Three Weeks With My Brother

  I laughed. "How could I forget?" The thing had exploded at our feet, scaring the daylights out of us.

  "Yeah, those are the memories that stay with me," he said. "Those guys were great, and they're the only ones I still really talk to anymore. It's hard to believe that it all happened twenty years ago."

  After lunch and a shower, we headed back to Ayers Rock with the rest of our group. By then, the glare was relentless. It was over a hundred degrees, and with the sun high overhead, Ayers Rock was sandstone, its color unremarkable. Flies swarmed everywhere; you had to move continuously or they'd land on your lips or eyelashes, your arms and your back. There were trillions of flies. The tourists looked as if they'd taken wiggle pills.

  Over the next few hours, the bus stopped in various places around Ayers Rock, which is regarded as sacred among the aborigines. We'd head out, walk around, listen to a story, then head back to the bus. We were led to some painted caves and a watering hole, where we were exposed to endless lectures about aboriginal history.

  At the third or fourth stop, I turned to say something to Micah. His eyes were glassy and unfocused. At that point, we'd been listening to a story concerning one of the upper crevices on the rock. It had to do with a spirit warrior who got lost in the desert, only to fight a battle with another spirit, and somehow the images of the battle had been imprinted on the rock. This, in turn, led people to know where the watering hole was; they would search the rock for said image, thereby knowing they were close. Or something like that. The blistering heat was making me dizzy and it was difficult to keep all the characters in the legend straight.

  "Have you ever noticed that the less interesting something is, the longer people want to talk about it?" Micah sighed, slapping at the buzzing flies.

  "C'mon, it's interesting. It's a culture we know nothing about."

  "The reason we don't know anything about it is because it's boring."

  "It's not boring."

  "It's a big rock in the middle of the desert."

  "What about the colors?"

  "We saw the colors this morning. In the daytime, it's a big rock. And I wasn't being eaten by flies or cooked in the sun while being subjected to endless stories about spirit battles."

  "Doesn't it amaze you that people could actually survive out here for thousands of years?"

  "It amazes me that they never left. What? You mean no aborigines ever wandered to the coast, saw the beaches and felt the cool breezes while catching fish for dinner, and said to themselves, 'Hey, maybe I should think about moving?'"

  "I think the heat's getting to you."

  "Oh yeah, it's getting to me. I'm dying out here. I feel like buzzards are overhead, just waiting for me to drop my guard."

  Late in the day, we headed back to Ayers Rock for the third time. This would be our chance to see how it changed colors at sunset.

  "I'm beginning to get the impression that there's not much to do around here besides stare at Ayers Rock," Micah confided.

  "It won't be so bad," I said. "I hear there's supposed to be original aborigine music tonight."

  "Oh, gee," he said, throwing up his hands. "I can't wait."

  As it turned out, that evening was one of the trip's most memorable. It began with a cocktail party--and yes, everyone stared at Ayers Rock when the sun started going down--but afterward we were led to a small clearing where tables had been set up, complete with white tablecloths, candle centerpieces, and beautiful floral arrangements; the setting was gorgeous and the food delicious. Among other things, on the buffet they had both kangaroo and crocodile meat, simmered in spices and cooked to perfection. The temperature cooled, and even the flies seemed to have vanished.

  We ate in the desert under a slowly blackening sky; in time, the stars appeared in full. Later, the candles were blown out and an astronomer began to speak. Using a floodlight to point to various areas of the sky, she described the world above.

  Not only was it dark and clear enough to make out individual stars in the vast sweep of the Milky Way, but because we were in the Southern Hemisphere, the sky was completely foreign to us. We were all spellbound. Instead of the Big Dipper and Polaris (the North Star), we saw the Southern Cross, and learned how sailors used it to navigate. Jupiter was closer to Earth than it had been in decades, and glowed bright in the sky. Saturn, too, was visible, making it the first time I'd ever seen both planets in the same sky. Even better, we found out that TCS had made arrangements for telescopes. That evening, I saw the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn, and while I'd seen them in books I'd never seen them through a lens. It was a first for Micah, too.

