"19 year old Zac Hanson was found late Monday night critically injured five miles from his West Tulsa home. Police have stated that the circumstances surrounding his injuries are unknown, and that while attempted foul play is not expected it has yet to be ruled out. Hanson, who is currently being held at Hillcrest Medical Center's Intensive Care Unit, was the youngest member of a local pop band that had several nationwide hits in the late '90s."
Zac-
Where do I start? Tuesday morning? That's not right, not the beginning at all.
We used to go to the same babysitter when we were little, and, according to our moms, when people tried to separate us we cried. That would be a logical beginning point for this letter, then: a tiny, golden you and tiny, dark me holding hands on the swingset behind our babysitter’s old house, shadowed in the gigantic dusk beneath hundred-year old lilac trees. I don’t really remember that, though, despite hearing the stories thousands of times since we met again.
Maybe instead of a beginning, then, I should be looking for a reason. I don’t know how to say that you were always there, though, hovering just behind the surface of my life, remaining just a hairsbreadth out of my conscious world for thirteen years. We're all intertwined like that, the two of us, like we couldn't really have gotten away from each other even if we had wanted to. Maybe our friendship was an unavoidable eventuality demanded by fate, or by nature, or by even your God. Think how much time we wasted when we could have been friends! All of those years of riding bikes and fourth of July picnics and first crushes and first kisses.
There it is. The beginning I’ve been looking for. That stupid barbecue.
You know how I hate parties, how I get nervous and shy and uncomfortable, and to this day I can't imagine what compelled me to go on that night. It was the worst sort of party, too—the kind held in Richardson's park by the Arkansas river—the kind that always turns into a drunken free-for-all. I’d be willing to bet that Angie had talked me into it, just like she’s always talking me into things. It's good, in a way; before you, she was probably the only reason I ever tried anything new. She and Taylor were the ones who brought me back to you.
I remember hearing the throbbing bass of some old song, "This is how we do it" by Montel Jordan, I think, even before I could see the huge bonfire that had been lit at one of the park’s more remote campsites. The site for that night's party had been a gritty, flat expanse, already filled with people busily milling around, huge red plastic kegger cups clutched in their hands. As soon as we had pulled up in Angie's bruised old Volvo we were greeted by him, by your perfect beautiful Adonis of a brother, and I vividly recall thinking that I was about to embark upon the most torturous evening of my young life.
The crash of our slamming car doors had barely floated into silence when Angie—then my best friend, always my sister by choice—flipped her long black hair over her shoulder and smiled at Taylor, smiled that secret smile she saves for only for him.
Funny that she and I are so close and yet everything we do is so different: she was forever leaning against him when he stood close by; she touched him whenever she could. I would never be that ridiculously physical, no matter how much I loved a boy, not even with you. Maybe that's the big disparity between Angie and I; she touches and I don't. Ice Queen, I was once called by Taylor, not that I really minded. What he thought of me wasn't important, but you know that I always hated myself for my body's reaction to him. His hair, honey blond and casually shaggy; his eyes, impossibly deep, blue sea bright, left me mute and struggling for some escape, full of the knowledge of his beauty and the fear of it all at once. He's gorgeous, always has been. I know that all through me whenever he is near, but he’s not….nice. It sounds like a silly, grandmotherly comment, but it’s true. His seems so hollow, too eternally concerned with looking good and sounding good to ever really be anything but a prop, a doll, a model. His exquisite lips twisted into a smirk when he saw me standing awkwardly beside Angie, trying to avoid notice in the shelter of her brightness. Your brother uses people. He was using Angie then because she’s beautiful, and because she’s always been ready to try anything, to be anything for approval.
Taylor had tugged playfully at the hem of Angie’s shirt, commanding all of her attention before leaning in to kiss her, fully and slowly, on the lips. I’m sure that no small part of my hostility towards him comes from jealousy. He was slowly stealing away my best friend, inviting her into a world filled with these parties and these people, a world where I didn’t belong. I guess it all comes down to the fact that people like Taylor demand a lot to survive: constant admiration, envy, and appreciation.
You could never be like that, even though you’re as beautiful as you’re brother. Even if my biased opinion is not to be believed, I see the way girls watch you, the way their eyes always seem drawn by the weight of your presence. The difference between you and Taylor? You're not afraid to make real contact. He demands that people always surround him to act as a foil to him, to make him laugh or, in Angie’s case, to prove his ability to conquer. You could never be like that.
Angie had tried her best to get me to come along with them to join in the dancing, but I wasn't interested. They had drifted off into each other, a place made for them only, a place where not even best friends can belong. From a distance I had watched them stand in the greasy smoke of the bonfire, eating juicy slices of sharp, pink watermelon. If I had asked right then Angie would have left, driven me home, and probably never talked about that night again, but I didn't want to do that. Even though I wished there was some other truth to the matter, I could almost understand why her eyes lit up around Taylor, just as I could almost understand the blush that reddened her cheeks as he protectively placed a hand on the small of her back, steering her through the amassed crowd.
I don’t really remember wandering away, but I must have, saying hello to the people I couldn't avoid, heading towards the distant mirror-like smoothness of the river, wishing I could throw myself into the water to cool hot skin and chase away the thickly humid August air. The one thing I do remember—like I’m standing there right now, exposed and alone in the stifling night—is that the stars, burning constant and bright in the sky above me, and how low they seemed, as if I could almost touch them.
I would much rather have been all alone right then, left to enjoy the soft buzz of crickets and the sparkle of those silvery heavens, but Angie must have decided that I wasn't having fun and so she joined me in the small, wooded area that I had deemed far enough away from the party to in which to hide.
"Lydia," her voice was so familiar, with its soft curves and gentle emphasis on the fist syllable of my name, but in my estrangement she served only to remind of the trap this town seemed like it had become. As a high schooler I didn't like life in Tulsa at all. I always felt like I was the only person who had the audacity to doubt the excellence of our hometown, but after living here for almost 16 years I didn't think I could bear for another cycle of sweltering summer and frozen winter to bracket my mundane existence. Then it had seemed like there was no way out for me, either: College was still two years away. All I could imagine to fill the foreseeable future was treading water, trapped stationary and against my will in a mold of endless sameness, of a never-ending haze of education at Nathan Hale and pizza construction at the Hideaway. "Come on," Angie had continued as Taylor, like a magnet to metal, made his way to her side again.
"Just come on Lydia. We’re not going to hurt you," he had joked, grinning wide and glassy.
I didn’t respond for a long moment, and Angie sighed with frustration. "We could go home if you want." It was easy to see through the constant pleasantness of her tone to the fact that she didn’t want to leave.
Taylor’s group of older, brutally "cool" friends had reached us by then, following their ringleader and idol, and it was like someone had flipped a switch in him. Gone was his attempt at levity, only to be replaced by that a knowing leer. "Maybe this will loosen you up a little bit."
Taylor pulled a small plastic bag out of his pocket, being sure that everyone around him was able to see the chalky white powder it contained. "It’ll be great, Lydia. Come on. Just a little." He was teasing at that point, his watching my nervous reactions closely.
I must have stood there, like a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming vehicle, for too long. The outsiders who had joined us at the edge of the river were all talking loudly and pushing each other around, but they barely registered in my mind. All I could see was Taylor, and that gleam in his eye, the one that accused me, without words, of being a baby, of being silly, of not being good enough to be Angie's best friend.
"Thanks, but I really don't feel like it." Finally my voice returned, scratchy and foreign, and I was able to stand up for myself. To this day, I’m not entirely sure what Taylor had been offering that night. All I know is that I’m glad I didn’t take it.
I remember the force of will it had cost to stand tall against the gaze of the amassed spectators, wondering how it was that even at 16 years old I could feel quite that confused, quite that lost, quite that weak. I didn't even presume to think that anyone was judging me on this one event, though, not Taylor, or his cronies, or even Angie. We all knew that they had made their minds up about me a long time ago. I felt like I was totally different from them in every way imaginable, like an alien left to struggle through life in an enigmatic, frightening planet. I don’t think that any of this has changed, but I know that I have. Now I'm okay with my separation from the people I grew up with, even grateful. And it's all thanks to you Zac. Do you know that? You saved me from wanting to be just like them, to fit into their crowd, to disappear their fathomless sea of Gap khakis and designer drugs.
"More for us," Taylor had assured me with one of those smiles, the cold and knowing kind that makes him seem like he’s a million miles away in both body and spirit, somehow leaving me more completely seen than I would ever have imagined possible, and found completely lacking. He had raised one precisely arched eyebrow in my direction and smirked for an instant before returning to his fawning admirers.
"I hate you," I remember muttering defiantly under my breath, feeling as sullen and out of control as a child, watching his tall figure and Angie's smaller one dissolve into the crowd until they were no longer differentiable.
"He's kind of a jerk, huh?" You had stood in front of me, outlined by a starry silver shine, left behind by the crowd and unnoticed until you had spoken. Looking back I like to think I recognized you. I mean, lord only knows I should have. We took baths together when we were little kids; bizarre to think of it, but after she met you my mom sure loved to whip out those pictures of us naked in the tub. And even if my memory somehow managed to shut out my playmate at the babysitter's, how could I have forgotten your sweet face? I would have thought that Angie's two year obsession with Taylor in elementary school (not to mention her current one, the only difference being that this time around it was apparently mutual) had turned me into a veritable Hanson zombie. I had seen you plastered on her walls, blocking out the delicate pink flowers that she and her mom had stenciled there, and I had heard your voice a billion times a day for years. Years! But somehow you just slipped out of my mind, presumably to be replaced by state capitols and multiplication tables. What a waste of brain cells.
Okay. Fine. So maybe I had no idea who you were. That's why I must have sounded so guarded when I had growled my quiet "yeah" in reply.
"You shouldn't let him push you around." That's exactly what you said. Word for word, and I just looked up at you, feeling indignant. I had gone through a emotional struggle against the darkside, and there you were, calling me a wimp.
"I didn't."
"I guess not." You hadn't sound convinced, but it didn’t occur to me to care. The mud lining the stagnant trickle of the Arkansas had all the while been soaking through my worn canvas Vans and making my feet tingle with cold, so I walked, not caring if you came, just blindly trying to escape the too-loud music of the party. After a second I realized that you were with me, though, thoughtfully watching the way the blacker than black mud sucked around the edges of your shoes.
"You don't go to Hale, do you?" Those parties by the river had tended to be frequented by kids from my high school, so this was a pretty logical question.
"Nah." You kicked at the accumulated muck on your shoes, speaking slowly and deliberately. "I'm home schooled, but my brother Taylor knows a lot of people here, and I just sort of got invited me to come along."
"You’re Taylor’s brother?" I couldn’t even believe what I was hearing. I had known that Taylor wasn’t an only child, but you seemed too quiet, too steady, too even, to share anything with him, most especially a family tree.
"Yeah." Your reply had been apologetic, and with it we lapsed into silence.
Our slow, methodical steps in the slippery mud kept pace and, eventually, I realized that you weren’t going to go away. I wasn’t used to patience from people, or such sudden, easy companionship.
Eventually, though, I must have given in to curiosity. I don’t remember why, or what I said, but we had begun to talk. "So you’re home schooled?" It's not that uncommon in Tulsa, but it still seemed weird to me, weird for parents to decide to narrow their children's world so much.
"Almost all my life." I remember you as being so quiet that night, not at all like I now know you really are.
"Wow. I would go crazy spending all my time at home like that. Or my mother would kill me. I can't decide what's more likely." I pondered these possibilities of a life not led as the distance between us and the party increased, laboriously heavy footstep by footstep. We were lucky for the brilliant spotlight of the moon that had practically turned that night to day, or we probably would have gotten lost out there, the distant glow of the bonfire barely illuminating one tiny corner of the horizon.
"I was going to go to public school last year, but it didn't work out." Too bad I didn't know how those words hurt you. I could hear your tone tense, and see the way your easy stride stiffened, but I just watched you as one might watch a lab experiment in freshman bio.
"It's not all it's cracked up to be."
"So I hear." You were looking up at the sky, drinking in its rich velvet smoothness, and for an instant the only noise was a teasing, faint breeze rustling through late summer leaves. "When I was little I used to try and count the stars."
