The Best Gift I Could Have Asked For
"Jess! You're home!" my father yelled, his huge voice filling every square inch of the house from the front entryway as he threw open the door. I loved watching Dad bring each of his children back into the fold at the holidays. He was such a little kid about it, racing out the door without coat, gloves or scarf, only a thick sweater, and this time grabbing his "big-little girl" and gathering her up in his arms.
Finally he released her and grabbed the duffel bag from where it had been abandoned in the driveway less than fifteen seconds after Jessica stepped out of the taxi she'd taken from the airport. She trudged up the yard, and I met her at the door.
"Taylor! I'm so glad to be home again. Finals all but wrung me out. I'm the last one, aren't I?"
"Hey Jess, good to have you home," I said, as I gave her a one-armed hug, tugging her long blonde ponytail, and held my mug at arm's length to avoid spilling hot cocoa on either one of us. "Yup, we're all here now. Want some cocoa? Avery just made it a little bit ago."
"Sounds good. Lead the way," she said, shedding her coat and hanging it in the hall closet. We walked to the kitchen shoulder-to-shoulder; she removed her scarf and hung it over the back of a chair. Zoë was pouring a mug of cocoa for herself, and poured another when she turned around to see Jess.
"Wow, you look great," she squealed, attempting an awkward hug with a steaming mug in each hand. Then she stepped back as Jess responded in kind, and offered up the beverage. "I'm helping Mom wrap gifts right now, but we'll catch up later, okay? I want to hear all about that gorgeous boyfriend of yours," Zoë winked on her way back upstairs.
I turned my attention back into the kitchen to find Jess holding the mug with both hands, letting the steam warm her still-pink-from-the-cold nose and cheeks. "Uh, Jess…"
"Mmm?"
"Don't you want to take those gloves off?" She was still wearing them, although she'd been in the house for several minutes now.
"Oh, I forgot." How does somebody forget something like that? Thanks to the roaring fire Dad and Ike had going in the living room fireplace, it had to have been eighty degrees in the house. She set her cocoa on the counter, and removed first the glove on her right hand. Then as she tugged at the fingers of her left, she seemed to hesitate for a moment before yanking it off and tossing it on the table with its mate. As she reached back for the mug, something caught in the light of the electric candle Mom had put in the windowsill above the sink and glistened.
I just stared at her. Could that be what I thought it might be? How could it possibly be? Twenty-two years old or not, Jess was still my little sister. I'd babysat for her when we were twelve and six. And here perched neatly on her left hand was a sign that she was as much an adult as I. "Wh--what's that?" I stammered, having finally found my voice again.
"Let's go talk in the den," she silenced me. "I don't want to make a scene with everybody just yet."
"Okay," I murmured questioningly, following her to the vacant and dimly-lit den. I closed the door behind us.
Jessica was quiet. Very unlike her; she was the only one of the three Hanson girls to rival their brothers in volume and/or energy. But it wasn't so much her silence that bothered me as the fact that she hadn't told me about this. Since she spoke her first word, she has always come to me to talk. She's told me about everything (well, almost everything... I'm still a guy, and there's some things Jess is too modest to talk to a guy about, even a guy who's her brother), even stuff she hasn't told Mom. But she didn't tell me about this. All through her life, Jessica has been the one sibling that I've most closely bonded with (Ike coming in a close second, but still second), so I was really disturbed that she could let so momentous an occasion in her life go by without even telling me. Me, Tay, the brother who'd helped her decide that it would be okay to go to an East Coast school in the first place when she decided to go away to college.
It must have been written all over my face, because she looked me in the eye as she perched on the back of a couch and said, "It's only a pre-engagement, Tay. Not the big deal yet."
"Yet." I refused to leave my posture of leaning against the bookcase across the room, hands hanging from the pockets of my jeans by my thumbs.
"Please, Tay, don't go against me now..." The assuredness ran away from her face. I softened to her plight. Jessica was scared.
"What is it that you have to be scared of, Jessie?" I used her childhood nickname by instinct rather than intention. It was something I hadn't done in years, and the look in her eyes that prompted it in me belied her terror as she crossed and uncrossed her arms several times. "Did he ...dishonor you? Hurt you? It is still Matt, isn't it? Or is there someone new that we don't know about?"
She sighed. "It's Matt yet, and no he didn't do anything wrong, I wanted this, don't freak out on me."
"Then what's wrong?" It wasn't like Jessica to second-guess herself. "Don't you love him?"
