyd had officially become a facet of existence I'd never come to establish an understanding in; I'd always been afraid to. He was the mirror image of me. But behind the decipherable face there was something alien – a monster, a tempest that could never be tamed.
From where I stood I had a clear line of vision to the boy I called my son. His dark hair, long and unkempt, fell like an opaque curtain over steel blue eyes. When his gaze slithered across the floor toward me, they caught my attention and held it captive there. He smiled then, a cold, unfeeling gesture – I'll always win, it said, and you can't change that.
That was the last time I ever really saw First Lieutenant Mac Taylor, standing there in that waiting room and staring at the stirring dark in the prodigal son. Fleeting glimpses of him still catch me when I least expect it, a ghost weaving in and out of my past, present and future as I struggle to carry on. As far as I know, he's gone for good.
But from the ashes of my former life the promise of a new man arose – Detective Mac Taylor, CSI.
I could still remember the feeling of looking up into the sky when I was a child and finding that the universe had a plan for me. It was doused in a clarity that made it feel like I'd only just experienced it for the first time a yesterday ago. As the years passed, I kept it close to me as a reminder that the past can only tear you down with its hollow promises.
My world that I had shared with Stella was shattered.
I never felt it again.
AN: I had the idea that Mac needs a doppelganger. This immediately popped into my head and I had to write it down. I apologize for the lack of Stella in this but...it was a focus on Mac and his son, really. I need to go back and edit this so forgive and forget any mistakes.
Disclaimer - I don't own Mac Taylor or Stella Bonasera.