"That would take a few lifetimes." I think I laughed a little at the thought of a miniature version of the boy beside me spending time in such a dream. You’re so tall, and so strong, that was hard for me to think of you as a little kid. I’ve since figured out that just because you’re so solid, so sturdy, doesn’t mean that beneath it all you’re not every bit a little kid, constantly giddy with wonder and awe.
"Maybe I've already been counting for lifetimes, though." Odd answer. But I didn't think you were weird for it, instead I saw you awash in a reflective glow that I liked. A lot. It sounds stupid, like a cliché from one of the bad romance novels our moms would swap back and forth, but as soon as we started talking I felt comfortable, like the events of the evening hadn't really been that big of a deal, like it was all forgivable. We had walked side by side for awhile on the bank of the river, listening to the distant roar of the highway, not talking at all. Even then we didn't have to struggle to fill the enveloping silence; it wasn't hostile or scary. I think we both enjoyed it, the fact that we didn't need to play stupid games or hide the fact that we weren’t always in control, that sometimes we were full of words and thoughts that could be shared without being spoken.
Who was the first one to take off their shoes, I can't be sure, but I think it may have been me; my feet were already crusted with the thick, brown soil, and so it didn't seem to matter. You had laughed at me, standing like a flamingo on one leg untying my laces, but soon you were standing beside me, a supportive hand on my shoulder, slipping out of your worn-to-perfection Docs. The mud was cool and soft between my toes, and I savored its embrace.
"So you’re not into Taylor’s favorite pastime?" You had asked as we resumed our voyage towards where the dark water lapped at the banks of the mud-rimmed river.
"Completely not. I think it’s incredibly stupid. I guess maybe Angie, the girl who got me to come, does it, though. That’s probably why he thought I would, too."
Your eyes seem to glow sometimes, almost like the bright pinpricks of cats' eyes in the dark, and the night I met you I remember being full of shock at their caramel light.
"That junk bugs me. I mean, he hides behind drugs all the time." You didn't mention Hanson, didn't mention that you had once belonged to what you would eventually tell me was "a little band." I suppose that even then, years after you guys stopped recording new albums, it was probably hard for you to meet someone who had no idea who you were. You probably treasured my ignorance, but oh man did I feel stupid when I figured it out later on.
The mud had been slick, slippery beneath our feet and every once in a while one of us would slide a bit, grabbing onto the other for support. For no reason that I can even now figure out, we had waded out into the water a little way, until our bare knees were covered. That's when someone fell. This time I'm pretty sure it wasn't me… but we both went down. If anyone had seen us from shore they would have probably had quite the good laugh. I remember we did, that’s for sure. Around most people it would have been mortifying, horrific, nightmarish to suddenly find myself floundering neck deep in murky water, but your guffawing laugh is nothing if not infectious, radiating around you in silly, sonorous waves. And of course I couldn’t help but join in.
"That was so your fault!" In retrospect I found the whole situation a lot funnier than it really was, causing these words to be desperately sputtered between fits of giggles.
"Um… excuse me… whose idea was coming out here?" You have seriously always gone from zero to hyper in about .09 seconds, as I was fast to realize when the splashing began. It was like being at the Jenks public pool in the middle of summer—cold water flew at me from every direction and I busily worked to return the spray by running the edge of my flattened hand quickly across the surface of the dark river.
"We're so wet we might as well take it all the way, huh?" You had begun to swim out into the glassy center of the river, taking long smooth strokes that barely disturbed the water. What possessed me to go along with you is a mystery to this day, but I'm glad I did it. Suspended fully clothed in the water, weightless as a daydream and more free than I'd ever imagined being, I really forgot about the mess: about why I hated Tulsa, about why Angie and Taylor and the crowd on shore seemed so foreign to me, about why I had to worry. That distance from reality, out in the center of the river where we were no longer overshadowed by the low-hanging branches of the forest canopy, everything seemed perfect. We swam until the stars came into full focus, scattered across the roof of our world.
Drifting in the current side by side, we had talked about everything. About music and TV, about school and our families, about a blur of silly and serious that I can’t remember now. That night, and the things we said, laid a foundation for us, for what would eventually become… whatever it was we were. I was fascinated by the small tribe of brothers and sisters you had, just as you were fascinated by my status as an only child. "But who do you hang out with?" You had asked, mystified.
"Usually people I met at school or something, like Angie. I've known her since kindergarten. She was the only militant feminist in the second grade and used to kidnap everyone's Barbies." How could I not smile at a memory quite so sweet? "Do you spend a lot of time with your family?"
"Yeah." I wondered if you were not going to say anything else, but at the end of a long quiet, heartbeat you continued. "We traveled around a lot when I was younger, and it was really hard to meet people. I ended up hanging out with my big brothers all the time, which was actually really cool. We did a lot together."
Steam had risen around us, streamers of insubstantial fluff, and every noise, from the distant cry of an owl to the nearby roar of hip-hop, seemed to echo hollowly in the silence, magnified by the water.
"Lydia?" Angie had sounded shocked when she screamed my name from the bank, no less than a half hour after our dunking. I can’t imagine what she must have thought, finding her best friend, the dark side to her light, doing the backstroke with some stranger. Very out of character, that must have seemed.
"Hey," I had called, reluctant to move. I remember your hand had brushed mine under the water, the lightest, smoothest caress. I wonder if you noticed, or maybe even did it on purpose? Back in the beginning I had quite the crush, spurred on equally by your huge brown eyes and whatever nameless sweetness always seems to cling to you.
"Are you ready to go? I have to work tomorrow morning." Angie had laughed incredulously as I allowed myself to fall away from the buoyant support of the river, bringing my feet down to rest on the rocky bottom.
"Well," I said in your direction, wading towards shore and watching the water slide ever lower around me. You had stood up, pushing your longish, wavy hair out of your eyes, and stepping to my side.
"Zac Hanson." One hand extended, your eyes glinted and your voice smiled in the dark.
"Lydia Redwing." I shook your hand before walking away, grinning to beat the band, as my Grandmother might have said.
"Are you drunk?" Angie had asked, shocked and bemused, as we made our way back to her car, me dripping a dark trail of water on the dusty ground.
So that's how it started, how we became friends again. Zac, please be okay. Please.
-Lydia
Zac-
I wonder if I'll give you these letters when you get better? I started off writing so you'd know what happened when you were unconscious, but it's weird because I just keep talking about us. Do you know how important you are to me? Maybe I shouldn't give you these letters after all. I think that you know how I feel, that you’re aware that any day I live through without you in it feels vacant, useless, empty.
School starts soon, but I don't want to leave. My mom keeps saying that it's too late to back out of my tuition, though, and that you'll be fine by the time I have to move back into the dorms. But I don't think I can bear to leave you for longer than I absolutely have to.
Why do I feel like that? Why am I so scared? I know you're going to be fine. But you don't look it. God Zac, you look terrible. I try not to see you, ghost white and pale on the hospital bed. But I can't help it.
I heard for the first time on the radio. Can you believe it? The radio. Khits morning news. I had been standing in front of my pale stained dresser, getting ready for work and marveling at my reflection in the large, circular mirror that had hung on my wall ever since I could remember. It seemed as if I should have changed somehow, that something about me should have looked different. There should have been some little clue about what had happened last night, a sign that the whole world could see. I couldn't help but feel that an event so momentous should have been marked by some outward symbol of maturity, but I was glad it wasn't. My dusky red brown skin looked the same, my just slightly to closely spaced brown eyes hadn't changed, and the delicate curves of my body looked just as they always had beneath my work clothes.
I was enraptured with myself, wondering how it was that you had seen me. Did you notice the scar on my right cheek? Did you see red, irritated spot on my calf that had been left by the wool skirt I had worn to church on Sunday?
Right then, safe and home with the promise of you dancing in my memory, I had everything in the whole world. I had a mother who loved me. I had a new semester at school to look forward to. I had you as a best friend.
It was all taken away, all of my future-inspired wonder and happiness, when the sharp voice of the morning DJ said something that broke through my early morning mental fog. Something about you.
Remember how we used to joke about the radio stations never talking about you guys any more? About how they had swept you under the carpet, a dark reminder of their own fallibility? I can practically hear Mary Travers, the sycophant that she is, rambling on about how maybe "I believe that the Hanson's may be headed straight to the top one of these days." You always say she's the same one who decided that you guys weren't right for her radio station only four years later. You maybe didn’t talk about it much, but I know it hurts you to be lost and forgotten like that, to be ignored. But now you're on every radio station in Tulsa, maybe even in the world.
It was a joke, I had assured myself, laying my brush on my bedside table in perfect alignment with the smooth silver arc of its matching comb. Nothing had really happened to you, I was sure. It was an accident or a joke being played by an evil minded programming director. No matter what I my think of our hometown, I’ve always been sure that bad things can’t happen here, especially not to people I know. The thirty second news brief was over in what seemed to be considerably less than the time it took for me to suddenly feel cold all over, like I had just stepped from the thick heat of a July Oklahoma and into the antiseptic chill of an overly air-conditioned building.
"19 year old Zac Hanson was found late Monday night critically injured…" the words circled me, rampaging through my mind leaving frigid trails of uncertainty in their wake. They wouldn't put something like that on the radio without checking their facts first, would they? But from somewhere in the depths of my mind memories surfaced. In sixth grade Angie had been sent home, crying and inconsolable. I hadn’t thought about it for years, but, suddenly faced with the news of the morning, the reason why felt comforting. There were rumors that you died, rumors started by a radio station DJ not entirely unlike the one I had just heard. It didn't happen then, I assured myself, and it wasn't happening now. You were probably just getting up, and I wondered if maybe you had been lucky enough to hear your own tragic accident announced to thousands and thousands of listeners of Khits.
No matter how often I told myself this, though, it wasn't working. When I heard a gentle knocking on my closed door I could feel myself beginning a downward spiral, almost like when I was a little girl riding the big, curly slide in the elementary school playground. I always started off breathless and excited at the top, but as I felt gravity wrap itself around my little body, tugging me ever faster and closer to the brink of control, I would wonder why I had begun the ride at all. I can remember seeing nothing but blue sky as I whizzed downward, before I finally clenched my eyes shut and gave myself up to the fear. The fear of getting hurt, the fear of never stopping and just soaring into that same blue sky with no way to stop, the fear of the unknown.
"Yeah?" I had called, probably too weakly for my mother to hear from her post in the hallway. She came in anyway, though, and I could see her green-brown eyes glazed over and her hands clenched tight at her sides.
"Baby," she whispered, voice trembling. "Diana just called…"
"I heard. I heard on the radio." I watched her for a second, hoping that her lips would part in a big smile, the kind that crinkled up the corners of her eyes and showed the pink of her gums. But instead she just stood there in the doorway, half illuminated by the shafts of morning light that slanted through my open window. "How bad?" My voice surprised me with its emptiness, with its total lack of emotion or inflection.
"Diana suggested you come down to the hospital to…" She broke right then, turning her back to me for a long moment before clearing her throat and continuing. "Diana and Walker think you should go visit him."
"That bad." There was no more question in me, no more hopeful belief in the powers of human stupidity. It was true. It was really happening.
I can't remember at all how we got to the hospital. I sort of expected someone to cry, either me or my mom, but we both just headed, tight lipped and silent, to her car. Somehow the hideaway got called to let them know that I wouldn't make it to work; somehow my mom got dressed; somehow I kept on breathing. You know how much my mom likes you? I think she has these grandiose notions of us growing up and getting married, and right then I think she was maybe more shocked than I was. I knew you'd be okay… I know you'll be okay. So I'm not that afraid.
-Lydia
Zac-
You always look so silly sitting on the tiny, brightly colored plastic chairs in the children's room of the library. I laugh even now remembering all six feet of you scrunched up, knees nearly at chin level, sun-streaked golden hair tucked behind your ears, cheeks red with excitement. There is just no way that can be a comfortable position, but it never, ever shows. You’re too busy taking over the room, filling it with your voice and that wide grin of yours, to look uncomfortable. You hold even the most rambunctious of seven year olds totally under your sway.
