Among my family, only Micah was there to cheer me on. My parents rarely made it to meets; in fact, in my entire career they would see me run—and break records—only once.
While some might think my parents’ lack of interest as odd, it never bothered me. After all, they didn’t watch Micah run, or see Dana participate on the drill team either. More important, we were doing these things for ourselves; we’d been on our own for so long by then that we didn’t expect them to attend these events, and I think all three of us kids understood that our parents were so busy during the week—working, keeping up the house, tending to daily responsibilities, taking care of us, and struggling with finances—that it didn’t seem fair to ask them to devote their weekends to us as well, when we all understood that other activities were more relaxing for them.
My mom, for instance, loved to work in the yard or on the house, and nothing made her happier than planting bushes or trees, or painting one of the rooms. Whenever I’d return from a meet, she’d have a smudge of dirt or paint on her cheeks; her jeans were spotted and stained like a laborer’s. My dad, on the other hand, used the weekends to catch up on work in a quiet house, and enjoyed organizing—and reorganizing—the books that lined his shelves. And no doubt it was nice to have a quiet house once in a while. Whether they took advantage of that to spend some quality time together, none of us ever knew. Our parents were very private when it came to their personal relationship and told us little about their days. And none of us ever bothered to ask.
Micah trained with me the following summer, and as a senior he’d become one of the better runners in the area. At most meets, we would both finish in the top three, but Micah never became as serious about running as I did.
After graduating, he went to California State University at Sacramento and put his energies into enjoying life instead. He dated one beautiful girl after the next, skied on the weekends, took up snowboarding, and fell in love with mountain biking. He went boating and water-skiing, and spent weekends in San Francisco, Lake Tahoe, or Yosemite. He went white-water rafting, and eventually mastered it well enough to become a guide. He was a member of a yacht crew that raced on weekends. He moved into an apartment near campus and joined other students at bars and nightclubs. Every weekend, it seemed, he was doing something new, something exciting, reveling in his newfound freedom. At the same time, he kept up his grades, and worked as an intern at a commercial real estate firm.
I, on the other hand, spent my senior year as a nervous wreck. Good grades had become an obsession; I was on the verge of graduating valedictorian and didn’t want this honor to slip from my grasp at the last moment. Furthermore, I knew that if I continued to run well, there was a chance I’d get a scholarship—a goal I’d set for myself—but I had yet to receive an offer, and wouldn’t until nearly April. I continued to work thirty-five hours a week and spent whatever free time I did have with my girlfriend. The stress of keeping it all going led to horrible bouts of insomnia. I slept less than three hours a night, and felt constantly on edge.
Part of me envied the kind of life that Micah was living. I admired his ability to simply live, without having to achieve. In the hallways at school, I’d listen to friends describing their weekends at Folsom Lake, or how much fun they’d had skiing at Squaw Valley. Maybe I should try to have more fun, a voice would whisper inside me, but every time I heard it, I forced myself to push the voice away. With a shake of my head, I’d tell myself that I didn’t have time, that I couldn’t risk injury, that I was too close to the finish line to quit now.
But I wasn’t necessarily happy. My goals had become ends in and of themselves, and there was little joy in pursuing them. Nonetheless, I somehow survived. And just as I wanted, I graduated valedictorian. A month earlier, after running one of the fastest 800-meter times in the country, I’d accepted a full athletic scholarship to the University of Notre Dame. And three months later, I would be living in South Bend, Indiana, two thousand miles from the only family I’d ever known.
Part of me didn’t want to go off to college. If you live the sort of childhood I did, you’re forced to bond with your family. My brother and sister, along with my parents, had been the only constants in my life, and though I’d known for years that it was inevitable, it was still a little frightening for me to leave them behind.
