"I'm not in the mood right now. I've got nothing against it, but I'm not getting anything out of it when I do go. I feel like a hypocrite sitting there."
"You can always use the time to pray."
"I've tried praying. I prayed for Dana every day, and she still died. Praying doesn't work."
We acknowledged our standoff with a moment of silence before Micah cleared his throat.
"So how's Ryan doing?"
In early August 2001, my brother was proven correct.
Endless nights of a
llowing myself only three hours of sleep had left me exhausted, and something inside me finally gave way. It came out of the blue. I woke with a feeling of anxiety unlike anything I'd ever experienced. I couldn't concentrate, and all of a sudden I started crying for the first time since my sister had died. I simply couldn't stop. My wife--now approaching her thirty-fifth week of pregnancy--held me in her arms, then sat me down.
"You need a break," she said. "Go to the beach house for a couple of days. I'll be fine here."
"Yeah . . . okay . . . let me get my things . . ."
She put her hand on my computer. "This stays here," she said. "I want you to relax. Take long walks by the water, sleep in. Do absolutely nothing for a few days."
My first night there, I slept seventeen straight hours. When I woke, I read for a little while, then slept another nine.
My brother called me a few days later.
"Heard about your little breakdown," he said. "I told you it would catch up to you."
"You were right."
"How you doing now?"
"Better," I said. "I think I was just tired and needed sleep."
"I think you need to learn to slow down."
"Like you?"
"Hey," he said, "I'm not the one who crashed. And in fact, I think I'm ready to go back to work. I'm starting another business."
"Doing what?"
"Same thing," he said. "Making garage cabinets."
"Good for you."
"Yeah, I'm excited about it, and with Christine pregnant, it's time. Besides, I've been getting bored lately. All my friends are working. No one has time to do anything fun."
Despite myself, I laughed. "Imagine that," I said.
In the fall of 2001, despite the lessons I should have learned, I threw myself back into work with a vengeance. If anything, I grew even busier than I'd been before.
Savannah and Lexie were born on August 24; Lexie Danielle had been named for my sister. While my wife took care of the twins and recovered, I took care of the other three kids and the household, at the same time pushing myself to finish the novel. A month later, I was on the road touring the country for A Bend in the Road. My wife, with twins, a toddler, and two older sons, somehow managed to keep the household running smoothly.
But again, there was more. There was always more.
At birth, Lexie had a small hemangioma--a collection of excess blood vessels in the soft tissue beneath her chin. It was the size of a pencil eraser at birth; by the time I went on tour for A Bend in the Road, it was a bulbous, purple mass that made her chin seem small in comparison.
It ruptured while I was on tour. Cat and I were talking on the phone, when she suddenly screamed, "I've got to go! Lexie's chin is gushing blood!"
Lexie was seven weeks old when she was rolled into surgery; that night, I signed books for eight hundred people, hating myself for not being with my family.
But still, I continued to work like a demon. I finished the first draft of The Guardian while in Jackson, Mississippi, and as soon as I got back home, I wrote a screenplay based on the same novel. I then composed text for a Web site that had more words than my first novel. In my spare time, I began working on a television pilot based on The Rescue for CBS, agreeing to serve as an executive producer if the network picked it up. Then, in late December 2001, I heard from my editor.
The Guardian, I was told, would need extensive revisions--including a complete rewrite on the last half of the book--and I couldn't imagine having to start all over on the novel. Yet, with a deadline looming, I needed a novel for the coming fall. Instead of reworking the novel, I began writing Nights in Rodanthe, to be published that fall in its place. The Guardian, my publisher and I decided, would be published in spring 2003, and I would edit it when Nights in Rodanthe was completed. While the time pressure on Nights in Rodanthe was intense--it had to be completed by April--it meant I had to do something else as well; namely I would have to write a third novel that year, immediately after finishing The Guardian, to be ready for fall 2003. The preliminary title was The Wedding.
In other words, 2002 was shaping up to be even busier than the previous year. Not only did I have five children and a wife--all of whom needed time and attention--but I'd have to work harder and faster than I ever had, simply to get it all done. It was still doubtful, though, I'd be able to finish before the year was out.
But by then, it didn't matter. I'd been running so hard, I didn't know how to stop. Life became something to conquer, rather than live, and had I wanted to change, I couldn't have figured out how to do it. Even then, however, I think I subconsciously knew that I needed to get my life back into balance, and that only Micah could help me do that.
And, as if my prayers were finally answered, it was around this time that the brochure came in the mail.