They had a cake for you today, carrot with cream cheese frosting just like you like, and the small, darkly paneled room had been strung with blue and red paper streamers. You missed your going away party, Zac. The cake was decorated with a thin, spindly rendering of the Eiffel Tower, and the words "au revior" had been cautiously spelled out by a less than steady hand along its side. I don't think the kids understand what it means that you're in the hospital, that you're sick, that you're asleep and maybe you will never wake up again.
In the last few crazy days I’ve almost forgotten that you were leaving me anyway, going abroad to spend the next year in a world where the safe anonymity you have so long ago lost in America could be restored. Your mom and brothers have always given me the impression that even when you were younger you had not really liked the traveling you had to do as a member of "Hanson." They say, with indulgent smiles, that back then hard, sarcastic little Zac had always seemed to have some wistful words for home. When you finally got your wish to return to Tulsa I guess it wasn't all you had hoped; although you could come home you couldn't slip back into to the life you had given up when the Middle of Nowhere had been released. The girls that had resolutely lined up along the deep green, snaking line of demarcation between your lawn and 78th street had made sure of that.
I'm probably boring you already. Or I would be, if I ever actually gave these letters to you, which I'm still not entirely convinced I will. Anyway, I went to the library today, and I tried to read in your place. Minna and I took turns with your favorite book, that ancient copy of The Last Unicorn, but we paled in comparison to you. No matter how hard I tried I just couldn't copy your magical tone, your gentle wonder, or your complete authority over the words and all their witnesses.
When I got to the part that you always read with the most relish, when Schmendrick first arrived at Mommy Fortuna's, I realized just how hard you always try to reach the children. "No creature of man's night loves cold iron, and while the unicorn could endure its presence, the murderous smell of it," I began, knowing that at this point you would have been looking with wide, exaggeratedly frantic eyes at the children gathered on the deep green carpeted floor before you, "seemed to turn her bones to sand and her blood to rain." Here you would have paused for just the perfect amount of time to allow breath to catch in tiny throats, and for small hands to reach out to mothers or fathers in gentle, dizzying fear. I found myself stumbling over the words, longing to be done with the story and yet somehow wishing I could stay in that exact moment forever; it was something to think about, after all, the rolling feel of the strange phrases on my lips, and the eyes of the children which, right then, held me as the center of their world.
The West Tulsa public library had been the first place we went together after we re-met that night at the party, and I have always kind of thought that fore this we have fate to thank, or blame. I had heard your voice floating on the heavy, too cold air while I was innocently wandering through Thompson's Market, searching for the one specific—and very well hidden—brand of laundry detergent my mother couldn't live without. Even though I couldn't see you, I knew right away that there was only one person in the world who could invest quite the amount of inflection that I was hearing into an argument over whether tootsie roll pops or blow pops were superior. I stood there, just listening, enraptured, to you reasoning.
"Blow pops are twice as good because even after you finish the lollipop part you still have gum to chew on." You've always been so strong and certain, Zac, and it shows in everything about you. If I had to describe how you talk to someone who didn't know you, I'd probably have to tell them that whatever you say, you say in capitol letters, even if it’s something about tootsie roll pops.
"But with tootsie roll pops their mouths will get gooed shut and they won't be able to interrupt," suggested a small voice, no less forceful in its self-righteousness than your own. "And it's educatshional," the tiny, unseen specter added in a final moment of lisping inspiration, "because you have to count how many licks it takes to get to the center!"
"Good point, that last one. Tootsie it is, Tootsie." A small bout of giggling had followed, and, as the receding clatter of a wire cart replaced your voices, I contemplated hiding. Yes, Zac, hiding; not everyone is like you. I was unsure, not positive if you would even have remembered me, let alone be able to pick me out at random. More than a week must have passed since that dark swim we had shared, and I was pretty sure I'd die of embarrassment if I went up to you only to find that the event that had made my weekend had not even registered for you. And on top of that, even if you did remember me, I was still worried that you'd be embarrassed. Maybe you had thought I was a dumb baby like Taylor and the rest of his friends did, and had just been trying to make me feel less left out in an attempt to get sainted or something. There was also the even more dire possibility that you had been tricked by the magical, silvery moonlight into thinking I was pretty, and that your illusions would be uncomfortably shattered in the harsh fluorescent light of the grocery store.
Being Lydia and all, I had been so wrapped up in my worries that I barely noticed the cluncking of a trolley with a bum wheel coming in my direction until a red and gold vision blurred past my face. It had been you, of course, balanced precariously with both of your feet on the bottom shelf of your cart, whizzing past at speed. I must have sighed with relief as you sailed by, sure that you hadn’t even noticed me. I had watched your receding back, laughing to myself as your feet lowered to contact the industrial strength linoleum floor for a fraction of a heartbeat, propelling yourself nearly out of my sight at the end of the long isle. You had left a trail of childish giggles in your wake, a sound that moved the world to make me smile.
My early fears of being forced into actual socialization were renewed by the enthusiastic "about face!" that I heard seconds later, though, and by the reappearance of your cart. You had continued your speedy journey; this time, bathed in your eyes, I remember feeling the irregular flutter of my heart growing louder and louder, and a the shiverings of a burning blush working its way to singe my cheeks. "Lydia Redwing, yes?"
I've had three years to try and figure out what happened next, but I still have no idea. "If you were seven years old would you prefer Tootsie Roll pops or Blow pops?" You didn’t wait for me to confirm my name before you asked this question in a perfectly reasonable tone of voice, like you had just inquired of an old friend about the weather. You and the passenger of your cart, the sweetest looking little girl I've ever seen, both watched me, eagerly waiting for some sort of response.
"Tootsie?" I hazarded as you leaned forward, elbows on the handle of the cart, to stare your little sister in the eye.
"You were right, tootsie." There was already a huge bag of the suckers in question resting on the girl's lap as she sat in the child seat of the cart, dressed in pink overalls, her curly blond hair swept up in a tiny baseball cap.
"Stop calling me tootsie!" She laughed, pushing with one small hand against your forehead.
"Her name's actually Zoë," you had smiled up at me, stepping away from the cart to stand so near to me that instinct dictated my blind step backward. This charming move seemed to uphold the natural law I had recently discovered: whenever you and I met I was destined to make a fool out of myself. You remember what happened? I certainly haven't forgotten; that kind of humiliation really stays with a girl. The thoughtless step had caused me to run into the pyramid shaped display of detergent I that had so recently been examining, thereby sending the heavy boxes crashing in an uncontrollable landslide to the ground.
Embarrassment just isn't the word. It doesn't even begin to cover the sinking sensation in my stomach, or the way my eyes began to burn as I turned to stare in disbelief at the huge pile of boxes that had fallen victim to my decided lack of grace. Right then it could have gone either way. I could have simply freaked out and left the building faster than Elvis tempted with a peanut butter and banana sandwich, and believe you me, I thought about it for several seconds. I could also have calmly accepted my clumsiness and tried to carry off the situation with the least amount of chagrin possible, which was the conclusion I had come to when your laughter shook into existence, at first held in, betrayed only by a faint snort and a rather pained expression.
"You, Zac Hanson, have the worst effect on me! First mud and now this!" I was lost, giggling then guffawing then just laughing until my sides hurt and my eyes began to water. It was such an absurd situation, such a moment of potential embarrassment, but your grin and the way your shoulders shook with barely suppressed laughter took it all away. We had leaned together, weak from mirth, and you had wrapped an arm around my shoulder. The gesture was so natural, so comfortable that I didn't even think about how weird it was, and didn't even contemplate the last time I'd let someone I barely know touch me. I enjoyed it too much, I guess.
"You two made a huge mess," Zoë had finally inserted as we began to calm down, no doubt for show in the face of the store employees who were beginning to discover their destroyed handiwork.
"You two?" You had demanded with false indignity, "I think only one of us took offense to the laundry detergent!"
"Sure, abandon me, why don't you?" I knelt and began to gather the boxes in an attempt at returning the display to its former state of glory, as a woman in a red apron with "Thompson's Market" embroidered across the chest came to stand hostility above me.
"I won't abandon you," I remember you smiling as you joined me on the floor, your silky light hair intermingling with my loose black strands as we leaned together.
"That's nice to hear," I had whispered, desperately trying to use all of my attention to carefully align a row of boxes to form the base of the pyramid.
"It took me forever to put that together!" The store employee growled, stepping briskly away, no doubt to summon reinforcements.
"So what are you doing today? After practicing your building skills, I mean?" You had asked, so close by my side that all I could think about was the heat of you.
"Crawling under the nearest rock, thank you."
"Come with us!" Zoë had demanded from her position in the cart, tossing the lollipops over her shoulder and holding up her arms and muttering "down, down," an impatient signal for a lift to the floor.
"We're going to read at the library," you had informed me, scrambling to your feet to help your little sister down, then allowing her to place a few detergent box bricks on the ever more organized pile.
I didn't even know what hit me. You entered my life like a hurricane, calling off all the bets and filling every little bit of me that had once been empty. You always make me laugh, and ever since that day in the grocery store I knew that you'd never leave me, taking somehow for granted that you'd always be there to be my strength, my supporting shadow.
At some point I agreed to go with you to the library, and I found myself twenty minutes later stepping out of the passenger side of your parents white van, staring at the forebodingly huddled brick structure of the west Tulsa library.
"We come here all the time," Zoë had explained, wrapping a slightly sticky hand around mine and skipping her way up the cement path to the front door. It smelled like every library I've ever been in, like old paint and books hidden out of the sun for to long, but inside was a different world. It was bright and cheery, and, to my shock, full of little kids. No fewer than thirty of the under ten set were patiently waiting, covering every available surface.
Minna had been reading to them when we came in, some brilliantly glossy picture book clutched in her hands. Her voice was soft but strong as she read through its sing-song stanzas, holding the book open in front of her and reading it from above. A small group of really little kids sat around her, staring up in wonder as she worked her way through the slender tome. The other children, most of those in attendance, even, were older and not so interested. They sprawled on the floor, on the hard, straight-backed chairs that surrounded the big, round library table, apparently waiting for something to happen. The something was you, of course. As soon as we walked in they jerked to attention as one, forcing Minna to raise her voice to be heard over them. "Hey Zac!" several if them called, ten and twelve years old and awkward and gawky and far too old to be at a library storytime.
When Minna finally finished her reading for the younger kids she came to our side, and all I remember thinking was how tiny she was, and how dark her hair seemed to glisten. A smile had twisted her simple features into beauty as she spoke to you saying, "they've been waiting for you." She always seems to glow, doesn't she?
"Minna, this is Lydia. Lydia, Minna. She's been the librarian here for as long as I can remember, and sometimes she lets me have the honor of reading during story time." Zoë had already been lost in the crush of children, discernible only because of her too-loud voice and sparkling laugh that could never be missed, no matter how many voices were layered over it.
"Nice to meet you, Minna." I had shook her hand, marveling at its strength.
You stepped away from us, giving my shoulder a quick squeeze. I had forgotten. That was twice you touched me that day, two unremarkable instants to reside in my memory forever. "Duty calls, ladies." The sea of children split for you, only to eagerly reform in your wake.
Did you ever know what happened then? It was funny in retrospect, but at the time the silence between Minna and I was deafening. Eventually had you folded yourself into a seat in front of the room, and finally she spoke: "Zac's never brought a little friend here before," followed by a suggestive wink. She thought I was your girlfriend, I guess, and she wasn't the only one. A small group of girls, some my age and a few even older, were congregated near your seat, and as soon as I looked away from Minna, oddly embarrassed by her assumption, I saw that they were eyeing me. Very bizarre Zac, very bizarre. They were there because of who you were, I would eventually realize, a group of practically grown women somehow not able to let go of a precious dream of childhood. That would be you, precious dream. Silly, huh? They only knew you as the little Hanson, as a wildman behind a set of drums, but this was enough for them to follow, chasing a reality that had been all too effectively created for them.
"Um, we're not. You know. I'm not, we're not. I'm not his little friend." My stammering phrases had doubtlessly been punctuated by the kind of ineffectual hand gestures I'm so prone to, but Minna had just kept smiling that knowing, warm grin at me.
