Three weeks with my brother - Nicholas Sparks [109]
The producer and crew had arrived early in the morning and followed me throughout the day. The crew filmed me both at home and on the job, and host Erin Moriarity interviewed me throughout the day about the process of writing and whether or not the book would be a success. Though Erin and Andrew left in the early evening to catch their flight back to New York, the film crew stayed at the house to get some last-minute footage of me working on my new novel. At around 9:00 P.M., while I was staring at the screen and typing for the camera, my wife came into the office, phone in hand.
“It’s Micah,” she said.
“Can you tell him I’ll call him back in a half hour or so?”
“He needs to talk to you now,” she said. “It’s important.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. But he sounds upset.”
I took the phone and felt the cameras swivel toward me.
“Hey Micah. What’s up?”
“It’s dad,” he said. He spoke in a low, dazed voice.
“What’s going on?”
“I got a call from the police department near Reno. He’s been in a car accident. I just called the hospital where they brought him in.”
I heard him draw a long breath. I knew enough to say nothing. I could hear the cameras from 48 Hours whirring behind me.
“He’s dead, Nicky,” Micah said quietly.
“Who?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
“Dad,” he said. “Our daddy died an hour ago.”
I was paralyzed. My eyes welled with tears at the same instant that Micah started to cry.
“Dana and I are driving up to see him now,” Micah went on. “I just called her, and I’m going to pick her up on the way. I know he’s gone, but we have to go see him.”
“Oh . . . Micah . . .”
“I know,” he said. “I gotta go . . .”
I hung up the phone. Throughout the conversation, Cat hadn’t taken her eyes from me.
“What is it?” she asked.
I told her. My wife burst into tears and opened her arms to me. Behind us, the camera finally clicked off. Everything, I realized, had been caught on film, but the cameramen were sensitive enough to pack up and leave quietly.
I stayed up most of the night, talking and crying with Cat. My brother called me sometime in the middle of the night and said that he and Dana had reached the hospital and seen my father’s body.
“I can’t believe he’s gone,” Micah told me. He was clearly in shock. “I just talked to him last night, and now I’ll never talk to him again.”
“How’s Dana doing?”
“Terrible. She hasn’t stopped crying since we got here, but we’ll be leaving in a couple of minutes. I mean . . . I don’t know what else to do.”
“I wish I was with you guys right now.”
“Me, too.” He paused. “When will you be coming out?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “As soon as I can. I’m supposed to be flying out to California for a booksellers dinner this weekend, but I’ll cancel . . . Jesus, I still can’t believe it.”
“It’s unreal, isn’t it?”
And then we both started crying again.
In the morning, Micah called again. As we talked about dad he grew quiet.
“Nick, I’ve been thinking about your book tour,” he finally said.
“Me, too.”
“You’re still going to do it, right?”
“I doubt it,” I said. “How can I?”
“You’ve got to go,” he said, growing serious.
“It seems wrong—”
“Dad was proud that you wrote the book,” he said, cutting me off. “He’d be the first to insist that you’ve got to go. He knows how important the tour is. It’s your first book. It might be the only chance you get.”
“But . . . I don’t know if I can.”
“You can, Nick. And you will. I know you loved dad, and he knows you loved him. He loved you, too. But you’ve got your own family to consider, too. Mom and dad would want you to go.”
After hanging up the phone, I thought about what he had said. He was, I thought, both right and wrong. I understood his point, but at the same time, it felt . . . callous. It was like trying to choose between my dreams for the future and respect for my father. If I stayed home, would I ever get another chance? And did that matter?
But if I decided to go, what then? If someone asked if I was enjoying the