Three Weeks With My Brother

by Nicholas Sparks

  “Oh, definitely a shame.”

  “If only you’d known, right?”

  “Exactly. I probably wouldn’t have gone.”

  He laughed. “Did you tell her to try to make sure they’re all better by the time you get home?”

  “I didn’t want her to kill me.”

  He laughed again. “Christine would kill me, too. You guys are going on vacation in a couple weeks? Just the two of you, right?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. We’ll spend a few days relaxing at the beach.”

  “You know she gets to decide what to do the entire vacation.”

  “Oh, I know. I’ve already figured that out.”

  “I mean, every bit of it,” he added for emphasis. “Instead of scuba diving, you’ll be browsing through stores for hours, looking at kid’s clothes. And she’ll ask you whether you like the shirt with the pink bunny or the yellow duck, and you have to act as if you’re giving the matter a lot of thought.”

  “I know.”

  “And you’ll have to treat her like a queen and pretend you’re enjoying yourself.”

  “I know.”

  “In fact, you’re pretty much going to have to grovel.”

  “Believe me. I know.” I shrugged. “But it’s only fair.”

  “Ah, the trade-offs we have to make.” He smiled. “Isn’t marriage great?”

  In the evening, we rode a gondola up the side of one of the peaks near Tromsø.

  At the top, we made our way to a lodge for a mountaintop cocktail party. With windows lining two walls, we could see the lights of Tromsø twinkling in the darkness. Outside the windows there were snow flurries. It seemed hard to believe that only a few days earlier we’d been sweating in places like Ethiopia, India, and Cambodia.

  It was our second-to-last night on the tour, and people were beginning to exchange phone numbers and addresses. Everyone was tired but in good spirits; it was hard to believe that our trip was nearly over.

  Instead of mingling, Micah and I went to sit by the windows. We were in a reflective mood, and, watching the snow flurries, we talked about the things we’d seen, the places we’d been. We talked about the places we would visit again—both of us had Machu Picchu at the top of our list—and how much we were both looking forward to seeing our families again.

  In time, Micah glanced at me.

  “So how’s Ryan doing these days?”

  “He’s doing well. On his last report card, he got two Bs and the rest As.”

  “And he’s in third grade?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Does he have more friends now?”

  “He’s in a great class,” I said, “and he’s been with the same group since kindergarten. The kids in his class are used to him. And they like him. It’s nice. And it’s funny, too—if you ask the kids how Ryan’s doing, they all say that he’s the smartest kid in the classroom.”

  “Does he play like other kids yet?”

  “He’s getting better. Socially, he’s still a little behind, and he still has a little trouble with regular conversations. He’s fine if you talk to him about his interests, but he’s not too good at banter or small talk yet. I think part of it, though, is that he’s shy. I don’t know whether it’s because of his problem, or whether he would have been shy anyway. It’s one of those unanswered questions.”

  “You guys have come a long way with him. It’s amazing how much better he is. Every time I see him, I notice how he’s improving all the time.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I know he’s come a long way, but to be honest, it’s sometimes hard to remember how bad he once was. We keep focusing on the future—you know, working on his conversations, his reading comprehension, things like that. It’s frustrating. You always have to figure out new ways to get through to him—it’s not like you can simply give him instructions.”

  “He’s come a long way, Nick. What you and Cathy have done is amazing. I mean it.”

  “Thanks,” I said again.

  “Did you ever find out what was wrong with him?”

  I shook my head. “No. We have some ideas, but we’ll never be certain. Cat thinks he just had CAPD—where he couldn’t understand sound—but I’m not so sure. I mean, I’ve read everything about that disorder, and if Ryan did have it, it was the worst case that I ever came across. I think it might have been part of the problem, but I think there was more to it. I think he was also autistic. But, like I said, I don’t think we’ll ever know for sure.” I took a long breath. “But we’ll keep working and he’ll keep getting better. In the end, I think he’ll be able to lead a normal life. I think he’ll go to college and get married and make mistakes like all of us. He’s close now. He’s not there yet, but he’s close. And we’re not going to give up on him. But sometimes . . .”

  I hesitated. Micah looked at me.

  “What?”

  “Sometimes I wonder why we had a child like Ryan. There was so much going on already with mom, dad, and Dana. It was too much, you know. It was too hard. It’s like I didn’t have enough challenges, so God gave me one more.” I paused. “Do you know what I always tell Miles and Ryan?”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “I tell Ryan that God gave him a brother like Miles so that Ryan could learn that anything is possible and that he can be good at anything. And I tell Miles that God gave him Ryan so that Miles could learn patience and persistence and how to overcome challenges.”

  Micah smiled. “That’s nice.”

  I shrugged. It was a good lesson, but part of me always wished I wouldn’t have had to say it at all.

  Micah put his hand on my shoulder. “I know why God gave Ryan to you and Cat.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why? Because he wanted to test my faith?”

  “No,” he said quietly. “Because not all parents could have done what you two did. He gave you Ryan because he knew that you two were smart and strong enough to help him. Ryan might have been lost with someone else.”