While I’ve written a lot about Micah and myself, I don’t want to leave you with the impression that my sister was any less important to me. In the early years, my sister and I played together as much as Micah and I did, albeit in different ways. She was always the one I talked to about our adventures; she was the one I talked to when I was having trouble in my relationship with Lisa. In the end, I talked to my sister about everything I’d felt growing up, and my sister, more than anyone else, seemed to understand why I’d become the person I had. Even better, my sister loved me, and she alone seemed to have the ability to put things into perspective for me. My struggles had always been her struggles, and hers had always been mine. And if you ask my brother, he would say exactly the same things about her, for he had the same type of relationship with Dana that I did.
Toward the end of my senior year, I remember hearing my sister crying in her bedroom. After knocking, I went in and found her sitting on the bed, her face in her hands.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, taking a seat beside her.
“Everything.”
“No tell me. What happened?”
“I hate my life,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because,” she said, “I’m not like you or Micah.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You guys—both of you—you have everything. You’re good at everything. You have good friends, you’re good in sports, you get good grades. You’re popular and you both have girlfriends. Everyone knows who you guys are, and they wish they could be more like you. I’m not like you two in any way. It’s like I came from different parents.”
“You’ve always been better,” I said. “You’re the sweetest person I’ve ever met.”
“So what? No one cares about that.”
I took her hand.
“What’s really bothering you?”
She didn’t want to answer. In the silence I looked around the room; like most teenage girls, she had various magazine pictures lining the walls. On her dresser was a collection of bells and ceramic horses. A Bible sat on her end table next to a rosary, and above her bed was a crucifix. It took a long time for her to get the words out.
“Holly got asked to the junior prom.”
Holly was my sister’s best friend; they’d been inseparable for years.
“That’s good, isn’t it?”
When she didn’t answer, my heart sank as I suddenly realized why she was so upset.
“But you’re upset because no one asked you.”
She began to cry again and I slipped my arm around her. “You’ll get asked,” I said soothingly. “You’re a great girl. You’re beautiful and kind, and anyone who doesn’t ask you is too dumb to realize what they’re missing.”
“You don’t understand,” she said. “You and Micah . . . well, all the girls think you’re both cute. They always tell me how lucky I am that you’re my brothers. But it’s hard . . . I mean, no one ever says that I’m pretty.”
“You are pretty,” I insisted.
“No,” she said, “I’m not. I’m average. And when I look in the mirror, I know that.”
Three Weeks With My Brother
She continued to cry, and refused to say anything more. When I finally left the room, I realized for the first time that my sister struggled with the same insecurities everyone had. She had simply been hiding them all along. But as I walked away, I was certain that she’d get asked; I’d meant what I said to her.
But as the days rolled on, and no boy rode up on a horse to be her knight in shining armor, I could see the pain in her disappointed, wounded expression. It killed me to think that no one seemed to realize how special she was, how much love she could offer to anyone who simply asked. I adored my sister in the same way I’d always adored my brother, and—like my parents, I suppose—I felt the need to protect her.
So one evening, about a week before the prom, I went into my sister’s room. If her friends thought I was handsome, if they thought I was popular, then I wanted nothing more than for them to see how much fun we could have together. To me, it made no difference that we were brother and sister; I would be proud to be seen with her and wanted the entire world to know it.
“Dana,” I said seriously, “would you go to the prom with me?”
“Don’t be silly,” she said.
“We’ll have fun,” I promised. “I’ll take you out to a fancy dinner, I’ll rent a limousine, and we’ll dance the night away. I’ll be the best date you’ve ever had.”
She smiled but shook her head. “No, that’s okay. I don’t want to go, anyway. I’m over it now. It doesn’t matter.”
I hesitated, trying to see if she meant it. “Are you sure? It would mean a lot to me.”
“Yeah, I’m sure. But thank you for asking.”
I looked at her. “You’re breaking my heart, you know.”
She gave a sad little laugh. “That’s funny,” she said. “It’s exactly the same thing Micah said.”
“What do you mean?”
“He asked me to the prom, too. Yesterday.”
“And you’re not going with him either?”
“No.”