"Indeed." You had began to read then, and I was swept away by the rush of your words invading the air, taking it over for their own purpose. The room fell, utter and complete, into hush. You had been telling the story of the Last Unicorn back then, a little bit every week, and that day you read about the outlaws' camp. I practically have it memorized, the part where the magician summoned their dreams in the form of Robin Hood and his merry men. "He's a myth," you intoned in the voice of Captain Cully, "a classic example of the heroic folk figures synthesized out of need, and so a legend grows around a grain of truth, like a pearl."
Cully's men abandoned him, and you had cried out as that man, "fools, fools, and children! It was a lie, like magic! There is no such person as Robin Hood!"
An hour might have passed, and I don't think I breathed once in all that time.
It wasn't like that today, Zac. Not at all. Which is why you have to stay at least a little longer. You have to go read one more time to those little kids, the ones who filled the air with another kind of silence in your absence.
--Lydia
Dear Zac-
My mom and I had another fight today. A bad one. I don't even know why, really. Well, I kind of do, I guess; she brought up the fact that I desperately need to start packing. She's right, because school starts Tuesday. My tuition is paid; Oklahoma City is a long drive from here, and I'm a Sophomore Business major who can't afford to miss even a day of classes for any reason. But she's wrong, because I won't go back. How can I? How am I supposed to leave you?
That's pretty much how it started off. Me saying that I wasn't going to go, and her saying I had to. I have no excuse for what happened then, for the way I yelled, for the way I slammed my door in her face. It was so stupid, and I knew it whole time, but once I got started it felt to good to stop...like I was on fire and the only thing I could do to make the pain go away was inflict it on someone else. So I said things I didn't even know I thought, things so mean I can't even bear to look at her now.
What's wrong with me Zac? Why am I like this to maybe the only person who really cares about me? It's all messed up, my life, and honestly and truly my mom is the only one who is even trying to understand. Angie has come over every day since we heard, and we've hung out together, but it's totally different. We sit in my room or walk around the neighborhood, but we never really talk. It's just her looking at her feet and never daring to say anything real, never daring to be my friend because she can't handle admitting what’s going on.
I wish I could rewind the world to last week, before all this happened, to that last day we spent together. I wish so bad it hurts.
I can't go downstairs because she's there, and I don't know why I'm writing this. I know that if you were here you'd let me whine until I finally had to pause for a breath, you'd do something silly to make me laugh, and somehow that laughter would make it all better. It wouldn't change the world, maybe, but instead it would drag me back to reality, and make the argument seem like not that big of a deal. But that's not going to happen, is it?
God. What's going on with me? I'm crying. Such a baby. I can't go back to school because if you—when something happens I want to be here. I want to be the first person you see when you wake up and then I want to smack you around for scaring us all like this, you jerk.
We used to fight a lot when we first met. Do you remember that? It was almost as bad as fighting with my mom, because as soon as I knew you, you were a part of me like she is. Only for us to belong together we didn't need the involuntary bonding of genes, of sixteen Christmas mornings, of nightmares, or of fathers that leave. We just fit together like best friends should, immediately and totally. That's why our fights were so harsh, I think. Because I cared about you so much before I even could name a reason.
As I sit up here in my room, scribbling away this note you probably couldn’t understand even read if did give it to you, the fight that stands out the most was that time in your backyard; it could only have been a few weeks after we first met. We had been at your house that day, alone with Taylor and Isaac.
It's always cool to see you three together, because you're like shades of each other. I don't know how to explain it, really, but if the world was a box of crayons, I think each person would have their own color. I bet I'd be a burnt umber or one of those other random shades that little kids don't really care about, but you guys would be the most brilliant blues. Taylor would be periwinkle, you navy, and Isaac midnight. You don't see it, and neither do your brothers, probably because something like that you have to be on the outside to notice. Maybe that’s the way everything works, maybe you always have to be on the outside to realize there's an inside.
I remember sitting in the cool green shade of that big oak tree behind your house, too hot to breathe, too hot to think, almost, too hot to do anything but stretch out on the sharp chill of the grass and take deep breaths full of the sticky sweet smell of the honeysuckle that rings the verdant expanse of your yard.
Taylor was in real human being mode, far away from anyone he felt like he needed to impress, was telling a story that I don't remember… scratch that. I do remember. He was telling me about the way you talk in your sleep. "I swear he was ordering a hamburger last night," Taylor had laughed, uprooting a handful of recently shorn grass and throwing it at you. "Well, at least I hope he was because that's the only 'juicy sweetness' I want to think my little brother has been exposed to." He must have been twenty then, home on summer break from the Berklee School of music. I don’t know what it is about Taylor, but whenever I see him I find myself thinking that if he had lived in the nineteenth century he would have been elegantly wasting away from some romantic disease, his smooth skin flushed with a consumptive blush, or perhaps gone artistic green.
I think my mom has come upstairs. I should go apologize, but I don't know what to say.
I'm not sure why, but Taylor's comments that day had made you genuinely mad, and as you ran your hands through your tangled hair I could see you shoot him an annoyed gaze. "Shut up," you had muttered, the resentment in your tone only half pretend.
"Touchy ground, is it?" Taylor nudged you, beginning to catch on to your anger. As I’ve gotten to knowing you both, I have lost some of my shock at your brotherhood. At first it seemed unfathomable that self-centered, wild Taylor could be related to someone who befriended random girls at parties and read to little kids at libraries, but over time I learned to divine a little of you behind those dreamy blue eyes, a little of that cleverness that makes you so special. Isaac had silently watched the pair of you, an expression of gentle amusement on his face. He was already married then, I think, and at 22 he seemed so grown up. It was odd to be around him, and to know that Emily was pregnant and he was practically a daddy.
"At least I don't drool in my sleep. That's just plain nasty." The defiance in your voice had faded a little, replaced by playfulness.
Taylor laughed for an instant before acquiescing, "You're right. You want to see some real drool, though?" Two seconds later he had you in a headlock, and the two of you were struggling, a blur of blonde hair and deeply tanned skin.
"You have yet to get used to the Hanson brothers, eh?" Isaac's voice was soft, and leisurely assured, the kind of tone that takes to offense just as slowly as it does to happiness. I had raised uncertain eyebrows in his direction, helplessly searching for an appropriate answer. "We're a little, unusual, I guess." He pulled himself closer to me on the grass, making it easier for me to hear his words over the furied growl of your laughter as you turned the tables on your older brother, pinning an always-weaker Taylor.
"I've never seen any siblings like you guys," I think I probably sounded almost apologetic.
"Most siblings aren't as close as we are. Homeschooling does that to people, and so does four years of adolescence spent in an ivory tower." Isaac’s eyes were focused on the dingy white clouds that slowly scrolled across the sky above us, seemingly focusing on something other than the human beings present. An Isaac habit, I was soon to realize.
"Ivory tower," I repeated contemplatively to myself. I had figured it out by then, known who you were and understood your history as more than the animated stories of your childhood that you loved to tell. Being who you were, a Hanson, had been great, it had been wonderful, and it had been profoundly wounding in a way that leaves you scarred to this day. When it means the difference between success and failure in the world of music—a place that people think is all about inspiration and art but is actually riddled with business and politics—all of a sudden different things matter. You had come to see your entire life as balanced on the precarious opinions of strangers, and because of this you’ve learned to give people what they want. Cold, record label sponsored photo shoots in t-shirts taught you never to complain. Meetings with the press taught you never to express a real opinion. Daytime TV taught you always to smile, always to look happy no matter what you really feel. I didn’t know these things, then. And I wish they weren’t true now.
Isaac had watched me, consideration a thick veil across his deep brown eyes. "That's what you have to understand about him, Lydia. He isn't from the same world as you." What a bizarre thing to say. At that time I was annoyed, and in an attempt to break his fixation on me I stretched out on my back, wrapped in what I remember as the impossibly sweet scent of your recently-mowed lawn. Right then I thought he was saying that you were better, that what you had done when you were younger had made you so distant from my world to be as far out of my reach as the rose-edged clouds I saw floating in the suddenly darkening sky above us.
Taylor had finally given up the wrestling match, and with a final, gentlemanly flourish in my direction, the two of you relaxed, sliding in close to once again complete our rough circle on the green of your lawn, the circle that seemed somehow too full with four bodies. "What are we talking about?" You had asked, smiling that smile that makes your whole face light up and your eyes crinkle up at the edges. You have always grinned wide, never afraid to show the teeth that you fought so hard to maintain orthodontics-free, despite their imperfections. When Ike smiles he does it faintly, keeping his mouth shut. I've realized this is a symptom of his constant thought, while you just give yourself over to the laughter, the wicked grin, and the deep guffaw that somehow always seems to follow you through life.
"I was just telling Lydia about your real family… the one on Albertane." Isaac had informed you teasingly.
"Ah! Ma and Pa!" You laughed. Who would have thought that you would still be okay with it all? I mean, you had been eleven years old when you wrote that silly song. I know that you can't help being a little embarrassed by it, but I also know that you would never wish it away. The Albertane years were a part of you, and you embraced them even though that was all the rest of the world bothered to see in you. The Mmmbop brothers, the washed up ones. It’s their own loss if they don’t realize that you're really only beginning. I have never been so sure of anything in my life as I am that someday in the future there will be more Hanson on the top of the charts.
"Too bad they never came back for you, even after all these years.." Taylor mused in jest, flopping backwards, propping himself on his elbows. Back then he was always self-consciously playing the role of art student, dressed totally in black from head to toe. The outfit he wore that day, a tight black T-shirt and black pants, made him almost blend into the incrementally increasing darkness.
Isaac must have left at some point, but I can't really remember why. Something about picking Emily up from work, maybe. It seems like that's all Ike ever did back in the early days of our friendship—talk about Emily or be with Emily, and he slips from my memory of the evening, quiet as ghost, unremarked as a shadow.
We continued to talk, just the three of us, as the night closed in and the air dimmed with chill. I should have gone home, but I didn't want to. It was too comfortable right there, watching all those sweet little mysteries that are your mannerisms: the way you flip absently at your shaggy hair, probably a remnant from your days of flowing locks; the way your hands never seem to stop moving when you talk, always flying in an illustrative dance around whatever point you want to make; the way sometimes your eyes catch the light and glint orange against the dark tan of your face.
"You guys want to smoke up?" The words came from nowhere, interrupting the pleasant reverie I had built around you, and Taylor pulled back into focus for me as he stood to grab his battered red backpack from the patio that runs along the back of your house.
I had screwed up my face at you, expecting to meet glances and share my distaste, but instead you were suddenly enraptured by the grass you were industriously ripping up from the roots. "I have some of the good stuff…" Taylor returned to our green triumvirate, fishing through his bag for an instant before pulling out a short, obviously hand-rolled cigarette.
"Um. I don't think so, thanks," I murmured as your brother looked to me for support.
"Come on, you don't get weed like this every day, and it's not the same to smoke alone!" I never really understood how Taylor can be like he is. No matter how crude a sentence he may construct, coming from him it doesn't seem so bad. I was completely repulsed, and with each second adding more reasons to my lengthy mental list of why he was all wrong for Angie. But the way Taylor comfortable and playing at the home venue, could smile so sweet as to blind, so sweet as to make me want to give in.
"Really, no thanks." Your silent presence encouraged me, and I was sure that any second you’d agree with me. I just don't get it. Smoking is so stupid. It takes nasty; it burns; it makes the truths of the world turn uncomfortably wrong. But those reasons, the last especially, are probably exactly why boys like Taylor…and I guess boys like you…smoke it.
You still hadn't said anything, but I was still convinced turn him down just as I had. Wasn't it you who had stood up to him for me at the party only a few weeks before? I would have bet my life that Zac Hanson the dangerous things in which Taylor Hanson obviously reveled.
"No man, I don't want to either." You had sounded less than convinced, and I watched you both glow golden in the dusk as you stared each other down, suddenly aware of the quiet chirping of local wildlife and the distant hum of the interstate.
"You're such a baby." I don't think I've ever heard anyone sound quite as disgusted as Taylor did right then, quite as nauseated to look at his own genetic flipside and see it going against him. "Come on, Zac. Don't be a loser." He had lit the roach, and was hungrily sucking down the dark smoke that made me feel queasy even from my position several feet away.
