As it turned out, I don’t know who they are, and that’s a little sad. No, it’s a lot sad.
So, I am going to make a videotape for you every year—but there’s something else I want to do for you, sweet boy.
I want to keep a diary, this diary, and I promise to be faithful about writing in it.
As I write this very first entry, you are two weeks old. But I want to start by telling you about some things that happened before you were born. I want to start before the beginning, so to speak.
This is for your eyes only, Nick.
This is what happened to Nicholas, Suzanne, and Matt.
Let me start the story on a warm and fragrant spring evening in Boston.
I was working at Massachusetts General Hospital at the time. I had been a physician for eight years. There were moments that I absolutely loved, cherished: seeing patients get well, and even being with some when it was clear they wouldn’t recover. Then there were the bureaucracy and the hopeless inadequacy of our country’s current health-care program. There were my own inadequacies as well.
I had just come off a twenty-four-hour rotation and I was tired beyond anything you can imagine. I was out walking my trusted and faithful golden retriever, Gustavus, a.k.a. Gus.
I suppose I should give you a little snapshot of myself back then. I had long blond hair, stood about five foot five, not exactly beautiful but nice enough to look at, a friendly smile most of the time, for most of the human race. Not too caught up in appearances.
It was a late Friday afternoon, and I remember that the weather was so nice, the air was sweet and as clear as crystal. It was the kind of day that I live for.
I can see it all as if it just happened.
Gus had sprinted off to harass and chase a poor, defenseless city duck that had wandered away from the safety of the pond. We were in the Boston Public Garden, by the swan boats. This was our usual walk, especially if Michael, my boyfriend, was working, as he was that night.
Gus had broken from his lead, and I ran after him. He is a gifted retriever, who lives to retrieve anything: balls, Frisbees, paper wrappers, soap bubbles, reflections on the windows of my apartment.
As I ran after Gus, I was suddenly struck by the worst pain I have ever felt in my life. Jesus, what is this?
It was so intense that I fell to my hands and knees.
Then it got worse. Razor-sharp knives were shooting up and down my arm, across my back, and into my jaw. I gasped. I couldn’t catch my breath. I couldn’t focus on anything in the Public Garden. Everything was a blur. I couldn’t actually be sure of what was happening to me, but something told me heart.
What was wrong with me?
I wanted to cry out for help, but even a few words were beyond me. The tree-laden Garden was spinning like a whirligig. Concerned people began crowding around, then hovering over me.
Gus had come skulking back. I heard him barking over my head. Then he was licking my cheek, but I barely felt his tongue.
I was flat on my back, holding my chest.
Heart? My God. I am only thirty-five years old.
“Get an ambulance,” someone cried. “She’s in trouble. I think she’s dying.”
I am not! I wanted to shout. I can’t be dying.
My breathing was becoming shallower and I was fading to black, to nothingness. Oh, God, I thought. Stay alive, breathe, keep conscious, Suzanne.
That’s when I remember reaching out for a stone that was near me in the dirt. Hang on to this stone, I thought, hang on tight. I believed it was the only thing that would keep me attached to the earth at that scary moment. I wanted to call out for Michael, but I knew it wouldn’t help.
Suddenly I realized what was happening to me. I must have passed out for several minutes. When I came to, I was being lifted into an ambulance. Tears streamed down my face. My body was soaked with sweat.
The EMT woman kept saying, “You’re gonna be fine. You’re all right, ma’am.” But I knew I wasn’t.
I looked at her with whatever strength I could muster and whispered, “Don’t let me die.”
All the while I was holding the small stone tightly in my hand. The last thing I recall is an oxygen mask being slipped over my face, a deathly weakness spreading through my body, and the stone finally dropping from my hand.
So, Nicky,
I was only thirty-five when I had the heart attack in Boston. The following day I had a coronary bypass at Mass. General. It put me out of action, out of circulation for almost two months, and it was during my recuperation that I had time to think, really think, maybe for the first time in my life.
I thoroughly, painfully examined my life in Boston, just how hectic it had become, with rounds, research, overtime, overwork, and double shifts. I thought about how I’d been feeling just before this awful thing happened. I also dealt with my own denial. My grandmother had died of heart failure. My family had a history of heart disease. And still I hadn’t been as careful as I should have been.
It was while I was recuperating that a doctor friend told me the story of the five balls. You should never forget this one, Nicky. This is terribly important.
It goes like this.
Imagine life is a game in which you are juggling five balls. The balls are called work, family, health, friends, and integrity. And you’re keeping all of them in the air. But one day you finally come to understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. The other four balls—family, health, friends, integrity—are made of glass. If you drop one of these, it will be irrevocably scuffed, nicked, perhaps even shattered. And once you truly understand the lesson of the five balls, you will have the beginnings of balance in your life.
Nicky, I finally understood.
Nick—
As you can probably tell, this is all pre-Daddy, pre-Matt.
Let me tell you about Dr. Michael Bernstein.