  For a long moment, we sat in silence. The snow flurries danced hypnotically, and began to coat the window ledges. I thought about Ryan, and his struggles, everything he’d been through. Yes, he was better because of the work Cat and I had done. And yes, I was confident about his future. But all at once, despite those thoughts, I felt a lump in my throat, and to be honest, I wasn’t sure where it came from.

  Our evening at the lodge ended relatively early, and Micah and I talked a few others on the tour into visiting one of the pubs in Tromsø. There are a lot of pubs in Tromsø, by the way. When it’s dark eighteen hours a day in a relatively small town, there isn’t much else to do if a person wants to spend time with friends. And Norwegians, we quickly discovered, are just about the friendliest people in the world. As soon as we found a table, locals gathered around to talk to us and listened as we described the trip we’d just been on. They asked our names and our histories, and asked how we liked their town. They offered to buy us drinks, and excitedly informed us that there would be karaoke that night. Some of the Norwegians took karaoke very seriously, and gradually the bar began to fill with people who’d come in just to sing. And here I thought karaoke stopped being popular years ago. Shows me how much I know.

  Now, I’ve never sung karaoke. I’ve never wanted to sing karaoke, mainly because I’m a terrible singer. Micah can’t sing either. And neither, I eventually learned, could anyone else on our tour.

  But sing we did, and gradually we warmed to the idea of performing for these Norwegians. We passed the microphone back and forth, laughing when it was someone else’s turn to belt out the next set of lyrics. We did this for hours, and it was one of the best evenings (along with Ayers Rock) that we had on the tour. The bar had a large selection of music, including Kenny Rogers’s “Coward of the County,” which made both of us laugh. It had to be an omen, and we belted out that tune at the top of our lungs. We also sang “Greased Lightning” from the movie Grease, doing our best to hide our off-key singing by danc
ing as exuberantly as we could. We moved like John Travolta, like professionals on Broadway, like we’d been dancing our entire lives, and at the end, the crowd clapped, whistled, and cheered. Later, when we asked one of the members of our tour what they really thought about our performance, there was a short pause before she answered.

  “You know those howler monkeys in Guatemala? You looked like them.”

  Like I said, all in all, a fabulous night.

  Our late night made rising early the following morning difficult. We were tired, and spent the morning at the museum in Tromsø.

  There, we were treated to long discourses on jars and bowls.

  After the museum, we drove out into the countryside to go dogsledding. There were low-lying hills and trees in every direction; in the distance, the snowcapped peaks were partially hidden by clouds.

  It was brisk, and we dressed in snowsuits that we could slip over our clothes. To reach the dogsleds, we had to descend a shallow hill, and were given the option of walking or riding down on an inner tube.

  Most of the people walked. Micah and I rode the inner tubes. About fifty times.

  We were loaded into the dogsleds in groups of three: Micah and I were joined by Jill, the physician, and as we waited we were introduced to the dogs. They were huskies, but smaller than I’d imagined they would be, maybe fifty pounds or so. And they were friendly; they seemed to enjoy being stroked and licked at our snowsuits in return.

  Our driver, a middle-aged woman who’d once placed fifth in the Alaskan Iditarod, had not only trained the dogs, but owned most of the surrounding area. The business of providing dogsled rides enabled her to exercise her dogs daily. And the dogs loved to exercise.

  As soon as the driver stepped on, the dogs got antsy and started barking; I suppose I expected her to yell “Mush!” but instead—and in a tone no louder than ordinary conversation—she simply said something that sounded like “Het.” The dogs started pulling and the sled took off, dogs trotting ahead and looking around.

  There are a few things about dogsledding you should know. First, the sled is slow, extremely bumpy, and hard on the rear end. Second, you’re seated in such a way to make you feel every bit of the ride. And finally, saying that you went dogsledding in Norway with a team that once competed in the Iditarod is more fun than the sledding itself.

  But hey, we did it. And took lots of pictures, too. And now, when I stand at a party, I can say things like,

  “Yes, I remember the time I was dogsledding in the Norwegian Alps . . . training the team for the Iditarod . . . going hard . . . with the snow swirling in my eyes . . . my lead dog limping but gamely carrying on . . . my face growing numb in the cold . . . and I remember thinking . . .”

  Pause.

  It’s even better than the “I remember the time I was riding the elephants on my way to ancient Amber Fort in Jaipur . . . the heat beating down . . . the elephant growing weary as we mounted the final crest . . . and I remember thinking . . .” story.

  After riding the dogsled, we joined our tour companions under a teepee; inside, they were serving reindeer stew that had been cooked over an open fire. The teepee was smoky, but it was warm and the food was enticing, especially after the morning we’d spent.

  Sadly, we were informed that because of the ever-deepening cloud cover, our chance to see the aurora borealis was next to nil; in fact, we would learn that the northern lights had been rare all winter. The chance to see them had been the reason for our visit to Tromsø in the first place, and both Micah and I were disappointed.

  We were, however, offered a chance to go to yet another museum, but Micah and I were museumed out by then. Instead, we spent the rest of the afternoon wandering the streets of Tromsø, talking and taking in the sights.

  “Did you ever wonder why things happened the way they did?” Micah asked, apropos of nothing.