  On the way back to the hotel, he leaned his head back on the seat, the picture of contentment. "The morning was great, and the evening was the best on the trip so far."

  "It's just the middle you could have done without, right?"

  He smiled without opening his eyes. "You're reading my mind, little brother."

  I leaned my head back and closed my eyes as well. No one on the bus was speaking; most seemed as relaxed as we were. In the silence, my mind wandered. The years had passed so quickly that I couldn't help but feel as if my life seemed surreal, almost like I were viewing it through someone else's eyes. Perhaps it was because of the evening I'd just spent, or maybe it was due to exhaustion, but in the midst of this foreign land I suddenly didn't feel like a thirty-seven-year-old author, or husband, or even a father of five. Instead, it almost seemed as if I were just starting out in the world and facing an uncertain future, similar to how I felt when I first stepped off the plane in South Bend, Indiana, in August 1984.

  My first year at Notre Dame proved to be a challenge. For the first time in my life, I wasn't the smartest kid in class, and my studies were much harder than I imagined they would be. I studied an average of four hours a day and didn't do nearly as well as I'd hoped; over the next four years, the number of hours I studied would only increase.

  I found it hard to be away from home. I missed my family and friends, I missed Lisa, and I didn't get along with my new roommate. Worst of all, the second week after I arrived, I strained my Achilles tendon, tried to train through the pain, and got a raging case of tendinitis. My Achilles swelled to the size of a golf ball. According to the doctors, the only thing that would allow it to heal was to stop running entirely.

  By that point, running was the most important thing in my life, and the idea of not running was counter to everything I believed in. My dream was to follow in Billy Mills's footsteps; to represent the United States on the Olympic team and win the gold medal. I know now that even had I never been injured, the dream was an unattainable one. I might as well have wished to fly.

  As I said, I was a good runner, but not a great one. I didn't have the natural foot speed or stamina to be world-class; indeed, I'd gotten as far as I had by training harder than most high schoolers. These realizations were only made in retrospect; at the time, the injury was devastating to me. For the first time in my life, I felt as if I were failing.

  The injury raged on throughout the fall; in the winter it healed slightly before I reinjured it again. Around that time, Lisa and I broke up, high school sweethearts doomed by the distance between us. School continued to be a challenge, in part because my mind was elsewhere.

  I somehow managed to scrape together a partial outdoor season, and even ended up breaking the school record as a member of one of the relay teams. It was my last meet of the year. By the time I finished the race, I could barely walk. My Achilles tendon had swollen to the size of a lemon. Any movement was excruciating; my tendon literally squeaked like a rusty hinge whenever I took a step. When I arrived back home for my summer break, I needed crutches to get off the plane.

  I was miserable for the first few weeks of the summer. I had no job, no girlfriend, and because my brother had moved out, no one to hang around with. In addition, I was under doctor's orders not to run for three months, which would only put me further behind my peers.

  My mom tried to come up
with ways to cheer me up. At least, that's what she called it. "Paint the living room," she'd say, "it'll cheer you up." Or, "Sand the door so we can stain it a different color. It'll boost your spirits."

  Had her ideas worked, I would have been the most cheerful kid on the planet. As it was, however, I simply moped around in paint-splattered clothes, working all day on various projects, and mumbling that all I wanted to do was run and wondering why God wouldn't help or listen to me. By mid-June, my mother had grown exasperated with my attitude, and, as I was lamenting my plight for the hundredth time at the kitchen table, finally shook her head.

  "Your problem is that you're bored. You need to find something to do."

  "I don't want to do anything but run."

  "What if you can't?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "What if your injury never gets better? Or, even if it does, what if you can't train the way you want to anymore for fear of hurting it again? You don't want to spend your life doing nothing."

  "Mom . . ."

  "Hey, I'm just offering up the obvious here. I know it wouldn't be fair, but no one ever said that life was fair."

  I lowered my head to the table.

