Three Weeks With My Brother

by Nicholas Sparks

  “Me, too.”

  “Maybe we should start a movement. Call it, ‘Eyeballs for Statues.’”

  “It has a nice ring to it. Go for it.”

  He continued to stare. “I really do think they’d look better, don’t you?”

  Standing next to Micah, I realized that there were times when we talked not because we needed to communicate anything important, but simply because we each drew comfort from the other’s voice.

  After taking photographs, we got back in our van and headed to Anakena, a cove fronted by a white-sand beach that was dotted with one of the few remaining groves of palm trees. For the first time, we saw a part of the island that looked tropical; an ancient Moai seemed to be standing guard at the head of the beach, watching over the bathers.

  After a barbecue on the beach, Micah and I and a few others went for a swim. By then, our group had begun breaking into cliques. Some folks were adventurous and wanted to experience everything they could; others seemed to view the sights as inconveniences they had to endure between meals and cocktail parties. Some of this was age-related, some of it had to do with attitudes. Micah and I were part of the adventurous group; we always took the “fast walker” tours as opposed to the “slow walker” tours, and the chance to swim in the South Pacific wasn’t something we were going to miss. Though a small thing, it would be another in a long line of “first-time-evers” we would experience together.

  “They don’t know what they’re missing, do they?” Micah said to me, as he pointed to the people sitting on the beach.

  “Maybe it’s not a big deal to them. A lot of these people have traveled before.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “Or maybe they never did it in the past, either. Some people just don’t know how to have fun. They aren’t even willing to try. “

  I glanced warily at Micah, suddenly wondering if he was talking about me.

  In seventh grade, Micah went off to Barrett Junior High School, and we continued to grow apart. My sister and I, however, were growing even closer. She laughed all the time and had a quality of sweetness that almost made me feel guilty about the kind of person I was. She seldom got angry, and I sometimes overheard her talking to mom about how proud she was of us. In her eyes, Micah and I could do no wrong, and whenever we were punished, my sister would be the one to come into our room and listen to us complain about the injustice of what our parents had done to us.

  My sister always seemed to know how I felt inside; she was the only one who understood that excelling in school had more to do with an inferiority complex than any particular love of school. She would sometimes ask me to help her with her schoolwork, and used those opportunities to build my confidence. “I wish I was as smart as you,” she’d say, or, “Mom and dad are so happy with how well you’re doing.”

  Growing up, Dana was the only one of us who ever had a birthday party because, as my mom explained to us, “She’s a girl.” This wouldn’t have been so bad—neither Micah nor I ever clamored for a party—but because my sister and I shared the same birthday, it always felt a little odd to have to watch my sister having a party, while I stood off to the side. If my mom didn’t understand it, however, my sister did, and one year she came into my room early on the morning of our birthday and sat on the edge of my bed. Jostled awake, I asked her what she was doing.

  She began to sing, “Happy Birthday to you . . .”

  Afterward, I sang the song back to her, and every year after that it was our own secret ritual. We’d sing to each other, just the two of us, and we never told anyone about it. This was our secret, as it would be for years, and after singing to each other, we’d talk for a while. I’d tell her everything—my hopes and fears and struggles and successes—and Dana would do the same.

  When she was twelve, I asked her, “What do you want to be when you grow up? What do you want more than anything?”

  My sister looked around the room with a dreamy smile. “I want to be married, and I want to have kids. And I want to own horses.”

  She got this, I knew, from my mom. More than anything in the world, my mom always wanted a horse. Growing up, she’d owned a horse named Tempo, and she often spoke of the horse and the wonderful times she used to have riding.

  “That’s it?” I asked.

  “That’s it. That’s all I want out of life.”

  “Don’t you want to be rich or famous, or do exciting things?”

  “No. That’s for you and Micah.”

  “But won’t you be bored with that?”

  “No,” she said, with conviction. “I won’t.”

