The Osborne Lights

Brittany Ackerman

Things had been bad for a while now, but still, we were going to see the lights. It was the last time that Disney World would host The Osborne Family Spectacle of Dancing Lights after a twenty-one-year run. My mom and I had made it a tradition to drive three hours north, and since my family had so few traditions, I felt I owed it to her to make it happen.

We always spent our first night at Hollywood Studios. We’d make our way to the Back Lot area of the park at sundown, just in time for the lights to be ceremonially switched on, the music blaring, artificial snow falling from the fake Hollywood skies. The snow was actually soap, but kids stuck out their tongues anyway to catch the flakes. Orlando was a solid ten degrees cooler than back home in Delray Beach, and it was funny to see everyone bust out their winter coats and hats to feel festive. 

When I say that things were bad, I mean that no one had heard from my brother in a while. Sometimes that was a good sign. Sometimes he was stable and keeping his head above water. But most of the time it meant he was on a bender. He stopped answering texts or calls, stopped reaching out. The last time we’d all been to a theme park together, I worried every time he went to the bathroom, anxious that he was going to go use. 

Every time his forehead glistened with sweat, I thought he might be high, but it was also summer in Florida. I’d never know if his smiles as we road rollercoasters or his sleepiness after we ate our theme park lunch of chicken fingers was genuine. And I’d never ask because I was afraid to know the truth. Every time I felt him pull away, I’d sift through the archive of his past and feared it was repeating itself. My mind would spin new scenarios too, worse than anything we’d lived though. I imagined police coming to our door, the phone call from the hospital. I tried to imagine never speaking to him again, not out of emotional separation, but out of impossibility, the shock of his jet-black hair never to be seen again.

I had just finished graduate school and felt myself gravitating toward adulthood. I was working at a high school teaching English, a job I hated but was proud of because of its stability. I had nights and weekends off that I spent mostly searching for other jobs. I was living with someone, but I had the feeling he secretly hoped he would come home one day to find me all packed up and gone. But I didn’t want to leave behind this thing I thought was love. I didn’t want to fail at the relationship, for another man to push me away, push me into a future I wasn’t sure I was ready to live in.

I hadn’t spoken to my brother since graduation, since he had realized my thesis project was about him, about us. Truly, it was an attempt at healing. Part of me wanted to forget, to be free from the responsibility I’d placed on myself long ago to care for him, to care so intensely about his wellbeing. The way I’d carry my brother to the car after he passed out at the movies, the way I’d tuck him into bed and sit by his side to make sure he was still breathing.

The other part felt I’d never love myself unless I loved him first. Years later, in session, a therapist would ask me to define the proper roles for brothers and sisters. I wouldn’t be able to answer.

In a Hollywood Studios gift shop, my mom bought me a coffee mug with Chip and Dale roasting marshmallows on it. I remember asking my mom to take a picture of me while I sipped peppermint hot cocoa, and the photo coming out blurry. I didn’t have the heart to ask for another. I remember how we linked arms and marveled at the light displays. At Disney World, we could walk miles and miles and never feel it in our bodies.

My mom always commented on how awesome the light show was, the true spectacle of it. The show boasted five million lights that included all things holiday: Christmas trees and festive wreaths, ringing bells, a giant rotating globe that displayed “Peace on Earth” with two doves circling its orbit. The lights actually danced. Whenever a song was played, the lights flashed on and off in a choreographed number. Favorite Disney characters like Mickey and Minnie and Goofy and Pluto appeared via colored clusters of lights to wave as you walked by. The show closed for good on my birthday in 2016, but there are still pictures online, videos and blogs recounting the lights in all their glory.

My mom wondered how long it took the park to set up everything, how they’d sync the lights to the Christmas music that played. It was incredible, but the park was making room for new rides and attractions. Soon, they would build a section for Toy Story, a whole land for Star Wars. The lights would be missed, but park-goers understood the need for expansion, for change. That last year, I had just cut my hair and was still getting used to the shorter length. I had a new fuzzy jacket, a teddy bomber coat that I loved but have since gotten rid of for some reason. In a month’s time, I would go through the worst breakup of my life. And in a year’s time I would be in Los Angeles, the snow and lights and wonder all a distant memory.

When I say things had been bad for a while, I mean maybe my whole life. I often think about how even when things were good, there was pain there, too. I think of my brother at his high school graduation, being awarded the medal for class valedictorian. I think of dinner later that evening, my brother passed out at the table—the whispers, the rushing to pay the check at the restaurant, the way he slept in the backseat of our family car on my mother’s lap, a milk-drunk baby. 

But he deserved that award, his, the most brilliant mind that school would ever see. He used to try to help me with my homework. I remember in tenth grade, when I learned about electron capture, my brother explained how an electron is drawn into the nucleus in order to become more stable. He told me that protons have more mass than electrons, that a positive charge will always outweigh a negative. I wondered what happened to the negative energy that was absorbed. He said that new atoms form neutrons and become a whole different element. I recall feeling hope then, the hope that maybe someday all our pain would transform into something else, something new.

My brother told me I could write about him, that I could say whatever I wanted. But when he sat in the audience at my graduation and I read a story about us going ice skating as kids, him falling hard on the ice and bleeding all over the car on the way home, I had trouble looking at his face in the crowd. I wondered if it was hard for him to listen to this story again, reliving it while the rest of the audience heard it for the very first time.

When I saw siblings laughing in Disney, their faces lit up in red and green and blue, I felt a pit in my stomach. Even when I saw a girl crying, a brother somewhere out there to blame, I felt the void. Why was this family intact and happy, and mine separated, so dysfunctional? Why were they able to keep it together and we were made to suffer?  Was it us versus them? Them versus me? 

I don’t remember the rest of that last Orlando trip except we tried a new restaurant for dinner just before heading back to the Florida Turnpike. It was a family-style BBQ place where the portions were bigger than we’d been prepared for. As my mom laughed at the heaping bowl of creamed corn before us, the entire rack of ribs we’d never be able to finish, I felt so lucky to have a mother that wanted me to enjoy this life. It wasn’t her fault, any of this. And maybe that’s why I tried all these years to carry some of that weight for her, to hold it inside while we walked through the light show and ate Mickey shaped desserts. The lights were too bright and beautiful, the music too loud, to tell her I could no longer keep it together. Even though my brother was never present, his absence felt like a being walking next to us. The idea of him held space that we didn’t know how to fill.

Brittany Ackerman is a writer from Riverdale, New York. She earned her BA in English from Indiana University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Florida Atlantic University. She has led workshops for UCLA’s Extension program, The Porch, Catapult, HerStry, Write or Die Tribe, and forthcoming for Lighthouse Writers. She currently teaches writing at Vanderbilt University in the English Department. She is a 2x Pushcart Prize Nominee and her work has been featured in Electric Literature, Jewish Book Council, Lit Hub, The Los Angeles Review, No Tokens, Hobart, and more. Her first collection of essays entitled The Perpetual Motion Machine was published with Red Hen Press in 2018, and her debut novel The Brittanys is out now with Vintage. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.