Nights in Rodanthe - Nicholas Sparks [9]
After the race, he gave the medal to his father and said that he had done all this for him.
“No,” his father replied, “you ran for you. I just hope you’re running toward something, not away from something.”
That night, Paul stared at the ceiling as he lay in bed, trying to figure out what his father had meant. In his mind, he was running toward something, toward everything. A better life. Financial stability. A way to help his father. Respect. Freedom from worry. Happiness.
In February of his senior year, after learning he’d been accepted to medical school at Vanderbilt, he went to visit his father and told him the good news. His father said that he was pleased for him. But later that night, long after his father should have been asleep, Paul looked out the window and saw him, a lonely figure standing near the fence post, staring out over the fields.
Three weeks later, his father died of a heart attack while tilling in preparation for the spring.
Paul was devastated by the loss, but instead of taking time to mourn, he avoided his memories by throwing himself even further into work. He enrolled at Vanderbilt early, went to summer school and took three classes to get ahead in his studies, then added extra classes in the fall to an already full schedule. After that, his life became a blur. He went to class, did his labwork, and studied until the early morning hours. He ran five miles a day and always timed his runs, trying to improve with each passing year. He avoided nightclubs and bars; he ignored the goings-on of the school athletic teams. He bought a television on a whim, but he never unpacked it from the box and sold it a year later. Though shy around girls, he was introduced to Martha, a sweet-tempered blonde from Georgia who was working at the medical school library, and when he never got around to asking her out, she took it upon herself to do so. Though worried about the frantic pace he held himself to, she nonetheless accepted his proposal, and they walked the aisle ten months later. With finals looming, there was no time for a honeymoon, but he promised they’d head someplace nice when school was out. They never got around to it. Mark, their son, was born a year later, and in the first two years of his son’s life, Paul never once changed a diaper or rocked the boy to sleep.
Rather, he studied at the kitchen table, staring at diagrams of human physiology or studying chemical equations, taking notes, and acing one exam after the next. He graduated at the top of his class in three years and moved the family to Baltimore to do his surgical residency at Johns Hopkins.
Surgery, he knew by then, was his calling. Many specialties require a great deal of human interaction and hand-holding; Paul was not particularly good at either. But surgery was different; patients weren’t as interested in communication skills as they were in ability, and Paul had not only the confidence to put them at ease before the operation, but the skill to do whatever was required. He thrived in that environment. In the last two years of his residency, Paul worked ninety hours a week and slept four hours a night but, oddly, showed no signs of fatigue.
After his residency,