  "Oh no," she said firmly, "you're not going to just sit here at the table and keep acting this way. Don't just pout. Do something about it."

  "Like what?"

  "It's your life."

  I raised my head in frustration. "Mom . . ."

  "I don't know," she said with a shrug. Then she looked at me and said the words that would eventually change my life. "Write a book."

  Until that moment, I'd never considered writing. Granted, I read all the time, but actually sitting down and coming up with a story on my own? The very notion was ridiculous. I knew nothing about the craft, I had no burning desire to see my words in print. I'd never taken a class in creative writing, had never written for the yearbook or school newspaper, nor did I suspect I had some sort of hidden talent when it came to composing prose. Yet, despite all those things, the notion was somehow appealing, and I found myself answering, "Okay."

  The next morning, I sat down at my dad's typewriter, rolled in the first sheet of paper, and began to write. I chose horror as a genre and conjured up a character who caused accidental death wherever he went. Six weeks and nearly three hundred pages later, after writing six or seven hours a day, I'd finished. To this day, I can remember typing the final sentence, and I don't know that I'd ever felt a higher sense of accomplishment with anything I'd done in my life.

  The only problem was the book. It was terrible and I knew it. It was atrocious in every sense of the word, but in the end, what did it matter? I didn't intend for it to be published; I'd written it to see if I could. Even then, I knew there was a big difference between starting a novel and actually finishing one. Even more surprising, I found that I'd actually enjoyed the process.

  I was nineteen years old and had become an accidental author. It's funny the way things happen in life.

  Because I was away from home eight months a year, my brother and I had little time to see each other. Micah continued to spend weekends trying new and exciting things. Meanwhile, my injury continued to plague me; I ran neither cross-country nor track, but concentrated on making a comeback.

  I'd made good friends with a few other freshman the year before, some of whom were on the track team, and they became the ones I would depend on to get me through yet another challenging year. But I'd learned something by heading off to college. My dependence on family had diminished more than it had for either my brother or sister. Dana still lived at home and was a freshman in college; though Micah was living in his own apartment, he still made it home three or four times a week. Whenever I called home, it always seemed as if he was there.

  Soon after I'd left for my sophomore year, my mom mentioned that Brandy wasn't doing well. She was twelve years old--not old for some breeds, but ancient for a Doberman--and I could hear the concern in my mom's voice. My mom loved her, as we all did, and when I pressed my mom, her answers were slightly evasive.

  "Well, she's lost a little weight, and her arthritis seems to be getting worse."

  When I came home for fall break, I was shocked by Brandy's appearance. I hadn't seen her in two months but in those two months she'd gone from being relatively healthy to a walking skeleton. Her stomach caved in, and it was possible to count her ribs from across the room. As she slowly wandered toward me, I could see the happy recognition in her eyes. Her tail--bone thin and nearly hairless--waved a slow greeting. I crouched down and stroked her softly, feeling her shake and tremble beneath my hand. I swallowed the lump in my throat.

  I spent most of the next two days with the dog, sitting beside her and patting her gently. I knew even then that she wouldn't last until Christmas; I murmured quietly to her, reminding her of all the adventures we'd had together growing up.

  The day before I was to head back to Notre Dame, we woke to find that Brandy had died.

  My brother and I held back our tears as we went to get our sister. Dana made no pretense of being tough, and began to sob immediately. It was the sound of her wailing that made my brother and me both begin to cry as well, and later that morning, with tears stinging our eyes, we dug a hole in the backyard and buried her. She was gone now except for memories that we would hold forever.

  "She waited until you were home," Micah said earnestly. "I think she must have known you were coming back and wanted to see you one last time."

  Years later, we discovered the truth of what happened to Brandy. Brandy, we learned, hadn't really died in her sleep. She'd died at the veterinarian's office earlier that morning, with my mother holding her tight as the final injection was administered. Afterward, while we were still sleeping, my mom had brought Brandy back home and placed her in the bed for us to find. She didn't want us to know that Brandy had been put down; she wanted the three of us to believe that Brandy had died peacefully in her sleep. My mom knew we would have been devastated by the idea of putting her to sleep, and thought it was important to spare our feelings.