"Yeah, I mean, I guess so, I mean ...Oh, I don't know." Throwing her hands up in the air, she watched my eyes follow the glint of the ring again. I couldn't help but stare at it. There was a small tree beside the window (Since things settled down for the band several years ago, and we've been able to spend time at home preparing for the holidays, my parents have gone crazy on the Christmas tree issue. There were three live trees in the house this year, one each in the living room, den, and sunporch.), and she walked over to it. Decorated only with tiny mulicolor lights, it looked uncomplicated. I know that's the last word you would expect in reference to a Christmas tree, but when you've lived the life I've had, you look forward to using such words like "uncomplicated" as frequently as you can.
"Jess," I said gently. "This is a big deal. How can you not know?"
She delicately fingered the slender pine needles, absently watching the rainbows cast across the back of her hand as she did so. "But, I mean, how can I know if this is right? I haven't exactly had a normal upbringing, or normal brothers."
Aha. We were getting somewhere. "...So because you haven't had a quote-unquote normal life up to recently, you don't know if you're getting into one now?"
"Something like that. I mean, Mackenzie and the younger girls and I never minded going along with Hanson, but I never thought that we would have repercussive affects to suffer for it. I thought I could just step out into the world and be a next-to-nobody, like everyone else."
"But you can't."
"Matt, and everyone else for that matter, knows whose sister I am. The fact that I'm studying music education doesn't help either. I've been asked more times than I can count if I would ever go for a record contract, with or without you guys."
I was mildly floored. Never had I considered that this would still carry on. When Hanson was still prominently known, yes, but we hadn't been heard of for a while now. "Are you serious? You haven't been given any real trouble, have you, harassment or anything?"
"No," she smiled. "But I have to admit that when I opened Matt's Christmas gift to find this, one of my initial thoughts was 'could he be trying to get to you through me?' How silly is that?"
"No Jess, it isn't silly. And I'm sorry that you felt that way. I'm sorry that the band gave you a weird childhood so that you ended up with these uncertainties."
"Please don't apologize. It's not your fault. Besides, it was you more than anybody --outside of Mom and Dad, of course-- who fought to keep me and the others out of the limelight as much as possible. This is as normal as I could have hoped to turn out."
"But it wasn't normal enough." All of a sudden, I began to resent. Not the band and the music itself, but everything that had been subsequently invited into our family because of it. The paparazzi and rude-journalist photos of the other kids being published online, the fanfictions that characterized them and us in weird situations and even killed one or another of us from time to time, the crazed fans driving by our house to take pictures and steal clumps of the lawn (to this day, I can find no logical reason as to how a handful of grass can hold sentimental value). The downside of stardom hit hard. And it had hit my sister in a way that I really didn't like.
Growing up, I had always tried my best to fix things for her when they needed to be. But this was so much deeper than I had encountered for myself, how could I help her with this? I swallowed – with some difficulty. My throat was growing thick with emotions of sympathy for Jessica, and disappointment for my own failures to help her and the career that had brought all this down on her and ruined what should have been one of her happiest moments. "Jess," I started, as she stared vacantly into the fragrant greenery, "I'm sorry."
"What for?"
"That I can't help you through this. I feel like I've failed you in so many ways as a brother."
"You haven't failed me in any way."
"But this situation is hard for you, I can tell. And I want to help. ...Look, from the way you've talked about Matt, I think it's safe to say that you love him. And from the way he treats you and speaks to you and looks at you, I know that he loves you too. So why are you upset by this engagement?"
"Pre-engagement.We didn't want to make the official commitment yet. And, ...I don't know... It's – it's because – because of who..."
"Who your brothers are? Jess, please don't be afraid to tell me that's what it is."
She lowered her eyes, and slowly brought them back up, but didn't meet my gaze. A tear ran down her cheeck. "It – it is because of that. I'm sorry..."
"You have nothing to be sorry for," I told her as I pulled her into a hug. "We knew when we started the band what it would mean. I'm sorry we didn't think about how deeply it would affect you and the others. But it's okay, really it is."
From the living room, we heard soft music. Isaac and Mackenzie had pulled out their guitars and were playing a soothing rendition of 'O Holy Night'. I stood back and took a good look at my little sister.
"This is right," I told her. "You want to marry him, so go for it. Marry him. Don't worry about anything else. Just be happy. When you see him again, make the engagement official. Then marry him. And be happy."
"Thank you, Tay. You've just given me the best gift I could have asked for." She didn't need to say anything more than that.
"Ready to make the announcement to the family, then?"
Jess nodded. "There's just one more thing," she called after me as I opened the door. I looked back over to where she stood, glowing enough to outshine the tree behind her.
"Matt doesn't have any brothers, so ...would you be his best man?"
I didn't try to hold back the tears that sprang to my eyes. "Now that is the best gift I could have asked for."
© 1999-2001 Quixotic Ink