I saw someone suggest what would happen if one of the other Clarke Kids survived.
....and while that is a heartbreaking thought, it made me think.
What if Anne or James had survived instead?
Sure, they wouldn't have survived to the present of the game like Anthony. But imagine the angst.
They were just arguing that day about their family before the fire.
They'd been having relationship and family trouble for awhile due to James' worry over his job, the strain of having four children close in age, and their worry over Megan.
And that night in particular... Well, think about it.
Picture it.
Anne somehow gets out of the bathroom and out of the house.
She escapes in a towel with burns on her feet, shoulders, and parts of her back.
She sees her oldest daughter hanged by her scarf or get burned alive.
She sees her oldest son impaled.
And she sees Anthony run in shouting for Megan.
Her husband is screaming inside.
Megan is quiet.
She's stopped from going back inside. She's cold and in a stranger's coat looking at the ruins of her home, staring at where she'd raised four children (only....not all of them were adults, were they? And were the oldest of them even REALLY adults? They were still so young-)
She has to bury her children and her husband, wondering what went wrong.
She's 40.
She married James at 17 and loved him for longer, and now he's gone.
She can't have any other children.
Can she even adopt more? Would she want more after losing four in one night?
She thinks about everything she took for granted.
Anne thinks about how she ignored Megan after her fight with James.
She thinks about how much she and Tanya had been fighting because she disapproved of Vince.
She thinks about how much she and Dennis fought over his band, and over the stupid records.
She thinks about all the fights with Megan and how Anthony was always trying to play peace keeper.
She thinks about the fighting with James and she aches.
She can't start over. She doesn't even know where to start.
And then all the stuff starts coming out about Carver.
And her grief turns to anger.
Anne's 40 years old.
She's rebuilding her life and everything reminds her of her family.
Her heart pangs whenever she sees the brand of alcohol and cigarettes James liked. She can't stand to hear the theme song to his favorite show. She keeps the photo from the factory and one of his history books on her nightstand.
Every time a certain song comes on, she thinks of little Dennis and the afternoons spent dancing in the kitchen back when he wasn't too cool to be seen hanging out with his mom.
She sees his face on posters in town, for a live performance he never gets to participate in. He wanted to be a rock star and in a twisted way, he's remembered as such by what few fans he had.
His band mates grow up. He doesn't. He's forever twenty.
She'll never hear him sing again. Never him whine "mom!" And complain about how she doesn't respect his collection of records again.
His rugby equipment, his guitar, and one of his broken records she'd fished from the fire of the house collect dust in a closet in her new home.
Anne can't bring herself to drive past the diner which Tanya worked at.
She thinks about how little she actually knew about her oldest in her final years.
She thought about every wasted moment, every argument.
She never stops regretting how much her daughter hated the family in that last year.
She wonders where their relationship went wrong. When Tanya stopped telling her things.
She regrets reading her diary.
Anne thinks about how Tanya never got out of little hope. How she never got to go to the cinema festival she wanted to go to. How she never got married. Never got away from her dead end job.
She watches as her daughter's friends get older, get out of town, and get married. All while hers is stuck at 22 forever.
She misses the days shortly after she adopted Tanya where the two weren't at each other's throats. She misses when Tanya would hold her hand as they weaved through crowds back when she was small.
Whenever a hot rocket song comes on the radio, Anne can't make herself turn it off.
Tanya's tennis and softball trophies are right next to Dennis'. Along with her pink aviator glasses and his green ones.
Anne avoids the area of the park where Anthony used to skate and the museum.
She regrets how mature and responsible he felt he had to be in his last year, and wished that he had just been able to enjoy his youth.
She remembers how she was worried about him when she first took him in, how much of a somber child he was and she wonders when she stopped worrying as much.
She misses having someone to tag along with her on errands.
She misses having someone to scold for reading under the table.