"Nah, giving it up for lent." I don't even know what I was thinking then. I know I was mad, though, and even now, years later, I can feel myself tightening up just remembering the quiet way you tried to stand up to your brother.
"Zaaaccc, come on." Taylor held out the cigarette to you, clutched between thumb and forefinger.
"If he doesn't want to, he doesn't have to." I finally interjected impatiently, giving Taylor what I imagine was my most matronly stare.
"Oh, that's right. I forgot that Zac doesn't make his own decisions. Never has." He took another drag, his angelic face turning indulgently petulant.
"Just give it to me." You had snatched the joint from Taylor's hands, taking a long and experienced toke. "I'm not a baby."
It wasn't my place to be there, I guess, stuck like a fly in the honey of your sibling rivalry. This fact, recognized in retrospect, wasn't enough to stop me, though. I stared at you, awash in thick dismay. It had been so easy to slip into looking up to you unquestioningly, to trust in the tender strength that almost always surrounded you, to believe that if anyone in the world could be perfect, it would be a boy like you. But there you were, giving in to your older brother because he called you a baby.
"Lydia?" You offered sharply, leaning towards me to pass off the cigarette.
"I don't think so, I'm leaving." I had felt then just like I did earlier today when I was fighting with my mother, like I was bathed in sizzling volcanic lava, scalding from within with anger and frustration.
"See you," Taylor took the joint back from you and pulled in another hit.
"Come on Lydia, don't go." You had pleaded quietly. "Please." You knew exactly why I was mad, and exactly why I didn't want to stay around, but it didn't stop you from once again accepting the fat cigarette from your brother. The gentle radiance of its burning tip light up the murky air, sending a faint streamer of smoke shimmering up towards the rapidly appearing stars.
"Oh my god. I don't even believe this," I remember muttering before climbing to my feet.
"Lydie? Stay…" You looked at Taylor for a second, no doubt noticing as I did that he was already reclining a tad too dreamily. "We'll just do a little. It will be fun." I'm not sure who you were trying to convince.
"Zac, just give it up." I had answered, preparing to blow the situation out of proportion. That's exactly what happened then—and probably did in most of our fights—but this one time stands out to me especially, maybe because it hurts so bad to have your illusions shattered.
"You're the baby." You said it, I know you did. Even though in the future you'd play innocent, I know those words crossed your lips. And that was all it took to send me off.
"I'm the baby? The one who gives up and smokes pot just because I can't tell someone no? I think I've proven myself able to handle such situations. You're a weakling, Zac Hanson. Anything your brothers do you have to do too!" I was probably shouting, and I wouldn't be surprised if half of your neighborhood heard me, but at that point I didn't much care.
"Whatever. You know that's so not true. You're shocked to discover my world doesn't revolve solely around you and what you think." We were both a little too close to the truth in what we said. The unity you and your brothers share is a great blessing, and you see it as that, but when its dark side appears you can't step away from the bond and see how that it is capable of hurting you. If Taylor did something wrong, something like that evening, you always allowed yourself to be sucked into it too, unable or unwilling to distance yourself from your brother. And me? I wouldn't have admitted it even to myself then, but it made me uncomfortable to see you around your family like that, fit into a jigsaw puzzle life that held no open spaces for me.
"I don't want your world revolving around me. It's too screwed up. Lord forbid anything ever steps between the almighty Hanson brothers. You're not going to make it out of your family alive if you don't start doing what you believe instead of what he tells you!" I was halfway to where my car waited in your newly paved driveway before the words had even fully been pronounced, ready to never look back. But I guess that's the thing, isn't it? I couldn't abandon the unit that is "Zac and Lydia" then any more then than I can now. You had already slipped into every aspect of my life: you used my toothbrush, you called my mother mama, you knew all my friends, and half of my wardrobe was already in your closet! That was what it was like to be overcome by the Zac Hanson tornado, to be carried away into your peculiar brand of Oz that always smelled like bubblegum and felt like the heated rush of winning at your favorite racing game in the arcade.
I was too full of myself and my righteous indignation to notice the betrayal on your face, or the way you flew to your feet and ran to step in front of me. I definitely feel for anyone who is stupid enough to piss you off, though, because when your bulk ground to an obstinate halt in front of me I was seriously afraid. You would never hurt me, and what really made my heart clatter to a frozen standstill in my chest wasn't your six feet, or even the muscles you've attained from many years of soccer and rock climbing, but instead the cold look of pain in your eyes. "Take it back." That was all you said. "Take it back." Like we were second graders on the playground and there were some magical words that could make it all go away, and could make it all get better.
"What do you mean, take it back? We both it's the truth!" My anger was withering away as I watched you shake a little, desperately hovering somewhere between tears and physical violence.
"Take it back."
Taylor was chortling on the grass, having apparently been smoking through our argument and enjoying the chain of events he had set into motion very much indeed. I don't know if you've noticed, but to many years of singing, of abusing his vocal cords, of living a little to fast and a little to long, has stolen from him the ability to really laugh. Instead what issues from his mouth is a raspy hawing like a sixty-year-old with emphysema. We stopped to look at him and the shadows that gathered around him, casting his fine features in sketchwork and charcoal.
My glance swiveled to you as you watched him, Zac, and I saw a little bit of Taylor's earlier disgust in your face. It's like you somehow feel that what one of the two of you is, the other is damned to be, automatically and completely. Taylor didn't like to see you being what he felt was childish because in your actions he saw himself. And right then, in your mind you were sitting on the grass, laughing with the broken voice upon which you had built so much of your world.
"I'm sorry." I whispered, before you turned to look back at me. "I'm sorry." It felt funny to talk at a normal decibel level after my unaccustomed bout of screaming, like I couldn't be heard by anyone but me.
"Just remember," you had said, gaze wavering between me and your still laughing brother, "just remember that there's no Robin Hood."
It took a second for your words to work their through my mind and to find meaning to me, but when they did, I wanted to cry. Because you were right, because there is no Robin Hood, but mostly because I knew that that fact would never stop anyone from looking for him.
I'm going to go apologize to my mother now. She didn't deserve what I said to her.
-Lydia
"Zac Hanson today underwent an operation that a spokesperson from Hillcrest Medical Center reported may save his life. According to Dr. Jose Torres, newly appointed Hillcrest chief of Surgery, 'we have done everything we can. All that is left now is to wait, and to hope.' 19 year old Hanson is still listed in critical condition."
When my Mother and I finally found the Intensive Care Unit at Hillcrest it had probably been an hour since I heard.
Nothing seemed quite real, though, and it wouldn't until we rounded an antiseptic corner to find Taylor sitting in a barren waiting room, his elbows on his knees and head in hands. It was then that I Knew—in that one second as he raised his burning, blue gaze in response to the clatter of our shoes in the silent, chill air—I realized the truth. His eyes were red and puffy, his perpetually flawless hair ruffled and his mouth a narrow, bitter red gash torn in the white of his face. Taylor, who was always doing things to be seen, doing things to make an impression, doing things to be different and special, was sitting in an empty room, crying. Taylor who never seemed to really care about anyone, not you or Angie or his family, was sitting vigil right there in the pale room, hot tears barely dried on his cheeks.
He sat in one corner of a small cluster of chairs, a low glass topped table by his side covered with a litter of coffee cups and tissue. My mom went to him first, I think, recognizing him from one of the hundreds of times that the four of us—you, me, Angie, and Taylor—had spent long, careless afternoons watching videos sprawled across her living room. At the time I hadn't even taken pause to wonder what he was doing there, but eventually I realized that he must have been on the first plane from LA after it happened. He looked stunned, horrified, and nauseated all at once as my mother approached him, saying his name softly, a delicate whisper designed to not startle.
I think she asked him how he was. Funny, huh? That life goes on even though time seems to stand still, funny that we keep on breathing even as the Earth seems to have frozen in its rotation.
"They’re down the hall," he answered the wrong query, slouching backwards into the molded plastic of his chair. "I just came out here to…get some air." Most of what I've written in these letters has been self-indulgent whining, probably not fit to show another human being, but I want to remember that moment just as it was: the way weak beams of sunlight struggled into the room through a set of heavily shaded windows, the way the stenciled green border that ran across the beige walls wasn't quite even, the way I suddenly felt like I understood Taylor as I never had before. The expressions that flashed across his face mimicked the constant cycling of my emotions, the sadness, the fear, the hurt, the worry.
"We'll just go in and see how things are going," my mother spoke for the both of us, taking my shoulder and leading me down the wide hallway in the direction he had gestured. Everything was a blur when we left Taylor, as if I was trapped in a movie and someone had finally become frustrated and decided to fast forward. Doctors and nurses flashed past us as we walked, little more than streaks of white or deep green. The paintings that hung at regular intervals on the walls seemed to blur together, forming two parallel lines smeared across my line of sight, composed of fragments of sunflowers and seascapes and moonlight.
If there's one thing I would never expect your family it would be silence, but on Tuesday that's exactly what they were, sitting inert as mannequins in a slightly smaller waiting room than the one Taylor had been seeking refuge in. The walls here were whiter, the furniture more formal, the brightness of overhead fluorescence making the whole thing seem to be a backdrop to some melodramatic play.
Your mother wasn't there when we first arrived, instead it was your father who was watching over Zoë as she did her best to entertain herself with a coloring book filled with pages that I could see even from the doorway were yellowed with age.
I found my voice there, among some of the people that I have over the past two years come to consider a part of my own family. "Mr. Hanson," I said to get his attention, my voice too loud even at a whisper.
"Walker, Lydia, please call me Walker." Even in a time of crisis like that, he appeared to be totally calm. The only marks that betrayed his worry were the two red splotches that blossomed on his cheeks, just beneath his eyes, those and the faint stubble on his face that made it obvious that your father had left the house that morning without taking the time to shave.
My mother and I had stood awkwardly for a second, uncertain of what to do. "Come sit down," your dad indicated the empty chairs beside him. "We haven't been able to get in to see him yet, but the doctors are saying that he's stabilized for the moment. Diana is trying to get in touch with Isaac, and Taylor’s around here, somewhere." His voice didn't shake as he brought us up to speed on the situation, but he didn't tell me the one thing I really wanted to hear. He didn't say, "this was all just one big joke, you know. Zac's going to come popping out from behind that couch over there, and he's going to think it's so funny that you actually believed any of this." He didn't say, "it's just a scratch. We're waiting for the nurse to get him one of those green and black camouflage Band-Aids like the ones Diana buys for Zoë."
The two of them, Zoë and your Dad, watched us sit down, eyes round with worry, and we began to wait. That was the worst part, I think. The waiting. There was nothing to do, and even if there had been it's not like anyone would have been able to concentrate on a distraction for more than two seconds at a time. Zoë didn't seem to really know what to make of the situation, and her muted discussion with herself over the appropriate shades with which to fill her current project seemed dull and forced.
I had sat next to your dad, and after a few seconds of staring straight ahead he began to talk to me in that calm, soothing voice of his. "Are you starting to get packed for school? Zac's been putting of getting ready for Paris, and it's driving Diana wild."
"I have a few days before I really have to get my act together, and today was my last shift for the summer at work, so I'll have some free time to pack," I answered. I think he was trying to take my mind off the situation at hand, in a typical Mr. Hanson sort of way. I had never seen him worry, or get worked up, or put himself first, and even then I didn’t think that I ever would.
I suspect that he would have continued on that path of surprising tranquility, but your mother entered the room in a mist of glistening blond hair and soft perfume. "Lydia, Cathy, I'm glad you were able to come. I don't know as we can really do anything here, but I know how much it would mean to Zac if you were both here when he woke up." She too seemed calm, but when she reached out to touch my hand I could see her nails had been bitten ragged, nearly bloody. A look was exchanged between your parents, and your Mom took a seat on the other side of your Dad. "Emily's brother is going to fly them down in his plane," she informed him quietly. "They should be here soon."