I met Michael in 1996 at the wedding reception for John Kennedy and Carolyn Bessette on Cumberland Island, Georgia. I must admit that both of us had led pretty charmed lives up until then. My parents had died when I was two, but I was fortunate enough to have been raised with great love and patience by my grandparents in Cornwall, New York. I went to Lawrenceville Academy in New Jersey, then Duke, and finally Harvard Medical School.
I felt incredibly lucky to be at each of the three schools, and I couldn’t have gotten a better education—except that nowhere did I learn the lesson of the five balls.
Michael also went to Harvard Medical School, but he had graduated four years before I got there. We didn’t meet until the Kennedy wedding. I was a guest of Carolyn’s; Michael was a guest of John’s. The wedding itself was magical, full of hope and promise. Maybe that was part of what drew Michael and me together.
What kept us together for the next four years was a little more complicated. Part of it was pure physical attraction, and at some point I want to talk to you about that—but not now. Michael was—is—tall and dashing, with a radiant smile. We had a lot of mutual interests. I loved his stories, always so droll, laconic, biting; I loved to listen to him play the piano and sing anything from Sinatra to Sting. Also, we were both workaholics—me at Mass. General, Michael at Children’s Hospital in Boston.
But none of these things are what love is really about, Nicholas. Trust me on that.
About four weeks after my heart attack, I woke up one morning at eight o’clock. The apartment where we lived was quiet, and I luxuriated in the peacefulness for a few moments. It seemed to have a healing quality. Finally I got up and went to the kitchen to make myself breakfast before I went off to rehab.
I jumped back when I heard a noise, the scratch of a chair leg against the floor. Nervously, I went to see who was out there.
It was Michael. I was surprised to see him still home, as he was almost always out of the house by seven. He was sitting at the small pine table in the breakfast nook.
“You almost gave me a heart attack,” I said, making what I thought was a
pretty decent joke.
Michael didn’t laugh. He patted the chair next to him at the table.
Then, with the calmness and self-reverence I was used to from him, he told me the three main reasons why he was leaving me: he said he couldn’t talk or relate to me the way he could with his male friends; he didn’t think that I could have a baby now, because of my heart attack; he had fallen for someone else already.
I ran out of the kitchen, and then out of the house. That morning the pain I felt was even worse than the heart attack. Nothing was right with my life; I had gotten it all wrong so far. Everything!!!
I did love being a doctor, but I was trying to do it in a large, somewhat bureaucratic, big-city hospital, which just wasn’t right for me.
I was working so hard—because there was nothing else of value in my life. I earned about $120,000 a year, but I was spending it on dinners in town, getaway weekends, clothes that I didn’t need or even like that much.
I had wanted children all my life, yet here I was without a significant other, without a child, without a plan, and no prospects to change any of it.
Here’s what I did, little boy.
I began to live the lesson of the five balls.
I left my job at Mass. General. I left Boston. I left my murderous schedule and commitments behind. I moved to the one place in the world where I had always been happy. I went there, truly, to mend a broken heart.
I was turning endlessly around and around like a hamster on a wheel in a tiny cage. My life was stretched to the limit, and something was bound to give. Unfortunately, it had been my heart.
This wasn’t a small change, Nicky; I had decided to change everything.
SAM’S LETTERS
TO
JENNIFER
A NOVEL
James Patterson
PROLOGUE
Just Like Always
SAM AND I are sitting on a mostly deserted beach on Lake Michigan a little north of the Drake Hotel in Chicago. The Drake is filled with treasured memories for both of us, and we had dinner at our favorite table there earlier. I need to be with Sam tonight, because it’s one year since, well, everything happened that shouldn’t have happened—it’s one year since Danny died.
“This is the spot where I met Danny, Sam. In May, six years ago,” I say.
Sam is a good listener who holds eye contact beautifully and is almost always interested in what I have to say, even when I’m being a bore, like now. We’ve been best friends since I was two, maybe even before that. Just about everybody calls us “the cutest couple,” which is a little too saccharine for both of our tastes. But it happens to be true.
“Sam, it was freezing that night Danny and I met, and I had a terrible cold. To make it worse, I had been locked out of our apartment by my old boyfriend Chris, that awful beast.”
“That despicable brute, that creep,” Sam contributes. “I never liked Chris. Can you tell?”
“So this nice guy, Danny, comes jogging by and he asks if I’m all right. I’m coughing and crying and a total mess. And I say, ‘Do I look like I’m all right? Mind your own blanking business. You’re not going to pick me up, if that’s what you’re thinking. Scram!’” I snorted a laugh Sam’s way.
“That’s where I got my nickname, ‘Scram.’ Anyway, Danny came back on the second half of his run. He said he could hear me coughing for two miles down the beach. He brought me coffee, Sam. He ran up the beach with a hot cup of coffee for a complete stranger.”
“Yes, but a beautiful stranger, you have to admit.”
I stopped talking, and Sam hugged me and said, “You’ve been through so much. It’s awful and it’s unfair. I wish I could wave a magic wand and make it all better for you.”
I pulled out a folded, wrinkled envelope from the pocket of my jeans. “Danny left this for me. In Hawaii. One year ago today.”
“Go ahead, Jennifer. Let it out. I want to hear everything tonight.”
I opened the letter and began to read. I was already starting to choke up.