  My sister, I knew then, wasn’t the complicated bundle of nerves that I was. When she finally left the room, I remember wishing that if I couldn’t be like Micah, that I could be just like her instead.

  When I started at Barrett Junior High the following year, I joined Micah on the long bus ride to school, but we never sat together, or even seemed to talk. Eighth-graders occupied a completely different realm than did seventh-graders—they were the Big Men On Campus—and our paths seldom crossed in the hallways or at recess. After school and on weekends, Micah ran off to see his friends, while I stayed to compete on various athletic teams. Though a good athlete, I wasn’t extraordinary, and distinguished myself neither on the football field nor when I ran track and field.

  The following year, Micah started high school and we were separated again, both during and after school. By then, I’d grown used to doing my own thing.

  Halfway through my eighth-grade year, in 1978, we moved to the first and only house my parents would ever own.

  We handled the move ourselves. Who needs to pay a moving company when there are a couple of strong boys and a Volkswagen van on hand? So day after day, we loaded everything from the house into the back of the van and hauled it to the new home.

  But Volkswagens aren’t really designed for exceptionally heavy loads, and my brother and I didn’t care how much we loaded into ours. We would fill the back of the van with my dad’s books until there wasn’t an inch to spare. It probably weighed half a ton, and the van was riding exceptionally low in the rear. Meanwhile, the nose of the vehicle actually pointed upward, like someone eyeing a distant horizon.

  “We got it all loaded in, Mom.”

  Mom stared at the van. “It looks like it’s just about to pop a wheelie.”

  “That’s just because it’s heavy in the back. It’ll straighten out when we unload it.”

  “You think it’s safe to drive?” she asked. Why she asked us, I’ll never know. Neither Micah nor I even had our license.

  “Of course it’s safe. Why wouldn’t it be?”

  The good news was that the van made it to the new house. The bad news was that—even after unloading all the books—the van didn’t level out. At all. We’d crushed whatever support there had been in the rear.

  “Is the front still pointing toward the sky, or is it just me?” mom finally asked.

  “Maybe we’re looking at it crooked. Or the street’s not level.”

  We tilted our heads, checking the van, looking up and down the road.

  “I think you broke something,” mom finally said.

  “Nah,” we said, “it’ll be fine. Give it time—it’ll go back to normal.”

  “Your dad’s going to be mad.”

  “He won’t even notice,” we reassured her. “But even if he does, he won’t care.”

  Of course my dad noticed, and the DEFCON countdown started after he got home, though we were smart enough to be long gone by then. Thankfully, by the time we got home, he had calmed down, since the van seemed to run fine, despite the crazy way it looked. And if it ran fine, that meant there was really no reason to fix it. That would be spending money we didn’t have. So in the end, the van was never repaired, and for the next three years—until we traded it in for the new, improved Volkswagen van—we drove around town looking as if we were hauling baby whales to the zoo.

  Our new house was small. A single-story ranch with a con
verted garage, it had four bedrooms, an office, a living room, and a kitchen. Two of the rooms (the office and master bedroom) had been converted from the garage. The house was twenty-five years old and in dire need of repairs. Even with the garage conversion, it was less than 1,300 square feet.

  But to us, it was awesome. My brother, sister, and I each had our own room for the first time in our lives, and we all took time decorating them in our own style. My mom was tremendously proud to finally have a home she could call her own, and she spent much of the next few years fixing the place up and adding her own splashes of personality. There were sixteen walls all painted in different colors—my mom changed wall paint more often than some people change their toothbrushes—and every weekend, Micah and I had to finish our mother’s “list” before we could head off to play. We spent our Saturday mornings building fences, painting walls over and over, planting bushes and trees, sanding kitchen cabinets, and executing whatever plan she happened to come up with while at work.

  Because the family had little extra money to spend on such things, it was a slow process. To build the fence, for instance, my mom would buy a dozen planks of wood every week, all she could spare from her paycheck. It took her nearly five months to accumulate all the wood we needed to build the fence, but thankfully—in her opinion anyway—the labor was free. Micah and I—no doubt drawing on our roofing experience in Nebraska—were put in charge of constructing the fence, and we did. That it ended up sloping noticeably—as opposed to being straight across the top—was simply one of the outcomes my brother and I assumed our mother had foreseen before deciding to delegate the project to us.