I wanted to think that what was happening wasn't all that serious, and the demeanor of your parents made my fiction seem almost plausible. Could they be so relaxed if you were really hurt? Wouldn't they be crying, or fighting with the doctor, or dedicating a song to you on Delilah? Aren't those the things that people do when they're sad or afraid? It most definitely seemed to me that they shouldn't take up a conversation about gardening, as did your mother only a few seconds after entering the room. "The shoots from that honeysuckle bush you gave me are growing so well," she began, directing her comments to my shaken mom.
"I'm shocked that it's doing so well by the porch like that. I wouldn't have thought there would be enough sunlight," Walker had interjected when her words died in the air, withered, unanswered and uncertain.
"Well, you know we used to have the bush out behind the garage when Lydia was younger, but it never really took there." My mom finally picked up the ball, casting her dark eyes uncertainly in my direction for a second. She didn’t know what to do, either. Even though she knew your parents well enough, times like this are too different; People change too much under stress, dealing with it in ways often totally unexpected. I remember the day after my Grandmother died last winter how Aunt Irene had given her mother's house its most thorough cleaning ever, washing all the hidden places beneath counters and over doorframes. Even though Grandmoo would never see any of these things, never see her house so glistening with care, Aunt Irene had done it. She and my mother would sell the house less than two months later, but during that time she continued the ceaseless regimen of cleaning that would have made her mother proud. My mom and I saw what she was doing for what it was: an attempt to hold on to the past, to cling to whatever vestige of normalcy that could be found. That's what your parents were doing then, I think, trying to fill their minds with the immaterial, with the passing, with the unimportant, all in hopes of avoiding the dark realities that lurked all around them.
A doctor entered the waiting room then, his pristine white scrubs seeming to blend into the monochromatic walls. He held the dark wooden door to the hallway open with one hand and surveyed our little group, a tentatively nervous look on his weathered face. "Mrs. Hanson, Mr. Hanson?"
Your parents’ stares were their only response to him, making them look a little like deer in headlights. They must have known something that I didn't, even then, and the terror on their faces was enough to twist my stomach into stinging knots and send waves of sharp pain running beneath my temples. They were scared. Really scared. And they didn't want to identify themselves to the doctor because they were afraid what he had to say.
"I'd like to talk to the two of you in private, if I could." They rose hesitantly, your father smoothing his wrinkled khakis, apparently on their second day of wear, and taking your mother's hand tightly before walking towards the doctor.
They stepped into the hall, and I don't think they knew we could hear. The door was open a crack, though, and their conversation floated in despite my best attempts to remain shielded from them.
The doctor's first solemn words were that you only had a fifty percent chance of making it through the day. I will never forget, however much I wish I could, the way your father had whimpered, trying to block the noise by biting at the edge of his fist. The doctor, looking barely older than Isaac, apologized. The damage was too great to repair, he continued, but if you continued to live and remained stable for the next day or two, they could attempt an operation to relieve the dangerous brain stem swelling that had been caused when you hit your head. I tried so hard not to listen, not wanting to know those horrible things.
Why you? What was it about you that had stood out like a lightening rod, telling God or nature or whomever it was that handled such things that you were ripe to be a victim? I could write the doctor’s exact words here, every soft whispered prognosis, if I could bear to relive them. All the conversations in these letters have been seasoned with my imagination, because after all it’s been years, but each and every syllable that that doctor uttered to your parents will never leave my mind. I can hear them now, a threatening whisper prowling through my thoughts, a whisper I would do anything to stop.
The doctor stepped away for a second, his attention stolen from your parents by one a nurse gliding up beside him and whispering something I couldn't hear. That was the worst moment, I think; your father took your mother in his arms then, finally breaking, finally crying, clinging to her desperately, bending down to rest his forehead on her shoulder. Your mom was so brave, more so than I can imagine any human being ever having been in the history of the world. She just stood strong for him, her eyes clenched tight, her pale hands tracing delicate patterns on your dad's shaking back. Her soft voice slid to me, "it will be all right. God will watch over our baby."
Maybe she was right, maybe your God did decide that it was about time he give you some protection, because you continue to draw breath even now, three days later. You live on in that sterile hospital room, your skin paper white, a thick blue plastic tube stuck through a hole in your neck, allowing you to breathe. I'm almost glad you haven't woken up. That's such a horrible thing to say, but even as it's horror strikes me, I know that if seeing you like this is scary for me, it would be a million times worse for you. Your beautiful hair has been shaved off. Your perfect face has been… but I don't want to write this. The mercy of your coma is that it may protect you from realizing what has happened, and if you ever do read this, you won't want to know. And I want to forget.
It's called cerebral edema, what's wrong with you; I don't think anyone wanted me to know, as if those words would bear some meaning. If it remained a mystery, though, I think it would have almost made it worse. Some unseen, unnamed specter would be threatening to take you away. And how could I stop it if I can't understand it? I couldn't. I can't. And I don't think the doctors can, either. They look at us as we sit in that same waiting room all day, putting forward their professional expressions and crisp words designed to be just comforting enough. When they're alone, though, white coats amongst white coats, I can see their faces change, stiffen, harden, and I can hear their words slip into murmurs reminiscent of those of the first morning: "negative prognosis" and "85% chance of failure."
-Lydia
Zac-
The Barrys from next door had to go to Maddie's basketball game tonight. Since they couldn't really bring a two year old with chicken pox, my mom volunteered me to stay with little Minnie when their regular sitter backed out at the last moment. The tiny red-haired girl was so desperate to itch that it literally hurt to watch her, and she spent most of her time in a hot oatmeal bath. Do you remember when Zoë came down with it last summer? She was all I could think about tonight, and I kept remembering our firefly escapade. Remember how she watched them glow as she was trapped in her room that night? There aren't many big brothers who would do what you did, and I don't know if there are many big brother's best friends who would be so proud of them for it. Capturing a firefly is no easy task, after all.
"I can't catch it, Zac!" I remember giggling as I nearly lost my balance desperately swinging a running 360, in hot pursuit of one of the hundreds of luminescent insects that had apparently made your backyard their home for that summer. "It's too fast! And I hate bugs."
"And I hate bugs?" You had laughed in response to my horror at the prospect of actually touching one of the creatures, however beautiful they may have been. "They're fireflies, Lydie. They're like stars, right here in our reach. They're perfection! You can hardly be afraid of that." There was awe in your voice, a humbled tremor that I don't think you were aware of.
The older I've gotten, the more I think of your words that night. It wasn't about the bugs, and never really was—just like it wasn't about the straight A's in French class, or the millions of albums you sold, or even the money in the bank. Not for you. Instead your world has always revolved around seeing the good in everything, and taking joy in the little triumphs of the world, in the gossamer, silken shimmer of a colony of bugs going about their lives in the backwoods of Oklahoma. Life was your perfection.
Above us in the cobalt heavens hung the real stars, never more distant for me than on that night. The fireflies, the biological lightening streaking through the sky, teased us with their untouchable closeness, as did their distant cosmic counterparts. I finally gave up in my attempts to actually capture the bugs, and rather simply delighted in the feel of the grass against my feet, already slick with dew, and the removed hum of your mother's easy -listening station, floating to us on the timid, hot July breeze.
You stood still in one place, the Crocodile Dundee of the firefly world, waiting for the tell-tale glow of one of the bugs to alert you to it's location, but I didn't follow suit. Instead I flitted about, dreaming of making my own light. Your calm, measured attempts to catch the fireflies were the way to go, there was no doubt in my mind, and so I'm sure you understood my utter shock at finding one of our targets hovering on a tall sunflower, inches from my eyes, a tiny lightbulb fighting against the resolute night that fell all around. For an instant I stopped, watched the lazily circuitous path of the seemingly captured day, and held my breath in giddy uncertainty.
"You can get it, Lydia. Just put your hands around it, softly…" You had whispered from behind me, and I felt you stepping close. The sky had been so big, so inlaid with diamonds of starshine, that I wasn't sure if I should even try. This light here wasn't so different from what that which was above: it was delicate; it was independent. I didn't want dirty it with my touch. But Zoë was upstairs, fighting the insatiable yearning to scratch that I could vividly remember from my chickenpocked days, even years later. I remember thinking that for her I would do it, so we could bring the little miracle to her bedside, so she could see the its wonder, too.
I did as you said, stretching my arms out inch by cautious inch, until I could cup the firefly within my hands. Its feet were soft on my skin, and for an instant I could feel the panicked flutter of its fine wings. "Don't hurt it." You voice was even softer now, a humid breeze on the back of my neck, despite the predator's need for silence being at an end. From the picnic table you collected the old mayonnaise jar your mother had given us, and we wound our concentration around the safe transference of the tiny life. I remember the look on your face, barely visible in the dim yard, and I remember the way you held the ancient looking glass container with one hand, using your other to steady mine.
"I won't hurt it," I think I answered. Funny that about that night I remember no particulars. It's like a dream to me, the way the moon was rising from behind your house, the way we cast shadows in its radiance. Usually I recall entire bits of our conversations, whole afternoons of video games sprawled on the beige carpeting of my living room, complete mornings playing Marco Polo with and Zoë in your parent's pool. All that I know is that we somehow introduced the firefly to its temporary home, and that you let me carry it into the house. I wasn't afraid of it any more; instead I was fascinated by the thick body of the insect and the way it lit up from within every few seconds.
I have since learned that the myth of mermaids began when sailors came across manatees languidly lying near Florida coastlines. I wonder if Faeries had begun like that? With a tempting glimmer in the dark, with the gentle beating wings on skin? I wouldn't be shocked, because there's something magical about the sight of a firefly, and maybe even a hint of the frightening in the inability of the ignorant to understand them.
Zoë was already in bed, her bright yellow big bird nightgown bringing out the summer brown of her arms and legs. I don't think your mom said anything as we flipped on Zoe's light switch, instead coming to stand outside the teletubby-covered door, watching with a smile on her face as you sat beside your sister's sleeping form. "Zoë… we have something to show you."
She awoke slowly, stretching and yawning, her first unconscious act to scratch at one of the hydrocortisone covered spots on her arm. "Huh?" You two have always looked a little alike, with your impossibly blonde hair and velvety soft brown eyes, but I don't remember any time that it was so plain to see as when you were both staring with obvious delight at the flickering firefly. "You caught it for me?" She too was awed, and I knelt in front of you both, holding the jar aloft to allow you better views. "Wow…" Zoë wasn't even initially afraid of the bug, I guess because any girlish tendencies toward fear were drowned out by her innately Hanson sense of wonder.
"I didn't realize how big they were…" I said, watching the animal pawing at the glass, stumped by the unknown barrier.
"That's probably the biggest one I've ever seen," you answered, nose nearly pressed up against the side of the jar. "And I've been catching these things since you were in diapers."
"Um… then you were in diapers too!"
"Well, duh. That's the point." An exaggerated eyebrow raise later you grinned, your face distorted with the whims of the glass.
"If you don't want to traumatize the firefly too badly you should return it to its home," your mother had interjected from her position at the doorway, an armful of clean linens balanced on her hip.
"We can't keep it?" Zoë asked, apparently envisioning a new pet.
Your mom had been about to say something, but you stepped in. "It would miss its family if we kept it. Can you imagine some strangers taking you away from us? You would be so sad."
Zoë would probably have nightmares that night, her thoughts impregnated by your scarily true assessment of the plight of our captive. "Then we have to bring it back to its Mommy." Her voice was full of martyrdom as we watched the bug finally settle, quivering, in one corner of its small prison.
That's what we did, the four of us. You, your mom, Zoë, and I carried the jar to the backyard and stood barefoot on the chill hardwood of the patio with the firefly on your picnic table between us. At first the creature was hesitant to fly away, and clinging to the glass. Finally, though, you picked up the jar, shaking it gently towards the stars above. The firefly gave in, floating to freedom, briefly circling an enraptured Zoë before disappearing.
We all stood there for a few moments, and I remember marveling at the seemingly countless pinpricks of brilliance that danced all around us. "Thank you guys for bringing him to me," Zoë stood between you and I, grabbing our hands when your mother finally demanded that we return her to bed, "and thank you for setting him free."
Minnie Barry is no Zoë, though, and I'm certainly no you. There were no fireflies tonight, only a babysitter who could barely keep from crying.