  Even though we were grown, even though she'd always stressed toughness, she didn't want Brandy's death to be harder on us than it had to be.

  I had surgery on both my Achilles and my foot in April of my sophomore year. Both my Achilles and plantar fascia (a tendon that runs along the bottom of the foot) had been severely damaged by intensive training. It was touch-and-go as to whether I would ever run again. With the dream still burning, I went through rehab and began jogging in July. By mid-August, I was running without pain for the first time in years. I trained hard and was soon recording the fastest training times I'd ever run in the past; in the second hard workout of the day, for instance, I clipped through five miles in a little more than twenty-three minutes and was never out of breath.

  By October, though, the pain was back and getting worse, and I had a cortisone injection at the site of the old injury. An anti-inflammatory, it numbs the area and I kept on running. When the pain came back six weeks later, I got another cortisone shot. Soon, I was getting them monthly, but I salvaged a respectable season nonetheless. By summer, I needed to receive cortisone injections weekly to continue training--I'd had nearly thirty injections since the surgery--and I had to gear myself up for one last season. Both my Achilles and plantar fascia were swollen. As I limped out to the track for a workout, I remember realizing with a sense of clear-eyed finality that I simply couldn't do it anymore.

  I hung up my shoes for good, feeling sadness and--strangely--relief. With the exception of breaking a school record that still stands after nineteen years, I'd failed to reach the other goals I'd set for myself. But despite the fact that running had been the defining force in my life for the previous seven years, I knew that I'd survive without it.

  I'd given it my best shot, but it wasn't meant to be. And if I had to do it all over--and fail to reach my dream again--I would. When you chase a dream, you learn about yourself. You learn your capabilities and limitati
ons, and the value of hard work and persistence.

  When I told my dad about my decision--sharing my disappointment as well as relief in knowing that I'd finally made a decision--he put his arm around my shoulder.

  "Everyone has dreams," he said. "And even if yours didn't work out the way you wanted, it doesn't make me any less proud of you. Too many people never really try."

  That year, my mom finally got the horse she'd always wanted. A three-year-old Arabian, she named it Chinook.

  Chinook was boarded at a stable near the American River, and my mom would drop in to feed and groom the horse before and after work. She could spend hours brushing Chinook's coat, cleaning her stable, and cleaning the mud from her hooves.

  Although there were riding trails along the American River, it was months before my mom could ride her. Chinook had lived most of her life in a pasture (along with a goat) and had never had so much as a saddle placed on her back, which was a big part of the reason my mom could afford to buy her. She was high-strung like many Arabians, but my mom had a natural talent when it came to calming her. Soon, Chinook allowed my mom to saddle her; when she got used to that, my mom finally crawled on. Chinook didn't seem to like it, but my mom was patient, and I remember the joy in my mom's voice one day when she called me on the phone.

  "I rode Chinook for hours today!" she said. "You can't believe how wonderful it was."

  "I'm happy for you, Mom," I said. My mom had lived a life of sacrifice, her own dreams always coming second to ours. I couldn't help but feel it was finally time that she got something that made her happy.

  Later, she would get a second horse named Napoleon. Napoleon was good-natured and even-tempered; the kind of horse that was perfect for my father. And surprising me, my father agreed to go riding as well.

  Though my dad was never comfortable in the saddle, I think it was his way of showing my mom that he was willing to work on the marriage. Years of emotional distance had strained their relationship, and Micah sometimes mentioned that he thought my mom had nearly reached the breaking point. Where once she was willing to stay married for the sake of the children, she now sometimes wondered aloud whether she would be happier without my dad. I don't know if either my mom or my dad ever seriously considered divorce; I do know, however, that my mom spoke the word with increasing frequency, both on the phone and around the house. And my dad, no doubt, had heard her speak of it as well.