  Knowing we’d continue to do most of the work on the house, our parents began giving us tools for Christmas. It was a way of killing two birds with one stone. Not only did we get something unexpected (how could I expect to receive a hammer for Christmas if I didn’t want one?), but they would save money at the same time. And it was much better than offering us weapons again. Late one Christmas morning, I sat beside Micah on the couch.

  “What did you think of Christmas this year?” he asked.

  “It was great,” I said, “for a carpenter.” I nodded toward my gifts. “What am I going to do with a dowel hammer? Do they want me to start building furniture next?”

  Micah shook his head and sighed. “Yeah, I know what you mean. But at least you got a lot of them. I got a jigsaw. What is mom going to make me use that for? I wanted a pair of Levi’s, for God’s sake.”

  We sat in silence.

  “Our parents are weird, aren’t they?” I asked.

  Micah didn’t answer. When I glanced at him, I saw him staring at the jigsaw.

  “What?”

  He shook his head, his brow furrowed. “Nothing really. It just says on the box here that this thing can cut through hardwood, like oak.”

  “So.”

  “Isn’t the hardwood in my bedroom oak?”

  “I think so.”

  He pondered the situation. “And wouldn’t you agree that our parents are a little heavy-handed?”

  “Absolutely,” I agreed. “They’re like guards at the Gulag.”

  He blinked as if suddenly in the presence of a Martian. “What are you talking about, Nick?”

  “Never mind.”

  “You’re weird sometimes, too.”

  “I know.” I’d heard this before. “But what were you saying?”

  “Well, what if we use this thing to our advantage?”

  “What do you mean?”

  He leaned in and whispered his plan, and I had to admit he was definitely on to something. And sure enough, as soon as my parents had left for work—we were still on school break—my brother used the jigsaw to cut a hole in his closet floor that led to the crawl space beneath the house. That way, after he’d supposedly gone to bed, he could sneak out at night via his bedroom without our parents ever knowing about it.

  And, of course, he did.

  It was around this time that my mom decided she was tired of working full-time, and doing all the cooking and cleaning around the house. My dad was thus drafted into becoming the chef.

  I remember hearing about it when I got home from school one afternoon, and I honestly believed that my dad was excited about it. He told us that he was going to make one of his favorite meals, one that he used to eat when he was a kid. He forbade us from coming into the kitchen to see what he was preparing.

  “It’s a surprise.”

  Neither Micah, Dana, nor I knew what to make of it. The only thing our dad ever cooked on his own was chicken gizzards. Not wings, not legs or breasts, but gizzards. My dad simply loved those things. He would fry up a plateful, and while we eventually acquired a taste for them, it was obvious that gizzards wasn’t on the menu that night.

  Frying gizzards—frying anything—made for a pleasant aroma in the kitchen. But all we could smell was something burned and scorchy—like flour that caught on fire—and more than once, I heard my dad yell, “Whoops!” and race to open the back slider, so the smoke could clear the kitchen. Then, popping his head back into the living room, he’d say, “You guys are going to love this!” or, “Cooking for you guys is going to be great! I can’t wait to share more of my childhood recipes. I’m really getting the hang of it now!”

  Eventually, after three or four “Whoops!” he called us to the table. Mom wasn’t home from work yet, and we took our seats. My dad brought the food over from the stove and set it before us.

  There were two items. A plate of toast, and . . . and . . .

  We looked closer, but still couldn’t tell. It was in a bowl, whatever it was. Gray and brown and lumpy, sort of gravylike, with specks of black mixed in. The spoon was resting on the slowly solidifying mass.

  “I might have burned it a little, but it should be fine. Eat up.”

  None of us moved.

  “What is it, Daddy?” Dana finally asked.

