and I believe my friends, it is the end, it is the end... I don't know why we all didn't forget whatever the little Hanson man had to say and just continue on with our neverending fight. I don't know why we actually stopped, and began to listen to Mackenzie Hanson's words of reason. I don't know how we stopped ourselves from lunging at each other's throats long enough to listen to him. "What do you have to say?" Avery said, trying her best to be the snotty Christian elitist who hated anyone who had ever sinned...including her own family. "Oh, shut up, Avery." Mackenzie didn't stand for it. He wasn't one to stand for it. Kinda reminds me of myeslf, I guess. I smiled faintly - bitttersweetly - at the thought of an eternal sibling rivalry between the puritans and the heathens of the Hanson family, and that's when he turned on me. Mackenzie gave me a disgusted look. "Oh, don't give me that, Jess," he said, accusing me of an idea I had only thought in my head. "We're not in competition, we're not on opposite sides of some imaginary battle. We're siblings, dammit." That statement meant to hit home, but it didn't. Yes, I knew we were siblings; but I learned a long time ago that being siblings didn't mean being friends. There was too much bad blood among us...there was too much blood spilled and too much time apart... There was no way we all could go back to the way we were before the Accident. There was no way we could be friends as well as sisters. There was no way I could look at him and ever admire him again. "Yes; siblings," Mackenzie continued. "And I know that doesn't mean a lot in this family, but dammit, it should. Now I don't know why you're here -" he shot a glance towards Isaac, who almost immediately shot his glare down at the ground. "- but I'm glad you are." My mouth fell open in shock. "You're glad?" I said. "He's the reason why any of us are here, and you're glad?" Avery shot me a disgusted look. "Jess, get off your fucking high horse and give the man some credit already!" Isaac came to his own defense - for a change. "Avery, I don't need you to defend me, so why don't you just -" "Guys, I said, shut the fuck up!" Mackenzie raised his voice, and we all grew silent. He wasn't playing around anymore. "God! Do you have to fight every single fucking year? I'm glad that he's here because that means he knows what today really means. He's finally come through with why we all need to be here today." He directed his next question to me. "Jess, do you even know why we're here?" I was dumbfounded by the question. Of course I knew why we were there. I set the damn thing up, didn't I? I tried to say something, anything, but words weren't forming in my mouth, nor my head. I couldn't think of anything to say. Mackenzie smiled slightly. "Aw, come on. You said it to me before, and I heard you say it to Avery, too. Why are we here?" "Because you and Zoe should know who they were." My answer was listless and weak. I finally had some idea as to what Mackenzie was getting at: his past. If he was forced to come here every year, he wanted to at least get what was coming to him. "Exactly." Mackenzie smiled warmly at me, and it made me feel awkward...out of place. Was this child - this apparition of a brother with a different childhood - rising as the voice of reason among the siblings who were supposed to be adults? Were we going to find the solution to all our bickering and fighting through the very one we thought would never understand? "I still don't get what you're getting at here," Avery said. I coughed out of disgust at the comment. Mackenzie didn't seem to mind. "Look," he began, "I didn't want to come here today. Even when I was right in front of those graves, I thought about copping out and running. But I've learned that you can't run away from your problems -" he shot another glance at Isaac, who now had tears in his eyes. "- and you can't run away from your past. If we're going to be here today, I want you guys to do this right. "Today isn't supposed to be about fighting among ourselves, about whatever stupid little detail you've snowballed into a major deal. It's not about something that happened seven years ago, or our separate little battles and emotions. It's about remembering them." He pointed out towards the graves, and it was then that we all knew he was right. "You guys knew them a lot better than me and Zoe did, and so it was harder for you when they died; I'm sure. And, because of that, you probably don't want to remember a lot about them; I understand that." Isaac shut his eyes tightly and balled his hands into fists, his entire body shaking with inner sobs. I stopped thinking about my pain and my suffering for a moment and thought about what Mackenzie said. Today wasn't about how I felt. It wasn't about what I wanted to say. It wasn't about me feeling better at all. I wondered what it must have been like for Isaac when he finally thought about the Accident all those years ago. When his mind finally registered that he murdered his own brothers. The images of the two caskets - one open, one closed - had haunted my dreams every night for four months, and stayed in my mind forever. I couldn't imagine what horrible images Isaac saw every time he closed his eyes. For the first time in seven years, I understood how Isaac felt. "But Zoe and I didn't know them at all. We didn't ever know them." Mackenzie's voice became shaky, and his eyes glistened with tears. "Do