-Lydia
Zac-
This time last year we were getting ready to accompany my mom on her yearly visit to Aunt Irene's in Old Orchard. Remember? I've spent at least a few days out of every summer of my life there, watching sunsets over endless glittering expanses of the Gulf of Mexico and bonding with the aid of ridiculously girlie movies rented by my mom and her only sister. They're all the family I have, and after becoming for all intents and purposes the eighth Hanson child I had really wanted to introduce you to this part of my life. I wonder did you see ghosts of mom or Irene shadowing my smile the way I can see your father behind each and every crooked Zac Hanson grin?
I think you had fun there. Old Orchard has always been a sort of second home to me, and I would have sworn I knew its every road and diversion just as well as I knew those of Tulsa. I would have sworn, that is, until last summer. With you there everything seemed different, more intensely alive, more exotic, more fun. The sun never could have been as bright, the water never such a shocking breath of life against my skin, as it was that week we spent together eating leisurely breakfasts at noon on Aunt Irene's deck and swimming in the green ocean until we were wrinkled, exhausted, and burned.
For some reason, when I think of that week my mind is always drawn to our last day of vacation freedom together. The sweetness of being near you, of being able to say absolutely whatever was on my mind and be assured that there was someone who would understand, was all the more powerful because we were beginning to realize that the semester we were about to spend apart, you at ORU and me at OKU, would be brutal.
I remember trying to teach you how to do a handstand as we had walked home one last time from the old fashioned wooden boardwalk where we had spent so much time, playing video games and eating greasy-sweet funnel cakes. "Just bend forward, put your arms out, and push with your legs," I had struggled to explain, following my own instructions to perform a textbook maneuver which left me hovering above the beach, balanced precariously. I kept pace with you momentarily, walking forward with my palms flat on the silky hot sand.
"Okay, Nadia, I get the point. Stop rubbing your expertise in already," you had laughed, watching my awkward progression at your side.
"This defiance of gravity is brought to you by five years of gymnastics and one of ballet," I had assured you while attempting to gracefully right myself. Of course, being Lydia and all, my landing wasn't quite what I had hoped. A small sand-slide and a few nasty words later, I was seated in an ignoble heap just inches away from the meekly lapping remains of dark waves which had risen high at their pinnacle.
"Five years of gymnastics and one of ballet, huh? I must be pretty gifted because I bet I could fall like that without having so much as touched a leotard in my life." You had chortled at me from your position standing upon the sea-smoothened dunes. People swarmed all around us in the haze of the humid afternoon, playing volleyball, swimming, building sandcastles, the air sweetened by their coconut tanning lotion and heated by the low hanging sun.
"I did that on purpose, thank you very much. It's time for a rest break." I asserted, reaching out to knock the back of your knee with one hand, throwing you out of balance and prompting you to take a seat next to me.
"You know, being a ballerina and all, I bet you're an amazing dancer." Your bare shoulder brushed mine, and I can still so vividly remember silently admiring the way your skin glowed orangey-tan from long days spent outside.
"You've known me for like three years. Have you ever once seen me dance?" I had asked, sure that you were baiting me.
"Actually, I don't think so." You sounded genuinely puzzled.
"Do you suppose there's a reason for that?" I had stretched out my legs to intercept the slight caress of a dying wave, watching the ocean and smiling to myself.
I do that a lot when you're around, smile, I mean. Maybe a person only has so many smiles in the course of a lifetime. Do you think? Maybe at birth a god or the God assigned a number, a figure encapsulating the total potential for happiness in a lifetime. It could be that only so many Christmas mornings, first kisses and new houses can fit into this allotment, and when they're gone, maybe it's over. Maybe the point of living is lost. If asked before I met you I would probably have said that fate hadn't afforded me many of those smiles, or maybe that I would have to live a long, long time before using them all up. Now I'm not so sure. Ever since I've known you I have smiled—to myself, to little kids on the bus, to deep green trees living peaceful lives sturdy and still. You, Zac, must have had an extraordinary number of smiles granted to you, a number dizzyingly high in comparison to the average human. Even if…even if you've run out, you have still smiled more than so many people could ever dare dream of.
"A reason not to dance? You're actually an amputee and you've just hidden it well?" You threw a tiny handful of sand at me, sand it seemed I would be picking out of my hair for weeks.
"Think Elaine Benis from those Seinfeld re-runs. There's a reason why I only did ballet for a year. The lady who taught me finally got sick of me tripping and ruining her exquisitely planned parents' night shows." I had explained.
"You couldn't have been that bad!"
"Interesting that you can still say that even after seeing my stunning performance of less than two minutes ago?" I didn't like where the conversation was going, not at all.
"It's not like anyone cares what you look like! Clubs are so dark and sweaty that no one would even notice you shuddering or hurting yourself."
"So you say now."
"Then it's settled. We're going dancing tonight."
"Um… where?" I reasoned, praying that practicality would win out and allow me to avoid attempting to shake my groove thing. "There aren't any under 21 places around here."
"But of course there are. Right on the end of the pier. Remember? We saw it our first night here when Aunt Irene had an ice-cream craving?" Of course you talked me into it, whittling my resistance further and further down as we continued our trek home.
It's not that I really dislike dancing, or even that I'm as whiney a pain in the butt as I seem to be coming off in these letters, but whenever you're around you constantly stretch my limits, getting me to try new things and break out of the quiet and shy archetypal character I've always acted in my life.
When we had arrived at the small all-ages club several hours later, the sun had long since disappeared from the sky to be replaced with the tiniest sliver of a silver moon. The dance floor was so beautiful, set behind a bar and hidden from the shore by the squat building, forcing the eye towards the quicksilver black of the sea that surrounded it on all sides. The air had been stifling and the smell of the sea amazingly strong, overcoming even the odors of flesh and cigarette smoke. A wooden railing, laced with brilliant white Christmas lights along its length, was the only separation from the water offered by the pier, and I remember thinking that I would be amazed if people didn't frequently find themselves floating after performing a particularly athletic dance move.
Music had embraced us as soon as we stepped onto the floor, as thick and palpable as the dark of the night. Fifty or sixty bodies moved in time with the buzz of a dance mix, looking almost like a continuation of the quivering sea.
"Now what?" I had asked, nervously eyeing the people who had unwillingly cleared out of a small space to allow us to step onto the worn, weather scoured-wooden dance floor.
"Now we dance." You had screamed over the music, breaking into something that could indeed probably have been loosely defined as a dance. You weren't really good at it, despite your former occupation as a drummer, but you totally gave yourself over to the beat, moving freely and without thought.
This had apparently been all that I needed to loosen up, because before long I was right there beside you, throbbing with music in the protective shadow of the night, abandoning rationality and just moving, regardless of what anyone may have thought of my gyrations.
We must have separated just enough to give people the impression that I was alone, because before the end of the song I found myself the partner of a stranger. The next morning I remember my mom inquiring if any boys had "asked to dance" with me. They hadn't, I told her, but this didn't mean I had remained with you for the entire night. Maybe when our parents were young, boys had really asked girls to dance, maybe that was my mother met my father. But now, though, it's different. Eye contact is permission and partners are traded in the blink of an eye—turn left and you're facing someone new, turn right and another man is hungry for attention.
It must have been the crowd's awareness of the impending end of summer that made that late August night so crazy. You had, being with all probability the best looking boy in the club, wound up dancing with two pretty blondes, alternating between them as the mood struck you. "Hey," you had whispered in my ear as chance drew us near, your voice barely distinguishable. "I bet I can pick up more girls than you can pick up guys." You were kidding, I'm sure, but I didn't even care. Right then I was so involved with the air on my skin and the thunder of the music for your words to hold much weight.
"Is that a challenge?" I had asked, turning to move with you for several seconds, abandoning my new found friend.
"Most definitely!" You were laughing at my change of attitude, pulling your self in close to grind against me for an instant.
"So we're tied… for now," I teased, wondering if I could really set my reservations aside and play your little game.
"I don't think so, Chiquita. There were two of them," you had emphatically reminded me, pointing to where the blondes continued to dance alone, apparently not even noticing you were missing.
"Fine, fine.." I gave in, even though as we watched the girls shared a long, slow kiss that proved exactly how interested they had been in you as a partner.
"Maybe I should actually get extra points for them." You had muttered absently, mostly to yourself as you settled on a new target across the floor and began to move in her direction.
We must have kept our little contest running for hours, because before I knew it the moon was receding towards the distant horizon, and I was sore and tired. I had had at least 12 partners since we agreed on the bet, and I remember feeling insanely proud of myself. I'm normal looking, I guess, maybe pretty to those who find my straight black hair and dark ocher skin exotically attractive, but under normal circumstances I wouldn't even have considered trying to dance with all those guys. But I owe that to you, of course, you who have a tendency to make circumstances the exact opposite of normal.
I remember being able to see you across the rapidly emptying deck, dancing so close with exactly an example of the type of model-perfect girl I've always thought you deserved, and I also remember finding myself more than a little jealous. She had lifted her long red hair in her upraised arms, exposing a perfectly flat stomach as her already miniscule shirt was pulled up by her stretch. I felt silly for the first time that night as I watched you, thinking that my khaki shorts and yellow T-shirt probably looked glaringly out of place around girls like that.
These feelings were why I think I didn't really mind when I found myself facing a new man, this one several years older than us and reeking unpleasantly of alcohol. Familiar chords began to pour from the speaker system, and I couldn't help but crack what must have been a huge grin as one of my all time favorite songs blasted through the dim night.
"You can dance, you can jive, having the time of your life," Abba had sang, erasing my thoughts and agreeably filling my mind. The man I was dancing with was named David, as he informed me with a toothy yell. He must have taken my smile of recognition as an invitation, because by the time the Queen of all trash pop songs got to the line, "anybody could be that guy, the night is young and the music high," his arms had formed a strong cage around my waist, pulling me towards him and sending his clammy breath shivering down my neck.
His hair was greasy, his clothes wrinkled, and I had tried so hard to back away without making a big deal of it, and for a while it was okay. I remember looking back in your direction, half hoping you'd come to my rescue and save me from this stranger's pawing hands, only to find you far closer to the red-haired girl than I was to the greaseball, not to mention showing no signs of displeasure at the situation.
I had given up on you as a savior, and instead I pulled myself even further away from my unwelcome partner, searching through the dark for another set of eyes to latch on to, for another man to dance with. It didn't do much good, though, because David, his short brown hair ruffled and his eyes bloodshot, followed each of my movements until I finally found myself with my back against one of the sparkling railings. The man, who I had by this point realized was blind drunk, slid ever closer. In the dark no one noticed, and no one cared as his hands came to rest on my hips, his dark alcohol smell hanging shroud-like around me.
"Um, I have to use the restroom," I had screamed over Abba, using the universally accepted desperate girls' ploy to ditch unwanted attention. He ignored me, though, instead sliding his hands under my shirt, leaving what felt like sticky trails on my sides as he mouthed "you're a tease and you turn him on, leave him burning," with the music. I don't know if you ever knew how freaked out I was at that moment, and I'm not even sure why I was to begin with. We were in public, it's not as if anything really serious was going to come of this guy's wandering hands, but I nevertheless felt panic surging, thick and hot, in my chest.
"Please!" I protested, shoving his him away, repulsed by his touch.
"You really are a tease, baby." He had pushed me hard against the railing, his lips wet on my neck.
Chest tightening with panic, I had pled "let go!" I've never been so disgusted in my entire life, or felt so out of control. There were people all around, but the wicked shimmer in his dark eyes gave me every indication that he didn't really care. He was hard against my leg, rubbing himself forcibly on the skin left bare by my shorts. Giving up caring about making a scene, I braced myself and prepared to shove him back with all my fury-intensified strength. The music was so loud, the lights so faint, my heart thudding so powerfully with fear and anger, that I felt the world spinning intoxicatedly around me.
You were there, Zac, a heartbeat after my frustration spiraled out of control, a second after the random man placed a hand high up on my left leg. "Leave her alone!" You had shoved him away from me, apparently spurred on to anger by the desperation that must have contorted my face. I was weak with relief at my newfound freedom, and wanted to do nothing more than throw my arms around you and bury my face in your broad chest, shutting out the rest of the world. That night at Old Orchard certainly wouldn't be the first or the last time I would have to fight this urge, but, until now, it had been the hardest to resist.