  “All the time,” I responded, knowing exactly what he was referring to.

  “Most of my friends haven’t lost anyone close to them.”

  “Neither have mine. And Cat hasn’t either.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Who knows. I wish I could tell you, but I can’t.”

  Micah pushed his hands into his pockets.

  “Have you ever noticed that people think of us as experts on death now? I mean, whenever a friend has someone die, he or she always calls me to talk. Does that happen to you?”

  “All the time,” I answered.

  “What do you say?”

  “It depends.”

  “I never know what to tell them. I mean, there’s nothing you can say to make a person stop hurting. Half the time, I just feel like telling them the truth. I’d say that for three months, you’re going to feel worse than you’ve ever felt, and you cope as best you can. And that after six months, the pain isn’t so bad, but it still hurts more than you think it will. And even after years, you still find yourself thinking about the person you lost, and get sad about it. And you still miss them all the time.”

  “Why don’t you say that?”

  “Because that’s not what people want to hear. They want to hear that it’s going to be okay. That the pain goes away. But it doesn’t. It never does. And you can’t say that when the wound is fresh. It would be like pouring salt in their wound, and you can’t do that to a person. So instead, I tell them what they want to hear.” He paused. “What have all these losses taught you?”

  “That it hurts, but you’ve got to go on anyway.”

  “That’s what I learned, too. But you know, I would rather have learned it a lot later in life.”

  “Me, too.”

  “You know what else I learned?” Micah asked.

  “What’s that?”

  “That it’s a cumulative thing. Mom’s and dad’s deaths were hard, but it’s like when you lose both of them, it’s not only twice the loss. It’s exponential. And then, when we lost Dana . . . it wasn’t like we’d lost three people we loved. It’s like we lost almost everything.”

  Micah shook his head before going on.

  “After something like that . . . well, even though you try to get through it—and might seem fine on the surface—underneath you’re a wreck, and you don’t even know it. And sometimes, it takes a while to figure out that you’re still struggling with everything that happened.”

  I nudged his shoulder. “You talking about me again?”

  “No, not just you,” he said. “Me, too. Like you said, we just reacted to the loss in different ways.”

  After our sister’s death, Micah changed.

  It was as if he’d suddenly become intimately aware of the fragility of life and how precious time really was. As a result, he made a conscious effort to simplify his life, with the goal of eliminating unnecessary stress. No longer interested in society’s definition of success, he began purging his life of material things. Life, he decided, was for living, not for having, and he wanted to experience every moment that he could. At the deepest level, he’d come to understand that life could end at any moment, and it was better to be happy than busy.

  He began selling things, getting rid of the clutter. Within a couple of months, he’d sold both businesses and converted his investments to cash. He sold both his boat and his jeep. He recommitted himself to his family, and when he called me, he explained his reasoning as follows.

  “The more you own, the more it owns you, and I’m tired of it. I’m tired of having to take care of everything. I’m tired of things breaking and having to fix them. It adds stress, and frankly, I’m giving myself a break.”

  In the end, he kept the basics: his house, his car, and his furniture. The sale of his businesses left him with more than enough money to meet his monthly obligations—for years if he had to—and for the next eight months he did nothing that might add unwanted pressure to his life.

  In some ways, he reverted to the young man he’d been during his college years. He went camping and hiking, he rafted during the summer, and as soon as snow began fal
ling in the Sierras, he snowboarded. He took a trip to Puerto Vallarta with Christine. He visited Cody and Cole at the ranch. He began exercising regularly again, and joined an indoor soccer league. He also made a point to see me as often as he could. When I had a meeting in Los Angeles, my brother flew down to spend a few days with me. When my tour brought me through Sacramento later that fall, he came with me to the promotional events. In December, six months after my sister passed away, Micah visited me in North Carolina with Christine and his stepdaughter, Alli; Bob also came, along with Cody and Cole. Our three families took a trip to New York and we stood atop the World Trade Center admiring the view, less than nine months before it would be reduced to rubble.

  Three weeks after our trip to New York, my brother called me. It was my birthday, and as soon as I answered the phone, he began to sing to me, in the same way my sister always had.

  I listened with my eyes closed, remembering it all.

  “I guess I’ll have to do this for you now,” he said, when he finished. “It’s a tradition, you know.”

  I smiled, missing my sister but thankful for my brother.

  “Thanks, Micah.”

  “No problem, little brother.”

  There was one other way in which my brother changed as well.

  While he still went to church, his attendance became sporadic and continued to diminish as time went on. And on those days he did go, he sat in the pew and felt nothing.

  With my sister’s death, my brother had lost his faith.

  I, too, had suddenly become aware of the fragility of life and the preciousness of time. But as similar as Micah and I were in many ways, my reaction was exactly the opposite.

  I came to believe that because life could end at any moment, I had to be prepared for any eventuality. I wanted to make sure my family was taken care of, no matter what might happen in the future. I had goals, and with the clock ticking, I had to hurry up and meet them before the unthinkable occurred. There was suddenly no time to waste. I had to hurry, I had to get things ready, I had to work. I had to go.