She wrapped her arms around me and gave me a hug. Then she kissed me on the cheek. “But I want you to know that you two are the best brothers that a sister could ever have. I get so proud when I think about you two. I’m the luckiest girl in the world, and I love you both so much.”
My throat constricted. “Oh, Dana,” I said, “I love you, too.”
CHAPTER 11
Three Weeks With My Brother
Ayers Rock, Australia
February 2–3
Unless you travel over the Pacific, it’s hard to fathom how large the ocean actually is. We’d flown four hours to reach Easter Island, and another seven hours to Rarotonga. Reaching Brisbane, Australia, took another seven hours, during which we crossed over the international date line, and from there we still had another three hours until we finally reached Ayers Rock, in the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, in the middle of the Australian outback.
Passing the international date line only served to make the journey longer. It’s an odd feeling to realize that a day seems to have vanished from your life. Not only that, our stop in Brisbane took a couple of hours; all in all, it was over twelve hours en route, which struck me as amazing, considering that we’d already been halfway across the ocean when we started.
By the time we got to our hotel, everyone wore the look of weary travelers. In the lobby, it was possible to sign up for excursions the following day. While everyone would go to Ayers Rock in the afternoon, the morning was open. You could rent Harleys, for instance, and explore parts of the outback on your own, or take a helicopter ride over the Olgas—an outcropping of rock and canyons near Ayers Rock. There was also a walking tour through part of the Olgas as well, and a sunrise trip to Ayers Rock, which would leave the hotel before dawn.
Though my brother and I wanted to sleep, we somehow woke in time to join the sunrise expedition party. It was cool and pitch black in the desert; without lights, it was possible to see tens of thousands—if not millions—of stars. Our bus was one in a long line of buses that made their way out there that morning; we later found out that our hotel was large enough to room over three thousand guests. While this may not mean much in a city like Orlando or Chicago, in the middle of the outback, it’s amazing. At any given moment, we learned, the hotel itself had a higher population than nearly every city for hundreds of miles in any direction.
Ayers Rock is the largest monolith, or single-unit stone, in the world. With a circumference of nearly five miles, it rises nearly a thousand feet in the air, and extends over three miles beneath the surface. In the predawn blackness, Ayers Rock was nothing but a darkened shadow, almost impossible to see unless you were looking directly toward it. Our disheveled group stumbled out of the bus and we made our way to the viewing area.
In time, light began glowing over the horizon, and as it slowly began to spread, our gaze was directed to the rock. Comprised of coarse-grained sandstone rich in feldspar, Ayers Rock was supposed to vary in color depending on the time of day and atmospheric conditions. Still, in the beginning anyway, it was difficult to understand why so many people found it fascinating; it had none of the fiery brilliance for which the rock had become famous. My brother and I took pictures, then more pictures, feeling disappointed. Soon, however, the sun rose high enough to brighten the eastern sky, and just when we came to the conclusion that the reputation of Ayers Rock was more hype than reality, it suddenly happened.
The sun hit the rock at such an angle that it began glowing red, like an enormous glowing coal. And for the next few minutes, all Micah and I could do was stare at it, thinking it was one of the most amazing things we’d ever seen.
Micah and I had opted for the helicopter ride instead of a walking tour through the Olgas, and by eight A.M. we were at the airport again, ready to depart.
There was, we learned, a good reason for taking the ride as early as we did. It was already hot by the time we arrived—it was summer in the desert, after all—and the canopy of the helicopter served only to intensify the heat. With five people crowded inside, everyone was sweating within moments of liftoff.
We were in the air a little more than thirty minutes, but it afforded us views impossible to see any other way. We circled Ayers Rock and flew over the Olgas; we spotted wild camels trailing through the desert. There were, we learned, tens of thousands of wild camels in Australia. They were nonindigenous—originally, they’d been imported for their survival skills to help settle the outback. A few had escaped and flourished; over time, the population had swelled. Nowadays, they were actually exported back to the Middle East.