Dear, wonderful, gorgeous Jennifer…
You’re the writer, not me, but I had to try to put down some of my feelings about your incredible news. I always thought that you couldn’t possibly make me any happier, but I was wrong.
Jen, I’m flying so high right now I can’t believe what I’m feeling. I am, without a doubt, the luckiest man in the world. I married the best woman, and now I’m going to have the best baby with her. How could I not be a pretty good dad, with all that going for me? I will be. I promise.
I love you even more today than I did yesterday, and you wouldn’t believe how much I loved you yesterday.
I love you, and our little “peanut.”… Danny.
Tears started to roll down my cheeks. “I’m such a big baby,” I said. “I’m pathetic.”
“No, you’re one of the strongest women I know. You’ve lost so much, and you’re still fighting.”
“Yeah, but I’m losing the battle. I’m losing. I’m losing real bad, Sam.”
Then Sam pulled me close and hugged me, and for the moment at least, it was all better—just like always.
PART ONE
The Letters
One
MY TWO-BEDROOM apartment was in a prewar building in Wrigleyville. Danny and I had loved everything about it—the city views, proximity to the real Chicago, the way we’d furnished the place. I was spending more and more time there, “holed up,” my good friends said. They also said I was “married to my job,” “a basket case,” “a hopeless workaholic,” “the new spinster,” and “romantically challenged”—to name just a few of their more memorable jibes. All of them, unfortunately, were true, and I could have added some others to the list.
I was trying not to think about what had happened, but it was hard. For several months after Danny’s death I kept having this terrible, obsessive thought: I can’t breathe without you, Danny.
Even after a year and a half I had to force myself not to think of the accident, and everything that happened after it.
I had finally begun to date—Teddy, a tall-drink-of-water editorial writer from the Trib; sportsaholic Mike, whom I met at a Cubs game; Corey, a blind date from the tenth circle of hell. I hated dating, but I needed to move on, right? I had a lot of good friends—couples, single women, a few guys who were just buddies. Really. Honest. I was doing okay, I told everybody, which was mostly crap, and my good friends knew it.
My best friends in the world, Kylie and Danny Borislow, were there for me again and again; I loved Kylie and Danny and I owe them so much.
So, anyhow, my deadline for that day’s incredible, awe-inspiring column in the Tribune was three hours away and I was in a jam. I’d already tossed three ideas into the recycle bin and was staring at a blank screen again. The really tricky thing about writing a “witty” newspaper column is that between Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, and Dorothy Parker, everything worth saying has already been said, and said better than I could ever say it.
So I pushed myself up from the sofa, put some Ella Fitzgerald on the Bose, and dialed up the air conditioner to high cool. I took a sip of coffee from my Uncommon Ground take-out cup. Found it sooo-ooo good. There is always hope in small things.
Then I paced around the living room in my writer’s outfit du jour: one of Danny’s Michigan U. jogging suits and my lucky red writing socks. I was dragging on a Newport Light, the latest in a string of bad habits I’d picked up lately. Mike Royko once said that you’re only as good as your last column, and that’s the truth that dogs me. That and my anorexic twenty-nine-year-old editor, Debbie, a former London tabloid reporter who wears Versace everything and Prada everything else with her Morgenthal Frederics glasses.
The point is, I really care about the column. I work hard to be original, make the words sing on occasion, and get the work in on time, without fail.
So I hadn’t answered the phone that had been ringing on and off for hours. I had cursed at it a couple of times, though.
&
nbsp; It’s hard to be fresh three times a week, fifty weeks a year, but, of course, that’s the job the Trib pays me to do. And in my case, the job is also pretty much my life.
Funny, then, how many readers write to say that my life is so glamorous, they’d like to swap places—wait, was that an idea?
The sudden crash behind my head was Sox, my year-old mostly tabby cat, knocking The Devil in the White City down from a bookshelf. That startled Euphoria, who’d been snoozing on the very typewriter F. Scott Fitzgerald supposedly wrote Tender Is the Night on. Or something like that. Maybe Zelda wrote Save Me the Last Waltz on it?
And when the phone rang again, I grabbed it.
When I realized who was on the line, a shock ran through me. I called up an old picture of John Farley, a family friend from Lake Geneva in Wisconsin. The minister’s voice cracked when he said hello and I had the strange sensation that he was crying.
“It’s Sam,” he said.
Two
I GRIPPED the phone receiver tightly with both hands. “What’s wrong?”
I heard him suck in a breath before he spoke again. “Ah, there’s no good way to tell you this, Jennifer. Your grandmother has taken a fall,” he told me. “It’s not good.”
“Oh, no!” I said, and sent my thoughts out to Lake Geneva, a resort community about an hour and a half north of Chicago. Lake Geneva was where I’d spent most of the summers of my childhood, some of the best times of my life.
“She was all alone in the house, so no one knows for sure what happened,” he continued. “Just that she’s in a coma. Can you come up to the lake, Jennifer?”
The news was a jolt. I’d just spoken to Sam two days before. We’d joked about my love life and she’d threatened to send me a box of anatomically approximate gingerbread men. Sam is a comedian, always has been.