EPILOGUE
Heading Home
Saturday, February 15
On our last night in Tromso, we had a farewell dinner. It was an early night. We would be departing first thing in the morning, and because of a two-hour layover in England, the flight home would take nearly fifteen hours.
The atmosphere on the plane varied from boisterous to quiet. People mingled in the aisles, continuing to exchange phone numbers and e-mail addresses. Micah and I said our good-byes as well; once we landed and got through customs, everyone would head off in different directions to catch their final flights back home.
Later, while Micah was napping, I gazed out the window, watching the clouds pass beneath us.
I wasn't sure how I felt. Part of me was sad that our adventure had come to an end; another part was thrilled at the thought of seeing my wife and kids. Cat and I have loved each other since the third week of March 1988, and my feelings for her have grown only stronger over the years. How could they not? We were married only six weeks when catastrophe first struck, and she was the one who held me on those first few terrible nights, when everything always seemed hardest. And she's never stopped holding me since. As hard as it's been, as heartbreaking as it's been, I know that in many ways I've been fortunate. My wife and children are proof of that. And even now, when I pray at night, I find myself thanking God for all the blessings in my life.
At heart, I suppose, I'm an optimist like my mom was. Granted, an optimist who sometimes worries too much or works too hard, but an optimist nonetheless. In those moments when I feel sad about the loss of my parents and my sister, I've found that if I look closely at my children, I see hints of my own past. In my family growing up, there were five of us; three males and two females. Among my kids, those numbers are exactly the same, and I've come to realize that as the echoes of my own family's voices gradually dim over time, they've been replaced by the excited sounds of happy childhood. As they say, the circle of life continues.
The lessons my parents taught are still with me. I keep a tighter leash when raising my kids than my parents did, but I often find myself doing or saying the same things they did. My mom, for instance, was always cheerful when coming in from work; I try to behave the same way when I finish writing for the day. My dad would listen intently when I came to him with a problem, to help me find a way to solve it on my own; I try to do the same with my own kids. At night, while I'm tucking my kids in bed, I ask them to tell me three nice things that each of their siblings did for them that day, in the hopes that it will help them grow as close as Micah, Dana, and I did. And more frequently than I ever would have imagined possible growing up, I find myself telling my children It's your life, or No one ever promised that life would be fair, and What you want and what you get are usually two entirely different things. And after I say these words, I turn away and try to hide my smile, wondering what my parents would think about that.
When my thoughts turn to Dana, though, it's not easy. Her death sent me into a tailspin of sorts, one that took years from which to recover. She was too young, too sweet, too much a part of me for me to accept that she's gone. Yet my sister taught me well. Alone among the family, my sister never let her
illness get her down, and I've tried to learn from her example. She lived her life fully despite her fears; she laughed and smiled until the very end. My sister, you see, had always been the strongest among us all.
"What are you thinking about?" Micah asked. Waking from his nap, he stretched in his seat.
"Everything," I said. "The trip. Our family. Cat and the kids."
"Did you think about work?"
I shook my head. "Actually, I didn't."
"But you'll plunge back in as soon as you get home, right?"
"I don't think so. I think I need to spend time with the family first."
Micah nudged me. "I think you're getting better," he said. "You look better. You're not nearly as glum as when you started. You actually look . . . relaxed."
"I am," I said. "But how about you? Are you doing any better?"
"I don't know what you're talking about. I never had any problems to begin with."
I snorted. "Must be nice being you."
"Oh, it is. Christine is one lucky lady to have a guy like me around."
I laughed. "So what's on your agenda when you get home?"
"Oh, the usual. See the wife, see the kids." He shrugged and let out a long breath. "And I'm sure Christine will want to go to church tomorrow, so I guess I'll have to go."
I raised my eyebrows but said nothing.
"What?" he asked.
I shook my head, unable to hide the smirk. "I didn't say anything."
"Listen, I'm not going to church because of anything I learned on the trip. Or anything you told me. You're not that wise, little brother."
"Oh, I know."
"I'm serious."
"I know."
"Don't look at me like that."
"Like what?"
"With that face. It wasn't like I completely stopped going to church. I still went every now and then. I'm just going to go because I think it's good for the kids to see me there. It teaches them the right kind of lessons--that you're part of God's plan. Mom did it for us, and look how we turned out."
"Mmmm," I said, nodding, continuing to smile.
"You're smirking."
"Yeah," I said smugly. "I know."
People often ask my brother and me how we continued to function--even flourish, by most standards--in the face of so much tragedy in our lives. I can't answer that question, except to say that neither Micah nor I ever considered the alternative. We'd been raised to survive, to meet challenges, and to chase our dreams.