Six feet of Zac Hanson is definitely more than enough to give anyone pause, and the drunk eased his grip on me for the breath it took me to slink away. "She's with me," David had protested, slurring his words and listing dangerously on his feet now that de didn't have me to lean on.
"I don't think so." You cast me a shaky smile, taking my hand and stepping protectively close enough for me to smell your minty shampoo. The nearness of you slowed my pulse, and the steady pressure of your touch was dizzyingly welcome after the groping of the man who now reeled before us.
"Well I do. She's leaving with me tonight." People had begun to notice us, giving up on their dancing and forming a voyeuristic circle around our argument.
"Definitely not." I had replied. I still can't even believe that happened, really. I can't believe that a person like David, the creep, could inhabit the same world as someone like you.
"Come on, Lydie. Let's get out of here." You were preaching to the choir on that one. I was halfway to the sidewalk leading back towards shore when I realized that you, who must have been listening to the man's words even as I was too flooded with relief to notice, weren't with me.
"Slut. Freaking whore." The man was shouting as I turned towards the two of you, and he stepped as menacingly towards me as anyone that totally smashed could.
I remember you standing between us, the twinkling Christmas lights reflected by your smooth hair, a look of extreme revulsion turning your features hard, making you look like a statue, the lost Michelangelo, perfect, strong, and beautifully young.
"You're going to leave her alone, aren't you?" I was utterly unable to move as I watched you stepping towards him, your voice thick with rage.
"Zac, come on. Let's blow this place. He's to drunk to bother anyone, really." I overcame whatever was holding me back—disgust, anger, or maybe even fear—and was at your side before the man was able to reply. I could see his eyes fluttering between us, uncertain but vicious.
"Like she didn't want it," I feel dirty even thinking about the way he looked at me, like his gaze imparted a stain on my mind that I'll never be able to get rid of.
"Asshole." I don't think I've ever heard you swear before or since this incident, but you looked like the word you actually said was the most polite on your mind.
"You know how women are, buddy. They lead you on…" I had been furious. After totally violating me, this guy trying to make me look like some kind of slut by screaming his antediluvian stereotypes over the throb of the unremarkable rap song that had taken the place of Dancing Queen.
You were not amused. I remember being flooded with horror as you stepped towards the man, placing one hand flat on his chest and backing him towards the railing. I was scared by the entire scene, by David, by your behavior, by my ridiculous, stupid inability to defend myself. Standing there, arms and legs tingling with goose-bumps, I thought I was seeing the same fear reflected in your actions. I had never seen you hurt another creature, or even threaten one. But right then, you were going to do what it took to make sure that I was okay, and that David would think twice before trying the same thing on anyone else.
The crowd that had built around us, looking worn and frazzled after hours of uninterrupted music, snickered en-masse as they realized what you were about to do. One step in his direction, two, three, and the tipsy guy, looking terrified, had his back to the same four-foot high rail he had had me pinned against only minutes before.
He barely made a splash as you advanced upon him the final centimeter that sent him sprawling into the starlight silvered water surrounding the pier.
You had told me afterwards that you knew he wouldn't be hurt, that the water was deep enough to break his barely five-foot fall, but I waited, breathless, for sounds of the man's struggle in the water below. Finally it came, a loud, sputtering, "you bastard!"
One of the bouncers that we had passed to enter the club so long ago, a muscular black man with a smoothly shaved head, had crossed the floor by then, laying a hand on your shoulder. "You should clear out. I bet he deserved it, but we don't want any fighting here."
"We're on our way out," you had replied, your voice back to normal, your fists relaxing from their clenched positions at your side. I swear a lot of the women who had remained at the club till the late hour had to fight to keep from clapping as you left. It made me feel so safe to have the honor of your protection.
I remember how quiet we were on the long walk home, and how shy I felt as we stayed further towards the lights of the hotels that lined the beach than to the somehow vaguely threatening dark surf. About halfway to Irene's you took my hand and held it as we walked, not letting go even when I fumbled with the lock on the little vacation house where we were staying.
We never talk about that night, but sometimes I notice me looking at me with that intense caramel gaze of yours, and I can almost hear the words you finally said after we hastily got ready for bed, brushing our teeth side by side in Aunt Irene's only bathroom. You had slept in the living room on the fold out couch every night before that one, but after I put my pajamas on and lay beneath a single, crisp sheet I had heard knocking on the closed door of the tiny attic bedroom that had been mine on those summer visits for as long as I can remember.
"Lydie?" you asked hesitantly through the door after a second of still hush.
"Come in." I remember you looking like a little kid going to mommy and daddy's room after a nightmare, a pillow clutched in one arm and the sunflower blanket from the couch draped over one shoulder.
"Do you mind?" You stood, silhouetted in the brightness of the hallway, your voice almost painfully tender.
"Course not. This bed is more than big enough for both of us," I answered, unaccountably grateful for your presence. Somehow I could still feel that man's hands on me, could still smell the liquor on his breath, and it made me afraid. Nothing had worked to free me from the ill-will of a stranger, not words, not force. He was all around me as you entered the room, closing the door with a soft thud behind you and plunging us into semi-dark.
"I'll sleep on the floor. I'm sorry." I think your fury had left you just as scared as I was by my inability to act.
"No you won't. Get in here." I held the sheet aloft with one arm, probably to you resembling a B-movie specter. "The world will not end if I share a bed with my best friend." I coaxed, and I remember just wanting you close to me worse than I had ever wanted anything before.
"Are you sure?" You sounded like a baby, younger than Zoë even, as your shadow tentatively approached the bed.
"Just get in here already," I had pushed over until my back was against the blue flowered wall, until there was no escape. I wasn't afraid, though, as you hesitantly stretched out beside me with a squeak of the bedsprings. Even though it must have been 100 degrees in my slope-roofed room you spread the blanket over both of us, only resting when we were covered from toes to chin. I had at this point known you for nearly two years, and my shyness was gone in your presence, leaving me less than shocked as you unthinkingly threw an arm around me as we lay facing each other on the bed, knees bent to brush and faces inches apart.
That night was the first time we really touched like that. Our contact had been simple at first, unintentionally brushing hands as we walked side by side, or holding hands to avoid getting lost in crowds, but eventually I think we both grew to find solace in the feeling of holding each other. Of course, later, things would be different. But our last night at the beach would be almost a year away before anything really changed.
"I'm sorry for making you go out tonight." You had mournfully murmured, sad and apologetic all at once.
"Zac, don't be. I had fun. One jerk doesn't ruin an evening." I tried to assure you, and after a few seconds I realized it was true. I had had enjoyed that night, despite its ending.
We were silent for a long while before you continued: "you're my best friend. I know that you're beautiful, but sometimes I forget." Your hand found its way to the nape of my neck, your gentle, soothing touch beneath my hair working to nearly lull me to sleep. "I guess I forget how other guys see you." As I began to adjust to the dark, I could tell that your eyes were closed. Your breath was whispery soft against my face, and smelled like crest.
"Thank you for helping me. And ditching your gorgeous girl." I broke into your words, your stream of verbal confusion that showed no signs of abating.
"Anytime. She didn't know who Abba was. I could never have a relationship with someone who didn't own at least one of their albums." You pulled closer, and I so clearly remember how you felt against me, warm and rhymicaly moving with each breath, that it feels like it was seconds ago.
"You know." I pretended to muse over something for an instant, "I own Abba's greatest hits. On Vinyl."
"Duh. Why do you think I hang out with you?" The moment which had engulfed us since the pier had passed, and the shy nervousness that I had begun to feel around you dissolved as we laughed, finding ourselves once again what we have always been.
"In the future, though, you can feel free to refrain from throwing strangers into large bodies of water, no matter how offensive they may be." I found myself continuing to giggle at the memory of the splash David had made as he hit the no doubt frigid ocean.
"I didn't really throw him. I just intimidated him into falling. A simple process, really." After another long pause, "You really had fun?" There was a smile I couldn't see lingering in your words.
"Totally! I got twelve points, by the way. Thirteen counting the last guy and 14 counting extra for his depth of obsession with me." I bet our laughter at this point must have been more than loud enough to wake my Mom and Aunt Irene downstairs.
"Thirteen, here. Fourteen if given extra points for the lesbian challenge."
"So we're tied, huh?"
"Yup." By unspoken agreement we had fallen silent, sliding towards slumber.
You called me beautiful. I have never said it back to you. I wonder if when you wake up you'll laugh at my ramblings here? I almost want to ask you to write letters, too. It's so much easier for me to say how I feel on this paper than it is face to face, even to you, Zac, and it makes me wonder what goes on behind those caramel eyes of yours.
I think giving you these notes will be my second deed after you come back to us, right after I tell you that you're beautiful.
-Lydia
Zac-
I don't know how you can stand it here. Everything is so sterile, so cold, so ridiculously and insultingly clean. I don't think that people like you are meant to be tidy; your natural state is as a pulsar of contradictions, of half eaten peanut butter and jelly sandwiches growing old under the bed beside last week's running shorts. If you were awake I would never admit my fondness toward this, of course, knowing that it would only encourage your slovenly ways. Your mom would probably kill me in some imaginative way for reversing years worth of progress in the great clean-clothes battle, but I don't know, that's just how I see you. It seems to take a certain amount of chaos to keep you functioning, and here there is nothing of the sort. Instead there are 50 CCs of amber hued curatives, shiny-sharp needles, and efficiently graying women who wear their watch faces to the inside of their wrists.
I've been sitting here, growing ever more accustomed to the horror of your appearance, for several hours now. Your mom has finally gone home for the first time in the eight days you've been at Hillcrest, chased out by well meaning nurses who said again and again that there was nothing she could do here. She's gone home to sleep in her own bed instead of the narrow hospital version that's been kept open for her in your private room, gone home to take a shower and get fresh clothes. I don't want you to be alone, though, so I'm going to stay until she comes back. I can't imagine how scary it would be if you woke up without anyone, in this freezing bare room, to find your arms tracked with scars from recent injections, to find the large white bandage wrapped expertly around your aching head.
What happened must have hurt you badly, to have made you disappear from our world like this, to make you retreat into your wounded mind and shut out all outside stimulus. I keep looking over at you, imagining, dreaming, wishing, that I've seen your eyes flutter or your hands move, but each time this happens I find you just a little more ashen and still than the last time I dared hazard a gaze at you. Please wake up Zac, please. We don't know what to do without you, none of us.
I've thought about bringing my laptop and writing to you on the computer like we used to—email being fast and furiously issued from our respective school accounts, sometimes four or five letters a day, sometimes more. I can't do it, though, instead I treasure the feel of this wide ruled paper in my hands; I value the weathered blue guidelines stretching to its edges in parallel infinities; I adore the constant musical scratch of my pen breaking into the unfailing drone of the machines which are keeping you alive. Right now I need to touch the reality these hastily scrawled words bring me, rather than loose my thoughts in the chill of those phantom electrons.
I don't dare touch you. Isn't that funny? I've touched you a thousand times, occasionally in anger, sometimes in love, often in friendship. But now, when I can't help but think that you need me the most, I can't bring myself to reach out and caress your cheek or brush what's left of you hair from your eyes. So I'll just keep sitting here, maybe hoping that you know that we haven't abandoned you, that you'll never really be alone, and that there will always be people who love you in this world.
Your whole family has been here, you know, your parents, brothers and sisters just the beginning of the flood of visitors. Various aunts, uncles, and cousins have appeared, people I've gotten to know at your crazy Hanson Christmas parties, celebrations which encourage one to forget their age and delight in the wonder of exquisitely decorated trees, perfectly wrapped red, green, and golden presents, and luxuriate in the passionate words of your minister. He's been here, too, sitting for several hours with your mom and dad on Tuesday, returning for at least a short stay every day since. Ash has flown in from Colorado, still glowing after his recent wedding, bringing his pretty new wife and their little daughter. Minna came early today, and Angie has been here too, as well a bunch of people from your church, both young and old. Chris