  “It’s beans,” he said. “I cooked them up using a secret recipe.”

  We looked at the bowl again. It sure didn’t look like beans. And it didn’t smell like beans, either. It smelled almost . . . unnatural. It reminded me of something the dog ate, partially digested, then offered up again. But okay, beans and toast and . . .

  “What’s for the main course?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like hamburger? Or chicken?”

  “Don’t need it. Not with this meal.”

  “What is this meal?” Micah asked.

  “Beans on toast,” he said, his voice ringing with pride. “Your mom never made this for you, did she?”

  We glanced at each other, then shook our heads.

  My dad reached for the bowl. “Who’s going to be first?”

  Neither Micah nor I moved a muscle. Dana finally cleared her throat.

  “I will, Daddy.”

  He beamed. Placing a piece of toast on her plate, he started to scoop from the bowl. It was thick and hard, and my dad had to really work the spoon. The smell only got worse as he began to penetrate the substance. I saw my dad’s nose wrinkle.

  “Like I said, I might have burned it a little,” he said. “But it should be fine. Enjoy.”

  “Are you going to eat some, Daddy?” Dana asked.

  “No, you three go ahead. I’ll just watch. You guys are still growing and need the energy. Micah?”

  My dad dug into the bowl again, grimacing as he worked at the beans, as if he were trying to scoop frozen ice cream.

  “No thanks. I’m supposed to be eating at Mark’s tonight. I don’t want to spoil my appetite.”

  “You didn’t mention that before.”

  “I guess I forgot. But really, I should be getting ready. I was supposed to be there ten minutes ago.”

  He quickly rose from the table and vanished.

  “Okay. How about you, Nick?”

  “Yeah, okay,” I said, raising my plate. I placed a piece of toast on it; the gravy-burned-bean-substance dropped like a baseball onto my pl
ate, nearly rolling off and hitting the table.

  “Just spread it out a little,” my dad suggested. “It’s better that way.”

  My sister and I began to poke at the dinner—trying to spread it, but getting nowhere—terrified at the thought of actually consuming it. But just when we knew we couldn’t postpone it any longer, my mom walked in the door.

  “Hey guys! How are you? It’s great to see you—” She stopped and wrinkled her nose. “What on earth is that stench?”

  “It’s dinner,” my dad said. “Come on. We’re waiting for you.”

  She moved to the table, took one look at the food, and said, “Kids, bring those plates to the sink.”

  “But . . .” my dad said

  “No buts. I’ll make spaghetti. You kids want spaghetti instead?”

  We nodded eagerly, and quickly rose from the table.

  “Okay. Just get the groceries from my baskets. I’ll get it going in a few minutes.”

  For whatever reason, my dad wasn’t all that upset. In fact, I think it had been his plan all along, for after that night, he was prohibited from cooking for us. And whenever my mom complained about his failure to assume more domestic responsibility, he could honestly say, “I tried. But you won’t let me.”

  Food in general became a strange sort of obsession in our home. Because we couldn’t afford the same sort of treats that other kids seemed to get—cookies, Twinkies, Ho Hos, etc.—we developed a binge mentality when the opportunity presented itself. If we were visiting someone’s house for instance, we’d devour whatever we could, eating until we felt like we would burst. It was nothing for us to consume thirty or forty Oreos in a sitting. At times, we’d leave our friends in their rooms, sneak back to the friend’s kitchen, raid the pantry, and eat even more.

  It was the same way whenever my mom was crazy enough to buy anything sweet. Cereal, for instance. As a rule, we had only Cheerios in the house. If she happened to buy Froot Loops or Trix on a whim, we’d eat the whole box, right away. We simply couldn’t fathom saving any for the following morning. Our thinking went, If I don’t eat it now, the other kids will, and I deserve my fair share. We’d eat until we were sick to our stomachs. Once, after consuming five large bowls each of Froot Loops in less than half an hour, Micah and I sat beside each other on the couch, bellies bloated.