you know how it feels to know that you had a brother - two brothers - and know that they died, and still, know that you should know who they were and remember something about their lives, but you can't??? You would never understand how it feels to try to reach for a memory in your mind that was never there -" He choked back a sob. Zoe was silently crying into his coat at his side. She hadn't said a word, nor did she ever let go of Mackenzie, since he began to speak. "I didn't know them...but I wanted to know them. And I still do. Every year, you come here, and you just fight. You fight about whatever comes up. And every year, I keep hoping, and I keep wishing, that you'd just shut up and start remembering their lives, not fighting over their deaths!" He was shouting now - it didn't matter, there was probably no one in the cemetery besides us - and every word tugged and pulled at my heart and my conscience until I couldn't take it anymore, and let out a quiet sob. I looked to my right, and saw that Avery was crying, too. None of the Hanson children were without tears tonight. "I don't care about how they died, or why they died," he continued. "I don't want to know about their deaths; I want to know about their lives! Why won't you just remember their lives and stop fighting over their deaths? The Accident is over, and everything's done with...why can't you just..." Mackenzie looked down at the ground, seemingly at a loss for words. He then surprised me more than he ever could have before. Looking up, his eyes large and innocent, Mackenzie spoke truth. And right then, he was more Taylor and Zachary's brother than ever before. "I remember having a lot of Power Ranger toys when I was a kid...someone told me they were Zac's. Were they Zac's?" There was a thick silence among us. None of us answered his question. None of us had the guts to bring up faded memories. Mackenzie prodded on. "Were they?" he asked, exasperated. His bloodshot eyes turned first to Isaac, then to Avery, and finally, to me. "Someone, please tell me!" All three of us looked down at the ground, hiding our eyes away from the crying boy and the little girl at his side. Finally, one of us gave him an answer. "Someone had told the press that Zac played with Power Ranger dolls when he really didn't. All the fans sent them in anyway as gifts, and so he gave them all to you." Avery's eyes glistened with tears as she smiled sadly at her brother. Mackenzie smiled back. He knew he broke through to us. "The bunny. I want to know who gave me the bunny." A smaller, more timid voice spoke up, and by the urgency in its tone, the speaker wanted to he heard. Zoe's eyes were still trained on the ground, her hands still gripped tightiy onto Mackenzie's coat. Almost immediately, without even thinking about it, my mind flashed back to the day when Zoe was given that stuffed rabbit; the one that was filthy and stained, the one with a ripped left ear and a missing cottontail, the one she hasn't left alone in the eight years she possessed it. The one that she was given on her second birthday by a boy who wasn't quite ready to give it up... I heard Isaac clear his throat, and as his words flowed through the space among us, I silently cried. "Um...that was actually Taylor's. He had the bunny for such a long time...I think it made him feel better when we were on the road. It was...a reminder of home. He gave the bunny to you when you were only two years old. Mom said you were too young to have it, and God knows he didn't want to part with the damn thing, but he gave it to you anyway. That was Tay; he was always thinking about someone else." His voice wavered through the entire mini-speech, and I could hear him choke back tears, but in one split second I could swear he almost smiled. "You know," Isaac said to Mackenzie, his voice strained and hoarse from crying, "you look a lot like Zac did when he was your age. You look so much like him; it's amazing, really." Mackenzie smiled, looked down at the ground, and for the first time that day, a Hanson child cried tears of happiness. "Yeah," he said, looking me in the eyes, forcing me to remember and regret everything I said to him that morning, everything I said to any of them, everything I did that forced us all to become so distant... "people have told me that." "Tell me more," Zoe said eagerly, her eyes full of yearning. And so we talked, for the remainder of the afternoon and well into the night, about Taylor and Zac. It brought a few more tears, and a few more painful memories to the surface, but it also brought back the feeling of friendship, and family, that had been lost in all our hearts for those long seven years. It brought back the warmth that only came from being with the ones you loved. And maybe this sounds a little bit too clich� for you, and maybe it's a little bit too much for you to swallow, but when you want something to happen, even when you don't know you want it to happen - no; when something is destined to happen, even when you don't want it to happen, it'll come, and hopefully you'll learn something along the way. I learned that there are more important things than holding grudges or hiding emotions. We had all learned that, even though they might have been gone, they were always remembered in our hearts. Standing beside the ones lost, but never forgotten, we were the ones who had just found ourselves...and just found each other. mail. [email protected] � FTLOM