She wishes she had been able to run in after him. She wishes it were her instead. She wishes that he'd had more friends attending his funeral.
Her son is forever eighteen and the little boy who's knees she used to patch up, and who she used to fuss over is gone.
His skateboard and a burned book of witchcraft rests in her closet beside Dennis and Tanya's things.
Horses make Anne's eyes water. They make her think of the wallpaper in Megan's room that they'd let her pick out when she was three.
Megan loved horses and she loved dolls. Not as much as she loved playing with matches but she loved them.
She loved art too.
Megan's art teacher approached her with some of her drawings after the funeral.
They're lamented and framed. They're the only things she has left of Megan other than a few pictures and a burnt doll.
Her 11 year old daughter is gone.
And the town is whispering about her.
(She tries to ignore the whispers of the people in town who think Megan started the fire on purpose).
(She could never hate her daughter).
(The one time someone tried to blame Anthony because of those damn matches with his fingerprints on them, she yells. She yells and curses and slaps the man until she's dragged out of the church. The man, her old neighbor, never approaches her again and he doesn't show up to church).
(It's one thing to blame an 11 year old, to accuse an 11 year old of doing it on purpose. 11 year olds are impulsive, they don't always understand the consequences and people rarely believe it. But to blame an 18 year old? To smear her 18 year old's son name when he wouldn't be given the same benefit of a doubt a child was? Anne wouldn't stand for it!).
Anne's husband and children are dead.
And she's stuck thinking about all the things she could have done differently if she had only had any patience left.
James wakes up to a burning living room and his youngest son screaming from outside.
He hears coughing upstairs but isn't sure if he's imagining it.
He books it out of the room, getting clipped on the shoulder by a falling beam and heads for the front door out of instinct.
Two of his children are on the roof of his burning house.
One is outside.
And he doesn't know where his wife and youngest are.
(Except he does because it's the middle of the night and there's nowhere else his Anne would be, let alone his youngest daughter. He's just not ready to face the fact that he left his wife and daughter to die, though there's likely not anything he could have done).
He escapes the house with minor burns and a broken shoulder.
Two of his children are screaming for him from the roof.
One is beside him panicked.
And then they hear Megan from inside.
James isn't fast enough to stop Anthony from running inside.
Tanya slips.
Dennis falls.
A man stops James from running back in the house.
And the house explodes with his wife and children in it.
James has to bury the wife and children he cursed that very night.
He has to think about the last thing he said to his wife.
"Maybe if we had kids of our own, none of this would be happening!"
He wonders if his kids heard it.
He knows they had to. He hates himself for it.
He thinks about his last words to his kids. How they sounded.
"Keep it down, will ya? Trying to sleep here!"
"You wanna try raising a family like this... The Devil himself would struggle with you guys..."
"You need to keep an eye on your little sister... Mom is real worried about her."
He wonders when the last time he told them he loved them was.
James was too drunk and too injured to help his family.
And he'd spent their last night on Earth mucking everything up.
He wonders if Anthony would have still run in the house after Megan if he hadn't asked him to keep an eye on her.
He wonders what would have happened if he'd stopped worrying about work so much or if he'd been more honest with Anne about it.
James spends his days after the funeral at work, staring at the framed photo on his desk and avoiding Vince.
He digs through the rubbish of his home.
And he sees the stars Tanya and he painted on that old tire swing he almost took down that summer.
He remembers teaching the kids how to ride their bikes.
He remembers how happy he and Anne used to be.
He remembers teaching Dennis how to play rugby.
He remembers taking Tanya and Dennis to practice and breaking up fights between the two.
He remembers bringing Megan home for the first time.
James remembers the long sleepless nights where Anne worried over how quiet little Anthony was.
His family is gone.
James is 42 and his entire family is dead.
He loses his job a few months later.
And all he can think about is how much he wishes his family was still here instead.
His job wasn't permanent. His job hadn't cared about him.
His family had.
And now they were gone.
